If this were only a libel, there had not been much in it. But it
has practical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who formed
the great body of your landed men and the whole of your military
officers, resembled those of Germany, at the period when the Hanse towns
were necessitated to confederate against the nobles in defence of their
property,--had they been like the Orsini and Vitelli in Italy, who used
to sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller,--had
they been such as the Mamelukes in Egypt, or the Nayres on the coast of
Malabar,--I do admit that too critical an inquiry might not be advisable
into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance. The statues of
Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds,
confounded with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the
suspension of its own rules in favor of its own principles, might turn
aside whilst fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruction of a
pretended nobility, which disgraced, whilst it persecuted, human nature.
The persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and arbitrary
confiscation might remain silent spectators of this civil war between
the vices.
But did the privileged nobility who met under the king's precept at
Versailles in 1789, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as
the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of
ancient times? If I had then asked the question, I should have passed
for a madman.
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