it may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the following reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the author and a very young gentleman at paris who did him the honor of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then and ever since have so much occupied the attention of all men an answer was written sometime in the month of october 1789 but it was kept back upon prudential considerations that letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets it has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed the reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman this produced on his part a new and pressing application for the author s sentiments the author began a second and more full discussion on the subject this he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring but the matter gaining upon him he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it however having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter and indeed when he sat down to write having intended it for a private letter he found it difficult to change the form of address when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another direction a different plan he is sensible might be more favourable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter dear sir you are pleased to call again and with some earnestness for my thoughts on the late proceedings in france i will not give you reason to imagine that i think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them they are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld it was from attention to you and to you only that i hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them in the first letter i had the honor to write to you and which at length i send i wrote neither for nor from any description of men nor shall i in this my errors if any are my own my reputation alone is to answer for them you see sir by the long letter i have transmitted to you that though i do most heartily wish that france may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty and that i think you bound in all honest policy to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside and an effectual organ by which it may act it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late transactions you imagined when you wrote last that i might possibly be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in france from the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in london called the constitutional society and the revolution society i certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious revolution are held in high reverence and i reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor it is because i do so that i think it necessary for me that there should be no mistake those who cultivate the memory of our revolution and those who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons who under the pretext of zeal toward the revolution and constitution too frequently wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one and which presides in the other before i proceed to answer the more material particulars in your letter i shall beg leave to give you such information as i have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have thought proper as bodies to interfere in the concerns of france first assuring you that i am not and that i have never been a member of either of those societies the first calling itself the constitutional society or society for constitutional information or by some such title is i believe of seven or eight years standing the institution of this society appears to be of a charitable and so far of a laudable nature it was intended for the circulation at the expense of the members of many books which few others would be at the expense of buying and which might lie on the hands of the booksellers to the great loss of an useful body of men whether the books so charitably circulated were ever as charitably read is more than i know possibly several of them have been exported to france and like goods not in request here may with you have found a market i have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence what improvements they have had in their passage i cannot tell but i never heard a man of common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society nor have their proceedings been accounted except by some of themselves as of any serious consequence your national assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that i do of this poor charitable club as a nation you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledgments for the revolution society when their fellows in the constitutional were in equity entitled to some share since you have selected the revolution society as the great object of your national thanks and praises you will think me excusable in making its late conduct the subject of my observations the national assembly of france has given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them and they return the favor by acting as a committee in england for extending the principles of the national assembly henceforward we must consider them as a kind of privileged persons as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body this is one among the revolutions which have given splendour to obscurity and distinction to undiscerned merit until very lately i do not recollect to have heard of this club i am quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my thoughts nor i believe those of any person out of their own set i find upon inquiry that on the anniversary of the revolution in 1688 a club of dissenters but of what denomination i know not have long had the custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches and that afterwards they spent the day cheerfully as other clubs do at the tavern but i never heard that any public measure or political system much less that the merits of the constitution of any foreign nation had been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivals until to my inexpressible surprise i found them in a sort of public capacity by a congratulatory address giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the national assembly in france in the ancient principles and conduct of the club so far at least as they were declared i see nothing to which i could take exception i think it very probable that for some purpose new members may have entered among them and that some truly christian politicians who love to dispense benefits but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole may have made them the instruments of their pious designs whatever i may have reason to suspect concerning private management i shall speak of nothing as of a certainty but what is public for one i should be sorry to be thought directly or indirectly concerned in their proceedings i certainly take my full share along with the rest of the world in my individual and private capacity in speculating on what has been done or is doing on the public stage in any place ancient or modern in the republic of rome or the republic of paris but having no general apostolically mission being a citizen of a particular state and being bound up in a considerable degree by its public will i should think it at least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation without the express authority of the government under which i live i should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under anything like an equivocal description which to many unacquainted with our usages might make the address in which i joined appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate capacity acknowledged by the laws of this kingdom and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it on account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions and of the deceit which may be practiced under them and not from mere formality the house of commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most trifling object under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open the folding doors of your presence chamber and have ushered into your national assembly with as much ceremony and parade and with as great a bustle of applause as if you have been visited by the whole representative majesty of the whole english nation if what this society has thought proper to send forth had been a piece of argument it would have signified little whose argument it was it would be neither the more nor the less convincing on account of the party it came from but this is only a vote and resolution it stands solely on authority and in this case it is the mere authority of individuals few of whom appear their signatures ought in my opinion to have been annexed to their instrument the world would then have the means of knowing how many they are who they are and of what value their opinions may be from their personal abilities from their knowledge their experience or their lead and authority in this state to me who am but a plain man the proceeding looks a little too refined and too ingenious it has too much the air of a political stratagem adopted for the sake of giving under a high sounding name an importance to the public declarations of this club which when the matter came to be closely inspected they did not altogether so well deserve it is a policy that has very much the complexion of a fraud i flatter myself that i love a manly moral regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society be he who he will and perhaps i have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public conduct i think i envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation but i cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect the circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind abstractedly speaking government as well as liberty is good yet could i in common sense ten years ago have felicitated france on her enjoyment of a government without inquiry what the nature of that government was or how it was administered can i now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind that i am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty am i to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights this would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance when i see the spirit of liberty in action i see a strong principle at work and this for a while is all i can possibly know of it the wild gas the fixed air is plainly broke loose but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided till the liquor is cleared and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface i must be tolerably sure before i venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing that they have really received one flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings i should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of france until i was informed how it had been combined with government with public force with the discipline and obedience of armies with the collection of an effective and well distributed revenue with morality and religion with the solidity of property with peace and order with civil and social manners all these are good things too and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts and is not likely to continue long the effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men but liberty when men act in bodies is power considerate people before they declare themselves will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles tempers and dispositions they have little or no experience and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers all these considerations however were below the transcendental dignity of the revolution society whilst i continued in the country from whence i had the honor of writing to you i had but an imperfect idea of their transactions on my coming to town i sent for an account of their proceedings which had been published by their authority containing a sermon of dr price with the duke de rochefoucault s and the archbishop of aix s letter and several other documents annexed the whole of that publication with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of france with those of england by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the national assembly gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness the effect of that conduct upon the power credit prosperity and tranquillity of france became every day more evident the form of constitution to be settled for its future polity became more clear we are now in a condition to discern with tolerable exactness the true nature of the object held up to our imitation if the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some circumstances in others prudence of a higher order may justify us in speaking our thoughts the beginnings of confusion with us in england are at present feeble enough but with you we have seen an infancy still more feeble growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon mountains and to wage war with heaven itself whenever our neighbours house is on fire it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country but by no means unconcerned for yours i wish to communicate more largely what was at first intended only for your private satisfaction i shall still keep your affairs in my eye and continue to address myself to you indulging myself in the freedom of epistolary intercourse i beg leave to throw out my thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in my mind with very little attention to formal method i set out with the proceedings of the revolution society but i shall not confine myself to them is it possible i should it appears to me as if i were in a great crisis not of the affairs of france alone but of all europe perhaps of more than europe all circumstances taken together the french revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world the most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous in the most ridiculous modes and apparently by the most contemptible instruments everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies in viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind alternate contempt and indignation alternate laughter and tears alternate scorn and horror it cannot however be denied that to some this strange scene appeared in quite another point of view into them it inspired no other sentiments than those of exultation and rapture they saw nothing in what has been done in france but a firm and temperate exertion of freedom so consistent on the whole with morals and with piety as to make it deserving not only of the secular applause of dashing machiavellian politicians but to render it a fit theme for all the devout effusions of sacred eloquence on the forenoon of the fourth of november last doctor richard price a non conforming minister of eminence preached at the dissenting meeting house of the old jewry to his club or society a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments and not ill expressed mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections but the revolution in france is the grand ingredient in the cauldron i consider the address transmitted by the revolution society to the national assembly through earl stanhope as originating in the principles of the sermon and as a corollary from them it was moved by the preacher of that discourse it was passed by those who came reeking from the effect of the sermon without any censure or qualification expressed or implied if however any of the gentlemen concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution they know how to acknowledge the one and to disavow the other they may do it i cannot for my part i looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man much connected with literary caballers and intriguing philosophers with political theologians and theological politicians both at home and abroad i know they set him up as a sort of oracle because with the best intentions in the world he naturally philippizes and chants his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs that sermon is in a strain which i believe has not been heard in this kingdom in any of the pulpits which are tolerated or encouraged in it since the year 1648 when a predecessor of dr price the rev hugh peters made the vault of the king s own chapel at st james s ring with the honor and privilege of the saints who with the high praises of god in their mouths and a two edged sword in their hands were to execute judgment on the heathen and punishments upon the people to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron few harangues from the pulpit except in the days of your league in france or in the days of our solemn league and covenant in england have ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation than this lecture in the old jewry supposing however that something like moderation were visible in this political sermon yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement no sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of christian charity the cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are for the greater part ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite surely the church is a place where one day s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind this pulpit style revived after so long a discontinuance had to me the air of novelty and of a novelty not wholly without danger i do not charge this danger equally to every part of the discourse the hint given to a noble and reverend lay divine who is supposed high in office in one of our universities and other lay divines of rank and literature may be proper and seasonable though somewhat new if the noble seekers should find nothing to satisfy their pious fancies in the old staple of the national church or in all the rich variety to be found in the well assorted warehouses of the dissenting congregations dr price advises them to improve upon non conformity and to set up each of them a separate meeting house upon his own particular principles it is somewhat remarkable that this reverend divine should be so earnest for setting up new churches and so perfectly indifferent concerning the doctrine which may be taught in them his zeal is of a curious character it is not for the propagation of his own opinions but of any opinions it is not for the diffusion of truth but for the spreading of contradiction let the noble teachers but dissent it is no matter from whom or from what this great point once secured it is taken for granted their religion will be rational and manly i doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the calculating divine computes from this great company of great preachers it would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes genera and species which at present beautify the hortus siccus of dissent a sermon from a noble duke or a noble marquis or a noble earl or baron bold would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations i should only stipulate that these new mess johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled pulpits the new evangelists will i dare say disappoint the hopes that are conceived of them they will not become literally as well as figuratively polemic divines nor be disposed so to drill their congregations that they may as in former blessed times preach their doctrines to regiments of dragoons and corps of infantry and artillery such arrangements however favourable to the cause of compulsory freedom civil and religious may not be equally conducive to the national tranquillity these few restrictions i hope are no great stretches of intolerance no very violent exertions of despotism but i may say of our preacher utinam nugis tota illa dedisset tempora saevitiae all things in this his fulminating bull are not of so in noxious a tendency his doctrines affect our constitution in its vital parts he tells the revolution society in this political sermon that his majesty is almost the only lawful king in the world because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people as to the kings of the world all of whom this arch pontiff of the rights of men with all the plenitude and with more than the boldness of the papal deposing power in its meridian fervour of the twelfth century puts into one sweeping clause of ban and anathema and proclaims usurpers by circles of longitude and latitude over the whole globe it behoves them to consider how they admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries who are to tell their subjects they are not lawful kings that is their concern it is ours as a domestic interest of some moment seriously to consider the solidity of the only principle upon which these gentlemen acknowledge a king of great britain to be entitled to their allegiance this doctrine as applied to the prince now on the british throne either is nonsense and therefore neither true nor false or it affirms a most unfounded dangerous illegal and unconstitutional position according to this spiritual doctor of politics if his majesty does not owe his crown to the choice of his people he is no lawful king now nothing can be more untrue than that the crown of this kingdom is so held by his majesty therefore if you follow their rule the king of great britain who most certainly does not owe his high office to any form of popular election is in no respect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers who reign or rather rob all over the face of this our miserable world without any sort of right or title to the allegiance of their people the policy of this general doctrine so qualified is evident enough the propagators of this political gospel are in hopes that their abstract principle would be overlooked whilst the king of great britain was not affected by it in the meantime the ears of their congregations would be gradually habituated to it as if it were a first principle admitted without dispute for the present it would only operate as a theory pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence and laid by for future use condo et compo no quae mox depromere possim by this policy whilst our government is soothed with a reservation in its favor to which it has no claim the security which it has in common with all governments so far as opinion is security is taken away thus these politicians proceed whilst little notice is taken of their doctrines but when they come to be examined upon the plain meaning of their words and the direct tendency of their doctrines then equivocations and slippery constructions come into play when they say the king owes his crown to the choice of his people and is therefore the only lawful sovereign in the world they will perhaps tell us they mean to say no more than that some of the king s predecessors have been called to the throne by some sort of choice and therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his people thus by a miserable subterfuge they hope to render their proposition safe by rendering it nugatory they are welcome to the asylum they seek for their offense since they take refuge in their folly for if you admit this interpretation how does their idea of election differ from our idea of inheritance and how does the settlement of the crown in the brunswick line derived from james the first come to legalize our monarchy rather than that of any of the neighbouring countries at some time or other to be sure all the beginners of dynasties were chosen by those who called them to govern there is ground enough for the opinion that all the kingdoms of europe were at a remote period elective with more or fewer limitations in the objects of choice but whatever kings might have been here or elsewhere a thousand years ago or in whatever manner the ruling dynasties of england or france may have begun the king of great britain is at this day king by a fixed rule of succession according to the laws of his country and whilst the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by him he holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the revolution society who have not a single vote for a king amongst them either individually or collectively though i make no doubt they would soon erect themselves into an electoral college if things were ripe to give effect to their claim his majesty s heirs and successors each in his time and order will come to the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which his majesty has succeeded to that he wears whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining away the gross error of fact which supposes that his majesty owes his crown to the choice of his people yet nothing can evade their full explicit declaration concerning the principle of a right in the people to choose which right is directly maintained and tenaciously adhered to all the oblique insinuations concerning election bottom in this proposition and are referable to it lest the foundation of the king s exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory freedom the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert that by the principles of the revolution the people of england have acquired three fundamental rights all which with him compose one system and lie together in one short sentence namely that we have acquired a right to choose our own governors to cashier them for misconduct to frame a government for ourselves this new and hitherto unheard of bill of rights though made in the name of the whole people belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only the body of the people of england have no share in it they utterly disclaim it they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes they are bound to do so by the laws of their country made at the time of that very revolution which is appealed to in favor of the fictitious rights claimed by the society which abuses its name these gentlemen of the old jewry in all their reasonings on the revolution of 1688 have a revolution which happened in england about forty years before and the late french revolution so much before their eyes and in their hearts that they are constantly confounding all the three together it is necessary that we should separate what they confound we must recall their erring fancies to the acts of the revolution which we revere for the discovery of its true principles if the principles of the revolution of 1688 are anywhere to be found it is in the statute called the declaration of right in that most wise sober and considerate declaration drawn up by great lawyers and great statesmen and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts not one word is said nor one suggestion made of a general right to choose our own governors to cashier them for misconduct and to form a government for ourselves this declaration of right is the cornerstone of our constitution as reinforced explained improved and in its fundamental principles for ever settled it is called an act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and for settling the succession of the crown you will observe that these rights and this succession are declared in one body and bound indissolubly together a few years after this period a second opportunity offered for asserting a right of election to the crown on the prospect of a total failure of issue from king william and from the princess afterwards queen anne the consideration of the settlement of the crown and of a further security for the liberties of the people again came before the legislature did they this second time make any provision for legalizing the crown on the spurious revolution principles of the old jewry no they followed the principles which prevailed in the declaration of right indicating with more precision the persons who were to inherit in the protestant line this act also incorporated by the same policy our liberties and an hereditary succession in the same act instead of a right to choose our own governors they declared that the succession in that line was absolutely necessary for the peace quiet and security of the realm and that it was equally urgent on them to maintain a certainty in the succession thereof to which the subjects may safely have recourse for their protection both these acts in which are heard the unerring unambiguous oracles of revolution policy instead of countenancing the delusive gipsy predictions of a right to choose our governors prove to a demonstration how totally adverse the wisdom of the nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law unquestionably there was at the revolution in the person of king william a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case and regarding an individual person privilegium non transit in exemplum if ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle that a king of popular choice was the only legal king without all doubt it was at the revolution its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time there is no person so completely ignorant of our history as not to know that the majority in parliament of both parties were so little disposed to anything resembling that principle that at first they were determined to place the vacant crown not on the head of the prince of orange but on that of his wife mary daughter of king james the eldest born of the issue of that king which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his it would be to repeat a very trite story to recall to your memory all those circumstances which demonstrated that their accepting king william was not properly a choice but to all those who did not wish in effect to recall king james or to deluge their country in blood and again to bring their religion laws and liberties into the peril they had just escaped it was an act of necessity in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken in the very act in which for a time and in a single case parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance in favour of a prince who though not next was however very near in the line of succession it is curious to observe how lord somers who drew the bill called the declaration of right has comported himself on that delicate occasion it is curious to observe with what address this temporary solution of continuity is kept from the eye whilst all that could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward and fostered and made the most of by this great man and by the legislature who followed him quitting the dry imperative style of an act of parliament he makes the lords and commons fall to a pious legislative ejaculation and declare that they consider it as a marvellous providence and merciful goodness of god to this nation to preserve their said majesties royal persons most happily to reign over us on the throne of their ancestors for which from the bottom of their hearts they return their humblest thanks and praises the legislature plainly had in view the act of recognition of the first of queen elizabeth chap 3rd and of that of james the first chap 1st both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown and in many parts they follow with a nearly literal precision the words and even the form of thanksgiving which is found in these old declaratory statutes the two houses in the act of king william did not thank god that they had found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their own governors much less to make an election the only lawful title to the crown their having been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it as much as possible was by them considered as a providential escape they threw a politic well wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they had then settled forever accordingly that they might not relax the nerves of their monarchy and that they might preserve a close conformity to the practice of their ancestors as it appeared in the declaratory statutes of queen mary and queen elizabeth in the next clause they vest by recognition in their majesties all the legal prerogatives of the crown declaring that in them they are most fully rightfully and entirely invested incorporated united and annexed in the clause which follows for preventing questions by reason of any pretended titles to the crown they declare that on the preserving a certainty in the succession thereof the unity peace and tranquillity of this nation doth under god wholly depend they knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble an election and that an election would be utterly destructive of the unity peace and tranquillity of this nation which they thought to be considerations of some moment to provide for these objects and therefore to exclude forever the old jewry doctrine of a right to choose our own governors they follow with a clause containing a most solemn pledge taken from the preceding act of queen elizabeth as solemn a pledge as ever was or can be given in favour of an hereditary succession and as solemn a renunciation as could be made of the principles by this society imputed to them the lords spiritual and temporal and commons do in the name of all the people aforesaid most humbly and faithfully submit themselves their heirs and posterities for ever and do faithfully promise that they will stand to maintain and defend their said majesties and also the limitation of the crown herein specified and contained to the utmost of their powers etc etc so far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the revolution to elect our kings that if we had possessed it before the english nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it for themselves and for all their posterity forever these gentlemen may value themselves as much as they please on their whig principles but i never desire to be thought a better whig than lord somers or to understand the principles of the revolution better than those by whom it was brought about or to read in the declaration of right any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances and in our hearts the words and spirit of that immortal law it is true that aided with the powers derived from force and opportunity the nation was at that time in some sense free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy and every other part of their constitution however they did not think such bold changes within their commission it is indeed difficult perhaps impossible to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power such as was exercised by parliament at that time but the limits of a moral competence subjecting even in powers more indisputably sovereign occasional will to permanent reason and to the steady maxims of faith justice and fixed fundamental policy are perfectly intelligible and perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority under any name or under any title in the state the house of lords for instance is not morally competent to dissolve the house of commons no nor even to dissolve itself nor to abdicate if it would its portion in the legislature of the kingdom though a king may abdicate for his own person he cannot abdicate for the monarchy by as strong or by a stronger reason the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority the engagement and pact of society which generally goes by the name of the constitution forbids such invasion and such surrender the constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force on this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is an hereditary succession by law in the old line it was a succession by the common law in the new by the statute law operating on the principles of the common law not changing the substance but regulating the mode and describing the persons both these descriptions of law are of the same force and are derived from an equal authority emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state communi sponsione reipublicae and as such are equally binding on king and people too as long as the terms are observed and they continue the same body politic it is far from impossible to reconcile if we do not suffer ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation the sacredness of an hereditary principle of succession in our government with a power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency even in that extremity the change is to be confined to the peccant part only to the part which produced the necessary deviation and even then it is to be effected without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve the two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical periods of the restoration and revolution when england found itself without a king at both those periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their ancient edifice they did not however dissolve the whole fabric on the contrary in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired they kept these old parts exactly as they were that the part recovered might be suited to them they acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people at no time perhaps did the sovereign legislature manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of british constitutional policy than at the time of the revolution when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession the crown was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved but the new line was derived from the same stock it was still a line of hereditary descent still an hereditary descent in the same blood though an hereditary descent qualified with protestantism when the legislature altered the direction but kept the principle they showed that they held it inviolable on this principle the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in the old time and long before the era of the revolution sometime after the conquest great questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary descent it became a matter of doubt whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes took place or the catholic heir when the protestant was preferred the inheritable principle survived with a sort of immortality through all transmigrations multosque per annos stat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum this is the spirit of our constitution not only in its settled course but in all its revolutions whoever came in or however he came in whether he obtained the crown by law or by force the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted the gentlemen of the society for revolution see nothing in that of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution and they take the deviation from the principle for the principle they have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine though they must see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country when such an unwarrantable maxim is once established that no throne is lawful but the elective no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs do they mean to attain and disable backward all the kings that have reigned before the revolution and consequently to stain the throne of england with the blot of a continual usurpation do they mean to invalidate annul or to call into question together with the titles of the whole line of our kings that great body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as usurpers to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties of as great value at least as any which have passed at or since the period of the revolution if kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws what will become of the statute de tallagio non concedendo of the petition of right of the act of habeas corpus do these new doctors of the rights of men presume to assert that king james the second who came to the crown as next of blood according to the rules of a then unqualified succession was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of england before he had done any of those acts which were justly construed into an abdication of his crown if he was not much trouble in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen commemorate but king james was a bad king with a good title and not an usurper the princes who succeeded according to the act of parliament which settled the crown on the electress sophia and on her descendants being protestants came in as much by a title of inheritance as king james did he came in according to the law as it stood at his accession to the crown and the princes of the house of brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown not by election but by the law as it stood at their several accessions of protestant descent and inheritance as i hope i have shown sufficiently the law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of king william the terms of this act bind us and our heirs and our posterity to them their heirs and their posterity being protestants to the end of time in the same words as the declaration of right had bound us to the heirs of king william and queen mary it therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance on what ground except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people forever could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our country presented to them and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess from whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men through a series of ages the princess sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th and 13th of king william for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power which she might not and in fact did not herself ever exercise she was adopted for one reason and for one only because says the act the most excellent princess sophia electress and duchess dowager of hanover is daughter of the most excellent princess elizabeth late queen of bohemia daughter of our late sovereign lord king james the first of happy memory and is hereby declared to be the next in succession in the protestant line etc etc and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body being protestants this limitation was made by parliament that through the princess sophia an inheritable line not only was to be continued in future but that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in king james the first in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages and might be preserved in the old approved mode by descent in which if our liberties had been once endangered they had often through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege been preserved they did well no experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right an irregular convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular convulsive disease but the course of succession is the healthy habit of the british constitution was it that the legislature wanted at the act for the limitation of the crown in the hanoverian line drawn through the female descendants of james the first a due sense of the inconveniences of having two or three or possibly more foreigners in succession to the british throne no they had a due sense of the evils which might happen from such foreign rule and more than a due sense of them but a more decisive proof cannot be given of the full conviction of the british nation that the principles of the revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure and without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our government than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary protestant succession in the old line with all the dangers and all the inconveniences of its being a foreign line full before their eyes and operating with the utmost force upon their minds a few years ago i should be ashamed to overload a matter so capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any argument but this seditious unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught avowed and printed the dislike i feel to revolutions the signals for which have so often been given from pulpits the spirit of change that is gone abroad the total contempt which prevails with you and may come to prevail with us of all ancient institutions when set in opposition to a present sense of convenience or to the bent of a present inclination all these considerations make it not unadvisable in my opinion to call back our attention to the true principles of our own domestic laws that you my french friend should begin to know and that we should continue to cherish them we ought not on either side of the water to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons by a double fraud export to you in illicit bottoms as raw commodities of british growth though wholly alien to our soil in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country manufactured after the newest paris fashion of an improved liberty the people of england will not ape the fashions they have never tried nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial they look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights not as among their wrongs as a benefit not as a grievance as a security for their liberty not as a badge of servitude they look on the frame of their commonwealth such as it stands to be of inestimable value and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution i shall beg leave before i go any further to take notice of some paltry artifices which the abettors of election as the only lawful title to the crown are ready to employ in order to render the support of the just principles of our constitution a task somewhat invidious these sophisters substitute a fictitious cause and feigned personages in whose favor they suppose you engaged whenever you defend the inheritable nature of the crown it is common with them to dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those exploded fanatics of slavery who formerly maintained what i believe no creature now maintains that the crown is held by divine hereditary and indefeasible right these old fanatics of single arbitrary power dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in the world just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority the old prerogative enthusiasts it is true did speculate foolishly and perhaps impiously too as if monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government and as if a right to govern by inheritance were in strictness indefeasible in every person who should be found in the succession to a throne and under every circumstance which no civil or political right can be but an absurd opinion concerning the king s hereditary right to the crown does not prejudice one that is rational and bottomed upon solid principles of law and policy if all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant we should have no law and no religion left in the world but an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other the second claim of the revolution society is a right of cashiering their governors for misconduct perhaps the apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as that of cashiering for misconduct was the cause that the declaration of the act which implied the abdication of king james was if it had any fault rather too guarded and too circumstantial but all this guard and all this accumulation of circumstances serves to show the spirit of caution which predominated in the national councils in a situation in which men irritated by oppression and elevated by a triumph over it are apt to abandon themselves to violent and extreme courses it shows the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event to make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions no government could stand a moment if it could be blown down with anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of misconduct they who led at the revolution grounded the virtual abdication of king james upon no such light and uncertain principle they charged him with nothing less than a design confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt acts to subvert the protestant church and state and their fundamental unquestionable laws and liberties they charged him with having broken the original contract between king and people this was more than misconduct a grave and overruling necessity obliged them to take the step they took and took with infinite reluctance as under that most rigorous of all laws their trust for the future preservation of the constitution was not in future revolutions the grand policy of all their regulations was to render it almost impracticable for any future sovereign to compel the states of the kingdom to have again recourse to those violent remedies they left the crown what in the eye and estimation of law it had ever been perfectly irresponsible in order to lighten the crown still further they aggravated responsibility on ministers of state by the statute of the 1st of king william sess 2nd called the act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and for settling the succession of the crown they enacted that the ministers should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration they secured soon after the frequent meetings of parliament by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom in the next great constitutional act that of the 12th and 13th of king william for the further limitation of the crown and better securing the rights and liberties of the subject they provided that no pardon under the great seal of england should be pleadable to an impeachment by the commons in parliament the rule laid down for government in the declaration of right the constant inspection of parliament the practical claim of impeachment they thought infinitely a better security not only for their constitutional liberty but against the vices of administration than the reservation of a right so difficult in the practice so uncertain in the issue and often so mischievous in the consequences as that of cashiering their governors dr price in this sermon condemns very properly the practice of gross adulatory addresses to kings instead of this fulsome style he proposes that his majesty should be told on occasions of congratulation that he is to consider himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of his people for a compliment this new form of address does not seem to be very soothing those who are servants in name as well as in effect do not like to be told of their situation their duty and their obligations the slave in the old play tells his master haec commemoratio est quasi exprobatio it is not pleasant as compliment it is not wholesome as instruction after all if the king were to bring himself to echo this new kind of address to adopt it in terms and even to take the appellation of servant of the people as his royal style how either he or we should be much mended by it i cannot imagine i have seen very assuming letters signed your most obedient humble servant the proudest denomination that ever was endured on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which is now proposed for sovereigns by the apostle of liberty kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself the servant of servants and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of the fisherman i should have considered all this as no more than a sort of flippant vain discourse in which as in an unsavory fume several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate if it were not plainly in support of the idea and a part of the scheme of cashiering kings for misconduct in that light it is worth some observation kings in one sense are undoubtedly the servants of the people because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage but it is not true that they are in the ordinary sense anything like servants the essence of whose situation is to obey the commands of some other and to be removable at pleasure but the king of great britain obeys no other person all other persons are individually and collectively too under him and owe to him a legal obedience the law which knows neither to flatter nor to insult calls this high magistrate not our servant as this humble divine calls him but our sovereign lord the king and we on our parts have learned to speak only the primitive language of the law and not the confused jargon of their babylonian pulpits as he is not to obey us but as we are to obey the law in him our constitution has made no sort of provision toward rendering him as a servant in any degree responsible our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like the justicia of aragon nor of any court legally appointed nor of any process legally settled for submitting the king to the responsibility belonging to all servants in this he is not distinguished from the commons and the lords who in their several public capacities can never be called to an account for their conduct although the revolution society chooses to assert in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution that a king is no more than the first servant of the public created by it and responsible to it ill would our ancestors at the revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom if they had found no security for their freedom but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure if they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power than civil confusion let these gentlemen state who that representative public is to whom they will affirm the king as a servant to be responsible it will then be time enough for me to produce to them the positive statute law which affirms that he is not the ceremony of cashiering kings of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease can rarely if ever be performed without force it then becomes a case of war and not of constitution laws are commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold the revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war in the only case in which any war and much more a civil war can be just justa bella quibus necessaria the question of dethroning or if these gentlemen like the phrase better cashiering kings will always be as it has always been an extraordinary question of state and wholly out of the law a question of dispositions and of means and of probable consequences rather than of positive rights as it was not made for common abuses so it is not to be agitated by common minds the speculative line of demarcation where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin is faint obscure and not easily definable it is not a single act or a single event which determines it governments must be abused and deranged indeed before it can be thought of and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past when things are in that lamentable condition the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical ambiguous bitter potion to a distempered state times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons the wise will determine from the gravity of the case the irritable from sensibility to oppression the high minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands the brave and bold from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause but with or without right a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good the third head of right asserted by the pulpit of the old jewry namely the right to form a government for ourselves has at least as little countenance from anything done at the revolution either in precedent or principle as the two first of their claims the revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty if you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution and the policy which predominated in that great period which has secured it to this hour pray look for both in our histories in our records in our acts of parliament and journals of parliament and not in the sermons of the old jewry and the after dinner toasts of the revolution society in the former you will find other ideas and another language such a claim is as ill suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance of authority the very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror we wished at the period of the revolution and do now wish to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant all the reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reverence to antiquity and i hope nay i am persuaded that all those which possibly may be made hereafter will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent authority and example our oldest reformation is that of magna charta you will see that sir edward coke that great oracle of our law and indeed all the great men who follow him to blackstone are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties they endeavor to prove that the ancient charter the magna charta of king john was connected with another positive charter from henry i and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a reaffirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom in the matter of fact for the greater part these authors appear to be in the right perhaps not always but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars it proves my position still the more strongly because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession toward antiquity with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators and of all the people whom they wish to influence have been always filled and the stationary policy of this kingdom in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance in the famous law of the 3rd of charles i called the petition of right the parliament says to the king your subjects have inherited this freedom claiming their franchises not on abstract principles as the rights of men but as the rights of englishmen and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers selden and the other profoundly learned men who drew this petition of right were as well acquainted at least with all the general theories concerning the rights of men as any of the discoursers in our pulpits or on your tribune full as well as dr price or as the abbe sieyes but for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science they preferred this positive recorded hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen to that vague speculative right which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit the same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the preservation of our liberties in the 1st of william and mary in the famous statute called the declaration of right the two houses utter not a syllable of a right to frame a government for themselves you will see that their whole care was to secure the religion laws and liberties that had been long possessed and had been lately endangered taking into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment that their religion laws and liberties might not be in danger of being again subverted they auspicate all their proceedings by stating as some of those best means in the first place to do as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient rights and liberties to declare and then they pray the king and queen that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom you will observe that from magna charta to the declaration of right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers and to be transmitted to our posterity as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right by this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts we have an inheritable crown an inheritable peerage and a house of commons and a people inheriting privileges franchises and liberties from a long line of ancestors this policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection or rather the happy effect of following nature which is wisdom without reflection and above it a spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors besides the people of england well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission without at all excluding a principle of improvement it leaves acquisition free but it secures what it acquires whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever by a constitutional policy working after the pattern of nature we receive we hold we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives the institutions of policy the goods of fortune the gifts of providence are handed down to us and from us in the same course and order our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts wherein by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race the whole at one time is never old or middle aged or young but in a condition of unchangeable constancy moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay fall renovation and progression thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state in what we improve we are never wholly new in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete by adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians but by the spirit of philosophic analogy in this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state our hearths our sepulchres and our altars through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason we have derived several other and those no small benefits from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers the spirit of freedom leading in itself to misrule and excess is tempered with an awful gravity this idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction by this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom it carries an imposing and majestic aspect it has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors it has its bearings and its ensigns armorial it has its gallery of portraits its monumental inscriptions its records evidences and titles we procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men on account of their age and on account of those from whom they are descended all your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations our breasts rather than our inventions for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges you might if you pleased have profited of our example and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity your privileges though discontinued were not lost to memory your constitution it is true whilst you were out of possession suffered waste and dilapidation but you possessed in some parts the walls and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle you might have repaired those walls you might have built on those old foundations your constitution was suspended before it was perfected but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished in your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed you had all that combination and all that opposition of interests you had that action and counteraction which in the natural and in the political world from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe these opposed and conflicting interests which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions they render deliberation a matter not of choice but of necessity they make all change a subject of compromise which naturally begets moderation they produce temperaments preventing the sore evil of harsh crude unqualified reformations and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power in the few or in the many for ever impracticable through that diversity of members and interests general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places you had all these advantages in your ancient states but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew you began ill because you began by despising everything that belonged to you you set up your trade without a capital if the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes you might have passed them by and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors under a pious predilection for those ancestors your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired respecting your forefathers you would have been taught to respect yourselves you would not have chosen to consider the french as a people of yesterday as a nation of lowborn servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789 in order to furnish at the expense of your honor an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours you would not have been content to be represented as a gang of maroon slaves suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed and ill fitted would it not my worthy friend have been wiser to have you thought what i for one always thought you a generous and gallant nation long misled to your disadvantage by your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity honor and loyalty that events had been unfavorable to you but that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition that in your most devoted submission you were actuated by a principle of public spirit and that it was your country you worshiped in the person of your king had you made it to be understood that in the delusion of this amiable error you had gone further than your wise ancestors that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor or if diffident of yourselves and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated constitution of your ancestors you had looked to your neighbors in this land who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of europe meliorated and adapted to its present state by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world you would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation you would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable but as when well disciplined it is auxiliary to law you would have had an unoppressive but a productive revenue you would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it you would have had a free constitution a potent monarchy a disciplined army a reformed and venerated clergy a mitigated but spirited nobility to lead your virtue not to overlay it you would have had a liberal order of commons to emulate and to recruit that nobility you would have had a protected satisfied laborious and obedient people taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions in which consists the true moral equality of mankind and not in that monstrous fiction which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid but not more happy you had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you beyond anything recorded in the history of the world but you have shown that difficulty is good for man compute your gains see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors and all their contemporaries and even to despise themselves until the moment in which they become truly despicable by following those false lights france has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings france has bought poverty by crime france has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest but she has abandoned her interest that she might prostitute her virtue all other nations have begun the fabric of a new government or the reformation of an old by establishing originally or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion all other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a system of a more austere and masculine morality france when she let loose the reins of regal authority doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practice and has extended through all ranks of life as if she were communicating some privilege or laying open some secluded benefit all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power this is one of the new principles of equality in france france by the perfidy of her leaders has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes and disarmed it of its most potent topics she has sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust and taught kings to tremble at the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people as subverters of their thrones as traitors who aim at their destruction by leading their easy good nature under specious pretenses to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power this alone is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind remember that your parliament of paris told your king that in calling the states together he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the throne it is right that these men should hide their heads it is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy to neglect those provisions preparations and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom for want of these they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison they have seen the french rebel against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury outrage and insult than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant their resistance was made to concession their revolt was from protection their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces favors and immunities this was unnatural the rest is in order they have found their punishment in their success laws overturned tribunals subverted industry without vigor commerce expiring the revenue unpaid yet the people impoverished a church pillaged and a state not relieved civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit and national bankruptcy the consequence and to crown all the paper securities of new precarious tottering power the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared rapine held out as a currency for the support of an empire in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came when the principle of property whose creatures and representatives they are was systematically subverted were all these dreadful things necessary were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty no nothing like it the fresh ruins of france which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes are not the devastation of civil war they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace they are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous because unresisted and irresistible authority the persons who have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils have met in their progress with little or rather with no opposition at all their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war their pioneers have gone before them and demolished and laid everything level at their feet not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined they have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than their shoebuckles whilst they were imprisoning their king murdering their fellow citizens and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear it has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety in authorizing treasons robberies rapes assassinations slaughters and burnings throughout their harassed land but the cause of all was plain from the beginning this unforced choice this fond election of evil would appear perfectly unaccountable if we did not consider the composition of the national assembly i do not mean its formal constitution which as it now stands is exceptionable enough but the materials of which in a great measure it is composed which is of ten thousand times greater consequence than all the formalities in the world if we were to know nothing of this assembly but by its title and function no colors could paint to the imagination anything more venerable in that light the mind of an inquirer subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a focus would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect instead of blamable they would appear only mysterious but no name no power no function no artificial institution whatsoever can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed any other than god and nature and education and their habits of life have made them capacities beyond these the people have not to give virtue and wisdom may be the objects of their choice but their choice confers neither the one nor the other on those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands they have not the engagement of nature they have not the promise of revelation for any such powers after i had read over the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the tiers etat nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing among them indeed i saw some of known rank some of shining talents but of any practical experience in the state not one man was to be found the best were only men of theory but whatever the distinguished few may have been it is the substance and mass of the body which constitutes its character and must finally determine its direction in all bodies those who will lead must also in a considerable degree follow they must conform their propositions to the taste talent and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct therefore if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world and for that reason cannot enter into calculation will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects if what is the more likely event instead of that unusual degree of virtue they should be actuated by sinister ambition and a lust of meretricious glory then the feeble part of the assembly to whom at first they conform becomes in its turn the dupe and instrument of their designs in this political traffic the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders to secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly they ought to respect in some degree perhaps to fear those whom they conduct to be led any otherwise than blindly the followers must be qualified if not for actors at least for judges they must also be judges of natural weight and authority nothing can secure a steady and moderate conduct in such assemblies but that the body of them should be respectably composed in point of condition in life or permanent property of education and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the understanding in the calling of the states general of france the first thing that struck me was a great departure from the ancient course i found the representation for the third estate composed of six hundred persons they were equal in number to the representatives of both the other orders if the orders were to act separately the number would not beyond the consideration of the expense be of much moment but when it became apparent that the three orders were to be melted down into one the policy and necessary effect of this numerous representation became obvious a very small desertion from either of the other two orders must throw the power of both into the hands of the third in fact the whole power of the state was soon resolved into that body its due composition became therefore of infinitely the greater importance judge sir of my surprise when i found that a very great proportion of the assembly was composed of practitioners in the law it was composed not of distinguished magistrates who had given pledges to their country of their science prudence and integrity not of leading advocates the glory of the bar not of renowned professors in universities but for the far greater part as it must in such a number of the inferior unlearned mechanical merely instrumental members of the profession there were distinguished exceptions but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates of stewards of petty local jurisdictions country attornies notaries and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation from the moment i read the list i saw distinctly and very nearly as it has happened all that was to follow the degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers might have been and in many it was undoubtedly very considerable in that military kingdom no part of the profession had been much regarded except the highest of all who often united to their professional offices great family splendor and were invested with great power and authority these certainly were highly respected and even with no small degree of awe the next rank was not much esteemed the mechanical part was in a very low degree of repute whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed it must evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves who had no previous fortune in character at stake who could not be expected to bear with moderation or to conduct with discretion a power which they themselves more than any others must be surprised to find in their hands who could flatter himself that these men suddenly and as it were by enchantment snatched from the humblest rank of subordination would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling daring subtle active of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention and laborious low unprofitable chicane who could doubt but that at any expense to the state of which they understood nothing they must pursue their private interests which they understand but too well it was not an event depending on chance or contingency it was inevitable it was necessary it was planted in the nature of things they must join in any project which could procure to them a litigious constitution which could lay open to them those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all great convulsions and revolutions in the state and particularly in all great and violent permutations of property was it to be expected that they would attend to the stability of property whose existence had always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable ambiguous and insecure their objects would be enlarged with their elevation but their disposition and habits and mode of accomplishing their designs must remain the same well but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other descriptions of more sober and more enlarged understandings were they then to be awed by the supereminent authority and awful dignity of a handful of country clowns who have seats in that assembly some of whom are said not to be able to read and write and by not a greater number of traders who though somewhat more instructed and more conspicuous in the order of society had never known anything beyond their counting house no both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers than to become their counterpoise with such a dangerous disproportion the whole must needs be governed by them to the faculty of law was joined a pretty considerable proportion of the faculty of medicine this faculty had not any more than that of the law possessed in france its just estimation its professors therefore must have the qualities of men not habituated to sentiments of dignity but supposing they had ranked as they ought to do and as with us they do actually the sides of sickbeds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators then came the dealers in stocks and funds who must be eager at any expense to change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance of land to these were joined men of other descriptions from whom as little knowledge of or attention to the interests of a great state was to be expected and as little regard to the stability of any institution men formed to be instruments not controls such in general was the composition of the tiers etat in the national assembly in which was scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of what we call the natural landed interest of the country we know that the british house of commons without shutting its doors to any merit in any class is by the sure operation of adequate causes filled with everything illustrious in rank in descent in hereditary and in acquired opulence in cultivated talents in military civil naval and politic distinction that the country can afford but supposing what hardly can be supposed as a case that the house of commons should be composed in the same manner with the tiers etat in france would this dominion of chicane be borne with patience or even conceived without horror god forbid i should insinuate anything derogatory to that profession which is another priesthood administering the rights of sacred justice but whilst i revere men in the functions which belong to them and would do as much as one man can do to prevent their exclusion from any i cannot to flatter them give the lie to nature they are good and useful in the composition they must be mischievous if they preponderate so as virtually to become the whole their very excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a qualification for others it cannot escape observation that when men are too much confined to professional and faculty habits and as it were inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle they are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind on experience in mixed affairs on a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state after all if the house of commons were to have a wholly professional and faculty composition what is the power of the house of commons circumscribed and shut in by the immovable barriers of laws usages positive rules of doctrine and practice counterpoised by the house of lords and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown to continue prorogue or dissolve us the power of the house of commons direct or indirect is indeed great and long may it be able to preserve its greatness and the spirit belonging to true greatness at the full and it will do so as long as it can keep the breakers of law in india from becoming the makers of law for england the power however of the house of commons when least diminished is as a drop of water in the ocean compared to that residing in a settled majority of your national assembly that assembly since the destruction of the orders has no fundamental law no strict convention no respected usage to restrain it instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution they have a power to make a constitution which shall conform to their designs nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on them what ought to be the heads the hearts the dispositions that are qualified or that dare not only to make laws under a fixed constitution but at one heat to strike out a totally new constitution for a great kingdom and in every part of it from the monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish but fools rush in where angels fear to tread in such a state of unbounded power for undefined and undefinable purposes the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the management of human affairs having considered the composition of the third estate as it stood in its original frame i took a view of the representatives of the clergy there too it appeared that full as little regard was had to the general security of property or to the aptitude of the deputies for the public purposes in the principles of their election that election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere country curates to the great and arduous work of new modeling a state men who never had seen the state so much as in a picture men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure village who immersed in hopeless poverty could regard all property whether secular or ecclesiastical with no other eye than that of envy among whom must be many who for the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share except in a general scramble instead of balancing the power of the active chicaners in the other assembly these curates must necessarily become the active coadjutors or at best the passive instruments of those by whom they had been habitually guided in their petty village concerns they too could hardly be the most conscientious of their kind who presuming upon their incompetent understanding could intrigue for a trust which led them from their natural relation to their flocks and their natural spheres of action to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms this preponderating weight being added to the force of the body of chicane in the tiers etat completed that momentum of ignorance rashness presumption and lust of plunder which nothing has been able to resist to observing men it must have appeared from the beginning that the majority of the third estate in conjunction with such a deputation from the clergy as i have described whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in that class in the spoil and humiliation of their own order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers to squander away the objects which made the happiness of their fellows would be to them no sacrifice at all turbulent discontented men of quality in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance generally despise their own order one of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others to be attached to the subdivision to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections it is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind the interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage there were in the time of our civil troubles in england several persons like the then earl of holland who by themselves or their families had brought an odium on the throne by the prodigal dispensation of its bounties toward them who afterwards joined in the rebellions arising from the discontents of which they were themselves the cause men who helped to subvert that throne to which they owed some of them their existence others all that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor if any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of people or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they would engross revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice confounded by the complication of distempered passions their reason is disturbed their views become vast and perplexed to others inexplicable to themselves uncertain they find on all sides bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things both in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged and appears without any limit when men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object and work with low instruments and for low ends the whole composition becomes low and base does not something like this now appear in france does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy a tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state other revolutions have been conducted by persons who whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled they had long views they aimed at the rule not at the destruction of their country they were men of great civil and great military talents and if the terror the ornament of their age they were not like jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils the compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp by his kinsman a favorite poet of that time shows what it was he proposed and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished in the success of his ambition still as you rise the state exalted too finds no distemper whilst tis changed by you changed like the world s great scene when without noise the rising sun night s vulgar lights destroys these disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as asserting their natural place in society their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them the hand that like a destroying angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered i do not say i do not say that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes but they were some corrective to their effects such was as i said our cromwell such were your whole race of guises condes and colignis such the richelieus who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war such as better men and in a less dubious cause were your henry the fourth and your sully though nursed in civil confusions and not wholly without some of their taint it is a thing to be wondered at to see how very soon france when she had a moment to respire recovered and emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation why because among all their massacres they had not slain the mind in their country a conscious dignity a noble pride a generous sense of glory and emulation was not extinguished on the contrary it was kindled and inflamed the organs also of the state however shattered existed all the prizes of honor and virtue all the rewards all the distinctions remained but your present confusion like a palsy has attacked the fountain of life itself every person in your country in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor is disgraced and degraded and can entertain no sensation of life except in a mortified and humiliated indignation but this generation will quickly pass away the next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns and money jobbers usurers and jews who will be always their fellows sometimes their masters believe me sir those who attempt to level never equalize in all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens some description must be uppermost the levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground the association of tailors and carpenters of which the republic is composed cannot be equal to the situation into which by the worst of usurpations an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature you attempt to force them the chancellor of france at the opening of the states said in a tone of oratorical flourish that all occupations were honorable if he meant only that no honest employment was disgraceful he would not have gone beyond the truth but in asserting that anything is honorable we imply some distinction in its favor the occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state but the state suffers oppression if such as they either individually or collectively are permitted to rule in this you think you are combating prejudice but you are at war with nature i do not determine whether this book be canonical as the gallican church has considered it or apocryphal as here it is taken i am sure it contains a great deal of sense and truth i do not my dear sir conceive you to be of that sophistical captious spirit or of that uncandid dulness as to require for every general observation or sentiment an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men you do not imagine that i wish to confine power authority and distinction to blood and names and titles no sir there is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom actual or presumptive wherever they are actually found they have in whatever state condition profession or trade the passport of heaven to human place and honor woe to the country which would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues civil military or religious that are given to grace and to serve it and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse luster and glory around a state woe to that country too that passing into the opposite extreme considers a low education a mean contracted view of things a sordid mercenary occupation as a preferable title to command everything ought to be open but not indifferently to every man no rotation no appointment by lot no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects because they have no tendency direct or indirect to select the man with a view to the duty or to accommodate the one to the other i do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power from obscure condition ought not to be made too easy nor a thing too much of course if rare merit be the rarest of all rare things it ought to pass through some sort of probation the temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence if it be opened through virtue let it be remembered too that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state that does not represent its ability as well as its property but as ability is a vigorous and active principle and as property is sluggish inert and timid it never can be safe from the invasion of ability unless it be out of all proportion predominant in the representation it must be represented too in great masses of accumulation or it is not rightly protected the characteristic essence of property formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation is to be unequal the great masses therefore which excite envy and tempt rapacity must be put out of the possibility of danger then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations the same quantity of property which is by the natural course of things divided among many has not the same operation its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused in this diffusion each man s portion is less than what in the eagerness of his desires he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others the plunder of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many but the many are not capable of making this calculation and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution the power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself it makes our weakness subservient to our virtue it grafts benevolence even upon avarice the possessors of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession are the natural securities for this transmission with us the house of peers is formed upon this principle it is wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction and made therefore the third of the legislature and in the last event the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions the house of commons too though not necessarily yet in fact is always so composed in the far greater part let those large proprietors be what they will and they have their chance of being amongst the best they are at the very worst the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth for though hereditary wealth and the rank which goes with it are too much idolized by creeping sycophants and the blind abject admirers of power they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant assuming short sighted coxcombs of philosophy some decent regulated preeminence some preference given to birth is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolitic it is said that twenty four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand true if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic this sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp post for its second to men who may reason calmly it is ridiculous the will of the many and their interest must very often differ and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice a government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty four millions of men though it were chosen by eight and forty millions nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power at present you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature the property of france does not govern it of course property is destroyed and rational liberty has no existence all you have got for the present is a paper circulation and a stock jobbing constitution and as to the future do you seriously think that the territory of france upon the republican system of eighty three independent municipalities can ever be governed as one body or can ever be set in motion by the impulse of one mind when the national assembly has completed its work it will have accomplished its ruin these commonwealths will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of paris they will not bear that this body should monopolize the captivity of the king and the dominion over the assembly calling itself national each will keep its own portion of the spoil of the church to itself and it will not suffer either that spoil or the more just fruits of their industry or the natural produce of their soil to be sent to swell the insolence or pamper the luxury of the mechanics of paris in this they will see none of the equality under the pretense of which they have been tempted to throw off their allegiance to their sovereign as well as the ancient constitution of their country there can be no capital city in such a constitution as they have lately made they have forgot that when they framed democratic governments they had virtually dismembered their country the person whom they persevere in calling king has not power left to him by the hundredth part sufficient to hold together this collection of republics the republic of paris will endeavor indeed to complete the debauchery of the army and illegally to perpetuate the assembly without resort to its constituents as the means of continuing its despotism it will make efforts by becoming the heart of a boundless paper circulation to draw everything to itself but in vain all this policy in the end will appear as feeble as it is now violent if this be your actual situation compared to the situation to which you were called as it were by the voice of god and man i cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on the choice you have made or the success which has attended your endeavors i can as little recommend to any other nation a conduct grounded on such principles and productive of such effects that i must leave to those who can see farther into your affairs than i am able to do and who best know how far your actions are favorable to their designs the gentlemen of the revolution society who were so early in their congratulations appear to be strongly of opinion that there is some scheme of politics relative to this country in which your proceedings may in some way be useful for your dr price who seems to have speculated himself into no small degree of fervor upon this subject addresses his auditory in the following very remarkable words i cannot conclude without recalling particularly to your recollection a consideration which i have more than once alluded to and which probably your thoughts have been all along anticipating a consideration with which my mind is impressed more than i can express i mean the consideration of the favourableness of the present times to all exertions in the cause of liberty it is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at the time big with some extraordinary design and it is very probable that the thoughts of his audience who understood him better than i do did all along run before him in his reflection and in the whole train of consequences to which it led before i read that sermon i really thought i had lived in a free country and it was an error i cherished because it gave me a greater liking to the country i lived in i was indeed aware that a jealous ever waking vigilance to guard the treasure of our liberty not only from invasion but from decay and corruption was our best wisdom and our first duty however i considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured than as a prize to be contended for i did not discern how the present time came to be so very favorable to all exertions in the cause of freedom the present time differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in france if the example of that nation is to have an influence on this i can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant aspect and are not quite reconcilable to humanity generosity good faith and justice are palliated with so much milky good nature toward the actors and borne with so much heroic fortitude toward the sufferers it is certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean to follow but allowing this we are led to a very natural question what is that cause of liberty and what are those exertions in its favor to which the example of france is so singularly auspicious is our monarchy to be annihilated with all the laws all the tribunals and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution is the house of lords to be voted useless is episcopacy to be abolished are the church lands to be sold to jews and jobbers or given to bribe new invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege are all the taxes to be voted grievances and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution or patriotic presents are silver shoebuckles to be substituted in the place of the land tax and the malt tax for the support of the naval strength of this kingdom are all orders ranks and distinctions to be confounded that out of universal anarchy joined to national bankruptcy three or four thousand democracies should be formed into eighty three and that they may all by some sort of unknown attractive power be organized into one for this great end is the army to be seduced from its discipline and its fidelity first by every kind of debauchery and then by the terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay are the curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order are the citizens of london to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their fellow subjects is a compulsory paper currency to be substituted in the place of the legal coin of this kingdom is what remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to watch over and to fight with each other if these are the ends and means of the revolution society i admit that they are well assorted and france may furnish them for both with precedents in point i see that your example is held out to shame us i know that we are supposed a dull sluggish race rendered passive by finding our situation tolerable and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its full perfection your leaders in france began by affecting to admire almost to adore the british constitution but as they advanced they came to look upon it with a sovereign contempt the friends of your national assembly among us have full as mean an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory of their country the revolution society has discovered that the english nation is not free they are convinced that the inequality in our representation is a defect in our constitution so gross and palpable as to make it excellent chiefly in form and theory that a representation in the legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional liberty in it but of all legitimate government that without it a government is nothing but an usurpation that when the representation is partial the kingdom possesses liberty only partially and if extremely partial it gives only a semblance and if not only extremely partial but corruptly chosen it becomes a nuisance dr price considers this inadequacy of representation as our fundamental grievance and though as to the corruption of this semblance of representation he hopes it is not yet arrived to its full perfection of depravity he fears that nothing will be done towards gaining for us this essential blessing until some great abuse of power again provokes our resentment or some great calamity again alarms our fears or perhaps till the acquisition of a pure and equal representation by other countries whilst we are mocked with the shadow kindles our shame to this he subjoins a note in these words a representation chosen chiefly by the treasury and a few thousands of the dregs of the people who are generally paid for their votes you will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who when they are not on their guard treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt whilst at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power it would require a long discourse to point out to you the many fallacies that lurk in the generality and equivocal nature of the terms inadequate representation i shall only say here in justice to that old fashioned constitution under which we have long prospered that our representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised i defy the enemies of our constitution to show the contrary to detail the particulars in which it is found so well to promote its ends would demand a treatise on our practical constitution i state here the doctrine of the revolutionists only that you and others may see what an opinion these gentlemen entertain of the constitution of their country and why they seem to think that some great abuse of power or some great calamity as giving a chance for the blessing of a constitution according to their ideas would be much palliated to their feelings you see why they are so much enamored of your fair and equal representation which being once obtained the same effects might follow you see they consider our house of commons as only a semblance a form a theory a shadow a mockery perhaps a nuisance these gentlemen value themselves on being systematic and not without reason they must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of representation this fundamental grievance as a thing not only vicious in itself but as rendering our whole government absolutely illegitimate and not at all better than a downright usurpation another revolution to get rid of this illegitimate and usurped government would of course be perfectly justifiable if not absolutely necessary indeed their principle if you observe it with any attention goes much further than to an alteration in the election of the house of commons for if popular representation or choice is necessary to the legitimacy of all government the house of lords is at one stroke bastardized and corrupted in blood that house is no representative of the people at all even in semblance or in form the case of the crown is altogether as bad in vain the crown may endeavor to screen itself against these gentlemen by the authority of the establishment made on the revolution the revolution which is resorted to for a title on their system wants a title itself the revolution is built according to their theory upon a basis not more solid than our present formalities as it was made by a house of lords not representing anyone but themselves and by a house of commons exactly such as the present that is as they term it by a mere shadow and mockery of representation something they must destroy or they seem to themselves to exist for no purpose one set is for destroying the civil power through the ecclesiastical another for demolishing the ecclesiastic through the civil they are aware that the worst consequences might happen to the public in accomplishing this double ruin of church and state but they are so heated with their theories that they give more than hints that this ruin with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and attend it and which to themselves appear quite certain would not be unacceptable to them or very remote from their wishes a man amongst them of great authority and certainly of great talents speaking of a supposed alliance between church and state says perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance be broken calamitous no doubt will that time be but what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation if it be attended with so desirable an effect you see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to view the greatest calamities which can befall their country it is no wonder therefore that with these ideas of everything in their constitution and government at home either in church or state as illegitimate and usurped or at best as a vain mockery they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm whilst they are possessed by these notions it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors the fundamental laws of their country the fixed form of a constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience and an increasing public strength and national prosperity they despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men and as for the rest they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity all precedents charters and acts of parliament they have the rights of men against these there can be no prescription against these no agreement is binding these admit no temperament and no compromise anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice against these their rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance or in the justice and lenity of its administration the objections of these speculatists if its forms do not quadrate with their theories are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest usurpation they are always at issue with governments not on a question of abuse but a question of competency and a question of title i have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics let them be their amusement in the schools illa se jactet in aula aeolus et clauso ventorum carcere regnet but let them not break prison to burst like a levanter to sweep the earth with their hurricane and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us far am i from denying in theory full as far is my heart from withholding in practice the real rights of men in denying their false claims of right i do not mean to injure those which are real and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy if civil society be made for the advantage of man all the advantages for which it is made become his right it is an institution of beneficence and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule men have a right to live by that rule they have a right to do justice as between their fellows whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation they have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful they have a right to the acquisitions of their parents to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring to instruction in life and to consolation in death whatever each man can separately do without trespassing upon others he has a right to do for himself and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society with all its combinations of skill and force can do in his favor in this partnership all men have equal rights but not to equal things he that has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion but he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock and as to the share of power authority and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state that i must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society for i have in my contemplation the civil social man and no other it is a thing to be settled by convention if civil society be the offspring of convention that convention must be its law that convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it every sort of legislative judicial or executory power are its creatures they can have no being in any other state of things and how can any man claim under the conventions of civil society rights which do not so much as suppose its existence rights which are absolutely repugnant to it one of the first motives to civil society and which becomes one of its fundamental rules is that no man should be judge in his own cause by this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man that is to judge for himself and to assert his own cause he abdicates all right to be his own governor he inclusively in a great measure abandons the right of self defense the first law of nature men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together that he may obtain justice he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him that he may secure some liberty he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it government is not made in virtue of natural rights which may and do exist in total independence of it and exist in much greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection but their abstract perfection is their practical defect by having a right to everything they want everything government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom among these wants is to be reckoned the want out of civil society of a sufficient restraint upon their passions society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted their will controlled and their passions brought into subjection this can only be done by a power out of themselves and not in the exercise of its function subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue in this sense the restraints on men as well as their liberties are to be reckoned among their rights but as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle the moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience this it is which makes the constitution of a state and the due distribution of its powers a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill it requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions the state is to have recruits to its strength and remedies to its distempers what is the use of discussing a man s abstract right to food or medicine the question is upon the method of procuring and administering them in that deliberation i shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics the science of constructing a commonwealth or renovating it or reforming it is like every other experimental science not to be taught a priori nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning the reverse also happens and very plausible schemes with very pleasing commencements have often shameful and lamentable conclusions in states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes things which appear at first view of little moment on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend the science of government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes a matter which requires experience and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life however sagacious and observing he may be it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes these metaphysic rights entering into common life like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium are by the laws of nature refracted from their straight line indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction the nature of man is intricate the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man s nature or to the quality of his affairs when i hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions i am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty the simple governments are fundamentally defective to say no worse of them if you were to contemplate society in but one point of view all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating in effect each would answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes but it is better that the whole should be imperfectly and anomalously answered than that while some parts are provided for with great exactness others might be totally neglected or perhaps materially injured by the over care of a favorite member the pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes and in proportion as they are metaphysically true they are morally and politically false the rights of men are in a sort of middle incapable of definition but not impossible to be discerned the rights of men in governments are their advantages and these are often in balances between differences of good in compromises sometimes between good and evil and sometimes between evil and evil political reason is a computing principle adding subtracting multiplying and dividing morally and not metaphysically or mathematically true moral denominations by these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power the body of the community whenever it can come to act can meet with no effectual resistance but till power and right are the same the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue and the first of all virtues prudence men have no right to what is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit for though a pleasant writer said liceat perire poetis when one of them in cold blood is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution ardentem frigidus aetnam insiluit i consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic license than as one of the franchises of parnassus and whether he was a poet or divine or politician that chose to exercise this kind of right i think that more wise because more charitable thoughts would urge me rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly the kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what i write refers if men are not shamed out of their present course in commemorating the fact will cheat many out of the principles and deprive them of the benefits of the revolution they commemorate i confess to you sir i never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread it renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty this distemper of remedy grown habitual relaxes and wears out by a vulgar and prostituted use the spring of that spirit which is to be exerted on great occasions it was in the most patient period of roman servitude that themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at school cum perimit saevos classis numerosa tyrannos in the ordinary state of things it produces in a country like ours the worst effects even on the cause of that liberty which it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation almost all the high bred republicans of my time have after a short space become the most decided thorough paced courtiers they soon left the business of a tedious moderate but practical resistance to those of us whom in the pride and intoxication of their theories they have slighted as not much better than tories hypocrisy of course delights in the most sublime speculations for never intending to go beyond speculation it costs nothing to have it magnificent but even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be suspected in these ranting speculations the issue has been much the same these professors finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified or as i may say civil and legal resistance in such cases employ no resistance at all it is with them a war or a revolution or it is nothing finding their schemes of politics not adapted to the state of the world in which they live they often come to think lightly of all public principle and are ready on their part to abandon for a very trivial interest what they find of very trivial value some indeed are of more steady and persevering natures but these are eager politicians out of parliament who have little to tempt them to abandon their favorite projects they have some change in the church or state or both constantly in their view when that is the case they are always bad citizens and perfectly unsure connections for considering their speculative designs as of infinite value and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation they are at best indifferent about it they see no merit in the good and no fault in the vicious management of public affairs they rather rejoice in the latter as more propitious to revolution they see no merit or demerit in any man or any action or any political principle any further than as they may forward or retard their design of change they therefore take up one day the most violent and stretched prerogative and another time the wildest democratic ideas of freedom and pass from one to the other without any sort of regard to cause to person or to party in france you are now in the crisis of a revolution and in the transit from one form of government to another you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country with us it is militant with you it is triumphant and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will i would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men or to comprehend all men of any description within them no far from it i am as incapable of that injustice as i am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities and who under the name of religion teach little else than wild and dangerous politics the worst of these politics of revolution is this they temper and harden the breast in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions but as these occasions may never arrive the mind receives a gratuitous taint and the moral sentiments suffer not a little when no political purpose is served by the depravation this sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature without opening one new avenue to the understanding they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart they have perverted in themselves and in those that attend to them all the well placed sympathies of the human breast this famous sermon of the old jewry breathes nothing but this spirit through all the political part plots massacres assassinations seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution cheap bloodless reformation a guiltless liberty appear flat and vapid to their taste there must be a great change of scene there must be a magnificent stage effect there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years security and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity the preacher found them all in the french revolution this inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame his enthusiasm kindles as he advances and when he arrives at his peroration it is in a full blaze then viewing from the pisgah of his pulpit the free moral happy flourishing and glorious state of france as in a bird s eye landscape of a promised land he breaks out into the following rapture what an eventful period is this i am thankful that i have lived to it i could almost say lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation i have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error i have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it i have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects before i proceed further i have to remark that dr price seems rather to overvalue the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and diffused in this age the last century appears to me to have been quite as much enlightened it had though in a different place a triumph as memorable as that of dr price and some of the great preachers of that period partook of it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of france on the trial of the rev hugh peters for high treason it was deposed that when king charles was brought to london for his trial the apostle of liberty in that day conducted the triumph i saw says the witness his majesty in the coach with six horses and peters riding before the king triumphing dr price when he talks as if he had made a discovery only follows a precedent for after the commencement of the king s trial this precursor the same dr peters concluding a long prayer at the royal chapel at whitehall said i have prayed and preached these twenty years and now i may say with old simeon lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation peters had not the fruits of his prayer for he neither departed so soon as he wished nor in peace he became himself a sacrifice to the triumph which he led as pontiff they dealt at the restoration perhaps too hardly with this poor good man but we owe it to his memory and his sufferings that he had as much illumination and as much zeal and had as effectually undermined all the superstition and error which might impede the great business he was engaged in as any who follow and repeat after him in this age which would assume to itself an exclusive title to the knowledge of the rights of men and all the glorious consequences of that knowledge after this sally of the preacher of the old jewry which differs only in place and time but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648 the revolution society the fabricators of governments the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs electors of sovereigns and leaders of kings in triumph strutting with a proud consciousness of the diffusion of knowledge of which every member had obtained so large a share in the donative were in haste to make a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus gratuitously received to make this bountiful communication they adjourned from the church in the old jewry to the london tavern where the same dr price in whom the fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated moved and carried the resolution or address of congratulation transmitted by lord stanhope to the national assembly of france i find a preacher of the gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation commonly called nunc dimittis made on the first presentation of our saviour in the temple and applying it with an inhuman and unnatural rapture to the most horrid atrocious and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind this leading in triumph a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports must shock i believe the moral taste of every well born mind several english were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph it was a spectacle more resembling a procession of american savages entering into onondaga after some of their murders called victories and leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation if a civilized nation or any men who had a sense of generosity were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and afflicted this my dear sir was not the triumph of france i must believe that as a nation it overwhelmed you with shame and horror i must believe that the national assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or the actors in it and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality the apology of that assembly is found in their situation but when we approve what they must bear it is in us the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind with a compelled appearance of deliberation they vote under the dominion of a stern necessity they sit in the heart as it were of a foreign republic they have their residence in a city whose constitution has emanated neither from the charter of their king nor from their legislative power there they are surrounded by an army not raised either by the authority of their crown or by their command and which if they should order to dissolve itself would instantly dissolve them there they sit after a gang of assassins had driven away some hundreds of the members whilst those who held the same moderate principles with more patience or better hope continued every day exposed to outrageous insults and murderous threats there a majority sometimes real sometimes pretended captive itself compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts at third hand the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffeehouses it is notorious that all their measures are decided before they are debated it is beyond doubt that under the terror of the bayonet and the lamp post and the torch to their houses they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions tongues and nations among these are found persons in comparison of whom catiline would be thought scrupulous and cethegus a man of sobriety and moderation nor is it in these clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters they undergo a previous distortion in academies intended as so many seminaries for these clubs which are set up in all the places of public resort in these meetings of all sorts every counsel in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious is taken for the mark of superior genius humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure amidst assassination massacre and confiscation perpetrated or meditated they are forming plans for the good order of future society embracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals and promoting their relations on the title of their offences they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime the assembly their organ acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty they act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men and of women lost to shame who according to their insolent fancies direct control applaud explode them and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority as they have inverted order in all things the gallery is in the place of the house this assembly which overthrows kings and kingdoms has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body nec color imperii nec frons ulla senatus they have a power given to them like that of the evil principle to subvert and destroy but none to construct except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction who is it that admires and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute lovers of monarchy lovers of republics must alike abhor it the members of your assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame none of the direction and little of the profit i am sure many of the members who compose even the majority of that body must feel as i do notwithstanding the applauses of the revolution society miserable king miserable assembly how must that assembly be silently scandalized with those of their members who could call a day which seemed to blot the sun out of heaven un beau jour how must they be inwardly indignant at hearing others who thought fit to declare to them that the vessel of the state would fly forward in her course toward regeneration with more speed than ever from the stiff gale of treason and murder which preceded our preacher s triumph what must they have felt whilst with outward patience and inward indignation they heard of the slaughter of innocent gentlemen in their houses that the blood spilled was not the most pure what must they have felt when they were besieged by complaints of disorders which shook their country to its foundations at being compelled coolly to tell the complainants that they were under the protection of the law and that they would address the king to cause the laws to be enforced for their protection when the enslaved ministers of that captive king had formally notified to them that there were neither law nor authority nor power left to protect what must they have felt at being obliged as a felicitation on the present new year to request their captive king to forget the stormy period of the last on account of the great good which he was likely to produce to his people to the complete attainment of which good they adjourned the practical demonstrations of their loyalty assuring him of their obedience when he should no longer possess any authority to command this address was made with much good nature and affection to be sure but among the revolutions in france must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness in england we are said to learn manners at second hand from your side of the water and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of france if so we are still in the old cut and have not so far conformed to the new parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment to say to the most humiliated creature that crawls upon the earth that great public benefits are derived from the murder of his servants the attempted assassination of himself and of his wife and the mortification disgrace and degradation that he has personally suffered it is a topic of consolation which our ordinary of newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the gallows i should have thought that the hangman of paris now that he is liberalized by the vote of the national assembly and is allowed his rank and arms in the herald s college of the rights of men would be too generous too gallant a man too full of the sense of his new dignity to employ that cutting consolation to any of the persons whom the lese nation might bring under the administration of his executive power a man is fallen indeed when he is thus flattered the anodyne draught of oblivion thus drugged is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory thus to administer the opiate potion of amnesty powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt is to hold to his lips instead of the balm of hurt minds the cup of human misery full to the brim and to force him to drink it to the dregs yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were so delicately urged in the compliment on the new year the king of france will probably endeavor to forget these events and that compliment but history who keeps a durable record of all our acts and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns will not forget either those events or the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind history will record that on the morning of the 6th of october 1789 the king and queen of france after a day of confusion alarm dismay and slaughter lay down under the pledged security of public faith to indulge nature in a few hours of respite and troubled melancholy repose from this sleep the queen was first startled by the sentinel at her door who cried out to her to save herself by flight that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give that they were upon him and he was dead instantly he was cut down a band of cruel ruffians and assassins reeking with his blood rushed into the chamber of the queen and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life for a moment this king to say no more of him and this queen and their infant children were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world which they left swimming in blood polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom two had been selected from the unprovoked unresisted promiscuous slaughter which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king s body guard these two gentlemen with all the parade of an execution of justice were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block and beheaded in the great court of the palace their heads were stuck upon spears and led the procession whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along amidst the horrid yells and shrilling screams and frantic dances and infamous contumelies and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women after they had been made to taste drop by drop more than the bitterness of death in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles protracted to six hours they were under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph lodged in one of the old palaces of paris now converted into a bastille for kings is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars to be commemorated with grateful thanksgiving to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastic ejaculation these theban and thracian orgies acted in france and applauded only in the old jewry i assure you kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few people in this kingdom although a saint and apostle who may have revelations of his own and who has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart may incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the entrance into the world of the prince of peace proclaimed in a holy temple by a venerable sage and not long before not worse announced by the voice of angels to the quiet innocence of shepherds at first i was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded transport i knew indeed that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some sort of palates there were reflections which might serve to keep this appetite within some bounds of temperance but when i took one circumstance into my consideration i was obliged to confess that much allowance ought to be made for the society and that the temptation was too strong for common discretion i mean the circumstance of the io paean of the triumph the animating cry which called for all the bishops to be hanged on the lampposts might well have brought forth a burst of enthusiasm on the foreseen consequences of this happy day i allow to so much enthusiasm some little deviation from prudence i allow this prophet to break forth into hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which appears like the precursor of the millennium and the projected fifth monarchy in the destruction of all church establishments there was however in the midst of this joy something to exercise the patience of these worthy gentlemen and to try the long suffering of their faith the actual murder of the king and queen and their child was wanting to the other auspicious circumstances of this beautiful day the actual murder of the bishops though called for by so many holy ejaculations was also wanting a group of regicide and sacrilegious slaughter was indeed boldly sketched but it was only sketched it unhappily was left unfinished in this great history piece of the massacre of innocents what hardy pencil of a great master from the school of the rights of man will finish it is to be seen hereafter the age has not yet the complete benefit of that diffusion of knowledge that has undermined superstition and error and the king of france wants another object or two to consign to oblivion in consideration of all the good which is to arise from his own sufferings and the patriotic crimes of an enlightened age extract of m de lally tollendal s second letter to a friend parlons du parti que j ai pris il est bien justifie dans ma conscience ni cette ville coupable ni cette assemblee plus coupable encore ne meritoient que je me justifie mais j ai a coeur que vous et les personnes qui pensent comme vous ne me condamnent pas ma sante je vous jure me rendoit mes fonctions impossibles mais meme en les mettant de cote il a ete au dessus de mes forces de supporter plus long tems l horreur que me causoit ce sang ces tetes cette reine presque egorgee ce roi amene esclave entrant a paris au milieu de ses assassins et precede des tetes de ses malheureux gardes ces perfides jannissaires ces assassins ces femmes cannibales ce cri de tous les eveques a la lanterne dans le moment ou le roi entre sa capitale avec deux eveques de son conseil dans sa voiture un coup de fusil que j ai vu tirer dans un des carosses de la reine m bailly appellant celaun beau jour l assemblee ayant declare froidement le matin qu il n etoit pas de sa dignite d aller toute entiere environner le roi m mirabeau disant impunement dans cette assemblee que le vaisseau de l etat loin d etre arrete dans sa course s elanceroit avec plus de rapidite que jamais vers sa regeneration m barnave riant avec lui quand des flots de sang couloient autour de nous le vertueux mounier echappant par miracle a vingt assassins qui avoient voulu faire de sa tete un trophee de plus voila ce qui me fit jurer de ne plus mettre le pied dans cette caverne d antropophages ou je n avois plus de force d elever la voix ou depuis six semaines je l avois elevee en vain moi mounier et tous les honnetes gens ont le dernier effort a faire pour le bien etoit d en sortir aucune idee de crainte ne s est approchee de moi je rougirois de m en defendre j avois encore recu sur la route de la part de ce peuple moins coupable que ceux qui l ont enivre de fureur des acclamations et des applaudissements dont d autres auroient ete flattes et qui m ont fait fremir c est a l indignation c est a l horreur c est aux convulsions physiques que se seul aspect du sang me fait eprouver que j ai cede on brave une seule mort on la brave plusieurs fois quand elle peut etre utile mais aucune puissance sous le ciel mais aucune opinion publique ou privee n ont le droit de me condamner a souffrir inutilement mille supplices par minute et a perir de desespoir de rage au milieu des triomphes du crime que je n ai pu arreter ils me proscriront ils confisqueront mes biens je labourerai la terre et je ne les verrai plus voila ma justification vous pouvez la lire la montrer la laisser copier tant pis pour ceux qui ne la comprendront pas ce ne sera alors moi qui auroit eu tort de la leur donner this military man had not so good nerves as the peaceable gentleman of the old jewry see mons mounier s narrative of these transactions a man also of honour and virtue and talents and therefore a fugitive although this work of our new light and knowledge did not go to the length that in all probability it was intended it should be carried yet i must think that such treatment of any human creatures must be shocking to any but those who are made for accomplishing revolutions but i cannot stop here influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature and not being illuminated by a single ray of this new sprung modern light i confess to you sir that the exalted rank of the persons suffering and particularly the sex the beauty and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many kings and emperors with the tender age of royal infants insensible only through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages to which their parents were exposed instead of being a subject of exultation adds not a little to any sensibility on that most melancholy occasion i hear that the august person who was the principal object of our preacher s triumph though he supported himself felt much on that shameful occasion as a man it became him to feel for his wife and his children and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him as a prince it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects and to be more grieved for them than solicitous for himself it derogates little from his fortitude while it adds infinitely to the honor of his humanity i am very sorry to say it very sorry indeed that such personages are in a situation in which it is not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great i hear and i rejoice to hear that the great lady the other object of the triumph has borne that day and that she bears all the succeeding days that she bears the imprisonment of her husband and her own captivity and the exile of her friends and the insulting adulation of addresses and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs with a serene patience in a manner suited to her rank and race and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage that like her she has lofty sentiments that she feels with the dignity of a roman matron that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace and that if she must fall she will fall by no ignoble hand it is now sixteen or seventeen years since i saw the queen of france then the dauphiness at versailles and surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch a more delightful vision i saw her just above the horizon decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy oh what a revolution and what a heart must i have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall little did i dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic distant respectful love that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom little did i dream that i should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers i thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult but the age of chivalry is gone that of sophisters economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of europe is extinguished forever never never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex that proud submission that dignified obedience that subordination of the heart which kept alive even in servitude itself the spirit of an exalted freedom the unbought grace of life the cheap defense of nations the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone it is gone that sensibility of principle that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity which ennobled whatever it touched and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness this mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry and the principle though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations even to the time we live in if it should ever be totally extinguished the loss i fear will be great it is this which has given its character to modern europe it is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government and distinguished it to its advantage from the states of asia and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world it was this which without confounding ranks had produced a noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social life it was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings without force or opposition it subdued the fierceness of pride and power it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem compelled stern authority to submit to elegance and gave a domination vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners but now all is to be changed all the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal which harmonized the different shades of life and which by a bland assimilation incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off all the super added ideas furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation are to be exploded as a ridiculous absurd and antiquated fashion on this scheme of things a king is but a man a queen is but a woman a woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order all homage paid to the sex in general as such and without distinct views is to be regarded as romance and folly regicide and parricide and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity the murder of a king or a queen or a bishop or a father are only common homicide and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it a sort of homicide much the most pardonable and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny on the scheme of this barbarous philosophy which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth on the principles of this mechanic philosophy our institutions can never be embodied if i may use the expression in persons so as to create in us love veneration admiration or attachment but that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place these public affections combined with manners are required sometimes as supplements sometimes as correctives always as aids to law the precept given by a wise man as well as a great critic for the construction of poems is equally true as to states non satis est pulchra esse poemata dulcia sunto there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well informed mind would be disposed to relish to make us love our country our country ought to be lovely but power of some kind or other will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish and it will find other and worse means for its support the usurpation which in order to subvert ancient institutions has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it when the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty which by freeing kings from fear freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny shall be extinct in the minds of men plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle when ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away the loss cannot possibly be estimated from that moment we have no compass to govern us nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer europe undoubtedly taken in a mass was in a flourishing condition the day on which your revolution was completed how much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation we must presume that on the whole their operation was beneficial we are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld nothing is more certain than that our manners our civilization and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization have in this european world of ours depended for ages upon two principles and were indeed the result of both combined i mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion the nobility and the clergy the one by profession the other by patronage kept learning in existence even in the midst of arms and confusions and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood and paid it with usury by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union and their proper place happy if learning not debauched by ambition had been satisfied to continue the instructor and not aspired to be the master along with its natural protectors and guardians learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude if as i suspect modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to ancient manners so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth even commerce and trade and manufacture the gods of our economical politicians are themselves perhaps but creatures are themselves but effects which as first causes we choose to worship they certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished they too may decay with their natural protecting principles with you for the present at least they all threaten to disappear together where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people and the spirit of nobility and religion remains sentiment supplies and not always ill supplies their place but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross stupid ferocious and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians destitute of religion honor or manly pride possessing nothing at present and hoping for nothing hereafter i wish you may not be going fast and by the shortest cut to that horrible and disgustful situation already there appears a poverty of conception a coarseness and a vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their instructors their liberty is not liberal their science is presumptuous ignorance their humanity is savage and brutal it is not clear whether in england we learned those grand and decorous principles and manners of which considerable traces yet remain from you or whether you took them from us but to you i think we trace them best you seem to me to be gentis incunabula nostrae france has always more or less influenced manners in england and when your fountain is choked up and polluted the stream will not run long or not run clear with us or perhaps with any nation this gives all europe in my opinion but too close and connected a concern in what is done in france excuse me therefore if i have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of october 1789 or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions which may be dated from that day i mean a revolution in sentiments manners and moral opinions as things now stand with everything respectable destroyed without us and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect one is almost forced to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men why do i feel so differently from the reverend dr price and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse for this plain reason because it is natural i should because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons because in events like these our passions instruct our reason because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the supreme director of this great drama and become the objects of insult to the base and of pity to the good we behold such disasters in the moral as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things we are alarmed into reflection our minds are purified by terror and pity our weak unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom some tears might be drawn from me if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage i should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial theatric sense of painted distress whilst i could exult over it in real life with such a perverted mind i could never venture to show my face at a tragedy people would think the tears that garrick formerly or that siddons not long since have extorted from me were the tears of hypocrisy i should know them to be the tears of folly indeed the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged poets who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation there where men follow their natural impulses they would not bear the odious maxims of a machiavellian policy whether applied to the attainments of monarchical or democratic tyranny they would reject them on the modern as they once did on the ancient stage where they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant though suitable to the character he sustained no theatric audience in athens would bear what has been borne in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day a principal actor weighing as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage and after putting in and out weights declaring that the balance was on the side of the advantages they would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism and the book keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt but by no means unable or unwilling to pay the balance in the theater the first intuitive glance without any elaborate process of reasoning will show that this method of political computation would justify every extent of crime they would see that on these principles even where the very worst acts were not perpetrated it was owing rather to the fortune of the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery and blood they would soon see that criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred they present a shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit public benefit would soon become the pretext and perfidy and murder the end until rapacity malice revenge and fear more dreadful than revenge could satiate their insatiable appetites such must be the consequences of losing in the splendor of these triumphs of the rights of men all natural sense of wrong and right but the reverend pastor exults in this leading in triumph because truly louis the sixteenth was an arbitrary monarch that is in other words neither more nor less than because he was louis the sixteenth and because he had the misfortune to be born king of france with the prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors and a long acquiescence of the people without any act of his had put him in possession a misfortune it has indeed turned out to him that he was born king of france but misfortune is not crime nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt i shall never think that a prince the acts of whose whole reign was a series of concessions to his subjects who was willing to relax his authority to remit his prerogatives to call his people to a share of freedom not known perhaps not desired by their ancestors such a prince though he should be subjected to the common frailties attached to men and to princes though he should have once thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on against his person and the remnants of his authority though all this should be taken into consideration i shall be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of paris and of dr price i tremble for the cause of liberty from such an example to kings i tremble for the cause of humanity in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind but there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know to keep firm in their seat to hold a strict hand over their subjects to assert their prerogative and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches to freedom against such as these they never elevate their voice deserters from principle listed with fortune they never see any good in suffering virtue nor any crime in prosperous usurpation if it could have been made clear to me that the king and queen of france were inexorable and cruel tyrants that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the national assembly i should think their captivity just if this be true much more ought to have been done but done in my opinion in another manner the punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind but if i were to punish a wicked king i should regard the dignity in avenging the crime justice is grave and decorous and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice had nero or agrippina or louis the eleventh or charles the ninth been the subject if charles the twelfth of sweden after the murder of patkul or his predecessor christina after the murder of monaldeschi had fallen into your hands sir or into mine i am sure our conduct would have been different if the french king or king of the french has in his own person and that of his queen really deserved these unavowed but unavenged murderous attempts and those frequent indignities more cruel than murder such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate executory trust which i understand is to be placed in him nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed a worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could not possibly be made but to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals and afterwards to trust him in your highest concerns as a faithful honest and zealous servant is not consistent to reasoning nor prudent in policy nor safe in practice those who could make such an appointment must be guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet committed against the people as this is the only crime in which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently i conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insinuations i think no better of all the other calumnies in england we give no credit to them we are generous enemies we are faithful allies we spurn from us with disgust and indignation the slanders of those who bring us their anecdotes with the attestation of the flower de luce on their shoulder we have lord george gordon fast in newgate and neither his being a public proselyte to judaism nor his having in his zeal against catholic priests and all sorts of ecclesiastics raised a mob which pulled down all our prisons have preserved to him a liberty of which he did not render himself worthy by a virtuous use of it we have rebuilt newgate and tenanted the mansion we have prisons almost as strong as the bastille for those who dare to libel the queens of france in this spiritual retreat let the noble libeller remain let him there meditate on his talmud until he learns a conduct more becoming his birth and parts and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which he has become a proselyte or until some persons from your side of the water to please your new hebrew brethren shall ransom him he may then be enabled to purchase with the old boards of the synagogue and a very small poundage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver the lands which are lately discovered to have been usurped by the gallican church send us your popish archbishop of paris and we will send you our protestant rabbin we shall treat the person you send us in exchange like a gentleman and an honest man as he is but pray let him bring with him the fund of his hospitality bounty and charity and depend upon it we shall never confiscate a shilling of that honorable and pious fund nor think of enriching the treasury with the spoils of the poor box to tell you the truth my dear sir i think the honor of our nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the proceedings of this society of the old jewry and the london tavern i have no man s proxy i speak only for myself when i disclaim as i do with all possible earnestness all communion with the actors in that triumph or with the admirers of it when i assert anything else as concerning the people of england i speak from observation not from authority but i speak from the experience i have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication with the inhabitants of this kingdom of all descriptions and ranks and after a course of attentive observations begun early in life and continued for nearly forty years i have often been astonished considering that we are divided from you but by a slender dyke of about twenty four miles and that the mutual intercourse between the two countries has lately been very great to find how little you seem to know of us i suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain publications which do very erroneously if they do at all represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in england the vanity restlessness petulance and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise and puffing and mutual quotation of each other makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions no such thing i assure you because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the british oak chew the cud and are silent pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field that of course they are many in number or that after all they are other than the little shrivelled meager hopping though loud and troublesome insects of the hour i almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the triumph of the revolution society if the king and queen of france and their children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war in the most acrimonious of all hostilities they would be treated with another sort of triumphal entry into london we formerly have had a king of france in that situation you have read how he was treated by the victor in the field and in what manner he was afterwards received in england four hundred years have gone over us but i believe we are not materially changed since that period thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character we still bear the stamp of our forefathers we have not lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages we are not the converts of rousseau we are not the disciples of voltaire helvetius has made no progress amongst us atheists are not our preachers madmen are not our lawgivers we know that we have made no discoveries and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality nor many in the great principles of government nor in the ideas of liberty which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grace has heaped its mold upon our presumption and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity in england we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails we still feel within us and we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians the active monitors of our duty the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals we have not been drawn and trussed in order that we may be filled like stuffed birds in a museum with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men we preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity we have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms we fear god we look up with awe to kings with affection to parliaments with duty to magistrates with reverence to priests and with respect to nobility why because when such ideas are brought before our minds it is natural to be so affected because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds to vitiate our primary morals to render us unfit for rational liberty and by teaching us a servile licentious and abandoned insolence to be our low sport for a few holidays to make us perfectly fit for and justly deserving of slavery through the whole course of our lives you see sir that in this enlightened age i am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings that instead of casting away all our old prejudices we cherish them to a very considerable degree and to take more shame to ourselves we cherish them because they are prejudices and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed the more we cherish them we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages many of our men of speculation instead of exploding general prejudices employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them if they find what they seek and they seldom fail they think it more wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason because prejudice with its reason has a motive to give action to that reason and an affection which will give it permanence prejudice is of ready application in the emergency it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical puzzled and unresolved prejudice renders a man s virtue his habit and not a series of unconnected acts through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature your literary men and your politicians and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us essentially differ in these points they have no respect for the wisdom of others but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own with them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things because it is an old one as to the new they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time and who place all their hopes in discovery they conceive very systematically that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments they think that government may vary like modes of dress and with as little ill effect that there needs no principle of attachment except a sense of present convenience to any constitution of the state they always speak as if they were of opinion that there is a singular species of compact between them and their magistrates which binds the magistrate but which has nothing reciprocal in it but that the majesty of the people has a right to dissolve it without any reason but its will their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with some of their fleeting projects it begins and ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their momentary opinion these doctrines or rather sentiments seem prevalent with your new statesmen but they are wholly different from those on which we have always acted in this country i hear it is sometimes given out in france that what is doing among you is after the example of england i beg leave to affirm that scarcely anything done with you has originated from the practice or the prevalent opinions of this people either in the act or in the spirit of the proceeding let me add that we are as unwilling to learn these lessons from france as we are sure that we never taught them to that nation the cabals here who take a sort of share of your transactions as yet consist of but a handful of people if unfortunately by their intrigues their sermons their publications and by a confidence derived from an expected union with the counsels and forces of the french nation they should draw considerable numbers into their faction and in consequence should seriously attempt anything here in imitation of what has been done with you the event i dare venture to prophesy will be that with some trouble to their country they will soon accomplish their own destruction this people refused to change their law in remote ages from respect to the infallibility of popes and they will not now alter it from a pious implicit faith in the dogmatism of philosophers though the former was armed with the anathema and crusade and though the latter should act with the libel and the lamp iron formerly your affairs were your own concern only we felt for them as men but we kept aloof from them because we were not citizens of france but when we see the model held up to ourselves we must feel as englishmen and feeling we must provide as englishmen your affairs in spite of us are made a part of our interest so far at least as to keep at a distance your panacea or your plague if it be a panacea we do not want it we know the consequences of unnecessary physic if it be a plague it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it i hear on all hands that a cabal calling itself philosophic receives the glory of many of the late proceedings and that their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them i have heard of no party in england literary or political at any time known by such a description it is not with you composed of those men is it whom the vulgar in their blunt homely style commonly call atheists and infidels if it be i admit that we too have had writers of that description who made some noise in their day at present they repose in lasting oblivion who born within the last forty years has read one word of collins and toland and tindal and chubb and morgan and that whole race who called themselves freethinkers who now reads bolingbroke who ever read him through ask the booksellers of london what is become of all these lights of the world in as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of all the capulets but whatever they were or are with us they were and are wholly unconnected individuals with us they kept the common nature of their kind and were not gregarious they never acted in corps or were known as a faction in the state nor presumed to influence in that name or character or for the purposes of such a faction on any of our public concerns whether they ought so to exist and so be permitted to act is another question as such cabals have not existed in england so neither has the spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame of our constitution or in any one of the several reparations and improvements it has undergone the whole has been done under the auspices and is confirmed by the sanctions of religion and piety the whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national character and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding which for a long time characterized those men who have successively obtained authority amongst us this disposition still remains at least in the great body of the people we know and what is better we feel inwardly that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort in england we are so convinced of this that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages that ninety nine in a hundred of the people of england would not prefer to impiety we shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions to supply its defects or to perfect its construction if our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation we shall not call on atheism to explain them we shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire it will be illuminated with other lights it will be perfumed with other incense than the infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics if our ecclesiastical establishment should want a revision it is not avarice or rapacity public or private that we shall employ for the audit or receipt or application of its consecrated revenue violently condemning neither the greek nor the armenian nor since heats are subsided the roman system of religion we prefer the protestant not because we think it has less of the christian religion in it but because in our judgment it has more we are protestants not from indifference but from zeal we know and it is our pride to know that man is by his constitution a religious animal that atheism is against not only our reason but our instincts and that it cannot prevail long but if in the moment of riot and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell which in france is now so furiously boiling we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort and one great source of civilization amongst us and amongst many other nations we are apprehensive that some uncouth pernicious and degrading superstition might take place of it for that reason before we take from our establishment the natural human means of estimation and give it up to contempt as you have done and in doing it have incurred the penalties you well deserve to suffer we desire that some other may be presented to us in the place of it we shall then form our judgment on these ideas instead of quarrelling with establishments as some do who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions we cleave closely to them we are resolved to keep an established church an established monarchy an established aristocracy and an established democracy each in the degree it exists and in no greater i shall show you presently how much of each of these we possess it has been the misfortune of this age that everything is to be discussed as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation than enjoyment for this reason as well as for the satisfaction of those among you who may wish to profit of examples i venture to trouble you with a few thoughts upon each of these establishments i do not think they were unwise in ancient rome who when they wished to new model their laws set commissioners to examine the best constituted republics within their reach first i beg leave to speak of our church establishment which is the first of our prejudices not a prejudice destitute of reason but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom i speak of it first it is first and last and midst in our minds for taking ground on that religious system of which we are now in possession we continue to act on the early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind that sense not only like a wise architect hath built up the august fabric of states but like a provident proprietor to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin as a sacred temple purged from all the impurities of fraud and violence and injustice and tyranny hath solemnly and forever consecrated the commonwealth and all that officiate in it this consecration is made that all who administer the government of men in which they stand in the person of god himself should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination that their hope should be full of immortality that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar but to a solid permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature and to a permanent fame and glory in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations and religious establishments provided that may continually revive and enforce them every sort of moral every sort of civil every sort of politic institution aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human understanding and affections to the divine are not more than necessary in order to build up that wonderful structure man whose prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own making and who when made as he ought to be made is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation but whenever man is put over men as the better nature ought ever to preside in that case more particularly he should as nearly as possible be approximated to his perfection the consecration of the state by a state religious establishment is necessary also to operate with a wholesome awe upon free citizens because in order to secure their freedom they must enjoy some determinate portion of power to them therefore a religion connected with the state and with their duty toward it becomes even more necessary than in such societies where the people by the terms of their subjection are confined to private sentiments and the management of their own family concerns all persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master author and founder of society this principle ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty than upon those of single princes without instruments these princes can do nothing whoever uses instruments in finding helps finds also impediments their power is therefore by no means complete nor are they safe in extreme abuse such persons however elevated by flattery arrogance and self opinion must be sensible that whether covered or not by positive law in some way or other they are accountable even here for the abuse of their trust if they are not cut off by a rebellion of their people they may be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their security against all other rebellion thus we have seen the king of france sold by his soldiers for an increase of pay but where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained the people have an infinitely greater because a far better founded confidence in their own power they are themselves in a great measure their own instruments they are nearer to their objects besides they are less under responsibility to one of the greatest controlling powers on the earth the sense of fame and estimation the share of infamy that is likely to fall to the lot of each individual in public acts is small indeed the operation of opinion being in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power their own approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public judgment in their favor a perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world as it is the most shameless it is also the most fearless no man apprehends in his person that he can be made subject to punishment certainly the people at large never ought for as all punishments are for example toward the conservation of the people at large the people at large can never become the subject of punishment by any human hand it is therefore of infinite importance that they should not be suffered to imagine that their will any more than that of kings is the standard of right and wrong they ought to be persuaded that they are full as little entitled and far less qualified with safety to themselves to use any arbitrary power whatsoever that therefore they are not under a false show of liberty but in truth to exercise an unnatural inverted domination tyrannically to exact from those who officiate in the state not an entire devotion to their interest which is their right but an abject submission to their occasional will extinguishing thereby in all those who serve them all moral principle all sense of dignity all use of judgment and all consistency of character whilst by the very same process they give themselves up a proper a suitable but a most contemptible prey to the servile ambition of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers when the people have emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should when they are conscious that they exercise and exercise perhaps in a higher link of the order of delegation the power which to be legitimate must be according to that eternal immutable law in which will and reason are the same they will be more careful how they place power in base and incapable hands in their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job but as to a holy function not according to their sordid selfish interest nor to their wanton caprice nor to their arbitrary will but they will confer that power on those only in whom they may discern that predominant proportion of active virtue and wisdom taken together and fitted to the charge such as in the great and inevitable mixed mass of human imperfections and infirmities is to be found when they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable either in the act or the permission to him whose essence is good they will be better able to extirpate out of the minds of all magistrates civil ecclesiastical or military anything that bears the least resemblance to a proud and lawless domination but one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is lest the temporary possessors and life renters in it unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors or of what is due to their posterity should act as if they were the entire masters that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers by this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken no one generation could link with the other men would become little better than the flies of a summer and first of all the science of jurisprudence the pride of the human intellect which with all its defects redundancies and errors is the collected reason of ages combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns as a heap of old exploded errors would be no longer studied personal self sufficiency and arrogance would usurp the tribunal of course no certain laws establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear would keep the actions of men in a certain course or direct them to a certain end nothing stable in the modes of holding property or exercising function could form a solid ground on which any parent could speculate in the education of his offspring or in a choice for their future establishment in the world no principles would be early worked into the habits as soon as the most able instructor had completed his laborious course of institution instead of sending forth his pupil accomplished in a virtuous discipline fitted to procure him attention and respect in his place in society he would find everything altered and that he had turned out a poor creature to the contempt and derision of the world ignorant of the true grounds of estimation who would insure a tender and delicate sense of honor to beat almost with the first pulses of the heart when no man could know what would be the test of honor in a nation continually varying the standard of its coin no part of life would retain its acquisitions barbarism with regard to science and literature unskilfulness with regard to arts and manufactures would infallibly succeed to the want of a steady education and settled principle and thus the commonwealth itself would in a few generations crumble away be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality and at length dispersed to all the winds of heaven to avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice we have consecrated the state that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father with pious awe and trembling solicitude by this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father s life society is indeed a contract subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee calico or tobacco or some other such low concern to be taken up for a little temporary interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties it is to be looked on with other reverence because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature it is a partnership in all science a partnership in all art a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living those who are dead and those who are to be born each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society linking the lower with the higher natures connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures each in their appointed place this law is not subject to the will of those who by an obligation above them and infinitely superior are bound to submit their will to that law the municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure and on their speculations of a contingent improvement wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community and to dissolve it into an unsocial uncivil unconnected chaos of elementary principles it is the first and supreme necessity only a necessity that is not chosen but chooses a necessity paramount to deliberation that admits no discussion and demands no evidence which alone can justify a resort to anarchy this necessity is no exception to the rule because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice the law is broken nature is disobeyed and the rebellious are outlawed cast forth and exiled from this world of reason and order and peace and virtue and fruitful penitence into the antagonist world of madness discord vice confusion and unavailing sorrow these my dear sir are were and i think long will be the sentiments of not the least learned and reflecting part of this kingdom they who are included in this description form their opinions on such grounds as such persons ought to form them the less inquiring receive them from an authority which those whom providence dooms to live on trust need not be ashamed to rely on these two sorts of men move in the same direction though in a different place they both move with the order of the universe they all know or feel this great ancient truth quod illi principi et praepotenti deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit nihil eorum quae quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quae civitates appellantur they take this tenet of the head and heart not from the great name which it immediately bears nor from the greater from whence it is derived but from that which alone can give true weight and sanction to any learned opinion the common nature and common relation of men persuaded that all things ought to be done with reference and referring all to the point of reference to which all should be directed they think themselves bound not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart or as congregated in that personal capacity to renew the memory of their high origin and cast but also in their corporate character to perform their national homage to the institutor and author and protector of civil society without which civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable nor even make a remote and faint approach to it they conceive that he who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed also the necessary means of its perfection he willed therefore the state he willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection they who are convinced of this his will which is the law of laws and the sovereign of sovereigns cannot think it reprehensible that this our corporate fealty and homage that this our recognition of a seigniory paramount i had almost said this oblation of the state itself as a worthy offering on the high altar of universal praise should be performed as all public solemn acts are performed in buildings in music in decoration in speech in the dignity of persons according to the customs of mankind taught by their nature that is with modest splendor and unassuming state with mild majesty and sober pomp for those purposes they think some part of the wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it can be in fomenting the luxury of individuals it is the public ornament it is the public consolation it nourishes the public hope the poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it whilst the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition it is for the man in humble life and to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease when he will be equal by nature and may be more than equal by virtue that this portion of the general wealth of his country is employed and sanctified i assure you i do not aim at singularity i give you opinions which have been accepted amongst us from very early times to this moment with a continued and general approbation and which indeed are worked into my mind that i am unable to distinguish what i have learned from others from the results of my own meditation it is on some such principles that the majority of the people of england far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful hardly think it lawful to be without one in france you are wholly mistaken if you do not believe us above all other things attached to it and beyond all other nations and when this people has acted unwisely and unjustifiably in its favor in their very errors you will at least discover their zeal this principle runs through the whole system of their polity they do not consider their church establishment as convenient but as essential to their state not as a thing heterogeneous and separable something added for accommodation what they may either keep or lay aside according to their temporary ideas of convenience they consider it as the foundation of their whole constitution with which and with every part of which it holds an indissoluble union church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics and in all stages from infancy to manhood even when our youth leaving schools and universities enter that most important period of life which begins to link experience and study together and when with that view they visit other countries instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to principal men from other parts three fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics not as austere masters nor as mere followers but as friends and companions of a graver character and not seldom persons as well born as themselves with them as relations they most constantly keep a close connection through life by this connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church and we liberalize the church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country so tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution that very little alteration has been made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth century adhering in this particular as in all things else to our old settled maxim never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity we found these old institutions on the whole favorable to morality and discipline and we thought they were susceptible of amendment without altering the ground we thought that they were capable of receiving and meliorating and above all of preserving the accessions of science and literature as the order of providence should successively produce them and after all with this gothic and monkish education we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science in arts and in literature which have illuminated and adorned the modern world as any other nation in europe we think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers it is from our attachment to a church establishment that the english nation did not think it wise to entrust that great fundamental interest of the whole to what they trust no part of their civil or military public service that is to the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals they go further they certainly never have suffered and never will suffer the fixed estate of the church to be converted into a pension to depend on the treasury and to be delayed withheld or perhaps to be extinguished by fiscal difficulties which difficulties may sometimes be pretended for political purposes and are in fact often brought on by the extravagance negligence and rapacity of politicians the people of england think that they have constitutional motives as well as religious against any project of turning their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of state they tremble for their liberty from the influence of a clergy dependent on the crown they tremble for the public tranquillity from the disorders of a factious clergy if it were made to depend upon any other than the crown they therefore made their church like their king and their nobility independent from the united considerations of religion and constitutional policy from their opinion of a duty to make sure provision for the consolation of the feeble and the instruction of the ignorant they have incorporated and identified the estate of the church with the mass of private property of which the state is not the proprietor either for use or dominion but the guardian only and the regulator they have ordained that the provision of this establishment might be as stable as the earth on which it stands and should not fluctuate with the euripus of funds and actions the men of england the men i mean of light and leading in england whose wisdom is open and direct would be ashamed as of a silly deceitful trick to profess any religion in name which by their proceedings they appear to contemn if by their conduct they seemed to regard the great ruling principle of the moral and the natural world as a mere invention to keep the vulgar in obedience they apprehend that by such a conduct they would defeat the politic purpose they have in view they would find it difficult to make others believe in a system to which they manifestly give no credit themselves the christian statesmen of this land would indeed first provide for the multitude because it is the multitude and is therefore as such the first object in the ecclesiastical institution and in all institutions they have been taught that the circumstance of the gospel s being preached to the poor was one of the great tests of its true mission they think therefore that those do not believe it who do not take care it should be preached to the poor but as they know that charity is not confined to any one description but ought to apply itself to all men who have wants they are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great they are not repelled through a fastidious delicacy at the stench of their arrogance and presumption from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and running sores they are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence to them than to any others from the greatness of the temptation to which they are exposed from the important consequences that attend their faults from the contagion of their ill example from the necessity of bowing down the stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of moderation and virtue from a consideration of the fat stupidity and gross ignorance concerning what imports men most to know which prevails at courts and at the head of armies and in senates as much as at the loom and in the field the english people are satisfied that to the great the consolations of religion are as necessary as its instructions they too are among the unhappy they feel personal pain and domestic sorrow in these they have no privilege but are subject to pay their full contingent to the contributions levied on mortality they want this sovereign balm under their gnawing cares and anxieties which being less conversant about the limited wants of animal life range without limit and are diversified by infinite combinations in the wild and unbounded regions of imagination some charitable dole is wanting to these our often very unhappy brethren to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear something to relieve in the killing languor and overlabored lassitude of those who have nothing to do something to excite an appetite to existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures which may be bought where nature is not left to her own process where even desire is anticipated and therefore fruition defeated by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight and no interval no obstacle is interposed between the wish and the accomplishment the people of england know how little influence the teachers of religion are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing and how much less with the newly fortunate if they appear in a manner no way assorted to those with whom they must associate and over whom they must even exercise in some cases something like an authority what must they think of that body of teachers if they see it in no part above the establishment of their domestic servants if the poverty were voluntary there might be some difference strong instances of self denial operate powerfully on our minds and a man who has no wants has obtained great freedom and firmness and even dignity but as the mass of any description of men are but men and their poverty cannot be voluntary that disrespect which attends upon all lay poverty will not depart from the ecclesiastical our provident constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance those who are to be censors over insolent vice should neither incur their contempt nor live upon their alms nor will it tempt the rich to a neglect of the true medicine of their minds for these reasons whilst we provide first for the poor and with a parental solicitude we have not relegated religion to obscure municipalities or rustic villages no we will have her to exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments we will have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life and blended with all the classes of society the people of england will show to the haughty potentates of the world and to their talking sophisters that a free a generous an informed nation honors the high magistrates of its church that it will not suffer the insolence of wealth and titles or any other species of proud pretension to look down with scorn upon what they looked up to with reverence nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility which they intend always to be and which often is the fruit not the reward of learning piety and virtue they can see without pain or grudging an archbishop precede a duke they can see a bishop of durham or a bishop of winchester in possession of ten thousand pounds a year and cannot conceive why it is in worse hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of this earl or that squire although it may be true that so many dogs and horses are not kept by the former and fed with the victuals which ought to nourish the children of the people it is true the whole church revenue is not always employed and to every shilling in charity nor perhaps ought it but something is generally employed it is better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will even with some loss to the object than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence the world on the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist when once the commonwealth has established the estates of the church as property it can consistently hear nothing of the more or the less too much and too little are treason against property what evil can arise from the quantity in any hand whilst the supreme authority has the full sovereign superintendence over this as over all property to prevent every species of abuse and whenever it notably deviates to give to it a direction agreeable to the purposes of its institution in england most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity toward those who are often the beginners of their own fortune and not a love of the self denial and mortification of the ancient church that makes some look askance at the distinctions and honors and revenues which taken from no person are set apart for virtue the ears of the people of england are distinguishing they hear these men speak broad their tongue betrays them their language is in the patois of fraud in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy the people of england must think so when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them but in the thing must be varied when the relation of that body to the state is altered when manners when modes of life when indeed the whole order of human affairs has undergone a total revolution we shall believe those reformers then to be honest enthusiasts not as now we think them cheats and deceivers when we see them throwing their own goods into common and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of the early church with these ideas rooted in their minds the commons of great britain in the national emergencies will never seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the church and poor sacrilege and proscription are not among the ways and means of our committee of supply the jews in change alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of canterbury i am not afraid that i shall be disavowed when i assure you that there is not one public man in this kingdom whom you would wish to quote no not one of any party or description who does not reprobate the dishonest perfidious and cruel confiscation which the national assembly has been compelled to make of that property which it was their first duty to protect it is with the exultation of a little national pride i tell you that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of paris in the cup of their abominations have been disappointed the robbery of your church has proved a security to the possession of ours it has roused the people they see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription it has opened and will more and more open their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men which commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud have ended in open violence and rapine at home we behold similar beginnings we are on our guard against similar conclusions i hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties imposed upon us by the law of social union as upon any pretext of public service to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen who but a tyrant could think of seizing on the property of men unaccused unheard untried by whole descriptions by hundreds and thousands together who that had not lost every trace of humanity could think of casting down men of exalted rank and sacred function some of them of an age to call at once for reverence and compassion of casting them down from the highest situation in the commonwealth wherein they were maintained by their own landed property to a state of indigence depression and contempt the confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from the scraps and fragments of their own tables from which they have been so harshly driven and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies of usury but to drive men from independence to live on alms is itself great cruelty that which might be a tolerable condition to men in one state of life and not habituated to other things may when all these circumstances are altered be a dreadful revolution and one to which a virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt except that which would demand the life of the offender but to many minds this punishment of degradation and infamy is worse than death undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering that the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favor of religion by education and by the place they held in the administration of its functions are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest to receive not from the charitable contributions of the faithful but from the insolent tenderness of known and avowed atheism the maintenance of religion measured out to them on the standard of the contempt in which it is held and for the purpose of rendering those who receive the allowance vile and of no estimation in the eyes of mankind but this act of seizure of property it seems is a judgment in law and not a confiscation they have it seems found out in the academies of the palais royal and the jacobins that certain men had no right to the possessions which they held under law usage the decisions of courts and the accumulated prescription of a thousand years they say that ecclesiastics are fictitious persons creatures of the state whom at pleasure they may destroy and of course limit and modify in every particular that the goods they possess are not properly theirs but belong to the state which created the fiction and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves with what they may suffer in their natural feelings and natural persons on account of what is done toward them in this their constructive character of what import is it under what names you injure men and deprive them of the just emoluments of a profession in which they were not only permitted but encouraged by the state to engage and upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had formed the plan of their lives contracted debts and led multitudes to an entire dependence upon them you do not imagine sir that i am going to compliment this miserable distinction of persons with any long discussion the arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful had not your confiscators by their early crimes obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty or that they can commit it is not the syllogism of the logician but the lash of the executioner that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder the sophistic tyrants of paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants who in former ages have vexed the world they are thus bold because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes shall we not use the same liberty that they do when we can use it with the same safety when to speak honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we abhor this outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with what on the system of their conduct was the most astonishing of all pretexts a regard to national faith the enemies to property at first pretended a most tender delicate and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king s engagements with the public creditor these professors of the rights of men are so busy in teaching others that they have not leisure to learn anything themselves otherwise they would have known that it is to the property of the citizen and not to the demands of the creditor of the state that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged the claim of the citizen is prior in time paramount in title superior in equity the fortunes of individuals whether possessed by acquisition or by descent or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community were no part of the creditor s security expressed or implied they never so much as entered into his head when he made his bargain he well knew that the public whether represented by a monarch or by a senate can pledge nothing but the public estate and it can have no public estate except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large this was engaged and nothing else could be engaged to the public creditor no man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity it is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions caused by the extreme rigor and the extreme laxity of this new public faith which influenced in this transaction and which influenced not according to the nature of the obligation but to the description of the persons to whom it was engaged no acts of the old government of the kings of france are held valid in the national assembly except its pecuniary engagements acts of all others of the most ambiguous legality the rest of the acts of that royal government are considered in so odious a light that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime a pension given as a reward for service to the state is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the state it is better for money is paid and well paid to obtain that service we have however seen multitudes of people under this description in france who never had been deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times by this assembly of the rights of men robbed without mercy they were told in answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood that their services had not been rendered to the country that now exists this laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate persons the assembly with perfect consistency it must be owned is engaged in a respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations under the former government and their committee is to report which of them they ought to ratify and which not by this means they have put the external fidelity of this virgin state on a par with its internal it is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal government should not of the two rather have possessed the power of rewarding service and making treaties in virtue of its prerogative than that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state actual and possible the treasure of the nation of all things has been the least allowed to the prerogative of the king of france or to the prerogative of any king in europe to mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion in the fullest sense over the public purse it goes far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation the acts however of that dangerous power have been alone held sacred whence arose this preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriving its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the exertions of monarchical authority reason can furnish nothing to reconcile inconsistency nor can partial favor be accounted for upon equitable principles but the contradiction and partiality which admit no justification are not the less without an adequate cause and that cause i do not think it difficult to discover by the vast debt of france a great monied interest had insensibly grown up and with it a great power by the ancient usages which prevailed in that kingdom the general circulation of property and in particular the mutual convertibility of land into money and of money into land had always been a matter of difficulty family settlements rather more general and more strict than they are in england the jus retractus the great mass of landed property held by the crown and by a maxim of the french law held unalienably the vast estates of the ecclesiastical corporations all these had kept the landed and monied interests more separated in france less miscible and the owners of the two distinct species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country the monied property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the people they saw it connected with their distresses and aggravating them it was no less envied by the old landed interests partly for the same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people but much more so as it eclipsed by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury the unendowed pedigrees and naked titles of several among the nobility even when the nobility which represented the more permanent landed interest united themselves by marriage with the other description the wealth which saved the family from ruin was supposed to contaminate and degrade it thus the enmities and heartburnings of these parties were increased even by the usual means by which discord is made to cease and quarrels are turned into friendship in the meantime the pride of the wealthy men not noble or newly noble increased with its cause they felt with resentment an inferiority the grounds of which they did not acknowledge there was no measure to which they were not willing to lend themselves in order to be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride and to exalt their wealth to what they considered as its natural rank and estimation they struck at the nobility through the crown and the church they attacked them particularly on the side on which they thought them the most vulnerable that is the possessions of the church which through the patronage of the crown generally devolved upon the nobility the bishoprics and the great commendatory abbeys were with few exceptions held by that order in this state of real though not always perceived warfare between the noble ancient landed interest and the new monied interest the greatest because the most applicable strength was in the hands of the latter the monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind being of a recent acquisition it falls in more naturally with any novelties it is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change along with the monied interest a new description of men had grown up with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union i mean the political men of letters men of letters fond of distinguishing themselves are rarely averse to innovation since the decline of the life and greatness of louis the fourteenth they were not so much cultivated either by him or by the regent or the successors to the crown nor were they engaged to the court by favors and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign what they lost in the old court protection they endeavored to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own to which the two academies of france and afterwards the vast undertaking of the encyclopedia carried on by a society of these gentlemen did not a little contribute the literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the christian religion this object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety they were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree and from thence by an easy progress with the spirit of persecution according to their means what was not to be done toward their great end by any direct or immediate act might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion to command that opinion the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it they contrived to possess themselves with great method and perseverance of all the avenues to literary fame many of them indeed stood high in the ranks of literature and science the world had done them justice and in favor of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar principles this was true liberality which they returned by endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense learning and taste to themselves or their followers i will venture to say that this narrow exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true philosophy these atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own and they have learned to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk but in some things they are men of the world the resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit to this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way and by every means all those who did not hold to their faction to those who have observed the spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property liberty and life the desultory and faint persecution carried on against them more from compliance with form and decency than with serious resentment neither weakened their strength nor relaxed their efforts the issue of the whole was that what with opposition and what with success a violent and malignant zeal of a kind hitherto unknown in the world had taken an entire possession of their minds and rendered their whole conversation which otherwise would have been pleasing and instructive perfectly disgusting a spirit of cabal intrigue and proselytism pervaded all their thoughts words and actions and as controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts on force they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence with foreign princes in hopes through their authority which at first they flattered they might bring about the changes they had in view to them it was indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism or by the earthquake of popular commotion the correspondence between this cabal and the late king of prussia will throw no small light upon the spirit of all their proceedings for the same purpose for which they intrigued with princes they cultivated in a distinguished manner the monied interest of france and partly through the means furnished by those whose peculiar offices gave them the most extensive and certain means of communication they carefully occupied all the avenues to opinion writers especially when they act in a body and with one direction have great influence on the public mind the alliance therefore of these writers with the monied interest had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth these writers like the propagators of all novelties pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders whilst in their satires they rendered hateful by every exaggeration the faults of courts of nobility and of priesthood they became a sort of demagogues they served as a link to unite in favor of one object obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty as these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all the late transactions their junction and politics will serve to account not upon any principles of law or of policy but as a cause for the general fury with which all the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations has been attacked and the great care which contrary to their pretended principles has been taken of a monied interest originating from the authority of the crown all the envy against wealth and power was artificially directed against other descriptions of riches on what other principle than that which i have stated can we account for an appearance so extraordinary and unnatural as that of the ecclesiastical possessions which had stood so many successions of ages and shocks of civil violences and were girded at once by justice and by prejudice being applied to the payment of debts comparatively recent invidious and contracted by a decried and subverted government was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public debts assume that it was not and that a loss must be incurred somewhere when the only estate lawfully possessed and which the contracting parties had in contemplation at the time in which their bargain was made happens to fail who according to the principles of natural and legal equity ought to be the sufferer certainly it ought to be either the party who trusted or the party who persuaded him to trust or both and not third parties who had no concern with the transaction upon any insolvency they ought to suffer who are weak enough to lend upon bad security or they who fraudulently held out a security that was not valid laws are acquainted with no other rules of decision but by the new institute of the rights of men the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be saved harmless those are to answer the debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers mortgagers nor mortgagees what had the clergy to do with these transactions what had they to do with any public engagement further than the extent of their own debt to that to be sure their estates were bound to the last acre nothing can lead more to the true spirit of the assembly which sits for public confiscation with its new equity and its new morality than an attention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy the body of confiscators true to that monied interest for which they were false to every other have found the clergy competent to incur a legal debt of course they declared them legally entitled to the property which their power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate implied recognizing the rights of those persecuted citizens in the very act in which they were thus grossly violated if as i said any persons are to make good deficiencies to the public creditor besides the public at large they must be those who managed the agreement why therefore are not the estates of all the comptrollers general confiscated why not those of the long succession of ministers financiers and bankers who have been enriched whilst the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels why is not the estate of m laborde declared forfeited rather than of the archbishop of paris who has had nothing to do in the creation or in the jobbing of the public funds or if you must confiscate old landed estates in favor of the money jobbers why is the penalty confined to one description i do not know whether the expenses of the duke de choiseul have left anything of the infinite sums which he had derived from the bounty of his master during the transactions of a reign which contributed largely by every species of prodigality in war and peace to the present debt of france if any such remains why is not this confiscated i remember to have been in paris during the time of the old government i was there just after the duke d aiguillon had been snatched from the block by the hand of a protecting despotism he was a minister and had some concern in the affairs of that prodigal period why do i not see his estate delivered up to the municipalities in which it is situated the noble family of noailles have long been servants to the crown of france and have had of course some share in its bounties why do i hear nothing of the application of their estates to the public debt why is the estate of the duke de rochefoucault more sacred than that of the cardinal de rochefoucault the former is i doubt not a worthy person and he makes a good use of his revenues but it is no disrespect to him to say what authentic information well warrants me in saying that the use made of a property equally valid by his brother the cardinal archbishop of rouen was far more laudable and far more public spirited can one hear of the proscription of such persons and the confiscation of their effects without indignation and horror he is not a man who does not feel such emotions on such occasions he does not deserve the name of a freeman who will not express them few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property none of the heads of the roman factions when they established crudelem illam hastam in all their auctions of rapine have ever set up to sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount it must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood their passions were inflamed their tempers soured their understandings confused with the spirit of revenge with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine they were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return of power with the return of property to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness these roman confiscators who were yet only in the elements of tyranny and were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise all sorts of cruelties on each other without provocation thought it necessary to spread a sort of color over their injustice they considered the vanquished party as composed of traitors who had borne arms or otherwise had acted with hostility against the commonwealth they regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property by their crimes with you in your improved state of the human mind there was no such formality you seized upon five millions sterling of annual rent and turned forty or fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses because such was your pleasure the tyrant harry the eighth of england as he was not better enlightened than the roman mariuses and sullas and had not studied in your new schools did not know what an effectual instrument of despotism was to be found in that grand magazine of offensive weapons the rights of men when he resolved to rob the abbeys as the club of the jacobins have robbed all the ecclesiastics he began by setting on foot a commission to examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in those communities as it might be expected his commission reported truths exaggerations and falsehoods but truly or falsely it reported abuses and offenses however as abuses might be corrected as every crime of persons does not infer a forfeiture with regard to communities and as property in that dark age was not discovered to be a creature of prejudice all those abuses were hardly thought sufficient ground for such a confiscation as it was for his purpose to make he therefore procured the formal surrender of these estates all these operose proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history as necessary preliminaries before he could venture by bribing the members of his two servile houses with a share of the spoil and holding out to them an eternal immunity from taxation to demand a confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an act of parliament had fate reserved him to our times four technical terms would have done his business and saved him all this trouble he needed nothing more than one short form of incantation philosophy light liberality the rights of men i can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors yet in these false colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice the power which was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame whilst shame keeps its watch virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants i believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections with our political poet on that occasion and will pray to avert the omen whenever these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his view or his imagination may no such storm fall on our times where ruin must reform tell me what monstrous dire offense what crimes could any christian king incense to such a rage was t luxury or lust was he so temperate so chaste so just were these their crimes they were his own much more but wealth is crime enough to him that s poor this same wealth which is at all times treason and lese nation to indigent and rapacious despotism under all modes of polity was your temptation to violate property law and religion united in one object but was the state of france so wretched and undone that no other recourse but rapine remained to preserve its existence on this point i wish to receive some information when the states met was the condition of the finances of france such that after economizing on principles of justice and mercy through all departments no fair repartition of burdens upon all the orders could possibly restore them if such an equal imposition would have been sufficient you well know it might easily have been made m necker in the budget which he laid before the orders assembled at versailles made a detailed exposition of the state of the french nation if we give credit to him it was not necessary to have recourse to any new impositions whatsoever to put the receipts of france on a balance with its expenses he stated the permanent charges of all descriptions including the interest of a new loan of four hundred millions at 531 444 000 livres the fixed revenue at 475 294 000 making the deficiency 56 150 000 or short of 2 200 000 sterling but to balance it he brought forward savings and improvements of revenue to rather more than the amount of that deficiency and he concludes with these emphatical words quel pays messieurs que celui ou sans impots et avec de simples objets inappercus on peut faire disparoitre un deficit qui a fait tant de bruit en europe as to the reimbursement the sinking of debt and the other great objects of public credit and political arrangement indicated in mons necker s speech no doubt could be entertained but that a very moderate and proportioned assessment on the citizens without distinction would have provided for all of them to the fullest extent of their demand if this representation of mons necker was false then the assembly are in the highest degree culpable for having forced the king to accept as his minister and since the king s deposition for having employed as their minister a man who had been capable of abusing so notoriously the confidence of his master and their own in a matter too of the highest moment and directly appertaining to his particular office but if the representation was exact then what can be said in favor of those who instead of moderate reasonable and general contribution have in cold blood and impelled by no necessity had recourse to a partial and cruel confiscation was that contribution refused on a pretext of privilege either on the part of the clergy or on that of the nobility no certainly as to the clergy they even ran before the wishes of the third order previous to the meeting of the states they had in all their instructions expressly directed their deputies to renounce every immunity which put them upon a footing distinct from the condition of their fellow subjects in this renunciation the clergy were even more explicit than the nobility but let us suppose that the deficiency had remained at the fifty six millions as at first stated by m necker let us allow that all the resources he opposed to that deficiency were impudent and groundless fictions and that the assembly at the jacobins were from thence justified in laying the whole burden of that deficiency on the clergy yet allowing all this a necessity of 2 200 000 sterling will not support a confiscation to the amount of five millions the imposition of 2 200 000 on the clergy as partial would have been oppressive and unjust but it would not have been altogether ruinous to those on whom it was imposed and therefore it would not have answered the real purpose of the managers perhaps persons unacquainted with the state of france on hearing the clergy and the noblesse were privileged in point of taxation may be led to imagine that previous to the revolution these bodies had contributed nothing to the state this is a great mistake they certainly did not contribute equally with each other nor either of them equally with the commons they both however contributed largely neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the excise on consumable commodities from duties of custom or from any of the other numerous indirect impositions which in france as well as here make so very large a proportion of all payments to the public the noblesse paid the capitation they paid also a land tax called the twentieth penny to the height sometimes of three sometimes of four shillings in the pound both of them direct impositions of no light nature and no trivial produce the clergy of the provinces annexed by conquest to france paid likewise to the capitation and the twentieth penny at the rate paid by the nobility the clergy in the old provinces did not pay the capitation but they had redeemed themselves at the expense of about 24 millions or a little more than a million sterling they were exempted from the twentieths but then they made free gifts they contracted debts for the state and they were subject to some other charges the whole computed at about a thirteenth part of their clear income they ought to have paid annually about forty thousand pounds more to put them on a par with the contribution of the nobility when the terrors of this tremendous proscription hung over the clergy they made an offer of a contribution through the archbishop of aix which for its extravagance ought not to have been accepted but it was evidently and obviously more advantageous to the public creditor than anything which could rationally be promised by the confiscation why was it not accepted the reason is plain there was no desire that the church should be brought to serve the state the service of the state was made a pretext to destroy the church in their way to the destruction of the church they would not scruple to destroy their country and they have destroyed it one great end in the project would have been defeated if the plan of extortion had been adopted in lieu of the scheme of confiscation the new landed interest connected with the new republic and connected with it for its very being could not have been created this was among the reasons why that extravagant ransom was not accepted the madness of the project of confiscation on the plan that was first pretended soon became apparent to bring this unwieldy mass of landed property enlarged by the confiscation of all the vast landed domain of the crown at once into market was obviously to defeat the profits proposed by the confiscation by depreciating the value of those lands and indeed of all the landed estates throughout france such a sudden diversion of all its circulating money from trade to land must be an additional mischief what step was taken did the assembly on becoming sensible of the inevitable ill effects of their projected sale revert to the offers of the clergy no distress could oblige them to travel in a course which was disgraced by any appearance of justice giving over all hopes from a general immediate sale another project seems to have succeeded they proposed to take stock in exchange for the church lands in that project great difficulties arose in equalizing the objects to be exchanged other obstacles also presented themselves which threw them back again upon some project of sale the municipalities had taken an alarm they would not hear of transferring the whole plunder of the kingdom to the stockholders in paris many of those municipalities had been reduced to the most deplorable indigence money was nowhere to be seen they were therefore led to the point that was so ardently desired they panted for a currency of any kind which might revive their perishing industry the municipalities were then to be admitted to a share in the spoil which evidently rendered the first scheme altogether impracticable public exigencies pressed upon all sides the minister of finance reiterated his call for supply with a most urgent anxious and boding voice thus pressed on all sides instead of the first plan of converting their bankers into bishops and abbots instead of paying the old debt they contracted a new debt at 3 per cent creating a new paper currency founded on an eventual sale of the church lands they issued this paper currency to satisfy in the first instance chiefly the demands made upon them by the bank of discount the great machine or paper mill of their fictitious wealth the spoil of the church was now become the only resource of all their operations in finance the vital principle of all their politics the sole security for the existence of their power it was necessary by all even the most violent means to put every individual on the same bottom and to bind the nation in one guilty interest to uphold this act and the authority of those by whom it was done in order to force the most reluctant into a participation of their pillage they rendered their paper circulation compulsory in all payments those who consider the general tendency of their schemes to this one object as a center and a center from which afterwards all their measures radiate will not think that i dwell too long upon this part of the proceedings of the national assembly to cut off all appearance of connection between the crown and public justice and to bring the whole under implicit obedience to the dictators in paris the old independent judicature of the parliaments with all its merits and all its faults was wholly abolished whilst the parliaments existed it was evident that the people might some time or other come to resort to them and rally under the standard of their ancient laws it became however a matter of consideration that the magistrates and officers in the courts now abolished had purchased their places at a very high rate for which as well as for the duty they performed they received but a very low return of interest simple confiscation is a boon only for the clergy to the lawyers some appearances of equity are to be observed and they are to receive compensation to an immense amount their compensation becomes part of the national debt for the liquidation of which there is the one exhaustless fund the lawyers are to obtain their compensation in the new church paper which is to march with the new principles of judicature and legislature the dismissed magistrates are to take their share of martyrdom with the ecclesiastics or to receive their own property from such a fund and in such a manner as all those who have been seasoned with the ancient principles of jurisprudence and had been the sworn guardians of property must look upon with horror even the clergy are to receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper which is stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege and with the symbols of their own ruin or they must starve so violent an outrage upon credit property and liberty as this compulsory paper currency has seldom been exhibited by the alliance of bankruptcy and tyranny at any time or in any nation in the course of all these operations at length comes out the grand arcanum that in reality and in a fair sense the lands of the church are not to be sold at all by the late resolutions of the national assembly they are indeed to be delivered to the highest bidder but it is to be observed that a certain portion only of the purchase money is to be laid down a period of twelve years is to be given for the payment of the rest the philosophic purchasers are therefore on payment of a sort of fine to be put instantly into possession of the estate it becomes in some respects a sort of gift to them to be held on the feudal tenure of zeal to the new establishment this project is evidently to let in a body of purchasers without money the consequence will be that these purchasers or rather grantees will pay not only from the rents as they accrue which might as well be received by the state but from the spoil of the materials of buildings from waste in woods and from whatever money by hands habituated to the gripings of usury they can wring from the miserable peasant he is to be delivered over to the mercenary and arbitrary discretion of men who will be stimulated to every species of extortion by the growing demands on the growing profits of an estate held under the precarious settlement of a new political system when all the frauds impostures violences rapines burnings murders confiscations compulsory paper currencies and every description of tyranny and cruelty employed to bring about and to uphold this revolution have their natural effect that is to shock the moral sentiments of all virtuous and sober minds the abettors of this philosophic system immediately strain their throats in a declamation against the old monarchical government of france when they have rendered that deposed power sufficiently black they then proceed in argument as if all those who disapprove of their new abuses must of course be partisans of the old that those who reprobate their crude and violent schemes of liberty ought to be treated as advocates for servitude i admit that their necessities do compel them to this base and contemptible fraud nothing can reconcile men to their proceedings and projects but the supposition that there is no third option between them and some tyranny as odious as can be furnished by the records of history or by the invention of poets this prattling of theirs hardly deserves the name of sophistry it is nothing but plain impudence have these gentlemen never heard in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice of anything between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude have they never heard of a monarchy directed by laws controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation and both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ is it then impossible that a man may be found who without criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity shall prefer such a mixed and tempered government to either of the extremes and who may repute that nation to be destitute of all wisdom and of all virtue which having in its choice to obtain such a government with ease or rather to confirm it when actually possessed thought proper to commit a thousand crimes and to subject their country to a thousand evils in order to avoid it is it then a truth so universally acknowledged that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form into which human society can be thrown that a man is not permitted to hesitate about its merits without the suspicion of being a friend to tyranny that is of being a foe to mankind i do not know under what description to class the present ruling authority in france it affects to be a pure democracy though i think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy but for the present i admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of what it pretends to i reprobate no form of government merely upon abstract principles there may be situations in which the purely democratic form will become necessary there may be some where it would be clearly desirable this i do not take to be the case of france or of any other great country until now we have seen no examples of considerable democracies the ancients were better acquainted with them not being wholly unread in the authors who had seen the most of those constitutions and who best understood them i cannot help concurring with their opinion that an absolute democracy no more than absolute monarchy is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government they think it rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic if i recollect rightly aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny of this i am certain that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity as they often must and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers and will be carried on with much greater fury than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single scepter in such a popular persecution individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation they seem deserted by mankind overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species but admitting democracy not to have that inevitable tendency to party tyranny which i suppose it to have and admitting it to possess as much good in it when unmixed as i am sure it possesses when compounded with other forms does monarchy on its part contain nothing at all to recommend it i do not often quote bolingbroke nor have his works in general left any permanent impression on my mind he is a presumptuous and a superficial writer but he has one observation which in my opinion is not without depth and solidity he says that he prefers a monarchy to other governments because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than anything of monarchy upon the republican forms i think him perfectly in the right the fact is so historically and it agrees well with the speculation i know how easy a topic it is to dwell on the faults of departed greatness by a revolution in the state the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour but steady independent minds when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers they will judge of human institutions as they do of human characters they will sort out the good from the evil which is mixed in mortal institutions as it is in mortal men your government in france though usually and i think justly reputed the best of the unqualified or ill qualified monarchies was still full of abuses these abuses accumulated in a length of time as they must accumulate in every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular representative i am no stranger to the faults and defects of the subverted government of france and i think i am not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric upon anything which is a just and natural object of censure but the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy but of its existence is it then true that the french government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform so that it was of absolute necessity that the whole fabric should be at once pulled down and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic experimental edifice in its place all france was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789 the instructions to the representatives to the states general from every district in that kingdom were filled with projects for the reformation of that government without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it had such a design been even insinuated i believe there would have been but one voice and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror men have been sometimes led by degrees sometimes hurried into things of which if they could have seen the whole together they never would have permitted the most remote approach when those instructions were given there was no question but that abuses existed and that they demanded a reform nor is there now in the interval between the instructions and the revolution things changed their shape and in consequence of that change the true question at present is whether those who would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the right to hear some men speak of the late monarchy of france you would imagine that they were talking of persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of tahmas kouli khan or at least describing the barbarous anarchic despotism of turkey where the finest countries in the most genial climates in the world are wasted by peace more than any countries have been worried by war where arts are unknown where manufactures languish where science is extinguished where agriculture decays where the human race itself melts away and perishes under the eye of the observer was this the case of france i have no way of determining the question but by reference to facts facts do not support this resemblance along with much evil there is some good in monarchy itself and some corrective to its evil from religion from laws from manners from opinions the french monarchy must have received which rendered it a despotism rather in appearance than in reality among the standards upon which the effects of government on any country are to be estimated i must consider the state of its population as not the least certain no country in which population flourishes and is in progressive improvement can be under a very mischievous government about sixty years ago the intendants of the generalities of france made with other matters a report of the population of their several districts i have not the books which are very voluminous by me nor do i know where to procure them but i think the population of france was by them even at that period estimated at twenty two millions of souls at the end of the last century it had been generally calculated at eighteen on either of these estimations france was not ill peopled m necker who is an authority for his own time at least equal to the intendants for theirs reckons and upon apparently sure principles the people of france in the year 1780 at twenty four millions six hundred and seventy thousand but was this the probable ultimate term under the old establishment dr price is of opinion that the growth of population in france was by no means at its acme in that year i certainly defer to dr price s authority a good deal more in these speculations than i do in his general politics this gentleman taking ground on m necker s data is very confident that since the period of that minister s calculation the french population has increased rapidly so rapidly that in the year 1789 he will not consent to rate the people of that kingdom at a lower number than thirty millions after abating much from the sanguine calculation of dr price i have no doubt that the population of france did increase considerably during this later period but supposing that it increased to nothing more than will be sufficient to complete the twenty four millions six hundred and seventy thousand to twenty five millions still a population of twenty five millions and that in an increasing progress on a space of about twenty seven thousand square leagues is immense it is for instance a good deal more than the proportionable population of this island or even than that of england the best peopled part of the united kingdom it is not universally true that france is a fertile country considerable tracts of it are barren and labor under other natural disadvantages in the portions of that territory where things are more favorable as far as i am able to discover the numbers of the people correspond to the indulgence of nature the generality of lisle upon an extent of four hundred and four leagues and a half about ten years ago contained seven hundred and thirty four thousand six hundred souls which is one thousand seven hundred and seventy two inhabitants to each square league the middle term for the rest of france is about nine hundred inhabitants to the same admeasurement i do not attribute this population to the deposed government because i do not like to compliment the contrivances of men with what is due in a great degree to the bounty of providence but that decried government could not have obstructed most probably it favored the operation of those causes whether of nature in the soil or habits of industry among the people which has produced so large a number of the species throughout that whole kingdom and exhibited in some particular places such prodigies of population i never will suppose that fabric of a state to be the worst of all political institutions which by experience is found to contain a principle favorable to the increase of mankind the wealth of a country is another and no contemptible standard by which we may judge whether on the whole a government be protecting or destructive france far exceeds england in the multitude of her people but i apprehend that her comparative wealth is much inferior to ours that it is not so equal in the distribution nor so ready in the circulation i believe the difference in the form of the two governments to be amongst the causes of this advantage on the side of england i speak of england not of the whole british dominions which if compared with those of france will in some degree weaken the comparative rate of wealth upon our side but that wealth which will not endure a comparison with the riches of england may constitute a very respectable degree of opulence m necker s book published in 1785 contains an accurate and interesting collection of facts relative to public economy and to political arithmetic and his speculations on the subject are in general wise and liberal in that work he gives an idea of the state of france very remote from the portrait of a country whose government was a perfect grievance an absolute evil admitting no cure but through the violent and uncertain remedy of a total revolution he affirms that from the year 1726 to the year 1784 there was coined at the mint of france in the species of gold and silver to the amount of about one hundred millions of pounds sterling it is impossible that m necker should be mistaken in the amount of the bullion which has been coined in the mint it is a matter of official record the reasonings of this able financier concerning the quantity of gold and silver which remained for circulation when he wrote in 1785 that is about four years before the deposition and imprisonment of the french king are not of equal certainty but they are laid on grounds so apparently solid that it is not easy to refuse a considerable degree of assent to his calculation he calculates the numeraire or what we call specie then actually existing in france at about eighty eight millions of the same english money a great accumulation of wealth for one country large as that country is m necker was so far from considering this influx of wealth as likely to cease when he wrote in 1785 that he presumes upon a future annual increase of two per cent upon the money brought into france during the periods from which he computed some adequate cause must have originally introduced all the money coined at its mint into that kingdom and some cause as operative must have kept at home or returned into its bosom such a vast flood of treasure as m necker calculates to remain for domestic circulation suppose any reasonable deductions from m necker s computation the remainder must still amount to an immense sum causes thus powerful to acquire and to retain cannot be found in discouraged industry insecure property and a positively destructive government indeed when i consider the face of the kingdom of france the multitude and opulence of her cities the useful magnificence of her spacious high roads and bridges the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations opening the conveniences of maritime communication through a solid continent of so immense an extent when i turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbors and to her whole naval apparatus whether for war or trade when i bring before my view the number of her fortifications constructed with so bold and masterly a skill and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side when i recollect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation and to what complete perfection the culture of many of the best productions of the earth have been brought in france when i reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics second to none but ours and in some particulars not second when i contemplate the grand foundations of charity public and private when i survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life when i reckon the men she has bred for extending her fame in war her able statesmen the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians her philosophers her critics her historians and antiquaries her poets and her orators sacred and profane i behold in all this something which awes and commands the imagination which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure and which demands that we should very seriously examine what and how great are the latent vices that could authorize us at once to level so spacious a fabric with the ground i do not recognize in this view of things the despotism of turkey nor do i discern the character of a government that has been on the whole so oppressive or so corrupt or so negligent as to be utterly unfit for all reformation i must think such a government well deserved to have its excellence heightened its faults corrected and its capacities improved into a british constitution whoever has examined into the proceedings of that deposed government for several years back cannot fail to have observed amidst the inconstancy and fluctuation natural to courts an earnest endeavor toward the prosperity and improvement of the country he must admit that it had long been employed in some instances wholly to remove in many considerably to correct the abusive practices and usages that had prevailed in the state and that even the unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his subjects inconsistent as undoubtedly it was with law and liberty had yet been every day growing more mitigated in the exercise so far from refusing itself to reformation that government was open with a censurable degree of facility to all sorts of projects and projectors on the subject rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation which soon was turned against those who fostered it and ended in their ruin it is but cold and no very flattering justice to that fallen monarchy to say that for many years it trespassed more by levity and want of judgment in several of its schemes than from any defect in diligence or in public spirit to compare the government of france for the last fifteen or sixteen years with wise and well constituted establishments during that or during any period is not to act with fairness but if in point of prodigality in the expenditure of money or in point of rigor in the exercise of power it be compared with any of the former reigns i believe candid judges will give little credit to the good intentions of those who dwell perpetually on the donations to favorites or on the expenses of the court or on the horrors of the bastille in the reign of louis the sixteenth whether the system if it deserves such a name now built on the ruins of that ancient monarchy will be able to give a better account of the population and wealth of the country which it has taken under its care is a matter very doubtful instead of improving by the change i apprehend that a long series of years must be told before it can recover in any degree the effects of this philosophic revolution and before the nation can be replaced on its former footing if dr price should think fit a few years hence to favor us with an estimate of the population of france he will hardly be able to make up his tale of thirty millions of souls as computed in 1789 or the assembly s computation of twenty six millions of that year or even m necker s twenty five millions in 1780 i hear that there are considerable emigrations from france and that many quitting that voluptuous climate and that seductive circean liberty have taken refuge in the frozen regions and under the british despotism of canada in the present disappearance of coin no person could think it the same country in which the present minister of the finances has been able to discover fourscore millions sterling in specie from its general aspect one would conclude that it had been for some time past under the special direction of the learned academicians of laputa and balnibarbi already the population of paris has so declined that m necker stated to the national assembly the provision to be made for its subsistence at a fifth less than what had formerly been found requisite it is said that a hundred thousand people are out of employment in that city though it is become the seat of the imprisoned court and national assembly nothing i am credibly informed can exceed the shocking and disgusting spectacle of mendicancy displayed in that capital indeed the votes of the national assembly leave no doubt of the fact they have lately appointed a standing committee of mendicancy they are contriving at once a vigorous police on this subject and for the first time the imposition of a tax to maintain the poor for whose present relief great sums appear on the face of the public accounts of the year in the meantime the leaders of the legislative clubs and coffee houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability they speak with the most sovereign contempt of the rest of the world they tell the people to comfort them in the rags with which they have clothed them that they are a nation of philosophers and sometimes by all the arts of quackish parade by show tumult and bustle sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions they attempt to drown the cries of indigence and to divert the eyes of the observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state a brave people will certainly prefer liberty accompanied with a virtuous poverty to a depraved and wealthy servitude but before the price of comfort and opulence is paid one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased and that she is to be purchased at no other price i shall always however consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance which has not wisdom and justice for her companions and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train when i sent this book to the press i entertained some doubt concerning the nature and extent of the last article in the above accounts which is only under a general head without any detail since then i have seen m de calonne s work i must think it a great loss to me that i had not that advantage earlier m de calonne thinks this article to be on account of general subsistence but as he is not able to comprehend how so great a loss as upwards of 1 661 000 sterling could be sustained on the difference between the price and the sale of grain he seems to attribute this enormous head of charge to secret expenses of the revolution i cannot say anything positively on that subject the reader is capable of judging by the aggregate of these immense charges on the state and condition of france and the system of public economy adopted in that nation these articles of account produced no inquiry or discussion in the national assembly the advocates for this revolution not satisfied with exaggerating the vices of their ancient government strike at the fame of their country itself by painting almost all that could have attracted the attention of strangers i mean their nobility and their clergy as objects of horror if this were only a libel there had not been much in it but it has practical consequences had your nobility and gentry who formed the great body of your landed men and the whole of your military officers resembled those of germany at the period when the hansetowns were necessitated to confederate against the nobles in defense of their property had they been like the orsini and vitelli in italy who used to sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller had they been such as the mamelukes in egypt or the nayres on the coast of malabar i do admit that too critical an inquiry might not be advisable into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance the statues of equity and mercy might be veiled for a moment the tenderest minds confounded with the dreadful exigency in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in favor of its own principles might turn aside whilst fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruction of a pretended nobility which disgraced whilst it persecuted human nature the persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and arbitrary confiscation might remain silent spectators of this civil war between the vices but did the privileged nobility who met under the king s precept at versailles in 1789 or their constituents deserve to be looked on as the nayres or mamelukes of this age or as the orsini and vitelli of ancient times if i had then asked the question i should have passed for a madman what have they since done that they were to be driven into exile that their persons should be hunted about mangled and tortured their families dispersed their houses laid in ashes and that their order should be abolished and the memory of it if possible extinguished by ordaining them to change the very names by which they were usually known read their instructions to their representatives they breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly and they recommend reformation as strongly as any other order their privileges relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered as the king from the beginning surrendered all pretense to a right of taxation upon a free constitution there was but one opinion in france the absolute monarchy was at an end it breathed its last without a groan without struggle without convulsion all the struggle all the dissension arose afterwards upon the preference of a despotic democracy to a government of reciprocal control the triumph of the victorious party was over the principles of a british constitution i have observed the affectation which for many years past has prevailed in paris even to a degree perfectly childish of idolizing the memory of your henry the fourth if anything could put one out of humor with that ornament to the kingly character it would be this overdone style of insidious panegyric the persons who have worked this engine the most busily are those who have ended their panegyrics in dethroning his successor and descendant a man as good natured at the least as henry the fourth altogether as fond of his people and who has done infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that great monarch did or we are sure he ever meant to do well it is for his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with for henry of navarre was a resolute active and politic prince he possessed indeed great humanity and mildness but a humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his interests he never sought to be loved without putting himself first in a condition to be feared he used soft language with determined conduct he asserted and maintained his authority in the gross and distributed his acts of concession only in the detail he spent the income of his prerogative nobly but he took care not to break in upon the capital never abandoning for a moment any of the claims which he made under the fundamental laws nor sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him often in the field sometimes upon the scaffold because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful he has merited the praises of those whom if they had lived in his time he would have shut up in the bastille and brought to punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished paris into a surrender if these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of henry the fourth they must remember that they cannot think more highly of him than he did of the noblesse of france whose virtue honor courage patriotism and loyalty were his constant theme but the nobility of france are degenerated since the days of henry the fourth this is possible but it is more than i can believe to be true in any great degree i do not pretend to know france as correctly as some others but i have endeavored through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature otherwise i should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind in that study i could not pass by a vast portion of our nature as it appeared modified in a country but twenty four miles from the shore of this island on my best observation compared with my best inquiries i found your nobility for the greater part composed of men of high spirit and of a delicate sense of honor both with regard to themselves individually and with regard to their whole corps over whom they kept beyond what is common in other countries a censorial eye they were tolerably well bred very officious humane and hospitable in their conversation frank and open with a good military tone and reasonably tinctured with literature particularly of the authors in their own language many had pretensions far above this description i speak of those who were generally met with as to their behavior to the inferior classes they appeared to me to comport themselves toward them with good nature and with something more nearly approaching to familiarity than is generally practiced with us in the intercourse between the higher and lower ranks of life to strike any person even in the most abject condition was a thing in a manner unknown and would be highly disgraceful instances of other ill treatment of the humble part of the community were rare and as to attacks made upon the property or the personal liberty of the commons i never heard of any whatsoever from them nor whilst the laws were in vigor under the ancient government would such tyranny in subjects have been permitted as men of landed estates i had no fault to find with their conduct though much to reprehend and much to wish changed in many of the old tenures where the letting of their land was by rent i could not discover that their agreements with their farmers were oppressive nor when they were in partnership with the farmer as often was the case have i heard that they had taken the lion s share the proportions seemed not inequitable there might be exceptions but certainly they were exceptions only i have no reason to believe that in these respects the landed noblesse of france were worse than the landed gentry of this country certainly in no respect more vexatious than the landholders not noble of their own nation in cities the nobility had no manner of power in the country very little you know sir that much of the civil government and the police in the most essential parts was not in the hands of that nobility which presents itself first to our consideration the revenue the system and collection of which were the most grievous parts of the french government was not administered by the men of the sword nor were they answerable for the vices of its principle or the vexations where any such existed in its management denying as i am well warranted to do that the nobility had any considerable share in the oppression of the people in cases in which real oppression existed i am ready to admit that they were not without considerable faults and errors a foolish imitation of the worst part of the manners of england which impaired their natural character without substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy has certainly rendered them worse than formerly they were habitual dissoluteness of manners continued beyond the pardonable period of life was more common amongst them than it is with us and it reigned with the less hope of remedy though possibly with something of less mischief by being covered with more exterior decorum they countenanced too much that licentious philosophy which has helped to bring on their ruin there was another error amongst them more fatal those of the commons who approached to or exceeded many of the nobility in point of wealth were not fully admitted to the rank and estimation which wealth in reason and good policy ought to bestow in every country though i think not equally with that of other nobility the two kinds of aristocracy were too punctiliously kept asunder less so however than in germany and some other nations this separation as i have already taken the liberty of suggesting to you i conceive to be one principal cause of the destruction of the old nobility the military particularly was too exclusively reserved for men of family but after all this was an error of opinion which a conflicting opinion would have rectified a permanent assembly in which the commons had their share of power would soon abolish whatever was too invidious and insulting in these distinctions and even the faults in the morals of the nobility would have been probably corrected by the greater varieties of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by orders would have given rise all this violent cry against the nobility i take to be a mere work of art to be honored and even privileged by the laws opinions and inveterate usages of our country growing out of the prejudice of ages has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man even to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime the strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature it operates as an instinct to secure property and to preserve communities in a settled state what is there to shock in this nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order it is the corinthian capital of polished society omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus was the saying of a wise and good man it is indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with some sort of partial propensity he feels no ennobling principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem it is a sour malignant envious disposition without taste for the reality or for any image or representation of virtue that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor i do not like to see anything destroyed any void produced in society any ruin on the face of the land it was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any incorrigible vices in the noblesse of france or any abuse which could not be removed by a reform very short of abolition your noblesse did not deserve punishment but to degrade is to punish it was with the same satisfaction i found that the result of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar it is no soothing news to my ears that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt it is not with much credulity i listen to any when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder i rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated when profit is looked for in their punishment an enemy is a bad witness a robber is a worse vices and abuses there were undoubtedly in that order and must be it was an old establishment and not frequently revised but i saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their substance nor those cruel insults and degradations and that unnatural persecution which have been substituted in the place of meliorating regulation if there had been any just cause for this new religious persecution the atheistic libellers who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to plunder do not love anybody so much as not to dwell with complacency on the vices of the existing clergy this they have not done they find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favor in order to justify upon very iniquitous because very illogical principles of retaliation their own persecutions and their own cruelties after destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes it is not very just to chastise men for the offenses of their natural ancestors but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts except in names and general descriptions is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age the assembly punishes men many if not most of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclesiastics in former times as much as their present persecutors can do and who would be as loud and as strong in the expression of that sense if they were not well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation is employed corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members but not for their punishment nations themselves are such corporations as well might we in england think of waging inexpiable war upon all frenchmen for the evils which they have brought upon us in the several periods of our mutual hostilities you might on your part think yourselves justified in falling upon all englishmen on account of the unparalleled calamities brought on the people of france by the unjust invasions of our henries and our edwards indeed we should be mutually justified in this exterminatory war upon each other full as much as you are in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen on account of the conduct of men of the same name in other times we do not draw the moral lessons we might from history on the contrary without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness in history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind it may in the perversion serve for a magazine furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state and supplying the means of keeping alive or reviving dissensions and animosities and adding fuel to civil fury history consists for the greater part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride ambition avarice revenge lust sedition hypocrisy ungoverned zeal and all the train of disorderly appetites which shake the public with the same troublous storms that toss the private state and render life unsweet these vices are the causes of those storms religion morals laws prerogatives privileges liberties rights of men are the pretexts the pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good you would not secure men from tyranny and sedition by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply if you did you would root out everything that is valuable in the human breast as these are the pretexts so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings priests magistrates senates parliaments national assemblies judges and captains you would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs nor ministers of state nor of the gospel no interpreters of law no general officers no public councils you might change the names the things in some shape must remain a certain quantum of power must always exist in the community in some hands and under some appellation wise men will apply their remedies to vices not to names to the causes of evil which are permanent not to the occasional organs by which they act and the transitory modes in which they appear otherwise you will be wise historically a fool in practice seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief wickedness is a little more inventive whilst you are discussing fashion the fashion is gone by the very same vice assumes a new body the spirit transmigrates and far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance it is renovated in its new organs with a fresh vigor of a juvenile activity it walks abroad it continues its ravages whilst you are gibbeting the carcass or demolishing the tomb you are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions whilst your house is the haunt of robbers it is thus with all those who attending only to the shell and husk of history think they are waging war with intolerance pride and cruelty whilst under color of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions and perhaps in worse your citizens of paris formerly had lent themselves as the ready instruments to slaughter the followers of calvin at the infamous massacre of st bartholomew what should we say to those who could think of retaliating on the parisians of this day the abominations and horrors of that time they are indeed brought to abhor that massacre ferocious as they are it is not difficult to make them dislike it because the politicians and fashionable teachers have no interest in giving their passions exactly the same direction still however they find it their interest to keep the same savage dispositions alive it was but the other day that they caused this very massacre to be acted on the stage for the diversion of the descendants of those who committed it in this tragic farce they produced the cardinal of lorraine in his robes of function ordering general slaughter was this spectacle intended to make the parisians abhor persecution and loathe the effusion of blood no it was to teach them to persecute their own pastors it was to excite them by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy to an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order which if it ought to exist at all ought to exist not only in safety but in reverence it was to stimulate their cannibal appetites by variety and seasoning and to quicken them to an alertness in new murders and massacres if it should suit the purpose of the guises of the day an assembly in which sat a multitude of priests and prelates was obliged to suffer this indignity at its door the author was not sent to the galleys nor the players to the house of correction not long after this exhibition those players came forward to the assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which they had dared to expose and to show their prostituted faces in the senate whilst the archbishop of paris whose function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions and his wealth only by his alms is forced to abandon his house and to fly from his flock because truly in the sixteenth century the cardinal of lorraine was a rebel and a murderer such is the effect of the perversion of history by those who for the same nefarious purposes have perverted every other part of learning but those who will stand upon that elevation of reason which places centuries under our eye and brings things to the true point of comparison which obscures little names and effaces the colors of little parties and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions will say to the teachers of the palais royal the cardinal of lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth century you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth and this is the only difference between you but history in the nineteenth century better understood and better employed will i trust teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages it will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future times the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error which in its quiescent state is more than punished whenever it is embraced it will teach posterity not to make war upon either religion or philosophy for the abuse which the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal patron who in all things eminently favors and protects the race of man if your clergy or any clergy should show themselves vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity and to those professional faults which can hardly be separated from professional virtues though their vices never can countenance the exercise of oppression i do admit that they would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure and justice in their punishment i can allow in clergymen through all their divisions some tenaciousness of their own opinion some overflowings of zeal for its propagation some predilection to their own state and office some attachment to the interests of their own corps some preference to those who listen with docility to their doctrines beyond those who scorn and deride them i allow all this because i am a man who has to deal with men and who would not through a violence of toleration run into the greatest of all intolerance i must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes undoubtedly the natural progress of the passions from frailty to vice ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand but is it true that the body of your clergy had passed those limits of a just allowance from the general style of your late publications of all sorts one would be led to believe that your clergy in france were a sort of monsters a horrible composition of superstition ignorance sloth fraud avarice and tyranny but is this true is it true that the lapse of time the cessation of conflicting interests the woeful experience of the evils resulting from party rage have had no sort of influence gradually to meliorate their minds is it true that they were daily renewing invasions on the civil power troubling the domestic quiet of their country and rendering the operations of its government feeble and precarious is it true that the clergy of our times have pressed down the laity with an iron hand and were in all places lighting up the fires of a savage persecution did they by every fraud endeavor to increase their estates did they use to exceed the due demands on estates that were their own or rigidly screwing up right into wrong did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious extortion when not possessed of power were they filled with the vices of those who envy it were they inflamed with a violent litigious spirit of controversy goaded on with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty were they ready to fly in the face of all magistracy to fire churches to massacre the priests of other descriptions to pull down altars and to make their way over the ruins of subverted governments to an empire of doctrine sometimes flattering sometimes forcing the consciences of men from the jurisdiction of public institutions into a submission of their personal authority beginning with a claim of liberty and ending with an abuse of power these or some of these were the vices objected and not wholly without foundation to several of the churchmen of former times who belonged to the two great parties which then divided and distracted europe if there was in france as in other countries there visibly is a great abatement rather than any increase of these vices instead of loading the present clergy with the crimes of other men and the odious character of other times in common equity they ought to be praised encouraged and supported in their departure from a spirit which disgraced their predecessors and for having assumed a temper of mind and manners more suitable to their sacred function when my occasions took me into france toward the close of the late reign the clergy under all their forms engaged a considerable part of my curiosity so far from finding the complaints and discontents against that body which some publications had given me reason to expect i perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their account on further examination i found the clergy in general persons of moderate minds and decorous manners i include the seculars and the regulars of both sexes i had not the good fortune to know a great many of the parochial clergy but in general i received a perfectly good account of their morals and of their attention to their duties with some of the higher clergy i had a personal acquaintance and of the rest in that class a very good means of information they were almost all of them persons of noble birth they resembled others of their own rank and where there was any difference it was in their favor they were more fully educated than the military noblesse so as by no means to disgrace their profession by ignorance or by want of fitness for the exercise of their authority they seemed to me beyond the clerical character liberal and open with the hearts of gentlemen and men of honor neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct they seemed to me rather a superior class a set of men amongst whom you would not be surprised to find a fenelon i saw among the clergy in paris men of great learning and candor and i had reason to believe that this description was not confined to paris what i found in other places i know was accidental and therefore to be presumed a fair example i spent a few days in a provincial town where in the absence of the bishop i passed my evenings with three clergymen his vicars general persons who would have done honor to any church they were all well informed two of them of deep general and extensive erudition ancient and modern oriental and western particularly in their own profession they had a more extensive knowledge of our english divines than i expected and they entered into the genius of those writers with a critical accuracy one of these gentlemen is since dead the abbe morangis i pay this tribute without reluctance to the memory of that noble reverend learned and excellent person and i should do the same with equal cheerfulness to the merits of the others who i believe are still living if i did not fear to hurt those whom i am unable to serve some of these ecclesiastics of rank are by all titles persons deserving of general respect they are deserving of gratitude from me and from many english if this letter should ever come into their hands i hope they will believe there are those of our nation who feel for their unmerited fall and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes with no common sensibility what i say of them is a testimony as far as one feeble voice can go which i owe to truth whenever the question of this unnatural persecution is concerned i will pay it no one shall prevent me from being just and grateful the time is fitted for the duty and it is particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude when those who have deserved well of us and of mankind are laboring under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive power you had before your revolution about a hundred and twenty bishops a few of them were men of eminent sanctity and charity without limit when we talk of the heroic of course we talk of rare virtue i believe the instances of eminent depravity may be as rare amongst them as those of transcendent goodness examples of avarice and of licentiousness may be picked out i do not question it by those who delight in the investigation which leads to such discoveries a man as old as i am will not be astonished that several in every description do not lead that perfect life of self denial with regard to wealth or to pleasure which is wished for by all by some expected but by none exacted with more rigor than by those who are the most attentive to their own interests or the most indulgent to their own passions when i was in france i am certain that the number of vicious prelates was not great certain individuals among them not distinguishable for the regularity of their lives made some amends for their want of the severe virtues in their possession of the liberal and were endowed with qualities which made them useful in the church and state i am told that with few exceptions louis the sixteenth had been more attentive to character in his promotions to that rank than his immediate predecessor and i believe that it may be true but the present ruling power has shown a disposition only to plunder the church it has punished all prelates which is to favor the vicious at least in point of reputation it has made a degrading pensionary establishment to which no man of liberal ideas or liberal condition will destine his children it must settle into the lowest classes of the people as with you the inferior clergy are not numerous enough for their duties as these duties are beyond measure minute and toilsome as you have left no middle classes of clergy at their ease in future nothing of science or erudition can exist in the gallican church to complete the project without the least attention to the rights of patrons the assembly has provided in future an elective clergy an arrangement which will drive out of the clerical profession all men of sobriety all who can pretend to independence in their function or their conduct and which will throw the whole direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licentious bold crafty factious flattering wretches of such condition and such habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions an object of low and illiberal intrigue those officers whom they still call bishops are to be elected to a provision comparatively mean through the same arts by men of all religious tenets that are known or can be invented the new lawgivers have not ascertained anything whatsoever concerning their qualifications relative either to doctrine or to morals no more than they have done with regard to the subordinate clergy nor does it appear but that both the higher and the lower may at their discretion practice or preach any mode of religion or irreligion that they please i do not yet see what the jurisdiction of bishops over their subordinates is to be or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at all in short sir it seems to me that this new ecclesiastical establishment is intended only to be temporary and preparatory to the utter abolition under any of its forms of the christian religion whenever the minds of men are prepared for this last stroke against it by the accomplishment of the plan for bringing its ministers into universal contempt they who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who guide in these matters have long entertained such a design are utterly ignorant of their character and proceedings these enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion that a state can subsist without any religion better than with one and that they are able to supply the place of any good which may be in it by a project of their own namely by a sort of eduction they have imagined founded in a knowledge of the physical wants of men progressively carried to an enlightened self interest which when well understood they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public the scheme of this education has been long known of late they distinguish it by the name of a civic education i hope their partisans in england will succeed neither in the pillage of the ecclesiastics nor in the introduction of a principle of popular election to our bishoprics and parochial cures this in the present condition of the world would be the last corruption of the church the utter ruin of the clerical character the most dangerous shock that the state ever received through a misunderstood arrangement of religion i know well enough that the bishoprics and cures under kingly and seignioral patronage as now they are in england and as they have been lately in france are sometimes acquired by unworthy methods but the other mode of ecclesiastical canvass subjects them infinitely more surely and more generally to all the evil arts of low ambition which operating on and through greater numbers will produce mischief in proportion those of you who have robbed the clergy think that they shall easily reconcile their conduct to all protestant nations because the clergy whom they have thus plundered degraded and given over to mockery and scorn are of the roman catholic that is of their own pretended persuasion i have no doubt that some miserable bigots will be found here as well as elsewhere who hate sects and parties different from their own more than they love the substance of religion and who are more angry with those who differ from them in their particular plans and systems than displeased with those who attack the foundation of our common hope these men will write and speak on the subject in the manner that is to be expected from their temper and character burnet says that when he was in france in the year 1683 the method which carried over the men of the finest parts to popery was this they brought themselves to doubt of the whole christian religion when that was once done it seemed a more indifferent thing of what side or form they continued outwardly if this was then the ecclesiastical policy of france it is what they have since but too much reason to repent of they preferred atheism to a form of religion not agreeable to their ideas they succeeded in destroying that form and atheism has succeeded in destroying them i can readily give credit to burnet s story because i have observed too much of a similar spirit amongst ourselves the humor however is not general the teachers who reformed our religion in england bore no sort of resemblance to your present reforming doctors in paris perhaps they were rather more than could be wished under the influence of a party spirit but they were more sincere believers men of the most fervent and exalted piety ready to die like true heroes in defense of their particular ideas of christianity as they would with equal fortitude and more cheerfully for that stock of general truth for the branches of which they contended with their blood these men would have disavowed with horror those wretches who claimed a fellowship with them upon no other titles than those of their having pillaged the persons with whom they maintained controversies and their having despised the common religion for the purity of which they exerted themselves with a zeal which unequivocally bespoke their highest reverence for the substance of that system which they wished to reform many of their descendants have retained the same zeal but with more moderation they do not forget that justice and mercy are substantial parts of religion impious men do not recommend themselves to their communion by iniquity and cruelty toward any description of their fellow creatures we hear these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration that those persons should tolerate all opinions who think none to be of estimation is a matter of small merit equal neglect is not impartial kindness the species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity there are in england abundance of men who tolerate in the true spirit of toleration they think the dogmas of religion though in different degrees are all of moment and that amongst them there is as amongst all things of value a just ground of preference they favor therefore and they tolerate they tolerate not because they despise opinions but because they respect justice they would reverently and affectionately protect all religions because they love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree and the great object to which they are all directed they begin more and more plainly to discern that we have all a common cause as against a common enemy they will not be so misled by the spirit of faction as not to distinguish what is done in favor of their subdivision from those acts of hostility which through some particular description are aimed at the whole corps in which they themselves under another denomination are included it is impossible for me to say what may be the character of every description of men amongst us but i speak for the greater part and for them i must tell you that sacrilege is no part of their doctrine of good works that so far from calling you into their fellowship on such title if your professors are admitted to their communion they must carefully conceal their doctrine of the lawfulness of the prescription of innocent men and that they must make restitution of all stolen goods whatsoever till then they are none of ours you may suppose that we do not approve your confiscation of the revenues of bishops and deans and chapters and parochial clergy possessing independent estates arising from land because we have the same sort of establishment in england that objection you will say cannot hold as to the confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns and the abolition of their order it is true that this particular part of your general confiscation does not affect england as a precedent in point but the reason implies and it goes a great way the long parliament confiscated the lands of deans and chapters in england on the same ideas upon which your assembly set to sale the lands of the monastic orders but it is in the principle of injustice that the danger lies and not in the description of persons on whom it is first exercised i see in a country very near us a course of policy pursued which sets justice the common concern of mankind at defiance with the national assembly of france possession is nothing law and usage are nothing i see the national assembly openly reprobate the doctrine of prescription which one of the greatest of their own lawyers tells us with great truth is a part of the law of nature he tells us that the positive ascertainment of its limits and its security from invasion were among the causes for which civil society itself has been instituted if prescription be once shaken no species of property is secure when it once becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent power i see a practice perfectly correspondent to their contempt of this great fundamental part of natural law i see the confiscators begin with bishops and chapters and monasteries but i do not see them end there i see the princes of the blood who by the oldest usages of that kingdom held large landed estates deprived of their possessions and in lieu of their stable independent property reduced to the hope of some precarious charitable pension at the pleasure of an assembly which of course will pay little regard to the rights of pensioners at pleasure when it despises those of legal proprietors flushed with the insolence of their first inglorious victories and pressed by the distresses caused by their lust of unhallowed lucre disappointed but not discouraged they have at length ventured completely to subvert all property of all descriptions throughout the extent of a great kingdom they have compelled all men in all transactions of commerce in the disposal of lands in civil dealing and through the whole communion of life to accept as perfect payment and good and lawful tender the symbols of their speculations on a projected sale of their plunder what vestiges of liberty or property have they left the tenant right of a cabbage garden a year s interest in a hovel the goodwill of an alehouse or a baker s shop the very shadow of a constructive property are more ceremoniously treated in our parliament than with you the oldest and most valuable landed possessions in the hands of the most respectable personages or than the whole body of the monied and commercial interest of your country we entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority but we have never dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to violate property to overrule prescription or to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that which is real and recognized by the law of nations but you who began with refusing to submit to the most moderate restraints have ended by establishing an unheard of despotism i find the ground upon which your confiscators go is this that indeed their proceedings could not be supported in a court of justice but that the rules of prescription cannot bind a legislative assembly so that this legislative assembly of a free nation sits not for the security but for the destruction of property and not of property only but of every rule and maxim which can give it stability and of those instruments which can alone give it circulation when the anabaptists of munster in the sixteenth century had filled germany with confusion by their system of leveling and their wild opinions concerning property to what country in europe did not the progress of their fury furnish just cause of alarm of all things wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource we cannot be ignorant of the spirit of atheistical fanaticism that is inspired by a multitude of writings dispersed with incredible assiduity and expense and by sermons delivered in all the streets and places of public resort in paris these writings and sermons have filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind which supersedes in them the common feelings of nature as well as all sentiments of morality and religion insomuch that these wretches are induced to bear with a sullen patience the intolerable distresses brought upon them by the violent convulsions and permutations that have been made in property the spirit of proselytism attends this spirit of fanaticism they have societies to cabal and correspond at home and abroad for the propagation of their tenets the republic of berne one of the happiest the most prosperous and the best governed countries upon earth is one of the great objects at the destruction of which they aim i am told they have in some measure succeeded in sowing there the seeds of discontent they are busy throughout germany spain and italy have not been untried england is not left out of the comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity and in england we find those who stretch out their arms to them who recommend their example from more than one pulpit and who choose in more than one periodical meeting publicly to correspond with them to applaud them and to hold them up as objects for imitation who receive from them tokens of confraternity and standards consecrated amidst their rites and mysteries who suggest to them leagues of perpetual amity at the very time when the power to which our constitution has exclusively delegated the federative capacity of this kingdom may find it expedient to make war upon them it is not the confiscation of our church property from this example in france that i dread though i think this would be no trifling evil the great source of my solicitude is lest it should ever be considered in england as the policy of a state to seek a resource in confiscations of any kind or that any one description of citizens should be brought to regard any of the others as their proper prey nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt public debts which at first were a security to governments by interesting many in the public tranquillity are likely in their excess to become the means of their subversion if governments provide for these debts by heavy impositions they perish by becoming odious to the people if they do not provide for them they will be undone by the efforts of the most dangerous of all parties i mean an extensive discontented monied interest injured and not destroyed the men who compose this interest look for their security in the first instance to the fidelity of government in the second to its power if they find the old governments effete worn out and with their springs relaxed so as not to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy and this energy will be derived not from an acquisition of resources but from a contempt of justice revolutions are favorable to confiscation and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorized i am sure that the principles predominant in france extend to very many persons and descriptions of persons in all countries who think their innoxious indolence their security this kind of innocence in proprietors may be argued into inutility and inutility into an unfitness for their estates many parts of europe are in open disorder in many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground a confused movement is felt that threatens a general earthquake in the political world already confederacies and correspondencies of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries in such a state of things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard in all mutations the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief and to promote what good may be in them is that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of property but it will be argued that this confiscation in france ought not to alarm other nations they say it is not made from wanton rapacity that it is a great measure of national policy adopted to remove an extensive inveterate superstitious mischief it is with the greatest difficulty that i am able to separate policy from justice justice itself is the great standing policy of civil society and any eminent departure from it under any circumstances lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all when men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their habits to it when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation and their departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty i am sure it is unjust in legislature by an arbitrary act to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor if to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation of all their goods i am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotic sport made of the feelings consciences prejudices and properties of men can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny if the injustice of the course pursued in france be clear the policy of the measure that is the public benefit to be expected from it ought to be at least as evident and at least as important to a man who acts under the influence of no passion who has nothing in view in his projects but the public good a great difference will immediately strike him between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions and on a question of their total abolition where they have cast their roots wide and deep and where by long habit things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them and in a manner interwoven with them that the one cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other he might be embarrassed if the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of debating but in this as in most questions of state there is a middle there is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence spartam nactus es hanc exorna this is in my opinion a rule of profound sense and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer i cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases a man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman everything else is vulgar in the conception perilous in the execution there are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are called to make improvements by great mental exertion in those moments even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country and to be invested with full authority they have not always apt instruments a politician to do great things looks for a power what our workmen call a purchase and if he finds that power in politics as in mechanics he cannot be at a loss to apply it in the monastic institutions in my opinion was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence there were revenues with a public direction there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes without any other than public ties and public principles men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune men denied to self interests whose avarice is for some community men to whom personal poverty is honor and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom in vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them the winds blow as they list these institutions are the products of enthusiasm they are the instruments of wisdom wisdom cannot create materials they are the gifts of nature or of chance her pride is in the use the perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has long views who meditates designs that require time in fashioning and which propose duration when they are accomplished he is not deserving to rank high or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen who having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth the discipline and the habits of such corporations as those which you have rashly destroyed cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country on the view of this subject a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind to destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount in the moral world to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material it would be like the attempt to destroy the expansive force of fixed air in nitre or the power of steam or of electricity or of magnetism these energies always existed in nature and they were always discernible they seemed some of them unserviceable some noxious some no better than a sport to children until contemplative ability combining with practic skill tamed their wild nature subdued them to use and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents in subservience to the great views and designs of men did fifty thousand persons whose mental and whose bodily labor you might direct and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue which was neither lazy nor superstitious appear too big for your abilities to wield had you no way of using them but by converting monks into pensioners had you no way of turning the revenue to account but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale if you were thus destitute of mental funds the proceeding is in its natural course your politicians do not understand their trade and therefore they sell their tools but the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence this i do not mean to dispute but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage you derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color in the moral eye as superstition itself it was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion as in all the passions but is superstition the greatest of all possible vices in its possible excess i think it becomes a very great evil it is however a moral subject and of course admits of all degrees and all modifications superstition is the religion of feeble minds and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest the body of all true religion consists to be sure in obedience to the will of the sovereign of the world in a confidence in his declarations and in imitation of his perfections the rest is our own it may be prejudicial to the great end it may be auxiliary wise men who as such are not admirers are not violently attached to these things nor do they violently hate them wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly they are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war and which make so cruel a use of their advantages as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar on the one side or the other in their quarrels prudence would be neuter but if in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear perhaps he would think the superstition which builds to be more tolerable than that which demolishes that which adorns a country than that which deforms it that which endows than that which plunders that which disposes to mistaken beneficence than that which stimulates to real injustice that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self denial such i think is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour for the present i postpone all consideration of the supposed public profit of the sale which however i conceive to be perfectly delusive i shall here only consider it as a transfer of property on the policy of that transfer i shall trouble you with a few thoughts in every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer this surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist it will be spent by a proprietor who does not labor but this idleness is itself the spring of labor this repose the spur to industry the only concern of the state is that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry from whence it came and that its expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it and to those of the people to whom it is returned in all the views of receipt expenditure and personal employment a sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his place before the inconveniences are incurred which must attend all violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation we ought to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated property will be in a considerable degree more laborious more virtuous more sober less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the laborer or to consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for the measure of an individual or that they should be qualified to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure than the old possessors call those possessors bishops or canons or commendatory abbots or monks or what you please the monks are lazy be it so suppose them no otherwise employed than by singing in the choir they are as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say as usefully even as those who sing upon the stage they are as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile degrading unseemly unmanly and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed if it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely directed labor of these unhappy people i should be infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quietude humanity and perhaps policy might better justify me in the one than in the other it is a subject on which i have often reflected and never reflected without feeling from it i am sure that no consideration except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury and the despotism of fancy who in their own imperious way will distribute the surplus product of the soil can justify the toleration of such trades and employments in a well regulated state but for this purpose of distribution it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay loiterers when the advantages of the possession and of the project are on a par there is no motive for a change but in the present case perhaps they are not upon a par and the difference is in favor of the possession it does not appear to me that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through whom they pass as the expenses of those favorites whom you are intruding into their houses why should the expenditure of a great landed property which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries which are the history of the force and weakness of the human mind through great collections of ancient records medals and coins which attest and explain laws and customs through paintings and statues that by imitating nature seem to extend the limits of creation through grand monuments of the dead which continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave through collections of the specimens of nature which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world that by disposition facilitate and by exciting curiosity open the avenues to science if by great permanent establishments all these objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and personal extravagance are they worse than if the same tastes prevailed in scattered individuals does not the sweat of the mason and carpenter who toil in order to partake of the sweat of the peasant flow as pleasantly and as salubriously in the construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury as honorably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness in opera houses and brothels and gaming houses and clubhouses and obelisks in the champ de mars is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by construing in the service of god than in pampering the innumerable multitude of those who are degraded by being made useless domestics subservient to the pride of man are the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man than ribbons and laces and national cockades and petit maisons and petit soupers and all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence sports away the burden of its superfluity we tolerate even these not from love of them but for fear of worse we tolerate them because property and liberty to a degree require that toleration but why proscribe the other and surely in every point of view the more laudable use of estates why through the violation of all property through an outrage upon every principle of liberty forcibly carry them from the better to the worse this comparison between the new individuals and the old corps is made upon a supposition that no reform could be made in the latter but in a question of reformation i always consider corporate bodies whether sole or consisting of many to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the power of the state in the use of their property and in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members than private citizens ever can be or perhaps ought to be and this seems to me a very material consideration for those who undertake anything which merits the name of a politic enterprise so far as to the estates of monasteries with regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons and commendatory abbots i cannot find out for what reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance can any philosophic spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a certain and that too a large portion of landed property passing in succession through persons whose title to it is always in theory and often in fact an eminent degree of piety morals and learning a property which by its destination in their turn and on the score of merit gives to the noblest families renovation and support to the lowest the means of dignity and elevation a property the tenure of which is the performance of some duty and the character of whose proprietors demands at least an exterior decorum and gravity of manners who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality part of whose income they are to consider as a trust for charity and who even when they fail in their trust when they slide from their character and degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions is it better that estates should be held by those who have no duty than by those who have one by those whose character and destination point to virtues than by those who have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own will and appetite nor are these estates held together in the character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain they pass from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other no excess is good and therefore too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life but it does not seem to me of material injury to any commonwealth that there should exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired by other means than the previous acquisition of money this letter has grown to a great length though it is indeed short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject various avocations have from time to time called my mind from the subject i was not sorry to give myself leisure to observe whether in the proceedings of the national assembly i might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of my first sentiments everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions it was my original purpose to take a view of the principles of the national assembly with regard to the great and fundamental establishments and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of our british constitution but this plan is of a greater extent than at first i computed and i find that you have little desire to take the advantage of any examples at present i must content myself with some remarks upon your establishments reserving for another time what i proposed to say concerning the spirit of our british monarchy aristocracy and democracy as practically they exist i have taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in france i have certainly spoken of it with freedom those whose principle it is to despise the ancient permanent sense of mankind and to set up a scheme of society on new principles must naturally expect that such of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon their trial they must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason but not at all to their authority they have not one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor they avow their hostility to opinion of course they must expect no support from that influence which with every other authority they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction i can never consider this assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state they have not the sanction and authority of the character under which they first met they have assumed another of a very different nature and have completely altered and inverted all the relations in which they originally stood they do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state they have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent which instructions as the assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law were the sole source of their authority the most considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities and in this sort of near divisions which carry only the constructive authority of the whole strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions if they had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny mankind would anticipate the time of prescription which through long usage mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement all those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize even in its cradle the child as legitimate which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth and on which they justify their continuance but they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity but which on the contrary has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed this assembly has hardly a year s prescription we have their own word for it that they have made a revolution to make a revolution is a measure which prima fronte requires an apology to make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding the sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power and to criticize on the use that is made of it with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority in obtaining and securing their power the assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use of it an observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct everything which they have done or continue to do in order to obtain and keep their power is by the most common arts they proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have done before them trace them through all their artifices frauds and violences you can find nothing at all that is new they follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader they never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation but in all the regulations relative to the public good the spirit has been the very reverse of this there they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns they make this difference because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest there they travel in the beaten road the public interests because about them they have no real solicitude they abandon wholly to chance i say to chance because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial we must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein the happiness of mankind is concerned but in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment in the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions they far outdo all the boasting of empirics the arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation i am convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in the national assembly some of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writings this cannot be without powerful and cultivated talents but eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom when i speak of ability i am obliged to distinguish what they have done toward the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men in the system itself taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring the prosperity and security of the citizen and for promoting the strength and grandeur of the state i confess myself unable to find out anything which displays in a single instance the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence their purpose everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty this it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront and to overcome and when they had overcome the first difficulty to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science and even to push forward beyond the reach of their original thoughts the landmarks of the human understanding itself difficulty is a severe instructor set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator who knows us better than we know ourselves as he loves us better too pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit he that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill our antagonist is our helper this amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations it will not suffer us to be superficial it is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task it is the degenerate fondness for tricking shortcuts and little fallacious facilities that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers they have created the late arbitrary monarchy of france they have created the arbitrary republic of paris with them defects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plenitude of force they get nothing by it commencing their labors on a principle of sloth they have the common fortune of slothful men the difficulties which they rather had eluded than escaped meet them again in their course they multiply and thicken on them they are involved through a labyrinth of confused detail in an industry without limit and without direction and in conclusion the whole of their work becomes feeble vicious and insecure it is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary assembly of france to commence their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction but is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies the shallowest understanding the rudest hand is more than equal to that task rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years the errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable it calls for little ability to point them out and where absolute power is given it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together the same lazy but restless disposition which loves sloth and hates quiet directs the politicians when they come to work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed to make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy no difficulties occur in what has never been tried criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition at once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing when the useful parts of an old establishment are kept and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained a vigorous mind steady persevering attention various powers of comparison and combination and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything of which it is in possession but you may object a process of this kind is slow it is not fit for an assembly which glories in performing in a few months the work of ages such a mode of reforming possibly might take up many years without question it might and it ought it is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible if circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom when we work only upon inanimate matter surely they become a part of duty too when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings by the sudden alteration of whose state condition and habits multitudes may be rendered miserable but it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in paris that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator far different are my ideas of that high office the true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility he ought to love and respect his kind and to fear himself it may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance but his movements toward it ought to be deliberate political arrangement as it is a work for social ends is to be only wrought by social means there mind must conspire with mind time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at our patience will achieve more than our force if i might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in paris i mean to experience i should tell you that in my course i have known and according to my measure have co operated with great men and i have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observation of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business by a slow but well sustained progress the effect of each step is watched the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second and so from light to light we are conducted with safety through the whole series we see that the parts of the system do not clash the evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise one advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another we compensate we reconcile we balance we are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men from hence arises not an excellence in simplicity but one far superior an excellence in composition where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them if justice requires this the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish it is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure solid and ruling principle in government a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature and having fixed the principle they have left it afterwards to its own operation to proceed in this manner that is to proceed with a presiding principle and a prolific energy is with me the criterion of profound wisdom what your politicians think the marks of a bold hardy genius are only proofs of a deplorable want of ability by their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer to every alchemist and empiric they despair of turning to account anything that is common diet is nothing in their system of remedy the worst of it is that this their despair of curing common distempers by regular methods arises not only from defect of comprehension but i fear from some malignity of disposition your legislators seem to have taken their opinions of all professions ranks and offices from the declamations and buffooneries of satirists who would themselves be astonished if they were held to the letter of their own descriptions by listening only to these your leaders regard all things only on the side of their vices and faults and view those vices and faults under every color of exaggeration it is undoubtedly true though it may seem paradoxical but in general those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and good but by habit they come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things by hating vices too much they come to love men too little it is therefore not wonderful that they should be indisposed and unable to serve them from hence arises the complexional disposition of some of your guides to pull everything in pieces at this malicious game they display the whole of their quadrimanous activity as to the rest the paradoxes of eloquent writers brought forth purely as a sport of fancy to try their talents to rouse attention and excite surprise are taken up by these gentlemen not in the spirit of the original authors as means of cultivating their taste and improving their style these paradoxes become with them serious grounds of action upon which they proceed in regulating the most important concerns of the state cicero ludicrously describes cato as endeavoring to act in the commonwealth upon the school paradoxes which exercised the wits of the junior students in the stoic philosophy if this was true of cato these gentlemen copy after him in the manner of some persons who lived about his time pede nudo catonem mr hume told me that he had from rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition that acute though eccentric observer had perceived that to strike and interest the public the marvelous must be produced that the marvelous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect that the giants magicians fairies and heroes of romance which succeeded had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age that now nothing was left to the writer but that species of the marvelous which might still be produced and with as great an effect as ever though in another way that is the marvelous in life in manners in characters and in extraordinary situations giving rise to new and unlooked for strokes in politics and morals i believe that were rousseau alive and in one of his lucid intervals he would be shocked at the practical frenzy of his scholars who in their paradoxes are servile imitators and even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith men who undertake considerable things even in a regular way ought to give us ground to presume ability but the physician of the state who not satisfied with the cure of distempers undertakes to regenerate constitutions ought to show uncommon powers some very unusual appearances of wisdom ought to display themselves on the face of the designs of those who appeal to no practice and who copy after no model has any such been manifested i shall take a view of what the assembly has done with regard first to the constitution of the legislature in the next place to that of the executive power then to that of the judicature afterwards to the model of the army and conclude with the system of finance to see whether we can discover in any part of their schemes the portentous ability which may justify these bold undertakers in the superiority which they assume over mankind it is in the model of the sovereign and presiding part of this new republic that we should expect their grand display here they were to prove their title to their proud demands for the plan itself at large and for the reasons on which it is grounded i refer to the journals of the assembly of the 29th of september 1789 and to the subsequent proceedings which have made any alterations in the plan so far as in a matter somewhat confused i can see light the system remains substantially as it has been originally framed my few remarks will be such as regard its spirit its tendency and its fitness for framing a popular commonwealth which they profess theirs to be suited to the ends for which any commonwealth and particularly such a commonwealth is made at the same time i mean to consider its consistency with itself and its own principles old establishments are tried by their effects if the people are happy united wealthy and powerful we presume the rest we conclude that to be good from whence good is derived in old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory indeed they are the results of various necessities and expediencies they are not often constructed after any theory theories are rather drawn from them in them we often see the end best obtained where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme the means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project they again react upon the primitive constitution and sometimes improve the design itself from which they seem to have departed i think all this might be curiously exemplified in the british constitution at worst the errors and deviations of every kind in reckoning are found and computed and the ship proceeds in her course this is the case of old establishments but in a new and merely theoretic system it is expected that every contrivance shall appear on the face of it to answer its ends especially where the projectors are no way embarrassed with an endeavor to accommodate the new building to an old one either in the walls or on the foundations the french builders clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found and like their ornamental gardeners forming everything into an exact level propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of three different kinds one geometrical one arithmetical and the third financial the first of which they call the basis of territory the second the basis of population and the third the basis of contribution for the accomplishment of the first of these purposes they divide the area of their country into eighty three pieces regularly square of eighteen leagues by eighteen these large divisions are called departments these they portion proceeding by square measurement into seventeen hundred and twenty districts called communes these again they subdivide still proceeding by square measurement into smaller districts called cantons making in all 6400 at first view this geometrical basis of theirs presents not much to admire or to blame it calls for no great legislative talents nothing more than an accurate land surveyor with his chain sight and theodolite is requisite for such a plan as this in the old divisions of the country various accidents at various times and the ebb and flow of various properties and jurisdictions settled their bounds these bounds were not made upon any fixed system undoubtedly they were subject to some inconveniences but they were inconveniences for which use had found remedies and habit had supplied accommodation and patience in this new pavement of square within square and this organization and semi organization made on the system of empedocles and buffon and not upon any politic principle it is impossible that innumerable local inconveniences to which men are not habituated must not arise but these i pass over because it requires an accurate knowledge of the country which i do not possess to specify them when these state surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration they had then recourse to another basis to support the building which tottered on that false foundation it was evident that the goodness of the soil the number of the people their wealth and the largeness of their contribution made such infinite variations between square and square as to render mensuration a ridiculous standard of power in the commonwealth and equality in geometry the most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men however they could not give it up but dividing their political and civil representation into three parts they allotted one of those parts to the square measurement without a single fact or calculation to ascertain whether this territorial proportion of representation was fairly assigned and ought upon any principle really to be a third having however given to geometry this portion out of compliment i suppose to that sublime science they left the other two to be scuffled for between the other parts population and contribution when they came to provide for population they were not able to proceed quite so smoothly as they had done in the field of their geometry here their arithmetic came to bear upon their juridical metaphysics had they stuck to their metaphysic principles the arithmetical process would be simple indeed men with them are strictly equal and are entitled to equal rights in their own government each head on this system would have its vote and every man would vote directly for the person who was to represent him in the legislature but soft by regular degrees not yet this metaphysic principle to which law custom usage policy reason were to yield is to yield itself to their pleasure there must be many degrees and some stages before the representative can come in contact with his constituent indeed as we shall soon see these two persons are to have no sort of communion with each other first the voters in the canton who compose what they call primary assemblies are to have a qualification what a qualification on the indefeasible rights of men yes but it shall be a very small qualification our injustice shall be very little oppressive only the local valuation of three days labor paid to the public why this is not much i readily admit for anything but the utter subversion of your equalizing principle as a qualification it might as well be let alone for it answers no one purpose for which qualifications are established and on your ideas it excludes from a vote the man of all others whose natural equality stands the most in need of protection and defense i mean the man who has nothing else but his natural equality to guard him you order him to buy the right which you before told him nature had given to him gratuitously at his birth and of which no authority on earth could lawfully deprive him with regard to the person who cannot come up to your market a tyrannous aristocracy as against him is established at the very outset by you who pretend to be its sworn foe the gradation proceeds these primary assemblies of the canton elect deputies to the commune one for every two hundred qualified inhabitants here is the first medium put between the primary elector and the representative legislator and here a new turnpike is fixed for taxing the rights of men with a second qualification for none can be elected into the commune who does not pay the amount of ten days labor nor have we yet done there is still to be another gradation these communes chosen by the canton choose to the department and the deputies of the department choose their deputies to the national assembly here is a third barrier of a senseless qualification every deputy to the national assembly must pay in direct contribution to the value of a mark of silver of all these qualifying barriers we must think alike that they are impotent to secure independence strong only to destroy the rights of men in all this process which in its fundamental elements affects to consider only population upon a principle of natural right there is a manifest attention to property which however just and reasonable on other schemes is on theirs perfectly unsupportable when they come to their third basis that of contribution we find that they have more completely lost sight of their rights of men this last basis rests entirely on property a principle totally different from the equality of men and utterly irreconcilable to it is thereby admitted but no sooner is this principle admitted than it is subverted and it is not subverted to approximate the inequality of riches to the level of nature the additional share in the third portion of representation is made to regard the district only and not the individuals in it who pay it is easy to perceive by the course of their reasonings how much they were embarrassed by their contradictory ideas of the rights of men and the privileges of riches the committee of constitution do as good as admit that they are wholly irreconcilable the relation with regard to the contributions is without doubt null when the question is on the balance of the political rights as between individual and individual without which personal equality would be destroyed and an aristocracy of the rich would be established but this inconvenience entirely disappears when the proportional relation of the contribution is only considered in the great masses and is solely between province and province it serves in that case only to form a just reciprocal proportion between the cities without affecting the personal rights of the citizens here the principle of contribution as taken between man and man is reprobated as null and destructive to equality and as pernicious too because it leads to the establishment of an aristocracy of the rich however it must not be abandoned and the way of getting rid of the difficulty is to establish the inequality as between department and department leaving all the individuals in each department upon an exact par observe that this parity between individuals had been before destroyed when the qualifications within the departments were settled nor does it seem a matter of great importance whether the equality of men be injured by masses or individually an individual is not of the same importance in a mass represented by a few as in a mass represented by many it would be too much to tell a man jealous of his equality that the elector has the same franchise who votes for three members as he who votes for ten now take it in the outer point of view and let us suppose their principle of representation according to contribution that is according to riches to be well imagined and to be a necessary basis for their republic in this their third basis they assume that riches ought to be respected and that justice and policy require that they should entitle men in some mode or other to a larger share in the administration of public affairs it is now to be seen how the assembly provides for the preeminence or even for the security of the rich by conferring in virtue of their opulence that larger measure of power to their district which is denied to them personally i readily admit that in a republican government which has a democratic basis the rich do require an additional security above what is necessary to them in monarchies they are subject to envy and through envy to oppression on the present scheme it is impossible to divine what advantage they derive from the aristocratic preference upon which the unequal representation of the masses is founded the rich cannot feel it either as a support to dignity or as security to fortune for the aristocratic mass is generated from purely democratic principles and the preference given to it in the general representation has no sort of reference to or connection with the persons upon account of whose property this superiority of the mass is established if the contrivers of this scheme meant any sort of favor to the rich in consequence of their contribution they ought to have conferred the privilege either on the individual rich or on some class formed of rich persons because the contest between the rich and the poor is not a struggle between corporation and corporation but a contest between men and men a competition not between districts but between descriptions it would answer its purpose better if the scheme were inverted that the vote of the masses were rendered equal and that the votes within each mass were proportioned to property let us suppose one man in a district to contribute as much as a hundred of his neighbors against these he has but one vote if there were but one representative for the mass his poor neighbors would outvote him by a hundred to one for that single representative bad enough but amends are to be made him how the district in virtue of his wealth is to choose say ten members instead of one that is to say by paying a very large contribution he has the happiness of being outvoted a hundred to one by the poor for ten representatives instead of being outvoted exactly in the same proportion for a single member in truth instead of benefiting by this superior quantity of representation the rich man is subjected to an additional hardship the increase of representation within his province sets up nine persons more and as many more than nine as there may be democratic candidates to cabal and intrigue and to flatter the people at his expense and to his oppression an interest is by this means held out to multitudes of the inferior sort in obtaining a salary of eighteen livres a day besides the pleasure of a residence in paris and their share in the government of the kingdom the more the objects of ambition are multiplied and become democratic just in that proportion the rich are endangered thus it must fare between the poor and the rich in the province deemed aristocratic which in its internal relation is the very reverse of that character in its external relation that is its relation to the other provinces i cannot see how the unequal representation which is given to masses on account of wealth becomes the means of preserving the equipoise and the tranquillity of the commonwealth for if it be one of the objects to secure the weak from being crushed by the strong how are the smaller and poorer of these masses to be saved from the tyranny of the more wealthy is it by adding to the wealthy further and more systematical means of oppressing them when we come to a balance of representation between corporate bodies provincial interests emulations and jealousies are full as likely to arise among them as among individuals and their divisions are likely to produce a much hotter spirit of dissension and something leading much more nearly to a war i see that these aristocratic masses are made upon what is called the principle of direct contribution nothing can be a more unequal standard than this the indirect contribution that which arises from duties on consumption is in truth a better standard and follows and discovers wealth more naturally than this of direct contribution it is difficult indeed to fix a standard of local preference on account of the one or of the other or of both because some provinces may pay the more of either or of both on account of causes not intrinsic but originating from those very districts over whom they have obtained a preference in consequence of their ostensible contribution if the masses were independent sovereign bodies who were to provide for a federative treasury by distinct contingents and that the revenue had not many impositions running through the whole which affect men individually and not corporately and which by their nature confound all territorial limits something might be said for the basis of contribution as founded on masses but of all things this representation to be measured by contribution is the most difficult to settle upon principles of equity in a country which considers its districts as members of a whole for a great city such as bordeaux or paris appears to pay a vast body of duties almost out of all assignable proportion to other places and its mass is considered accordingly but are these cities the true contributors in that proportion no the consumers of the commodities imported into bordeaux who are scattered through all france pay the import duties of bordeaux the produce of the vintage in guienne and languedoc give to that city the means of its contribution growing out of an export commerce the landholders who spend their estates in paris and are thereby the creators of that city contribute for paris from the provinces out of which their revenues arise very nearly the same arguments will apply to the representative share given on account of direct contributions because the direct contribution must be assessed on wealth real or presumed and that local wealth will itself arise from causes not local and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a local preference it is very remarkable that in this fundamental regulation which settles the representation of the mass upon the direct contribution they have not yet settled how that direct contribution shall be laid and how apportioned perhaps there is some latent policy toward the continuance of the present assembly in this strange procedure however until they do this they can have no certain constitution it must depend at last upon the system of taxation and must vary with every variation in that system as they have contrived matters their taxation does not so much depend on their constitution as their constitution on their taxation this must introduce great confusion among the masses as the variable qualification for votes within the district must if ever real contested elections take place cause infinite internal controversies to compare together the three bases not on their political reason but on the ideas on which the assembly works and to try its consistency with itself we cannot avoid observing that the principle which the committee call the basis of population does not begin to operate from the same point with the two other principles called the bases of territory and of contribution which are both of an aristocratic nature the consequence is that where all three begin to operate together there is the most absurd inequality produced by the operation of the former on the two latter principles every canton contains four square leagues and is estimated to contain on the average 4000 inhabitants or 680 voters in the primary assemblies which vary in numbers with the population of the canton and send one deputy to the commune for every 200 voters nine cantons make a commune now let us take a canton containing a seaport town of trade or a great manufacturing town let us suppose the population of this canton to be 12 700 inhabitants or 2193 voters forming three primary assemblies and sending ten deputies to the commune oppose to this one canton two others of the remaining eight in the same commune these we may suppose to have their fair population of 4000 inhabitants and 680 voters each or 8000 inhabitants and 1360 voters both together these will form only two primary assemblies and send only six deputies to the commune when the assembly of the commune comes to vote on the basis of territory which principle is first admitted to operate in that assembly the single canton which has half the territory of the other two will have ten voices to six in the election of three deputies to the assembly of the department chosen on the express ground of a representation of territory this inequality striking as it is will be yet highly aggravated if we suppose as we fairly may the several other cantons of the commune to fall proportionably short of the average population as much as the principal canton exceeds it now as to the basis of contribution which also is a principle admitted first to operate in the assembly of the commune let us again take one canton such as is stated above if the whole of the direct contributions paid by a great trading or manufacturing town be divided equally among the inhabitants each individual will be found to pay much more than an individual living in the country according to the same average the whole paid by the inhabitants of the former will be more than the whole paid by the inhabitants of the latter we may fairly assume one third more then the 12 700 inhabitants or 2193 voters of the canton will pay as much as 19 050 inhabitants or 3289 voters of the other cantons which are nearly the estimated proportion of inhabitants and voters of five other cantons now the 2193 voters will as i before said send only ten deputies to the assembly the 3289 voters will send sixteen thus for an equal share in the contribution of the whole commune there will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for deputies to be chosen on the principle of representing the general contribution of the whole commune by the same mode of computation we shall find 15 875 inhabitants or 2741 voters of the other cantons who pay one sixth less to the contribution of the whole commune will have three voices more than the 12 700 inhabitants or 2193 voters of the one canton such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass in this curious repartition of the rights of representation arising out of territory and contribution the qualifications which these confer are in truth negative qualifications that give a right in an inverse proportion to the possession of them in this whole contrivance of the three bases consider it in any light you please i do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one consistent whole but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held together by your philosophers like wild beasts shut up in a cage to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction i am afraid i have gone too far into their way of considering the formation of a constitution they have much but bad metaphysics much but bad geometry much but false proportionate arithmetic but if it were all as exact as metaphysics geometry and arithmetic ought to be and if their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts it would make only a more fair and sightly vision it is remarkable that in a great arrangement of mankind not one reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or anything politic nothing that relates to the concerns the actions the passions the interests of men hominem non sapiunt you see i only consider this constitution as electoral and leading by steps to the national assembly i do not enter into the internal government of the departments and their genealogy through the communes and cantons these local governments are in the original plan to be as nearly as possible composed in the same manner and on the same principles with the elective assemblies they are each of them bodies perfectly compact and rounded in themselves you cannot but perceive in this scheme that it has a direct and immediate tendency to sever france into a variety of republics and to render them totally independent of each other without any direct constitutional means of coherence connection or subordination except what may be derived from their acquiescence in the determinations of the general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic such in reality is the national assembly and such governments i admit do exist in the world though in forms infinitely more suitable to the local and habitual circumstances of their people but such associations rather than bodies politic have generally been the effect of necessity not choice and i believe the present french power is the very first body of citizens who having obtained full authority to do with their country what they pleased have chosen to dissever it in this barbarous manner it is impossible not to observe that in the spirit of this geometrical distribution and arithmetical arrangement these pretended citizens treat france exactly like a country of conquest acting as conquerors they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race the policy of such barbarous victors who contemn a subdued people and insult their feelings has ever been as much as in them lay to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country in religion in polity in laws and in manners to confound all territorial limits to produce a general poverty to put up their properties to auction to crush their princes nobles and pontiffs to lay low everything which had lifted its head above the level or which could serve to combine or rally in their distresses the disbanded people under the standard of old opinion they have made france free in the manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind the romans freed greece macedon and other nations they destroyed the bonds of their union under color of providing for the independence of each of their cities when the members who compose these new bodies of cantons communes and departments arrangements purposely produced through the medium of confusion begin to act they will find themselves in a great measure strangers to one another the electors and elected throughout especially in the rural cantons will be frequently without any civil habitudes or connections or any of that natural discipline which is the soul of a true republic magistrates and collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts bishops with their dioceses or curates with their parishes these new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of rome in better and wiser days they were careful to make the elements of methodical subordination and settlement to be coeval and even to lay the foundations of civil discipline in the military but when all the good arts had fallen into ruin they proceeded as your assembly does upon the equality of men and with as little judgment and as little care for those things which make a republic tolerable or durable but in this as well as almost every instance your new commonwealth is born and bred and fed in those corruptions which mark degenerated and worn out republics your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death the facies hippocratica forms the character of its physiognomy and the prognostic of its fate the legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman they had to do with men and they were obliged to study human nature they had to do with citizens and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life they were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination and thence arose many diversities amongst men according to their birth their education their professions the periods of their lives their residence in towns or in the country their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property and according to the quality of the property itself all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals from hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes and to place them in such situations in the state as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might secure to them what their specific occasions required and which might furnish to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity of interests that must exist and must contend in all complex society for the legislator would have been ashamed that the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his sheep horses and oxen and should have enough of common sense not to abstract and equalize them all into animals without providing for each kind an appropriate food care and employment whilst he the economist disposer and shepherd of his own kindred subliming himself into an airy metaphysician was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general it is for this reason that montesquieu observed very justly that in their classification of the citizens the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers and even soared above themselves it is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series and sunk even below their own nothing as the first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens and combined them into one commonwealth the others the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators have taken the direct contrary course they have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens as well as they could into one homogeneous mass and then they divided this their amalgama into a number of incoherent republics they reduce men to loose counters merely for the sake of simple telling and not to figures whose power is to arise from their place in the table the elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons the troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there was something else in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity they might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there were eight heads more in every complex deliberation which they have never thought of though these of all the ten are the subjects on which the skill of man can operate anything at all so far from this able disposition of some of the old republican legislators which follows with a solicitous accuracy the moral conditions and propensities of men they have leveled and crushed together all the orders which they found even under the coarse unartificial arrangement of the monarchy in which mode of government the classing of the citizens is not of so much importance as in a republic it is true however that every such classification if properly ordered is good in all forms of government and composes a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism as well as it is the necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic for want of something of this kind if the present project of a republic should fail all securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed insomuch that if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in france under this or under any other dynasty it will probably be if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth this is to play a most desperate game the confusion which attends on all such proceedings they even declare to be one of their objects and they hope to secure their constitution by a terror of a return of those evils which attended their making it by this say they its destruction will become difficult to authority which cannot break it up without the entire disorganization of the whole state they presume that if this authority should ever come to the same degree of power that they have acquired it would make a more moderate and chastised use of it and would piously tremble entirely to disorganize the state in the savage manner that they have done they expect from the virtues of returning despotism the security which is to be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices i wish sir that you and my readers would give an attentive perusal to the work of m de calonne on this subject it is indeed not only an eloquent but an able and instructive performance i confine myself to what he says relative to the constitution of the new state and to the condition of the revenue as to the disputes of this minister with his rivals i do not wish to pronounce upon them as little do i mean to hazard any opinion concerning his ways and means financial or political for taking his country out of its present disgraceful and deplorable situation of servitude anarchy bankruptcy and beggary i cannot speculate quite so sanguinely as he does but he is a frenchman and has a closer duty relative to those objects and better means of judging of them than i can have i wish that the formal avowal which he refers to made by one of the principal leaders in the assembly concerning the tendency of their scheme to bring france not only from a monarchy to a republic but from a republic to a mere confederacy may be very particularly attended to it adds new force to my observations and indeed m de calonne s work supplies my deficiencies by many new and striking arguments on most of the subjects of this letter it is this resolution to break their country into separate republics which has driven them into the greatest number of their difficulties and contradictions if it were not for this all the questions of exact equality and these balances never to be settled of individual rights population and contribution would be wholly useless the representation though derived from parts would be a duty which equally regarded the whole each deputy to the assembly would be the representative of france and of all its descriptions of the many and of the few of the rich and of the poor of the great districts and of the small all these districts would themselves be subordinate to some standing authority existing independently of them an authority in which their representation and everything that belongs to it originated and to which it was pointed this standing unalterable fundamental government would make and it is the only thing which could make that territory truly and properly a whole with us when we elect popular representatives we send them to a council in which each man individually is a subject and submitted to a government complete in all its ordinary functions with you the elective assembly is the sovereign and the sole sovereign all the members are therefore integral parts of this sole sovereignty but with us it is totally different with us the representative separated from the other parts can have no action and no existence the government is the point of reference of the several members and districts of our representation this is the center of our unity this government of reference is a trustee for the whole and not for the parts so is the other branch of our public council i mean the house of lords with us the king and the lords are several and joint securities for the equality of each district each province each city when did you hear in great britain of any province suffering from the inequality of its representation what district from having no representation at all not only our monarchy and our peerage secure the equality on which our unity depends but it is the spirit of the house of commons itself the very inequality of representation which is so foolishly complained of is perhaps the very thing which prevents us from thinking or acting as members for districts cornwall elects as many members as all scotland but is cornwall better taken care of than scotland few trouble their heads about any of your bases out of some giddy clubs most of those who wish for any change upon any plausible grounds desire it on different ideas your new constitution is the very reverse of ours in its principle and i am astonished how any persons could dream of holding out anything done in it as an example for great britain with you there is little or rather no connection between the last representative and the first constituent the member who goes to the national assembly is not chosen by the people nor accountable to them there are three elections before he is chosen two sets of magistracy intervene between him and the primary assembly so as to render him as i have said an ambassador of a state and not the representative of the people within a state by this the whole spirit of the election is changed nor can any corrective which your constitution mongers have devised render him anything else than what he is the very attempt to do it would inevitably introduce a confusion if possible more horrid than the present there is no way to make a connection between the original constituent and the representative but by the circuitous means which may lead the candidate to apply in the first instance to the primary electors in order that by their authoritative instructions these primary electors may force the two succeeding bodies of electors to make a choice agreeable to their wishes but this would plainly subvert the whole scheme it would be to plunge them back into that tumult and confusion of popular election which by their interposed gradation of elections they mean to avoid and at length to risk the whole fortune of the state with those who have the least knowledge of it and the least interest in it this is a perpetual dilemma into which they are thrown by the vicious weak and contradictory principles they have chosen unless the people break up and level this gradation it is plain that they do not at all substantially elect to the assembly indeed they elect as little in appearance as reality what is it we all seek for in an election to answer its real purposes you must first possess the means of knowing the fitness of your man and then you must retain some hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence for what end are these primary electors complimented or rather mocked with a choice they can never know anything of the qualities of him that is to serve them nor has he any obligation whatsoever to them of all the powers unfit to be delegated by those who have any real means of judging that most peculiarly unfit is what relates to a personal choice in case of abuse that body of primary electors never can call the representative to an account for his conduct he is too far removed from them in the chain of representation if he acts improperly at the end of his two years lease it does not concern him for two years more by the new french constitution the best and the wisest representatives go equally with the worst into this limbus patrum their bottoms are supposed foul and they must go into dock to be refitted every man who has served in an assembly is ineligible for two years after just as these magistrates begin to learn their trade like chimney sweepers they are disqualified for exercising it superficial new petulant acquisition and interrupted dronish broken ill recollection is to be the destined character of all your future governors your constitution has too much of jealousy to have much of sense in it you consider the breach of trust in the representative so principally that you do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it this purgatory interval is not unfavorable to a faithless representative who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad governor in this time he may cabal himself into a superiority over the wisest and most virtuous as in the end all the members of this elective constitution are equally fugitive and exist only for the election they may be no longer the same persons who had chosen him to whom he is to be responsible when he solicits for a renewal of his trust to call all the secondary electors of the commune to account is ridiculous impracticable and unjust they may themselves have been deceived in their choice as the third set of electors those of the department may be in theirs in your elections responsibility cannot exist finding no sort of principle of coherence with each other in the nature and constitution of the several new republics of france i considered what cement the legislators had provided for them from any extraneous materials their confederations their spectacles their civic feasts and their enthusiasm i take no notice of they are nothing but mere tricks but tracing their policy through their actions i think i can distinguish the arrangements by which they propose to hold these republics together the first is the confiscation with the compulsory paper currency annexed to it the second is the supreme power of the city of paris the third is the general army of the state of this last i shall reserve what i have to say until i come to consider the army as a head by itself as to the operation of the first merely as a cement i cannot deny that these the one depending on the other may for some time compose some sort of cement if their madness and folly in the management and in the tempering of the parts together does not produce a repulsion in the very outset but allowing to the scheme some coherence and some duration it appears to me that if after a while the confiscation should not be found sufficient to support the paper coinage then instead of cementing it will add infinitely to the dissociation distraction and confusion of these confederate republics both with relation to each other and to the several parts within themselves but if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper currency the cement is gone with the circulation in the meantime its binding force will be very uncertain and it will straighten or relax with every variation in the credit of the paper one thing only is certain in this scheme which is an effect seemingly collateral but direct i have no doubt in the minds of those who conduct this business that is its effect in producing an oligarchy in every one of the republics a paper circulation not founded on any real money deposited or engaged for amounting already to forty four millions of english money and this currency by force substituted in the place of the coin of the kingdom becoming thereby the substance of its revenue as well as the medium of all its commercial and civil intercourse must put the whole of what power authority and influence is left in any form whatsoever it may assume into the hands of the managers and conductors of this circulation in england we feel the influence of the bank though it is only the center of a voluntary dealing he knows little indeed of the influence of money upon mankind who does not see the force of the management of a monied concern which is so much more extensive and in its nature so much more depending on the managers than any of ours but this is not merely a money concern there is another member in the system inseparably connected with this money management it consists in the means of drawing out at discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land and land into paper when we follow this process in its effects we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate by this means the spirit of money jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself and incorporates with it by this kind of operation that species of property becomes volatilized it assumes an unnatural and monstrous activity and thereby throws into the hands of the several managers principal and subordinate parisian and provincial all the representative of money and perhaps a full tenth part of all the land in france which has now acquired the worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper circulation the greatest possible uncertainty in its value they have reversed the latonian kindness to the landed property of delos they have sent theirs to be blown about like the light fragments of a wreck oras et littora circum the new dealers being all habitually adventurers and without any fixed habits of local predilections will purchase to job out again as the market of paper or of money or of land shall present an advantage for though a holy bishop thinks that agriculture will derive great advantages from the enlightened usurers who are to purchase the church confiscations i who am not a good but an old farmer with great humility beg leave to tell his late lordship that usury is not a tutor of agriculture and if the word enlightened be understood according to the new dictionary as it always is in your new schools i cannot conceive how a man s not believing in god can teach him to cultivate the earth with the least of any additional skill or encouragement diis immortalibus sero said an old roman when he held one handle of the plough whilst death held the other though you were to join in the commission all the directors of the two academies to the directors of the caisse d escompte one old experienced peasant is worth them all i have got more information upon a curious and interesting branch of husbandry in one short conversation with an old carthusian monk than i have derived from all the bank directors that i have ever conversed with however there is no cause for apprehension from the meddling of money dealers with rural economy these gentlemen are too wise in their generation at first perhaps their tender and susceptible imaginations may be captivated with the innocent and unprofitable delights of a pastoral life but in a little time they will find that agriculture is a trade much more laborious and much less lucrative than that which they had left after making its panegyric they will turn their backs on it like their great precursor and prototype they may like him begin by singing beatus ille but what will be the end haec ubi locutus foenerator alphius jam jam futurus rusticus omnem redegit idibus pecuniam quaerit calendis ponere they will cultivate the caisse d eglise under the sacred auspices of this prelate with much more profit than its vineyards and its cornfields they will employ their talents according to their habits and their interests they will not follow the plough whilst they can direct treasuries and govern provinces your legislators in everything new are the very first who have founded a commonwealth upon gaming and infused this spirit into it as its vital breath the great object in these politics is to metamorphose france from a great kingdom into one great playtable to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters to make speculation as extensive as life to mix it with all its concerns and to divert the whole of the hopes and fears of the people from their usual channels into the impulses passions and superstitions of those who live on chances they loudly proclaim their opinion that this their present system of a republic cannot possibly exist without this kind of gaming fund and that the very thread of its life is spun out of the staple of these speculations the old gaming in funds was mischievous enough undoubtedly but it was so only to individuals even when it had its greatest extent in the mississippi and south sea it affected but few comparatively where it extends further as in lotteries the spirit has but a single object but where the law which in most circumstances forbids and in none countenances gaming is itself debauched so as to reverse its nature and policy and expressly to force the subject to this destructive table by bringing the spirit and symbols of gaming into the minutest matters and engaging everybody in it and in everything a more dreadful epidemic distemper of that kind is spread than yet has appeared in the world with you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation what he receives in the morning will not have the same value at night what he is compelled to take as pay for an old debt will not be received as the same when he comes to pay a debt contracted by himself nor will it be the same when by prompt payment he would avoid contracting any debt at all industry must wither away economy must be driven from your country careful provision will have no existence who will labor without knowing the amount of his pay who will study to increase what none can estimate who will accumulate when he does not know the value of what he saves if you abstract it from its uses in gaming to accumulate your paper wealth would be not the providence of a man but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw the truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamesters is this that though all are forced to play few can understand the game and fewer still are in a condition to avail themselves of the knowledge the many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations what effect it must have on the country people is visible the townsman can calculate from day to day not so the inhabitant of the country when the peasant first brings his corn to market the magistrate in the towns obliges him to take the assignat at par when he goes to the shop with his money he finds it seven per cent the worse for crossing the way this market he will not readily resort to again the townspeople will be inflamed they will force the country people to bring their corn resistance will begin and the murders of paris and st denis may be renewed through all france what signifies the empty compliment paid to the country by giving it perhaps more than its share in the theory of your representation where have you placed the real power over monied and landed circulation where have you placed the means of raising and falling the value of every man s freehold those whose operations can take from or add ten per cent to the possessions of every man in france must be the masters of every man in france the whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers and the monied directors who lead them the landed gentleman the yeoman and the peasant have none of them habits or inclinations or experience which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in france the very nature of a country life the very nature of landed property in all the occupations and all the pleasures they afford render combination and arrangement in a manner impossible amongst country people combine them by all the art you can and all the industry they are always dissolving into individuality anything in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable amongst them hope fear alarm jealousy the ephemerous tale that does its business and dies in a day all these things which are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers are not easily employed or hardly at all amongst scattered people they assemble they arm they act with the utmost difficulty and at the greatest charge their efforts if ever they can be commenced cannot be sustained they cannot proceed systematically if the country gentlemen attempt an influence through the mere income of their property what is it to that of those who have ten times their income to sell and who can ruin their property by bringing their plunder to meet it at market if the landed man wishes to mortgage he falls the value of his land and raises the value of assignats he augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must take to contend with him the country gentleman therefore the officer by sea and land the man of liberal views and habits attached to no profession will be as completely excluded from the government of his country as if he were legislatively proscribed it is obvious that in the towns all things which conspire against the country gentleman combine in favor of the money manager and director in towns combination is natural the habits of burghers their occupations their diversion their business their idleness continually bring them into mutual contact their virtues and their vices are sociable they are always in garrison and they come embodied and half disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military action all these considerations leave no doubt on my mind that if this monster of a constitution can continue france will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations by societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats and trustees for the sale of church lands attorneys agents money jobbers speculators and adventurers composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown the church the nobility and the people here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men in the serbonian bog of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed sunk and lost forever though human eyes cannot trace them one would be tempted to think some great offenses in france must cry to heaven which has thought fit to punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious domination in which no comfort or compensation is to be found in any even of those false splendors which playing about other tyrannies prevent mankind from feeling themselves dishonored even whilst they are oppressed i must confess i am touched with a sorrow mixed with some indignation at the conduct of a few men once of great rank and still of great character who deluded with specious names have engaged in a business too deep for the line of their understanding to fathom who have lent their fair reputation and the authority of their high sounding names to the designs of men with whom they could not be acquainted and have thereby made their very virtues operate to the ruin of their country so far as to the first cementing principle the second material of cement for their new republic is the superiority of the city of paris and this i admit is strongly connected with the other cementing principle of paper circulation and confiscation it is in this part of the project we must look for the cause of the destruction of all the old bounds of provinces and jurisdictions ecclesiastical and secular and the dissolution of all ancient combinations of things as well as the formation of so many small unconnected republics the power of the city of paris is evidently one great spring of all their politics it is through the power of paris now become the center and focus of jobbing that the leaders of this faction direct or rather command the whole legislative and the whole executive government everything therefore must be done which can confirm the authority of that city over the other republics paris is compact she has an enormous strength wholly disproportioned to the force of any of the square republics and this strength is collected and condensed within a narrow compass paris has a natural and easy connection of its parts which will not be affected by any scheme of a geometrical constitution nor does it much signify whether its proportion of representation be more or less since it has the whole draft of fishes in its dragnet the other divisions of the kingdom being hackled and torn to pieces and separated from all their habitual means and even principles of union cannot for some time at least confederate against her nothing was to be left in all the subordinate members but weakness disconnection and confusion to confirm this part of the plan the assembly has lately come to a resolution that no two of their republics shall have the same commander in chief to a person who takes a view of the whole the strength of paris thus formed will appear a system of general weakness it is boasted that the geometrical policy has been adopted that all local ideas should be sunk and that the people should no longer be gascons picards bretons normans but frenchmen with one country one heart and one assembly but instead of being all frenchmen the greater likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country no man ever was attached by a sense of pride partiality or real affection to a description of square measurement he never will glory in belonging to the chequer no 71 or to any other badge ticket we begin our public affections in our families no cold relation is a zealous citizen we pass on to our neighborhoods and our habitual provincial connections these are inns and resting places such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit and not by a sudden jerk of authority were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill the love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards by which alone men come to be affected as with their own concern in the prosperity of a kingdom so extensive as that of france in that general territory itself as in the old name of provinces the citizens are interested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits and not on account of the geometric properties of its figure the power and pre eminence of paris does certainly press down and hold these republics together as long as it lasts but for the reasons i have already given you i think it cannot last very long passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing principles of this constitution to the national assembly which is to appear and act as sovereign we see a body in its constitution with every possible power and no possible external control we see a body without fundamental laws without established maxims without respected rules of proceeding which nothing can keep firm to any system whatsoever their idea of their powers is always taken at the utmost stretch of legislative competence and their examples for common cases from the exceptions of the most urgent necessity the future is to be in most respects like the present assembly but by the mode of the new elections and the tendency of the new circulations it will be purged of the small degree of internal control existing in a minority chosen originally from various interests and preserving something of their spirit if possible the next assembly must be worse than the present the present by destroying and altering everything will leave to their successors apparently nothing popular to do they will be roused by emulation and example to enterprises the boldest and the most absurd to suppose such an assembly sitting in perfect quietude is ridiculous your all sufficient legislators in their hurry to do everything at once have forgotten one thing that seems essential and which i believe never has been before in the theory or the practice omitted by any projector of a republic they have forgotten to constitute a senate or something of that nature and character never before this time was heard of a body politic composed of one legislative and active assembly and its executive officers without such a council without something to which foreign states might connect themselves something to which in the ordinary detail of government the people could look up something which might give a bias and steadiness and preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of state such a body kings generally have as a council a monarchy may exist without it but it seems to be in the very essence of a republican government it holds a sort of middle place between the supreme power exercised by the people or immediately delegated from them and the mere executive of this there are no traces in your constitution and in providing nothing of this kind your solons and numas have as much as in anything else discovered a sovereign incapacity let us now turn our eyes to what they have done toward the formation of an executive power for this they have chosen a degraded king this their first executive officer is to be a machine without any sort of deliberative discretion in any one act of his function at best he is but a channel to convey to the national assembly such matter as it may import that body to know if he had been made the exclusive channel the power would not have been without its importance though infinitely perilous to those who would choose to exercise it but public intelligence and statement of facts may pass to the assembly with equal authenticity through any other conveyance as to the means therefore of giving a direction to measures by the statement of an authorized reporter this office of intelligence is as nothing to consider the french scheme of an executive officer in its two natural divisions of civil and political in the first it must be observed that according to the new constitution the higher parts of judicature in either of its lines are not in the king the king of france is not the fountain of justice the judges neither the original nor the appellate are of his nomination he neither proposes the candidates nor has a negative on the choice he is not even the public prosecutor he serves only as a notary to authenticate the choice made of the judges in the several districts by his officers he is to execute their sentence when we look into the true nature of his authority he appears to be nothing more than a chief of bum bailiffs sergeants at mace catchpoles jailers and hangmen it is impossible to place anything called royalty in a more degrading point of view a thousand times better had it been for the dignity of this unhappy prince that he had nothing at all to do with the administration of justice deprived as he is of all that is venerable and all that is consolatory in that function without power of originating any process without a power of suspension mitigation or pardon everything in justice that is vile and odious is thrown upon him it was not for nothing that the assembly has been at such pains to remove the stigma from certain offices when they are resolved to place the person who had lately been their king in a situation but one degree above the executioner and in an office nearly of the same quality it is not in nature that situated as the king of the french now is he can respect himself or can be respected by others view this new executive officer on the side of his political capacity as he acts under the orders of the national assembly to execute laws is a royal office to execute orders is not to be a king however a political executive magistracy though merely such is a great trust it is a trust indeed that has much depending upon its faithful and diligent performance both in the person presiding in it and in all its subordinates means of performing this duty ought to be given by regulation and dispositions toward it ought to be infused by the circumstances attendant on the trust it ought to be environed with dignity authority and consideration and it ought to lead to glory the office of execution is an office of exertion it is not from impotence we are to expect the tasks of power what sort of person is a king to command executory service who has no means whatsoever to reward it not in a permanent office not in a grant of land no not in a pension of fifty pounds a year not in the vainest and most trivial title in france the king is no more the fountain of honor than he is the fountain of justice all rewards all distinctions are in other hands those who serve the king can be actuated by no natural motive but fear by a fear of everything except their master his functions of internal coercion are as odious as those which he exercises in the department of justice if relief is to be given to any municipality the assembly gives it if troops are to be sent to reduce them to obedience to the assembly the king is to execute the order and upon every occasion he is to be spattered over with the blood of his people he has no negative yet his name and authority is used to enforce every harsh decree nay he must concur in the butchery of those who shall attempt to free him from his imprisonment or show the slightest attachment to his person or to his ancient authority executive magistracy ought to be constituted in such a manner that those who compose it should be disposed to love and to venerate those whom they are bound to obey a purposed neglect or what is worse a literal but perverse and malignant obedience must be the ruin of the wisest counsels in vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions to make them act zealously is not in the competence of law kings even such as are truly kings may and ought to bear the freedom of subjects that are obnoxious to them they may too without derogating from themselves bear even the authority of such persons if it promotes their service louis the thirteenth mortally hated the cardinal de richelieu but his support of that minister against his rivals was the source of all the glory of his reign and the solid foundation of his throne itself louis the fourteenth when come to the throne did not love the cardinal mazarin but for his interests he preserved him in power when old he detested louvois but for years whilst he faithfully served his greatness he endured his person when george the second took mr pitt who certainly was not agreeable to him into his councils he did nothing which could humble a wise sovereign but these ministers who were chosen by affairs not by affections acted in the name of and in trust for kings and not as their avowed constitutional and ostensible masters i think it impossible that any king when he has recovered his first terrors can cordially infuse vivacity and vigor into measures which he knows to be dictated by those who he must be persuaded are in the highest degree ill affected to his person will any ministers who serve such a king with but a decent appearance of respect cordially obey the orders of those whom but the other day in his name they had committed to the bastille will they obey the orders of those whom whilst they were exercising despotic justice upon them they conceived they were treating with lenity and from whom in a prison they thought they had provided an asylum if you expect such obedience amongst your other innovations and regenerations you ought to make a revolution in nature and provide a new constitution for the human mind otherwise your supreme government cannot harmonize with its executory system there are cases in which we cannot take up with names and abstractions you may call half a dozen leading individuals whom we have reason to fear and hate the nation it makes no other difference than to make us fear and hate them the more if it had been thought justifiable and expedient to make such a revolution by such means and through such persons as you have made yours it would have been more wise to have completed the business of the fifth and sixth of october the new executive officer would then owe his situation to those who are his creators as well as his masters and he might be bound in interest in the society of crime and in gratitude to serve those who had promoted him to a place of great lucre and great sensual indulgence and of something more for more he must have received from those who certainly would not have limited an aggrandized creature as they have done a submitting antagonist a king circumstanced as the present if he is totally stupefied by his misfortunes so as to think it not the necessity but the premium and privilege of life to eat and sleep without any regard to glory can never be fit for the office if he feels as men commonly feel he must be sensible that an office so circumstanced is one in which he can obtain no fame or reputation he has no generous interest that can excite him to action at best his conduct will be passive and defensive to inferior people such an office might be matter of honor but to be raised to it and to descend to it are different things and suggest different sentiments does he really name the ministers they will have a sympathy with him are they forced upon him the whole business between them and the nominal king will be mutual counteraction in all other countries the office of ministers of state is of the highest dignity in france it is full of peril and incapable of glory rivals however they will have in their nothingness whilst shallow ambition exists in the world or the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive to short sighted avarice those competitors of the ministers are enabled by your constitution to attack them in their vital parts whilst they have not the means of repelling their charges in any other than the degrading character of culprits the ministers of state in france are the only persons in that country who are incapable of a share in the national councils what ministers what councils what a nation but they are responsible it is a poor service that is to be had from responsibility the elevation of mind to be derived from fear will never make a nation glorious responsibility prevents crimes it makes all attempts against the laws dangerous but for a principle of active and zealous service none but idiots could think of it is the conduct of a war to be trusted to a man who may abhor its principle who in every step he may take to render it successful confirms the power of those by whom he is oppressed will foreign states seriously treat with him who has no prerogative of peace or war no not so much as in a single vote by himself or his ministers or by any one whom he can possibly influence a state of contempt is not a state for a prince better get rid of him at once i know it will be said that these humors in the court and executive government will continue only through this generation and that the king has been brought to declare the dauphin shall be educated in a conformity to his situation if he is made to conform to his situation he will have no education at all his training must be worse even than that of an arbitrary monarch if he reads whether he reads or not some good or evil genius will tell him his ancestors were kings thenceforward his object must be to assert himself and to avenge his parents this you will say is not his duty that may be but it is nature and whilst you pique nature against you you do unwisely to trust to duty in this futile scheme of polity the state nurses in its bosom for the present a source of weakness perplexity counteraction inefficiency and decay and it prepares the means of its final ruin in short i see nothing in the executive force that has even an appearance of vigor or that has the smallest degree of just correspondence or symmetry or amicable relation with the supreme power either as it now exists or as it is planned for the future government you have settled by an economy as perverted as the policy two establishments of government one real one fictitious both maintained at a vast expense but the fictitious at i think the greatest such a machine as the latter is not worth the grease of its wheels the expense is exorbitant and neither the show nor the use deserve the tenth part of the charge oh but i don t do justice to the talents of the legislators i don t allow as i ought to do for necessity their scheme of executive force was not their choice this pageant must be kept the people would not consent to part with it right i understand you you do in spite of your grand theories to which you would have heaven and earth to bend you do know how to conform yourselves to the nature and circumstances of things but when you were obliged to conform thus far to circumstances you ought to have carried your submission further and to have made what you were obliged to take a proper instrument and useful to its end that was in your power for instance among many others it was in your power to leave to your king the right of peace and war what to leave to the executive magistrate the most dangerous of all prerogatives i know none more dangerous nor any one more necessary to be so trusted i do not say that this prerogative ought to be trusted to your king unless he enjoyed other auxiliary trusts along with it which he does not now hold but if he did possess them hazardous as they are undoubtedly advantages would arise from such a constitution more than compensating the risk there is no other way of keeping the several potentates of europe from intriguing distinctly and personally with the members of your assembly from intermeddling in all your concerns and fomenting in the heart of your country the most pernicious of all factions factions in the interest and under the direction of foreign powers from that worst of evils thank god we are still free your skill if you had any would be well employed to find out indirect correctives and controls upon this perilous trust if you did not like those which in england we have chosen your leaders might have exerted their abilities in contriving better if it were necessary to exemplify the consequences of such an executive government as yours in the management of great affairs i should refer you to the late reports of m de montmorin to the national assembly and all the other proceedings relative to the differences between great britain and spain it would be treating your understanding with disrespect to point them out to you i hear that the persons who are called ministers have signified an intention of resigning their places i am rather astonished that they have not resigned long since for the universe i would not have stood in the situation in which they have been for this last twelvemonth they wished well i take it for granted to the revolution let this fact be as it may they could not placed as they were upon an eminence though an eminence of humiliation but be the first to see collectively and to feel each in his own department the evils which have been produced by that revolution in every step which they took or forbore to take they must have felt the degraded situation of their country and their utter incapacity of serving it they are in a species of subordinate servitude in which no men before them were ever seen without confidence from their sovereign on whom they were forced or from the assembly who forced them upon him all the noble functions of their office are executed by committees of the assembly without any regard whatsoever to their personal or their official authority they are to execute without power they are to be responsible without discretion they are to deliberate without choice in their puzzled situations under two sovereigns over neither of whom they have any influence they must act in such a manner as sometimes to betray the one sometimes the other and always to betray themselves such has been their situation such must be the situation of those who succeed them i have much respect and many good wishes for m necker i am obliged to him for attentions i thought when his enemies had driven him from versailles that his exile was a subject of most serious congratulations sed multae urbes et publica vota vicerunt he is now sitting on the ruins of the finances and of the monarchy of france a great deal more might be observed on the strange constitution of the executory part of the new government but fatigue must give bounds to the discussion of subjects which in themselves have hardly any limits as little genius and talent am i able to perceive in the plan of judicature formed by the national assembly according to their invariable course the framers of your constitution have begun with the utter abolition of the parliaments these venerable bodies like the rest of the old government stood in need of reform even though there should be no change made in the monarchy they required several more alterations to adapt them to the system of a free constitution but they had particulars in their constitution and those not a few which deserved approbation from the wise they possessed one fundamental excellence they were independent the most doubtful circumstance attendant on their office that of its being vendible contributed however to this independence of character they held for life indeed they may be said to have held by inheritance appointed by the monarch they were considered as nearly out of his power the most determined exertions of that authority against them only showed their radical independence they composed permanent bodies politic constituted to resist arbitrary innovation and from that corporate constitution and from most of their forms they were well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws they had been a safe asylum to secure these laws in all the revolutions of humor and opinion they had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions they kept alive the memory and record of the constitution they were the great security to private property which might be said to be in fact as well guarded in france as in any other country whatever is supreme in a state ought to have as much as possible its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it but in some sort to balance it it ought to give a security to its justice against its power it ought to make its judicature as it were something exterior to the state these parliaments had furnished not the best certainly but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy such an independent judicature was ten times more necessary when a democracy became the absolute power of the country in that constitution elective temporary local judges such as you have contrived exercising their dependent functions in a narrow society must be the worst of all tribunals in them it will be vain to look for any appearance of justice toward strangers toward the obnoxious rich toward the minority of routed parties toward all those who in the election have supported unsuccessful candidates it will be impossible to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction all contrivances by ballot we know experimentally to be vain and childish to prevent a discovery of inclinations where they may the best answer the purposes of concealment they answer to produce suspicion and this is a still more mischievous cause of partiality if the parliaments had been preserved instead of being dissolved at so ruinous a charge to the nation they might have served in this new commonwealth perhaps not precisely the same but nearly the same purposes as the court and senate of areopagus did in athens that is as one of the balances and correctives to the evils of a light and unjust democracy every one knows that this tribunal was the great stay of that state every one knows with what care it was upheld and with what a religious awe it was consecrated the parliaments were not wholly free from faction i admit but this evil was exterior and accidental and not so much the vice of their constitution itself as it must be in your new contrivance of sexennial elective judicatories several english commend the abolition of the old tribunals as supposing that they determined everything by bribery and corruption but they have stood the test of monarchic and republican scrutiny the court was well disposed to prove corruption on those bodies when the were dissolved in 1771 those who have again dissolved them would have done the same if they could but both inquisitions having failed i conclude that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare amongst them it would have been prudent along with the parliaments to preserve their ancient power of registering and of remonstrating at least upon all the decrees of the national assembly as they did upon those which passed in the time of the monarchy it would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence the vice of the ancient democracies and one cause of their ruin was that they ruled as you do by occasional decrees psephismata this practice soon broke in upon the tenor and consistency of the laws it abated the respect of the people toward them and totally destroyed them in the end your vesting the power of remonstrance which in the time of the monarchy existed in the parliament of paris in your principal executive officer whom in spite of common sense you persevere in calling king is the height of absurdity you ought never to suffer remonstrance from him who is to execute this is to understand neither council nor execution neither authority nor obedience the person whom you call king ought not to have this power or he ought to have more your present arrangement is strictly judicial instead of imitating your monarchy and seating your judges on a bench of independence your object is to reduce them to the most blind obedience as you have changed all things you have invented new principles of order you first appoint judges who i suppose are to determine according to law and then you let them know that at some time or other you intend to give them some law by which they are to determine any studies which they have made are to be useless to them but to supply these studies they are to be sworn to obey all the rules orders and instructions which from time to time they are to receive from the national assembly these if they submit to they leave no ground of law to the subject they become complete and most dangerous instruments in the hands of the governing power which in the midst of a cause or on the prospect of it may wholly change the rule of decision if these orders of the national assembly come to be contrary to the will of the people who locally choose judges such confusion must happen as is terrible to think of for the judges owe their places to the local authority and the commands they are sworn to obey come from those who have no share in their appointment in the meantime they have the example of the court of chatelet to encourage and guide them in the exercise of their functions that court is to try criminals sent to it by the national assembly or brought before it by other courses of delation they sit under a guard to save their own lives they know not by what law they judge nor under what authority they act nor by what tenure they hold it is thought that they are sometimes obliged to condemn at peril of their lives this is not perhaps certain nor can it be ascertained but when they acquit we know they have seen the persons whom they discharge with perfect impunity to the actors hanged at the door of their court the assembly indeed promises that they will form a body of law which shall be short simple clear and so forth that is by their short laws they will leave much to the discretion of the judge whilst they have exploded the authority of all the learning which could make judicial discretion deserving the appellation of a sound discretion it is curious to observe that the administrative bodies are carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals that is those persons are exempted from the power of the laws who ought to be the most entirely submitted to them those who execute public pecuniary trusts ought of all men to be the most strictly held to their duty one would have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares if you did not mean that those administrative bodies should be real sovereign independent states to form an awful tribunal like your late parliaments or like our king s bench where all corporate officers might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their functions and would find coercion if they trespassed against their legal duty but the cause of the exemption is plain these administrative bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through democracy to oligarchy they must therefore be put above the law it will be said that the legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them they are undoubtedly they are unfit for any rational purpose it will be said too that the administrative bodies will be accountable to the general assembly this i fear is talking without much consideration of the nature of that assembly or of these corporations however to be subject to the pleasure of that assembly is not to be subject to law either for protection or for constraint this establishment of judges as yet wants something to its completion it is to be crowned by a new tribunal this is to be a grand state judicature and it is to judge of crimes committed against the nation that is against the power of the assembly it seems as if they had something in their view of the nature of the high court of justice erected in england during the time of the great usurpation as they have not yet finished this part of the scheme it is impossible to form a right judgment upon it however if great care is not taken to form it in a spirit very different from that which has guided them in their proceedings relative to state offenses this tribunal subservient to their inquisition the committee of research will extinguish the last sparks of liberty in france and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation if they wish to give to this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice they must not evoke from or send to it the causes relative to their own members at their pleasure they must also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of paris has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judicature the able arrangement of this part is the more difficult and requires the greatest skill and attention not only as the great concern in itself but as it is the third cementing principle in the new body of republics which you call the french nation truly it is not easy to divine what that army may become at last you have voted a very large one and on good appointments at least fully equal to your apparent means of payment but what is the principle of its discipline or whom is it to obey you have got the wolf by the ears and i wish you joy of the happy position in which you have chosen to place yourselves and in which you are well circumstanced for a free deliberation relatively to that army or to anything else the minister and secretary of state for the war department is m de la tour du pin this gentleman like his colleagues in administration is a most zealous assertor of the revolution and a sanguine admirer of the new constitution which originated in that event his statement of facts relative to the military of france is important not only from his official and personal authority but because it displays very clearly the actual condition of the army in france and because it throws light on the principles upon which the assembly proceeds in the administration of this critical object it may enable us to form some judgment how far it may be expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of france m de la tour du pin on the fourth of last june comes to give an account of the state of his department as it exists under the auspices of the national assembly no man knows it so well no man can express it better addressing himself to the national assembly he says his majesty has this day sent me to apprise you of the multiplied disorders of which every day he receives the most distressing intelligence the army threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy entire regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws to the king to the order established by your decrees and to the oaths which they have taken with the most awful solemnity compelled by my duty to give you information of these excesses my heart bleeds when i consider who they are that have committed them those against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to this day have been so full of honor and loyalty and with whom for fifty years i have lived the comrade and the friend what incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once led them astray whilst you are indefatigable in establishing uniformity in the empire and molding the whole into one coherent and consistent body whilst the french are taught by you at once the respect which the laws owe to the rights of man and that which the citizens owe to the laws the administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance and confusion i see in more than one corps the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken the most unheard of pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise the ordinances without force the chiefs without authority the military chest and the colors carried off the authority of the king himself proudly defied the officers despised degraded threatened driven away and some of them prisoners in the midst of their corps dragging on a precarious life in the bosom of disgust and humiliation to fill up the measure of all these horrors the commandants of places have had their throats cut under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers these evils are great but they are not the worst consequences which may be produced by such military insurrections sooner or later they may menace the nation itself the nature of things requires that the army should never act but as an instrument the moment that erecting itself into a deliberative body it shall act according to its own resolutions the government be it what it may will immediately degenerate into a military democracy a species of political monster which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it after all this who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the common soldiers and non commissioned officers without the knowledge or even in contempt of the authority of their superiors although the presence and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to such monstrous democratic assemblies it is not necessary to add much to this finished picture finished as far as its canvas admits but as i apprehend not taking in the whole of the nature and complexity of the disorders of this military democracy which the minister at war truly and wisely observes wherever it exists must be the true constitution of the state by whatever formal appellation it may pass for though he informs the assembly that the more considerable part of the army have not cast off their obedience but are still attached to their duty yet those travelers who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best rather observe in them the absence of mutiny than the existence of discipline i cannot help pausing here for a moment to reflect upon the expressions of surprise which this minister has let fall relative to the excesses he relates to him the departure of the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and honor seems quite inconceivable surely those to whom he addresses himself know the causes of it but too well they know the doctrines which they have preached the decrees which they have passed the practices which they have countenanced the soldiers remember the 6th of october they recollect the french guards they have not forgotten the taking of the king s castles in paris and marseilles that the governors in both places were murdered with impunity is a fact that has not passed out of their minds they do not abandon the principles laid down so ostentatiously and laboriously of the equality of men they cannot shut their eyes to the degradation of the whole noblesse of france and the suppression of the very idea of a gentleman the total abolition of titles and distinctions is not lost upon them but m de la tour du pin is astonished at their disloyalty when the doctors of the assembly have taught them at the same time the respect due to laws it is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men with arms in their hands are likely to learn as to the authority of the king we may collect from the minister himself that it is not of more consideration with these troops than it is with everybody else the king says he has over and over again repeated his orders to put a stop to these excesses but in so terrible a crisis your concurrence is become indispensably necessary to prevent the evils which menace the state you unite to the force of the legislative power that of opinion still more important to be sure the army can have no opinion of the power or authority of the king perhaps the soldier has by this time learned that the assembly itself does not enjoy a much greater degree of liberty than that royal figure it is now to be seen what has been proposed in this exigency one of the greatest that can happen in a state the minister requests the assembly to array itself in all its terrors and to call forth all its majesty he desires that the grave and severe principles announced by them may give vigor to the king s proclamation after this we should have looked for courts civil and martial breaking of some corps decimating of others and all the terrible means which necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress of the most terrible of all evils particularly one might expect that a serious inquiry would be made into the murder of commandants in the view of their soldiers not one word of all this or of anything like it after they had been told that the soldiery trampled upon the decrees of the assembly promulgated by the king the assembly pass new decrees and they authorize the king to make new proclamations after the secretary at war had stated that the regiments had paid no regard to oaths pretes avec la plus imposante solemnite they propose what more oaths they renew decrees and proclamations as they experience their insufficiency and they multiply oaths in proportion as they weaken in the minds of men the sanctions of religion i hope that handy abridgments of the excellent sermons of voltaire d alembert diderot and helvetius on the immortality of the soul on a particular superintending providence and on a future state of rewards and punishments are sent down to the soldiers along with their civic oaths of this i have no doubt as i understand that a certain description of reading makes no inconsiderable part of their military exercises and that they are full as well supplied with the ammunition of pamphlets as of cartridges to prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies irregular consultations seditious committees and monstrous democratic assemblies of the soldiers and all the disorders arising from idleness luxury dissipation and insubordination i believe the most astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men even in all the inventions of this prolific age it is no less than this the king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority and encouragement that the several corps should join themselves with the clubs and confederations in the several municipalities and mix with them in their feasts and civic entertainments this jolly discipline it seems is to soften the ferocity of their minds to reconcile them to their bottle companions of other descriptions and to merge particular conspiracies in more general associations that this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers as they are described by m de la tour du pin i can readily believe and that however mutinous otherwise they will dutifully submit themselves to these royal proclamations but i should question whether all this civic swearing clubbing and feasting would dispose them more than at present they are disposed to an obedience to their officers or teach them better to submit to the austere rules of military discipline it will make them admirable citizens after the french mode but not quite so good soldiers after any mode a doubt might well arise whether the conversations at these good tables would fit them a great deal the better for the character of mere instruments which this veteran officer and statesman justly observes the nature of things always requires an army to be concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline by the free conversation of the soldiers with municipal festive societies which is thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction we may judge by the state of the municipalities themselves furnished to us by the war minister in this very speech he conceives good hopes of the success of his endeavors toward restoring order for the present from the good disposition of certain regiments but he finds something cloudy with regard to the future as to preventing the return of confusion for this the administration cannot be answerable to you as long as they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an authority over the troops which your institutions have reserved wholly to the monarch you have fixed the limits of the military authority and the municipal authority you have bounded the action which you have permitted to the latter over the former to the right of requisition but never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons in these municipalities to break the officers to try them to give orders to the soldiers to drive them from the posts committed to their guard to stop them in their marches ordered by the king or in a word to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities or even market towns through which they are to pass such is the character and disposition of the municipal society which is to reclaim the soldiery to bring them back to the true principles of military subordination and to render them machines in the hands of the supreme power of the country such are the distempers of the french troops such is their cure as the army is so is the navy the municipalities supersede the orders of the assembly and the seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the municipalities from my heart i pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public like this war minister obliged in his old age to pledge the assembly in their civic cups and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years wear and tear amongst mankind they seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state and have a certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all subjects upon the credit of which one of their doctors has thought fit with great applause and greater success to caution the assembly not to attend to old men or to any persons who valued themselves upon their experience i suppose all the ministers of state must qualify and take this test wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation every man has his own relish but i think if i could not attain to the wisdom i would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age these gentlemen deal in regeneration but at any price i should hardly yield my rigid fibers to be regenerated by them nor begin in my grand climacteric to squall in their new accents or to stammer in my second cradle the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam et in eorum cunis vagiam valde recusem the imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they call a constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact or that bears any the remotest relation to it you cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown without displaying the debility of the assembly you cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities the military lays open the civil and the civil betrays the military anarchy i wish everybody carefully to peruse the eloquent speech of m de la tour du pin he attributes the salvation of the municipalities to the good behavior of some of the troops these troops are to preserve the well disposed part of those municipalities which is confessed to be the weakest from the pillage of the worst disposed which is the strongest but the municipalities affect a sovereignty and will command those troops which are necessary for their protection indeed they must command them or court them the municipalities by the necessity of their situation and by the republican powers they have obtained must with relation to the military be the masters or the servants or the confederates or each successively or they must make a jumble of all together according to circumstances what government is there to coerce the army but the municipality or the municipality but the army to preserve concord where authority is extinguished at the hazard of all consequences the assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves and they hope to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy by giving it a debauched interest in the municipal if the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs cabals and confederacies an elective attraction will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part with them will be their habits affections and sympathies the military conspiracies which are to be remedied by civic confederacies the rebellious municipalities which are to be rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing the very armies of the state that are to keep them in order all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the confusion from which they have arisen there must be blood the want of common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions of forces and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities will make it flow disorders may be quieted in one time and in one part they will break out in others because the evil is radical and intrinsic all these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken still more and more the military connection of soldiers with their officers as well as add military and mutinous audacity to turbulent artificers and peasants to secure a real army the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier first and last in his attention observance and esteem officers it seems there are to be whose chief qualification must be temper and patience they are to manage their troops by electioneering arts they must bear themselves as candidates not as commanders but as by such means power may be occasionally in their hands the authority by which they are to be nominated becomes of high importance what you may do finally does not appear nor is it of much moment whilst the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all the parts of your republic as well as the puzzled relation of those parts to each other and to the whole remain as they are you seem to have given the provisional nomination of the officers in the first instance to the king with a reserve of approbation by the national assembly men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power they must soon perceive that those who can negative indefinitely in reality appoint the officers must therefore look to their intrigues in that assembly as the sole certain road to promotion still however by your new constitution they must begin their solicitation at court this double negotiation for military rank seems to me a contrivance as well adapted as if it were studied for no other end to promote faction in the assembly itself relative to this vast military patronage and then to poison the corps of officers with factions of a nature still more dangerous to the safety of government upon any bottom on which it can be placed and destructive in the end to the efficiency of the army itself those officers who lose the promotions intended for them by the crown must become of a faction opposite to that of the assembly which has rejected their claims and must nourish discontents in the heart of the army against the ruling powers those officers on the other hand who by carrying their point through an interest in the assembly feel themselves to be at best only second in the good will of the crown though first in that of the assembly must slight an authority which would not advance and could not retard their promotion if to avoid these evils you will have no other rule for command or promotion than seniority you will have an army of formality at the same time it will become more independent and more of a military republic not they but the king is the machine a king is not to be deposed by halves if he is not everything in the command of an army he is nothing what is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head of the army who to that army is no object of gratitude or of fear such a cipher is not fit for the administration of an object of all things the most delicate the supreme command of military men they must be constrained by a real vigorous effective decided personal authority the authority of the assembly itself suffers by passing through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen the army will not long look to an assembly acting through the organ of false show and palpable imposition they will not seriously yield obedience to a prisoner they will either despise a pageant or they will pity a captive king this relation of your army to the crown will if i am not greatly mistaken become a serious dilemma in your politics it is besides to be considered whether an assembly like yours even supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ through which its orders were to pass is fit for promoting the obedience and discipline of an army it is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years the officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men if they see with perfect submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders whose military policy and the genius of whose command must be as uncertain as their duration is transient in the weakness of one kind of authority and in the fluctuation of all the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction until some popular general who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery and who possesses the true spirit of command shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself armies will obey him on his personal account there is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things but the moment in which that event shall happen the person who really commands the army is your master the master of your king the master of your assembly the master of your whole republic how came the assembly by their present power over the army chiefly to be sure by debauching the soldiers from their officers they have begun by a most terrible operation they have touched the central point about which the particles that compose armies are at repose they have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great essential critical link between the officer and the soldier just where the chain of military subordination commences and on which the whole of that system depends the soldier is told he is a citizen and has the rights of man and citizen the right of a man he is told is to be his own governor and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self government it is very natural he should think that he ought most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience he will therefore in all probability systematically do what he does at present occasionally that is he will exercise at least a negative in the choice of his officers at present the officers are known at best to be only permissive and on their good behavior in fact there have been many instances in which they have been cashiered by their corps here is a second negative on the choice of the king a negative as effectual at least as the other of the assembly the soldiers know already that it has been a question not ill received in the national assembly whether they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers or some proportion of them when such matters are in deliberation it is no extravagant supposition that they will incline to the opinion most favorable to their pretensions they will not bear to be deemed the army of an imprisoned king whilst another army in the same country with whom too they are to feast and confederate is to be considered as the free army of a free constitution they will cast their eyes on the other and more permanent army i mean the municipal that corps they well know does actually elect its own officers they may not be able to discern the grounds of distinction on which they are not to elect a marquis de la fayette of their own if this election of a commander in chief be a part of the rights of men why not of theirs they see elective justices of peace elective judges elective curates elective bishops elective municipalities and elective commanders of the parisian army why should they alone be excluded are the brave troops of france the only men in that nation who are not the fit judges of military merit and of the qualifications necessary for a commander in chief are they paid by the state and do they therefore lose the rights of men they are a part of that nation themselves and contribute to that pay and is not the king is not the national assembly and are not all who elect the national assembly likewise paid instead of seeing all these forfeit their rights by their receiving a salary they perceive that in all these cases a salary is given for the exercise of those rights all your resolutions all your proceedings all your debates all the works of your doctors in religion and politics have industriously been put into their hands and you expect that they will apply to their own case just as much of your doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices and as far as in you lay all the instincts which support government therefore the moment any difference arises between your national assembly and any part of the nation you must have recourse to force nothing else is left to you or rather you have left nothing else to yourselves you see by the report of your war minister that the distribution of the army is in a great measure made with a view of internal coercion you must rule by an army and you have infused into that army by which you rule as well as into the whole body of the nation principles which after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make of it the king is to call out troops to act against his people when the world has been told and the assertion is still ringing in our ears that troops ought not to fire on citizens the colonies assert to themselves an independent constitution and a free trade they must be constrained by troops in what chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able to read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their commerce monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others as the colonists rise on you the negroes rise on them troops again massacre torture hanging these are your rights of men these are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted it was but the other day that the farmers of land in one of your provinces refused to pay some sort of rents to the lord of the soil in consequence of this you decree that the country people shall pay all rents and dues except those which as grievances you have abolished and if they refuse then you order the king to march troops against them you lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism the leaders of the present system tell them of their rights as men to take fortresses to murder guards to seize on kings without the least appearance of authority even from the assembly whilst as the sovereign legislative body that assembly was sitting in the name of the nation and yet these leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in these very disorders to coerce those who shall judge on the principles and follow the examples which have been guaranteed by their own approbation the leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feudality as the barbarism of tyranny and they tell them afterwards how much of that barbarous tyranny they are to bear with patience as they are prodigal of light with regard to grievances so the people find them sparing in the extreme with regard to redress they know that not only certain quitrents and personal duties which you have permitted them to redeem are as nothing to those burdens for which you have made no provision at all they know that almost the whole system of landed property in its origin is feudal that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original proprietors made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous instruments and that the most grievous effects of the conquest are the land rents of every kind as without question they are the peasants in all probability are the descendants of these ancient proprietors romans or gauls but if they fail in any degree in the titles which they make on the principles of antiquaries and lawyers they retreat into the citadel of the rights of men there they find that men are equal and the earth the kind and equal mother of all ought not to be monopolized to foster the pride and luxury of any men who by nature are no better than themselves and who if they do not labor for their bread are worse they find that by the laws of nature the occupant and subduer of the soil is the true proprietor that there is no prescription against nature and that the agreements which have been made with the landlords during the time of slavery are only the effect of duress and force and that when the people reentered into the rights of men those agreements were made as void as everything else which had been settled under the prevalence of the old feudal and aristocratic tyranny they will tell you that they see no difference between an idler with a hat and a national cockade and an idler in a cowl or in a rochet if you ground the title to rents on succession and prescription they tell you from the speech of m camus published by the national assembly for their information that things ill begun cannot avail themselves of prescription that the title of these lords was vicious in its origin and that force is at least as bad as fraud as to the title by succession they will tell you that the succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property and not rotten parchments and silly substitutions that the lords have enjoyed their usurpation too long and that if they allow to these lay monks any charitable pension they ought to be thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor who is so generous toward a false claimant to his goods when the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason on which you have set your image and superscription you cry it down as base money and tell them you will pay for the future with french guards and dragoons and hussars you hold up to chastise them the second hand authority of a king who is only the instrument of destroying without any power of protecting either the people or his own person through him it seems you will make yourselves obeyed they answer you have taught us that there are no gentlemen and which of your principles teach us to bow to kings whom we have not elected we know without your teaching that lands were given for the support of feudal dignities feudal titles and feudal offices when you took down the cause as a grievance why should the more grievous effect remain as there are now no hereditary honors and no distinguished families why are we taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist you have sent down our old aristocratic landlords in no other character and with no other title but that of exactors under your authority have you endeavored to make these your rent gatherers respectable to us no you have sent them to us with their arms reversed their shields broken their impresses defaced and so displumed degraded and metamorphosed such unfeathered two legged things that we no longer know them they are strangers to us they do not even go by the names of our ancient lords physically they may be the same men though we are not quite sure of that on your new philosophic doctrines of personal identity in all other respects they are totally changed we do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their honors titles and distinctions this we have never commissioned you to do and it is one instance among many indeed of your assumption of undelegated power we see the burghers of paris through their clubs their mobs and their national guards directing you at their pleasure and giving that as law to you which under your authority is transmitted as law to us through you these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all why should not you attend as much to the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our rent by which we are affected in the most serious manner as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers relative to distinctions and titles of honor by which neither they nor we are affected at all but we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessities is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals before this measure of yours we might have thought we were not perfectly equal we might have entertained some old habitual unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords but we cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to them you could have made the law that degrades them you have forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect and now you send troops to saber and to bayonet us into a submission to fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion the ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all rational ears but to the politicians of metaphysics who have opened schools for sophistry and made establishments for anarchy it is solid and conclusive it is obvious that on a mere consideration of the right the leaders in the assembly would not in the least have scrupled to abrogate the rents along with the title and family ensigns it would be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings and to complete the analogy of their conduct but they had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed property by confiscation they had this commodity at market and the market would have been wholly destroyed if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves the only security which property enjoys in any one of its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity with regard to some other they have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and what subverted neither have they left any principle by which any of their municipalities can be bound to obedience or even conscientiously obliged not to separate from the whole to become independent or to connect itself with some other state the people of lyons it seems have refused lately to pay taxes why should they not what lawful authority is there left to exact them the king imposed some of them the old states methodized by orders settled the more ancient they may say to the assembly who are you that are not our kings nor the states we have elected nor sit on the principles on which we have elected you and who are we that when we see the gabelles which you have ordered to be paid wholly shaken off when we see the act of disobedience afterwards ratified by yourselves who are we that we are not to judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay and are not to avail ourselves of the same powers the validity of which you have approved in others to this the answer is we will send troops the last reason of kings is always the first with your assembly this military aid may serve for a time whilst the impression of the increase of pay remains and the vanity of being umpires in all disputes is flattered but this weapon will snap short unfaithful to the hand that employs it the assembly keep a school where systematically and with unremitting perseverance they teach principles and form regulations destructive to all spirit of subordination civil and military and then they expect that they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by an anarchic army the municipal army which according to the new policy is to balance this national army if considered in itself only is of a constitution much more simple and in every respect less exceptionable it is a mere democratic body unconnected with the crown or the kingdom armed and trained and officered at the pleasure of the districts to which the corps severally belong and the personal service of the individuals who compose or the fine in lieu of personal service are directed by the same authority nothing is more uniform if however considered in any relation to the crown to the national assembly to the public tribunals or to the other army or considered in a view to any coherence or connection between its parts it seems a monster and can hardly fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great national calamity it is a worse preservative of a general constitution than the systasis of crete or the confederation of poland or any other ill devised corrective which has yet been imagined in the necessities produced by an ill constructed system of government having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of the supreme power the executive the judicature the military and on the reciprocal relation of all these establishments i shall say something of the ability shown by your legislators with regard to the revenue in their proceedings relative to this object if possible still fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial resource when the states met it seemed to be the great object to improve the system of revenue to enlarge its collection to cleanse it of oppression and vexation and to establish it on the most solid footing great were the expectations entertained on that head throughout europe it was by this grand arrangement that france was to stand or fall and this became in my opinion very properly the test by which the skill and patriotism of those who ruled in that assembly would be tried the revenue of the state is the state in effect all depends upon it whether for support or for reformation the dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon the quantity and the kind of virtue that may be exerted in it as all great qualities of the mind which operate in public and are not merely suffering and passive require force for their display i had almost said for their unequivocal existence the revenue which is the spring of all power becomes in its administration the sphere of every active virtue public virtue being of a nature magnificent and splendid instituted for great things and conversant about great concerns requires abundant scope and room and cannot spread and grow under confinement and in circumstances straitened narrow and sordid through the revenue alone the body politic can act in its true genius and character and therefore it will display just as much of its collective virtue and as much of that virtue which may characterize those who move it and are as it were its life and guiding principle as it is possessed of a just revenue for from hence not only magnanimity and liberality and beneficence and fortitude and providence and the tutelary protection of all good arts derive their food and the growth of their organs but continence and self denial and labor and vigilance and frugality and whatever else there is in which the mind shows itself above the appetite are nowhere more in their proper element than in the provision and distribution of the public wealth it is therefore not without reason that the science of speculative and practical finance which must take to its aid so many auxiliary branches of knowledge stands high in the estimation not only of the ordinary sort but of the wisest and best men and as this science has grown with the progress of its object the prosperity and improvement of nations has generally increased with the increase of their revenues and they will both continue to grow and flourish as long as the balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals and what is collected for the common efforts of the state bear to each other a due reciprocal proportion and are kept in a close correspondence and communication and perhaps it may be owing to the greatness of revenues and to the urgency of state necessities that old abuses in the constitution of finances are discovered and their true nature and rational theory comes to be more perfectly understood insomuch that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in one period than a far greater is found to be in another the proportionate wealth even remaining the same in this state of things the french assembly found something in their revenues to preserve to secure and wisely to administer as well as to abrogate and alter though their proud assumption might justify the severest tests yet in trying their abilities on their financial proceedings i would only consider what is the plain obvious duty of a common finance minister and try them upon that and not upon models of ideal perfection the objects of a financier are then to secure an ample revenue to impose it with judgment and equality to employ it economically and when necessity obliges him to make use of credit to secure its foundations in that instance and forever by the clearness and candor of his proceedings the exactness of his calculations and the solidity of his funds on these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of those in the national assembly who have taken to themselves the management of this arduous concern far from any increase of revenue in their hands i find by a report of m vernier from the committee of finances of the second of august last that the amount of the national revenue as compared with its produce before the revolution was diminished by the sum of two hundred millions or eight millions sterling of the annual income considerably more than one third of the whole if this be the result of great ability never surely was ability displayed in a more distinguished manner or with so powerful an effect no common folly no vulgar incapacity no ordinary official negligence even no official crime no corruption no peculation hardly any direct hostility which we have seen in the modern world could in so short a time have made so complete an overthrow of the finances and with them of the strength of a great kingdom cedo qui vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito the sophisters and declaimers as soon as the assembly met began with decrying the ancient constitution of the revenue in many of its most essential branches such as the public monopoly of salt they charged it as truly as unwisely with being ill contrived oppressive and partial this representation they were not satisfied to make use of in speeches preliminary to some plan of reform they declared it in a solemn resolution or public sentence as it were judicially passed upon it and this they dispersed throughout the nation at the time they passed the decree with the same gravity they ordered the same absurd oppressive and partial tax to be paid until they could find a revenue to replace it the consequence was inevitable the provinces which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly some of whom were charged with other contributions perhaps equivalent were totally disinclined to bear any part of the burden which by an equal distribution was to redeem the others as to the assembly occupied as it was with the declaration and violation of the rights of men and with their arrangements for general confusion it had neither leisure nor capacity to contrive nor authority to enforce any plan of any kind relative to the replacing the tax or equalizing it or compensating the provinces or for conducting their minds to any scheme of accommodation with other districts which were to be relieved the people of the salt provinces impatient under taxes damned by the authority which had directed their payment very soon found their patience exhausted they thought themselves as skillful in demolishing as the assembly could be they relieved themselves by throwing off the whole burden animated by this example each district or part of a district judging of its own grievance by its own feeling and of its remedy by its own opinion did as it pleased with other taxes we are next to see how they have conducted themselves in contriving equal impositions proportioned to the means of the citizens and the least likely to lean heavy on the active capital employed in the generation of that private wealth from whence the public fortune must be derived by suffering the several districts and several of the individuals in each district to judge of what part of the old revenue they might withhold instead of better principles of equality a new inequality was introduced of the most oppressive kind payments were regulated by dispositions the parts of the kingdom which were the most submissive the most orderly or the most affectionate to the commonwealth bore the whole burden of the state nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government to fill up all the deficiencies in the old impositions and the new deficiencies of every kind which were to be expected what remained to a state without authority the national assembly called for a voluntary benevolence for a fourth part of the income of all the citizens to be estimated on the honor of those who were to pay they obtained something more than could be rationally calculated but what was far indeed from answerable to their real necessities and much less to their fond expectations rational people could have hoped for little from this their tax in the disguise of a benevolence a tax weak ineffective and unequal a tax by which luxury avarice and selfishness were screened and the load thrown upon productive capital upon integrity generosity and public spirit a tax of regulation upon virtue at length the mask is thrown off and they are now trying means of exacting their benevolence by force this benevolence the rickety offspring of weakness was to be supported by another resource the twin brother of the same prolific imbecility the patriotic donations were to make good the failure of the patriotic contribution john doe was to become security for richard roe by this scheme they took things of much price from the giver comparatively of small value to the receiver they ruined several trades they pillaged the crown of its ornaments the churches of their plate and the people of their personal decorations the invention of these juvenile pretenders to liberty was in reality nothing more than a servile imitation of one of the poorest resources of doting despotism they took an old huge full bottomed periwig out of the wardrobe of the antiquated frippery of louis the fourteenth to cover the premature baldness of the national assembly they produced this old fashioned formal folly though it had been so abundantly exposed in the memoirs of the duke de st simon if to reasonable men it had wanted any arguments to display its mischief and insufficiency a device of the same kind was tried in my memory by louis the fifteenth but it answered at no time however the necessities of ruinous wars were some excuse for desperate projects the deliberations of calamity are rarely wise but here was a season for disposition and providence it was in a time of profound peace then enjoyed for five years and promising a much longer continuance that they had recourse to this desperate trifling they were sure to lose more reputation by sporting in their serious situation with these toys and playthings of finance which have filled half their journals than could possibly be compensated by the poor temporary supply which they afforded it seemed as if those who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circumstances or wholly unequal to their necessities whatever virtue may be in these devices it is obvious that neither the patriotic gifts nor the patriotic contribution can ever be resorted to again the resources of public folly are soon exhausted the whole indeed of their scheme of revenue is to make by any artifice an appearance of a full reservoir for the hour whilst at the same time they cut off the springs and living fountains of perennial supply the account not long since furnished by m necker was meant without question to be favorable he gives a flattering view of the means of getting through the year but he expresses as it is natural he should some apprehension for that which was to succeed on this last prognostic instead of entering into the grounds of this apprehension in order by a proper foresight to prevent the prognosticated evil m necker receives a sort of friendly reprimand from the president of the assembly as to their other schemes of taxation it is impossible to say anything of them with certainty because they have not yet had their operation but nobody is so sanguine as to imagine they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide gaping breach which their incapacity had made in their revenues at present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash and swells more and more in fictitious representation when so little within or without is now found but paper the representative not of opulence but of want the creature not of credit but of power they imagine that our flourishing state in england is owing to that bank paper and not the bank paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce to the solidity of our credit and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction they forget that in england not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited and that it is convertible at pleasure in an instant and without the smallest loss into cash again our paper is of value in commerce because in law it is of none it is powerful on change because in westminster hall it is impotent in payment of a debt of twenty shillings a creditor may refuse all the paper of the bank of england nor is there amongst us a single public security of any quality or nature whatsoever that is enforced by authority in fact it might be easily shown that our paper wealth instead of lessening the real coin has a tendency to increase it instead of being a substitute for money it only facilitates its entry its exit and its circulation that it is the symbol of prosperity and not the badge of distress never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation well but a lessening of prodigal expenses and the economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient assembly make amends for the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue in this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a financier have those who say so looked at the expenses of the national assembly itself of the municipalities of the city of paris of the increased pay of the two armies of the new police of the new judicatures have they even carefully compared the present pension list with the former these politicians have been cruel not economical comparing the expense of the former prodigal government and its relation to the then revenues with the expenses of this new system as opposed to the state of its new treasury i believe the present will be found beyond all comparison more chargeable it remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability furnished by the present french managers when they are to raise supplies on credit here i am a little at a stand for credit properly speaking they have none the credit of the ancient government was not indeed the best but they could always on some terms command money not only at home but from most of the countries of europe where a surplus capital was accumulated and the credit of that government was improving daily the establishment of a system of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new strength and so it would actually have done if a system of liberty had been established what offers has their government of pretended liberty had from holland from hamburg from switzerland from genoa from england for a dealing in their paper why should these nations of commerce and economy enter into any pecuniary dealings with a people who attempt to reverse the very nature of things amongst whom they see the debtor prescribing at the point of the bayonet the medium of his solvency to the creditor discharging one of his engagements with another turning his very penury into his resource and paying his interest with his rags their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of church plunder has induced these philosophers to overlook all care of the public estate just as the dream of the philosopher s stone induces dupes under the more plausible delusion of the hermetic art to neglect all rational means of improving their fortunes with these philosophic financiers this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state these gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege is there a debt which presses them issue assignats are compensations to be made or a maintenance decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in their office or expelled from their profession assignats is a fleet to be fitted out assignats if sixteen millions sterling of these assignats forced on the people leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever issue says one thirty millions sterling of assignats says another issue fourscore millions more of assignats the only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance they are all professors of assignats even those whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce not obliterated by philosophy furnish decisive arguments against this delusion conclude their arguments by proposing the emission of assignats i suppose they must talk of assignats as no other language would be understood all experience of their inefficiency does not in the least discourage them are the old assignats depreciated at market what is the remedy issue new assignats mais si maladia opiniatria non vult se garire quid illi facere assignare postea assignare ensuita assignare the word is a trifle altered the latin of your present doctors may be better than that of your old comedy their wisdom and the variety of their resources are the same they have not more notes in their song than the cuckoo though far from the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty their voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of the raven who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state the sole security for the public credit in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of confiscated property if however an excessive zeal for the state should have led a pious and venerable prelate to pillage his own order and for the good of the church and people to take upon himself the place of grand financier of confiscation and comptroller general of sacrilege he and his coadjutors were in my opinion bound to show by their subsequent conduct that they knew something of the office they assumed when they had resolved to appropriate to the fisc a certain portion of the landed property of their conquered country it was their business to render their bank a real fund of credit as far as such a bank was capable of becoming so to establish a current circulating credit upon any land bank under any circumstances whatsoever has hitherto proved difficult at the very least the attempt has commonly ended in bankruptcy but when the assembly were led through a contempt of moral to a defiance of economical principles it might at least have been expected that nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this difficulty to prevent any aggravation of this bankruptcy it might be expected that to render your land bank tolerable every means would be adopted that could display openness and candor in the statement of the security everything which could aid the recovery of the demand to take things in their most favorable point of view your condition was that of a man of a large landed estate which he wished to dispose of for the discharge of a debt and the supply of certain services not being able instantly to sell you wished to mortgage what would a man of fair intentions and a commonly clear understanding do in such circumstances ought he not first to ascertain the gross value of the estate the charges of its management and disposition the encumbrances perpetual and temporary of all kinds that affect it then striking a net surplus to calculate the just value of the security when that surplus had been clearly ascertained and properly vested in the hands of trustees then he would indicate the parcels to be sold and the time and conditions of sale after this he would admit the public creditor if he chose it to subscribe his stock into this new fund or he might receive proposals for an assignat from those who would advance money to purchase this species of security this would be to proceed like men of business methodically and rationally and on the only principles of public and private credit that have an existence the dealer would then know exactly what he purchased and the only doubt which could hang upon his mind would be the dread of the resumption of the spoil which one day might be made from the sacrilegious gripe of those execrable wretches who could become purchasers at the auction of their innocent fellow citizens an open and exact statement of the clear value of the property and of the time the circumstances and the place of sale were all necessary to efface as much as possible the stigma that has hitherto been branded on every kind of land bank it became necessary on another principle that is on account of a pledge of faith previously given on that subject that their future fidelity in a slippery concern might be established by their adherence to their first engagement when they had finally determined on a state resource from church booty they came on the 14th of april 1790 to a solemn resolution on the subject and pledged themselves to their country that in the statement of the public charges for each year there should be brought to account a sum sufficient for defraying the expenses of the r c a religion the support of the ministers at the altars the relief of the poor the pensions to the ecclesiastics secular as well as regular of the one and of the other sex in order that the estates and goods which are at the disposal of the nation may be disengaged of all charges and employed by the representatives or the legislative body to the great and most pressing exigencies of the state they further engaged on the same day that the sum necessary for the year 1791 should be forthwith determined in this resolution they admit it their duty to show distinctly the expense of the above objects which by other resolutions they had before engaged should be first in the order of provision they admit that they ought to show the estate clear and disengaged of all charges and that they should show it immediately have they done this immediately or at any time have they ever furnished a rent roll of the immovable estates or given in an inventory of the movable effects which they confiscate to their assignats in what manner they can fulfill their engagements of holding out to public service an estate disengaged of all charges without authenticating the value of the estate or the quantum of the charges i leave it to their english admirers to explain instantly upon this assurance and previously to any one step toward making it good they issue on the credit of so handsome a declaration sixteen millions sterling of their paper this was manly who after this masterly stroke can doubt of their abilities in finance but then before any other emission of these financial indulgences they took care at least to make good their original promise if such estimate either of the value of the estate or the amount of the encumbrances has been made it has escaped me i never heard of it at length they have spoken out and they have made a full discovery of their abominable fraud in holding out the church lands as a security for any debts or any service whatsoever they rob only to enable them to cheat but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud by making out accounts for other purposes which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception i am obliged to m de calonne for his reference to the document which proves this extraordinary fact it had by some means escaped me indeed it was not necessary to make out my assertion as to the breach of faith on the declaration of the 14th of april 1790 by a report of their committee it now appears that the charge of keeping up the reduced ecclesiastical establishments and other expenses attendant on religion and maintaining the religious of both sexes retained or pensioned and the other concomitant expenses of the same nature which they have brought upon themselves by this convulsion in property exceeds the income of the estates acquired by it in the enormous sum of two millions sterling annually besides a debt of seven millions and upwards these are the calculating powers of imposture this is the finance of philosophy this is the result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable people in rebellion murder and sacrilege and to make them prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country never did a state in any case enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens this new experiment has succeeded like all the rest every honest mind every true lover of liberty and humanity must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy nor rapine the high road to riches i subjoin with pleasure in a note the able and spirited observations of m de calonne on this subject in order to persuade the world of the bottomless resource of ecclesiastical confiscation the assembly have proceeded to other confiscations of estates in offices which could not be done with any common color without being compensated out of this grand confiscation of landed property they have thrown upon this fund which was to show a surplus disengaged of all charges a new charge namely the compensation to the whole body of the disbanded judicature and of all suppressed offices and estates a charge which i cannot ascertain but which unquestionably amounts to many french millions another of the new charges is an annuity of four hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling to be paid by daily payments for the interest of the first assignats have they even given themselves the trouble to state fairly the expense of the management of the church lands in the hands of the municipalities to whose care skill and diligence and that of their legion of unknown underagents they have chosen to commit the charge of the forfeited estates the consequence of which had been so ably pointed out by the bishop of nancy but it is unnecessary to dwell on these obvious heads of encumbrance have they made out any clear state of the grand encumbrance of all i mean the whole of the general and municipal establishments of all sorts and compared it with the regular income by revenue every deficiency in these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate before the creditor can plant his cabbages on an acre of church property there is no other prop than this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the ground in this situation they have purposely covered all that they ought industriously to have cleared with a thick fog and then blindfold themselves like bulls that shut their eyes when they push they drive by the point of the bayonets their slaves blindfolded indeed no worse than their lords to take their fictions for currencies and to swallow down paper pills by thirty four millions sterling at a dose then they proudly lay in their claim to a future credit on failure of all their past engagements and at a time when it is clear that the surplus estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages i mean that of the four hundred millions of assignats in all this procedure i can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud the objections within the assembly to pulling up the floodgates for this inundation of fraud are unanswered but they are thoroughly refuted by a hundred thousand financiers in the street these are the numbers by which the metaphysic arithmeticians compute these are the grand calculations on which a philosophical public credit is founded in france they cannot raise supplies but they can raise mobs let them rejoice in the applauses of the club at dundee for their wisdom and patriotism in having thus applied the plunder of the citizens to the service of the state i hear of no address upon this subject from the directors of the bank of england though their approbation would be of a little more weight in the scale of credit than that of the club at dundee but to do justice to the club i believe the gentlemen who compose it to be wiser than they appear that they will be less liberal of their money than of their addresses and that they would not give a dog s ear of their most rumpled and ragged scotch paper for twenty of your fairest assignats early in this year the assembly issued paper to the amount of sixteen millions sterling what must have been the state into which the assembly has brought your affairs that the relief afforded by so vast a supply has been hardly perceptible this paper also felt an almost immediate depreciation of five per cent which in a little time came to about seven the effect of these assignats on the receipt of the revenue is remarkable m necker found that the collectors of the revenue who received in coin paid the treasury in assignats the collectors made seven per cent by thus receiving in money and accounting in depreciated paper it was not very difficult to foresee that this must be inevitable it was however not the less embarrassing m necker was obliged to buy gold and silver for the mint which amounted to about twelve thousand pounds above the value of the commodity gained that minister was of opinion that whatever their secret nutritive virtue might be the state could not live upon assignats alone that some real silver was necessary particularly for the satisfaction of those who having iron in their hands were not likely to distinguish themselves for patience when they should perceive that whilst an increase of pay was held out to them in real money it was again to be fraudulently drawn back by depreciated paper the minister in this very natural distress applied to the assembly that they should order the collectors to pay in specie what in specie they had received it could not escape him that if the treasury paid three per cent for the use of a currency which should be returned seven per cent worse than the minister issued it such a dealing could not very greatly tend to enrich the public the assembly took no notice of this recommendation they were in this dilemma if they continued to receive the assignats cash must become an alien to their treasury if the treasury should refuse those paper amulets or should discountenance them in any degree they must destroy the credit of their sole resource they seem then to have made their option and to have given some sort of credit to their paper by taking it themselves at the same time in their speeches they made a sort of swaggering declaration something i rather think above legislative competence that is that there is no difference in value between metallic money and their assignats this was a good stout proof article of faith pronounced under an anathema by the venerable fathers of this philosophic synod credat who will certainly not judaeus apella a noble indignation rises in the minds of your popular leaders on hearing the magic lantern in their show of finance compared to the fraudulent exhibitions of mr law they cannot bear to hear the sands of his mississippi compared with the rock of the church on which they build their system pray let them suppress this glorious spirit until they show to the world what piece of solid ground there is for their assignats which they have not preoccupied by other charges they do injustice to that great mother fraud to compare it with their degenerate imitation it is not true that law built solely on a speculation concerning the mississippi he added the east india trade he added the african trade he added the farms of all the farmed revenue of france all these together unquestionably could not support the structure which the public enthusiasm not he chose to build upon these bases but these were however in comparison generous delusions they supposed and they aimed at an increase of the commerce of france they opened to it the whole range of the two hemispheres they did not think of feeding france from its own substance a grand imagination found in this night of commerce something to captivate it was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle it was not made to entice the smell of a mole nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth as yours is men were not then quite shrunk from their natural dimensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy and fitted for low and vulgar deceptions above all remember that in imposing on the imagination the then managers of the system made a compliment to the freedom of men in their fraud there was no mixture of force this was reserved to our time to quench the little glimmerings of reason which might break in upon the solid darkness of this enlightened age on recollection i have said nothing of a scheme of finance which may be urged in favor of the abilities of these gentlemen and which has been introduced with great pomp though not yet finally adopted in the national assembly it comes with something solid in aid of the credit of the paper circulation and much has been said of its utility and its elegance i mean the project for coining into money the bells of the suppressed churches this is their alchemy there are some follies which baffle argument which go beyond ridicule and which excite no feeling in us but disgust and therefore i say no more upon it it is as little worth remarking any further upon all their drawing and re drawing on their circulation for putting off the evil day on the play between the treasury and the caisse d escompte and on all these old exploded contrivances of mercantile fraud now exalted into policy of state the revenue will not be trifled with the prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment for a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder here then the metaphysicians descend from their airy speculations and faithfully follow examples what examples the examples of bankrupts but defeated baffled disgraced when their breath their strength their inventions their fancies desert them their confidence still maintains its ground in the manifest failure of their abilities they take credit for their benevolence when the revenue disappears in their hands they have the presumption in some of their late proceedings to value themselves on the relief given to the people they did not relieve the people if they entertained such intentions why did they order the obnoxious taxes to be paid the people relieved themselves in spite of the assembly but waiving all discussion on the parties who may claim the merit of this fallacious relief has there been in effect any relief to the people in any form mr bailly one of the grand agents of paper circulation lets you into the nature of this relief his speech to the national assembly contained a high and labored panegyric on the inhabitants of paris for the constancy and unbroken resolution with which they have borne their distress and misery a fine picture of public felicity what great courage and unconquerable firmness of mind to endure benefits and sustain redress one would think from the speech of this learned lord mayor that the parisians for this twelvemonth past had been suffering the straits of some dreadful blockade that henry the fourth had been stopping up the avenues to their supply and sully thundering with his ordnance at the gates of paris when in reality they are besieged by no other enemies than their own madness and folly their own credulity and perverseness but mr bailly will sooner thaw the eternal ice of his atlantic regions than restore the central heat to paris whilst it remains smitten with the cold dry petrific mace of a false and unfeeling philosophy some time after this speech that is on the thirteenth of last august the same magistrate giving an account of his government at the bar of the same assembly expresses himself as follows in the month of july 1789 the finances of the city of paris were yet in good order the expenditure was counterbalanced by the receipt and she had at that time a million in bank the expenses which she has been constrained to incur subsequent to the revolution amount to 2 500 000 livres from these expenses and the great falling off in the product of the free gifts not only a momentary but a total want of money has taken place this is the paris upon whose nourishment in the course of the last year such immense sums drawn from the vitals of all france have been expended as long as paris stands in the place of ancient rome so long she will be maintained by the subject provinces it is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics as it happened in rome it may survive that republican domination which gave rise to it in that case despotism itself must submit to the vices of popularity rome under her emperors united the evils of both systems and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her ruin to tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition statesmen before they valued themselves on the relief given to the people by the destruction of their revenue ought first to have carefully attended to the solution of this problem whether it be more advantageous to the people to pay considerably and to gain in proportion or to gain little or nothing and to be disburdened of all contribution my mind is made up to decide in favor of the first proposition experience is with me and i believe the best opinions also to keep a balance between the power of acquisition on the part of the subject and the demands he is to answer on the part of the state is the fundamental part of the skill of a true politician the means of acquisition are prior in time and in arrangement good order is the foundation of all good things to be enabled to acquire the people without being servile must be tractable and obedient the magistrate must have his reverence the laws their authority the body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds they must respect that property of which they cannot partake they must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained and when they find as they commonly do the success disproportioned to the endeavour they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice of this consolation whoever deprives them deadens their industry and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation he that does this is the cruel oppressor the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched at the same time that by his wicked speculations he exposes the fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of fortune to the plunder of the negligent the disappointed and the unprosperous too many of the financiers by profession are apt to see nothing in revenue but banks and circulations and annuities on lives and tontines and perpetual rents and all the small wares of the shop in a settled order of the state these things are not to be slighted nor is the skill in them to be held of trivial estimation they are good but then only good when they assume the effects of that settled order and are built upon it but when men think that these beggarly contrivances may supply a resource for the evils which result from breaking up the foundations of public order and from causing or suffering the principles of property to be subverted they will in the ruin of their country leave a melancholy and lasting monument of the effect of preposterous politics and presumptuous short sighted narrow minded wisdom the effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the all atoning name of liberty in some people i see great liberty indeed in many if not in the most an oppressive degrading servitude but what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue it is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly vice and madness without tuition or restraint those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads on account of their having high sounding words in their mouths grand swelling sentiments of liberty i am sure i do not despise they warm the heart they enlarge and liberalize our minds they animate our courage in a time of conflict old as i am i read the fine raptures of lucan and corneille with pleasure neither do i wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity they facilitate the carrying of many points of moment they keep the people together they refresh the mind in its exertions and they diffuse occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces and to join compliance with reason but in such an undertaking as that in france all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices are of little avail to make a government requires no great prudence settle the seat of power teach obedience and the work is done to give freedom is still more easy it is not necessary to guide it only requires to let go the rein but to form a free government that is to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work requires much thought deep reflection a sagacious powerful and combining mind this i do not find in those who take the lead in the national assembly perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear i rather believe it it would put them below the common level of human understanding but when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity their talents in the construction of the state will be of no service they will become flatterers instead of legislators the instruments not the guides of the people if any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited and defined with proper qualifications he will be immediately outbid by his competitors who will produce something more splendidly popular suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards and compromise as the prudence of traitors until in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed but am i so unreasonable as to see nothing at all that deserves commendation in the indefatigable labors of this assembly i do not deny that among an infinite number of acts of violence and folly some good may have been done they who destroy everything certainly will remove some grievance they who make everything new have a chance that they may establish something beneficial to give them credit for what they have done in virtue of the authority they have usurped or which can excuse them in the crimes by which that authority has been acquired it must appear that the same things could not have been accomplished without producing such a revolution most assuredly they might because almost every one of the regulations made by them which is not very equivocal was either in the cession of the king voluntarily made at the meeting of the states or in the concurrent instructions to the orders some usages have been abolished on just grounds but they were such that if they had stood as they were to all eternity they would little detract from the happiness and prosperity of any state the improvements of the national assembly are superficial their errors fundamental whatever they are i wish my countrymen rather to recommend to our neighbors the example of the british constitution than to take models from them for the improvement of our own in the former they have got an invaluable treasure they are not i think without some causes of apprehension and complaint but these they do not owe to their constitution but to their own conduct i think our happy situation owing to our constitution but owing to the whole of it and not to any part singly owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations as well as to what we have altered or superadded our people will find employment enough for a truly patriotic free and independent spirit in guarding what they possess from violation i would not exclude alteration neither but even when i changed it should be to preserve i should be led to my remedy by a great grievance in what i did i should follow the example of our ancestors i would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building a politic caution a guarded circumspection a moral rather than a complexional timidity were among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct not being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of france tell us they have got so abundant a share they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind he that had made them thus fallible rewarded them for having in their conduct attended to their nature let us imitate their caution if we wish to deserve their fortune or to retain their bequests let us add if we please but let us preserve what they have left and standing on the firm ground of the british constitution let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aeronauts of france i have told you candidly my sentiments i think they are not likely to alter yours i do not know that they ought you are young you cannot guide but must follow the fortune of your country but hereafter they may be of some use to you in some future form which your commonwealth may take in the present it can hardly remain but before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass as one of our poets says through great varieties of untried being and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood i have little to recommend my opinions but long observation and much impartiality they come from one who has been no tool of power no flatterer of greatness and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life they come from one almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others from one in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny and who snatches from his share in the endeavors which are used by good men to discredit opulent oppression the hours he has employed on your affairs and who in so doing persuades himself he has not departed from his usual office they come from one who desires honors distinctions and emoluments but little and who expects them not at all who has no contempt for fame and no fear of obloquy who shuns contention though he will hazard an opinion from one who wishes to preserve consistency but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end and when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise footnote psalm cxlix discourse on the love of our country nov 4 1789 by dr richard price 3d ed pp 17 18 those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public authority ought if they can find no worship out of the church which they approve to set up a separate worship for themselves and by doing this and giving an example of a rational and manly worship men of weight from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world p 18 dr price s sermon discourse on the love of our country by dr price p 34 1st mary sess 3 ch 1 that king james the second having endeavored to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people and by the advice of jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom hath abdicated the government and the throne is thereby vacant pp 22 24 see blackstone s magna charta printed at oxford 1759 w and m ecclesiasticus chap xxxviii verses 24 25 the wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure and he that hath little business shall become wise how can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough and that glorieth in the goad that driveth oxen and is occupied in their labors and whose talk is of bullocks ver 27 so every carpenter and work master that laboureth night and day etc ver 33 they shall not be sought for in public counsel nor sit high in the congregation they shall not sit on the judge s seat nor understand the sentence of judgment they cannot declare justice and judgment and they shall not be found where parables are spoken ver 34 but they will maintain the state of the world discourse on the love of our country 3d ed p 39 another of these reverend gentlemen who was witness to some of the spectacles which aris has lately exhibited expresses himself thus a king dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects is one of those appearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of human affairs and which during the remainder of my life i shall think of with wonder and gratification these gentlemen agree marvelously in their feelings state trials vol ii pp 360 363 6th of october 1789 tous les eveques a la lanterne it is proper here to refer to a letter written upon this subject by an eye witness that eye witness was one of the most honest intelligent and eloquent members of the national assembly one of the most active and zealous reformers of the state he was obliged to secede from the assembly and he afterwards became a voluntary exile on account of the horrors of this pious triumph and the dispositions of men who profiting of crimes if not causing them have taken the lead in public affairs n b mr mounier was then speaker of the national assembly he has since been obliged to live in exile though one of the firmest assertors of liberty see the fate of bailly and condorcet supposed to be here particularly alluded to compare the circumstances of the trial and execution of the former with this prediction the english are i conceive misrepresented in a letter published in one of the papers by a gentleman thought to be a dissenting minister when writing to dr price of the spirit which prevails at paris he says the spirit of the people in this place has abolished all the proud distinctions which the king and nobles had usurped in their minds whether they talk of the king the noble or the priest their whole language is that of the most enlightened and liberal among st the english if this gentleman means to confine the terms enlightened and liberal to one set of men in england it may be true it is not generally so sit igitur hoc ab initio persuasum civibus dominos esse omnium rerum ac moderatores deos eaque quae gerantur eorum geri vi ditione ac numine eosdemque optime de genere hominum mereri et qualis quisque sit quid agat quid in se admittat qua mente qua pietate colat religiones intueri piorum et impiorum habere rationem his enim rebus imbutae mentes haud sane abhorrebunt ab utili et a vera sententia cic de legibus 1 2 quicquid multis peccatur inultum this and some other parts here and there were inserted on his reading the manuscript by my lost son i do not choose to shock the feeling of the moral reader with any quotation of their vulgar base and profane language their connection with turgot and almost all the people of the finance all have been confiscated in their turn not his brother nor any near relation but this mistake does not affect the argument the rest of the passage is this who having spent the treasures of his crown condemns their luxury to feed his own and yet this act to varnish over the shame of sacrilege must bear devotion s name no crime so bold but would be understood a real or at least a seeming good who fears not to do ill yet fears the name and free from conscience is a slave to fame thus he the church at once protects and spoils but princes swords are sharper than their styles and thus to the ages past he makes amends their charity destroys their faith defends then did religion in a lazy cell in empty aery contemplation dwell and like the block unmoved lay but ours as much too active like the stork devours is there no temperate region can be known betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone could we not wake from that lethargic dream but to be restless in a worse extreme and for that lethargy was there no cure but to be cast into a calenture can knowledge have no bound but must advance so far to make us wish for ignorance and rather in the dark to grope our way than led by a false guide to err by day who sees these dismal heaps but would demand what barbarous invader sacked the land but when he hears no goth no turk did bring this desolation but a christian king when nothing but the name of zeal appears twixt our best actions and the worst of theirs what does he think our sacrilege would spare when such the effects of our devotion are cooper s hill by sir john denham rapport de mons le directeur general des finances fait par ordre du roi a versailles mai 5 1789 in the constitution of scotland during the stuart reigns a committee sat for preparing bills and none could pass but those previously approved by them the committee was called lords of articles when i wrote this i quoted from memory after many years had elapsed from my reading the passage a learned friend has found it and it is as follows to ethos to auto kai ampho despotika ton beltionon kai ta psephismata osper ekei ta epitagmata kai o demagogos kai o kolax oi autoi kai analogoi kai malista ekateroi par ekaterois ischuousin oi men kolakes para turannois oi de demagogoi para tois demois tois toioutois the ethical character is the same both exercise despotism over the better class of citizens and decrees are in the one what ordinances and arrets are in the other the demagogue too and the court favorite are not unfrequently the same identical men and always bear a close analogy and these have the principal power each in their respective forms of government favorites with the absolute monarch and demagogues with a people such as i have described arist politic lib iv cap 4 de l administration des finances de la france par mons necker vol i p 288 de l administration des finances de la france par m necker ibid vol iii chap 8 and chap 9 the world is obliged to m de calonne for the pains he has taken to refute the scandalous exaggerations relative to some of the royal expenses and to detect the fallacious account given of pensions for the wicked purpose of provoking the populace to all sorts of crimes see gulliver s travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers m de calonne states the falling off of the population of paris as far more considerable and it may be so since the period of m necker s calculation travaux de charite pour subvenir au livres s d manque de travail a paris et dans les provinces 3 866 920 161 121 13 4 destruction de vagabondage et de la mendicite 1 671 417 69 642 7 6 primes pour l importation de grains 5 671 907 236 329 9 2 depenses relatives aux subsistances deduction fait des recouvrements qui ont eu lieu 39 871 790 1 661 324 11 8 total 51 082 034 2 128 418 1 8 this is on the supposition of the truth of the story but he was not in france at the time one name serves as well as another domat speech of mr camus published by order of the national assembly whether the following description is strictly true i know not but it is what the publishers would have pass for true in order to animate others in a letter from toul given in one of their papers is the following passage concerning the people of that district dans la revolution actuelle ils ont resiste a toutes les seductions du bigotisme aux persecutions et aux tracasseries des ennemis de la revolution oubliant leurs plus grands interets pour rendre hommage aux vues d ordre general qui ont determine l assemblee nationale ils voient sans se plaindre supprimer cette foule detablissemens ecclesiastiques par lesquels ils subsistoient et meme en perdant leur siege episcopal la seule de toutes ces ressources qui pouvoit ou plutot qui devoit en toute equite leur etre conservee condamnes a la plus effrayante misere sans avoir ete ni pu etre entendus ils ne murmurent point ils restent fideles aux principes du plus pur patriotisme ils sont encore prets a verser leur sang pour le maintien de la constitution qui va reduire leur ville a la plus deplorable nullite these people are not supposed to have endured those sufferings and injustices in a struggle for liberty for the same account states truly that they had been always free their patience in beggary and ruin and their suffering without remonstrance the most flagrant and confessed injustice if strictly true can be nothing but the effect of this dire fanaticism a great multitude all over france is in the same condition and the same temper see the proceedings of the confederation at nantz si plures sunt ii quibus improbe datum est quam illi quibus injuste ademptum est idcirco plus etiam valent non enim numero haec judicantur sed pondere quam autem habet aequitatem ut agrum multis annis aut etiam saeculis ante possessum qui nullum habuit habeat qui autem habuit amittat ac propter hoc injuriae genus lacedaemonii lysandrum ephorum expulerunt agin regem necaverunt exque eo tempore tantae discordiae secutae sunt ut et tyranni existerint et optimates exterminarentur et preclarissime constituta respublica dilaberetur nec vero solum ipsa cecidit sed etiam reliquam graeciam evertit contagionibus malorum quae a lacedaemoniis profectae manarunt latius after speaking of the conduct of the model of true patriots aratus of sicyon which was in a very different spirit he says sic par est agere cum civibus non ut bis jam vidimus hastam in foro ponere et bona civium voci subjicere praeconis at ille graecus omnibus consulendum esse putavit eaque est summa ratio et sapientia boni civis commoda civium non divellere sed omnes eadem aequitate continere cic off 1 2 see two books entitled einige originalschriften des illuminatenordens system und folgen des illuminatenordens munchen 1787 a leading member of the assembly m rabaud de st etienne has expressed the principle of all their proceedings as clearly as possible nothing can be more simple tous les etablissemens en france couronnent le malheur du peuple pour le rendre heureux il faut le renouveler changer ses idees changer ses loix changer ses moeurs changer les hommes changer les choses changer les mots tout detruire oui tout detruire puisque tout est a recreer this gentleman was chosen president in an assembly not sitting at the quinze vingt or the petits maisons and composed of persons giving themselves out to be rational beings but neither his ideas language or conduct differ in the smallest degree from the discourses opinions and actions of those within and without the assembly who direct the operations of the machine now at work in france the assembly in executing the plan of their committee made some alterations they have struck out one stage in these gradations this removes a part of the objection but the main objection namely that in their scheme the first constituent voter has no connection with the representative legislator remains in all its force there are other alterations some possibly for the better some certainly for the worse but to the author the merit or demerit of these smaller alterations appears to be of no moment where the scheme itself is fundamentally vicious and absurd non ut olim universae legiones deducebantur cum tribunis et centurionibus et sui cujusque ordinis militibus ut consensu et caritate rempublicam afficerent sed ignoti inter se diversis manipulis sine rectore sine affectibus mutuis quasi ex alio genere mortalium repente in unum collecti numerus magis quam colonia tac annal 1 14 sect 27 all this will be still more applicable to the unconnected rotatory biennial national assemblies in this absurd and senseless constitution qualitas relatio actio passio ubi quando situs habitus see l etat de la france p 363 in reality three to reckon the provincial republican establishments for further elucidations upon the subject of all these judicature s and of the committee of research see m de calonne s work comme sa majeste y a reconnu non une systeme d associations particulieres mais une reunion de volontes de tous les francois pour la liberte et la prosperite communes ainsi pour la maintien de l ordre publique il a pense qu il convenoit que chaque regiment prit part a ces fetes civiques pour multiplier les rapports et reserrer les liens d union entre les citoyens et les troupes lest should not be credited i insert the words authorizing the troops to feast with the popular confederacies this war minister has since quitted the school and resigned his office courier francois 30th july 1790 assemblee nationale numero 210 i see by m necker s account that the national guards of paris have received over and above the money levied within their own city about 145 000 sterling out of the public treasures whether this be an actual payment for the nine months of their existence or an estimate of their yearly charge i do not clearly perceive it is of no great importance as certainly they may take whatever they please the reader will observe that i have but lightly touched on the condition of the french finances as connected with the demands upon them if i had intended to do otherwise the materials in my hands for such a task are not altogether perfect on this subject i refer the reader to m de calonne s work and the tremendous display that he has made of the havoc and devastation in the public estate and in all the affairs of france caused by the presumptuous good intentions of ignorance and incapacity such effects those causes will always produce looking over that account with a pretty strict eye and with perhaps too much rigor deducting everything which may be placed to the account of a financier out of place who might be supposed by his enemies desirous of making the most of his cause i believe it will be found that a more salutary lesson of caution against the daring spirit of innovators than what has been supplied at the expense of france never was at any time furnished to mankind la bruyere of bossuet ce n est point a l assemblee entiere que je m adresse ici je ne parle qu a ceux qui l egarent en lui cachant sous des gazes seduisantes le but ou ils l entrainent c est a eux que je dis votre objet vous n en disconviendrez pas c est d oter tout espoir au clerge de consommer sa ruine c est la en ne vous soupconnant d aucune combinaison de cupidite d aucun regard sur le jeu des effets publics c est la ce qu on doit croire que vous avez en vue dans la terrible operation que vous proposez c est ce qui doit en etre le fruit mais le peuple que vous y interessez quel avantage peut il y trouver en vous servant sans cesse de lui que faites vous pour lui rien absolument rien au contraire vous faites ce qui ne conduit qu a l accabler de nouvelles charges vous avez rejete a son prejudice une offre de 400 millions dont l acceptation pouvoit devenir un moyen de soulagement en sa faveur a cette ressource aussi profitable que legitime vous avez substitue une injustice ruineuse qui de votre propre aveu charge le tresor public par consequent le peuple d un surcroit de depense annuelle de 50 millions au moins d un remboursement de 150 millions malheureux peuple voila ce que vous vaut en dernier resultat l expropriation de l eglise la durete des decrets taxateurs du traitement des ministres d une religion bienfaisante deformais ils seront a votre charge leurs charites soulageoient les pauvres vous allez etre imposes pour subvenir a leur entretien de l etat de la france p 81 see also p 92 and the following pages 