but a positive evil.—­That the question did not at all turn, as it had been stated, on a parallel between a monarchy and a republic.  He denied that the present scheme of things in France did at all deserve the respectable name of a republic:  he had therefore no comparison between monarchies and republics to make.—­That what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy, to perpetuate and fix disorder.  That it was a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral Nature.  He undertook to prove that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.—­He offered to make out that those who have led in that business had conducted themselves with the utmost perfidy to their colleagues in function, and with the most flagrant perjury both towards their king and their constituents:  to the one of whom the Assembly had sworn fealty; and to the other, when under no sort of violence or constraint, they had sworn a full obedience to instructions.—­That, by the terror of assassination, they had driven away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false appearance of a majority.—­That this fictitious majority had fabricated a Constitution, which, as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age; that therefore the lovers of it must be lovers, not of liberty, but, if they really understand its nature, of the lowest and basest of all servitude.

He proposed to prove that the present state of things in France is not a transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably represented it, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing future and (if that were possible) worse evils.—­That it is not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be utterly incapable of correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could publicly declare his approbation.

If it had been permitted to Mr. Burke, he would have shown distinctly, and in detail, that what the Assembly calling itself National had held out as a large and liberal toleration is in reality a cruel and insidious religious persecution, infinitely more bitter than any which had been heard of within this century.—­That it had a feature in it worse than the old persecutions.—­That the old persecutors acted, or pretended to act, from zeal towards some system of piety and virtue:  they gave strong preferences to their own; and if they drove people from one religion, they provided for them another, in which men might take refuge and expect consolation.—­That their new persecution is not against a variety in conscience, but against all conscience.  That it professes contempt towards its object; and whilst it treats all religion with scorn, is not so much as neutral about the modes:  it unites the opposite evils of intolerance and of indifference.