[Sidenote:  King of France.]

This unfortunate king (not without a large share of blame to himself) was deluded to his ruin by a desire to humble and reduce his nobility, clergy, and big corporate magistracy:  not that I suppose he meant wholly to eradicate these bodies, in the manner since effected by the democratic power; I rather believe that even Necker’s designs did not go to that extent.  With his own hand, however, Louis the Sixteenth pulled down the pillars which upheld his throne; and this he did, because he could not bear the inconveniences which are attached to everything human,—­because he found himself cooped up, and in durance, by those limits which Nature prescribes to desire and imagination, and was taught to consider as low and degrading that mutual dependence which Providence has ordained that all men should have on one another.  He is not at this minute, perhaps, cured of the dread of the power and credit like to be acquired by those who would save and rescue him.  He leaves those who suffer in his cause to their fate,—­and hopes, by various mean, delusive intrigues, in which I am afraid he is encouraged from abroad, to regain, among traitors and regicides, the power he has joined to take from his own family, whom he quietly sees proscribed before his eyes, and called to answer to the lowest of his rebels, as the vilest of all criminals.

[Sidenote:  Emperor.]

It is to be hoped that the Emperor may be taught better things by this fatal example.  But it is sure that he has advisers who endeavor to fill him with the ideas which have brought his brother-in-law to his present situation.  Joseph the Second was far gone in this philosophy, and some, if not most, who serve the Emperor, would kindly initiate him into all the mysteries of this freemasonry.  They would persuade him to look on the National Assembly, not with the hatred of an enemy, but the jealousy of a rival.  They would make him desirous of doing, in his own dominions, by a royal despotism, what has been done in France by a democratic.  Rather than abandon such enterprises, they would persuade him to a strange alliance between those extremes.  Their grand object being now, as in his brother’s time, at any rate to destroy the higher orders, they think he cannot compass this end, as certainly he cannot, without elevating the lower.  By depressing the one and by raising the other they hope in the first place to increase his treasures and his army; and with these common instruments of royal power they flatter him that the democracy, which they help in his name to create, will give him but little trouble.  In defiance of the freshest experience, which might show him that old impossibilities are become modern probabilities, and that the extent to which evil principles may go, when left to their own operation, is beyond the power of calculation, they will endeavor to persuade him that such a democracy is a thing which cannot subsist by itself; that in whose ever hands the military command