."--Signed by the members of the
Commission and the two Committees.

--_"Il est dangereux d'apprendre au peuple a raisonner: il ne faut pas
l'eclairer trop, parce qu'il n'est pas possible de l'eclairer assez."_
["It is dangerous to teach the people to reason--they should not be too
much enlightened, because it is not possible to enlighten them
sufficiently."]--When the enthusiasm of Rousseau's genius was thus
usefully submitted to his good sense and knowledge of mankind, he little
expected every hamlet in France would be inundated with scraps of the
contrat social, and thousands of inoffensive peasants massacred for not
understanding the Profession de Foi.

The arguments of mistaken philanthropists or designing politicians may
divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature--they may
create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it
with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without
labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually
accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and
propensities with which it is incompatible.

The situation of France has amply demonstrated the folly of attempting to
make a whole people reasoners and politicians--there seems to be no
medium; and as it is impossible to make a nation of sages, you let loose
a horde of savages: for the philosophy which teaches a contempt for
accustomed restraints, is not difficult to propagate; but that superior
kind, which enables men to supply them, by subduing the passions that
render restraints necessary, is of slow progress, and never can be
general.

I have made the war of La Vendee more a subject of reflection than
narrative, and have purposely avoided military details, which would be
not only uninteresting, but disgusting. You would learn no more from
these desultory hostilities, than that the defeats of the republican
armies were, if possible, more sanguinary than their victories; that the
royalists, who began the war with humanity, were at length irritated to
reprisals; and that more than two hundred thousand lives have already
been sacrificed in the contest, yet undecided.

Amiens, Oct. 24, 1794.

Revolutions, like every thing else in France, are a mode, and the
Convention already commemorate four since 1789: that of July 1789, which
rendered the monarchical power nugatory; that of August the 10th, 1792,
which subverted it; the expul