the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the national assembly has been compelled to make, of that property which it was their first duty to protect. It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you, that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the cup of their abominations, have been disappointed. The robbery of your church has proved a security to the poffeffions of ours. It has roused the people. They fee with horrour and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind, and the narrow libe rality 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 againft fimilar conclufions. 1 I hope we shall never be so totally loft to all sense of the duties imposed upon us by the law of focial union, as, upon any pretext of publick 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 feizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace of humanity, humanity, could think of cafting down men of exalted rank and sacred function, some of them of an age to call at once for reverence and compaffion, of cafting them down from the highest situation in the commonwealth, wherein they were maintained by their own landed property, to a state of indigence, depreffion, and contempt? The confiscators truly have made fome allow ance, to their victims from the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been fo harshly 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 itself 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 these 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 worse 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 administration of its functions, are to receive the remnants of the property as alms from the profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest; to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the charitable contributions of the faithful, but from the infolent tenderness of known and avow ed atheism, the maintenance of religion, measured out to them on the standard of the contempt in which it is held; and for the purpose of rendering those who receive the allowance vile, and of no estimation in the eyes of mankind. But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in law, and not a confifcation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the Palais Royal, 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 prescription of a thousand years. They fay that ecclesiasticks are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify in every particular; that the goods they possess are not pro perly theirs, but belong to the state which created the fiction; and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves with what they may fuffer in their natural feelings and natural persons, 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 just emoluments of a profession, in which they were not only permitted but encouraged by the state to engage; and upon the fuppofed certainty of 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 distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of ty. ranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators, by their early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the fyllogifm of the logician, but the lash of the executioner that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistick tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants, who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold, because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters. Shall we be more ten der of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes? shall we not use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it with the same safety? 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 first covered with what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts -a regard to national faith. The enemies to property perty at first pretended a most tender, delicate, and fcrupulous anxiety for keeping the king's engage ments with the publick creditor. These profeffors of the rights of men are so bufy in teaching others, that they have not leisure to learn any thing them selves; otherwise 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 society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount In title, fuperiour in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquifition, or by defcent, or in virtue of a participation in the goods of fome community, were no part of the credi tor's fecurity, expressed or implied. They never so much as entered into his head when he made his bargain. He well knew that the publick, whe ther reprefented by a monarch or by a fenate, can pledge nothing but the publick estate; and it can have no publick estate, 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 publick creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity. |