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of Justice is placed in front of the whole machinery, which is at that moment grinding down into dust the lives and properties of innocent and helpless men. "You do not imagine, sir," Burke indignantly appeals, "that I am going to compliment those persons (the confiscators) with any long discussion. The arguments of tyranny 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, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted the sophistry which become an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistic 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 tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes?

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 all property at first pretended a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the King's engagement with the public creditor. Those professors of the rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure to learn any thing themselves; other wise 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, superior in equity. . The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition, or by descent, or by participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. They never so much as entered into his head when he made the bargain. He well knew, that the public, whether represented by a monarch or a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate, except

what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the "citizens at large. This was engaged, and nothing else could be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity."

The next step in this progress of national legislation and national treachery was downward, and in regular succession,-the breach of faith with all those who had entitled themselves by their services to national provision-the abolition of all pensions, no matter for what merits they had been assigned. Burke reasons briefly, but unanswerably, on this act of equal folly and injustice, "A pension, given as a reward for service to the State, is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the State. It is a better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that service. We have, however, seen multitudes of persons under this description in France, who had never been deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers, in the most ar bitrary times, robbed, without mercy, by this Assembly of the rights of men. They were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned by their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the country that now exists!"

The next step of the Republic was equally in course-the universal violation of the faith of treaties. "The Assembly, with perfect consistency, it must be owned, is now engaged in a respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations under the former government; and their committee is to report, which of them it ought to ratify, and which not! By this means they have put the external fidelity of their virgin Republic on a par with the internal."

The next step was more precipitate still, but in regular order,-the ruin of the nobility. This was effected by rousing against them the passions, jealousies, and pride of the whole trading community. Napoleon once named England the nation of shopkeepers; the name was misapplied, but no name could have been more expressive of the condition of trade in France. A few opulent stockjobbers or wine-dealers

excepted, the whole commerce of France was retail, and the whole race that carried it on were a needy, querulous, and struggling multitude, angry with the state which necessarily left them to make their bread as they could, bitter against every rank above them, and, as in all lands, eager for any change that might give them a place in society for which they were not fit, and a property which they had not earned. The higher adventurers of this class were, of course, the more active instruments in the general hostility against their superiors: but those leaders of the République boutiquière were sustained by the whole peevish and vexed multitude of petty trade, down to the lowest vender of the lowest commodity. The provincial towns consisted of nothing else; and in the idle hours which their scanty commerce so amply allowed, and in the common privations which neither monarchies nor republics can avert from the indolent, the ignorant, or the poor, they found room for declamation on the ill-arranged destinies of society. The commercial body, in all its grades in France, was, as it is more or less in all lands, republican. "There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend themselves, in order to be avenged. They struck at the nobility through the Crown and the Church. They attacked them particularly on the side on which they thought them most vulnerable, the possessions of the Church, which, through the patronage of the Crown, generally devolved upon the nobility."

Another step, as natural in its progression as any of the former, but directly leading to the consummation of the highest national crime, rapidly followed. "Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union, the political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and greatness of Louis XIV., they were not much cultivated by either him, or the Regent, or the successors to the Crown. Nor were they engaged to the Court by favours and emoluments so sys

tematically as during the splendid period of that ostentatious, and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old Court protection, they endeavoured to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own."

The purposes to which this union was turned, were of a still deeper dye than those of the original movers of French rebellion. Bacon's maxim, that all things best in their nature, become most formidable in their perversion, was fully realized. The lettered ability of France, not merely furnished a more powerful weapon for overthrow, than the rude jealousies of the stockbrokers and traders, but it struck at higher objects. The rough violence of the mob struck only at the exterior of the State, longed to break down the pillars of the throne, or strip the State edifice of its ornaments, partly for revenge, partly for plunder, and have done. The deadlier hostility of profligate literature seemed determined not only on the overthrow of the great building, but on precluding the spot from being built on for ever, infecting the air and the soil with a moral pestilence, that prohibited the dwelling of man. The works poured out by this band of conspirators against all law, human and divine, were directly aimed, not simply against the State, but against society. If the volumes of the Chamforts and the Diderots had once become the guides of life, they must have extinguished every feeling that forms the honour, strength, or use of society. One boundless mortification would have seized the whole moral frame. Licentiousness would have been the law of private life, and treason of public. The nearest ties of blood would have only the more effectively ensured its corruption; the highest obligations of the subject to the sovereign would have been only a surer pledge of treachery. But those men had a more awful determination to evil, in the final object of their hostility. Man, and the works of man, were too trivial for their towering aspirations. "Highly they raged against the Highest." Their declared purpose, and France listened to it without astonishment, was to overthrow all belief in the Deity. They were wise in their generation; for of all the

instruments of national confusion, national infidelity would have been the most rapid, the most resistless, and the most consummate. The operation of Assemblies and Legislatures would have been feeble and tardy, to the fierce, swift, and subtle ruin projected over the land by the passions of a people at length unchecked by some last sense of a Supreme Providence. They might then have rested on their oars, and suffered the vessel to have gone down with the stream. The course of nature would have saved the toil of the politician. Having once dissolved the great principle that holds the elements of society together, they might have safely resigned the world to the conflict of flood and flame. The national crime extended in France just so far as to shew to Europe the inevitable results of Atheism adopted by a Legislature. The adoption was hideously repaid by massacre. Robespierre was the incarnation of the fiend that administered the punishment, and his reign of terror the time allotted to its execution. But the success of the effort was partial. Even in France, there were hearts in which true loyalty, through all its ignorant hereditary prejudices, and true religion, through all its clouding superstitions, were still treasured; and the Vendée saved the character, and perhaps averted the Divine ruin, of the land.

The machinations of the Parisian men of letters had long before attracted the eye of Europe. "The literary cabal," says Burke, "had, some years ago, formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion! This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree, and thence, by an easy process, with a spirit of persecution according to their means. Those atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own. They have learnt to talk against monks in the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defect of argument. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an

unremitting industry to blacken all those who did not hold to their faction. A spirit of cabal, intrigue, and proselytism, pervaded all their thoughts, words, and actions. And as controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts on force, they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence with foreign princes; in hopes, that through their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring about the changes which they had in view. To them it was indifferent, whether those changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism, or by the earthquake of popular commotion. Those writers,

like the propagators of all novelties, pretended a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, while, in their satires, they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, the nobility, and the priesthood. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty."

In this masterly sketch we have the whole regulated progress of overthrow, the outline of that whole hideous dance, in which the revolutionary principle, flaunting along in a hundred different characters, throughout the whole masquerade had one perpetual partner-Death! First comes the plunder of the Church property, then the degradation of the Nobles, then the seizure of the corporation funds, and the breaking up of the corporations; then the general assault on all laws, usages, and morals, by a conspiracy against all social order; then the avowed determination of corrupt literature to establish Atheism as the substitute for Christianity in France, and make the irreligion of France a preliminary to outlawing the belief in a God from the world. We have the warning, and upon our own heads be the peril of its neglect. One thing is clear, tha confiscation was the principle of the Revolution. It predominates n every provision of its being, it speaks in every tone of its voice, whether haranguing the mob, domineering in the Assembly, or menacing in the presence of the King. Whether it wore the embroidered garb of office, or rushed along in the gory rags of

riot and homicide, its step and gesture were modelled by confiscation; every puff of fortune that flung back its cloak, shewed the gaunt proportions of robbery within. But it is to be remembered also, that it was this principle which made the sacrifice of the Revolution worse than useless. It was this defiance of justice from the beginning, that perverted all its chances of salutary change into an aggravation of all the old evils; that on the ruins of a Church erected a bigotry of Atheism, a thousand times more hostile even to free dom of opinion; that replaced the nobility by an upstart oligarchy, with more than all their pride, and immeasurably more their prodigality, profligacy, or tyranny; that fixed on the spot, from which a gentle and virtuous King, the truest friend of freedom in France, had been foully cast down, a furious despotism,-or rather, by its incantations of blood and perjury, summoned from the place of darkness a spirit unparalleled among the principles of human evil, to inhabit the shape of authority moulded by their own hands, and exercise over their fallen country the last inflictions of sorrow and shame.

One of the common subterfuges for this defiance of justice, was, that the higher orders of France had exempted themselves from all share in bearing the burdens of the State. The declaimers in England echoed the subterfuge until they had constructed it into a charge. But the superior knowledge of Burke struck away this pretext for insulting the ruined fortunes of the peerage and the priesthood. "They certainly,' "They certainly," said he," did not contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the Commons. They both, however, contributed largely. Neither the nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the excise on consumable commodities, from duties of custom, or from any of the numerous indirect impositions, which in France, as well as here, make so very large a proportion of all payments to the public. The noblesse paid the capitation. They paid also a land-tax, called the twentieth penny, to the height sometimes of three, sometimes of four shillings in the

VOL. XXXV. NO. CCXVIII.

pound; both of them direct impositions of no slight nature, and no trivial produce. The clergy of the provinces annexed by conquest to France, (which in extent make about an eighth part of the whole, but in wealth a much larger proportion,) paid likewise to the capitation and the twentieth penny, at the rate paid by the nobility. The clergy in the old provinces did not pay the capitation, but they had redeemed themselves at the expense of about a million sterling. They were exempted from the twentieths; but then they made free gifts, they contracted debts for the State, and they were subject to some other charges, the whole computed at about a thirteenth part of their income."

The true benefit of a volume like this is its giving the force of the most powerful logic and the most accurate enquiry to principles familiar to the human understanding, yet obscured by the partialities or ignorance of popular passions. Of all the institutions that ever called down the declamatory wrath of pretended philosophy, or held a conspicuous place in that general indictment preferred by Jacobinism against all the old adjuncts of the State, the monasteries were the most obnoxious subject. On this ground the Revolutionist stood, not only claiming acquittal, but insisting upon panegyric. The destruction of the monasteries was harangued into a merit, which more than atoned for all the possible evils of change; it was the cloak that covered the whole contingent multitude of revolutionary sins. Burke shews finely that Jacobinism was not wiser in this instance than it was honest, and that in the ruin even of the monastic establishments, it had the fortune of committing at once a blunder and a crime. The whole passage is a noble specimen of reasoning and eloquence. "A politician, to do great things, looks for a power-what our workmen callapurchase-and if he finds that power in politics, as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of a politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly

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set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honour, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow as they list. Those institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of Nature or of chance; her pride is in their use. He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country. On the first view of the subject, a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank, productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. Those energies always existed in nature, and they were always discernible. They seem ed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children; until contemplative ability, uniting with practic skill, subdued them into use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred thousands a-year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using the men but by converting monks into pen

sioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to account, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its regular course. Your politicians do not understand their trade, and therefore they sell their tools."

The reply to the common remark, that the monasteries nurtured superstition, is in the same rich yet powerful strain." This I do not mean

to dispute, but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage. It was your business to correct and mitigate every thing that was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess, I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral subject; and of course admits of all degrees and modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds. And they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it in some trifling, or some enthusiastic shape, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion consists in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in his declarations, and in an imitation of his perfections. The rest is our own. it

may be prejudicial to the great end, it may be auxiliary. * * Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly. They are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war. Prudence would be neuter. But if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the superstition which builds, to be more tolerable than that which demolishes, that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it

that which endows, than that which plunders, that which disposes to mistaken benefits, than that which stimulates to real injustice,-that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial. Such,

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