We entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority, but
we have never dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to
violate property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency
of their own fiction in the place of that which is real and recognized
by the law of nations. But you, who began with refusing to submit to
the most moderate restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of
despotism. I find the ground upon which your confiscators go is
this: that, indeed, their proceedings could not be supported in a
court of justice, but that the rules of prescription cannot bind a
legislative assembly.*(2) So that this legislative assembly of a
free nation sits, not for the security, but for the destruction, of
property, and not of property only, but of every rule and maxim
which can give it stability, and of those instruments which can
alone give it circulation.
* Domat.
*(2) Speech of Mr. Camus, published by order of the National
Assembly.
When the Anabaptists of Munster, in the sixteenth century, had
filled Germany with confusion by their system of leveling and their
wild opinions concerning property, to what country in Europe did not
the progress of their fury furnish just cause of alarm? Of all things,
wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of
all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to
furnish any kind of resource.
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