s happen, they surely are more imputable to the
tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant. The
analogy holds with the French peasants. The murder of a
seigneur, or a country seat in flames, is recorded in every
newspaper; the rank of the person who suffers attracts
notice; but where do we find the registers of that seigneur's
oppressions of his peasantry, and his exactions of feudal
services from those whose children were dying around them for
want of bread? Where do we find the minutes that assigned
these starving wretches to some vile pettifogger, to be
fleeced by impositions, and mockery of justice, in the
seigneural courts? Who gives us the awards of the Intendant
and his _sub-delegues_, which took off the taxes of a man of
fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the poor,
who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbours? Who has
dwelt sufficiently upon explaining all the ramifications of
despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical,
pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a
circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of
poverty and wretchedness? In these cases the sufferers are
too ignoble to be known; and the mass too indiscriminate to
be pitied. But should a philosopher feel and reason thus?
Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all
his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because
they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions? The
excesses of the people cannot, I fear, be justified; it would
undoubtedly have done them credit, both as men and as
Christians, if they had possessed their new acquired power
with moderation. But let it be remembered that the populace
in no country ever use power with moderation; excess is
inherent in their aggregate constitution: and as every
Government in the world knows that violence infallibly
attends power in such hands, it is doubly bound in common
sense, and for common safety, so to conduct itself, that the
people may not find an interest in public confusions. They
will always suffer much and long, before they are effectually
roused; nothing, therefore, can kindle the flame but such
oppressions of some classes or order in society as give able
men the opportunity of seconding the general mass; disc