have been contrived.  They have sometimes brought forth five or six hundred drunken women calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their own children, as being Royalists or Constitutionalists.  Sometimes they have got a body of wretches, calling themselves fathers, to demand the murder of their sons, boasting that Rome had but one Brutus, but that they could show five hundred.  There were instances in which they inverted and retaliated the impiety, and produced sons who called for the execution of their parents.  The foundation of their republic is laid in moral paradoxes.  Their patriotism is always prodigy.  All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural affections.  They, on the contrary, have omitted no pains to eradicate every benevolent and noble propensity in the mind of men.  In their culture it is a rule always to graft virtues on vices.  They think everything unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private.  All their new institutions (and with them everything is new) strike at the root of our social nature.  Other legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavored by every art to make it sacred.  The Christian religion, by confining it to the pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these two things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilization of the world than by any other part in this whole scheme of Divine wisdom.  The direct contrary course has been taken in the synagogue of Antichrist,—­I mean in that forge and manufactory of all evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789.  Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate and degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy and honorable.  By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronounced that marriage was no better than a common civil contract.  It was one of their ordinary tricks, to put their sentiments into the mouths of certain personated characters, which they theatrically exhibited at the bar of what ought to be a serious assembly.  One of these was brought out in the figure of a prostitute, whom they called by the affected name of “a mother without being a wife.”  This creature they made to call for a repeal of the incapacities which in civilized states are put upon bastards.  The prostitutes of the Assembly gave to this their puppet the sanction of their greater impudence.  In consequence of the principles laid down, and the manners authorized,