on the revenues which ought to have fed Christian pastors and their flocks; the Reformation was left to struggle with poverty; and instead of making its progress a perpetual triumph, and riding forth, like the apocalyptic vision, a magnificent figure of truth and holiness, with the emblems of honour on its brow, and of power in its hands, the crown and the bow, conquering, and to conquer," it was sent forth to wander in nakedness and beggary through the land, to live on the alms of the people, and be the mendicant, where it was not the martyr.

The constant principle of the Revolutionists in our country, is that no price can be too great for Revolution. Their constant answer to the argument from the miseries of France is, that she achieved liberty at last. Burke, in 1790, shewed the fallacy of the principle. France herself, in 1833, proclaims the fraud of the practice. No man can doubt the value of a free constitution, the magnanimity of struggling against oppression, or the wisdom of securing for our children the inheritance of freedom gained by our struggles. But the whole question is, whether subversion and massacre are the natural price of liberty; whether we cannot approach to the shrine of that propitious genius of nations, with out binding the nation as a victim to the horns of the altar; whether all the comforts and securities of the highest practical freedom are not to be obtained in the securest way by the avoidance of all injustice, public and private, by reverencing the sacred maxims of truth and virtue, and especially by taking Religion in every step of our journey through the ruggedness and difficulty of change, as our permanent guide. The argument for a violent and revolutionary freedom, is totally overthrown by the evidence of revolutionized France. In 1789, that great and powerful country possessed, without a free constitution, nearly all the enjoyments of personal freedom and national influence, that freedom could give. The only deficiency in this prosperous state, a free constitution, was on the point of being conceded to her by the throne, without the loss of a drop of blood. But she rejected the concession on those simple terms. Her theatrical passion was

not to be satisfied with this cheap contract. She required a spectacle; she must dress up the characters in a new costume, and put extravagant language into their lips; she must have a melodramatic stage, and melodramatic actors, fierce declamation, distorted nature, glaring colours, the struggle of dethroned kings, the blaze of camps and castles, and the grand finale of a universal explosion. By eleven years of this theatrical frenzy, she gained infinite public misery, concluding in remorseless public slavery. By eleven years more of this slavery, she gained universal overthrow; the degradation of the only prize won through her slavery, military name; the conquest of her country; the capture of her metropolis; the exile of her sovereign, and the abscission of her whole revolutionary empire. Yet, did she achieve her freedom, such as it is, by her own hands at last? No. Even to the last hour she was still a slave, and more a slave than ever. France was never in a lower state of servility than at the close of her eleven years of despotism. It was neither her own love for liberty, nor her national courage, nor that inevitable working of the principle of recovery, of which her theorists have talked so much, that gave her a constitution—it was the sword of the Duke of Wellington. If Napoleon had not been driven from the throne by the day of Waterloo, she would still have been in the dungeon; and Napoleon, or his successor, would have been the keeper of the keys. It was no native energy of human kind-no natural return of that stream of vigour to the heart of France, which had been so long wasted and chilled in the extremities-no great inevitable cycle of popular magnanimity coming to rectify the errors and delays of the reckoning of Revolution, that gave France even such liberty as she possesses at this hour. It was even a thing to be so little calculated upon, as the chance of battle; perhaps the life of an individual. If the English General had left his gallant corpse upon that field, instead of the guards that surrounded and established the despotism of France, she would have been at this hour as much trampled, shamed, and scourged as ever.

Thus, France, while she was offered every thing on the terms of a

trict of the kingdom, were filled with projects for the reformation of the government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it! Had such a design been even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. * *

"To hear some men speak of the late monarchy of France, you would imagine that they were talking of Persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of Tahmas Kouli Khan, or at least describing the barbarous, anarchic despotism of Turkey, where the finest countries in the most genial climates of the world are wasted by peace, more than any other countries have been worried by war; where arts are unknown, where manufactures languish, where science is extinguished, where agriculture decays, where the human race itself melts away and perishes under the eye of the observer. Was this the case of France? Facts do not support the resemblance. ** * *

peaceful Revolution, lost every thing by a furious one; lost a quarter of a century of European progress, milHions of lives, millions of treasure, and more than millions, in personal suffering, moral degradation, political impurity, and national shame. If she now has liberty, or the semblance of liberty, it was not the work of glory, but of humiliation-not the purchase of revolution, but the boon of conquest. For what can national outrage produce but national evil? What, by the course of nature, must be his crop who sows the wind? What must be the natural result of letting loose all the furious and bitter passions of the multitude, or rather of summoning them to a banquet expressly laid out to dazzle and inflame, to pamper meagre iniquity into feverish strength and boldness, for the hour, to extinguish all scruples, to stimulate all vengeances, to give new fires to the burning heart of jealousy, cupidity, envy, and licentiousness-and when the intoxication is at its height, to send the whole wild array, torch in hand, to wrap the noblest monuments and labours of empire, whether temple or palace, in unsparing flame? If we have men in England who still dream over the felicities of Revolution, let them awake to its profits in France, and compare the pacific constitution offered to his people forty years ago by the unfortunate and virtuous Louis, with the constitution which they at this hour possess, at the rate of a street campaign and massacre every two years.

Burke's Exposé of the state of France under the monarchy, is one of the celebrated passages of his volume; and for its wisdom, research, and practical views, is worthy of more than all its celebrity. Commencing with the solid observation, that the honestest partisans of change never know how far they are to go, never think of the peril of the first step down a declivity, and are often plunged into irreparable evil, before they are aware that they have gone a single step beyond the natural boundaries of improvement; hewarns his country, that the opinion of all France in 1789, was for, what is called, merely a qualified Reform-"The instructions to the representatives to the States-General, from every dis

"Among the standards upon which the effects of government on any country are to be estimated, I must consider the state of its population as not the least certain. No country, in which population flourishes, and is in progressive improvement, can be under a very mischievous government. About sixty years ago, the Intendants of the Generalities of France made a report of the population of their several districts. I am obliged to speak from memory; but I think the population was by them, even at that period, estimated at twenty-two millions of souls. At the end of the century before, it had been calculated at eighteen. On either of those estimations, France was not ill peopled. M. Neckar, who is an authority for his own time, at least equal to the Intendants for theirs, reckons, and upon apparently sure principles, the people of France in the year 1780, at twenty-four millions, six hundred and seventy thou sand. But was this the probable ultimate term under the old establishment? Dr Price is of opinion, that the growth of population in France was by no means at its acmé in that year. I certainly defer to Dr Price's authority a good deal more in these speculations than I do in his general politics. In the year 1789,

he will not consent to rate the people of that kingdom at a lower number than thirty millions. But, supposing it increased to nothing more than will be sufficient to complete the twenty-four millions to twenty-five, still, a population of twenty-five millions, and that in an increasing progress, on a space of about twentyseven thousand square leagues, is immense. It is, for instance, a good deal more than the proportion of this island, or even of England, the best peopled part of the kingdom.

"It is not universally true, that France is a fertile country. Considerable tracts of it are barren, and labour under other natural disadvantages. In the portions of that territory, where things are more favourable, as far as I am able to discover, the numbers of the people correspond to the indulgence of nature. I do not attribute this population to the deposed government; because I do not like to compliment the contrivances of men with what is due in a great degree to the bounty of Providence. But that decried government could not have obstructed, most probably it favoured, the operation of those causes, whether of nature in the soil, or habits of industry in the people, which have produced so large a number of the species throughout the whole kingdom. "The wealth of a country is another, and no contemptible standard, by which we may judge, whether, on the whole, a government be protecting or destructive. M. Neckar's book published in 1785, contains an accurate and interesting collection of facts relative to public economy, and political arithmetic. In that work, he gives an idea of the state of France, very remote from the portrait of a country whose government was a perfect grievance, an absolute evil, admitting no cure, but through the violent and uncertain remedy of a total revolution. He affirms, that from 1726 to 1784, there was coined at the Mint of France, in gold and silver, to the amount of about one hundred millions of pounds sterling! In 1785, that is about four years before the deposition of the French King, he calculates the numeraire, or what we call specie, then actually existing in France, at about eightyeight millions of the same English

money! a great accumulation of wealth for one country, large as that country is. Some adequate cause must have originally introduced all the money coined at its Mint into that kingdom. And some cause as operative must have kept at home, or returned into its bosom, such a vast flood of treasure. Causes, thus powerful to acquire, and to retain, cannot be found in discouraged industry, insecure property, and a positively destructive government. Indeed, when I consider the face of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of her cities, the useful magnificence of her spacious highroads and bridges, her artificial canals and navigations, opening the conveniences of maritime communication through a solid continent of so immense an extent; when I turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before my view the number of her fortifications, constructed with so bold and masterly a skill, and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when I recollect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what complete perfection the culture of many of the best productions of the earth have been brought in France; when I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of_charity public and private, when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men that she has bred for extending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her orators, sacred and profane; I behold in all this, something which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure, and which demands that we should very seriously examine, what and how great are the latent vices that could authorize us at once to level so spacious a fabric

not lead prosperity and plenty in her train."

with the ground. I do not recognise, in this view of things, the despotism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the character of a government that has been, on the whole, so oppres sive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all Reformation. I must think such a govern. ment well deserved to have its excellences heightened, its faults corrected, and its capacities improved into a British Constitution."

With this fine and unquestionably true statement of the general operation of the monarchy on the public force, wealth, and activity of France, he contrasts the palpable evils brought upon her by the very first movements of change. The disappearance of coin, the loss of employment, a hundred thousand people being thrown out of work in Paris alone, the sudden, repulsive, and ruinous overflow of mendicancy, demanding, even in the last exhaustion of the treasury, an advance of fiftyone millions of livres, or upwards of two millions sterling! the reduction of the population of the capital by a fifth; and pronounces, that these evils, of themselves, show that there is something hollow in the triumph of their liberty. "In the meantime, the leaders of your legislative clubs and coffeehouses are intoxicated with admiration of their own wisdom. They speak with the most Sovereign contempt of the rest of the world; they tell the people to comfort them in the rags in which they have clothed them, that they are a nation of philosophers! and sometimes, by all the arts of quackish parade, by show, tumult, and bustle; sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions, they attempt to drown the cries of indigence, and to divert the eyes of the observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state. A brave people will certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But, before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does

The first attempt of the Revolutionists had been, as it always is, to destroy the Church; the second was, as it always will be, to destroy the Nobility; the Throne is the last plunder, but it is to the full as determined a purpose, and will always inevitably follow the ruin of its great bulwarks in both. Burke powerfully exposes the false pretences under which the constitutional character of the national nobility was libelled. "Had your nobility and gentry, who formed the great body of your landed men, and the whole of your military officers, resembled those of Germany, when the Hanse Towns were necessitated to confederate in defence of their property; had they been like the Orsini and Vitelli in Italy, who used to sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller; had they been such as the Mamatukes of Egypt, or the Nayres of Malabar, I do admit, that too critical an enquiry might not be advisable into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance. The statues of Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds, confounded with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in favour of its own principles, might turn aside, while fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruction of a pretended nobility which disgraced, while it persecuted, human nature. The persons most abhorrent from blood, treason, and arbitrary confiscation, might remain silent spectators of the civil war between the vices!"

In all instances, Jacobinism is but a pretext for robbing the rich and pulling down the high. Its whole fabric is built upon two passions, the basest and bitterest of our na ture;-Envy and Malignity. The Jacobin's whole creed is comprised in the two commandments of a rebellious heart-Exclude providence from the conduct of its own world, and hate your neighbour as you love yourself. Disown the one that you may be entitled to disobey him-and libel the other, that you may be en titled to plunder him. Thus, disburthening his conscience, that he

may give a loose to his passions, he proceeds, under the banner of athe ism and treason, to consummate his work in the extinction of morals and the overthrow of society. This consummation is not yet ripe among ourselves, but the principles are vigorously disseminated; and unless the providence which it scorns shall vindicate itself by the timely extinc tion of the scorners, the harvest will be gathered in in due season. We have the whole progress of Jacobinism laid before us in France; the whole seven ages of public revolt, almost in the graphic succession of the great Poet of life and nature, the smiling infancy, the ingenuous boyhood, the fierce, abrupt, and fiery youth, the stern and martial manhood, the harsh and frowning maturity, until the principle sinks down into natural decay, and exhibits a spectacle of emptiness, and feeble senseless decrepitude to the world. But Jacobinism is, like its parent, essentially a liar. It seeks no reform, it desires no renovation; with the good of mankind eternally on its lips, it has a rankling hatred of human prosperity in its heart; it has the sagacity to know that its element is disorder, and this disorder it must keep alive, let the means be what they will. What man of common sense but must be astonished and disgusted at the language which takes the lead in all our popular meetings at this moment? If we follow the democratic pencil in the picture of our time, we see nothing but monsters; a parliament, even after its fatal delivery into the hands of those new artists of governments and nations to model according to their wisdom, teeming only with corruption; profligate and pernicious; suffered to exist only till the national justice shall have leisure to grasp it and extinguish the national nuisance; a clergy fit for nothing but exile or extermination; a nobility of proud pensioners on the Crown, or insolent oppressors of the people; commerce perishing in our ports through the corruption of our Legislature; manufactures shut out of every part of Europe by the visions of our Ministry. Ruin in the four corners of the land, and the only remedy, general combustion! We leave the painter and his gallery

of evils, and come out into the open air. There we see the sky and the earth free from tempest, none of the congregated clouds and murky atmosphere of the Jacobin canvass; we see the old shapes of commerce, and manners, and legislation, the whole vigour of the civil state alive, the huge and healthy limbs of the body politic in full movement. Still the Jacobin is at work, fabricating discontent, and distorting his own intellect, and that of every student of his school, into a hatred of the forms of truth and nature, into a love for the fantastic mingled with the furious, into scenes of passion without feeling; of power without dignity, of vengeance without justice; a wild, yet deliberate, letting loose of all the crimes and fiercenesses of the heart, for the purpose, grovelling and individual as it is, of exalting himself, and himself alone, into the means of exercising all the oppres sions, corruptions, pampered epicu rean selfishness, and long treasured, remorseless retribution, that he had so contemptuously charged upon the ruling orders of the country. "Did the nobility," exclaims Burke, with natural indignation," who met under the King's precept at Versailles in 1789, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as the Nayres and Mamalukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of ancient times? If I had then asked the question I should have passed for a madman. What have they since done that they were to be driven into exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled and tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in ashes, their order abolished, and the memory of it, if possible, extinguished, by ordaining them to change the very names by which they were usually known. Read their instructions to their representatives, they breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend reformation as strongly as any other order. Their privileges relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered, as the King from the beginning surrendered the right of taxation. Upon a free constitution there was but one opinion in France-the absolute Monarchy was at an end. It had breathed its last, without a groan, without struggle, without convulsion.

All