application of a remedy.  Even the clergy were conscious of such necessity; and aware, from the immunities they had long enjoyed, that the people would insist upon their bearing some share of the burden, offered of themselves a considerable portion of their superfluities.  The Assembly was true to justice, and refused to compromise the interests of the Nation by accepting as a satisfaction the insidious offerings of compulsive charity.  They enforced their right.  They took from the clergy a large share of their wealth, and applied it to the alleviation of the national misery.  Experience shows daily the wise employment of the ample provision which yet remains to them.  While you reflect on the vast diminution which some men’s fortunes must have undergone, your sorrow for these individuals will be diminished by recollecting the unworthy motives which induced the bulk of them to undertake the office, and the scandalous arts which enabled so many to attain the rank and enormous wealth which it has seemed necessary to annex to the charge of a Christian pastor.  You will rather look upon it as a signal act of justice that they should thus unexpectedly be stripped of the rewards of their vices and their crimes.  If you should lament the sad reverse by which the hero of the necklace[18] has been divested of about 1,300,000 livres of annual revenue, you may find some consolation that a part of this prodigious mass of riches is gone to preserve from famine some thousands of cures, who were pining in villages unobserved by Courts.

[18] Prince de Rohan.

I now proceed to principles.  Your Lordship very properly asserts that ’the liberty of man in a state of society consists in his being subject to no law but the law enacted by the general will of the society to which he belongs.’  You approved of the object which the French had in view when, in the infancy of the Revolution, they were attempting to destroy arbitrary power, and to erect a temple to Liberty on its remains.  It is with surprise, then, that I find you afterwards presuming to dictate to the world a servile adoption of the British constitution.  It is with indignation I perceive you ‘reprobate’ a people for having imagined happiness and liberty more likely to flourish in the open field of a Republic than under the shade of Monarchy.  You are therefore guilty of a most glaring contradiction.  Twenty-five millions of Frenchmen have felt that they could have no security for their liberties under any modification of monarchical power.  They have in consequence unanimously chosen a Republic.  You cannot but observe that they have only exercised that right in which, by your own confession, liberty essentially resides.

As to your arguments, by which you pretend to justify your anathemas of a Republic—­if arguments they may be called—­they are so concise, that I cannot but transcribe them.  ’I dislike a Republic for this reason, because of all forms of government, scarcely excepting the most despotic, I think a Republic the most oppressive to the bulk of the people; they are deceived in it with a show of liberty, but they live in it under the most odious of all tyrannies—­the tyranny of their equals.’