When they have
rendered that deposed power sufficiently black, they then proceed in
argument, as if all those who disapprove of their new abuses must of
course be partisans of the old,--that those who reprobate their crude
and violent schemes of liberty ought to be treated as advocates for
servitude. I admit that their necessities do compel them to this base
and contemptible fraud. Nothing can reconcile men to their proceedings
and projects but the supposition that there is no third option between
them and some tyranny as odious as can be furnished by the records of
history or by the invention of poets. This prattling of theirs hardly
deserves the name of sophistry. It is nothing but plain impudence. Have
these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory
and practice, of anything between the despotism of the monarch and the
despotism of the multitude? Have they never heard of a monarchy directed
by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and
hereditary dignity of a nation, and both again controlled by a judicious
check from the reason and feeling of the people at large, acting by a
suitable and permanent organ? Is it, then, impossible that a man may be
found who, without criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity, shall
prefer such a mixed and tempered government to either of the
extremes,--and who may repute that nation to be destitute of all wisdom
and of all virtue, which, having in its choice to obtain such a
government with ease, _or rather to confirm it when actually possessed_,
thought proper to commit a thousand crimes, and to subject their country
to a thousand evils, in order to avoid it? Is it, then, a truth so
universally acknowledged, that a pure democracy is the only tolerable
form into which human society can be thrown, that a man is not permitted
to hesitate about its merits, without the suspicion of being a friend to
tyranny, that is, of being a foe to mankind?
I do not know under what description to class the present ruling
authority in France.
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