in a great extent of
country, finished the work, and gave to that part of the revolutionary
faction a degree of strength which required other energies than the
late king possessed, to resist, or even to restrain. It spread
everywhere; but it was nowhere more prevalent than in the heart of the
court. The palace of Versailles, by its language, seemed a forum of
democracy. To have pointed out to most of those politicians, from
their dispositions and movements, what has since happened, the fall of
their own monarchy, of their own laws, of their own religion, would
have been to furnish a motive the more for pushing forward a system on
which they considered all these things as encumbrances. Such in truth
they were. And we have seen them succeed not only in the destruction
of their monarchy, but in all the objects of ambition that they
proposed from that destruction. When I contemplate the scheme on which
France is formed, and when I compare it with these systems, with which
it is, and ever must be, in conflict, those things which seem as
defects in her polity are the very things which make me tremble. The
states of the Christian world have grown up to their present
magnitude in a great length of time, and by a great variety of
accidents. They have been improved to what we see them with greater or
less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has been formed
upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As their
constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any
_peculiar_ end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.
The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety,
and have become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries the
state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the
state. Every state has pursued not only every sort of social
advantage, but it has cultivated the welfare of every individual. His
wants, his wishes, even his tastes, have been consulted. This
comprehensive scheme virtually produced a degree of personal liberty
in forms the most adverse to it. That liberty was found, under
monarchies styled absolute, in a degree unknown to the ancient
commonwealths. From hence the powers of all our modern states meet, in
all their movements, with some obstruction. It is therefore no wonder,
that, when these states are to be considered as machines to operate
for some one great end, this dissipated and balanced force is not
easily con