For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state
corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a
mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever
any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or
the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession;
their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding
out graces, favors, and immunities.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their
punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted;
industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the
people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil
and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything
human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national
bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of
new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of
impoverished fraud and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the
support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that
represent the lasting, conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared
and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the
principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was
systematically subverted.
Pages:
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323