ted. Had my friends who have been slaughtered by Le Bon's
tribunal persisted in endeavouring to escape, they might have lived, and
their families, though despoiled by the rapacity of the government, have
been comparatively happy.*

* The first horrors of the revolution are well known, and I have
seen no accounts which exaggerate them. The niece of a lady of my
acquaintance, a young woman only seventeen, escaped from her
country-house (whilst already in flames) with her infant at her
breast, and literally without clothes to cover her. In this state
she wandered a whole night, and when she at length reached a place
where she procured assistance, was so exhausted that her life was in
danger.--Another lady, whom I knew, was wounded in the arm by some
peasants assembled to force from her the writings of her husband's
estates. Even after this they still remained in France, submitted
with cheerfulness to all the demands of patriotic gifts, forced
loans, requisitions and impositions of every kind; yet her husband
was nevertheless guillotined, and the whole of their immense
property confiscated.

Retrospections, like these, obliterate many of my former notions on the
subject of the Emigrants; and if I yet condemn emigration, it is only as
a general measure, impolitic, and inadequate to the purposes for which it
was undertaken. But errors of judgment, in circumstances so
unprecedented, cannot be censured consistently with candour, through we
may venture to mark them as a discouragement to imitation; for if any
nation should yet be menaced by the revolutionary scourge, let it beware
of seeking external redress by a temporary abandonment of its interests
to the madness of systemists, or the rapine of needy adventurers. We
must, we ought to, lament the fate of the many gallant men who have
fallen, and the calamities of those who survive; but what in them has
been a mistaken policy, will become guilt in those who, on a similar
occasion, shall not be warned by their example. I am concerned when I
hear these unhappy fugitives are any where objects of suspicion or
persecution, as it is not likely that those who really emigrated from
principle can merit such treatment: and I doubt not, that most of the
instances of treachery or misconduct ascribed to the Emigrants originated
in republican emissaries, who have assumed that character for the double
purpose of dis