If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and
a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to
discover how this despotic sport, made of the feelings, consciences,
prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the
rankest tyranny.
If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, the
policy of the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from
it, ought to be at least as evident and at least as important. To a
man who acts under the influence of no passion, who has nothing in
view in his projects but the public good, a great difference will
immediately strike him between what policy would dictate on the
original introduction of such institutions and on a question of
their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and deep,
and where, by long habit, things more valuable than themselves are
so adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one
cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other. He might be
embarrassed if the case were really such as sophisters represent it in
their paltry style of debating. But in this, as in most questions of
state, there is a middle. There is something else than the mere
alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence. Spartam
nactus es; hanc exorna. This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound
sense and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer.
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