That objection, you will
say, cannot hold as to the confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns
and the abolition of their order. It is true that this particular part
of your general confiscation does not affect England, as a precedent
in point; but the reason implies, and it goes a great way. The Long
Parliament confiscated the lands of deans and chapters in England on
the same ideas upon which your Assembly set to sale the lands of the
monastic orders. But it is in the principle of injustice that the
danger lies, and not in the description of persons on whom it is first
exercised. I see, in a country very near us, a course of policy
pursued which sets justice, the common concern of mankind, at
defiance. With the National Assembly of France possession is
nothing, law and usage are nothing. I see the National Assembly openly
reprobate the doctrine of prescription, which* one of the greatest
of their own lawyers tells us, with great truth, is a part of the
law of nature. He tells us that the positive ascertainment of its
limits, and its security from invasion, were among the causes for
which civil society itself has been instituted. If prescription be
once shaken, no species of property is secure when it once becomes
an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent power. I
see a practice perfectly correspondent to their contempt of this great
fundamental part of natural law.
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