s all. Why should not you attend as much to the desires of the
laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by which we are affected
in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent
burghers relative to distinctions and titles of honor, by which neither
they nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay more regard to
their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the rights of man to
pay tribute to his equals? Before this measure of yours we might have
thought we were not perfectly equal; we might have entertained some old,
habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords; but we
cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect
to them you could have made the law that degrades them. You have
forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect;
and now you send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to
fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild
authority of opinion."

The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all
rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics, who have opened
schools for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid
and conclusive. It is obvious, that, on a mere consideration of the
right, the leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled
to abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns. It would
be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings, and to complete
the analogy of their conduct. But they had newly possessed themselves of
a great body of landed property by confiscation. They had this commodity
at market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, if they were
to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so
freely intoxicated themselves. The only security which property enjoys
in any one of its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity
with regard to some other. They have left nothing but their own
arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and
what subverted.

Neither have they left any principle by which any of their
municipalities can be bound to obedience,--or even conscientiously
obliged not to separate from the whole, to become independent, or to
connect itself with some other state. The people of Lyons, it seems,
have refused lately to pay taxes. Why should they not? What lawful
authority is there left to exact them? The king impo