The present time
differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in
France. If the example of that nation is to have an influence on this,
I can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an
unpleasant aspect and are not quite reconcilable to humanity,
generosity, good faith, and justice are palliated with so much milky
good-nature toward the actors, and borne with so much heroic fortitude
toward the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent to discredit the
authority of an example we mean to follow. But allowing this, we are
led to a very natural question: What is that cause of liberty, and
what are those exertions in its favor to which the example of France
is so singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with
all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of
the kingdom? Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor
of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of
Lords to be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the
church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers or given to bribe
new-invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege?
Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a
patriotic contribution or patriotic presents? Are silver shoebuckles
to be substituted in the place of the land tax and the malt tax for
the support of the naval strength of this kingdom? Are all orders,
ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal
anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four thousand
democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they may all,
by some sort of unknown attractive power, be organized into one? For
this great end, is the army to be seduced from its discipline and
its fidelity, first, by every kind of debauchery and, then, by the
terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the
curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the
delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order? Are
the citizens of London to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding
them at the expense of their fellow subjects? Is a compulsory paper
currency to be substituted in the place of the legal coin of this
kingdom? Is what remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to
be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to watch
over and to fight with each other? If these are the ends and means
of the Revolution Society, I admit that they are well assorted; and
France may furnish them for both with precedents in point.
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