of one object, obnoxious wealth to
restless and desperate poverty.

As these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all the late
transactions, their junction and politics will serve to account, not
upon any principles of law or of policy, but as a _cause_, for the
general fury with which all the landed property of ecclesiastical
corporations has been attacked, and the great care which, contrary to
their pretended principles, has been taken of a moneyed interest
originating from the authority of the crown. All the envy against wealth
and power was artificially directed against other descriptions of
riches. On what other principle than that which I have stated can we
account for an appearance so extraordinary and unnatural as that of the
ecclesiastical possessions, which had stood so many successions of ages
and shocks of civil violences, and were guarded at once by justice and
by prejudice, being applied to the payment of debts comparatively
recent, invidious, and contracted by a decried and subverted government?

Was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public debts? Assume
that it was not, and that a loss _must_ be incurred somewhere. When the
only estate lawfully possessed, and which the contracting parties had in
contemplation at the time in which their bargain was made, happens to
fail, who, according to the principles of natural and legal equity,
ought to be the sufferer? Certainly it ought to be either the party who
trusted, or the party who persuaded him to trust, or both; and not third
parties who had no concern with the transaction. Upon any insolvency,
they ought to suffer who were weak enough to lend upon bad security, or
they who fraudulently held out a security that was not valid. Laws are
acquainted with no other rules of decision. But by the new institute of
the rights of men, the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are
the only persons who are to be saved harmless: those are to answer the
debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers, mortgagers nor mortgagees.

What had the clergy to do with these transactions? What had they to do
with any public engagement further than the extent of their own debt? To
that, to be sure, their estates were bound to the last acre. Nothing can
lead more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public
confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention
to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy. The body of