ected, his commission reported truths, exaggerations, and
falsehoods. But truly or falsely, it reported abuses and offences.
However, as abuses might be corrected, as every crime of persons does
not infer a forfeiture with regard to communities, and as property, in
that dark age, was not discovered to be a creature of prejudice, all
those abuses (and there were enough of them) were hardly thought
sufficient ground for such a confiscation as it was for his purposes to
make. He therefore procured the formal surrender of these estates. All
these operose proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided
tyrants in the rolls of history, as necessary preliminaries, before he
could venture, by bribing the members of his two servile Houses with a
share of the spoil, and holding out to them an eternal immunity from
taxation, to demand a confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an
act of Parliament. Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical
terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he
needed nothing more than one short form of incantation:--"_Philosophy,
Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men_."

I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has
hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors; yet in these
false colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice. The power which
was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame. Whilst
shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart,
nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections with our
political poet on that occasion, and will pray to avert the omen,
whenever these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his
view or his imagination:--

"May no such storm
Fall on our times, where rain must reform!
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous, dire offence,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was't luxury, or lust
Was _he_ so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Were these their crimes? They were his own much more:
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor."[102]

This same wealth, which is at all times treason and _leze-nation_ to
indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes of polity, was your
temptation to violate property, law, and religion, united in one
object. But was the state of France so wretched and undone, tha