mparison was to be made between the British government and the
French usurpation.--That they who endeavored madly to compare them were
by no means making the comparison of one good system with another good
system, which varied only in local and circumstantial differences; much
less that they were holding out to us a superior pattern of legal
liberty, which we might substitute in the place of our old, and, as they
describe it, superannuated Constitution. He meant to demonstrate that
the French scheme was not a comparative good, but a positive evil.--That
the question did not at all turn, as it had been stated, on a parallel
between a monarchy and a republic. He denied that the present scheme of
things in France did at all deserve the respectable name of a republic:
he had therefore no comparison between monarchies and republics to
make.--That what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize
anarchy, to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious,
monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral Nature. He undertook
to prove that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood,
hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.--He offered to make out that those who
have led in that business had conducted themselves with the utmost
perfidy to their colleagues in function, and with the most flagrant
perjury both towards their king and their constituents: to the one of
whom the Assembly had sworn fealty; and to the other, when under no sort
of violence or constraint, they had sworn a full obedience to
instructions.--That, by the terror of assassination, they had driven
away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false
appearance of a majority.--That this fictitious majority had fabricated
a Constitution, which, as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any
example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age;
that therefore the lovers of it must be lovers, not of liberty, but, if
they really understand its nature, of the lowest and basest of all
servitude.

He proposed to prove that the present state of things in France is not a
transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably represented it,
of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of
producing future and (if that were possible) worse evils.--That it is
not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may
gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom;
but that it is so f