mous and shameless act of profcription. It has opened, and will more and more open their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind, and the narrow liberality of fentiment of infidious men, which commencing in close hypocrify and fraud have ended in open violence and rapine. At home we behold fimilar beginnings. We are on our guard against fimilar conclufions.

I hope we shall never be fo totally loft to all fenfe of the duties impofed upon us by the law of focial union, as, upon any pretext of public fervice, to confifcate the goods of a fingle unoffending citizen. Who but a tyrant (a name expreffive of every thing which can vitiate and degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccufed, unheard, untried, by whole defcriptions, by hundreds and thousands together? who that had not loft every trace of humanity could think of casting down men of exalted rank and facred function, some of them of an age to call at once for reverence and compaffion, of cafting them down from the highest fituation in the commonwealth, wherein they were maintained by their own landed property, to a ftate of indigence, depreffion and contempt ?

The confifcators truly have made fome allowance to their victims from the fcraps and fragments of their own tables from which they have been fo harfhly driven, and which have been fo bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies of ufury. But to drive men from independence to live on alms is itfelf 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 thefe 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 worfe than death. Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel fuffering, that the perfons who were taught a double prejudice in favour of religion, by education and by the place they held in the adminiftration of its functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and impious hands of thofe

who

who had plundered them of all the reft; to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the charitable contributions of the faithful, but from the infolent tendernefs of known and avowed Atheism, the maintenance. of religion, measured out to them on the ftandard of the contempt in which it is held; and for the purpose of rendering thofe who receive the allowance vile and of no estimation in the eyes of mankind.

But this act of feizure of property, it feems, is a judge-, ment in law, and not a confifcation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the Palais Royale, and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the poffeffions which they held under law, usage, the decifions of courts, and the accumulated prefcription of a thousand years. They fay that ecclefiaftics are fictitious perfons, creatures of the ftate; whom at pleasure they may deftroy, and of courfe limit and modify in every particular; that the goods they poffefs are not properly theirs, but belong to the ftate which created the fiction; and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves with what they may fuffer in their natural feelings and natural perfons, on account of what is done towards them in this their constructive character. Of what import is it, under what names you injure men, and deprive them of the juft emoluments of a profeffion, in which they were not only permitted but encouraged by the ftate to engage; and upon the fuppofed 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 miferable diftinction of perfons with any long difcuffion. The arguments of tyranny are as contempti ble as its force is dreadful. Had not your confifcators by their early crimes obtained a power which fecures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have fince been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the fyllogifm of the logician but the 1h of the executioner that would have refuted a fophiftry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The fophiftic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants who in former ages have vexed the

world.

world. They are thus bold, because they are fafe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old mafters. Shal we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we fee them acting worfe tragedies under our eyes? fhall we not use the fame liberty that they do, when we can ufe it with the fame fafety? 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 firft covered with what, on the fyftem 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 fcrupulous anxiety for keeping the king's engagements with the public creditor. These profeffors of the rights of men are fo bufy in teaching others that they have not leisure to learn any thing themselves; otherwife 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 fociety is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, fuperior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether poffeffed by acquifition, or by defcenty or in virtue of a participation in the goods of fome commu→ nity, were no part of the creditor's fecurity, expreffed or implied. They never fo much as entered into his head when he made his bargain. He well knew that the public, whether reprefented by a monarch, or by a fenate, can pledge nothing but the public eftate; and it can have no public eftate, except, in what it derives from a just and proportioned impofition upon the citizens at large. This was engaged, and nothing elfe could be engaged to the public creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

It is impoffible to avoid fome obfervation on the contradictions caufed by the extreme rigour and the extreme laxity of the new public faith, which influenced in this tranfaction, and which influenced not according to the nature of the obligation, but to the defcription of the perfons to whom it was engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of France are held valid in the National Affembly, except its pecuniary engagements;

acts of all others of the most ambiguous legality. The reft of the acts of that royal government are confidered in fo odious a light, that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a fort of crime. A pension, given as a reward for fervice to the state, is furely as good a ground of property as any fecurity for money advanced to the ftate. It is a better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that fervice. We have however feen multitudes of people under this description in France, who never had been deprived of their allowances by the moft arbitrary minifters, in the most arbitrary times, by this affembly of the rights of men, robbed without mercy. They were told, in anfwer 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 perfons. The affembly, with perfect confiftency it must be owned, is engaged in a refpectable 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 ftate on a par with its internal.

It is not eafy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal government should not, of the two, rather have poffeffed 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 poffible. The treafure of the nation, of all things, has been the leaft 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 fovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes far beyond the truft even of a temporary and occafional taxation. The acts however of that dangerous power (the diftinctive mark of a boundless defpotifm) have been alone held facred. Whence arofe this preference given by a democratic affembly 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 inconfiftency;

nor

nor can partial favour be accounted for upon equitable principles. But the contradiction and partiality which admit no juftification, are not the lefs without an adequate caufe; and that cause I do not think it difficult to discover.

By the vast debt of France a great monied interest had infenfibly grown up, and with it a great power. By the ancient ufages 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 fettlements, rather more general and more strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mafs of landed property held by the crown, and by a maxim of the French law held unalienably, the vast eftates of the ecclefiaftic corporations,-all thefe had kept the landed and monied interefts more feparated in France, lefs mifcible, and the owners of the two diftin& fpecies of property not fo well difpofed 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 faw it connected with their diftreffes, and aggravating them. It was no less envied by the old landed interefts, partly for the fame reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it eclipfed, by the splendour of an oftentatious luxury, the unendowed pedigrees and naked titles of feveral among the nobility. Even when the nobility, which reprefented the more permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage (which fometimes was the cafe) with the other defcription, the wealth which faved the family from ruin, was fuppofed to contaminate and degrade it. Thus the enmities and heart-burnings of thefe parties were encreafed even by the ufual means by which difcord is made to cease, and quarrels are turned into friendship. In the mean time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble or newly noble, encreased with its caufe. They felt with refentment an inferiority, the grounds of which they did not acknowledge. There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend themfelves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of this