progress of the French Revolution through most
of its principal stages, from its commencement to the taking of the
Bastille, and its establishment by the Declaration of Rights, I will
close the subject with the energetic apostrophe of M. de la Fayette,
"May this great monument, raised to Liberty, serve as a lesson to the
oppressor, and an example to the oppressed!"*[11]

MISCELLANEOUS CHAPTER

To prevent interrupting the argument in the preceding part of this work,
or the narrative that follows it, I reserved some observations to be
thrown together in a Miscellaneous Chapter; by which variety might
not be censured for confusion. Mr. Burke's book is all Miscellany. His
intention was to make an attack on the French Revolution; but instead of
proceeding with an orderly arrangement, he has stormed it with a mob of
ideas tumbling over and destroying one another.

But this confusion and contradiction in Mr. Burke's Book is easily
accounted for.--When a man in a wrong cause attempts to steer his course
by anything else than some polar truth or principle, he is sure to be
lost. It is beyond the compass of his capacity to keep all the parts
of an argument together, and make them unite in one issue, by any
other means than having this guide always in view. Neither memory nor
invention will supply the want of it. The former fails him, and the
latter betrays him.

Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves no better name, that Mr.
Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession,
and that a Nation has not a right to form a Government of itself; it
happened to fall in his way to give some account of what Government is.
"Government," says he, "is a contrivance of human wisdom."

Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must
necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights
(as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible
to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a
wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a
nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now
takes is fatal to every part of his cause. The argument changes from
hereditary rights to hereditary wisdom; and the question is, Who is the
wisest man? He must now show that every one in the line of hereditary
succession was a Solomon, or his title is not good to be a king. What a
stroke has Mr. Bu