They are strangers to us. They do
not even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physically they may
be the same men, though we are not quite sure of that, on your new
philosophic doctrines of personal identity. In all other respects they
are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as good a right
to refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their honors,
titles, and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to do;
and it is one instance, among many indeed, of your assumption of
undelegated power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their
clubs, their mobs, and their national guards, directing you at their
pleasure and giving that as law to you which, under your authority, is
transmitted as law to us. Through you these burghers dispose of the
lives and fortunes of us all. Why should not you attend as much to the
desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by
which we are affected in the most serious manner, as you do to the
demands of these insolent burghers, relative to distinctions and
titles of honor, by which neither they nor we are affected at all? But
we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our
necessities. Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his
equals? Before this measure of yours, we might have thought we were
not perfectly equal. We might have entertained some old, habitual,
unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords; but we cannot
conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to
them, you could have made the law that degrades them.
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