As for the ancient religious military orders, which were chiefly founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Malta, the Teutonic, the Knights Templars, etc., the injustice and the wickedness of those establishments cannot, I am sure, have escaped your observation.  Their pious object was, to take away by force other people’s property, and to massacre the proprietors themselves if they refused to give up that property, and adopt the opinions of these invaders.  What right or pretense had these confederated Christians of Europe to the Holy Land?  Let them produce their grant of it in the Bible.  Will they say, that the Saracens had possessed themselves of it by force, and that, consequently, they had the same right?  Is it lawful then to steal goods because they were stolen before?  Surely not.  The truth is, that the wickedness of many, and the weakness of more, in those ages of ignorance and superstition, concurred to form those flagitious conspiracies against the lives and properties of unoffending people.  The Pope sanctified the villany, and annexed the pardon of sins to the perpetration of it.  This gave rise to the Crusaders, and carried such swarms of people from Europe to the conquests of the Holy Land.  Peter the Hermit, an active and ambitious priest, by his indefatigable pains, was the immediate author of the first crusade; kings, princes, all professions and characters united, from different motives, in this great undertaking, as every sentiment, except true religion and morality, invited to it.  The ambitious hoped for kingdoms; the greedy and the necessitous for plunder; and some were enthusiasts enough to hope for salvation, by the destruction of a considerable number of their fellow creatures, who had done them no injury.  I cannot omit, upon this occasion, telling you that the Eastern emperors at Constantinople (who, as Christians, were obliged at least to seem to favor these expeditions), seeing the immense numbers of the ‘Croisez’, and fearing that the Western Empire might have some mind to the Eastern Empire too, if it succeeded against the Infidels, as ‘l’appetit vient en mangeant’; these Eastern emperors, very honestly, poisoned the waters where the ‘Croisez’ were to pass, and so destroyed infinite numbers of them.

The later orders of knighthood, such as the Garter in England; the Elephant in Denmark; the Golden Fleece in Burgundy; the St. Esprit, St. Michel, St. Louis, and St. Lazare, in France etc., are of a very different nature and were either the invitations to, or the rewards of; brave actions in fair war; and are now rather the decorations of the favor of the prince, than the proofs of the merit of the subject.  However, they are worth your inquiries to a certain degree, and conversation will give you frequent opportunities for them.  Wherever you are, I would advise you to inquire into the respective orders of that country, and to write down a short account of them.  For example, while you are in Saxony, get an account of