Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/134



would betray the legislative body into transgressing its proper limits. Committees of military execution would be proposed, as some have lately proposed committees of political execution: the king would be then no more than the agent of these committees; we should have two executive powers, or rather the legislative body would exercise the royalty.

Therefore, by this encroachment of one power upon the other, our Constitution would utterly depart from its own nature; from being monarchical, as it ought to be, it would become a downright aristocracy. You have not answered this objection, and I think that you never can answer it. You talk of restraining nothing but ministerial abuses, and I am talking of the means of restraining the abuses of a representative assembly. I am telling you that it is our duty to control that bias which all government takes insensibly toward the predominating form wherewith it is impressed.

But if, when the king is inclined to war, you confine the deliberations of the legislative body to a consent that such war shall be undertaken, or to a resolution that it ought not to be undertaken, and to compelling the executive power to negotiating a peace, you avoid all those inconveniences: and take especial notice (for here it is that my system is so eminently distinguished) that you are perfectly consistent with the principles of the Constitution.

The king's veto finds itself, from the very