uded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that
usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new
principles of equality in France.

France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of
lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most
potent topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of
tyrannous distrust, and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter
be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns
will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in
their people as subverters of their thrones,--as traitors who aim at
their destruction, by leading their easy good-nature, under specious
pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a
participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) is
an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your
Parliament of Paris told your king, that, in calling the states
together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal
in providing for the support of the throne. It is right that these men
should hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in
the ruin which their counsel has brought on their sovereign and their
country. Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep,--to
encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried
policy,--to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions
which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man
can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or
of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state
corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a
mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever
any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or
the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession;
their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding
out graces, favors, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their
punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted;
industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the
people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil
and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything
human and divine sacrificed to the idol