the image of a relation in blood; binding up the
constitution of our country with our dearest domesticities; keeping
inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and
mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres,
and our altars. Always acting as if in the presence of canonised
forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.

All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a
manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our
nature rather than our speculations for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.

_II.--A Lost Opportunity_

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given
to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. You possessed in some
parts the walls, and, in all, the foundations, of a noble and venerable
castle. You might have repaired those walls, you might have built on
those old foundations. But you began ill, because you began by despising
everything that belonged to you. Respecting your forefathers, you would
have been taught to respect yourselves. By following wise examples you
would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom is
not only reconcilable, but auxiliary to law. You would have had a free
constitution. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and
obedient people, taught to seek the happiness that is to be found by
virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of
mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false
ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure
walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real
inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life
establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an
humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more
splendid but not more happy.

Compute your gains; see what is got by those extravagant and
presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all
their predecessors and all their contemporaries, and even to despise
themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable. By
following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities
at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal
blessings. She has ab