and the relinquishment of the means of
existence.--The military occupiers offered nothing very alleviating to
such unpleasant reflections; and I beheld with as much regret the
collection of these scattered individuals, as the separation of those
whose habitations they fill. They are most of them extremely young,
taken from villages and the service of agriculture, and are going to risk
their lives in a cause detested perhaps by more than three parts of the
nation, and only to secure impunity to its oppressors.

It has usually been a maxim in all civilized states, that when the
general welfare necessitates some act of partial injustice, it shall be
done with the utmost consideration for the sufferer, and that the
required sacrifice of moral to political expediency shall be palliated,
as much as the circumstances will admit, by the manner of carrying it
into execution. But the French legislators, in this respect, as in most
others, truly original, disdain all imitation, and are rarely guided by
such confined motives. With them, private rights are frequently
violated, only to facilitate the means of public oppressions--and cruel
and iniquitous decrees are rendered still more so by the mode of
enforcing them.

I have met with no person who could conceive the necessity of expelling
the female religious from their convents. It was, however, done, and
that with a mixture of meanness and barbarity which at once excites
contempt and detestation. The ostensible, reasons were, that these
communities afforded an asylum to the superstitious, and that by their
entire suppression, a sale of the houses would enable the nation to
afford the religious a more liberal support than had been assigned them
by the Constituent Assembly. But they are shallow politicians who expect
to destroy superstition by persecuting those who practise it: and so far
from adding, as the decree insinuates, to the pensions of the nuns, they
have now subjected them to an oath which, to those at least whose
consciences are timid, will act as a prohibition to their receiving what
they were before entitled to.

The real intention of the legislature in thus entirely dispersing the
female religious, besides the general hatred of every thing connected
with religion, is, to possess itself of an additional resource in the
buildings and effects, and, as is imagined by some, to procure numerous
and convenient state prisons. But, I believe, the latter is only an
a