mber of its agents; it will enlarge the circle of
its privileges; it will end by appropriating a ruinous proportion.

But the most remarkable part of it is the astonishing blindness of the
public through it all. When successful soldiers used to reduce the
vanquished to slavery, they were barbarous, but they were not absurd.
Their object, like ours, was to live at other people's expense, and they
did not fail to do so. What are we to think of a people who never seem
to suspect that _reciprocal plunder_ is no less plunder because it is
reciprocal; that it is no less criminal because it is executed legally
and with order; that it adds nothing to the public good; that it
diminishes it, just in proportion to the cost of the expensive medium
which we call the Government?

And it is this great chimera which we have placed, for the edification
of the people, as a frontispiece to the Constitution. The following is
the beginning of the introductory discourse:--

"France has constituted itself a republic for the purpose of raising all
the citizens to an ever-increasing degree of morality, enlightenment,
and well-being."

Thus it is France, or an abstraction, which is to raise the French, or
_realities_, to morality, well-being, &c. Is it not by yielding to this
strange delusion that we are led to expect everything from an energy not
our own? Is it not giving out that there is, independently of the
French, a virtuous, enlightened, and rich being, who can and will bestow
upon them its benefits? Is not this supposing, and certainly very
gratuitously, that there are between France and the French--between the
simple, abridged, and abstract denomination of all the individualities,
and these individualities themselves--relations as of father to son,
tutor to his pupil, professor to his scholar? I know it is often said,
metaphorically, "the country is a tender mother." But to show the
inanity of the constitutional proposition, it is only needed to show
that it may be reversed, not only without inconvenience, but even with
advantage. Would it be less exact to say--

"The French have constituted themselves a Republic, to raise France to
an ever-increasing degree of morality, enlightenment, and well-being."

Now, where is the value of an axiom where the subject and the attribute
may change places without inconvenience? Everybody understands what is
meant by this--"The mother will feed the child." But it would be
ridiculous to say--"The