You have
forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect,
and now you send troops to saber and to bayonet us into a submission
to fear and force, which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild
authority of opinion.
The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous
to all rational ears, but to the politicians of metaphysics who have
opened schools for sophistry and made establishments for anarchy, it
is solid and conclusive. It is obvious that, on a mere consideration
of the right, the leaders in the Assembly would not in the least
have scrupled to abrogate the rents along with the title and family
ensigns. It would be only to follow up the principle of their
reasonings and to complete the analogy of their conduct. But they
had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed property by
confiscation. They had this commodity at market; and the market
would have been wholly destroyed if they were to permit the husbandmen
to riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated
themselves. The only security which property enjoys in any one of
its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity with regard
to some other. They have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure
to determine what property is to be protected and what subverted.
Neither have they left any principle by which any of their
municipalities can be bound to obedience, or even conscientiously
obliged not to separate from the whole to become independent, or to
connect itself with some other state.
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