The monied interest is in its nature more ready for any
adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of
any kind. Being of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally
with any novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be
resorted to by all who wish for change.
Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown
up with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union- I
mean the political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of
distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since
the decline of the life and greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, they
were not so much cultivated, either by him or by the regent or the
successors to the crown, nor were they engaged to the court by
favors and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid
period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in
the old court protection, they endeavored to make up by joining in a
sort of incorporation of their own; to which the two academies of
France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopedia,
carried on by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little
contribute.
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a
regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This
object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been
discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety.
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