Perhaps bold speculations are more acceptable because more new to you than to us, who have been, long since satiated with them.  We continue, as in the two last ages, to read, more generally than I believe is now done on the Continent, the authors of sound antiquity.  These occupy our minds; they give us another taste and turn; and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality.  It is not that I consider this writer as wholly destitute of just notions.  Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain.  But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,—­and the more mischievous for this mixture:  for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally vicious) would reject and throw off with disgust a lesson of pure and unmixed evil.  These writers make even virtue a pander to vice.

However, I less consider the author than the system of the Assembly in perverting morality through his means.  This I confess makes me nearly despair of any attempt upon the minds of their followers, through reason, honor, or conscience.  The great object of your tyrants is to destroy the gentlemen of France; and for that purpose they destroy, to the best of their power, all the effect of those relations which may render considerable men powerful or even safe.  To destroy that order, they vitiate the whole community.  That no means may exist of confederating against their tyranny, by the false sympathies of this Nouvelle Eloise they endeavor to subvert those principles of domestic trust and fidelity which form the discipline of social life.  They propagate principles by which every servant may think it, if not his duty, at least his privilege, to betray his master.  By these principles, every considerable father of a family loses the sanctuary of his house. Debet sua cuique domus esse perfugium tutissimum, says the law, which your legislators have taken so much pains first to decry, then to repeal.  They destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life:  turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father of the family must drag out a miserable existence, endangered in proportion to the apparent means of his safety,—­where he is worse than solitary in a crowd of domestics, and more apprehensive from his servants and inmates than from the hired, bloodthirsty mob without doors who are ready to pull him to the lanterne.

It is thus, and for the same end, that they endeavor to destroy that tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees.  Your despots govern by terror.  They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.  Their object is, that their fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe but that of their Committee of Research and of their lanterne.