erty? While the Girondists predominated in France, Brissot,
self-styled de Warville, was their avowed leader; and Brissot, ten years
before the Revolution, in his 'Philosophic Researches into the Rights of
Property, and Robbery considered in the Light of Nature,' published at
Chartres in 1780, had laid it down as a great principle that 'exclusive
ownership is, in Nature, a real crime.' 'Our institutions,' said this
worthy man, 'punish theft, which is a virtuous action, commended by
Nature herself.' Clearly such 'institutions' needed a great reformation.
It came. France was 'regenerated by blood,' and the disciples of
Rousseau widened the area of human happiness, not by burning only, but
by 'looting' all the houses they could break into.

The chateaux having been duly pillaged and burned, and their owners
driven to fly for their lives, the government, controlled by the
'principles' of Brissot, made emigration a crime, seized the remaining
property of the 'emigrants,' and turned it over with a national title,
to other people!

A most interesting and valuable chapter in history is still to be
written on the relation of the French Revolution to property in France.
Such a history cannot be written by the unassisted light of the statutes
and the code. Family records, private correspondence, the reports and
despatches of the diplomatic agents of the successive French Governments
between 1789 and 1799, must all be laid under contribution, if we are to
get at the truth concerning the conditions under which a very large
proportion of the land of France passed during that period, from the
ownership of men who had much to lose by the changes of the Revolution,
into the ownership of men who had everything to gain from those changes.

The landed proprietors of France were driven into emigration, not that
France might be free--for France was much more free before the
emigration began in 1789 than she was in 1791--but that other people
might get possession of their estates. Without understanding this, it is
impossible to understand some of the most atrocious measures adopted,
chiefly while the Girondists were masters, first by the Legislative
Assembly, and then by the Convention, in regard to 'emigrants.'

This subject was evidently dealt with in the Assembly and the
Convention, as the American Colonel Swan discovered, in 1791, that the
tobacco question was dealt with--'by a knot of men who disposed of all
things as they liked, and