influence) in a manner impossible amongst country-people.  Combine them by all the art you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into individuality.  Anything in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable amongst them.  Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers, are not easily employed, or hardly at all, amongst scattered people.  They assemble, they arm, they act, with the utmost difficulty, and at the greatest charge.  Their efforts, if ever they can be commenced, cannot be sustained.  They cannot proceed systematically.  If the country-gentlemen attempt an influence through the mere income of their property, what is it to that of those who have ten times their income to sell, and who can ruin their property by bringing their plunder to meet it at market?  If the landed man wishes to mortgage, he falls the value of his land and raises the value of assignats.  He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must take to contend with him.  The country-gentleman, therefore, the officer by sea and land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his country as if he were legislatively proscribed.  It is obvious, that, in the towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gentleman combine in favor of the money manager and director.  In towns combination is natural.  The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion, their business, their idleness, continually bring them into mutual contact.  Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military action.

All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that, if this monster of a Constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns, formed of directors in assignats, and trustees for the sale of Church lands, attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown, the Church, the nobility, and the people.  Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men.  In “the Serbonian bog” of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost forever.

Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think some great offences in France must cry to Heaven, which has thought fit to punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious domination, in which no comfort or compensation is to be found in any even of those false splendors which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent mankind from feeling themselves dishonored even whilst they are oppressed.  I must confess I am touched with a sorrow mixed with