tices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if he were communicating fome privilege, or laying open fome fecluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that ufually 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 difgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has fanctified the dark fufpicious. maxims of tyrannous diftruft; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delufive plausibilities, of moral politicians. Sovereigns will confider thofe who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as fubverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim, at their deftruction, by leading their eafy good-nature, under fpecious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithlefs men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) 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 excefs 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 fhould bear their part in the ruin which their counfel has brought on their fovereign and their country. Such fanguine declarations tend to Jull authority afleep; to encourage it rafhly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy;

to neglect those provifions, preparations, and precautions, which diftinguish benevolence from imbecillity; and without which no man can answer for the falutary effect of any abftract plan of government or of freedom. For want of thefe, they have feen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poifon. They have feen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and infult, than ever any people has been known to rife against the most illegal ufurper, or the most fanguinary tyrant. Their refiftance was made to conceffion; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The reft is in order. They have found their punishment in their fuccefs. Laws overturned; tribunals fubverted industry without vigour; commerce expiring s the revenue unpaid, yet the people impove rished; a church pillaged, and a ftate not re lieved; civil and military anarchy made the conftitution of the kingdom; every thing human and divine facrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the confequence; and to crown all, the paper fecurities of new, precarious, tottering power, the difcredited paper fecurities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the fupport of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized fpecies that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared

and

and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whofe creatures and representatives they are, was fyftematically fubverted.

Were all these dreadful things neceffary? were they the inevitable refults of the desperate ftruggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the quiet fhore of a tranquil and profperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which fhock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devaftation of civil war; they are the fad but inftructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the difplay of inconfiderate and prefumptuous, because unrefifted and irresistible authority. The perfons who have thus fquandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the perfons who have made this prodigal and wild wafte of public evils (the laft ftake referved for the ultimate ransom of the state) have met in their progress with little, or rather with no oppofition at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal proceffion than the progrefs of a Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid every thing level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they fhed in the cause of the country they have ruined. They have made no facrifices to their projects of greater confequence than their fhoebuckles, whilft they were imprisoning their king," murdering

war.

murdering their fellow citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and diftrefs, thoufands of worthy men and worthy families. Theircruelty has not even been the base refult of fear. It has been the effect of their fenfe of perfect fafety, in authorizing treafons, robberies, rapes, affaffinations, flaughters, and burnings throughout their harraffed land. But the caufe of all was plain from the beginning.

This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly unaccountable, if we did not confider the compofition of the National Affembly; I do not mean its formal conftitution, which, as it now ftands, is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which in a great meafure it is compofed, which is of ten thousand times greater confequence than all the formalities in the world. If we were to know nothing of this Affembly but by its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination any thing more venerable. In that light the mind of an enquirer, fubdued by fuch an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a focus, would paufe and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst afpect. Inftead of blameable, they would appear only myfterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial inftitution whatfoever, can make the men of whom any fyftem of authority is compofed, any other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them. Capacities

beyond

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 fuch powers.

After I had read over the lift of the perfons and defcriptions elected into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did' could appear aftonishing. Among them, indeed, I faw fome of known rank; fome of fhining talents; but of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The beft were only men of theory. But whatever the diftinguifhed few may have been, it is the fubftance and mafs of the body which conftitutes its character, and must finally determine its direction. In all bodies, thofe who will lead, must also, in a confiderable degree, follow. They must conform their propofitions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an Affembly. is viciously or feebly compofed in a very great part of it, nothing but fuch a fupreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talents diffeminated through it from becoming only the expert inftruments of abfurd projects! If what is the more likely event, instead of that unufual degree of virtue, they fhould be actuated by finifter ambition and a luft of meretricious glory, then the feeble part of the Affembly,