berty
that they do, when we can use it with the same safety, when to speak
honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose
actions we abhor?

This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with
what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all
pretexts,--a regard to national faith. The enemies to property at first
pretended a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping
the king's engagements with the public creditor. These professors of the
rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure
to learn anything themselves; otherwise they would have known that it is
to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor
of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is
pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title,
superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by
acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of a participation in the goods
of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or
implied. They never so much as entered into his head, when he made his
bargain. He well knew that the public, whether represented by a monarch
or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can
have no public estate, except in what it derives from a just and
proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large. This was engaged,
and nothing else could be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can
mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.

It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions, caused
by the extreme rigor and the extreme laxity of this new public faith,
which influenced in this transaction, and which influenced not according
to the nature of the obligation, but to the description of the persons
to whom it was engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of
France are held valid in the National Assembly, except its pecuniary
engagements: acts of all others of the most ambiguous legality. The rest
of the acts of that royal government are considered in so odious a light
that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of
crime. A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely
as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the
state. It is a better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that
service. We have, however, seen multitudes of peo