Your fundamental laws, as well as ours, suppose a monarchy.  Your zeal, Sir, in standing so firmly for it as you have done, shows not only a sacred respect for your honor and fidelity, but a well-informed attachment to the real welfare and true liberties of your country.  I have expressed myself ill, if I have given you cause to imagine that I prefer the conduct of those who have retired from this warfare to your behavior, who, with a courage and constancy almost supernatural, have struggled against tyranny, and kept the field to the last.  You see I have corrected the exceptionable part in the edition which I now send you.  Indeed, in such terrible extremities as yours, it is not easy to say, in a political view, what line of conduct is the most advisable.  In that state of things, I cannot bring myself severely to condemn persons who are wholly unable to bear so much as the sight of those men in the throne of legislation who are only fit to be the objects of criminal justice.  If fatigue, if disgust, if unsurmountable nausea drive them away from such spectacles, ubi miseriarum pars non minima erat videre et aspici, I cannot blame them.  He must have an heart of adamant who could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion, treating their honest fellow-citizens as rebels, because they refused to bind them selves through their conscience, against the dictates of conscience itself, and had declined to swear an active compliance with their own ruin.  How could a man of common flesh and blood endure that those who but the other day had skulked unobserved in their antechambers, scornfully insulting men illustrious in their rank, sacred in their function, and venerable in their character, now in decline of life, and swimming on the wrecks of their fortunes,—­that those miscreants should tell such men scornfully and outrageously, after they had robbed them of all their property, that it is more than enough, if they are allowed what will keep them from absolute famine, and that, for the rest, they must let their gray hairs fall over the plough, to make out a scanty subsistence with the labor of their hands?  Last, and, worst, who could endure to hear this unnatural, insolent, and savage despotism called liberty?  If, at this distance, sitting quietly by my fire, I cannot read their decrees and speeches without indignation, shall I condemn those who have fled from the actual sight and hearing of all these horrors?  No, no! mankind has no title to demand that we should be slaves to their guilt and insolence, or that we should serve them in spite of themselves.  Minds sore with the poignant sense of insulted virtue, filled with high disdain against the pride of triumphant baseness, often have it not in their choice to stand their ground.  Their complexion (which might defy the rack) cannot go through such a trial.  Something very high must fortify men to that proof.  But when I am