It is that new-invented virtue which your masters canonize that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart was incapable of harboring one spark of common parental affection.  Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy.  Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes.  He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings.  The bear loves, licks, and forms her young:  but bears are not philosophers.  Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings.  Thousands admire the sentimental-writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.

Under this philosophic instructor in the ethics of vanity, they have attempted in France a regeneration of the moral constitution of man.  Statesmen like your present rulers exist by everything which is spurious, fictitious, and false,—­by everything which takes the man from his house, and sets him on a stage,—­which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted, theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candle-light, and formed to be contemplated at a due distance.  Vanity is too apt to prevail in all of us, and in all countries.  To the improvement of Frenchmen, it seems not absolutely necessary that it should be taught upon system.  But it is plain that the present rebellion was its legitimate offspring, and it is piously fed by that rebellion with a daily dole.

If the system of institution recommended by the Assembly is false and theatric, it is because their system of government is of the same character.  To that, and to that alone, it is strictly conformable.  To understand either, we must connect the morals with the politics of the legislators.  Your practical philosophers, systematic in everything, have wisely began at the source.  As the relation between parents and children is the first among the elements of vulgar, natural morality,[4] they erect statues to a wild, ferocious, low-minded, hard-hearted father, of fine general feelings,—­a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred.  Your masters reject the duties of this vulgar relation, as contrary to liberty, as not founded in the social compact, and not binding according to the rights of men; because the relation is not, of course, the result of free election,—­never so on the side of the children, not always on the part of the parents.