that of exactors under your authority.  Have you endeavored to make these your rent-gatherers respectable to us?  No.  You have sent them to us with their arms reversed, their shields broken, their impresses defaced,—­and so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no longer know them.  They are strangers to us.  They do not even go by the names of our ancient lords.  Physically they may be the same men,—­though we are not quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal identity.  In all other respects they are totally changed.  We do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their honors, titles, and distinctions.  This we have never commissioned you to do; and it is one instance among many, indeed, of your assumption of undelegated power.  We see the burghers of Paris, through their clubs, their mobs, and their national guards, directing you at their pleasure, and giving that as law to you, which, under your authority, is transmitted as law to us.  Through you, these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all.  Why should not you attend as much to the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers relative to distinctions and titles of honor, by which neither they nor we are affected at all?  But we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessities.  Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals?  Before this measure of yours we might have thought we were not perfectly equal; we might have entertained some old, habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords; but we cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to them you could have made the law that degrades them.  You have forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect; and now you send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion.”

The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics, who have opened schools for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid and conclusive.  It is obvious, that, on a mere consideration of the right, the leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled to abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns.  It would be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings, and to complete the analogy of their conduct.  But they had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed property by confiscation.  They had this commodity at market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves.  The only security which property enjoys in any one of its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity with regard to some other.  They have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and what subverted.