CHAPTER VI.

Portrait of the true Legislator-Sketch of Rousseau-Burke's ridicule of the meanness of Republicanism-Patriotic Stock-jobbing.

"The

THE machinations of the Parisian men of letters had long before attracted the eye of Europe. literary cabal," says Burke, "had, some years ago, formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion! This object they pur.. sued 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 thence, by an easy process, with a spirit of persecution according to their means. * * Those atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own. They have learned to talk against monks in the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The re

sources of intrigue are called in to supply the defect

of argument. To this system of literary monopoly

was joined an unremitting industry to blacken all those who did not hold to their faction. * * 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, that through their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring about the changes which they had in view. To them it was indifferent, whether those changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism, or by the earthquake of popular commotion.

Those writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, while, in their satires, they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, the nobility, and the priesthood. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty."

In this masterly sketch we have the whole graduated progress of overthrow, the outline of that whole hideous dance of Death, in which the revolutionary principle, flaunting along in a hundred different characters, throughout the whole masquerade had one perpetual partner-Homicide! We, too, have the warning, and upon our own heads be the peril.

One of the common subterfuges for this defiance of justice, was, that the higher orders of France had exempted themselves from all share in bearing the bur

dens of the State. The declaimers in England echoed the subterfuge until they had constructed it into a charge. But the superior knowledge of Burke struck away this pretext for insulting the ruined fortunes of the peerage and the priesthood. "They certainly," said he, "did not contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the Commons. They both, however, contributed largely. Neither the nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the excise on consumable commodities, from duties of customs, or from any of the 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 slight 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 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 income."

On another favourite point of declamation, he illus

trates the true principle on which all Reform of public institutions ought to proceed. The destruction of the monasteries had been harangued into a merit, which more than atoned for all the possible evils of change; it was the cloak that covered the whole contingent multitude of revolutionary sins. Burke shews finely that Jacobinism was not wiser in this instance than it was honest, and that in the ruin even of the monastic establishments, it had the fortune of committing at once a blunder and a crime. The whole passage is a noble specimen of reasoning and eloquence. "A politician, to do great things, looks for a power-what our workmen call a purchase-and if he finds that power in politics, as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of a politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honour, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow as they list. Those institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in

their use. He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country. On the first view of the subject, a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank, productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. Those energies always existed in nature, and they were always discernible. They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children; until contemplative ability, uniting with practic skill, subdued them into use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred thousands a-year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using the men but by converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to account, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift