r grantees, will
pay, not only from the rents as they accrue, which might as well be
received by the state, but from the spoil of the materials of buildings,
from waste in woods, and from whatever money, by hands habituated to the
gripings of usury, they can wring from the miserable peasant. He is to
be delivered over to the mercenary and arbitrary discretion of men who
will be stimulated to every species of extortion by the growing demands
on the growing profits of an estate held under the precarious
settlement of a new political system.

When all the frauds, impostures, violences, rapines, burnings, murders,
confiscations, compulsory paper currencies, and every description of
tyranny and cruelty employed to bring about and to uphold this
Revolution have their natural effect, that is, to shock the moral
sentiments of all virtuous and sober minds, the abettors of this
philosophic system immediately strain their throats in a declamation
against the old monarchical government of France. When they have
rendered that deposed power sufficiently black, they then proceed in
argument, as if all those who disapprove of their new abuses must of
course be partisans of the old,--that those who reprobate their crude
and violent schemes of liberty ought to be treated as advocates for
servitude. I admit that their necessities do compel them to this base
and contemptible fraud. Nothing can reconcile men to their proceedings
and projects but the supposition that there is no third option between
them and some tyranny as odious as can be furnished by the records of
history or by the invention of poets. This prattling of theirs hardly
deserves the name of sophistry. It is nothing but plain impudence. Have
these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory
and practice, of anything between the despotism of the monarch and the
despotism of the multitude? Have they never heard of a monarchy directed
by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and
hereditary dignity of a nation, and both again controlled by a judicious
check from the reason and feeling of the people at large, acting by a
suitable and permanent organ? Is it, then, impossible that a man may be
found who, without criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity, shall
prefer such a mixed and tempered government to either of the
extremes,--and who may repute that nation to be destitute of all wisdom
and of all virtue, which, having in its choi