It is a thing
to be wondered at, to see how very soon France, when she had a
moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and most
dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation. Why? Because
among all their massacres they had not slain the mind in their
country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory
and emulation was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled
and inflamed. The organs also of the state, however shattered,
existed. All the prizes of honor and virtue, all the rewards, all
the distinctions remained. But your present confusion, like a palsy,
has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your
country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor, is
disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life
except in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this
generation will quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility
will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers usurers,
and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.
BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In
all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some
description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change
and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of
society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure
requires to be on the ground.
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