of finance affects every department of the
state; it reigns triumphant at Court; all have become venal; and
all distinction of rank is broken up. Your Ministers are without
genius and capacity since the dismissal of MM. d'Argenson and de
Machault. You alone cannot judge of their incapacity, because
they lay before you what has been prepared by skilful clerks, but
which they pass as their own. They provide only for the necessity
of the day, but there is no spirit of government in their acts.
The military changes that have taken place disgust the troops,
and cause the most deserving officers to resign; a seditious flame
has sprung up in the very bosom of the Parliaments; you seek
to corrupt them, and the remedy is worse than the disease. It is
introducing vice into the sanctuary of justice, and gangrene into
the vital parts of the commonwealth. Would a corrupted Parliament
have braved the fury of the League, in order to preserve the
crown for the legitimate sovereign? Forgetting the maxims of
Louis XIV., who well understood the danger of confiding the
administration to noblemen, you have chosen M. de Choiseul, and
even given him three departments; which is a much heavier burden
than that which he would have to support as Prime Minister, because
the latter has only to oversee the details executed by the
Secretaries of State. The public fully appreciate this dazzling
Minister. He is nothing more than a _petit-maitre_, without talents
or information, who has a little phosphorus in his mind. There
is a thing well worthy of remark, Sire; that is, the open war
carried on against religion. Henceforward there can spring up no
new sects, because the general belief has been shaken, that no
one feels inclined to occupy himself with difference of sentiment
upon some of the articles. The Encyclopedists, under pretence of
enlightening mankind, are sapping the foundations of religion.
All the different kinds of liberty are connected; the Philosophers
and the Protestants tend towards republicanism, as well as the
Jansenists. The Philosophers strike at the root, the others lop
the branches; and their efforts, without being concerted, will
one day lay the tree low. Add to these the Economists, whose
object is political liberty, as that of the others is liberty of
worship, and the Government may find itself, in twenty or thirty
years, undermined in every direction, and will then fall with a
crash. If Your Majesty, struck by this picture, b