of public credit, and national
bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of
new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of
impoverished fraud and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the
support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that
represent the lasting, conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared
and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the
principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was
systematically subverted.

Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable
results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to
wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and
prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France,
which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the
devastation of civil war: they are the sad, but instructive monuments of
rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the
display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and
irresistible authority. The persons who have thus squandered away the
precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this
prodigal and wild waste of public evils, (the last stake reserved for
the ultimate ransom of the state,) have met in their progress with
little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more
like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. Their pioneers
have gone before them, and demolished and laid everything level at their
feet. Not one drop of _their_ blood have they shed in the cause of the
country they have ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their projects
of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, whilst they were
imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in
tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and
worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of
fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in
authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and
burnings, throughout their harassed land. But the cause of all was plain
from the beginning.

* * * * *

This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly
unaccountable, if we did not consider the composition of the National
Assembly: I do not mean its formal co