IN FRANCE, you are now in the crisis of a revolution and in the
transit from one form of government to another- you cannot see that
character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in
this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and
you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will.
I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any
description of men or to comprehend all men of any description
within them- No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice as I
am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities
and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and
dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this:
they temper and harden the breast in order to prepare it for the
desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But
as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous
taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little when no
political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people
are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that
they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue
to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that
lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those
that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human
breast.
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