nd
impulse, it was by the sinister use made of a season of scarcity, it was
under an infinitely diversified succession of wicked pretences wholly
foreign to the question of monarchy or aristocracy, that this light
people were inspired with their present spirit of levelling. Their old
vanity was led by art to take another turn: it was dazzled and seduced
by military liveries, cockades, and epaulets, until the French populace
was led to become the willing, but still the proud and thoughtless,
instrument and victim of another domination. Neither did that people
despise or hate or fear their nobility: on the contrary, they valued
themselves on the generous qualities which distinguished the chiefs of
their nation.

So far as to the attack on Mr. Burke in consequence of his reforms.

To show that he has in his last publication abandoned those principles
of liberty which have given energy to his youth, and in spite of his
censors will afford repose and consolation to his declining age, those
who have thought proper in Parliament to declare against his book ought
to have produced something in it which directly or indirectly militates
with any rational plan of free government. It is something
extraordinary, that they whose memories have so well served them with
regard to light and ludicrous expressions, which years had consigned to
oblivion, should not have been able to quote a single passage in a piece
so lately published, which contradicts anything he has formerly ever
said in a style either ludicrous or serious. They quote his former
speeches and his former votes, but not one syllable from the book. It is
only by a collation of the one with the other that the alleged
inconsistency can be established. But as they are unable to cite any
such contradictory passage, so neither can they show anything in the
general tendency and spirit of the whole work unfavorable to a rational
and generous spirit of liberty; unless a warm opposition to the spirit
of levelling, to the spirit of impiety, to the spirit of proscription,
plunder, murder, and cannibalism, be adverse to the true principles of
freedom.

The author of that book is supposed to have passed from extreme to
extreme; but he has always kept himself in a medium. This charge is not
so wonderful. It is in the nature of things, that they who are in the
centre of a circle should appear directly opposed to those who view them
from any part of the circumference. In that middle poin