existing assembly, and the permanence of the assembly was accordingly
declared. The debate respecting its indivisibility, or its division, was
very animated. Necker, Mounier, and Lally-Tollendal desired, in addition
to a representative chamber, a senate, to be composed of members to be
appointed by the king on the nomination of the people. They considered
this as the only means of moderating the power, and even of preventing the
tyranny of a single assembly. They had as partisans such members as
participated in their ideas, or who hoped to form part of the upper
chamber. The majority of the nobility did not wish for a house of peers,
but for an aristocratic assembly, whose members it should elect. They
could not agree; Mounier's party refusing to fall in with a project
calculated to revive the orders, and the aristocracy refusing to accept a
senate, which would confirm the ruin of the nobility. The greater portion
of the deputies of the clergy and of the commons were in favour of the
unity of the assembly. The popular party considered it illegal to appoint
legislators for life; it thought that the upper chamber would become the
instrument of the court and aristocracy, and would then be dangerous, or
become useless by uniting with the commons. Thus the nobility, from
dissatisfaction, and the national party, from a spirit of absolute
justice, alike rejected the upper chamber.

This determination of the assembly has been the object of many reproaches.
The partisans of the peerage have attributed all the evils of the
revolution to the absence of that order; as if it had been possible for
anybody whatsoever to arrest its progress. It was not the constitution
which gave it the character it has had, but events arising from party
struggles. What would the upper chamber have done between the court and
the nation? If in favour of the first, it would have been unable to guide
or save it; if in favour of the second, it would not have strengthened it;
in either case, its suppression would have infallibly ensued. In such