It was by art and impulse, it was by the sinister use made of a season of scarcity, it was under an infinitely diversified succession of wicked pretences wholly foreign to the question of monarchy or aristocracy, that this light people were inspired with their present spirit of levelling.  Their old vanity was led by art to take another turn:  it was dazzled and seduced by military liveries, cockades, and epaulets, until the French populace was led to become the willing, but still the proud and thoughtless, instrument and victim of another domination.  Neither did that people despise or hate or fear their nobility:  on the contrary, they valued themselves on the generous qualities which distinguished the chiefs of their nation.

So far as to the attack on Mr. Burke in consequence of his reforms.

To show that he has in his last publication abandoned those principles of liberty which have given energy to his youth, and in spite of his censors will afford repose and consolation to his declining age, those who have thought proper in Parliament to declare against his book ought to have produced something in it which directly or indirectly militates with any rational plan of free government.  It is something extraordinary, that they whose memories have so well served them with regard to light and ludicrous expressions, which years had consigned to oblivion, should not have been able to quote a single passage in a piece so lately published, which contradicts anything he has formerly ever said in a style either ludicrous or serious.  They quote his former speeches and his former votes, but not one syllable from the book.  It is only by a collation of the one with the other that the alleged inconsistency can be established.  But as they are unable to cite any such contradictory passage, so neither can they show anything in the general tendency and spirit of the whole work unfavorable to a rational and generous spirit of liberty; unless a warm opposition to the spirit of levelling, to the spirit of impiety, to the spirit of proscription, plunder, murder, and cannibalism, be adverse to the true principles of freedom.

The author of that book is supposed to have passed from extreme to extreme; but he has always kept himself in a medium.  This charge is not so wonderful.  It is in the nature of things, that they who are in the centre of a circle should appear directly opposed to those who view them from any part of the circumference.  In that middle point, however, he will still remain, though he may hear people who themselves run beyond Aurora and the Ganges cry out that he is at the extremity of the West.