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middle between these must be attracted to the better part. This will be compassed, when every gentleman, everywhere being restored to his landed estate, each on his patrimonial ground, may join the clergy in reanimating the loyalty, fidelity, and religion of the people,--that these gentlemen proprietors of land may sort that people according to the trust they severally merit, that they may arm the honest and well-affected, and disarm and disable the factious and ill-disposed. No foreigner can make this discrimination nor these arrangements. The ancient corporations of burghers according to their several modes should be restored, and placed (as they ought to be) in the hands of men of gravity and property in the cities or bailliages, according to the proper constitutions of the commons or third estate of France. They will restrain and regulate the seditious rabble there, as the gentlemen will on their own estates. In this way, and _in this way alone_, the country (once broken in upon by foreign force well directed) may be gained and settled. It must be gained and settled by _itself_, and through the medium of its _own_ native dignity and property. It is not honest, it is not decent, still less is it politic, for foreign powers themselves to attempt anything in this minute, internal, local detail, in which they could show nothing but ignorance, imbecility, confusion, and oppression. As to the prince who has a just claim to exercise the regency of France, like other men he is not without his faults and his defects. But faults or defects (always supposing them faults of common human infirmity) are not what in any country destroy a legal title to government. These princes are kept in a poor, obscure, country town of the king of Prussia's. Their reputation is entirely at the mercy of every calumniator. They cannot show themselves, they cannot explain themselves, as princes ought to do. After being well informed as any man here can be, I do not find that these blemishes in this eminent person are at all considerable, or that they at all affect a character which is full of probity, honor, generosity, and real goodness. In some points he has but too much resemblance to his unfortunate brother, who, with all his weaknesses, had a good understanding, and many parts of an excellent man and a good king. But Monsieur, without supposing the other deficient, (as he was not,) excels him in general knowledge, and in a sharp and keen obse
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