They regarded them as persons who had forfeited their
property by their crimes. With you, in your improved state of the
human mind, there was no such formality. You seized upon five millions
sterling of annual rent and turned forty or fifty thousand human
creatures out of their houses, because "such was your pleasure". The
tyrant Harry the Eighth of England, as he was not better enlightened
than the Roman Mariuses and Sullas, and had not studied in your new
schools, did not know what an effectual instrument of despotism was to
be found in that grand magazine of offensive weapons, the rights of
men. When he resolved to rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins
have robbed all the ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a
commission to examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in
those communities. As it might be expected, his commission reported
truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods. But truly or falsely, it
reported abuses and offenses. However, as abuses might be corrected,
as every crime of persons does not infer a forfeiture with regard to
communities, and as property, in that dark age, was not discovered
to be a creature of prejudice, all those abuses (and there were enough
of them) were hardly thought sufficient ground for such a confiscation
as it was for his purpose to make. He, therefore, procured the
formal surrender of these estates.
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