ruction was not as yet proved to them? How could they believe
themselves free and sovereign, when we made them take such an oath as we
thought fit, as a test to give them the right of voting? How could they
believe themselves free, when openly despising their religious worship,
which religious worship that superstitious people valued beyond their
liberty, beyond even their life; when we proscribed their priests; when
we banished them from their assemblies, where they were in the practice
of seeing them govern; when we seized their revenues, their domains, and
riches, to the profit of the nation; when we carried to the very censer
those hands which they regarded as profane? Doubtless these operations
were founded on principles; but those principles ought to have had the
consent of the Belgians, before they were carried into practice;
otherwise they necessarily became our most cruel enemies.

Arrived ourselves at the last bounds of liberty and equality, trampling
under our feet all human superstitions, (after, however, a four years'
war with them,) we attempt all at once to raise to the same eminence
men, strangers even to the first elementary principles of liberty, and
plunged for fifteen hundred years in ignorance and superstition; we
wished to force men to see, when a thick cataract covered their eyes,
even before we had removed that cataract; we would force men to see,
whose dulness of character had raised a mist before their eyes, and
before that character was altered.[8]

Do you believe that the doctrine which now prevails in France would have
found many partisans among us in 1789? No: a revolution in ideas and in
prejudices is not made with that rapidity; it moves gradually; it does
not escalade.

Philosophy does not inspire by violence, nor by seduction; nor is it the
sword that begets love of liberty.

Joseph the Second also borrowed the language of philosophy, when he
wished to suppress the monks in Belgium, and to seize upon their
revenues. There was seen on him a mask only of philosophy, covering the
hideous countenance of a greedy despot; and the people ran to arms.
Nothing better than another kind of despotism has been seen in the
_revolutionary power_.

We have seen in the commissioners of the National Convention nothing but
proconsuls working the mine of Belgium for the profit of the French
nation, seeking to conquer it for the sovereign of Paris,--either to
aggrandize his empire, or to share the burd