2 Through the fame plan of conformity to nature in our artificial inftitutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful inftincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived feveral other, and thofe no fmall benefits, from confidering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the prefence of canonized fore-fathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to mifrule and excefs, is tempered with an awful gavity. This idea of a liberal defcent infpires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upftart infolence almost inevitably adhering to and difgracing those who are the first acquir ers of any diftinction. By this means, our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It has a pedigree and illustrating anceftors. It has its bearings and its enfigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental infcriptious; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil inftitutions 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 defcended. All your fophifters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preferve a rational and manly freedom than the courfe that we have purfued, who bave chofen our nature rather than our speculations, our breafts rather than our intentions, fot the great confervatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. "You might, if you pleafed, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correfpondent dignity. Your privileges though difcontinued, were not loft to memory. Your conftitution, it is true, whilft you were out of poffeffon, fuffered waste and dilapidation; but you poffeffed in fome parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable caftle. You might have repaired thofe walls; you might have built on thofe old foundations. Your conftitution was fufpended before it was perfected; but you had the clements of a conftitution very nearly as good as could be withed. In your old ftates you poffeffed that variety of parts correfponding with the various defcript ons of which your community was happily compofed; you had all that combination, and all that oppofition of interefts, you had an action and counteraction which in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal fruggle of difcordant powers, draws out the harmony of the univerfe. Thefe oppofed and conflicting interefts, which you confider as fo great a blemish in your old and in our prefent conftitution, interpofe a falutary check to all precipitate refolutions: They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of neceffity; they make all change a subject of com promife, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the fore evil of harfh, crude, unqualified reformations; aed rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable. Through that diverfity of members and interefts, general liberty had as many fecurities as there were feparate views in the feyeral orders; whilft by prefling down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the feparate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places. You had all these advantages in your your ancient states: but you chofe to ors; that you were refolved to refume your ancient privileges, whilst you preferved the fpirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourfelves, and not clearly difcerning the almost obliterated conftitution of your anceftors, 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 ftate-by following wife examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the caufe of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have fhamed defpotiím from the earth, by fhewing that freedom was not only reconcileable, but, as when well difciplined 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 fpirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and recruit that nobility; you would have had a protected, fatisfied, aborious, and obedient people, taught to feek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which confts the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monftrous fiction, which, by infpiring falfe ideas and vain expectations into men defined to travel in the obfcure walk of laborious ife, ferves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life eftablishes, as much for the benefit of thofe whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to condition more fplendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and eafy career of feli city and glory laid open to you, beyond any thing recorded in the hiftory of the world; but you have shewn 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 defpife all their predeceffors, and all their contemporaries, and even to defpife themselves, until the moment in which they be came truly defpicable. By following thofe falfe lights, France has bought undifguifed calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchafed the moft unequivocal bleflings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not facrificed her virtue to her intereft; but fhe has abandoned her intereft, that he might proflitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by eftablishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactnefs, fome rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in feverer manners, and a fyftem of a more auftere and mafculine morality. France, when fhe let loofe the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious diffolutenefs in manners, and of an infolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if he were communicating fome privilege, or laying open fome fecluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that ufually were the difeafe 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 moft potent topics. She has fanctified the dark fufpicious maxims of tyrannous diftruft; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called, The delufive plaufibilities of moral politiplans. Sovereigns will confider thofe who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as fubverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their deftruction, by leading their eafy good nature, under fpecious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithlefs men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing elfe) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your parliament of Paris told your King, that in calling the ftates together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excefs of their zeal in providing for the fupport of the throne. It is right that these men fhould hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel has brought on their fovereign 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 thefe provifions, preparations, and precautions, which diftinguish 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 thefe, they have feen the medicine of the ftate corrupted into its poifon. They have feen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and infult, than ever any people has been known to rife against the moft illegal uforper or the most fanguinary tyrant. Their refiflance was made to concellion; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities. "This was unnatural. The reft is in order. They have found their punilhment in their fuccefs. Laws over turned; tribunals fubverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished: a church pillaged, and a ftate not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; kingdom; every thing human and divine facrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the confequence; and to crown all, the paper fecurities of new, precarious, tottering power, the difcredited paper fecurities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the fupport of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized fpecies that reprefent the lafting conventional credit of mankind, which difappeared and hid themfelves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whofe creatures and reprefentatives they are, was fyftematically fubverted. "Were all these dreadful things neceffary? were they the inevitable refults of the defperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the quiet fhore of a tranquil and profperous liberty? No! nothing like it, The fresh ruins of France, which fhock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devaftation of civil war; they are the fad but inftructive monuments of rash and ignorant council in time of profound peace. They are the display of inconfiderate and prefumptuous, because unrefifted and irrefiftible authority. The perfons who have thus fquandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the perfons who have made this prodigal and wild wafte of public evils (the laft ftake referved for the ultimate ranfom of the ftate) have met in their progrefs with little or rather with no oppofition at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal proceflion than the progress of a war. Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid every thing level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they fhed in the caufe of the country they have ruined. They have made no facrifices to their projects of greater confequence than their fh-e-buckles, whilst they were imprifoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and diftrefs, thousands of wor thy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result. of fear. It has been the effect of their fenfe of perfect fafety, in authorising treafons, robberies, rapes, affaffinations, flaughters, and burnings throughout their haraffed 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 confider the compofition of the National Affembly; I do not mean its formal conftitution, which, as it now. ftands, is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which in a great meafure it is compofed, which is of ten thoufand times greater confequence than all the formalities in the world. If we were to know nothing of this Affembly but by its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination any thing more venerable. In that light the mind of an enquirer; fubdued by fuch an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a focus, would paufe and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst afpect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only myfterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial inftitution whatsoever, can make the men of whom any system of authority is compofed, any other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them. Capacities beyond thefe the people have not to give. Virtue and wifdom may be the objects of their choice; but their choice confers neither the one nor the other, on thofe upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the engagement of nature, they have not the promile of revelalation for any fuch powers. "After I had read over the lift of the perfons and defcriptions ele&ted into the Tiers Libat, nothing which they they afterwards did could appear aftonishing. Among them, indeed, I faw fome of known rank; fome of fhining talents; but of any practical experience in the ftate, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. But whatever the diftinguished few may have been, it is the fubftance and mass of the body which conftitutes its character, and muft fimally determine its direction. In all bodies, thofe who will lead, must alfo, in a confiderable degree, follow. They must conform their propofitions to the tafte, talent, and difpofition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an Affembly is viciously or feebly compofed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a fupreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reafon cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talents diffeminated through it from becoming only the expert inftruments of abfurd projects! If, what is the more likely event, inBead of that unusual degree of virtue, they should be actuated by finifter ambition and a luft of meretricious glory, then the feeble part of the Af. fembly, to whom at firft they conform, becomes in its turn the dupe and inftrument of their defigns. In this political traffic the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become fubfervient to the worst defigns of their leaders. "To fecure any degree of fobriety in the propofitions made by the leaders in any public affembly, they ought to refpect, in fome degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct. To be led any otherwife than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at leaft for judges; they muft alfo be judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing can fecure a fteady and moderate conduct in fuch affemblies, but that the body of them fhould be refpectably compofed, in point of condition in life, of peima nent property, of education, and of fuch habits as enlarge and liberalize the understanding.. In the calling of the ftates-general of France, the first thing which struck me, was a great departure from the ancient courfe. I found the reprefentation for the Third Eftate composed of fix hundred perfons. They were equal in number to the reprefentatives of both the other orders. If the orders were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the confideration of the expence, be of much moment. But when it became apparent that the three orders were to be melted down into one, the policy and neceffary effect of this numerous reprefentation became obvious. A very fmall defertion from either of the other two orders muft throw the power of both into the hands of the third. In fact, the whole power of the state was foon refolved into that body. Its due compofition became therefore of infinitely the greater importance. "Judge, Sir, of my furprife, when I found that a very great proportion of the Affembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was compofed of practitioners in the law. It was compofed not of diftinguished magiftrates, who had given pledges to their country of their fcience, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned profeffors in univerfities; --but for the far greater part, as it muft in fuch a nun.ber, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely inftrumental members of the profef fion. There were diftinguifhed exceptions; but the general compofition was of obfcure provincial advocates, of ftewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the minifters of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village' vexation. From the moment I read the lift 1 faw diftinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow. On |