you, beyond any thing recorded in the history of the world; but you have shown that difficulty is good for man. Compute your gains; see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider 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 expense of your honor, an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be rep-moment in which they became truly despicable. resented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly By following those false lights, France has bought broke loose from the house of bondage, and there- undisguised calamities at a higher price than any fore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessto which you were not accustomed, and were illings! France has bought poverty by crime! fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have France has not sacrificed her virtue to her inbeen wiser to have you thought, what I, for one, terest, but she has abandoned her interest, that always thought you, a generous and gallant na- she might prostitute her virtue. All other nation, long misled, to your disadvantage, by your tions have begun the fabric of a new governhigh and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honor, ment, or the reformation of an old, by establishand loyalty; that events had been unfavorable ing originally, or by enforcing with greater exto you, but that you were not enslaved through actness, some rites or other of religion. All any illiberal or servile disposition; that, in your other people have laid the foundations of civil most devoted submission, you were actuated by freedom in severer manners, and a system of a a principle of public spirit, and that it was your more austere and masculine morality. France, country you worshiped, in the person of your when she let loose the reins of regal authority, king? Had you made it to be understood that, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in the delusion of this amiable error, you had in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opingone farther than your wise ancestors; that you ions and practices, and has extended through all were resolved to resume your ancient privileges, ranks of life, as if she were communicating some while you preserved the spirit of your ancient and privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, your recent loyalty and honor; or, if diffident of all the unhappy corruptions that usually were yourselves, and not clearly discerning the almost the disease of wealth and power. This is one obliterated Constitution of your ancestors, you of the new principles of equality in France. had looked to your neighbors 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 wise 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 showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, 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, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure 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 a 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 France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified 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 consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as subverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good nature, under specious pretenses, 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 support 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 Sovereign and their country. Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary 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 insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities. SEIZURE OF THE King and Queen of France. History will record, that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the King and Queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a This was unnatural. The rest is in order. few hours of respite and troubled melancholy They have found their punishment in their suc-repose. From this sleep the Queen was first cess. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, industry without vigor; commerce expiring; who cried out to her to save herself by flightthe revenue unpaid, yet the people impover- that this was the last proof of fidelity he could ished; a church pillaged, and a state not re-give-that they were upon him, and he was lieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; every thing human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to erown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted. dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the Queen, and pierced, with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards, the bed from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a King and husband not secure of his own life for a moment. This King, to say no more of him, and this Queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the Were all these dreadful things necessary? world, which they left swimming in blood, polWere they the inevitable results of the despe- luted by massacre, and strewed with scattered rate struggle of determined patriots, compelled limbs and mutilated carcases. Thence they to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet were conducted into the capital of their kingshore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! dom. Two had been selected from the unpronothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which voked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, was made of the gentlemen of birth and family are not the devastation of civil war; they are the who composed the King's body-guard. These sad but instructive monuments of rash and igno- two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execurant counsel in time of profound peace. They are tion of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, be- to the block, and beheaded in the great court cause unresisted and irresistible authority. The of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon persons who have thus squandered away the pre-spears, and led the procession; while the royal cious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils (the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of the state), have met in their progress with little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid every thing level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined. They have made no sacrifice to their projects of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, while they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and distress, thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings, throughout their harassed land; but the cause of all was plain from the beginning. captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amid the horrid yells, and thrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastile for kings. THE QUEEN OF FRANCE AND THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY. I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well), and that she bears all the succeeding days-that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that, like her, she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss, I fear, will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage from the states of Asia, and, possibly, from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to sub It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate, without motion, that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp anti--the various orders of knights devoted to the servdote against disgrace concealed in that bosom ;2 little did I dream that I should have lived to see ice of the Monarch, and the honor and protection of the Fair, producing "that generous loyalty to rank such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gal-dience," which formed so peculiarly the spirit of and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obelant men, in a nation of men of honor and of eav- chivalry. Individual instances would, no doubt, be aliers. I thought ten thousand swords must present to his imagination, of men like Bayard, and have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even hundreds of others, whose whole life was made up a look that threatened her with insult.3 But the of "high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy." age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, econ- It is here that we find the true type of Mr. Burke's omists, and calculators has succeeded; and the genius, rather than in the brilliant imagery with glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Nev- which the paragraph commences. er, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroication. Vice, in the higher classes, when connected enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.* 2 The "sharp antidote against disgrace" here mentioned was a dagger, which, it was then reported, the Queen carried in her bosom, with a view to end her life if any indignities should be offered her. See London Chris. Obs., vol. vi., p. 67. The report, however, proved to be incorrect. This image may have been suggested by the following lines of Milton's Paradise Lost, book i., line 664, which are correspondent in thought, though not coincident in expression: half its evil by losing all its grossness," he obviousWhen Mr. Burke speaks of vice as having "lost ly refers not to the personal guilt of the man, but to the injurious effects he produces on society. Even in this sense, he would hardly have laid down so sweeping a proposition, except from the influence of one-sided views in a moment of excited feeling and imagin less offensive to taste, but it is more insidious and se- He spake; and, to confirm his words, out flew It is hardly necessary to remark on the wide extent of reading and reflection involved in these three sentences. The whole history of the Middle Ages must have flashed across the mind of Mr. Burke as he wrote-the division of Europe into feudal dependencies, creating a "cheap defense of nations." in bodies of armed men always ready at a moment's call, without expense to the sovereign have rejected with horror; but his own remark is capable of being so understood, or, at least, so applied, as to give a seeming countenance to this corrupt sentiment. History, on which he so much relied, affords the completest testimony, that the ruin of states which have attained to a high degree of civilization has almost uniformly resulted from the polished corruption of the higher classes, and not from the "grossness" of the lower. mit to the soft collar of social esteem; compelled | economical politicians, are themselves, perhaps, stern authority to submit to elegance; and gave but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners. POLITICAL INFLUENCE OF ESTABLISHED OPIN IONS. as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufacWhen ancient opinions and rules of life are tures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of taken away, the loss can not possibly be esti- nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, mated. From that moment we have no com- and not always ill-supplies their place; but if pass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly commerce and the arts should be lost in an exto what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, periment to try how well a state may stand withtaken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition out these old fundamental principles, what sort the day on which your revolution was complet-of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, feed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes can not be indifferent in their operation, we must presume that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial. We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and, possibly, may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence even in the midst of arms and confusions, and while governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value fully as much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be here particularly alluded to. Compare the circumstances of the trial and execution of the former with this prediction. Mr. Burke has been accused, without the slightest reason, of here applying the phrase "swinish multitude" to the lower class of society in general, as a distinctive appellation. The language was obviously suggested by the scriptural direction, "Cast not you pearls before swine." Bailly and Condorcet did this, and experienced the natural consequen ces; and Mr. Burke says that such will always be the case, that "learning will be trodden under the hoofs of a inot the) swinish multitude." rocious, and, at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter? VIEWS OF THE ENGLISH NATION. When I assert any thing as concerning the people of England I speak from observation, not from authority; but I speak from the experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and after a course of attentive observation, begun in early life, and continued for near forty years. I have often been astonished, considering that we are divided from you but by a slender dike of about twenty-four miles, and that the mutual intercourse between the two countries has lately been very great, to find how little you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judg ment of this nation from certain publications, which do very erroneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulence, and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a general mark of acquiescence in their opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour. I almost venture to affirm, that not one in a hundred among us participates in the "triumph" of the revolution society. If the King and Queen of France and their children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities (I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility), they would be treated with another sort of triumphal entry into Lon don. We formerly have had a king of France employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man, hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. THEORY OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION. in that situation; you have read how he wasulation, instead of exploding general prejudices, treated by the victor in the field; and in what manner he was afterward received in England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation; thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor, as yet, have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress among us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mold upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely emboweled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings, still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to Parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because, when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of slavery through the whole course of our lives. You see, sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of spec You will observe that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity, as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our Constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable Crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors. The policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or, rather, the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain, forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit, our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, |