to you. You set up your trade without a
capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much
lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your
claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection
for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a
standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour;
and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you
aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to
respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as
a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born, servile wretches until
the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expense of
your honor, an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of
yours, you would not have been content to be represented as a gang of
Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and
therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were
not accustomed, and were ill fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend,
have been wiser to have you thought, what I for one always thought you,
a generous and gallant nation, long misled to your disadvantage by your
high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that
events had been unfavorable to you, but that you were not enslaved
through any illiberal or servile disposition; that, in your most devoted
submission, you were actuated by a principle of public spirit; and that
it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you
made it to be understood, that, in the delusion of this amiable error,
you had gone further than your wise ancestors,--that you were resolved
to resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of
your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; or if, diffident of
yourselves, and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated
Constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbors in this
land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old
common law of Europe, meliorated and adapted to its present state,--by
following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to
the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the
eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed
despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only
reconcilable, but, as, when well disciplined, it is, a