You began ill, because you began by
despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade
without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared
without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by and
derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious
predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations 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
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 lowborn
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 represented as a gang of Maroon slaves suddenly broke
loose from the house 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 wiser 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 romantic
sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that events had been
unfavorable to you, but that you were not enslaved through any
illiberal or servile disposition; that in your most devoted submission
you were actuated by a principle of public spirit, and that it was
your country you worshiped in the person of your king? Had you made it
to be understood that in the delusion of this amiable error you had
gone further than your wise ancestors, that you were resolved to
resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of
your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; or if, diffident of
yourselves and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated
constitution of your ancestors, you 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.
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