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"Still as you rise, the state exalted too, "Finds no distemper whilft 'tis chang'd by you; "Chang'd like the world's great scene, when without " noife

"The rising fun night's vulgar lights destroys."

These disturbers were not so much like men ufurping power, as asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it fuffered. I do not say (God forbid) I do not say, that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I faid, our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condés, and Colignis. Such the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not wholly without some of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at, to see how very foon France, when she had a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any na

tion. Why? Because, among all their massacres, they

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they had not flain the mind in their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous fenfe of glory and emulation, was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and inflamed. The organs also of the state, however shattered, existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the rewards, all the distinctions, remained. But your present confufion, like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this generation will quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters. Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermoft. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of fociety, by setting up in the air what the folidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The associations of taylors and carpenters, of which the republick (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation, into which, by the worst of ufurpations, an ufurpation on the prerogatives of nature, you attempt to force them.

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The chancellor of France at the opening of the states, said, in a tone of oratorial flourish, that all occupations were honourable. If he meant only, that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the truth. But in asserting, that any thing is honourable, we imply some diftinction in its favour. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any perfon-to say nothing of a number of other more fervile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to fuffer oppreffion from the state; but the state fuffers oppreffion, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.*

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• Ecclefiafticus, chap. xxxviii. verse 24, 25. "The wisdom " of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he "that hath little business shall become wife."-" How can he

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get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the "goad; that driveth oxen; and is occupied in their labours; " and whose talk is of bullocks?"

Ver. 27. "So every carpenter and work-master that laboureth " night and day," &c.

Ver. 33. "They shall not be fought for in publick counsel, " nor fit high in the congregation: they shall not fit on the judges "seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment: they cannot " declare justice and judgment, and they shall not be found " where parables are spoken."

Ver. 34.

"But they will maintain the state of the world."

I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that fophiftical captious spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for every general observation or fentinent, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions, which reason will prefume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine, that I wish to confine power, authority, and diftinction to blood, and names, and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or prefumptive. Whereever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profeffion or trade, the paffport of Heaven to human place and honour. Woe to the country which would madly and impioufly reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity every thing formed to diffuse luftre and glory around a state. Woe to that country too, that passing into the opposite extreme, confiders a low education, a mean contracted view of things, a fordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to command. Every thing ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man. No rotation; no appoint

I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican church (till lately) has confidered it, or apocryphal, as here it is taken. I am fure it contains a great deal of fenfe, and truth.

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ment by lot; no mode of election operating in the fpirit of fortition or rotation, can be generally good in a government converfant in extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to accommodate the one to the other. I do not hefitate to say, that the road to eminence and power, from obfcure condition, ought not to be made too eafy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through fome fort of probation. The. temple of honour ought to be seated on an emi. nence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not reprefent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the reprefentation. It must be represented too in great maffes of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characteristick essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the poffibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about

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