ent spirit which may prevail in any of the
orders. These balances existed in their oldest constitution, and in the
constitution of this country, and in the constitution of all the
countries in Europe. These they rashly destroyed, and then they melted
down the whole into one incongruous, ill-connected mass.

When they had done this, they instantly, and with the most atrocious
perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root of
all property, and consequently of all national prosperity, by the
principles they established and the example they set, in confiscating
all the possessions of the Church. They made and recorded a sort of
_institute_ and _digest_ of anarchy, called the Rights of Man, in such a
pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at
school: but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and
pedantic in them; as by their name and authority they systematically
destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the
minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state,
and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has
ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war,
and perhaps many such.

With them the question was not between despotism and liberty. The
sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country was not made
on the altar of freedom. Freedom, and a better security for freedom than
that they have taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all.
They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that
through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged
themselves headlong into those calamities to prevent themselves from
settling into that constitution, or into anything resembling it.

That, if they should perfectly succeed in what they propose, as they are
likely enough to do, and establish a democracy, or a mob of democracies,
in a country circumstanced like France, they will establish a very bad
government,--a very bad species of tyranny.

That the worst effect of all their proceeding was on their military,
which was rendered an army for every purpose but that of defence. That,
if the question was, whether soldiers were to forget they were citizens,
as an abstract proposition, he could have no difference about it;
though, as it is usual, when abstract principles are to be applied, much
was to be thought on the manner of uniting t