noble
pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished. On
the contrary, it was kindled and inflamed. The organs also of the state,
however shattered, existed. All the prizes of honor and virtue, all the
rewards, all the distinctions, remained. But your present confusion,
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in
your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor, is
disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except
in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this generation will
quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble the
artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be
always their fellows, sometimes their masters. Believe me, Sir, those
who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of
various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.
The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of
things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what
the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
associations of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris,
for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which,
by the worst of usurpations, an usurpation on the prerogatives of
Nature, you attempt to force them.

The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the States, said, in a tone
of oratorial flourish, that all occupations were honorable. If he meant
only that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have gone
beyond the truth. But in asserting that anything is honorable, we imply
some distinction in its favor. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a
working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honor to any person,--to
say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such
descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but
the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or
collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating
prejudice, but you are at war with Nature.[86]

I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious
spirit, or of that uncandid dullness, as to require, for every general
observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and
exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general
propositions which come from reasonable