ow these venerable
asylums escaped from being sold with the king's pictures, as stone and
timber, and why their rich endowments were not shared among such
inveterate ignorance and remorseless spoliation, might claim some
inquiry.

The Abbe Morellet, a great political economist, imagined that the source
of all the crimes of the French Revolution was their violation of the
sacred rights of property. The perpetual invectives of the
_Sans-culottes_ of France _against proprietors and against property_
proceeded from demoralised beings who formed panegyrics on all crimes;
crimes, to explain whose revolutionary terms, a new dictionary was
required. But even these anarchists, in their mad expressions against
property, and in their wildest notions of their "egalite," have not gone
beyond the daring of our own "Rumpers!"

Of those revolutionary journals of the parliament of 1649, which in
spirit so strongly resemble the diurnal or hebdomadal effusions of the
redoubtable French Hebert, Marat, and others of that stamp, one of the
most remarkable is, "The Moderate, impartially communicating Martial
Affairs to the _Kingdom_ of England;" the monarchical title our
commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their
colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English,
_The Moderate_! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy
to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the
rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a
parallel to their compositions. "The Moderate!" was a title assumed on
the principle on which Marat denominated himself "l'Ami du Peuple." It
is curious that the most ferocious politicians usually assert their
moderation. Robespierre, in his justification, declares that Marat "m'a
souvent accuse de _Moderantisme_." The same actors, playing the same
parts, may be always paralleled in their language and their deeds. This
"Moderate" steadily pursued one great principle--the overthrow of all
property. Assuming that _property_ was the original cause of _sin_! an
exhortation to the people for this purpose is the subject of the present
paper:[337] the illustration of his principle is as striking as the
principle itself.

It is an apology for, or rather a defence of, robbery! Some
moss-troopers had been condemned to be hanged for practising their
venerable custom of gratuitously supplying themselves from the flocks
and herds of their