by a desire to humble and reduce his nobility,
clergy, and big corporate magistracy: not that I suppose he meant wholly
to eradicate these bodies, in the manner since effected by the
democratic power; I rather believe that even Necker's designs did not go
to that extent. With his own hand, however, Louis the Sixteenth pulled
down the pillars which upheld his throne; and this he did, because he
could not bear the inconveniences which are attached to everything
human,--because he found himself cooped up, and in durance, by those
limits which Nature prescribes to desire and imagination, and was taught
to consider as low and degrading that mutual dependence which Providence
has ordained that all men should have on one another. He is not at this
minute, perhaps, cured of the dread of the power and credit like to be
acquired by those who would save and rescue him. He leaves those who
suffer in his cause to their fate,--and hopes, by various mean, delusive
intrigues, in which I am afraid he is encouraged from abroad, to regain,
among traitors and regicides, the power he has joined to take from his
own family, whom he quietly sees proscribed before his eyes, and called
to answer to the lowest of his rebels, as the vilest of all criminals.

[Sidenote: Emperor.]

It is to be hoped that the Emperor may be taught better things by this
fatal example. But it is sure that he has advisers who endeavor to fill
him with the ideas which have brought his brother-in-law to his present
situation. Joseph the Second was far gone in this philosophy, and some,
if not most, who serve the Emperor, would kindly initiate him into all
the mysteries of this freemasonry. They would persuade him to look on
the National Assembly, not with the hatred of an enemy, but the jealousy
of a rival. They would make him desirous of doing, in his own dominions,
by a royal despotism, what has been done in France by a democratic.
Rather than abandon such enterprises, they would persuade him to a
strange alliance between those extremes. Their grand object being now,
as in his brother's time, at any rate to destroy the higher orders, they
think he cannot compass this end, as certainly he cannot, without
elevating the lower. By depressing the one and by raising the other they
hope in the first place to increase his treasures and his army; and with
these common instruments of royal power they flatter him that the
democracy, which they help in his name to create, will gi