d all continued
to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy, if
learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the
instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural
protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and
trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.[93]

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing
to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as
much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the
gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but
creatures, are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning
flourished. They, too, may decay with their natural protecting
principles. With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to
disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a
people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment
supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and
the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may
stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing
must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor
and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride,
possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter?

I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that
horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of
conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the
Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal.
Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and
brutal.

It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand and decorous
principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from
you, or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace
them best. You seem to me to be _gentis incunabula nostrae_. France has
always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your
fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long or not
run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in
my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in
France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious
spectacle of the six