lery of portraits; its monumental inferiptions; its records, évidences, and titles. We procuré reverence to our civil inftitutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are defcended. All your fophifters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preferve a rational and manly freedom than the courfe that we have pursued, who have chofen our nature rather than our spe culations, our breafts rather than our inventions, for the great confervatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though difcontinued, were not loft to memory. Your conftitution, it is true, whilft you were out of poffeffion, fuffered waste and dilapidation; but you poffeffed in fome parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable caftle. You might have repaired thofe walls; you might have built on thofe old foundations. Your conftitution was fufpended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a conftitution very nearly as good as could be wifhed. In your old states you poffeffed that variety of parts correfponding with the various deferiptions of which your community was happily compofed; you had all that combination, and all that oppo fition of interefts, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the poli

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tical world, from the reciprocal struggle of difcordant powers, draws out the harmony of the univerfe. Thefe oppofed and conflicting interefts, which you confidered as fo great a blemish in your old and in our prefent conftitution, interpofe a falutary check to all precipitate refolutions; They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of neceffity; they make all change a fubject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the fore evil of harfh, crude, unqualified reformations; and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for eyer impracticable. Through that diverfity of members and interefts, generalliberty had as many fecurities as there were feparate views in the feveral orders; whilft by preffing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the feparate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your antient ftates; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil fociety, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by defpifing every thing that belonged to you. You fet up your trade without a capital. If the laft generations of your country appeared without much luftre in your eyes, you might have paffed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection to those ancestors, your imaE 2 ginations

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ginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour and you would have risen with the example to whofe 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 yefterday, as a nation of low-born fervile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expence of your honour, an excuse to your apologifts here for feveral enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon flaves, fuddenly broke loose from the houfe of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed and 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 mifled to your difadvantage by your high and romantic fentiments of fidelity, honour, and loyalty; that events had been unfavourable to you,' but that you were not enflaved through any illiberal or fervile difpofition; that in your most devoted fubmiffion, you were actuated by a principle of public fpirit, 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 error you had gone further than your wife ancestors; that you were refolved to refume your ancient privileges, whilft you preferved the fpirit of your ancient and your

recent

recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourselves, and not clearly difcerning the almoft 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 ftate-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 defpotifm from the earth, by fhewing that freedom was not only reconcileable, but as, when well difciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppreffive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourifhing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free conftitution; a potent monarchy; a difciplined army; a reformed and venerated. clergy; a mitigated but fpirited 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 happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which confifts the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monftrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men deftined to travel in the obfcure walk of laborious life, ferves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality,

which it never can remove; and which the or der of civil life eftablishes as much for the benefit of those whom it muft leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more fplendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and eafy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond any thing recorded in the hiftory of the world; but you have fhewn that difficulty is good for man.

Compute your gains: fee what is got by thofe extravagant and prefumptuous fpeculations which have taught your leaders to defpife all their predeceffors, and all their contemporaries, and even to defpife themfelves, until the moment in which they became truly defpicable. By following thofe falfe lights, France has bought undifguifed calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal bleffings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not facrificed her virtue to her intereft; but he has abandoned her intereft, that fhe might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness fome rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in feverer manners, and a fyftem of a more auftere and mafculine morality. France, when fhe let loofe the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious diffolutenefs in manners, and of an infolent irreligion in opinions and prac