A name, which every wind to heaven would bear,
    Which men to speak, and angels joy to hear!

To finish all,—­this great good, as in the instant it is, contains in it the seeds of all further improvement, and may be considered as in a regular progress, because founded on similar principles, towards the stable excellence of a British Constitution.

Here was a matter for congratulation and for festive remembrance through ages.  Here moralists and divines might indeed relax in their temperance, to exhilarate their humanity.  But mark the character of our faction.  All their enthusiasm is kept for the French Revolution.  They cannot pretend that France had stood so much in need of a change as Poland.  They cannot pretend that Poland has not obtained a better system of liberty or of government than it enjoyed before.  They cannot assert that the Polish Revolution cost more dearly than that of France to the interests and feelings of multitudes of men.  But the cold and subordinate light in which they look upon the one, and the pains they take to preach up the other of these Revolutions, leave us no choice in fixing on their motives.  Both Revolutions profess liberty as their object; but in obtaining this object the one proceeds from anarchy to order, the other from order to anarchy.  The first secures its liberty by establishing its throne; the other builds its freedom on the subversion of its monarchy.  In the one, their means are unstained by crimes, and their settlement favors morality; in the other, vice and confusion are in the very essence of their pursuit, and of their enjoyment.  The circumstances in which these two events differ must cause the difference we make in their comparative estimation.  These turn the scale with the societies in favor of France. Ferrum est quod amant.  The frauds, the violences, the sacrileges, the havoc and ruin of families, the dispersion and exile of the pride and flower of a great country, the disorder, the confusion, the anarchy, the violation of property, the cruel murders, the inhuman confiscations, and in the end the insolent domination of bloody, ferocious, and senseless clubs,—­these are the things which they love and admire.  What men admire and love they would surely act.  Let us see what is done in France; and then let us undervalue any the slightest danger of falling into the hands of such a merciless and savage faction!

“But the leaders of the factious societies are too wild to succeed in this their undertaking.”  I hope so.  But supposing them wild and absurd, is there no danger but from wise and reflecting men?  Perhaps the greatest mischiefs that have happened in the world have happened from persons as wild as those we think the wildest.  In truth, they are the fittest beginners of all great changes.  Why encourage men in a mischievous proceeding, because their absurdity may disappoint their malice?—­“But noticing them may give them consequence.”  Certainly.  But they are noticed; and they are noticed, not with reproof, but with that kind of countenance which is given by an apparent concurrence (not a real one, I am convinced) of a great party in the praises of the object which they hold out to imitation.