peaceful Revolution, lost every thing by a furious one; lost a quarter of a century of European progress, millions 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

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. * * * *

"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 thousand. 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

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 oppressive, 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

not lead prosperity and plenty in her train."

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 Mamalukes 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 nature;-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 entitled to plunder him. Thus, disburthening his conscience, that he'

may give a loose to his passions, he proceeds, under the banner of atheism 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 extinction 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 oppressions, corruptions, pampered epicurean 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

the struggle, all the dissension arose afterwards, upon the preference of a despotic Democracy to a govern ment of reciprocal control. The triumph of the victorious party was over the principles of a British Constitution."

At some distance, but connected with the argument, a passage of remarkable beauty, and of no less dignity and wisdom, follows:"All this violent cry against the nobility, I take to be a mere work of art. To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and usages of our country, has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism, implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communi

ties in a settled state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society! Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus,' was the saying of a wise and good man. It is indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion, and permanence to fugitive existence. It is a sour, malignant, and envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see any thing destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land."

The singularly happy image of the nobles as the consummate decoration of the great social column, excited universal admiration on the first appearance of the Reflections, as uniting equal appositeness and elegance. It was at once ingenious, forcible, and true. His vindication of the ruined French clergy has an additional value to us, from its close, prospective, penetration into the

spirit, which, in all times of conspiracy against the state, will first rage against the church. The vindication is general, not of the doctrines or professional observances of an establishment so totally distinct from that which he revered as his own, but of the common principles of human honour, assailed by the common principles of rapine and revenge. "It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result of my enquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned, or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness, a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses there were undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It was an old establishment, and not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their substance!***** If there had been any just cause for this new religious persecution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to plunder, do not love. anybody so much as not to dwell with complacence on the vices of the existing clergy. This they have not done. They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages, for every instance of oppression and persecution by that body, or in its favour, in order to justify, upon every iniquitous, because very illogical, principle of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just in man to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age.'

It is thus among ourselves that the mob orators look into the history of the Romish supremacy for the