the galleys, or making their confessions on the scaffold. If George III had been King of France, the whole tribe of the philosophes, the atheist politicians, the club orators, and the heroes of the tocsin, would have been peopling the Antipodes; he would have met the smiles and bows of Lafayette with the halterLafayette, of all the perpetrators of national mischief, the most odious, as the bypocrite is more abhorred than the ruffian. He would have taught the Rolands, Baillys, and Pétions loyalty with the scourge. The result of this determined spirit was, that England saved her old unrivalled constitution; and, more important than all, asserted her rank and office as the great depositary of pure religion, and the protectress of Protestantism in Europe.

In one word, if this country is to be saved, it must be by a recurrence to the principles and the conduct of Pitt.

Our statesmen must look to his powerful, clear, and prompt defiance of treason, his sudden and fearless grasp of the traitors, and his generous and confiding appeal to all that is noble, free, and fear less in the hearts of Englishmen. In his day, the insolence of rebellion was even more open than in ours, yet he never shrank-he never compromised-he never stopped till he had crushed Jacobinism, let it take what shape it might. He threw into one common condemnation Correspond ing Societies, Rights of Man Clubs, Magna Charta Associations, British Brotherhoods, and the whole crowd of those bustling knaves and blockheads, who, with all their specious titles, were proceeding, with all sails set, to the invasion of public and private freedom. Some he hanged, more he banished, more he drove out, by their own terrors, to seek the beggar's bread in foreign countries, and carry his stripes with them to the grave. If a man like Pitt were to arise among us now, how instantly he would be felt through every pulse of the nation-how rapidly the defyers of Government would feel that their hour was come-how profoundly the perjured would hide their heads-how unequivocally the brazen effrontery of mob-orators, the miserable sycophancy of mob adulators, the vulgar boasting of

mob leaders, and the hollow courage of dastards, sheltered behind an ignominious impunity, would shrink before the majesty of the true patriot. But how long are we to wait for such a man? or is so noble an instrument of national safety refused by an offended providence to a nation that has suffered its religion and its constitution to be polluted by the presence of the avowed enemies of England?

But hastening, as England is, to a revolution, unless some direct hand of Heaven interpose to check the tide by miracle, the progress of France to ruin may give us warning of our own progress, if all warning be not thrown away upon the reckless and turbulent feelings of the time. It is never to be forgotten for our learning, that the first act of the national legislature was confiscation, and the first act of confiscation was levelled at the property of the Church. The deed was consummately done. The legislators exulted in its unanswerable evidence of their patriotism-the Ministers exulted in the discovery of an inexhaustible source of revenue-the populace exulted in being able to scoff at the prelates and priests, whose opulence they had so long been malignantly taught to envy. The Church was pulled down, and its pulling down was a national triumph. The lowest of the rabble were entitled, by the act of the legislature, to trample on the highest of the ancient clergy of France, now more in a state of mendicancy than themselves. The residences of the clergy were burned, or converted into dwellings for the gendarmerie and officials of the provinces. The churchyards were turned into parades for the National Guards, the churches were turned into barracks, or receptacles for the plunder of the priests; or were stripped of their timber for fuel, and of their lead for balls; in all cases alike, they were equally given over to ruin.

It is not to be alleged, that we should rejoice in this fall of á religion which we pronounce impure. No Protestant can desire the permanency of that religion. But if the religion was corrupt, the property was innocent. The original belief of the country and the Church had

been scriptural. The chief part of the Church property of France had been given in the times of that purer Church. While the property existed, it was capable of being employed in the righteous cause, as in England it had been employed. It remained a noble fund for building up that purer religion, for meeting the exigences of a pure religious education, and for rewarding and exciting the religious literature and feeling of the land. All those objects were, of course, extinguished in their remotest possibility, by the sweeping act of the Church-plundering legislature. But whatever plea a Protestant might have against the endowments of a corrupt church in France, this plea was neither the available, nor even the adopted one, in the French legislature. No charge was there brought against the doctrines of the Church as impure, or against its teachers as inadequate. Spoil was the object, and the property was seized for its simple value to the spoilers. The iniquitous principles were declared-that the clergy were the mere salaried servants of the people-that what the hands of private piety had given, the public will had a right to take away; and -that the existence of any property, however ancient, solemn, or sacred, was dependent altogether upon the demands of the state. On those principles the zealots for the plunder of the Church of England act at this hour in defiance of the obvious facts, that the clergy are not the salaried servants of the public, but men paid by the possessions of the Church, occupiers of hereditary incomes, and incapable of being deprived of this inheritance, but by a breach of the law by which they inherit-that in no case has the will of the legislature any right to interfere with the will of the individual exercised according to the law, the chief object of all law being to give permanent security to the will of the individual -and that the demands of the state have no power to overthrow any contract made by competent authorities, nor to abolish any one right of property, whether vested in the priesthood or in the peerage, whether in the individual or the body; law being the great express protector of those rights of personal

and corporate property. It is admitted that there may be public exigences, which make the "seizure of all individual or corporate property necessary; but those are not the rights of legislation, but of despairnot the creatures of law, but the resorts of a stern necessity, which, by its nature, supersedes all law; the same species of exigence which would seize every man for a soldier or sailor, and tearing away the whole population from their pursuits, and turning a deaf ear to all rights, harness them all in arms to meet ruinous invasion. But are such the exigences of the present hour? What man in his senses pronounces the state undone, unless it can clutch the pittance of the parish priest? The cry is not necessity, but improvement. The violation of the common principles of British law is urged, on the simple ground of Church renovation, and the robbery is to be committed, not by a nation with famine urging it to deeds of indiscriminate spoil, but by a nation calmly theorizing on the means of giving a new impulse to public prosperity, at leisure to think of making that better which is already best, in comparison with the most flourishing kingdoms of the continent, and of calmly swelling a tide of public opulence, freedom and power, to which the world has never seen an equal.

But let speculation pause till facts have spoken. What was the practical result of the seizure of the Church property in France? The most immediate, universal, and remediless burst of public misery, confusion, and convulsion ever known. The life of the peasant was first to have been raised immeasurably in the scale. The whole of peasant life was first thrown into disorder. Dependent in a great degree on the presence, the benefactions, and the personal ministrations of the clergy, the blow that struck the Church into famine was felt as a mortal blow in every village of France. In a vast number of instances the result was peasant violence against the property which was now flung out for general temptation-in many it was a generous and virtuous indignation, on the part of the peasantry, against a government of robbers-in all it was disorganization followed by riot,

and riot plunging the whole lower population into idleness and misery. The rapid confusion of all classes followed. In a letter from Mr Eden (Lord Auckland), a man of character and intelligence, to Pitt, this able and responsible writer says, "It would lead me too far to enter into the strange and unhappy particulars of the present situation of this country. The anarchy is most complete. The people have renounced every idea and principle of subordination. The magistracy (so far as there remains any magistracy) is panic-struck. The army is utterly undone, and the soldiers are so free from military discipline, that, on every discontent, and in the face of day, they take their arms and knapsacks and leave their regiments. The Church, which formerly had so much influence, is now in general treated by the people with derision. The revenue is greatly diminishing

amid the disorders of the time: even the industry of the labouring classes is interrupted and suspended. In short, the prospect, in every point of view, is most alarming; and it is sufficient to walk the streets, and look at the faces of those who pass, to see that there is a general impres sion of calamity and terror. Such a state of things must soon come to a crisis, and the anxiety to be restored to order and security would soon tend to establish, in some shape, an executive government; but there is a cruel want of some man of eminent talent to take the lead. I know personally all who are most conspicuous at present. But I see no man equal, in any degree, to the task which presents itself."

The clubs and associations for "Constitutional Reform," and the rapid restoration of the golden age of liberty, now coalesced, and sent their commands to the National Assembly, to which that Assembly listened with the profoundest deference. Kings and priests were declared by those clubs to be public offences, and the Assembly, though decorously expressing its sense of the unfitness of the names, yet felt too delicately for the popular right of obloquy to punish the revilers. The clubs proceeded to discuss politics on a larger scale, and the Parisian Common Council, long notorious for rabble

manners and ignorant presumption, took the lead in debating matters of government, which its members, or the delegates of its members, carried into the National Assembly, where they were voted forthwith, and became law. The French Parliament was now a slave, the abject and notorious slave of the mob, and scarcely daring to give the formality of a debate to any proposition which came recommended by the sovereign will of any five hundred of the lowest rabble of the suburbs of Paris. But in the midst of this reign of liberty, all became flight, robbery, and bloodshed. The mansions of the men of property in the provinces were surrounded by mobs, taught to believe in the new rights of man. Their owners were shot, or, if they escaped, they at least left their houses behind them, which were first pillaged by the patriots, and then given to the flames. The absence of all men of property, and employers, was, of course, soon felt by the peasantry, who, with freedom in full possession, were every where on the point of famine. Still the work of regeneration went on. The National Assembly, trembling at its own rashness, hurried on, applauding, admiring, and regenerating, until it began to expect a visit from its masters in the streets, who threatened to set the house on fire over its head.

It now advanced another stride in regeneration, and gave the true model of a legislature after the popular heart. The National Assembly, fully establishing the doctrine, that in politics every change is valuable only as regarded the parent of change, and that the most desperate means are the most natural for a progression to the most desperate end, employed itself on an improved shape of the constitution. By this new approach to representative perfection, the elections were to take place every two years. A succession of similar improvements hurried on. The King was to be a cypher, or, in the jargon of treason, to have a suspensive veto, and this negation of all power was to sum up the royal authority; the old divisions of the kingdom were to be broken up for the ostensible purpose of making the returns of members more suitable to

the population; and the local privileges of the country, municipalities, and corporations, were to be utterly abolished. Having thus dealt with the privileges of the King and the Commons, the Nobles were not to be spared. By a decree of the most childish impolicy, not less than of the most sweeping insolence, the whole nobility of France, many of them, too, foremost in the ranks of regeneration, were commanded to lay down their titles; all honours, whether obtained by personal services, by purchase, or by descent from the great soldiers and statesmen of France, were stripped away at once. A single vote abolished in that hour of destiny the rights of the entire body of the French noblesse. It was in vain argued, that by extinguishing all titles, the nation was actually extinguishing a portion of the public power, and that the most exalted portion, the power of reward; and that thenceforth the only form of reward for the most meritorious services, must be money, at once the most expensive to the public and the least productive of public virtue. The patriot who is to be made a patriot only by gain, is a nondescript, and belongs to nothing in human nature. But the true source of this abhorrence of hereditary dignities was neither the vice nor the uselessness of the French nobility; it was the mere rancour of the low against the high, the mere vulgar jealousy of the obscure against the conspicuous, the mere overflowing of that bitter, and mean-spirited, and contemptible desire to sink all things to the level of the contemptible, which belongs to the very nature of the Democrat. This spirit reigns at this moment in the heart of every leveller. This is the spirit which bellows in the cla mour of America against a peerage. Contradicting alike the promptings of that high-hearted and direct instinct by which every man would desire to see his son advancing to a higher station in society than himself, and that legislative foresight by which a provision is made for the stability of a constitution in the stability of a race of great proprietors, possessing their privileges with the effect of a trust for posterity, removed by their station from the everyday influence of the rabble; and pre

eminently feeling their public and personal tenure connected with the steadiness and strength of the constitution. Of all the fine stimulants ever applied to the finer parts of our nature, the most animating, elevating, and unmixed, is the hope of founding a family. A hope which is to be realized only where a hereditary nobility is in existence. This hope the British leveller would destroy, and with it the monarchy. This hope the American leveller has destroyed, and turned his nation into a race of traffickers, where money is the idol; where corruption is the grand instrument of public life, and where republicanism is rapidly inflaming into revolution.

But it was against the Church that the most vigorous hand of national regeneration was raised. The true cause of this violence was the helplessness of the Ecclesiastical body; of all causes the most ungenerous, but when has the rabble exhibited magnanimity? The work of ruin found no obstacle, the whole revolutionary theory had its full completion; all the dignities of the Church were swept away. The parish priesthood alone were left, and these were paid by a small stipend from the state. The livings were made elective, and as, according to the new code of freedom, the right of election in every instance was the "dearest privilege" of man, every man, Atheist, Deist, or Jew, was to have a vote in the election of the parish priest. An oath was further imposed on the whole body of the clergy," that they would maintain to the utmost of their power the new constitution;" which fluctuated from hour to hour, and which was on the point of being superseded by one still more precipitate, rapacious, blind, and bloody. Many of the priesthood, refusing to take this oath, which was denounced by the Pope, the master to whom, in whatever land they exist, their first allegiance is habitually paid, but which they had the still better reason for refusing, that it was in fact the sealing of their bond of ruin, were deprived of their benefices, and left to beg their way through the world.

Yet even this robbery could not make the robbers rich. They soon reached the discovery, that spolia

tion is not revenue. With all the lands of the Church in their possession; with all the tithe in their granaries; with the old glorious dream of the general seizure of all Church property, down to the communion plate, realized, the National Assembly found itself poorer than ever. The treasure which was to relieve France from all burdens for a century to come was found to be worth nothing; from the instant that it touched their hands, it lost its use. The plundering legislature even found, that instead of being benefited by the plunder, it had actually been impoverished. There lay the lands and houses, but no man would buy them. Money fled from France; credit there was none; or if either had existed, who would expend it on purchases which the next decree of an Assembly, where speeches were wisdom and the mob gave the law, might extinguish within twentyfour hours. In the mean time, the stipends of the clergy must be paid, and the nation thus obtained nothing but a pension list of forty thousand paupers.

But the finance of the Assembly began to be more desperate still. The annual expenditure was now no less than twelve millions sterling above the receipts; nearly six times the deficit which had first alarmed the nation; and nearly four times the loan in 1785 which had roused the Parliament of Paris to opposition, and driven Calonne from the helm. The only resource left was the swindling contrivance of issuing vast quantities of paper, on the security of the Church confiscation; irresponsible paper on inconvertible security. The result was natural. The notes (assignats) were speedily depreciated; every man who held them lost by every livre, and the consequence of the whole operation was that the National Assembly, beginning by the robbery of the Church, fiuished by a tenfold robbery of the nation.

Every step of this profligate and prodigious career henceforward is not less fearfully and directly instructive. We have seen the triumph of political renovation complete; France adopting the whole magazine of political specifics which modern renovators pronounce to be essential to public prosperity. She then

had her biennial Parliaments, her universal suffrage, her provinces partitioned into voting districts, her vote by ballot, her corporations levelled with the ground, her Nobility turned into slaves of her Commons, her King the simple possessor of a chair; her Church stripped of its hereditary income, and pensioned by the state; her army replaced by a voluntary levy of the people; the Commons of France the sole depositary of power; the uncontrolled governor of the state, the state. The whole theory of political regeneration never was so completely reduced to fact. Not an old fragment of the antiquated constitution remained; all was brilliant, new, pure! From this splendid elevation, as her orators told Europe, France was to look back on the wis dom of antiquity with scorn, and forward through the remotest future with exultation. All was to be peace unbroken, opulence undisturbed, and prosperity broad, deep, and flowing for ever.

But men on this side of the Channel, who judged that out of evil, evil must come, pronounced that France had now reached only a stage in that deadly trial which awaits the wilful iniquity of nations. Some of these immortal names, which make the noblest renown of a country, pointed to the fierce and wild progress through which faction had strode to supremacy; the road strewed on either side with the fragments of every memorial and institute that nature, feeling, and principle had once combined to honour; the bloodmarks of that rapid heel which had trampled on the helpless; the brandishings of that guilty weapon which was now lifted up in defiance to heaven, and now fell with the weight of cruelty and rapine upon man; the robe torn from the altar, the shattered crown on its forehead snatched from the brow of the unhappy sovereign, and the countenance of mingled haughtiness, passion, and enmity, with which that towering profligate looked down on all nations.

The leaders of the British mind in this great emergency pronounced that religion was the first security of good government, and that where it was scorned, all government must run into anarchy; that where confiscation was made the source of reve