virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whofe imitation you afpired. Refpecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to confider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born fervile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expence of your honour, 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 flaves, fuddenly 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 were ill fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wifer 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 romantick fentiments of fidelity, honour, and loyalty; that events had been unfavourable to you, but that you were not enflaved through any illiberal or fervile difpofition; that in your most devoted fubmiffion, you were actuated by a principle of publick spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the perfon of your king? Had you made it to be understood, that in the delufion of this amiable errour further than your had you gone wife ancestors; that you were relolved to refume

your ancient privileges, whilft you preferved the fpirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourselves, and not clearly difcerning the almoft obliterated conftitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its prefent state-by following wife 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 defpotism from the earth, by fhewing that freedom was not only reconcileable, but as, when well disciplined, it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppreffive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free conftitution; a potent monarchy; a difciplined 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, fatisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to feek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which confifts the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monftrous fiction, which, by in

fpiring

fpiring false ideas and vain expectations into men deftined to travel in the obfcure walk of laborious life, ferves only to aggravate and imbitter 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 an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more fplendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond any thing recorded in the history of the world; but you have fhewn that difficulty is good for man.

Compute your gains: fee what is got by thofe extravagant and prefumptuous fpeculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predeceffors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they became truly defpicable. By following those falfe lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal bleflings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not facrificed her virtue to her intereft; but she has aban doned her intereft, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabrick of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness fome rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations

of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more auftere and masculine morality. France, when she let loofe the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious diffoluteness in manners, and of an infolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating fome privilege, or laying open fome fecluded 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 difgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and difarmed it of its most potent topicks. She has fanctified the dark fufpicious maxims of tyrannous diftruft; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delufive plausibilities, of moral politicians. Sovereigns will confider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as fubverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their deftruction, by leading their easy goodnature, under fpecious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithlefs men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king, that in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal

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 fhould bear their part in the ruin which their counfe has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such fanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rafhly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect those provifions, preparations and precautions, which dif tinguish benevolence from imbecility; and without which no man can answer for the falutary 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 poifon. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and infult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the moft illegal ufurper, or the most fanguinary tyrant. Their refiftance was made to conceffion; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The reft is in order. They have found their punishment in their fuccefs. Laws overturned; tribunals fubverted; induftry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the conftitution of the king