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.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their
punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted;
industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the
people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved;
civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom;
everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,
and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown 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.
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable
results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to
wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and
prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it.
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