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French have made their way through the deftruction of their country, to a bad conftitution, when they were absolutely in poffefsion of a good one. They were in poffeffion of it the day the states met in separate orders. Their business, had they been either virtuous, or wife, or had been left to their own judgment, was to secure the stability and independence of the states, according to those orders, under the monarch on the throne. It was then their duty to redress grievances.

Instead of redreffing grievances, and improving the fabrick of their state, to which they were called by their monarch, and fent by their country, they were made to take a very different course. They first destroyed all the balances and counterpoifes which serve to fix the state, and to give it a steady direction; and which furnish sure correctives to any violent spirit which may prevail in any of the orders. These balances existed in their oldest constitution; and in the constitution of this country; and in the constitution of all the countries in Europe. These they rashly destroyed, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous, illconnected mass.

When they had done this, they instantly, and with the most atrocious perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root of all property, and confequently of all national profperity, by the principles they established, and the example

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example they set, in confiscating all the poffeffions of the church. They made and recorded a fort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the rights of man, in fuch a pedantick abuse of elementary prin ciples as would have disgraced boys at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and pedantick in them; as by their name and authority they systematically deftroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people. By this mad declaration they fubverted the state; and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to fuffer, and which may in the end produce fuch a war, and perhaps, many such.

With them the question was not between defpotism and liberty. The sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country was not made on the altar of freedom. Freedom, and a better security for freedom than that they have.. taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all. They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged themselves headlong into those calamities, to prevent themselves from fettling into that conftitution, or into any thing resembling it.

That if they should perfectly succeed in what they propose, as they are likely enough to do, and establish a democracy, or a mob of democracies,

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in a country circumstanced like France, they will establish a very bad government-a very bad fpecies of tyranny.

That, the worst effect of all their proceeding was on their military, which was rendered an army for every purpose but that of defence. That, if the question was, whether foldiers were to forget they were citizens, as an abstract proposition, he could have no difference about it; though as it is usual, when abstract principles are to be applied, much was to be thought on the manner of uniting the character of citizen and foldier. But as applied to the events which had happened in France, where the abstract principle was cloathed with its circumstances, he thought that his friend would agree with him, that what was done there furnished no matter of exultation, either in the act or the example. These soldiers were not citizens; but base hireling mutineers, and mercenary fordid deferters, wholly deftitute of any honourable principle. Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchick spirit, from the evils of which a democracy itself was to be reforted to, by those who were the least disposed to that form, as a fort of refuge. It was not an army in corps and with difcipline, and embodied under the respectable patriot citizens of the state in resisting tyranny. Nothing like it. It was the cafe of common foldiers deserting from their officers,

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to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to a cause, the real object of which was to level all those institutions, and to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of fubordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents. That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to fervitude, but to society.

He wished the house to confider, how the members would like to have their mansions pulled down and pillaged, their persons abused, insulted, and destroyed; their title deeds brought out and burned before their faces, and themselves and their families driven to seek refuge in every nation throughout Europe, for no other reason than this; that without any fault of theirs, they were born gentlemen, and men of property, and were fufpected of a defire to preserve their confideration and their eftates. The desertion in France was to aid an abominable fedition, the very professed principle of which was an implacable hoftility to nobility and gentry, and whose savage war-hoop was " à l'Aristocrate," by which senseless, bloody cry, they animated one another to rapine and murder; whilft abetted by ambitious men of another class,

they

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they were crushing every thing respectable and virtuous in their nation, and to their power difgracing almost every name, by which we formerly knew there was such a country in the world as France. 1

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He knew too well, and he felt as much as any man, how difficult it was to accommodate a standing army to a free constitution, or to any constitution, An armed, difciplined body is, in its effence, dangerous to liberty; undisciplined it is ruinous to fociety. Its component parts are, in the latter cafe, neither good citizens nor good foldiers. What have they thought of in France, under such a difficulty as almost puts the human faculties to a stand? They have put their army under such a variety of principles of duty, that it is more likely to breed litigants, pettifoggers, and mutineers, than foldiers *. They have fet up, to balance their crown army, another army, deriving under another authority, called a municipal army-a balance of armies, not of orders. These latter they have destroyed with every mark of infult and oppreffion. States may, and they will best, exist with a partition of civil powers. Armies cannot exist under a divided command. This state of things he thought, in effect, a state of war, or, at best, but a truce instead of peace, in the country.

They are sworn to obey the king, the nation, and the law.

VOL. V.

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What

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