The fresh ruins of France,
which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the
devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments
of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the
display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and
irresistible, authority. The persons who have thus squandered away the
precious 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 everything 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 sacrifices to their
projects of greater consequence than their shoebuckles, whilst 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.
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