e humane
and enlightened, it would be safe to venture on a change. But, as this
system has destroyed morality, and prevented the development of the
intellect,--as it has turned men, who might under different training
have formed a virtuous and happy community, into savage and stupid wild
beasts,--therefore it ought to last for ever. The English Revolution,
it is said, was truly a glorious Revolution. Practical evils were
redressed; no excesses were committed; no sweeping confiscations took
place; the authority of the laws was scarcely for a moment suspended;
the fullest and freest discussion was tolerated in Parliament; the
nation showed, by the calm and temperate manner in which it asserted its
liberty, that it was fit to enjoy liberty. The French Revolution was,
on the other hand, the most horrible event recorded in history,--all
madness and wickedness,--absurdity in theory, and atrocity in practice.
What folly and injustice in the revolutionary laws! What grotesque
affectation in the revolutionary ceremonies! What fanaticism! What
licentiousness! What cruelty! Anacharsis Clootz and Marat,--feasts of
the Supreme Being, and marriages of the Loire--trees of liberty, and
heads dancing on pikes--the whole forms a kind of infernal farce, made
up of everything ridiculous, and everything frightful. This it is to
give freedom to those who have neither wisdom nor virtue.

It is not only by bad men interested in the defence of abuses that
arguments like these have been urged against all schemes of political
improvement. Some of the highest and purest of human beings conceived
such scorn and aversion for the follies and crimes of the French
Revolution that they recanted, in the moment of triumph, those liberal
opinions to which they had clung in defiance of persecution. And, if
we inquire why it was that they began to doubt whether liberty were a
blessing, we shall find that it was only because events had proved, in
the clearest manner, that liberty is the parent of virtue and of order.
They ceased to abhor tyranny merely because it had been signally shown
that the effect of tyranny on the hearts and understandings of men is
more demoralising and more stupifying than had ever been imagined by
the most zealous friend of popular rights. The truth is, that a stronger
argument against the old monarchy of France may be drawn from the
noyades and the fusillades than from the Bastile and the Parc-aux-cerfs.
We believe it to be a rule w