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 moment in which they become truly
despicable. By following those false lights, France has bought
undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased
the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime!
France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has
abandoned her interest, that she 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 some rites or other of religion. All other people
have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a
system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she
let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a
ferocious dissoluteness in manners and of an insolent irreligion in
opinions and practice, and has extended through all ranks of life,
as if she were communicating some privilege or laying open some
secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the
disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of
equality in France.
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.
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