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virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chofen to confider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expence of your honour, an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be reprefented as a gang of Maroon slaves, fuddenly broke loofe from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed, and were 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 misled to your disadvantage by your high and romantick sentiments of fidelity, honour, and loyalty; that events had been unfavourable to you, but that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or fervile disposition; that in your most devoted fubmiffion, you were actuated by a principle of publick spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood, that in the delufion of this amiable errour you had gone further than your wife ancestors; that you were resolved to refume your

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your ancient privileges, whilft you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourselves, and not clearly difcerning the almost obliterated conftitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its present state-by following wife examples you would have given new examples of wisdom 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 shamed despotism from the earth, by shewing that freedom was not only reconcileable, but as, when well disciplined, it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution; a potent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited 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 happinefs 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 inspiring spiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obfcure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy 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 those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predeceffors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they became truly defpicable. By following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchafed the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not facrificed her virtue to her interest; but she has aban doned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabrick of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and mafculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious diffoluteness in manners, and of an infolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some fecluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease 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 disarmed it of its most potent topicks. She has fanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities, 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 easy goodnature, under fpecious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) 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 excess of their zeal in providing for the fupport of the throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel 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 untried policy; to neglect those pro

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visions, preparations and precautions, which diftinguish benevolence from imbecility; and without which no man can answer for the falutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and infult, than ever any people has been known to rife against the most illegal ufurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to conceffion; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church. pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom;

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