he greatest
difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice. Justice is
itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent
departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of
being no policy at all.

When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the
existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful
occupation,--when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their
habits to it,--when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a
ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace
and even of penalty,--I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an
arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their
feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and
to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs
which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor. If
to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation
of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this
despotic sport made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and
properties of men can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.

If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, the policy of
the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from it, ought
to be at least as evident, and at least as important. To a man who acts
under the influence of no passion, who has nothing in view in his
projects but the public good, a great difference will immediately strike
him, between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of
such institutions, and on a question of their total abolition, where
they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where, by long habit,
things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a
manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without
notably impairing the other. He might be embarrassed, if the case were
really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of
debating. But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle.
There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute
destruction or unreformed existence. _Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna_.
This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to
depart from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any
man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider
his c