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to preserve its greatness, and the spirit belonging to true greatness, at the full; and it will do so, as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from becoming the makers of law for England. The power, however, of the house of commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of water in the ocean, compared to that residing in a settled majority of your national afssembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected ufage to restrain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which shall conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But" fools rush in where angels fear to tread." In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man to the function, must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the management of human affairs.

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Having confidered the composition of the third eftate as it stood in its original frame, I took a view of the representatives of the clergy. There. too it appeared, that full as little regard was had to the general fecurity of property, or to the aptitude` of the deputies for their publick purposes, in the principles of their election. That election was fo contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere country curates to the great and arduous work of new-modelling a state; men who never had seen the state so much as in a picture; men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obfcure village; who, immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all property, whether fecular or ecclefiaftical, with no other eye than that of envy; among whom must be many, who, for the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder, would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth, in which they could hardly look to have any share, except in a general scramble. Instead of balancing the power of the active chicaners in the other assembly, these curates must neceffarily become the active coadjutors, or at beft the passive instruments of those by whom they had been habitually guided in their petty village concerns. They too could hardly be the most confcientious of their kind, who, presuming upon their incompetent understanding, could intrigue for a trust which led them from their natural relation to their flocks, and their natural spheres of action, to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This

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This preponderating weight being added to the force of the body of chicane in the Tiers Etat, completed that momentum of ignorance, rafhness, presumption, and lust of plunder, which nothing has been able to refift.

To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning, that the majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction with fuch a deputation from the clergy as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers. To squander away the objects which made the happiness of their fellows, would be to them no facrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a felfish and mischievous ambition, is a profligate difregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the fubdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in fociety, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of focial arrangement is a trust in the hands hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but trai. tors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

There were, in the time of our civil troubles in England (I do not know whether you have any such in your assembly in France) several perfons, like the then earl of Holland, who by themselves or their families had brought an odium on the throne, by the prodigal difpenfation of its bounties towards them, who afterwards joined in the rebellions arifing from the discontents of which they were themselves the cause; men who helped to fubvert that throne to which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor. If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that fort of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice. Confounded by the complication of distempered paffions, their reason is dif turbed; their views become vast and perplexed; to others inexplicable; to themselves uncertain. They find, on all fides, bounds to their unprincipled am. bition in any fixed order of things. But in the fog and haze of confufion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit.

When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and bafe. Does not something like this now appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious? a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy? a tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolutions have been conducted by perfons, who whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction of their country. They were men of great civil, and great military talents, and if the terrour, the ornament of their age. They were not like Jew bro, kers contending with each other who could beft remedy with fraudulent, circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils. The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by his kinfman, a favourite poet of that time, shews what it was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished in the fuccess of his ambition:

" Still

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