tical world, from the reciprocal ftruggle of difcordant powers, draws out the harmony of the univerfe. Thefe oppofed and conflicting interefts, which you confidered as fo great a blemish in your old and in our prefent conftitution, interpose a falutary check to all precipitate refolutions; They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of neceflity; they make all change a subject of compromife, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the fore evil of harfh, 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 interefts, general liberty had as many fecurities as there were separate views in the feveral orders; whilft by preffing 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 antient ftates; but you chofe to act as if you had never been moulded into civil fociety, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by defpifing every thing that belonged to you. You fet up your trade without a capital. If the laft generations of your country appeared without much luftre in your eyes, you might have paffed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for thofe ancestors, your imaginations E 2 would would have realized in them a ftandard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour and you would have rifen with the example to whofe imitation you afpired. Refpecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to refpect yourselves. You would not have chofen 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 excufe to your apologists here for feveral enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be reprefented as a gang of Maroon flaves, fuddenly broke loofe from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accuftomed and 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 mifled to your difadvantage by your high and romantic 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 public fpirit, 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 error you had gone further than your wife ancestors; that you were refolved to refume your antient privileges, whilst you preferved the fpirit of your antient and your recent recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourfelves, 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 antient 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 wifdom 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 fhamed defpotifin 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 disciplined 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 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 monstrous fiction, which, by infpiring falfe 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, E 3 inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life eftablishes as much for the benefit of thofe whom it muft leave in an humble ftate, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more fplendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and eafy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond any thing recorded in the history 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 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 bleffings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not facrificed her virtue to her intereft; but fhe has abandoned her intereft, that she might prostitute 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 exactness 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 prac tices; tices; 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 most 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 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 destruction, by leading their eafy goodnature, 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 states 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 mon should hide their heads. It is right that they fhould bear their part in the ruin which their counfel has brought on their fovereign and their country. Such fanguine declarations tend to lull authority afleep; to encourage it rafhly to engage in perilous adventures of M a |