But allowing this, we are led to a very natural
question:--What is that cause of liberty, and what are those exertions
in its favor, to which the example of France is so singularly
auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws, all
the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom? Is every
landmark of the country to be done away in favor of a geometrical and
arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to be voted useless?
Is Episcopacy to be abolished? Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews
and jobbers, or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a
participation in sacrilege? Are all the taxes to be voted grievances,
and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution or patriotic
presents? Are silver shoe-buckles to be substituted in the place of the
land-tax and the malt-tax, for the support of the naval strength of this
kingdom? Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that
out of universal anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four
thousand democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they
may all, by some sort of unknown attractive power, be organized into
one? For this great end is the army to be seduced from its discipline
and its fidelity, first by every kind of debauchery, and then by the
terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the curates
to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the delusive
hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order? Are the citizens of
London to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense
of their fellow-subjects? Is a compulsory paper currency to be
substituted in the place of the legal coin of this kingdom? Is what
remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to be employed in the
wild project of maintaining two armies to watch over and to fight with
each other? If these are the ends and means of the Revolution Society, I
admit they are well assorted; and France may furnish them for both with
precedents in point.
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