n consistently hear nothing of the more or the less. Too
much and too little are treason against property. What evil can arise
from the quantity in any hand, whilst the supreme authority has the
full, sovereign superintendence over this, as over any property, to
prevent every species of abuse,--and whenever it notably deviates, to
give to it a direction agreeable to the purposes of its institution?

In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity towards
those who are often the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love
of the self-denial and mortification of the ancient Church, that makes
some look askance at the distinctions and honors and revenues which,
taken from no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people
of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their
tongue betrays them. Their language is in the _patois_ of fraud, in the
cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so,
when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive
evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them,
(and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing must be
varied, when the relation of that body to the state is altered,--when
manners, when modes of life, when indeed the whole order of human
affairs, has undergone a total revolution. We shall believe those
reformers to be then honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them,
cheats and deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into
common, and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of
the early Church.

With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in
the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the
confiscation of the estates of the Church and poor. Sacrilege and
proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of
Supply. The Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes
of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury. I am
not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I assure you that there is
not _one_ public man in this kingdom, whom you wish to quote,--no, not
one, of any party or description,--who does not reprobate the dishonest,
perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has been
compelled to make of that property which it was their first duty to
protect.

It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you that
those amongst