The habits of
burghers, their occupations, their diversion, their business, their
idleness continually bring them into mutual contact. Their virtues and
their vices are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come
embodied and half disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form
them for civil or military action.
All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind that, if this
monster of a constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed
by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed
of directors of assignats, and trustees for the sale of church
lands, attorneys, agents, money jobbers, speculators, and adventurers,
composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the
crown, the church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the
deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In the
Serbonian bog of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk,
and lost forever.
Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think
some great offenses in France must cry to heaven, which has thought
fit to punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious domination
in which no comfort or compensation is to be found in any, even of
those false, splendors which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent
mankind from feeling themselves dishonored even whilst they are
oppressed.
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