uxiliary to law.
You would have had an unoppressive, but a productive revenue. You would
have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free
Constitution, a potent monarchy, a disciplined army, a reformed and
venerated clergy,--a mitigated, but spirited nobility, to lead your
virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of
commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a
protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and
to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all
conditions,--in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and
not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain
expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of
laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real
inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life
establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an
humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more
splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of
felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond anything recorded in the
history of the world; but you have shown that difficulty is good for
man.

Compute your gains; see what is got by those extravagant and
presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all
their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise
themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable. By
following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities
at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal
blessings. France has bought poverty by crime. France has not sacrificed
her virtue to her interest; but she has abandoned her interest, that she
might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of
a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing
originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or other
of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom
in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and masculine
morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority,
doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an
insolent irreligion in opinions and practices,--and has extended through
all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or
laying open some secl