The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion,
their business, their idleness, continually bring them into mutual
contact. Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in
garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of
those who mean to form them for civil or military action.
All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that, if this
monster of a Constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed
by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns, formed of
directors in assignats, and trustees for the sale of Church lands,
attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers,
composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown,
the Church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the deceitful
dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In "the Serbonian
bog" of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost
forever.
Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think some
great offences in France must cry to Heaven, which has thought fit to
punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious domination, in
which no comfort or compensation is to be found in any even of those
false splendors which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent mankind
from feeling themselves dishonored even whilst they are oppressed.
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