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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