sive
correspondence with Mr. Burke. He recommended wise and vast plans; and
these, if possible, would have been adopted. The substance of some of
the leading ones I can recall from the journal of Her Highness and
letters which I have myself frequently deciphered. I shall endeavour,
succinctly, to detail such of them as I remember.

Mr. Burke recommended the suppression of all superfluous religious
institutions, which had not public seminaries to support. Their lands,
he advised, should be divided, without regard to any distinction but that
of merit, among such members of the army and other useful classes of
society, as, after having served the specified time, should have risen,
through their good conduct, to either civil or military preferment. By
calculations upon the landed interest, it appeared that every individual
under the operation of this bounty would, in the course of twenty years,
possess a yearly income of from five to seven hundred francs.

Another of the schemes suggested by Mr. Burke was to purge the kingdom of
all the troops which had been corrupted from their allegiance by the
intrigues growing out of the first meeting of the Notables. He proposed
that they should sail at the same time, or nearly so, to be colonized in
the different French islands and Madagascar; and, in their place, a new
national guard created, who should be bound to the interest of the
legitimate Government by receiving the waste crown lands to be shared
among them, from the common soldier to its generals and Field-marshals.
Thus would the whole mass of rebellious blood have been reformed. To
ensure an effectual change, Mr. Burke advised the enrolment, in rotation,
of sixty thousand Irish troops, twenty thousand always to remain in
France, and forty thousand in reversion for the same service. The
lynx-eyed statesman saw clearly, from the murders of the Marquis de
Launay and M. Flesselles, and from the destruction of the Bastille, and
of the ramparts of Paris, that party had not armed itself against Louis,
but against the throne. It was therefore necessary to produce a
permanent revolution in the army.

[Mr. Burke was too great a statesman not to be the friend of his
country's interest. He also saw that, from the destruction of the
monarchy in France, England had more to fear than to gain. He well knew
that the French Revolution was not, like that of the Americans, founded
on grievances and urged in support of a great and disinterest