The French revolutionists have not been unobserving of these circumstances, nor scrupulous of profiting by them:  they knew they might have discussed for ever their metaphysical definitions of the rights of man, without reaching the comprehension, or exciting the interest, of the country people; but that if they would not understand the propagation of the rights of man, they would very easily comprehend an abolition of the rights of their landlords.  Accordingly, the first principle of liberty they were taught from the new code was, that they had a right to assemble in arms, to force the surrender of title-deeds; and their first revolutionary notions of equality and property seem to have been manifested by the burning of chateaux, and refusing to pay their rents.  They were permitted to intimidate their landlords, in order to force them to emigration, and either to sell their estates at a low price, or leave them to the mercy of the tenants.

At a time when the necessities of the state had been great enough to be made the pretext of a dreadful revolution, they were not only almost exempt from contributing to its relief, but were enriched by the common distress; and while the rest of their countrymen beheld with unavailing regret their property gradually replaced by scraps of paper, the peasants became insolent and daring by impunity, refused to sell but for specie, and were daily amassing wealth.  It is not therefore to be wondered at, that they were partial to the new order of things.  The prisons might have overflowed or been thinned by the miseries of those with whom they had been crowded—­the Revolutionary Tribunal might have sacrificed half France, and these selfish citizens, I fear, would have beheld it tranquilly, had not the requisition forced their labourers to the army, and the “maximum” lowered the price of their corn.  The exigency of the war, and an internal scarcity, having rendered these measures necessary, and it being found impossible to persuade the farmers into a peaceful compliance with them, the government has had recourse to its usual summary mode of expostulation—­a prison or the Guillotine.*

* The avarice of the farmers was doubtless to be condemned, but the cruel despotism of the government almost weakened our sense of rectitude; for by confounding error with guilt, and guilt with innocence, they habituated us to indiscriminate pity, and obliged us to transfer our hatred of a crime to those who in punishing it, observed neither mercy nor justice.  A farmer was guillotined, because some blades of corn appeared growing in one of his ponds; from which circumstance it was inferred, he had thrown in a large quantity, in order to promote a scarcity—­though it was substantially proved on his trial, that at the preceding harvest the grain of an adjoining field had been got in during a high wind, and that in all probability some scattered ears which reached the water had produced what was deemed sufficient