In the theater, the
first intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning,
will show that this method of political computation would justify
every extent of crime. They would see that on these principles, even
where the very worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to
the fortune of the conspirators than to their parsimony in the
expenditure of treachery and blood. They would soon see that
criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred. They present a
shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral
virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public
benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end,
until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge
could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the
consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs of the
rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph",
because truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is,
in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the
Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born king of
France, with the prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors and
a long acquiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put him
in possession. A misfortune it has indeed turned out to him that he
was born king of France.
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