that France may be animated by a spirit
of rational liberty, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts
concerning several material points in your late transactions. I love a
manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as anyone; but I cannot stand
forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human
actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject, as it
stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction.

I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of
France until I was informed how it had been combined with government;
with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the
collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality
and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with
civil and social manners.

All these, in their way, are good things, too; and, without them,
liberty is not a benefit while it lasts, and is not likely to continue
long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they
please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk
congratulations. It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of
the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than
Europe.

All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most
astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. Everything seems
out of nature in this chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of
crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this
monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions succeed, and
sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and
indignation; laughter and tears; scorn and horror.

You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it
has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our
liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers
and to be transmitted to our posterity.

Our political system is placed in a just symmetry with the order of the
world; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding
together the great, mysterious incorporation of the human race, the
whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a
condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor
of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. We have given to
our frame of polity