REFLECTIONS

ON

THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

Dear Sir,—­You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France.  I will not give you reason to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them.  They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld.  It was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them.  In the first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither for nor from any description of men; nor shall I in this.  My errors, if any, are my own.  My reputation alone is to answer for them.

You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that, though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late transactions.

You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society, and the Revolution Society.

I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the Constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution are held in high reverence; and I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that Constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor.  It is because I do so that I think it necessary for me that there should be no mistake.  Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those who are attached to the Constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and Constitution, too frequently wander from their true principles, and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm, but cautious and deliberate, spirit which produced the one and which presides in the other.  Before I proceed to answer the more material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of France,—­first assuring you that I am not, and that I have never been, a member of either of those societies.