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REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE..............................................................................1

by Edmund Burke....................................................................................................................................1

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 some time 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

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 favorable to a commodious division and distribution

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

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 (as it is said some liquors

are meliorated by crossing the sea) 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 splendor 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

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

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 apostolical 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

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 strategem adopted for the sake of giving, under a

highsounding 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

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 (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) 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

(for she then had 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 welldistributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order,

with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) 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

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 tranquility 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 neighbor's 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

On the forenoon of the fourth of November last, Doctor Richard Price, a nonconforming 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

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

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 twoedged 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

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 wellassorted warehouses of the dissenting congregations, Dr. Price advises them

to improve upon nonconformity and to set up, each of them, a separate meeting house upon his own

particular principles.*(2) 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 MessJohns in robes and coronets should keep some sort

of bounds in the democratic and leveling 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 favorable to the cause of compulsory freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally

conducive to the national tranquility. These few restrictions I hope are no great stretches of intolerance, no

* Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr. Richard Price, 3d ed., pp. 17, 18.

*(2) "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.

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 innoxious 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 (except one) this archpontiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude and with more than the

boldness of the papal deposing power in its meridian fervor 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 behooves 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

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 (their principle that a popular choice is necessary to

the legal existence of the sovereign magistracy) 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 compono 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

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 neighboring 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 (as they are performed), 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

Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining away the gross error of fact, which supposes that his

Majesty (though he holds it in concurrence with the wishes) 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

(3) to frame a government for ourselves. This new and hitherto unheardof 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

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,

This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2, ch. 2) 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 (the Protestant

line drawn from James the First), 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

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 favorable 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 favor 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, wellwrought 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

(observing also in this the traditionary language, along with the traditionary policy of the nation, and

repeating as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James,) that on the preserving

"a certainty in the SUCCESSION thereof, the unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation doth, under God,

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 for ever 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

favor 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,

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

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

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 (if we take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the Revolution), 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

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. Some time 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

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 attaint 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

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

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 (what they thought very material) 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 (with safety to our religion) 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

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

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

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.

* "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

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

beenperfectly 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

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

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 (by our constitution, at

least), 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

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,

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

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 (like all other questions of state) 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 highminded, 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

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 afterdinner toasts of the

Revolution Society. In the former you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as illsuited

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

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

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

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

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 middleaged 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,

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

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

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

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 (what will hereafter be called) 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 goodnature,

under specious pretenses, to admit combinations of bold and faithless 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

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

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

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 (the last stake reserved

for the ultimate ransom of the state) 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

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

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,

In the calling of the StatesGeneral 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 (a majority, I believe, of

the members who attended) 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

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 (if their capacity did not permit them to lead) 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

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

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

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 newmodeling 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 (the germ as

it were) 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

There were in the time of our civil troubles in England (I do not know whether you have any such in your

assembly in France) 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

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 (Cromwell) 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

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 (God forbid), 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

moneyjobbers 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 (of

Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which by the worst of usurpations an

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 tallowchandler 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.*

* 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 labours; and whose talk is of

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

I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican church (till lately) 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

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 (as most concerned in it), 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, shortsighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent,

regulated preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth is neither unnatural, nor

IT is said that twentyfour 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 lamppost 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 twentyfour 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 stockjobbing

constitution; and as to the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, upon the republican

system of eightythree independent municipalities (to say nothing of the parts that compose them), 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

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

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, everwaking

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 goodnature 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 newinvented 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 eightythree, 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

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 amongst 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 oldfashioned 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 (so they call it) 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 any one but themselves, and by a House of Commons exactly such as the present, that is, as they

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

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

Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to

give or to withhold) 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

selfdefense, 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

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

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

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

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

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 highbred republicans of my time have, after a short space, become the most decided, thoroughpaced

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

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 wellplaced sympathies of

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'seye 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.*

* Another of these reverend gentlemen, who was witness to some of the spectacles which Paris 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

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 (he had very triumphantly

chosen his place), 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 (what I heartily

hope none of his followers may be in this country) 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

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

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

wellborn mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless

we have been strangely deceived) 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

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 lamppost

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

(the captive 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? * 6th

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 secondhand 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 (whether in condolence or

congratulation) 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

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

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

This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the

pride and hope of a great and generous people) 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

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

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

There was, however, (as in all human affairs there is) in the midst of this joy something to exercise the

patience of these worthy gentlemen and to try the longsuffering 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 historypiece 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

* 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

"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 audessus de mes forces de supporter plus longtems

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 cela un 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

"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 (sic) 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

(*) N.B. Mr. Mounier was then speaker of the National Assembly. He has since been obliged to live in exile,

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 newsprung 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

I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day (one is

interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well), 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

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

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

IN%"EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET" "Elaine Brennan" d 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

superadded 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 wellinformed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our

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

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

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

* See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be here particularly alluded to. Compare the

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

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

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

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 (as it has long since been observed) 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

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 bookkeepers 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

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

If it could have been made clear to me that the king and queen of France (those I mean who were such before

the triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the

National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in certain publications), 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

If the French king, or king of the French (or by whatever name he is known in the new vocabulary of your

constitution), 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

flowerdeluce 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 (excuse the term, it is still in use here) 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 (Dr. Price has shown us what

miracles compound interest will perform in 1790 years,), 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

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 twentyfour 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,

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 (I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility),

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 (as I conceive)

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.

* 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 amongst 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.

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

These doctrines, or rather sentiments, seem prevalent with your new statesmen. But they are wholly different

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

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

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 ninetynine 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

* 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,

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 (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious,

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 (not, as these gentlemen think it, the glory) 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 (if any such you have 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 newmodel 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

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

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 selfopinion,

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

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 (which any man may well tremble to give or to receive) 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

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 liferenters 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

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

selfsufficiency and arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom

greater than their own) 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

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 (as in some instances they have done most certainly), in their

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

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, threefourths 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 wellborn 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 (for such it is in the groundwork) 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

The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England, whose wisdom (if they have any) 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 (the only language that rarely lies) 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

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

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 selfdenial 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

(like something we were ashamed to show) 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 (for

what can be 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

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

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 selfdenial 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 (and in us, too, however we may like it), 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

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.

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 (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human nature) 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,

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 (if they are at

all 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

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,

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

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

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 (the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) 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

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

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 (which

sometimes was the case) 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,

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

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

* This (down to the end of the first sentence in the next paragraph) and some other parts here and there were

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

* I do not choose to shock the feeling of the moral reader with any quotation of their vulgar, base, and

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,

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

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

comptrollersgeneral 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 moneyjobbers, 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 (as it was generally thought) 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 (meritorious servants I admit) 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 (if it were not a sort of profaneness to talk of the use, as affecting the title to the

property) 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,*(2) the

cardinal archbishop of Rouen, was far more laudable and far more publicspirited. 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

*(2) Not his brother nor any near relation; but this mistake does not affect the argument.

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

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 (and there

were enough of them) 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,

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

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.*

* Rapport de Mons. le DirecteurGeneral des Finances, fait par ordre du Roi a Versailles, Mai 5, 1789.

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 L2,200,000 sterling. But to balance it, he brought

forward savings and improvements of revenue (considered as entirely certain) to rather more than the amount

of that deficiency; and he concludes with these emphatical words (p. 39), "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

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 (as having always, along with you, conceived a high degree of respect for M.

Necker, I make no doubt it was), 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

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

But let us suppose that the deficiency had remained at the fiftysix millions (or L2,200,000 sterling), 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 (or their lords of articles* 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

L2,200,000 sterling will not support a confiscation to the amount of five millions. The imposition of

L2,200,000 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

* 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".

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 landtax, 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 (which in extent make about an eighth part of the whole, but in wealth a much larger

proportion) paid likewise to the capitation and the twentieth penny, at the rate paid by the nobility. The clergy

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

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

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 (upon system)

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 (if ever it had been seriously entertained) 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 papermill, of

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

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

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 (so far as anything certain can be gathered from their proceedings) 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

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 (very few, and very particularly circumstanced) 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

* When I wrote this I quoted from memory, after many years had elapsed from my reading the passage. A

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

"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

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

YOUR government in France, though usually, and I think justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or

illqualified 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 StatesGeneral, 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

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 (though by no means a free, and therefore by no

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 (I am obliged to

speak by memory, and therefore the less positively), but I think the population of France was by them, even

at that period, estimated at twentytwo 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 twentyfour 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 (and much I think ought to be abated) 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

twentyfour millions six hundred and seventy thousand to twentyfive millions, still a population of

twentyfive millions, and that in an increasing progress, on a space of about twentyseven thousand square

leagues is immense. It is, for instance, a good deal more than the proportionable population of this island, or

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

(this I admit is the strongest example) upon an extent of four hundred and four leagues and a half, about ten

years ago, contained seven hundred and thirtyfour thousand six hundred souls, which is one thousand seven

hundred and seventytwo inhabitants to each square league. The middle term for the rest of France is about

* De l'Administration des Finances de la France, par Mons. Necker, vol. I, p. 288.

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 (whatever they

were), 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 (however latent it may be) 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

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 eightyeight 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

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

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 wellconstituted 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.*

* 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

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 twentysix millions of that year, or even M. Necker's twentyfive

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

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.*(2) It is said (and I have never heard it contradicted) 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.*(3) In the meantime the leaders of the legislative clubs and

coffeehouses 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

*(2) M. de Calonne states the falling off of the population of Paris as far more considerable; and it may be so,

*(3): Travaux de charite pour subvenir au Livres L 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...........................

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 L1,661,000 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

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

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 goodnatured, 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

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,

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 twentyfour 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 illtreatment

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,

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

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

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

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

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 (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry)

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

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

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,

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 (which one would think

had been gorged sufficiently) 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 (as from ravenous wolves) because, truly, in the sixteenth century, the cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel

* This is on the supposition of the truth of the story, but he was not in France at the time. One name serves as

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

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

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

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 (except from one set of men, not then very

numerous, though very active) 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 (many of the description are not to be met with anywhere) 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 vicarsgeneral,

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

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

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 selfdenial, 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 (as some spirit of reform has prevailed through the whole reign) 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 (in comparison of which the stipend of an

exciseman is lucrative and honorable) 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 (that is, electioneering

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

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 selfinterest 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 (as they

have got an entirely new nomenclature of technical terms) by the name of a Civic Education.

I hope their partisans in England (to whom I rather attribute very inconsiderate conduct than the ultimate

object in this detestable design) 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,

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 (for a little of it is "much too much") amongst ourselves. The

THE teachers who reformed our religion in England bore no sort of resemblance to your present reforming

doctors in Paris. Perhaps they were (like those whom they opposed) 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 (as some of them did 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 (as less engaged in conflict) 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

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, (hardly with the compliment of a debate) 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 unheardof 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.*(2) 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;*(2) 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.

* 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.

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.*(2) In such a state of things we ought to hold

ourselves upon our guard. In all mutations (if mutations must be) 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

* "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 (quod nunquam antea apud eos

acciderat) 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 (id quod fuit sapientis et praestantis viri) omnibus consulendum esse

putavit: eaque est summa ratio et sapientia boni civis, commoda civium non divellere, sed omnes eadem

*(2) See two books entitled, Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens. System und Folgen des

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,

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

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 selfinterests,

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 (if it were in our competence 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

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 (not

admirers at least of the Munera Terrae), 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 selfdenial. 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

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

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 strangelydirected 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 wellregulated 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

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

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 (whatever value you may

choose to set upon that 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

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

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

IN%"EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET" "Elaine Brennan" ld 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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

* 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 Quinzevingt, 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

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 cooperated 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 wellsustained 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

unlookedfor 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

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 (it shall for the subject be a very short one) 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

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

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

eightythree 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

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 semiorganization, 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

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 (or rather buttress) 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 (of a third for her dower) out of compliment, I

suppose, to that sublime science, they left the other two to be scuffled for between the other parts, population

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,

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

* 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

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,

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 (as

usual) it is subverted; and it is not subverted (as we shall presently see) to approximate the inequality of

riches to the level of nature. The additional share in the third portion of representation (a portion reserved

exclusively for the higher contribution) 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 (say they) 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

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 (indeed I should lay it down as a fundamental principle) 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 (as historians represent Servius Tullius to have done

in the early constitution of Rome), 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 (it is an easy supposition) 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 (to them a vast object) 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

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 (as in all society undoubtedly it is), 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

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 (as it has) 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

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

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

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

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

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 onethird 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 onesixth LESS to the contribution of the whole commune, will have three VOICES MORE than the

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

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

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,

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

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 (whatever course they took with foreign nations) 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 wornout republics. Your child comes

into the world with the symptoms of death: the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its physiognomy,

* 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,

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

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

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

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

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 constitutionmongers 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 (and something more perhaps) 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

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

As to the operation of the first (the confiscation and paper currency) 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 (as I am morally certain it will

not), 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 straiten or relax with every variation in the

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 fortyfour 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 moneyjobbing and speculation goes

into the mass of land itself and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation that species of property

becomes (as it were) 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 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

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

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

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

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 form, 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 (the

sole way of procuring and exerting influence) 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

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

highsounding names to the designs of men with whom they could not be acquainted, and have thereby made

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

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 badgeticket. 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 preeminence 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

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

Your allsufficient 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

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

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

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

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 (or whatever he may be called) 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 (if in crimes there could be virtues) 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

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 shortsighted 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

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 (I cannot call it authority)

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

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

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 (in effect, whatever they may

intend) 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 (when personal liberty had no existence) 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

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 (I do not mean an exact

parallel), 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

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

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

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 (if any 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

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 (a thing perilous at best)

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

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

* For further elucidations upon the subject of all these judicatures, and of the committee of research, see M.

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

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.

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 (le corps militaire) 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

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

unheardof 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 (risum

teneatis?) 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

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

After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations and turbulent committees formed in

some regiments by the common soldiers and noncommissioned officers without the knowledge, or even in

contempt of the authority, of their superiors, although the presence and concurrence of those superiors could

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

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 (if any argument on

that head were not quite superfluous) 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 (the Assembly's) 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

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

To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular consultations, seditious committees, and

monstrous democratic assemblies (comitia, comices) 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

* 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 I should not be credited, I insert the words,

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 (says he) 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

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

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

(such it is) 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 welldisposed part of those municipalities, which is

confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worstdisposed, 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

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

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 (and their inclinations lead them to what their necessities require) 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 (if they should have any), 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 (that is little) 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 selfgovernment. 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 (or what is his new name?) of their own. If

this election of a commanderinchief 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

commanderinchief? 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

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 (but have

furnished no money for the redemption), 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

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 (where any there are) 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

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 secondhand 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 rentgatherers 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 twolegged 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,

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 illdevised corrective which has yet been imagined in the necessities produced by an

* 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 L145,000 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.

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

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 selfdenial, 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

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

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 illcontrived, 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

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

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 (with little success)

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, fullbottomed 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 oldfashioned 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

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 bankpaper, and

not the bankpaper 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

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.*

* The reader will observe that I have but lightly touched (my plan demanded nothing more) 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

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

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

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 (by anticipation a father of the church*) 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 comptrollergeneral

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

To establish a current circulating credit upon any Landbank, 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 landbank 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 (the only security to the creditor) 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 (perhaps with an addition of punishment) 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 landbank. 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

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 rentroll 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

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

* "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'estla, en ne vous

soupconnant d'aucune combinaison de cupidite, d'aucun regard sur le jeu des effets publics, c'estla 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 peutil 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

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 (if they choose to keep faith) 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 thirtyfour 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 (if in such a matter anything can be clear) it is clear

that the surplus estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages, I mean that of the four hundred

millions (or sixteen millions sterling) 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

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 (I believe, for a considerable part, in the market of London) 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

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

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

It is as little worth remarking any further upon all their drawing and redrawing 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 period of everlasting commemoration) 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

(forty thousand pounds sterling) 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

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, shortsighted, narrowminded 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 "allatoning 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

highsounding 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

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

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

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.