in his designs, as he
can procure: for how can you know the dispositions of the majority to
destroy their government, but by tampering with some part of the body?
You must begin by a secret conspiracy, that you may end with a national
confederation. The mere pleasure of the beginner must be the sole guide;
since the mere pleasure of others must be the sole ultimate sanction, as
well as the sole actuating principle in every part of the progress.
Thus, arbitrary will (the last corruption of ruling power) step by step
poisons the heart of every citizen. If the undertaker fails, he has the
misfortune of a rebel, but not the guilt. By such doctrines, all love to
our country, all pious veneration and attachment to its laws and
customs, are obliterated from our minds; and nothing can result from
this opinion, when grown into a principle, and animated by discontent,
ambition, or enthusiasm, but a series of conspiracies and seditions,
sometimes ruinous to their authors, always noxious to the state. No
sense of duty can prevent any man from being a leader or a follower in
such enterprises. Nothing restrains the tempter; nothing guards the
tempted. Nor is the new state, fabricated by such arts, safer than the
old. What can prevent the mere will of any person, who hopes to unite
the wills of others to his own, from an attempt wholly to overturn it?
It wants nothing but a disposition to trouble the established order, to
give a title to the enterprise.

When you combine this principle of the right to change a fixed and
tolerable constitution of things at pleasure with the theory and
practice of the French Assembly, the political, civil, and moral
irregularity are, if possible, aggravated. The Assembly have found
another road, and a far more commodious, to the destruction of an old
government, and the legitimate formation of a new one, than through the
previous will of the majority of what they call the people. Get, say
they, the possession of power by any means you can into your hands; and
then, a subsequent consent (what they call an _address of adhesion_)
makes your authority as much the act of the people as if they had
conferred upon you originally that kind and degree of power which
without their permission you had seized upon. This is to give a direct
sanction to fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, and the breach of the most sacred
trusts that can exist between man and man. What can sound with such
horrid discordance in the moral ear as