Reflections on the Revolution in France
 
by Edmund Burke
 
 
 
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 sentiments.
 
 
 
The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he 
 
had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but, the matter 
 
gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far 
 
exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a 
 
more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow 
 
upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a 
 
letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a 
 
private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address when 
 
his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another 
 
direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favorable to a 
 
commodious division and distribution of his matter.
 
 
 
Dear Sir,
 
 
 
You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts 
 
on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine 
 
that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited 
 
about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either 
 
communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only, 
 
that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them. In the 
 
first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I 
 
wrote neither for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this. 
 
My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.
 
 
 
You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that though I 
 
do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational 
 
liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a 
 
permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by 
 
which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning 
 
several material points in your late transactions.
 
 
 
YOU IMAGINED, WHEN YOU WROTE LAST, that I might possibly be reckoned among 
 
the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal 
 
of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, 
 
called the Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society.
 
 
 
I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one, in which the 
 
constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution 
 
are held in high reverence, and I reckon myself among the most forward in 
 
my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their 
 
utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so, that I think it necessary 
 
for me that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of 
 
our Revolution and those who are attached to the constitution of this 
 
kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under 
 
the pretext of zeal toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently 
 
wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart 
 
from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one, 
 
and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more 
 
material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such 
 
information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have 
 
thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of France, first 
 
assuring you that I am not, and that I have never been, a member of either 
 
of those societies.
 
 
 
The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for 
 
Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven 
 
or eight years standing. The institution of this society appears to be of a 
 
charitable and so far of a laudable nature; it was intended for the 
 
circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others 
 
would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the 
 
booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men. Whether the books, 
 
so charitably circulated, were ever as charitably read is more than I know. 
 
Possibly several of them have been exported to France and, like goods not 
 
in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk 
 
of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What 
 
improvements they have had in their passage (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 authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National 
 
Assembly in France.
 
 
 
In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they 
 
were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it 
 
very probable that for some purpose new members may have entered among 
 
them, and that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense 
 
benefits but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole, 
 
may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may 
 
have reason to suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of 
 
nothing as of a certainty but what is public.
 
 
 
For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or indirectly, concerned 
 
in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest 
 
of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what 
 
has been done or is doing on the public stage in any place ancient or 
 
modern; in the republic of Rome or the republic of Paris; but having no 
 
general 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 authority of the government under which I live.
 
 
 
I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under 
 
anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with 
 
our usages, might make the address, in which I joined, appear as the act of 
 
persons in some sort of corporate capacity acknowledged by the laws of this 
 
kingdom and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of 
 
the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of 
 
the deceit which may be practiced under them, and not from mere formality, 
 
the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most 
 
trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open 
 
the folding doors of your presence chamber, and have ushered into your 
 
National Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as great a 
 
bustle of applause, as if you have been visited by the whole representative 
 
majesty of the whole English nation. If what this society has thought 
 
proper to send forth had been a piece of argument, it would have signified 
 
little whose argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less 
 
convincing on account of the party it came from. But this is only a vote 
 
and resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is the 
 
mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought, 
 
in my opinion, to have been annexed to their instrument. The world would 
 
then have the means of knowing how many they are; who they are; and of what 
 
value their opinions may be, from their personal abilities, from their 
 
knowledge, their experience, or their lead and authority in this state. To 
 
me, who am but a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and 
 
too ingenious; it has too much the air of a political strategem adopted for 
 
the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name, an importance to the public 
 
declarations of this club which, when the matter came to be closely 
 
inspected, they did not altogether so well deserve. It is a policy that has 
 
very much the complexion of a fraud.
 
 
 
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as 
 
any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given 
 
as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my 
 
public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other 
 
nation. But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything 
 
which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the 
 
object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and 
 
solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (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 well-distributed 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 who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the 
 
real movers.
 
 
 
ALL these considerations, however, were below the transcendental dignity of 
 
the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the country, from whence I 
 
had the honor of writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their 
 
transactions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of their 
 
proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a 
 
sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of 
 
Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that 
 
publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France 
 
with those of England by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the 
 
National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect 
 
of that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and 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 to render it a 
 
fit theme for all the devout effusions of sacred eloquence.
 
 
 
On the forenoon of the fourth of November last, Doctor Richard Price, a 
 
non-conforming minister of eminence, preached, at the dissenting meeting 
 
house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary 
 
miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious 
 
sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of 
 
various political opinions and reflections; but the Revolution in France is 
 
the grand ingredient in the cauldron. I consider the address transmitted by 
 
the Revolution Society to the National Assembly, through Earl Stanhope, as 
 
originating in the principles of the sermon and as a corollary from them. 
 
It was moved by the preacher of that discourse. It was passed by those who 
 
came reeking from the effect of the sermon without any censure or 
 
qualification, expressed or implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen 
 
concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know 
 
how to acknowledge the one and to disavow the other. They may do it: I 
 
cannot.
 
 
 
For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man 
 
much connected with literary caballers and intriguing philosophers, with 
 
political theologians and theological politicians both at home and abroad. 
 
I know they set him up as a sort of oracle, because, with the best 
 
intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes and chants his prophetic 
 
song in exact unison with their designs.
 
 
 
That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been heard in this 
 
kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are tolerated or encouraged in it, 
 
since the year 1648, when a predecessor of Dr. Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters, 
 
made the vault of the king's own chapel at St. James's ring with the honor 
 
and privilege of the saints, who, with the "high praises of God in their 
 
mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands, were to execute judgment on 
 
the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with 
 
chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron". [1] Few harangues from the 
 
pulpit, except in the days of your league in France or in the days of our 
 
Solemn League and Covenant in England, have ever breathed less of the 
 
spirit of moderation than this lecture in the Old Jewry. Supposing, 
 
however, that something like moderation were visible in this political 
 
sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. 
 
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian 
 
charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as 
 
that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper 
 
character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, 
 
ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. 
 
Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, 
 
and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much 
 
confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. 
 
Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to 
 
the dissensions and animosities of mankind.
 
 
 
This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, had to me the 
 
air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly without danger. I do not charge 
 
this danger equally to every part of the discourse. The hint given to a 
 
noble and reverend lay divine, who is supposed high in office in one of our 
 
universities, [2] and other lay divines "of rank and literature" may be 
 
proper and seasonable, though somewhat new. If the noble Seekers should 
 
find nothing to satisfy their pious fancies in the old staple of the 
 
national church, or in all the rich variety to be found in the 
 
well-assorted warehouses of the dissenting congregations, Dr. Price advises 
 
them to improve upon non-conformity and to set up, each of them, a separate 
 
meeting house upon his own particular principles. [3] (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 Mess-Johns 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 very violent exertions of despotism.
 
 
 
BUT I may say of our preacher "utinam nugis tota illa dedisset tempora 
 
saevitiae". -- All things in this his fulminating bull are not of so 
 
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 
 
king of Great Britain to be entitled to their allegiance.
 
 
 
This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British throne, either 
 
is nonsense and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most 
 
unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position. According to 
 
this spiritual doctor of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to 
 
the choice of his people, he is no lawful king. Now nothing can be more 
 
untrue than that the crown of this kingdom is so held by his Majesty. 
 
Therefore, if you follow their rule, the king of Great Britain, who most 
 
certainly does not owe his high office to any form of popular election, is 
 
in no respect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers who reign, or 
 
rather rob, all over the face of this our miserable world without any sort 
 
of right or title to the allegiance of their people. The policy of this 
 
general doctrine, so qualified, is evident enough. The propagators of this 
 
political gospel are in hopes that their abstract principle (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 election differ from 
 
our idea of inheritance?
 
 
 
And how does the settlement of the crown in the Brunswick line derived from 
 
James the First come to legalize our monarchy rather than that of any of 
 
the 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 succeeded to that he wears.
 
 
 
Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining away the gross error 
 
of fact, which supposes that his Majesty (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 [4] that, by 
 
the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three 
 
fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one system and lie 
 
together in one short sentence, namely, that we have acquired a right:
 
 
 
(1) to choose our own governors.
 
 
 
(2) to cashier them for misconduct.
 
 
 
(3) to frame a government for ourselves.
 
 
 
This new and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the name of 
 
the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only. The 
 
body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim 
 
it. They will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and 
 
fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their country made at the 
 
time of that very Revolution which is appealed to in favor of the 
 
fictitious rights claimed by the Society which abuses its name.
 
 
 
THESE GENTLEMEN OF THE OLD JEWRY, in all their reasonings on the Revolution 
 
of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years 
 
before and the late French revolution, so much before their eyes and in 
 
their hearts that they are constantly confounding all the three together. 
 
It is necessary that we should separate what they confound. We must recall 
 
their erring fancies to the acts of the Revolution which we revere, for the 
 
discovery of its true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of 
 
1688 are anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Declaration 
 
of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration, drawn up 
 
by great lawyers and great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced 
 
enthusiasts, not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general 
 
right "to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to 
 
form a government for ourselves".
 
 
 
This Declaration of Right (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 of necessity into a rule of law.
 
 
 
Unquestionably, there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William, 
 
a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular 
 
hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of 
 
jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case and 
 
regarding an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. If 
 
ever there was a time 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, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the 
 
rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to 
 
perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure 
 
from what they had then settled forever. Accordingly, that they might not 
 
relax the nerves of their monarchy, and that they might preserve a close 
 
conformity to the practice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the 
 
declaratory statutes of Queen Mary [5] 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, 
 
wholly depend".
 
 
 
They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble 
 
an election, and that an election would be utterly destructive of the 
 
"unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation", which they thought to be 
 
considerations of some moment. To provide for these objects and, therefore, 
 
to exclude 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, herein specified and contained, to the utmost of their 
 
powers, etc. etc.
 
 
 
So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to 
 
elect our kings that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did 
 
at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves and for 
 
all their posterity forever. These gentlemen may value themselves as much 
 
as they please on their whig principles, but I never desire to be thought a 
 
better whig than Lord Somers, or to understand the principles of the 
 
Revolution better than those, by whom it was brought about, or to read in 
 
the Declaration of Right any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating 
 
style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts, the words and 
 
spirit of that immortal law.
 
 
 
It is true that, aided with the powers derived from force and opportunity, 
 
the nation was at that time, in some sense, free to take what course it 
 
pleased for filling the throne, but only free to do so upon the same 
 
grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy and every 
 
other part of their constitution. However, they did not think such bold 
 
changes within their commission. It is indeed difficult, perhaps 
 
impossible, to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme 
 
power, such as was exercised by parliament at that time, but the limits of 
 
a moral competence subjecting, even in powers more indisputably sovereign, 
 
occasional will to permanent reason and to the steady maxims of faith, 
 
justice, and fixed fundamental policy, are perfectly intelligible and 
 
perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name or 
 
under any title, in the state. The House of Lords, for instance, is not 
 
morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons, no, nor even to 
 
dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the 
 
legislature of the kingdom. Though a king may abdicate for his own person, 
 
he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, 
 
the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement 
 
and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, 
 
forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state 
 
are obliged to hold their public faith with each other and with all those 
 
who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the 
 
whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise 
 
competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but the 
 
will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of the crown 
 
has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law; in the old 
 
line it was a succession by the common law; in the new, by the statute law 
 
operating on the principles of the common law, not changing the substance, 
 
but regulating the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions 
 
of law are of the same force and are derived from an equal authority 
 
emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, 
 
communi sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king and 
 
people, too, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the same 
 
body politic.
 
 
 
It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer ourselves to be 
 
entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the use both of a fixed 
 
rule and an occasional deviation: the sacredness of an hereditary principle 
 
of succession in our government with a power of change in its application 
 
in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity (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 new civil order out of the first elements of 
 
society.
 
 
 
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its 
 
conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part 
 
of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The 
 
two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two 
 
critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when England found 
 
itself without a king. At both those periods the nation had lost the bond 
 
of union in their ancient edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the 
 
whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient 
 
part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. 
 
They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered 
 
might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the 
 
shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a 
 
disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature 
 
manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British 
 
constitutional policy than at the time of the Revolution, when it deviated 
 
from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried 
 
somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved, but the new line was 
 
derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent, 
 
still an hereditary descent in the same blood, though an hereditary descent 
 
qualified with Protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction, 
 
but kept the principle, they showed that they held it inviolable.
 
 
 
On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in 
 
the old time, and long before the era of the Revolution. 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 adopted.
 
 
 
The gentlemen of the Society for Revolution see nothing in that of 1688 but 
 
the deviation from the constitution; and they take the deviation from the 
 
principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious 
 
consequences of their doctrine, though they must see that it leaves 
 
positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this 
 
country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no 
 
throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded 
 
this era of fictitious election can be valid. Do these theorists mean to 
 
imitate some of their predecessors who dragged the bodies of our ancient 
 
sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to 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 
 
sufficiently.
 
 
 
The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the 
 
succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of 
 
this act bind "us and our heirs, and our posterity, to them, their heirs, 
 
and their posterity", being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same 
 
words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs of King William 
 
and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an 
 
hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of 
 
forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to 
 
preclude a choice of the people forever, could the legislature have 
 
fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our country 
 
presented to them and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess from 
 
whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to 
 
govern millions of men through a series of ages?
 
 
 
The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th and 13th 
 
of King William for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings, and not 
 
for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power which she might 
 
not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for one 
 
reason, and for one only, because, says the act, "the most excellent 
 
Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of 
 
the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of 
 
our late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and is 
 
hereby declared to be the next in succession in the Protestant line etc., 
 
etc., and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being 
 
Protestants." This limitation was made by parliament, that through the 
 
Princess Sophia an inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, 
 
but (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 liberty.
 
 
 
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor 
 
go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They look upon 
 
the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not 
 
as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for 
 
their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. They look on the frame of their 
 
commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value, and they 
 
conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the 
 
stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.
 
 
 
I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some paltry 
 
artifices which the abettors of election, as the only lawful title to the 
 
crown, are ready to employ in order to render the support of the just 
 
principles of our constitution a task somewhat invidious. These sophisters 
 
substitute a fictitious cause and feigned personages, in whose favor they 
 
suppose you engaged whenever you defend the inheritable nature of the 
 
crown. It is common with them to dispute as if they were in a conflict with 
 
some of those exploded fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained what I 
 
believe no creature now maintains, "that the crown is held by divine 
 
hereditary and indefeasible right". -- These old fanatics of single 
 
arbitrary power dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful 
 
government in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary 
 
power maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of 
 
authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did speculate 
 
foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had more of a divine 
 
sanction than any other mode of government; and as if a right to govern by 
 
inheritance were in strictness indefeasible in every person who should be 
 
found in the succession to a throne, and under every circumstance, which no 
 
civil or political right can be. But an absurd opinion concerning the 
 
king's hereditary right to the crown does not prejudice one that is 
 
rational and bottomed upon solid principles of law and policy. If all the 
 
absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which 
 
they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the 
 
world. But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no 
 
justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims 
 
on the other.
 
 
 
THE second claim of the Revolution Society is "a right of cashiering their 
 
governors for misconduct". Perhaps the apprehensions our ancestors 
 
entertained of forming such a precedent as that "of cashiering for 
 
misconduct" was the cause that the declaration of the act, which implied 
 
the abdication of King James, was, if it had any fault, rather too guarded 
 
and too circumstantial. [6] But all this guard and all this accumulation of 
 
circumstances serves to show the spirit of caution which predominated in 
 
the national councils in a situation in which men irritated by oppression, 
 
and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to abandon themselves to violent 
 
and extreme courses; it shows the anxiety of the great men who influenced 
 
the conduct of affairs at that great event to make the Revolution a parent 
 
of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
 
 
 
No government could stand a moment if it could be blown down with anything 
 
so loose and indefinite as an opinion of "misconduct". They who led at the 
 
Revolution grounded the virtual abdication of King James upon no such light 
 
and uncertain principle. They charged him with nothing less than a design, 
 
confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt acts, to subvert the Protestant 
 
church and state, and their fundamental, unquestionable laws and liberties; 
 
they charged him with having broken the original contract between king and 
 
people. This was more than misconduct. A grave and overruling necessity 
 
obliged them to take the step they took, and took with infinite reluctance, 
 
as under that most rigorous of all laws. Their trust for the future 
 
preservation of the constitution was not in future revolutions. The grand 
 
policy of all their regulations was to render it almost impracticable for 
 
any future sovereign to compel the states of the kingdom to have again 
 
recourse to those violent remedies. They left the crown what, in the eye 
 
and estimation of law, it had ever been -- perfectly irresponsible. In order 
 
to lighten the crown still further, they aggravated responsibility on 
 
ministers of state. By the statute of the 1st of King William, sess. 2nd, 
 
called "the act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and 
 
for settling the succession of the crown", they enacted that the ministers 
 
should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration. They secured soon 
 
after the frequent meetings of parliament, by which the whole government 
 
would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular 
 
representative and of the magnates of the kingdom. In the next great 
 
constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King William, for the 
 
further limitation of the crown and better securing the rights and 
 
liberties of the subject, they provided "that no pardon under the great 
 
seal of England should be pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons in 
 
parliament". The rule laid down for government in the Declaration of Right, 
 
the constant inspection of parliament, the practical claim of impeachment, 
 
they thought infinitely a better security, not only for their 
 
constitutional liberty, but against the vices of administration, than the 
 
reservation of a right so difficult in the practice, so uncertain in the 
 
issue, and often so mischievous in the consequences, as that of "cashiering 
 
their governors".
 
 
 
Dr. Price, in this sermon, [7] condemns very properly the practice of 
 
gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of this fulsome style, he 
 
proposes that his Majesty should be told, on occasions of congratulation, 
 
that "he is to consider himself as more properly the servant than the 
 
sovereign of his people". For a compliment, this new form of address does 
 
not seem to be very soothing. Those who are servants in name, as well as in 
 
effect, do not like to be told of their situation, their duty, and their 
 
obligations. The slave, in the old play, tells his master, "Haec 
 
commemoratio est quasi exprobatio". It is not pleasant as compliment; it is 
 
not wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to bring himself 
 
to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take 
 
the appellation of Servant of the People as his royal style, how either he 
 
or we should be much mended by it I cannot imagine. I have seen very 
 
assuming letters, signed "Your most obedient, humble servant". The proudest 
 
denomination that ever was endured on earth took a title of still greater 
 
humility than that which is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of 
 
Liberty. Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling 
 
himself "the Servant of Servants"; and mandates for deposing sovereigns 
 
were sealed with the signet of "the Fisherman".
 
 
 
I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of flippant, vain 
 
discourse, in which, as in an unsavory fume, several persons suffer the 
 
spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not plainly in support of the 
 
idea and a part of the scheme of "cashiering kings for misconduct". In that 
 
light it is worth some observation.
 
 
 
Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people because 
 
their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; 
 
but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense (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 confused 
 
jargon of their Babylonian pulpits.
 
 
 
As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law in him, our 
 
constitution has made no sort of provision toward rendering him, as a 
 
servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing of a 
 
magistrate like the Justicia of Aragon, nor of any court legally appointed, 
 
nor of any process legally settled, for submitting the king to the 
 
responsibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not distinguished 
 
from the Commons and the Lords, who, in their several public capacities, 
 
can never be called to an account for their conduct, although the 
 
Revolution Society chooses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the 
 
wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that "a king is no 
 
more than the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible 
 
to it"
 
 
 
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for 
 
wisdom if they had found no security for their freedom but in rendering 
 
their government feeble in its operations, and precarious in its tenure; if 
 
they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power 
 
than civil confusion. Let these gentlemen state who that representative 
 
public is to whom they will affirm the king, as a servant, to be 
 
responsible. It will then be time enough for me to produce to them the 
 
positive statute law which affirms that he is not.
 
 
 
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at 
 
their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force. It then 
 
becomes a case of war, and not of constitution. Laws are commanded to hold 
 
their tongues amongst arms, and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace 
 
they are no longer able to uphold. The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a 
 
just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can 
 
be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria. The question of dethroning or, if 
 
these gentlemen like the phrase better, "cashiering kings" will always be, 
 
as it has always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out 
 
of the law -- a question (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 high-minded, from 
 
disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and 
 
bold, from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause; but, with or 
 
without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking 
 
and the good.
 
 
 
THE third head of right, asserted by the pulpit of the Old Jewry, namely, 
 
the "right to form a government for ourselves", has, at least, as little 
 
countenance from anything done at the Revolution, either in precedent or 
 
principle, as the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to 
 
preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient 
 
constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. 
 
If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution and the 
 
policy which predominated in that great period which has secured it to this 
 
hour, pray look for both in our histories, in our records, in our acts of 
 
parliament, and journals of parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old 
 
Jewry and the after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the former 
 
you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as 
 
ill-suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance 
 
of authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is 
 
enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the 
 
Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance 
 
from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken 
 
care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. 
 
All the reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the 
 
principle of reverence to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that 
 
all those which possibly may be made hereafter will be carefully formed 
 
upon analogical precedent, authority, and example.
 
 
 
Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir 
 
Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who 
 
follow him, to Blackstone, [8] are industrious to prove the pedigree of our 
 
liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna 
 
Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry 
 
I, and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a 
 
reaffirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. In the 
 
matter of fact, for the greater part these authors appear to be in the 
 
right; perhaps not always; but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, 
 
it proves my position still the more strongly, because it demonstrates the 
 
powerful prepossession toward antiquity, with which the minds of all our 
 
lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence, 
 
have been always filled, and the stationary policy of this kingdom in 
 
considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance.
 
 
 
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I, called the Petition of Right, 
 
the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this 
 
freedom", claiming their franchises not on abstract principles "as the 
 
rights of men", but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived 
 
from their forefathers. Selden and the other profoundly learned men who 
 
drew this Petition of Right were as well acquainted, at least, with all the 
 
general theories concerning the "rights of men" as any of the discoursers 
 
in our pulpits or on your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price or as the Abbe 
 
Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded 
 
their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary 
 
title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague 
 
speculative right which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for 
 
and torn to pieces by every wild, litigious spirit.
 
 
 
The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the 
 
preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary, in the 
 
famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two Houses utter not a 
 
syllable of "a right to frame a government for themselves". You will see 
 
that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties that 
 
had been long possessed, and had been lately endangered. "Taking [9] into 
 
their most serious consideration the best means for making such an 
 
establishment, that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in 
 
danger of being again subverted", they auspicate all their proceedings by 
 
stating as some of those best means, "in the first place" to do "as their 
 
ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient 
 
rights and liberties, to declare" -- and then they pray the king and queen 
 
"that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the rights and 
 
liberties asserted and declared are the true ancient and indubitable rights 
 
and liberties of the people of this kingdom".
 
 
 
You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has 
 
been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our 
 
liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, 
 
and to be transmitted to our posterity -- as an estate specially belonging 
 
to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other 
 
more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a 
 
unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, 
 
an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting 
 
privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
 
 
 
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or 
 
rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without 
 
reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of 
 
a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to 
 
posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people 
 
of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure 
 
principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at 
 
all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but 
 
it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state 
 
proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family 
 
settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional 
 
policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we 
 
transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we 
 
enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, 
 
the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and 
 
from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a 
 
just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the 
 
mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, 
 
wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the 
 
great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, 
 
is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable 
 
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, 
 
renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in 
 
the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in 
 
what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and 
 
on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the 
 
superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In 
 
this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image 
 
of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our 
 
dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our 
 
family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of 
 
all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, 
 
our sepulchres, and our altars.
 
 
 
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial 
 
institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful 
 
instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we 
 
have derived several other, and those no small, benefits from considering 
 
our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the 
 
presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself 
 
to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a 
 
liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which 
 
prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and 
 
disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this 
 
means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and 
 
majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its 
 
bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its 
 
monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles. We procure 
 
reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature 
 
teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age and on account 
 
of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce 
 
anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the 
 
course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our 
 
speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great 
 
conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.
 
 
 
YOU MIGHT, IF YOU PLEASED, have profited of our example and have given to 
 
your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though 
 
discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, 
 
whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you 
 
possessed in some parts the walls and in all the foundations of a noble and 
 
venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built 
 
on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was 
 
perfected, but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good 
 
as could be wished. In your old states you possessed that variety of parts 
 
corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was 
 
happily composed; you had all that combination and all that opposition of 
 
interests; you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and 
 
in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, 
 
draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting 
 
interests which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our 
 
present constitution interpose a salutary check to all precipitate 
 
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of 
 
necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally 
 
begets moderation; they produce temperaments preventing the sore evil of 
 
harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering all the headlong 
 
exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever 
 
impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general 
 
liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several 
 
orders, whilst, by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real 
 
monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and 
 
starting from their allotted places.
 
 
 
You had all these advantages in your ancient states, but you chose to act 
 
as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to 
 
begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that 
 
belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last 
 
generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you 
 
might have passed them by and derived your claims from a more early race of 
 
ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your 
 
imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom 
 
beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you would have risen with the 
 
example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you 
 
would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to 
 
consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of lowborn 
 
servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, 
 
at the expense of your honor, an excuse to your apologists here for several 
 
enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be represented as a 
 
gang of Maroon slaves suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and 
 
therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were 
 
not accustomed and ill fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been 
 
wiser to have you thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous 
 
and gallant nation, long misled to your disadvantage by your high and 
 
romantic sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that events had been 
 
unfavorable to you, but that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or 
 
servile disposition; that in your most devoted submission you were actuated 
 
by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshiped 
 
in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood that in the 
 
delusion of this amiable error you had gone further than your wise 
 
ancestors, that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges, whilst 
 
you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; 
 
or if, diffident of yourselves and not clearly discerning the almost 
 
obliterated constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your 
 
neighbors in this land who had kept alive the ancient principles and models 
 
of the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its present state 
 
-- by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom 
 
to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the 
 
eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism 
 
from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as 
 
when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an 
 
unoppressive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing 
 
commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution, a potent 
 
monarchy, a disciplined army, a reformed and venerated clergy, a mitigated 
 
but spirited nobility to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would 
 
have had a liberal order of commons to emulate and to recruit that 
 
nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and 
 
obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to 
 
be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral 
 
equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring 
 
false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the 
 
obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that 
 
real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil 
 
life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a 
 
humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more 
 
splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of felicity 
 
and glory laid open to you, beyond anything recorded in the history of the 
 
world, but you have shown that difficulty is good for man.
 
 
 
COMPUTE your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous 
 
speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their 
 
predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves 
 
until the moment in which they become truly despicable. By following those 
 
false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price 
 
than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings! France has 
 
bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her 
 
interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her 
 
virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the 
 
reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by enforcing with 
 
greater exactness some rites or other of religion. All other people have 
 
laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a system of a 
 
more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins 
 
of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in 
 
manners and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practice, and has 
 
extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some 
 
privilege or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions 
 
that usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new 
 
principles of equality in France.
 
 
 
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of 
 
lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most 
 
potent topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous 
 
distrust, and taught kings to tremble at (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 good-nature, 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 aimed at a hand holding out 
 
graces, favors, and immunities.
 
 
 
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment 
 
in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without 
 
vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; 
 
a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy 
 
made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine 
 
sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the 
 
consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, 
 
tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and 
 
beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire in 
 
lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting, 
 
conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the 
 
earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose 
 
creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted.
 
 
 
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results 
 
of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through 
 
blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? 
 
No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings 
 
wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they 
 
are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time 
 
of profound peace. They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, 
 
because unresisted and irresistible, authority. The persons who have thus 
 
squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have 
 
made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils (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 harassed 
 
land. But the cause of all was plain from the beginning.
 
 
 
THIS unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly 
 
unaccountable if we did not consider the composition of the National 
 
Assembly. I do not mean its formal constitution, which, as it now stands, 
 
is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which, in a great measure, it 
 
is composed, which is of ten thousand times greater consequence than all 
 
the formalities in the world. If we were to know nothing of this assembly 
 
but by its title and function, no colors could paint to the imagination 
 
anything more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by 
 
such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people 
 
collected into a focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even 
 
of the very worst aspect. Instead of blamable, they would appear only 
 
mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution 
 
whatsoever can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed any 
 
other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have 
 
made them. Capacities beyond these the people have not to give. Virtue and 
 
wisdom may be the objects of their choice, but their choice confers neither 
 
the one nor the other on those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. 
 
They have not the engagement of nature, they have not the promise of 
 
revelation, for any such powers.
 
 
 
After I had read over the list of the persons and descriptions elected into 
 
the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing. 
 
Among them, indeed, I saw some of known rank, some of shining talents; but 
 
of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The 
 
best were only men of theory. But whatever the distinguished few may have 
 
been, it is the substance and mass of the body which constitutes its 
 
character and must finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those 
 
who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must 
 
conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those 
 
whom they wish to conduct; therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly 
 
composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of 
 
virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot 
 
enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through 
 
it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects! If, what 
 
is the more likely event, instead of that unusual degree of virtue, they 
 
should be actuated by sinister ambition and a lust of meretricious glory, 
 
then the feeble part of the assembly, to whom at first they conform, 
 
becomes in its turn the dupe and instrument of their designs. In this 
 
political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of 
 
their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst 
 
designs of their leaders.
 
 
 
To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in 
 
any public assembly, they ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, 
 
those whom they conduct. To be led any otherwise than blindly, the 
 
followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they 
 
must also be judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing can secure a 
 
steady and moderate conduct in such assemblies but that the body of them 
 
should be respectably composed, in point of condition in life or permanent 
 
property, of education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the 
 
understanding.
 
 
 
In the calling of the States-General of France, the first thing that struck 
 
me was a great departure from the ancient course. I found the 
 
representation for the Third Estate composed of six hundred persons. They 
 
were equal in number to the representatives of both the other orders. If 
 
the orders were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the 
 
consideration of the expense, be of much moment. But when it became 
 
apparent that the three orders were to be melted down into one, the policy 
 
and necessary effect of this numerous representation became obvious. A very 
 
small desertion from either of the other two orders must throw the power of 
 
both into the hands of the third. In fact, the whole power of the state was 
 
soon resolved into that body. Its due composition became therefore of 
 
infinitely the greater importance.
 
 
 
Judge, Sir, of my surprise when I found that a very great proportion of the 
 
assembly (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 repute.
 
 
 
Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed, it must 
 
evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands 
 
of men not taught habitually to respect themselves, who had no previous 
 
fortune in character at stake, who could not be expected to bear with 
 
moderation, or to conduct with discretion, a power which they themselves, 
 
more than any others, must be surprised to find in their hands. Who could 
 
flatter himself that these men, suddenly and, as it were, by enchantment 
 
snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated 
 
with their unprepared greatness? Who could conceive that men who are 
 
habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and 
 
unquiet minds would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure 
 
contention and laborious, low, unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but 
 
that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they 
 
must pursue their private interests, which they understand but too well? It 
 
was not an event depending on chance or contingency. It was inevitable; it 
 
was necessary; it was planted in the nature of things. They must join (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 accomplishing their designs, must remain the same.
 
 
 
Well! but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other 
 
descriptions, of more sober and more enlarged understandings. Were they 
 
then to be awed by the supereminent authority and awful dignity of a 
 
handful of country clowns who have seats in that assembly, some of whom are 
 
said not to be able to read and write, and by not a greater number of 
 
traders who, though somewhat more instructed and more conspicuous in the 
 
order of society, had never known anything beyond their counting house? No! 
 
Both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the 
 
intrigues and artifices of lawyers than to become their counterpoise. With 
 
such a dangerous disproportion, the whole must needs be governed by them. 
 
To the faculty of law was joined a pretty considerable proportion of the 
 
faculty of medicine. This faculty had not, any more than that of the law, 
 
possessed in France its just estimation. Its professors, therefore, must 
 
have the qualities of men not habituated to sentiments of dignity. But 
 
supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do 
 
actually, the sides of sickbeds are not the academies for forming statesmen 
 
and legislators. Then came the dealers in stocks and funds, who must be 
 
eager, at any expense, to change their ideal paper wealth for the more 
 
solid substance of land. To these were joined men of other descriptions, 
 
from whom as little knowledge of, or attention to, the interests of a great 
 
state was to be expected, and as little regard to the stability of any 
 
institution; men formed to be instruments, not controls. Such in general 
 
was the composition of the Tiers Etat in the National Assembly, in which 
 
was scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of what we call the 
 
natural landed interest of the country.
 
 
 
We know that the British House of Commons, without shutting its doors to 
 
any merit in any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate causes, 
 
filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and 
 
in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and 
 
politic distinction that the country can afford. But supposing, what hardly 
 
can be supposed as a case, that the House of Commons should be composed in 
 
the same manner with the Tiers Etat in France, would this dominion of 
 
chicane be borne with patience or even conceived without horror? God forbid 
 
I should insinuate anything derogatory to that profession which is another 
 
priesthood, administering the rights of sacred justice. But whilst I revere 
 
men in the functions which belong to them, and would do as much as one man 
 
can do to prevent their exclusion from any, I cannot, to flatter them, give 
 
the lie to nature. They are good and useful in the composition; they must 
 
be mischievous if they preponderate so as virtually to become the whole. 
 
Their very excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a 
 
qualification for others. It cannot escape observation that when men are 
 
too much confined to professional and faculty habits and, as it were, 
 
inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are 
 
rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of 
 
mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive, connected view 
 
of the various, complicated, external and internal interests which go to 
 
the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.
 
 
 
After all, if the House of Commons were to have a wholly professional and 
 
faculty composition, what is the power of the House of Commons, 
 
circumscribed and shut in by the immovable barriers of laws, usages, 
 
positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of 
 
Lords, and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown to 
 
continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of the House of Commons, 
 
direct or indirect, is indeed great; and long may it be able to preserve 
 
its greatness and the spirit belonging to true greatness at the full; and 
 
it will do so as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from 
 
becoming the makers of law for England. The power, however, of the House of 
 
Commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of water in the ocean, 
 
compared to that residing in a settled majority of your National Assembly. 
 
That assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no fundamental law, 
 
no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it. Instead of finding 
 
themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution, they have a power to 
 
make a constitution which shall conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven 
 
or upon earth can serve as a control on them. What ought to be the heads, 
 
the hearts, the dispositions that are qualified or that dare, not only to 
 
make laws under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a 
 
totally new constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from 
 
the monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But -- "fools rush in 
 
where angels fear to tread". In such a state of unbounded power for 
 
undefined and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical 
 
inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive 
 
to happen in the management of human affairs.
 
 
 
Having considered the composition of the Third Estate as it stood in its 
 
original frame, I took a view of the representatives of the clergy. There, 
 
too, it appeared that full as little regard was had to the general security 
 
of property or to the aptitude of the deputies for the public purposes, in 
 
the principles of their election. That election was so contrived as to send 
 
a very large proportion of mere country curates to the great and arduous 
 
work of new-modeling a state: men who never had seen the state so much as 
 
in a picture -- men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an 
 
obscure village; who, immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all 
 
property, whether secular or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of 
 
envy; among whom must be many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest 
 
dividend in plunder, would readily join in any attempts upon a body of 
 
wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share except in a 
 
general scramble. Instead of balancing the power of the active chicaners in 
 
the other assembly, these curates must necessarily become the active 
 
coadjutors, or at best the passive instruments, of those by whom they had 
 
been habitually guided in their petty village concerns. They, too, could 
 
hardly be the most conscientious of their kind who, presuming upon their 
 
incompetent understanding, could intrigue for a trust which led them from 
 
their natural relation to their flocks and their natural spheres of action 
 
to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This preponderating weight, 
 
being added to the force of the body of chicane in the Tiers Etat, 
 
completed that momentum of ignorance, rashness, presumption, and lust of 
 
plunder, which nothing has been able to resist.
 
 
 
To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning that the majority 
 
of the Third Estate, in conjunction with such a deputation from the clergy 
 
as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, 
 
would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in 
 
that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order these 
 
individuals would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers. 
 
To squander away the objects which made the happiness of their fellows 
 
would be to them no sacrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of 
 
quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and 
 
arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms 
 
they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate 
 
disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to 
 
the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the 
 
first principle (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 own 
 
personal advantage.
 
 
 
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 haze of confusion all is 
 
enlarged and appears without any limit.
 
 
 
When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a 
 
distinct object and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole 
 
composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now appear 
 
in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious -- a kind 
 
of meanness in all the prevalent policy, a tendency in all that is done to 
 
lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state? 
 
Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they attempted 
 
or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by 
 
advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had 
 
long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their 
 
country. They were men of great civil and great military talents, and if 
 
the terror, the ornament of their age. They were not like Jew brokers, 
 
contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent 
 
circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on 
 
their country by their degenerate councils. The compliment made to one of 
 
the great bad men of the old stamp (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 of his ambition:
 
 
 
   Still as you rise, the state exalted too, Finds no distemper whilst 'tis 
 
changed by you; Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise 
 
The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys.
 
 
 
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as asserting 
 
their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify 
 
the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. 
 
The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the country communicated to 
 
it the force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say (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 money-jobbers usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, 
 
sometimes their masters.
 
 
 
BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all 
 
societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description 
 
must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the 
 
natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in 
 
the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. 
 
The association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, 
 
for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which by 
 
the worst of usurpations -- an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature -- 
 
you attempt to force them.
 
 
 
The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the states, said, in a tone of 
 
oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honorable. If he meant only 
 
that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond 
 
the truth. But in asserting that anything is honorable, we imply some 
 
distinction in its favor. The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working 
 
tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person -- to say nothing 
 
of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men 
 
ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers 
 
oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are 
 
permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you 
 
are at war with nature. [10]
 
 
 
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 
 
intend this distribution.
 
 
 
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most 
 
valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which 
 
tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness 
 
subservient to our virtue, it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The 
 
possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends 
 
hereditary possession (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, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated 
 
preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth 
 
is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.
 
 
 
IT is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred 
 
thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of 
 
arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for 
 
its second; to men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the 
 
many and their interest must very often differ, and great will be the 
 
difference when they make an evil choice. A government of five hundred 
 
country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions 
 
of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions, nor is it the 
 
better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality who have betrayed 
 
their trust in order to obtain that power. At present, you seem in 
 
everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property of 
 
France does not govern it. Of course, property is destroyed and rational 
 
liberty has no existence. All you have got for the present is a paper 
 
circulation and a stock-jobbing constitution; and as to the future, do you 
 
seriously think that the territory of France, upon the republican system of 
 
eighty-three independent municipalities (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 of 
 
liberty."
 
 
 
It is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at the time big 
 
with some extraordinary design; and it is very probable that the thoughts 
 
of his audience, who understood him better than I do, did all along run 
 
before him in his reflection and in the whole train of consequences to 
 
which it led.
 
 
 
Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in a free country; 
 
and it was an error I cherished, because it gave me a greater liking to the 
 
country I lived in. I was, indeed, aware that a jealous, ever-waking 
 
vigilance to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but 
 
from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty. However, 
 
I considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured than as a 
 
prize to be contended for. I did not discern how the present time came to 
 
be so very favorable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The present 
 
time differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in 
 
France. If the example of that nation is to have an influence on this, I 
 
can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant 
 
aspect and are not quite reconcilable to humanity, generosity, good faith, 
 
and justice are palliated with so much milky good-nature toward the actors, 
 
and borne with so much heroic fortitude toward the sufferers. It is 
 
certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean to 
 
follow. But allowing this, we are led to a very natural question: What is 
 
that cause of liberty, and what are those exertions in its favor to which 
 
the example of France is so singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be 
 
annihilated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient 
 
corporations of the kingdom? Is every landmark of the country to be done 
 
away in favor of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House 
 
of Lords to be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the church 
 
lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers or given to bribe new-invented 
 
municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege? Are all the taxes to 
 
be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution or 
 
patriotic presents? Are silver shoebuckles to be substituted in the place 
 
of the land tax and the malt tax for the support of the naval strength of 
 
this kingdom? Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, 
 
that out of universal anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four 
 
thousand democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they may 
 
all, by some sort of unknown attractive power, be organized into one? For 
 
this great end, is the army to be seduced from its discipline and its 
 
fidelity, first, by every kind of debauchery and, then, by the terrible 
 
precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the curates to be 
 
seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the delusive hope of a 
 
dole out of the spoils of their own order? Are the citizens of London to be 
 
drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their fellow 
 
subjects? Is a compulsory paper currency to be substituted in the place of 
 
the legal coin of this kingdom? Is what remains of the plundered stock of 
 
public revenue to be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies 
 
to watch over and to fight with each other? If these are the ends and means 
 
of the Revolution Society, I admit that they are well assorted; and France 
 
may furnish them for both with precedents in point.
 
 
 
I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know that we are 
 
supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive by finding our situation 
 
tolerable, and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining to 
 
its full perfection. Your leaders in France began by affecting to admire, 
 
almost to adore, the British constitution; but as they advanced, they came 
 
to look upon it with a sovereign contempt. The friends of your National 
 
Assembly 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". [11] That a 
 
representation in the legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all 
 
constitutional liberty in it, but of "all legitimate government; that 
 
without it a government is nothing but an usurpation"; -- that "when the 
 
representation is partial, the kingdom possesses liberty only partially; 
 
and if extremely partial, it gives only a semblance; and if not only 
 
extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, it becomes a nuisance". Dr. Price 
 
considers this inadequacy of representation as our fundamental grievance; 
 
and though, as to the corruption of this semblance of representation, he 
 
hopes it is not yet arrived to its full perfection of depravity, he fears 
 
that "nothing will be done towards gaining for us this essential blessing, 
 
until some great abuse of power again provokes our resentment, or some 
 
great calamity again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the acquisition of a 
 
pure and equal representation by other countries, whilst we are mocked with 
 
the shadow, kindles our shame." To this he subjoins a note in these words. 
 
"A representation chosen chiefly by the treasury, and a few thousands of 
 
the dregs of the people, who are generally paid for their votes".
 
 
 
You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they 
 
are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the 
 
greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the 
 
depositories of all power. It would require a long discourse to point out 
 
to you the many fallacies that lurk in the generality and equivocal nature 
 
of the terms "inadequate representation". I shall only say here, in justice 
 
to that old-fashioned constitution under which we have long prospered, that 
 
our representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes 
 
for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised. I defy 
 
the enemies of our constitution to show the contrary. To detail the 
 
particulars in which it is found so well to promote its ends would demand a 
 
treatise on our practical constitution. I state here the doctrine of the 
 
Revolutionists only that you and others may see what an opinion these 
 
gentlemen entertain of the constitution of their country, and why they seem 
 
to think that some great abuse of power or some great calamity, as giving a 
 
chance for the blessing of a constitution according to their ideas, would 
 
be much palliated to their feelings; you see why they are so much enamored 
 
of your fair and equal representation, which being once obtained, the same 
 
effects might follow. You see they consider our House of Commons as only "a 
 
semblance", "a form", "a theory", "a shadow", "a mockery", perhaps "a 
 
nuisance".
 
 
 
These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic, and not without 
 
reason. They must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of 
 
representation, this fundamental grievance (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 term it, by a mere "shadow and mockery" of 
 
representation.
 
 
 
Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves to exist for no 
 
purpose. One set is for destroying the civil power through the 
 
ecclesiastical; another, for demolishing the ecclesiastic through the 
 
civil. They are aware that the worst consequences might happen to the 
 
public in accomplishing this double ruin of church and state, but they are 
 
so heated with their theories that they give more than hints that this 
 
ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and attend it, and which 
 
to themselves appear quite certain, would not be unacceptable to them or 
 
very remote from their wishes. A man amongst them of great authority and 
 
certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed alliance between church 
 
and state, says, "perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers 
 
before this most unnatural alliance be broken. Calamitous no doubt will 
 
that time be. But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a 
 
subject of lamentation if it be attended with so desirable an effect?" You 
 
see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to view the 
 
greatest calamities which can befall their country.
 
 
 
IT is no wonder, therefore, that with these ideas of everything in their 
 
constitution and government at home, either in church or state, as 
 
illegitimate and usurped, or at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad 
 
with an eager and passionate enthusiasm. Whilst they are possessed by these 
 
notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the 
 
fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution whose 
 
merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience and an increasing 
 
public strength and national prosperity. They despise experience as the 
 
wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought 
 
underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples 
 
of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have 
 
"the rights of men". Against these there can be no prescription, against 
 
these no agreement is binding; these admit no temperament and no 
 
compromise; anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud 
 
and injustice. Against these their rights of men let no government look for 
 
security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of 
 
its administration. The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do 
 
not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and 
 
beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest 
 
usurpation. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of 
 
abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title. I have nothing 
 
to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be 
 
their amusement in the schools. -- "Illa se jactet in aula Aeolus, et 
 
clauso ventorum carcere regnet". -- But let them not break prison to burst 
 
like a Levanter to sweep the earth with their hurricane and to break up the 
 
fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us.
 
 
 
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding 
 
in practice (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 self-defense, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the 
 
rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain 
 
justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most 
 
essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in 
 
trust of the whole of it.
 
 
 
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist 
 
in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a 
 
much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection 
 
is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want 
 
everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for 
 
human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by 
 
this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil 
 
society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires 
 
not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that 
 
even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations 
 
of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their 
 
passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of 
 
themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will 
 
and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this 
 
sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned 
 
among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with 
 
times and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be 
 
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss 
 
them upon that principle.
 
 
 
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern 
 
himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, 
 
from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a 
 
consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a 
 
state and the due distribution of its powers a matter of the most delicate 
 
and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and 
 
human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the 
 
various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil 
 
institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and remedies 
 
to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to 
 
food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and 
 
administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in 
 
the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of 
 
metaphysics.
 
 
 
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming 
 
it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. 
 
Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical 
 
science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; 
 
but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its 
 
remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects 
 
it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible 
 
schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and 
 
lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost 
 
latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which 
 
a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially 
 
depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself 
 
and intended for such practical purposes -- a matter which requires 
 
experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole 
 
life, however sagacious and observing he may be -- it is with infinite 
 
caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which 
 
has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of 
 
society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of 
 
approved utility before his eyes.
 
 
 
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which 
 
pierce into a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted from their 
 
straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions 
 
and concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of 
 
refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if 
 
they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of 
 
man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible 
 
complexity; and, therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can 
 
be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I 
 
hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new 
 
political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are 
 
grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The 
 
simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If 
 
you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, all these simple 
 
modes of polity are infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its 
 
single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all 
 
its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole should be imperfectly 
 
and anomalously answered than that, while some parts are provided for with 
 
great exactness, others might be totally neglected or perhaps materially 
 
injured by the over-care of a favorite member.
 
 
 
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion 
 
as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. 
 
The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not 
 
impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their 
 
advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good, in 
 
compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and 
 
evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, 
 
multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or 
 
mathematically, true moral denominations.
 
 
 
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically 
 
confounded with their power. The body of the community, whenever it can 
 
come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and 
 
right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with 
 
virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what 
 
is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit; for though a 
 
pleasant writer said, liceat perire poetis, when one of them, in cold 
 
blood, is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, 
 
ardentem frigidus Aetnam insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as an 
 
unjustifiable poetic license than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; 
 
and whether he was a poet, or divine, or politician that chose to exercise 
 
this kind of right, I think that more wise, because more charitable, 
 
thoughts would urge me rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen 
 
slippers as the monuments of his folly.
 
 
 
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I write 
 
refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course in commemorating 
 
the fact, will cheat many out of the principles, and deprive them of the 
 
benefits, of the revolution they commemorate. I confess to you, Sir, I 
 
never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the 
 
practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily 
 
bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary; it is 
 
taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate and swallowing down repeated 
 
provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.
 
 
 
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and wears out, by a 
 
vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to be 
 
exerted on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of Roman 
 
servitude that themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at 
 
school -- cum perimit saevos classis numerosa tyrannos. In the ordinary 
 
state of things, it produces in a country like ours the worst effects, even 
 
on the cause of that liberty which it abuses with the dissoluteness of an 
 
extravagant speculation. Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time 
 
have, after a short space, become the most decided, thorough-paced 
 
courtiers; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate, but 
 
practical resistance to those of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of 
 
their theories, they have slighted as not much better than Tories. 
 
Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations, for, never 
 
intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it 
 
magnificent. But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be 
 
suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been much the same. 
 
These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases 
 
which call only for a qualified or, as I may say, civil and legal 
 
resistance, in such cases employ no resistance at all. It is with them a 
 
war or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their schemes of politics 
 
not adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they often come 
 
to think lightly of all public principle, and are ready, on their part, to 
 
abandon for a very trivial interest what they find of very trivial value. 
 
Some, indeed, are of more steady and persevering natures, but these are 
 
eager politicians out of parliament who have little to tempt them to 
 
abandon their favorite projects. They have some change in the church or 
 
state, or both, constantly in their view. When that is the case, they are 
 
always bad citizens and perfectly unsure connections. For, considering 
 
their speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement 
 
of the state as of no estimation, they are at best indifferent about it. 
 
They see no merit in the good, and no fault in the vicious, management of 
 
public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to 
 
revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or any 
 
political principle any further than as they may forward or retard their 
 
design of change; they therefore take up, one day, the most violent and 
 
stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest democratic ideas of 
 
freedom, and pass from one to the other without any sort of regard to 
 
cause, to person, or to party.
 
 
 
IN FRANCE, you are now in the crisis of a revolution and in the transit 
 
from one form of government to another -- you cannot see that character of 
 
men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With 
 
us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act 
 
when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to 
 
confine those observations to any description of men or to comprehend all 
 
men of any description within them -- No! far from it. I am as incapable of 
 
that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles 
 
of extremities and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than 
 
wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is 
 
this: they temper and harden the breast in order to prepare it for the 
 
desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as 
 
these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and 
 
the moral sentiments suffer not a little when no political purpose is 
 
served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their 
 
theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his 
 
nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have 
 
succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted 
 
in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed 
 
sympathies of the human breast.
 
 
 
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit 
 
through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations seem to 
 
some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. Cheap, bloodless 
 
reformation, a guiltless liberty appear flat and vapid to their taste. 
 
There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage 
 
effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination grown 
 
torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years' security and the still 
 
unanimating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the 
 
French Revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. 
 
His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his 
 
peroration it is in a full blaze. Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his 
 
pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flourishing and glorious state of France as 
 
in a bird's-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into the 
 
following rapture: What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I 
 
have lived to it; I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant 
 
depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. -- I have lived to 
 
see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error. 
 
-- I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and 
 
nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it. -- I 
 
have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, 
 
spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice. 
 
Their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to 
 
his subjects. [12]
 
 
 
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". [13] 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 men and all 
 
the glorious consequences of that knowledge.
 
 
 
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in 
 
place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the 
 
rapture of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators of governments, 
 
the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and 
 
leaders of kings in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of the 
 
diffusion of knowledge of which every member had obtained so large a share 
 
in the donative, were in haste to make a generous diffusion of the 
 
knowledge they had thus gratuitously received. To make this bountiful 
 
communication, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to the 
 
London Tavern, where the same Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his oracular 
 
tripod were not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the resolution or 
 
address of congratulation transmitted by Lord Stanhope to the National 
 
Assembly of France.
 
 
 
I find a preacher of the gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic 
 
ejaculation, commonly called "nunc dimittis", made on the first 
 
presentation of our Saviour in the Temple, and applying it with an inhuman 
 
and unnatural rapture to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting 
 
spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of 
 
mankind. This "leading in triumph", a thing in its best form unmanly and 
 
irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must 
 
shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English 
 
were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (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 they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice of a 
 
vitiated mind.
 
 
 
With a compelled appearance of deliberation, they vote under the dominion 
 
of a stern necessity. They sit in the heart, as it were, of a foreign 
 
republic: they have their residence in a city whose constitution has 
 
emanated neither from the charter of their king nor from their legislative 
 
power. There they are surrounded by an army not raised either by the 
 
authority of their crown or by their command, and which, if they should 
 
order to dissolve itself, would instantly dissolve them. There they sit, 
 
after a gang of assassins had driven away some hundreds of the members, 
 
whilst those who held the same moderate principles, with more patience or 
 
better hope, continued every day exposed to outrageous insults and 
 
murderous threats. There a majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, 
 
captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third 
 
hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy 
 
coffeehouses. It is notorious that all their measures are decided before 
 
they are debated. It is beyond doubt that, under the terror of the bayonet 
 
and the lamp-post and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt 
 
all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a 
 
monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations. Among these are 
 
found persons, in comparison of whom Catiline would be thought scrupulous 
 
and Cethegus a man of sobriety and moderation. Nor is it in these clubs 
 
alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo a 
 
previous distortion in academies, intended as so many seminaries for these 
 
clubs, which are set up in all the places of public resort. In these 
 
meetings of all sorts every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and 
 
violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity 
 
and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. 
 
Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public. Liberty 
 
is always to be estimated perfect, as property is rendered insecure. Amidst 
 
assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they 
 
are forming plans for the good order of future society. Embracing in their 
 
arms the carcasses of base criminals and promoting their relations on the 
 
title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the 
 
same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.
 
 
 
The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with 
 
as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before 
 
a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of 
 
ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent 
 
fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them, and sometimes mix and take 
 
their seats amongst them, domineering over them with a strange mixture of 
 
servile petulance and proud, presumptuous authority. As they have inverted 
 
order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This 
 
assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy 
 
and aspect of a grave legislative body -- nec color imperii, nec frons ulla 
 
senatus. They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, 
 
to subvert and destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may 
 
be fitted for further subversion and further destruction.
 
 
 
WHO is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to, national 
 
representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such 
 
a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion of that sacred institute? 
 
Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics must alike abhor it. The members of 
 
your assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have 
 
all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit. I am sure 
 
many of the members who compose even the majority of that body must feel as 
 
I do, notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. Miserable 
 
king! miserable assembly! How must that assembly be silently scandalized 
 
with those of their members who could call a day which seemed to blot the 
 
sun out of heaven "un beau jour!" [14] 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?
 
 
 
This address was made with much good nature and affection, to be sure. But 
 
among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution 
 
in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at 
 
second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behavior in 
 
the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut and have not so 
 
far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it 
 
quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (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 the lese nation 
 
might bring under the administration of his executive power.
 
 
 
A man is fallen indeed when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught of 
 
oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling 
 
wakefulness and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to 
 
administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients 
 
of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of "the balm of hurt 
 
minds", the cup of human misery full to the brim and to force him to drink 
 
it to the dregs.
 
 
 
Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were so delicately 
 
urged in the compliment on the new year, the king of France will probably 
 
endeavor to forget these events and that compliment. But history, who keeps 
 
a durable record of all our acts and exercises her awful censure over the 
 
proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget either those events 
 
or the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind. 
 
History will record that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the 
 
king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and 
 
slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge 
 
nature in a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy repose. From this 
 
sleep the queen was first startled by the sentinel at her door, who cried 
 
out to her to save herself by flight -- that this was the last proof of 
 
fidelity he could give -- that they were upon him, and he was dead. 
 
Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking 
 
with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen and pierced with a 
 
hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this 
 
persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways 
 
unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king 
 
and husband not secure of his own life for a moment.
 
 
 
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children 
 
(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 the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a bastille for kings.
 
 
 
Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be commemorated with 
 
grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent 
 
prayer and enthusiastic ejaculation? -- These Theban and Thracian orgies, 
 
acted in France and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you, kindle 
 
prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few people in this kingdom, 
 
although a saint and apostle, who may have revelations of his own and who 
 
has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart, may 
 
incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the entrance into 
 
the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed in a holy temple by a 
 
venerable sage, and not long before not worse announced by the voice of 
 
angels to the quiet innocence of shepherds.
 
 
 
At first I was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded transport. I 
 
knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to 
 
some sort of palates. There were reflections which might serve to keep this 
 
appetite within some bounds of temperance. But when I took one circumstance 
 
into my consideration, I was obliged to confess that much allowance ought 
 
to be made for the Society, and that the temptation was too strong for 
 
common discretion -- I mean, the circumstance of the Io Paean of the 
 
triumph, the animating cry which called "for all the BISHOPS to be hanged 
 
on the lampposts", [15] might well have brought forth a burst of enthusiasm 
 
on the foreseen consequences of this happy day. I allow to so much 
 
enthusiasm some little deviation from prudence. I allow this prophet to 
 
break forth into hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which appears 
 
like the precursor of the Millennium and the projected fifth monarchy in 
 
the destruction of all church establishments.
 
 
 
There was, however, (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 long-suffering of their faith. The actual murder of the king and queen, 
 
and their child, was wanting to the other auspicious circumstances of this 
 
"beautiful day". The actual murder of the bishops, though called for by so 
 
many holy ejaculations, was also wanting. A group of regicide and 
 
sacrilegious slaughter was indeed boldly sketched, but it was only 
 
sketched. It unhappily was left unfinished in this great history-piece of 
 
the massacre of innocents. What hardy pencil of a great master from the 
 
school of the rights of man will finish it is to be seen hereafter. The age 
 
has not yet the complete benefit of that diffusion of knowledge that has 
 
undermined superstition and error; and the king of France wants another 
 
object or two to consign to oblivion, in consideration of all the good 
 
which is to arise from his own sufferings and the patriotic crimes of an 
 
enlightened age. [16]
 
 
 
EXTRACT of M. de Lally Tollendal's Second Letter to a Friend.
 
 
 
"Parlons du parti que j'ai pris; il est bien justifie dans ma conscience. 
 
-- Ni cette ville coupable, ni cette assemblee plus coupable encore, ne 
 
meritoient que je me justifie; mais j'ai a coeur que vous, et les personnes 
 
qui pensent comme vous, ne me condamnent pas. -- Ma sante, je vous jure, me 
 
rendoit mes fonctions impossibles; mais meme en les mettant de cote il a 
 
ete au-dessus de mes forces de supporter plus long-tems l'horreur que me 
 
causoit ce sang, -- ces tetes -- cette reine presque egorgee, -- ce roi, -- 
 
amene esclave, -- entrant a Paris, au milieu de ses assassins, et precede 
 
des tetes de ses malheureux gardes. -- Ces perfides jannissaires, ces 
 
assassins, ces femmes cannibales, ce cri de, TOUS LES EVEQUES A LA 
 
LANTERNE, dans le moment ou le roi entre sa capitale avec deux eveques de 
 
son conseil dans sa voiture. Un coup de fusil, que j'ai vu tirer dans un 
 
des carosses de la reine. M. Bailly appellant 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 ([17]) echappant par miracle 
 
a vingt assassins, qui avoient voulu faire de sa tete un trophee de plus.
 
 
 
"Voila ce qui me fit jurer de ne plus mettre le pied dans cette caverne 
 
d'Antropophages ou je n'avois plus de force d'elever la voix, ou depuis six 
 
semaines je l'avois elevee en vain. Moi, Mounier, et tous les honnetes 
 
gens, ont le dernier effort a faire pour le bien etoit (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 fugitive.
 
 
 
Although this work of our new light and knowledge did not go to the length 
 
that in all probability it was intended it should be carried, yet I must 
 
think that such treatment of any human creatures must be shocking to any 
 
but those who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But I cannot stop 
 
here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature, and not being 
 
illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung modern light, I confess to 
 
you, Sir, that the exalted rank of the persons suffering, and particularly 
 
the sex, the beauty, and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many 
 
kings and emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, insensible only 
 
through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages to which their parents 
 
were exposed, instead of being a subject of exultation, adds not a little 
 
to any sensibility on that most melancholy occasion.
 
 
 
I hear that the august person who was the principal object of our 
 
preacher's triumph, though he supported himself, felt much on that shameful 
 
occasion. As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, 
 
and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood 
 
about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful 
 
transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more grieved for them 
 
than solicitous for himself. It derogates little from his fortitude, while 
 
it adds infinitely to the honor of his humanity. I am very sorry to say it, 
 
very sorry indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it is 
 
not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great.
 
 
 
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the 
 
triumph, has borne that day (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 no ignoble hand.
 
 
 
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then 
 
the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which 
 
she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above 
 
the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to 
 
move in -- glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and 
 
joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate 
 
without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she 
 
added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful 
 
love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against 
 
disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have 
 
lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in 
 
a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords 
 
must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened 
 
her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, 
 
economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is 
 
extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous 
 
loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, 
 
that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, 
 
the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap 
 
defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is 
 
gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor 
 
which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated 
 
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself 
 
lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
 
 
 
THIS mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient 
 
chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying 
 
state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession 
 
of generations even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally 
 
extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its 
 
character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all 
 
its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the 
 
states of Asia and possibly from those states which flourished in the most 
 
brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without 
 
confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality and handed it down through 
 
all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated 
 
kings into companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings. 
 
Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power, 
 
it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, 
 
compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, 
 
vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.
 
 
 
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power 
 
gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of 
 
life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the 
 
sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved 
 
by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery 
 
of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from 
 
the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the 
 
understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, 
 
shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to 
 
be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
 
 
 
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a 
 
woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage 
 
paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be 
 
regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege are 
 
but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its 
 
simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are 
 
only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance or in any way 
 
gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which 
 
we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.
 
 
 
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold 
 
hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it 
 
is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by 
 
their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them 
 
from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private 
 
interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you 
 
see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections 
 
on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic 
 
philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the 
 
expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, 
 
or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is 
 
incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with 
 
manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, 
 
always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great 
 
critic, for the construction of poems is equally true as to states: -- Non 
 
satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of 
 
manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to 
 
relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
 
 
 
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners 
 
and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its 
 
support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, 
 
has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those 
 
by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of 
 
fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects 
 
from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, 
 
plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and 
 
preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which 
 
form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor and the 
 
honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when 
 
subjects are rebels from principle.
 
 
 
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot 
 
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; 
 
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, 
 
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your 
 
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to 
 
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such 
 
causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume that on 
 
the whole their operation was beneficial.
 
 
 
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, 
 
without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been 
 
produced and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than that our 
 
manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with 
 
manners and with civilization have, in this European world of ours, 
 
depended for ages upon two principles and were, indeed, the result of both 
 
combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. The 
 
nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, 
 
kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and 
 
whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid 
 
back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with 
 
usury, by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy if 
 
they had all continued to know their indissoluble union and their proper 
 
place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to 
 
continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its 
 
natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and 
 
trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish [18] multitude.
 
 
 
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to 
 
own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much 
 
as they are worth. Even commerce and trade and manufacture, the gods of our 
 
economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures, are 
 
themselves but effects which, as first causes, we choose to worship. They 
 
certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They, 
 
too, may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the 
 
present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and 
 
manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and 
 
religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their 
 
place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try 
 
how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what 
 
sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and, at the 
 
same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or 
 
manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing 
 
hereafter?
 
 
 
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible 
 
and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a 
 
coarseness, and a vulgarity in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of 
 
all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is 
 
presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
 
 
 
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand and decorous 
 
principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from you 
 
or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace them best. 
 
You seem to me to be gentis incunabula nostrae. France has always more or 
 
less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and 
 
polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us or 
 
perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too 
 
close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, 
 
therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th 
 
of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which 
 
have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all 
 
revolutions, which may be dated from that day -- I mean a revolution in 
 
sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now stand, with 
 
everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy 
 
within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for 
 
harboring the common feelings of men.
 
 
 
WHY do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of his 
 
lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? -- For 
 
this plain reason: because it is natural I should; because we are so made 
 
as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the 
 
unstable condition of mortal prosperity and the tremendous uncertainty of 
 
human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; 
 
because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when 
 
kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great 
 
drama and become the objects of insult to the base and of pity to the good, 
 
we behold such disasters in the moral as we should behold a miracle in the 
 
physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds (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 should know them to be the tears of folly.
 
 
 
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches, 
 
where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets who have to deal 
 
with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men and 
 
who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart would not 
 
dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There, where men 
 
follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a 
 
Machiavellian policy, whether applied to the attainments of monarchical or 
 
democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern as they once did 
 
on the ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical 
 
proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though 
 
suitable to the character he sustained. No theatric audience in Athens 
 
would bear what has been borne in the midst of the real tragedy of this 
 
triumphal day: a principal actor weighing, as it were, in scales hung in a 
 
shop of horrors, so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage; 
 
and after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the 
 
side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new 
 
democracy posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and 
 
the book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no 
 
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theater, the first 
 
intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show 
 
that this method of political computation would justify every extent of 
 
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the very worst 
 
acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of the 
 
conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery and 
 
blood. They would soon see that criminal means once tolerated are soon 
 
preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through the 
 
highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public 
 
benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and 
 
murder the end, until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful 
 
than revenge could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the 
 
consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs of the rights of 
 
men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
 
 
 
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph", because truly 
 
Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other words, 
 
neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because 
 
he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the prerogatives of 
 
which a long line of ancestors and a long acquiescence of the people, 
 
without any act of his, had put him in possession. A misfortune it has 
 
indeed turned out to him that he was born king of France. But misfortune is 
 
not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I shall never 
 
think that a prince the acts of whose whole reign was a series of 
 
concessions to his subjects, who was willing to relax his authority, to 
 
remit his prerogatives, to call his people to a share of freedom not known, 
 
perhaps not desired, by their ancestors -- such a prince, though he should 
 
be subjected to the common frailties attached to men and to princes, though 
 
he should have once thought it necessary to provide force against the 
 
desperate designs manifestly carrying on against his person and the 
 
remnants of his authority -- though all this should be taken into 
 
consideration, I shall be led with great difficulty to think he deserves 
 
the cruel and insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for 
 
the cause of liberty from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause 
 
of humanity in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But 
 
there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind, that they 
 
look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know to 
 
keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to 
 
assert their prerogative, and, by the awakened vigilance of a severe 
 
despotism, to guard against the very first approaches to freedom. Against 
 
such as these they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle, 
 
listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue, nor any 
 
crime in prosperous usurpation.
 
 
 
If it could have been made clear to me that the king and queen of France 
 
(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 been 
 
different.
 
 
 
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 
 
flower-de-luce on their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in 
 
Newgate; and neither his being a public proselyte to Judaism, nor his 
 
having, in his zeal against Catholic priests and all sorts of 
 
ecclesiastics, raised a mob (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 of the poor-box.
 
 
 
To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I think the honor of our nation to be 
 
somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the proceedings of this society of 
 
the Old Jewry and the London Tavern. I have no man's proxy. I speak only 
 
for myself when I disclaim, as I do with all possible earnestness, all 
 
communion with the actors in that triumph or with the admirers of it. When 
 
I assert anything else as concerning the people of England, I speak from 
 
observation, not from authority, but I speak from the experience I have had 
 
in a pretty extensive and mixed communication with the inhabitants of this 
 
kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and after a course of attentive 
 
observations begun early in life and continued for nearly forty years. I 
 
have often been astonished, considering that we are divided from you but by 
 
a slender dyke of about twenty-four miles, and that the mutual intercourse 
 
between the two countries has lately been very great, to find how little 
 
you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a 
 
judgment of this nation from certain publications which do very 
 
erroneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions 
 
generally prevalent in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and 
 
spirit of intrigue, of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their 
 
total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual 
 
quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of 
 
their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions. No 
 
such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern 
 
make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great 
 
cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are 
 
silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only 
 
inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or 
 
that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meager, 
 
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.
 
 
 
I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us 
 
participates in the "triumph" of the Revolution Society. If the king and 
 
queen of France, and their children, were to fall into our hands by the 
 
chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities (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. [19] Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, 
 
it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and 
 
spurious and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to 
 
render us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, 
 
licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few 
 
holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery 
 
through the whole course of our lives.
 
 
 
YOU see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that 
 
we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away 
 
all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, 
 
to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are 
 
prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they 
 
have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live 
 
and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that 
 
this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better 
 
to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. 
 
Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, 
 
employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. 
 
If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise 
 
to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the 
 
coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because 
 
prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and 
 
an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready 
 
application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady 
 
course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the 
 
moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a 
 
man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just 
 
prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
 
 
 
Your literary men and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the 
 
enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no 
 
respect for the wisdom of others, but they pay it off by a very full 
 
measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to 
 
destroy an old scheme of things because it is an old one. As to the new, 
 
they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run 
 
up in haste, because duration is no object to those who think little or 
 
nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in 
 
discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give 
 
perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with 
 
all establishments. They think that government may vary like modes of 
 
dress, and with as little ill effect; that there needs no principle of 
 
attachment, except a sense of present convenience, to any constitution of 
 
the state. They always speak as if they were of opinion that there is a 
 
singular species of compact between them and their magistrates which binds 
 
the magistrate, but which has nothing reciprocal in it, but that the 
 
majesty of the people has a right to dissolve it without any reason but its 
 
will. Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees 
 
with some of their fleeting projects; it begins and ends with that scheme 
 
of polity which falls in with their momentary opinion.
 
 
 
These doctrines, or rather sentiments, seem prevalent with your new 
 
statesmen. But they are wholly different from those on which we have always 
 
acted in this country.
 
 
 
I hear it is sometimes given out in France that what is doing among you is 
 
after the example of England. I beg leave to affirm that scarcely anything 
 
done with you has originated from the practice or the prevalent opinions of 
 
this people, either in the act or in the spirit of the proceeding. Let me 
 
add that we are as unwilling to learn these lessons from France as we are 
 
sure that we never taught them to that nation. The cabals here who take a 
 
sort of share of your transactions as yet consist of but a handful of 
 
people. If, unfortunately, by their intrigues, their sermons, their 
 
publications, and by a confidence derived from an expected union with the 
 
counsels and forces of the French nation, they should draw considerable 
 
numbers into their faction, and in consequence should seriously attempt 
 
anything here in imitation of what has been done with you, the event, I 
 
dare venture to prophesy, will be that, with some trouble to their country, 
 
they will soon accomplish their own destruction. This people refused to 
 
change their law in remote ages from respect to the infallibility of popes, 
 
and they will not now alter it from a pious implicit faith in the dogmatism 
 
of philosophers, though the former was armed with the anathema and crusade, 
 
and though the latter should act with the libel and the lamp-iron.
 
 
 
Formerly, your affairs were your own concern only. We felt for them as men, 
 
but we kept aloof from them because we were not citizens of France. But 
 
when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and 
 
feeling, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs, in spite of us, are 
 
made a part of our interest, so far at least as to keep at a distance your 
 
panacea, or your plague. If it be a panacea, we do not want it. We know the 
 
consequences of unnecessary physic. If it be a plague, it is such a plague 
 
that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established 
 
against it.
 
 
 
I hear on all hands that a cabal calling itself philosophic receives the 
 
glory of many of the late proceedings, and that their opinions and systems 
 
are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them. I have heard of no 
 
party in England, literary or political, at any time, known by such a 
 
description. It is not with you composed of those men, is it, whom the 
 
vulgar in their blunt, homely style commonly call atheists and infidels? If 
 
it be, I admit that we, too, have had writers of that description who made 
 
some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, 
 
born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, 
 
and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called 
 
themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him 
 
through? Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights 
 
of the world. In as few years their few successors will go to the family 
 
vault of "all the Capulets". But whatever they were, or are, with us, they 
 
were and are wholly unconnected individuals. With us they kept the common 
 
nature of their kind and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps or 
 
were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to influence in that 
 
name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our 
 
public concerns. Whether they ought so to exist and so be permitted to act 
 
is another question. As such cabals have not existed in England, so neither 
 
has the spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame 
 
of our constitution or in any one of the several reparations and 
 
improvements it has undergone. The whole has been done under the auspices, 
 
and is confirmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety. The whole has 
 
emanated from the simplicity of our national character and from a sort of 
 
native plainness and directness of understanding, which for a long time 
 
characterized those men who have successively obtained authority amongst 
 
us. This disposition still remains, at least in the great body of the 
 
people.
 
 
 
WE KNOW, AND WHAT IS BETTER, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis 
 
of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort. [20] In 
 
England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition 
 
with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted 
 
it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people 
 
of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never be such fools as to 
 
call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, 
 
to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious 
 
tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on atheism 
 
to explain them. We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed 
 
fire. It will be illuminated with other lights. It will be perfumed with 
 
other incense than the infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers 
 
of adulterated metaphysics. If our ecclesiastical establishment should want 
 
a revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public or private, that we shall 
 
employ for the audit, or receipt, or application of its consecrated 
 
revenue. Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, 
 
since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the 
 
Protestant, not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in 
 
it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We are Protestants, not from 
 
indifference, but from zeal.
 
 
 
We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a 
 
religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our 
 
instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot 
 
and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of 
 
hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our 
 
nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been 
 
our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us and 
 
amongst many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the 
 
mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading 
 
superstition might take place of it.
 
 
 
For that reason, before we take from our establishment the natural, human 
 
means of estimation and give it up to contempt, as you have done, and in 
 
doing it have incurred the penalties you well deserve to suffer, we desire 
 
that some other may be presented to us in the place of it. We shall then 
 
form our judgment.
 
 
 
On these ideas, instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do who 
 
have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such 
 
institutions, we cleave closely to them. We are resolved to keep an 
 
established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, 
 
and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no 
 
greater. I shall show you presently how much of each of these we possess.
 
 
 
It has been the misfortune (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 new-model 
 
their laws, set commissioners to examine the best constituted republics 
 
within their reach.
 
 
 
First, I beg leave to speak of our church establishment, which is the first 
 
of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it 
 
profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it first. It is first and last 
 
and midst in our minds. For, taking ground on that religious system of 
 
which we are now in possession, we continue to act on the early received 
 
and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense not only, like a wise 
 
architect, hath built up the august fabric of states, but, like a provident 
 
proprietor, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a 
 
sacred temple purged from all the impurities of fraud and violence and 
 
injustice and tyranny, hath solemnly and forever consecrated the 
 
commonwealth and all that officiate in it. This consecration is made that 
 
all who administer the government of men, in which they stand in the person 
 
of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and 
 
destination, that their hope should be full of immortality, that they 
 
should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and 
 
transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence in the 
 
permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory in the 
 
example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.
 
 
 
Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted 
 
situations, and religious establishments provided that may continually 
 
revive and enforce them. Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every 
 
sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that 
 
connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more 
 
than necessary in order to build up that wonderful structure Man, whose 
 
prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own making, and 
 
who, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place 
 
in the creation. But whenever man is put over men, as the better nature 
 
ought ever to preside, in that case more particularly, he should as nearly 
 
as possible be approximated to his perfection.
 
 
 
The consecration of the state by a state religious establishment is 
 
necessary, also, to operate with a wholesome awe upon free citizens, 
 
because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determinate 
 
portion of power. To them, therefore, a religion connected with the state, 
 
and with their duty toward it, becomes even more necessary than in such 
 
societies where the people, by the terms of their subjection, are confined 
 
to private sentiments and the management of their own family concerns. All 
 
persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully 
 
impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account 
 
for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and 
 
Founder of society.
 
 
 
This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of 
 
those who compose the collective sovereignty than upon those of single 
 
princes. Without instruments, these princes can do nothing. Whoever uses 
 
instruments, in finding helps, finds also impediments. Their power is, 
 
therefore, by no means complete, nor are they safe in extreme abuse. Such 
 
persons, however elevated by flattery, arrogance, and self-opinion, must be 
 
sensible that, whether covered or not by positive law, in some way or other 
 
they are accountable even here for the abuse of their trust. If they are 
 
not cut off by a rebellion of their people, they may be strangled by the 
 
very janissaries kept for their security against all other rebellion. Thus 
 
we have seen the king of France sold by his soldiers for an increase of 
 
pay. But where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people 
 
have an infinitely greater, because a far better founded, confidence in 
 
their own power. They are themselves, in a great measure, their own 
 
instruments. They are nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under 
 
responsibility to one of the greatest controlling powers on the earth, the 
 
sense of fame and estimation. The share of infamy that is likely to fall to 
 
the lot of each individual in public acts is small indeed, the operation of 
 
opinion being in the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power. 
 
Their own approbation of their own acts has to them the appearance of a 
 
public judgment in their favor. A perfect democracy is, therefore, the most 
 
shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the 
 
most fearless. No man apprehends in his person that he can be made subject 
 
to punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought, for as all 
 
punishments are for example toward the conservation of the people at large, 
 
the people at large can never become the subject of punishment by any human 
 
hand. [21] It is therefore of infinite importance that they should not be 
 
suffered to imagine that their will, any more than that of kings, is the 
 
standard of right and wrong. They ought to be persuaded that they are full 
 
as little entitled, and far less qualified with safety to themselves, to 
 
use any arbitrary power whatsoever; that therefore they are not, under a 
 
false show of liberty, but in truth to exercise an unnatural, inverted 
 
domination, tyrannically to exact from those who officiate in the state not 
 
an entire devotion to their interest, which is their right, but an abject 
 
submission to their occasional will, extinguishing thereby in all those who 
 
serve them all moral principle, all sense of dignity, all use of judgment, 
 
and all consistency of character; whilst by the very same process they give 
 
themselves up a proper, a suitable, but a most contemptible prey to the 
 
servile ambition of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers.
 
 
 
When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will, 
 
which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should, when they 
 
are conscious that they exercise, and exercise perhaps in a higher link of 
 
the order of delegation, the power, which to be legitimate must be 
 
according to that eternal, immutable law in which will and reason are the 
 
same, they will be more careful how they place power in base and incapable 
 
hands. In their nomination to office, they will not appoint to the exercise 
 
of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function, not according 
 
to their sordid, selfish interest, nor to their wanton caprice, nor to 
 
their arbitrary will, but they will confer that power (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 infirmities is to be found.
 
 
 
When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable, either 
 
in the act or the permission, to him whose essence is good, they will be 
 
better able to extirpate out of the minds of all magistrates, civil, 
 
ecclesiastical, or military, anything that bears the least resemblance to a 
 
proud and lawless domination.
 
 
 
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth 
 
and the laws are consecrated is, lest the temporary possessors and 
 
life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their 
 
ancestors or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were 
 
the entire masters, that they should not think it among their rights to cut 
 
off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their 
 
pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, hazarding to leave to 
 
those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation -- and teaching 
 
these successors as little to respect their contrivances as they had 
 
themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this 
 
unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in 
 
as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and 
 
continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could 
 
link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a 
 
summer.
 
 
 
And first of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human 
 
intellect, which with all its defects, redundancies, and errors is the 
 
collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with 
 
the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, 
 
would be no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance (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 renovate their father's life.
 
 
 
SOCIETY is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere 
 
occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure -- but the state ought not 
 
to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade 
 
of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, 
 
to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the 
 
fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because 
 
it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal 
 
existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all 
 
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all 
 
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many 
 
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are 
 
living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who 
 
are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in 
 
the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the 
 
higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a 
 
fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical 
 
and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not 
 
subject to the will of those who by an obligation above them, and 
 
infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The 
 
municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty 
 
at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, 
 
wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate 
 
community and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos 
 
of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a 
 
necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to 
 
deliberation, that admits no discussion and demands no evidence, which 
 
alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to 
 
the rule, because this necessity itself is a part, too, of that moral and 
 
physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or 
 
force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the 
 
object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the 
 
rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled from this world of reason, 
 
and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the 
 
antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing 
 
sorrow.
 
 
 
These, my dear Sir, are, were, and, I think, long will be the sentiments of 
 
not the least learned and reflecting part of this kingdom. They who are 
 
included in this description form their opinions on such grounds as such 
 
persons ought to form them. The less inquiring receive them from an 
 
authority which those whom Providence dooms to live on trust need not be 
 
ashamed to rely on. These two sorts of men move in the same direction, 
 
though in a different place. They both move with the order of the universe. 
 
They all know or feel this great ancient truth: Quod illi principi et 
 
praepotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit, nihil eorum quae quidem fiant 
 
in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quae 
 
civitates appellantur. They take this tenet of the head and heart, not from 
 
the great name which it immediately bears, nor from the greater from whence 
 
it is derived, but from that which alone can give true weight and sanction 
 
to any learned opinion, the common nature and common relation of men. 
 
Persuaded that all things ought to be done with reference, and referring 
 
all to the point of reference to which all should be directed, they think 
 
themselves bound, not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart or 
 
as congregated in that personal capacity, to renew the memory of their high 
 
origin and cast, but also in their corporate character to perform their 
 
national homage to the institutor and author and protector of civil 
 
society; without which civil society man could not by any possibility 
 
arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a 
 
remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He who gave our nature 
 
to be perfected by our virtue willed also the necessary means of its 
 
perfection. He willed therefore the state -- He willed its connection with 
 
the source and original archetype of all perfection. They who are convinced 
 
of this His will, which is the law of laws and the sovereign of sovereigns, 
 
cannot think it reprehensible that this our corporate fealty and homage, 
 
that this our recognition of a seigniory paramount, I had almost said this 
 
oblation of the state itself as a worthy offering on the high altar of 
 
universal praise, should be performed as all public, solemn acts are 
 
performed, in buildings, in music, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity 
 
of persons, according to the customs of mankind taught by their nature; 
 
that is, with modest splendor and unassuming state, with mild majesty and 
 
sober pomp. For those purposes they think some part of the wealth of the 
 
country is as usefully employed as it can be in fomenting the luxury of 
 
individuals. It is the public ornament. It is the public consolation. It 
 
nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and 
 
dignity in it, whilst the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment 
 
makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and 
 
degrades and vilifies his condition. It is for the man in humble life, and 
 
to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a state in which the 
 
privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may 
 
be more than equal by virtue, that this portion of the general wealth of 
 
his country is employed and sanctified.
 
 
 
I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I give you opinions which have 
 
been accepted amongst us, from very early times to this moment, with a 
 
continued and general approbation, and which indeed are worked into my mind 
 
that I am unable to distinguish what I have learned from others from the 
 
results of my own meditation.
 
 
 
It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, 
 
far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful, hardly think 
 
it lawful to be without one. In France you are wholly mistaken if you do 
 
not believe us above all other things attached to it, and beyond all other 
 
nations; and when this people has acted unwisely and unjustifiably in its 
 
favor (as in some instances they have done most certainly), in their very 
 
errors you will at least discover their zeal.
 
 
 
This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. They do not 
 
consider their church establishment as convenient, but as essential to 
 
their state, not as a thing heterogeneous and separable, something added 
 
for accommodation, what they may either keep or lay aside according to 
 
their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of 
 
their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it 
 
holds an indissoluble union. Church and state are ideas inseparable in 
 
their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the 
 
other.
 
 
 
Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our 
 
education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all 
 
stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools and 
 
universities, enter that most important period of life which begins to link 
 
experience and study together, and when with that view they visit other 
 
countries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to 
 
principal men from other parts, three-fourths of those who go abroad with 
 
our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics, not as austere masters, 
 
nor as mere followers, but as friends and companions of a graver character, 
 
and not seldom persons as well-born as themselves. With them, as relations, 
 
they most constantly keep a close connection through life. By this 
 
connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church, and we 
 
liberalize the church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the 
 
country.
 
 
 
So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of 
 
institution that very little alteration has been made in them since the 
 
fourteenth or fifteenth century; adhering in this particular, as in all 
 
things else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to depart 
 
from antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole, favorable to 
 
morality and discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment 
 
without altering the ground. We thought that they were capable of receiving 
 
and meliorating, and above all of preserving, the accessions of science and 
 
literature, as the order of Providence should successively produce them. 
 
And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education (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 of funds and actions.
 
 
 
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 senates as much as at the loom and in the field.
 
 
 
The English people are satisfied that to the great the consolations of 
 
religion are as necessary as its instructions. They, too, are among the 
 
unhappy. They feel personal pain and domestic sorrow. In these they have no 
 
privilege, but are subject to pay their full contingent to the 
 
contributions levied on mortality. They want this sovereign balm under 
 
their gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less conversant about the 
 
limited wants of animal life, range without limit, and are diversified by 
 
infinite combinations, in the wild and unbounded regions of imagination. 
 
Some charitable dole is wanting to these our often very unhappy brethren to 
 
fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds which have nothing on earth to 
 
hope or fear; something to relieve in the killing languor and overlabored 
 
lassitude of those who have nothing to do; something to excite an appetite 
 
to existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures which may 
 
be bought where nature is not left to her own process, where even desire is 
 
anticipated, and therefore fruition defeated by meditated schemes and 
 
contrivances of delight; and no interval, no obstacle, is interposed 
 
between the wish and the accomplishment.
 
 
 
The people of England know how little influence the teachers of religion 
 
are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing, and how 
 
much less with the newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way 
 
assorted to those with whom they must associate, and over whom they must 
 
even exercise, in some cases, something like an authority. What must they 
 
think of that body of teachers if they see it in no part above the 
 
establishment of their domestic servants? If the poverty were voluntary, 
 
there might be some difference. Strong instances of self-denial operate 
 
powerfully on our minds, and a man who has no wants has obtained great 
 
freedom and firmness and even dignity. But as the mass of any description 
 
of men are but men, and their poverty cannot be voluntary, that disrespect 
 
which attends upon all lay poverty will not depart from the ecclesiastical. 
 
Our provident constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to 
 
instruct presumptuous ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent 
 
vice, should neither incur their contempt nor live upon their alms, nor 
 
will it tempt the rich to a neglect of the true medicine of their minds. 
 
For these reasons, whilst we provide first for the poor, and with a 
 
parental solicitude, we have not relegated religion (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 the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot 
 
exist.
 
 
 
When once the commonwealth has established the estates of the church as 
 
property, it can, consistently, hear nothing of the more or the less. "Too 
 
much" and "too little" are treason against property. What evil can arise 
 
from the quantity in any hand whilst the supreme authority has the full, 
 
sovereign superintendence over this, as over all property, to prevent every 
 
species of abuse, and, whenever it notably deviates, to give to it a 
 
direction agreeable to the purposes of its institution?
 
 
 
In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity toward those 
 
who are often the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love of the 
 
self-denial and mortification of the ancient church, that makes some look 
 
askance at the distinctions, and honors, and revenues which, taken from no 
 
person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are 
 
distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. 
 
Their language is in the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of 
 
hypocrisy. The people of England must think so when these praters affect to 
 
carry back the clergy to that primitive, evangelic poverty which, in the 
 
spirit, ought always to exist in them (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 first duty to protect.
 
 
 
It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you that those 
 
amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the cup of 
 
their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery of your church has 
 
proved a security to the possession of ours. It has roused the people. They 
 
see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription. 
 
It has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish 
 
enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious 
 
men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open 
 
violence and rapine. At home we behold similar beginnings. We are on our 
 
guard against similar conclusions.
 
 
 
I HOPE WE SHALL NEVER be so totally lost to all sense of the duties imposed 
 
upon us by the law of social union as, upon any pretext of public service, 
 
to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen. Who but a tyrant 
 
(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, to a state of indigence, depression, and contempt?
 
 
 
The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from the 
 
scraps and fragments of their own tables from which they have been so 
 
harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast to 
 
the harpies of usury. But to drive men from independence to live on alms is 
 
itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable condition to men in 
 
one state of life, and not habituated to other things, may, when all these 
 
circumstances are altered, be a dreadful revolution, and one to which a 
 
virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt except that which 
 
would demand the life of the offender. But to many minds this punishment of 
 
degradation and infamy is worse than death. Undoubtedly it is an infinite 
 
aggravation of this cruel suffering that the persons who were taught a 
 
double prejudice in favor of religion, by education and by the place they 
 
held in the administration of its functions, are to receive the remnants of 
 
their property as alms from the profane and impious hands of those who had 
 
plundered them of all the rest; to receive (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 the eyes of mankind.
 
 
 
But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in law, and 
 
not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the 
 
Palais Royal and the Jacobins that certain men had no right to the 
 
possessions which they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts, and 
 
the accumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that 
 
ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at 
 
pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify in every 
 
particular; that the goods they possess are not properly theirs but belong 
 
to the state which created the fiction; and we are therefore not to trouble 
 
ourselves with what they may suffer in their natural feelings and natural 
 
persons on account of what is done toward them in this their constructive 
 
character. Of what import is it under what names you injure men and deprive 
 
them of the just emoluments of a profession, in which they were not only 
 
permitted but encouraged by the state to engage, and upon the supposed 
 
certainty of which emoluments they had formed the plan of their lives, 
 
contracted debts, and led multitudes to an entire dependence upon them?
 
 
 
You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable 
 
distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of tyranny 
 
are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators, by 
 
their early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the 
 
crimes of which they have since been guilty or that they can commit, it is 
 
not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that 
 
would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and 
 
murder. The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations 
 
against the departed regal tyrants, who in former ages have vexed the 
 
world. They are thus bold, because they are safe from the dungeons and iron 
 
cages of their old masters. Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our 
 
own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes? Shall we 
 
not use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it with the same 
 
safety -- when to speak honest truth only requires a contempt of the 
 
opinions of those whose actions we abhor?
 
 
 
This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with what, 
 
on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts -- 
 
a regard to national faith. The enemies to property at first pretended a 
 
most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king's 
 
engagements with the public creditor. These professors of the rights of men 
 
are so busy in teaching others that they have not leisure to learn anything 
 
themselves; otherwise they would have known that it is to the property of 
 
the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the 
 
first and original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the 
 
citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The 
 
fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition or by descent or 
 
in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, were no part 
 
of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. They never so much as 
 
entered into his head when he made his bargain. He well knew that the 
 
public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing 
 
but the public estate; and it can have no public estate except in what it 
 
derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large. 
 
This was engaged, and nothing else could be engaged, to the public 
 
creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.
 
 
 
It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions caused by 
 
the extreme rigor and the extreme laxity of this new public faith which 
 
influenced in this transaction, and which influenced not according to the 
 
nature of the obligation, but to the description of the persons to whom it 
 
was engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of France are held 
 
valid in the National Assembly except its pecuniary engagements: acts of 
 
all others of the most ambiguous legality. The rest of the acts of that 
 
royal government are considered in so odious a light that to have a claim 
 
under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime. A pension, given as a 
 
reward for service to the state, is surely as good a ground of property as 
 
any security for money advanced to the state. It is better; for money is 
 
paid, and well paid, to obtain that service. We have, however, seen 
 
multitudes of people under this description in France who never had been 
 
deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers in the most 
 
arbitrary times, by this assembly of the rights of men robbed without 
 
mercy. They were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned with 
 
their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the country that 
 
now exists.
 
 
 
This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate persons. 
 
The Assembly, with perfect consistency it must be owned, is engaged in a 
 
respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the treaties made with 
 
other nations under the former government, and their committee is to report 
 
which of them they ought to ratify, and which not. By this means they have 
 
put the external fidelity of this virgin state on a par with its internal.
 
 
 
It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal 
 
government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of 
 
rewarding service and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative, than 
 
that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state, actual and 
 
possible. The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least 
 
allowed to the prerogative of the king of France or to the prerogative of 
 
any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign 
 
dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes far beyond 
 
the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation. The acts, however, 
 
of that dangerous power (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 it difficult to discover.
 
 
 
By the vast debt of France a great monied interest had insensibly grown up, 
 
and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in that 
 
kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the mutual 
 
convertibility of land into money, and of money into land, had always been 
 
a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more general and more 
 
strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of 
 
landed property held by the crown, and, by a maxim of the French law, held 
 
unalienably, the vast estates of the ecclesiastical corporations -- all 
 
these had kept the landed and monied interests more separated in France, 
 
less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species of property not 
 
so well disposed to each other as they are in this country.
 
 
 
The monied property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the 
 
people. They saw it connected with their distresses, and aggravating them. 
 
It was no less envied by the old landed interests, partly for the same 
 
reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it 
 
eclipsed, by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed 
 
pedigrees and naked titles of several among the nobility. Even when the 
 
nobility which represented the more permanent landed interest united 
 
themselves by marriage (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, 
 
held by that order.
 
 
 
In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare between the 
 
noble ancient landed interest and the new monied interest, the greatest, 
 
because the most applicable, strength was in the hands of the latter. The 
 
monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure, and its 
 
possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind. Being of a recent 
 
acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any novelties. It is therefore 
 
the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.
 
 
 
Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up with 
 
whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union -- I mean the 
 
political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing 
 
themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life 
 
and greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much cultivated, 
 
either by him or by the regent or the successors to the crown, nor were 
 
they engaged to the court by favors and emoluments so systematically as 
 
during the splendid period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. 
 
What they lost in the old court protection, they endeavored to make up by 
 
joining in a sort of incorporation of their own; to which the two academies 
 
of France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopedia, carried 
 
on by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little contribute.
 
 
 
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan 
 
for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued 
 
with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the 
 
propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of 
 
proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy 
 
progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their means. [22] 
 
What was not to be done toward their great end by any direct or immediate 
 
act might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To 
 
command that opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those 
 
who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and 
 
perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame. Many of them indeed 
 
stood high in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done them 
 
justice and in favor of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their 
 
peculiar principles. This was true liberality, which they returned by 
 
endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to 
 
themselves or their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, 
 
exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste 
 
than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a 
 
bigotry of their own, and they have learned to talk against monks with the 
 
spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The 
 
resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and 
 
wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry 
 
to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who 
 
did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of 
 
their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power 
 
of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution 
 
which would strike at property, liberty, and life.
 
 
 
The desultory and faint persecution carried on against them, more from 
 
compliance with form and decency than with serious resentment, neither 
 
weakened their strength nor relaxed their efforts. The issue of the whole 
 
was that, what with opposition, and what with success, a violent and 
 
malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world, had taken an 
 
entire possession of their minds and rendered their whole conversation, 
 
which otherwise would have been pleasing and instructive, perfectly 
 
disgusting. A spirit of cabal, intrigue, and proselytism pervaded all their 
 
thoughts, words, and actions. And as controversial zeal soon turns its 
 
thoughts on force, they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence 
 
with foreign princes, in hopes through their authority, which at first they 
 
flattered, they might bring about the changes they had in view. To them it 
 
was indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the 
 
thunderbolt of despotism or by the earthquake of popular commotion. The 
 
correspondence between this cabal and the late king of Prussia will throw 
 
no small light upon the spirit of all their proceedings. [23] For the same 
 
purpose for which they intrigued with princes, they cultivated, in a 
 
distinguished manner, the monied interest of France; and partly through the 
 
means furnished by those whose peculiar offices gave them the most 
 
extensive and certain means of communication, they carefully occupied all 
 
the avenues to opinion.
 
 
 
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have 
 
great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these 
 
writers with the monied interest [24] had no small effect in removing the 
 
popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These 
 
writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal 
 
for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered 
 
hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of 
 
priesthood. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to 
 
unite, in favor of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate 
 
poverty.
 
 
 
As these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all the late 
 
transactions, their junction and politics will serve to account, not upon 
 
any principles of law or of policy, but as a cause, for the general fury 
 
with which all the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations has been 
 
attacked; and the great care which, contrary to their pretended principles, 
 
has been taken of a monied interest originating from the authority of the 
 
crown. All the envy against wealth and power was artificially directed 
 
against other descriptions of riches. On what other principle than that 
 
which I have stated can we account for an appearance so extraordinary and 
 
unnatural as that of the ecclesiastical possessions, which had stood so 
 
many successions of ages and shocks of civil violences, and were girded at 
 
once by justice and by prejudice, being applied to the payment of debts 
 
comparatively recent, invidious, and contracted by a decried and subverted 
 
government?
 
 
 
WAS the public estate a sufficient stake for the public debts? Assume that 
 
it was not, and that a loss must be incurred somewhere. -- When the only 
 
estate lawfully possessed, and which the contracting parties had in 
 
contemplation at the time in which their bargain was made, happens to fail, 
 
who according to the principles of natural and legal equity ought to be the 
 
sufferer? Certainly it ought to be either the party who trusted or the 
 
party who persuaded him to trust, or both, and not third parties who had no 
 
concern with the transaction. Upon any insolvency they ought to suffer who 
 
are weak enough to lend upon bad security, or they who fraudulently held 
 
out a security that was not valid. Laws are acquainted with no other rules 
 
of decision. But by the new institute of the rights of men, the only 
 
persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be 
 
saved harmless: those are to answer the debt who neither were lenders nor 
 
borrowers, mortgagers nor mortgagees.
 
 
 
What had the clergy to do with these transactions? What had they to do with 
 
any public engagement further than the extent of their own debt? To that, 
 
to be sure, their estates were bound to the last acre. Nothing can lead 
 
more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public 
 
confiscation, with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention 
 
to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy. The body of 
 
confiscators, true to that monied interest for which they were false to 
 
every other, have found the clergy competent to incur a legal debt. Of 
 
course, they declared them legally entitled to the property which their 
 
power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate implied, recognizing 
 
the rights of those persecuted citizens in the very act in which they were 
 
thus grossly violated.
 
 
 
If, as I said, any persons are to make good deficiencies to the public 
 
creditor, besides the public at large, they must be those who managed the 
 
agreement. Why, therefore, are not the estates of all the 
 
comptrollers-general confiscated? [25] Why not those of the long succession 
 
of ministers, financiers, and bankers who have been enriched whilst the 
 
nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels? Why is not 
 
the estate of M. Laborde declared forfeited rather than of the archbishop 
 
of Paris, who has had nothing to do in the creation or in the jobbing of 
 
the public funds? Or, if you must confiscate old landed estates in favor of 
 
the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined to one description? I do not 
 
know whether the expenses of the Duke de Choiseul have left anything of the 
 
infinite sums which he had derived from the bounty of his master during the 
 
transactions of a reign which contributed largely by every species of 
 
prodigality in war and peace to the present debt of France. If any such 
 
remains, why is not this confiscated? I remember to have been in Paris 
 
during the time of the old government. I was there just after the Duke 
 
d'Aiguillon had been snatched (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, [26](2) the cardinal archbishop of Rouen, was far more 
 
laudable and far more public-spirited. Can one hear of the proscription of 
 
such persons and the confiscation of their effects without indignation and 
 
horror? He is not a man who does not feel such emotions on such occasions. 
 
He does not deserve the name of a freeman who will not express them.
 
 
 
Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in 
 
property. None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they established 
 
crudelem illam hastam in all their auctions of rapine, have ever set up to 
 
sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount. It must 
 
be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity that what was done by 
 
them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood. Their passions were 
 
inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings confused with the 
 
spirit of revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions 
 
and retaliations of blood and rapine. They were driven beyond all bounds of 
 
moderation by the apprehension of the return of power, with the return of 
 
property, to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of 
 
forgiveness.
 
 
 
These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the elements of tyranny, and 
 
were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise all sorts of cruelties 
 
on each other without provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of 
 
color over their injustice. They considered the vanquished party as 
 
composed of traitors who had borne arms, or otherwise had acted with 
 
hostility, against the commonwealth. They regarded them as persons who had 
 
forfeited their property by their crimes. With you, in your improved state 
 
of the human mind, there was no such formality. You seized upon five 
 
millions sterling of annual rent and turned forty or fifty thousand human 
 
creatures out of their houses, because "such was your pleasure". The tyrant 
 
Harry the Eighth of England, as he was not better enlightened than the 
 
Roman Mariuses and Sullas, and had not studied in your new schools, did not 
 
know what an effectual instrument of despotism was to be found in that 
 
grand magazine of offensive weapons, the rights of men. When he resolved to 
 
rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the 
 
ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a commission to examine into the 
 
crimes and abuses which prevailed in those communities. As it might be 
 
expected, his commission reported truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods. 
 
But truly or falsely, it reported abuses and offenses. However, as abuses 
 
might be corrected, as every crime of persons does not infer a forfeiture 
 
with regard to communities, and as property, in that dark age, was not 
 
discovered to be a creature of prejudice, all those abuses (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, Liberality, the Rights of Men".
 
 
 
I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny which no voice has 
 
hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors, yet in these false 
 
colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice. The power which was 
 
above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame. Whilst shame 
 
keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will 
 
moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.
 
 
 
I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections with our 
 
political poet on that occasion, and will pray to avert the omen whenever 
 
these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his view or his 
 
imagination: --
 
 
 
May no such storm
 
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform. 
 
Tell me (my Muse) what monstrous dire offense,
 
What crimes could any Christian king incense
 
To such a rage? Was't luxury, or lust?
 
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?
 
Were these their crimes? they were his own much more,
 
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor. [27]
 
 
 
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. [28]
 
 
 
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 them to the fullest extent of 
 
their demand.
 
 
 
If this representation of Mons. Necker was false, then the Assembly are in 
 
the highest degree culpable for having forced the king to accept as his 
 
minister and, since the king's deposition, for having employed as their 
 
minister a man who had been capable of abusing so notoriously the 
 
confidence of his master and their own, in a matter, too, of the highest 
 
moment and directly appertaining to his particular office. But if the 
 
representation was exact (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 partial and cruel confiscation?
 
 
 
Was that contribution refused on a pretext of privilege, either on the part 
 
of the clergy or on that of the nobility? No, certainly. As to the clergy, 
 
they even ran before the wishes of the third order. Previous to the meeting 
 
of the states, they had in all their instructions expressly directed their 
 
deputies to renounce every immunity which put them upon a footing distinct 
 
from the condition of their fellow subjects. In this renunciation the 
 
clergy were even more explicit than the nobility.
 
 
 
But let us suppose that the deficiency had remained at the fifty-six 
 
millions (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 
 
[29] 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 purpose of the managers.
 
 
 
Perhaps persons unacquainted with the state of France, on hearing the 
 
clergy and the noblesse were privileged in point of taxation, may be led to 
 
imagine that, previous to the Revolution, these bodies had contributed 
 
nothing to the state. This is a great mistake. They certainly did not 
 
contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the 
 
commons. They both, however, contributed largely. Neither nobility nor 
 
clergy enjoyed any exemption from the excise on consumable commodities, 
 
from duties of custom, or from any of the other numerous indirect 
 
impositions, which in France, as well as here, make so very large a 
 
proportion of all payments to the public. The noblesse paid the capitation. 
 
They paid also a land-tax, called the twentieth penny, to the height 
 
sometimes of three, sometimes of four, shillings in the pound -- both of 
 
them direct impositions of no light nature and no trivial produce. The 
 
clergy of the provinces annexed by conquest to France (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 in the old provinces did not pay the 
 
capitation, but they had redeemed themselves at the expense of about 24 
 
millions, or a little more than a million sterling. They were exempted from 
 
the twentieths; but then they made free gifts, they contracted debts for 
 
the state, and they were subject to some other charges, the whole computed 
 
at about a thirteenth part of their clear income. They ought to have paid 
 
annually about forty thousand pounds more to put them on a par with the 
 
contribution of the nobility.
 
 
 
When the terrors of this tremendous proscription hung over the clergy, they 
 
made an offer of a contribution through the archbishop of Aix, which, for 
 
its extravagance, ought not to have been accepted. But it was evidently and 
 
obviously more advantageous to the public creditor than anything which 
 
could rationally be promised by the confiscation. Why was it not accepted? 
 
The reason is plain: there was no desire that the church should be brought 
 
to serve the state. The service of the state was made a pretext to destroy 
 
the church. In their way to the destruction of the church they would not 
 
scruple to destroy their country; and they have destroyed it. One great end 
 
in the project would have been defeated if the plan of extortion had been 
 
adopted in lieu of the scheme of confiscation. The new landed interest 
 
connected with the new republic, and connected with it for its very being, 
 
could not have been created. This was among the reasons why that 
 
extravagant ransom was not accepted.
 
 
 
THE madness of the project of confiscation, on the plan that was first 
 
pretended, soon became apparent. To bring this unwieldy mass of landed 
 
property, enlarged by the confiscation of all the vast landed domain of the 
 
crown, at once into market was obviously to defeat the profits proposed by 
 
the confiscation by depreciating the value of those lands and, indeed, of 
 
all the landed estates throughout France. Such a sudden diversion of all 
 
its circulating money from trade to land must be an additional mischief 
 
What step was taken? Did the Assembly, on becoming sensible of the 
 
inevitable ill effects of their projected sale, revert to the offers of the 
 
clergy? No distress could oblige them to travel in a course which was 
 
disgraced by any appearance of justice. Giving over all hopes from a 
 
general immediate sale, another project seems to have succeeded. They 
 
proposed to take stock in exchange for the church lands. In that project 
 
great difficulties arose in equalizing the objects to be exchanged. Other 
 
obstacles also presented themselves, which threw them back again upon some 
 
project of sale. The municipalities had taken an alarm. They would not hear 
 
of transferring the whole plunder of the kingdom to the stockholders in 
 
Paris. Many of those municipalities had been (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 
 
paper-mill, of their fictitious wealth.
 
 
 
The spoil of the church was now become the only resource of all their 
 
operations in finance, the vital principle of all their politics, the sole 
 
security for the existence of their power. It was necessary by all, even 
 
the most violent means, to put every individual on the same bottom, and to 
 
bind the nation in one guilty interest to uphold this act and the authority 
 
of those by whom it was done. In order to force the most reluctant into a 
 
participation of their pillage, they rendered their paper circulation 
 
compulsory in all payments. Those who consider the general tendency of 
 
their schemes to this one object as a center, and a center from which 
 
afterwards all their measures radiate, will not think that I dwell too long 
 
upon this part of the proceedings of the National Assembly.
 
 
 
To cut off all appearance of connection between the crown and public 
 
justice, and to bring the whole under implicit obedience to the dictators 
 
in Paris, the old independent judicature of the parliaments, with all its 
 
merits and all its faults, was wholly abolished. Whilst the parliaments 
 
existed, it was evident that the people might some time or other come to 
 
resort to them and rally under the standard of their ancient laws. It 
 
became, however, a matter of consideration that the magistrates and 
 
officers, in the courts now abolished, had purchased their places at a very 
 
high rate, for which, as well as for the duty they performed, they received 
 
but a very low return of interest. Simple confiscation is a boon only for 
 
the clergy; to the lawyers some appearances of equity are to be observed, 
 
and they are to receive compensation to an immense amount. Their 
 
compensation becomes part of the national debt, for the liquidation of 
 
which there is the one exhaustless fund. The lawyers are to obtain their 
 
compensation in the new church paper, which is to march with the new 
 
principles of judicature and legislature. The dismissed magistrates are to 
 
take their share of martyrdom with the ecclesiastics, or to receive their 
 
own property from such a fund, and in such a manner, as all those who have 
 
been seasoned with the ancient principles of jurisprudence and had been the 
 
sworn guardians of property must look upon with horror. Even the clergy are 
 
to receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper, which is 
 
stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege and with the symbols of 
 
their own ruin, or they must starve. So violent an outrage upon credit, 
 
property, and liberty as this compulsory paper currency has seldom been 
 
exhibited by the alliance of bankruptcy and tyranny, at any time or in any 
 
nation.
 
 
 
In the course of all these operations, at length comes out the grand 
 
arcanum -- that in reality, and in a fair sense, the lands of the church 
 
(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 tyranny, that is, of being a foe to 
 
mankind?
 
 
 
I do not know under what description to class the present ruling authority 
 
in France. It affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct 
 
train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the 
 
present I admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of what it 
 
pretends to. I reprobate no form of government merely upon abstract 
 
principles. There may be situations in which the purely democratic form 
 
will become necessary. There may be some (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