Justifying perfidy and murder for
public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and
perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear
more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.
Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these
triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.

But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because
truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other
words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth,
and because he had the misfortune to be born King of France, with the
prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence
of the people, without any act of his, had put him in possession. A
misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was born King of
France. But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the
greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose
whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects; who was
willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his
people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not desired, by their
ancestors: such a prince, though he should be subjected to the common
frailties attached to men and to princes, though he should have once
thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs
manifestly carrying on against his person and the remnants of his
authority,--though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall
be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and
insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of
liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of
humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But
there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that
they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who
know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their
subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of
a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches of
freedom. Against such as these they never elevate their voice. Deserters
from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in
suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.

If it could have been made clear to me that the King and Queen of France
(those I mean w