e of a property
equally valid, by his brother,[101] the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen,
was far more laudable and far more public-spirited. Can one hear of the
proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects,
without indignation, and horror? He is not a man who does not feel such
emotions on such occasions. He does not deserve the name of a free man
who will not express them.

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in
property. None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they established
_crudelem illam hastam_ in all their auctions of rapine, have ever set
up to sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous
amount. It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity, that
what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood.
Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings
confused with the spirit of revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated
and recent inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine. They were
driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return
of power with the return of property to the families of those they had
injured beyond all hope of forgiveness.

These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the elements of tyranny,
and were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise all sorts of
cruelties on each other without provocation, thought it necessary to
spread a sort of color over their injustice. They considered the
vanquished party as composed of traitors, who had borne arms, or
otherwise had acted with hostility, against the commonwealth. They
regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property by their
crimes. With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no
such formality. You seized upon five millions sterling of annual rent,
and turned forty or fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses,
because "such was your pleasure." The tyrant Harry the Eighth of
England, as he was not better enlightened than the Roman Mariuses and
Syllas, and had not studied in your new schools, did not know what an
effectual instrument of despotism was to be found in that grand
magazine of offensive weapons, the rights of men. When he resolved to
rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the
ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a commission to examine into
the crimes and abuses which prevailed in those communities. As it might
be exp