them. Hope,
fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and
dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs by which
leaders check or urge the minds of followers, are not easily employed,
or hardly at all, amongst scattered people. They assemble, they arm,
they act, with the utmost difficulty, and at the greatest charge. Their
efforts, if ever they can be commenced, cannot be sustained. They cannot
proceed systematically. If the country-gentlemen attempt an influence
through the mere income of their property, what is it to that of those
who have ten times their income to sell, and who can ruin their property
by bringing their plunder to meet it at market? If the landed man wishes
to mortgage, he falls the value of his land and raises the value of
assignats. He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must
take to contend with him. The country-gentleman, therefore, the officer
by sea and land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no
profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his
country as if he were legislatively proscribed. It is obvious, that, in
the towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gentleman
combine in favor of the money manager and director. In towns combination
is natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion,
their business, their idleness, continually bring them into mutual
contact. Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in
garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of
those who mean to form them for civil or military action.

All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that, if this
monster of a Constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed
by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns, formed of
directors in assignats, and trustees for the sale of Church lands,
attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers,
composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown,
the Church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the deceitful
dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In "the Serbonian
bog" of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost
forever.

Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think some
great offences in France must cry to Heaven, which has thought fit to
punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious dom