ast fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of
all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense
was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair
of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in
that place, that has not been increased,--brothels, gaming-houses,
everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a
triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to their utmost
perfection, and cover them with every species of imposing magnificence.
They have all along avowed them as a part of their policy; and whilst
they corrupt young minds through pleasure, they form them to crimes.
Every idea of corporal gratification is carried to the highest excess,
and wooed with all the elegance that belongs to the senses. All elegance
of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy
phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse
dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the
tone and idiom of their language and their manners. Any one, who attends
to all their own descriptions, narratives, and dissertations, will find
in that whole place more of the air of a body of assassins, banditti,
housebreakers, and outlawed smugglers, joined to that of a gang of
strolling players expelled from and exploded orderly theatres, with
their prostitutes in a brothel, at their debauches and bacchanals, than
anything of the refined and perfected virtues, or the polished,
mitigated vices of a great capital.

Is it for this benefit we open "the usual relations of peace and amity"?
Is it for this our youth of both sexes are to form themselves by travel?
Is it for this that with expense and pains we form their lisping infant
accents to the language of France? I shall be told that this abominable
medley is made rather to revolt young and ingenuous minds. So it is in
the description. So perhaps it may in reality to a chosen few. So it may
be, when the magistrate, the law, and the church frown on such manners,
and the wretches to whom they belong,--when they are chased from the
eye of day, and the society of civil life, into night-cellars and caves
and woods. But when these men themselves are the magistrates,--when all
the consequence, weight, and authority of a great nation adopt
them,--when we see them conjoined with victory, glory, power, and
dominion, and homage paid to them by every government,