It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you
that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris
in the cup of their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery
of your church has proved a security to the possession of ours. It has
roused the people. They see with horror and alarm that enormous and
shameless act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and more
open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow
liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close
hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine. At home
we behold similar beginnings. We are on our guard against similar
conclusions.
I HOPE WE SHALL NEVER be so totally lost to all sense of the
duties imposed upon us by the law of social union as, upon any pretext
of public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending
citizen. Who but a tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can
vitiate and degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the
property of men unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by
hundreds and thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace
of humanity could think of casting down men of exalted rank and sacred
function, some of them of an age to call at once for reverence and
compassion, of casting them down from the highest situation in the
commonwealth, wherein they were maintained by their own landed
property, to a state of indigence, depression, and contempt?
The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims
from the scraps and fragments of their own tables from which they have
been so harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread
for a feast to the harpies of usury.
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