Chapter LII: Section IX: Doctrines of the French Revolution Contrasted

with the Conservative Tendencies of the English People

If you wish for a comprehensive view of all these personages, study Sir Joshua Reynolds,[573] and then look at the fine French portraits of this time, the cheerful ministers, gallant and charming archbishops, Marshal de Saxe, who in the Strasburg monument goes down to his tomb with the grace and ease of a courtier on the staircase at Versailles. In England, under skies drowned in pallid mists, amid soft, vaporous clouds, appear expressive or contemplative heads: the rude energy of the character has not awed the artist; the coarse bloated animal; the strange and ominous bird of prey; the growling jaws of the fierce bulldog--he has put them all in: levelling politeness has not in his pictures effaced individual asperities under uniform pleasantness. Beauty is there, but only in the cold decision of look, in the deep seriousness and sad nobility of the pale countenance, in the conscientious gravity and the indomitable resolution of the restrained gesture. In place of Lely's courtesans, we see by their side chaste ladies, sometimes severe and active; good mothers surrounded by their little children, who kiss them and embrace one another: morality is here, and with it the sentiment of home and family, propriety of dress, a pensive air, the correct deportment of Miss Burney's heroines. They are men who have done the world some service: Bakewell transforms and reforms their cattle; Arthur Young their agriculture; Howard their prisons; Arkwright and Watt their industry; Adam Smith their political economy; Bentham their penal law; Locke, Hutcheson, Ferguson, Bishop Butler, Reid, Stewart, Price, their psychology and their morality. They have purified their private manners, they now purify their public manners. They have settled their government, they have established themselves in their religion. Johnson is able to say with truth, that no nation in the world better tills its soil and its mind. There is none so rich, so free, so well nourished, where public and private efforts are directed with such assiduity, energy, and ability towards the improvement of public and private affairs. One point alone is wanting: lofty speculation. It is just this point which, when all others are wanting, constitutes at this moment the glory of France; and English caricatures show, with a good appreciation of burlesque, face to face and in strange contrast, on one side the Frenchman in a tumbledown cottage, shivering, with long teeth, thin, feeding on snails and a handful of roots, but otherwise charmed with his lot, consoled by a republican cockade and humanitarian programmes; on the other, the Englishman, red and puffed out with fat, seated at his table in a comfortable room, before a dish of most juicy roast-beef, with a pot of foaming ale, busy in grumbling against the public distress and the treacherous ministers, who are going to ruin everything.

Thus Englishmen arrive on the threshold of the French Revolution, Conservatives and Christians facing the French free-thinkers and revolutionaries. Without knowing it, the two nations have rolled onwards for two centuries towards this terrible shock; without knowing it, they have only been working to make it worse. All their effort, all their ideas, all their great men have accelerated the motion which hurls them towards the inevitable conflict. A hundred and fifty years of politeness and general ideas have persuaded the French to trust in human goodness and pure reason. A hundred and fifty years of moral reflection and political strife have attached the Englishman to positive religion and an established constitution. Each has his contrary dogma and his contrary enthusiasm. Neither understands and each detests the other. What one calls reform, the other calls destruction; what one reveres as the establishment of right, the other curses as the overthrow of right; what seems to one the annihilation of superstition, seems to the other the abolition of morality. Never was the contrast of two spirits and two civilizations shown in clearer characters, and it was Burke who, with the superiority of a thinker and the hostility of an Englishman, took it in hand to show this to the French.

He is indignant at this "tragi-comick farce," which at Paris is called the regeneration of humanity. He denies that the contagion of such folly can ever poison England. He laughs at the cockneys, who, roused by the pratings of democratic societies, think themselves on the brink of a revolution:

"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."[574]

Real England hates and detests the maxims and actions of the French Revolution:[575]

"The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished... to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.... (We claim) our franchises not as the rights of men, but as the rights of Englishmen."[576]

Our rights do not float in the air, in the imagination of philosophers; they are put down in Magna Charta. We despise this abstract verbiage, which deprives man of all equity and respect to puff him up with presumption and theories:

"We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men."[577]

Our constitution is not a fictitious contract, like that of Rousseau, sure to be violated in three months, but a real contract, by which king, nobles, people, church, everyone holds the other, and is himself held. The crown of the prince and the privilege of the noble are as sacred as the land of the peasant and the tool of the working-man. Whatever be the acquisition or the inheritance, we respect it in every man, and our law has but one object, which is, to preserve to each his property and his rights.

"We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility."[578]

"There is not one public man in this kingdom who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has been compelled to make.... Church and State are ideas inseparable in our minds.... Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiasticks, and in all stages, from infancy to manhood.... They never will suffer the fixed estate of the church to be converted into a pension, to depend on the treasury.... They made their church like their nobility, independent. They can see without pain or grudging an archbishop precede a duke. They can see a Bishop of Durham or a Bishop of Winchester in possession of ten thousand a year."[579]

We will never suffer the established domain of our church to be converted into a pension, so as to place it in dependence on the treasury. We have made our church as our king and our nobility, independent. We are shocked at your robbery--first, because it is an outrage upon property; next, because it is an attack upon religion. We hold that there exists no society without belief, and we feel that, in exhausting the source, you dry up the whole stream. We have rejected as a poison the infidelity which defiled the beginning of our century and of yours, and we have purged ourselves of it, whilst you have been saturated with it.

"Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal,... and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?"[580]

"We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.

"Atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts.

"We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater."[581]

We base our establishment upon the sentiment of right, and the sentiment of right on reverence for God.

In place of right and of God, whom do you, Frenchmen, acknowledge as master? The sovereign people, that is, the arbitrary inconstancy of a numerical majority. We deny that the majority has a right to destroy a constitution.

"The constitution of a country being once settled upon some compact, tacit or expressed, there is no power existing of force to alter it, without the breach of the covenant, or the consent of all the parties."[582]

We deny that a majority has a right to make a constitution; unanimity must first have conferred this right on the majority. We deny that brute force is a legitimate authority, and that a populace is a nation.[583]

"A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state or separable from it.... When great multitudes act together under that discipline of nature, I recognise the people;... when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains so as to form them into an adverse army, I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds."[584]

We detest with all our power of hatred the right of tyranny which you give them over others, and we detest still more the right of insurrection which you give them against themselves. We believe that a constitution is a trust transmitted to this generation by the past, to be handed down to the future, and that if a generation can dispose of it as its own, it ought also to respect it as belonging to others. We hold that, "by this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies and fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer."[585] We repudiate this meagre and coarse reason, which separates a man from his ties, and sees in him only the present, which separates a man from society, and counts him as only one head in a flock. We despise these "metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics of an exciseman," by which you cut up the state and man's rights according to square miles and numerical unities. We have a horror of that cynical coarseness by which "all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off," by which "now a queen is but a woman, and a woman is but an animal,"[586] which cuts down chivalric and religious spirit, the two crowns of humanity, to plunge them, together with learning, into the popular mire, to be "trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude."[587] We have a horror of this systematic levelling which disorganizes civil society. Burke continues thus:

"I am satisfied beyond a doubt that the project of turning a great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless and absurd, in any mode, or with any qualifications. I can never be convinced that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in churchwardens and constables, and other such officers, guided by the prudence of litigious attornies, and Jew brokers, and set in action by shameless women of the lowest condition, by keepers of hotels, taverns, and brothels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop-boys, hairdressers, fiddlers, and dancers on the stage (who, in such a commonwealth as yours, will in future overbear, as already they have overborne, the sober incapacity of dull uninstructed men, of useful but laborious occupations), can never be put into any shape that must not be both disgraceful and destructive."[588] "If monarchy should ever obtain an entire ascendancy in France, it will probably be... the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth. France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors in assignats,... attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people."[589]

This is what Burke wrote in 1790 at the dawn of the first French Revolution.[590] Two years after the people of Birmingham destroyed the houses of some English democrats, and the miners of Wednesbury went out in a body from their pits to come to the succor of "king and church." If we compare one crusade with another, scared England was as fanatical as enthusiastic France. Pitt declared that they could not "treat with a nation of atheists."[591] Burke said that the war was not between people and people, but between property and brute force. The rage of execration, invective, and destruction mounted on both sides like a conflagration.[592] It was not the collision of the two governments, but of the two civilizations and the two doctrines. The two vast machines, driven with all their momentum and velocity, met face to face, not by chance, but by fatality. A whole age of literature and philosophy had been necessary to amass the fuel which filled their sides, and laid down the rail which guided their course. In this thundering clash, amid these ebullitions of hissing and fiery vapor, in these red flames which licked the boilers, and whirled with a rumbling noise upwards to the heavens, an attentive spectator may still discover the nature and the accumulation of the force which caused such an outburst, dislocated such iron plates, and strewed the ground with such ruins.

[Footnote 483: 1742, Report of Lord Lonsdale.]

[Footnote 484: In the present inflamed temper of the people, the Act could not be carried into execution without an armed force.--"Speech of Sir Robert Walpole."]

[Footnote 485: See Walpole's terrible speech against him, 1734.]

[Footnote 486: See, tor the truth of this statement, "Memoirs of Horace Walpole," 2 vols, ed. E. Warburton, 1851, I. 381, note.--Tr.]

[Footnote 487: Notes during a journey in England made in 1729 with Lord Chesterfield.]

[Footnote 488: Dr. W. King, "Political and Literary Anecdotes of his own Times," 1818, 27.]

[Footnote 489: Frederick died 1751. "Memoirs of Horace Walpole," I. 262.]

[Footnote 490: Walpole's "Memoirs of George II," ed. Lord Holland, 3 vols. 2d ed. 1847, I. 77.]

[Footnote 491: See the character of Birton in Voltaire's "Jenny."]

[Footnote 492: The original letter is in French. Chesterfield's "Letters to his Son," ed. Mahon, 4 vols. 1845; II. April 15, 1751, p. 127.]

[Footnote 493: Ibid. II. January 3, 1751, p. 72.]

[Footnote 494: Ibid. II. November 12, 1750, p. 57.]

[Footnote 495: Ibid. II. May 16, 1751, p. 146.]

[Footnote 496: Ibid. II. January 21, 1751, p. 81.]

[Footnote 497: "They (the English) are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster and the fellows of their college. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin, but not one word of modern history or modern languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad, as they call it; but, in truth, they stay at home all that while: for, being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good; but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern."--"Chesterfield's Letters to his Son," I. May 10 (O. S.) 1748, p. 136. "I could wish you would ask him (Mr. Burrish) for some letters to young fellows of pleasure or fashionable coquettes, that you may be dans l'honnete débauche de Munich."--Ibid. II. October 3 1753, p. 331.]

[Footnote 498: Speech of the Beggar in the Epilogue of the "Beggars' Opera."]

[Footnote 499: Gay's Plays, "The Beggars' Opera," I, 1.]

[Footnote 500: Ibid.]

[Footnote 501: Ibid.]

[Footnote 502: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 503: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 504: I cannot find these lines in the edition I have consulted.--Tr.]

[Footnote 505: In these Eclogues the ladies explain in good style that their friends have their lackeys for lovers: "Her favours Sylvia shares amongst mankind; such gen'rous Love could never be confin'd." Elsewhere the servant girl says to her mistress: "Have you not fancy'd, in his frequent kiss, th' ungrateful leavings of a filthy miss?"]

[Footnote 506: Chesterfield's Letters, II. April 22 (O. S.) 1751, p. 131. See, for a contrast, Swift's "Essay on Polite Conversation."]

[Footnote 507: Even in 1826, Sydney Smith, arriving at Calais, writes ("Life and Letters", II. 253, 254): "What pleases me is the taste and ingenuity displayed in the shops, and the good manners and politeness of the people. Such is the state of manners, that you appear almost to have quitted a land of barbarians. I have not seen a cobbler who is not better bred than an English gentleman."]

[Footnote 508: See in "Evelina," by Miss Burney, 3 vols. 1784, the character of the poor, genteel Frenchman, M. Dubois, who is made to tremble even whilst lying in the gutter. These very correct young ladies go to see Congreve's "Love for Love"; their parents are not afraid of showing them Miss Prue. See also, in "Evelina," by way of contrast, the boorish character of the English captain; he throws Mrs. Duval twice in the mud; he says to his daughter Molly: "I charge you, as you value my favour, that you'll never again be so impertinent as to have a taste of your own before my face" (I. 190). The change, even from sixty years ago, is surprising.]

[Footnote 509: Needham (1713-1781), a learned English naturalist, made and published microscopical discoveries and remarks on the generation of organic bodies.--Tr.]

[Footnote 510: The title of a philosophical novel by Diderot.--Tr.]

[Footnote 511: The title of a philosophical tale by Voltaire.--Tr.]

[Footnote 512: "The consciousness of silent endurance, so dear to every Englishman, of standing out against something and not giving in."--"Tom Brown's School Days."]

[Footnote 513: William Penn.]

[Footnote 514: On one tour he slept three weeks on the bare boards. One day, at three in the morning, he said to Nelson, his companion: "Brother Nelson, let us be of good cheer, I have one whole side yet; for the skin is off but on one side."--Southey's "Life of Wesley," 2 vols, 1820, II. ch. XV. 54.]

[Footnote 515: Southey's "Life of Wesley," II. 176.]

[Footnote 516: Ibid, I. 251.]

[Footnote 517: Ibid. I. ch. VI, 236.]

[Footnote 518: Southey's "Life of Wesley," II. ch. XVII. 111.]

[Footnote 519: Ibid. II. ch. XXIV. 320.]

[Footnote 520: Tillotson's Sermons, 10 vols. 1760, I. 1.]

[Footnote 521: Ibid. I. 5.]

[Footnote 522: Tillotson's Sermons, III. 2.]

[Footnote 523: Tillotson's Sermons, IV. 15-16; Sermon 55, "Of Sincerity towards God and Man," John I. 47. This was the last sermon Tillotson preached; July 29, 1694.--Tr.]

[Footnote 524: Barrow's Theological Works, 6 vols. Oxford, 1818, I. 141-142; Sermon VIII. "The Duty of Thanksgiving," Eph. V. 20.

"These words, although (as the very syntax doth immediately discover) they bear a relation to, and have a fit coherence with, those that precede, may yet (especially considering St. Paul's style and manner of expression in the preceptive and exhortative parts of his Epistles), without any violence or prejudice on either hand, be severed from the context, and considered distinctly by themselves.... First, then, concerning the duty itself, to give thanks, or rather to be thankful (for εύχαριστέΐν doth not only signify gratias agere, reddere, dicere, to give, render, or declare thanks, but also gratias habere, grate affectum esse, to be thankfully disposed, to entertain a grateful affection, sense, or memory)... I say, concerning this duty itself (abstractedly considered), as it involves a respect to benefits or good things received; so in its employment about them it imports, requires, or supposes these following particulars."]

[Footnote 525: He was a mathematician of the highest order, and had resigned his chair to Newton.]

[Footnote 526: Barrow's Theological Works, I. Sermon XXIII. 500-501.]

[Footnote 527: Barrow's Theological Works, I. 145; Sermon VIII. "The Duty of Thanksgiving," Eph. V. 20.]

[Footnote 528: Ibid. I. 159-160, Sermon VIII.]

[Footnote 529: Jacques Bridaine (1701-1767), a celebrated and zealous French preacher, whose sermons were always extempore, and hence not very cultivated and refined in style.--Tr.]

[Footnote 530: South's Sermons, 1715, II vols., VI. 110. The fourth and last discourse from those words in Isaiah V. 20, "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter."--Tr.]

[Footnote 531: South's Sermons, VI. 118.]

[Footnote 532: I thought it necessary to look into the Socinian pamphlets, which have swarmed so much among us within a few years.--Stillingfleet, "In Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity," 1697.]

[Footnote 533: John Hales of Eaton, Works, 3 vols., 12 mo, 1765, I. 4.]

[Footnote 534: He examines, amongst other things, "the sin against the Holy Ghost." They would very much like to know in what this consists. But nothing is more obscure. Calvin and other theologians each gave a different definition. After a minute dissertation, Hales concludes thus: "And though negative proofs from Scripture are not demonstrative, yet the general silence of the apostles may at least help to infer a probability that the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is not committable by any Christian who lived not in the time of our Saviour" (1636). This is a training for argument. So, in Italy, the discussion about giving drawers to, or withholding them from the Capuchins, developed political and diplomatic ability.--Ibid. I. 36.]

[Footnote 535: "The Scripture is a book of morality, and not of philosophy. Everything there relates to practice.... It is evident, from a cursory view of the Old and New Testament, that they are miscellaneous books, some parts of which are history, others writ in a poetical style, and others prophetical; but the design of them all, is professedly to recommend the practice of true religion and virtue."--John Clarke, Chaplain of the King, 1721. (I have not been able to find these exact words in the edition of Clarke accessible to me.--Tr.)]

[Footnote 536: Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France."]

[Footnote 537: Ray, Boyle Barrow, Newton.]

[Footnote 538: Bentley, Clarke, Warburton, Berkeley.]

[Footnote 539: Locke, Addison, Swift, Johnson, Richardson.]

[Footnote 540: "Paupertina philosophia" says Leibnitz.]

[Footnote 541: After the constant conjunction of two objects--heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity--we are determined by custom alone to expect the one from the appearance of the other. All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning.... "Upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connection which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate; one event follows another; but we can never observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected."--Hume's Essays, 4 vols., 1760, III. 117.]

[Footnote 542: We must read Sir Robert Filmer's "Patriarcha," London, 1680, on the prevailing theory in order to see from what a quagmire of follies people emerged. He said that Adam, on his creation, had received an absolute and regal power over the universe; that in every society of men there was one legitimate king, the direct heir of Adam. "Some say it was by lot, and others that Noah sailed round the Mediterranean in ten years, and divided the world into Asia, Africa, and Europe" (p. 15)--portions for his three sons. Compare Bossuet, "Politique fondée sur l'Ecriture." At this epoch moral science was being emancipated from theology.]

[Footnote 543: Locke, "Of Civil Government," 1714, book II. ch. II. sec. 4.]

[Footnote 544: Ibid. sec. 13.]

[Footnote 545: Ibid. II. ch. VII. sec. 87.]

[Footnote 546: Ibid.]

[Footnote 547: Ibid. sec. 93.]

[Footnote 548: Ibid. II. ch. VIII. sec. 95.]

[Footnote 549: De Foe's estimate.]

[Footnote 550: "Their eating, indeed, amazes me; had I five hundred heads, and were each head furnished with brains, yet would they all be insufficient to compute the number of cows, pigs, geese, and turkies which upon this occasion die for the good of their country!... On the contrary, they seem to lose their temper as they lose their appetites; every morsel they swallow serves to increase their animosity... The mob meet upon the debate, fight themselves sober, and then draw off to get drunk again, and charge for another encounter."--Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," Letter CXII. "An election described." See also Hogarth's prints.]

[Footnote 551: Ibid.]

[Footnote 552: Montesquieu, "Notes sur l'Angleterre."]

[Footnote 553: Smollett, "Peregrine Pickle," ch. 40.]

[Footnote 554: See Hogarth's prints.]

[Footnote 555: Goldsmith's "Traveller."]

[Footnote 556: Chesterfield observes that a Frenchman of his time did not understand the word Country; you must speak to him of his Prince.]

[Footnote 557: The executioner of Charles I.]

[Footnote 558: Montesquieu, "De l'Esprit des Lois," book XIX. ch. 27.]

[Footnote 559: Junius wrote anonymously, and critics have not yet been able with certainty to reveal his true name. Most probably he was Sir Philip Francis.]

[Footnote 560: "Anecdotes and Speeches of the Earl of Chatham," 7th ed. 3 vols. 1810, II. ch. 42 and 44.]

[Footnote 561: Ibid. II. ch. 29.]

[Footnote 562: Ibid. 42.]

[Footnote 563: Junius's Letters, 2 vols. 1772, XXIII. I. 162.]

[Footnote 564: Ibid. XII. I. 75.]

[Footnote 565: Junius's Letters, XXXVI. II. 56.]

[Footnote 566: Ibid. XXXV. II. 29.]

[Footnote 567: Fox's Speeches, 6 vols. 1815, II. 271; December 17, 1783.]

[Footnote 568: Fox's Speeches, II. p. 268.]

[Footnote 569: "An Inquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful."]

[Footnote 570: Burke's Works, 1808, 8 vols. IV. 286, "Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts."]

[Footnote 571: Burke's Works, IV. 282.]

[Footnote 572: Ibid. VIII. 35; "A Letter to a Noble Lord."]

[Footnote 573: Lord Heathfield, the Earl of Mansfield, Major Stringer Lawrence, Lord Ashburton, Lord Edgecombe, and many others.]

[Footnote 574: Burke's Works, V. 165; "Reflections on the Revolution in France."]

[Footnote 575: "I almost venture to affirm, that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the triumph of the revolution society."--Ibid.]

[Footnote 576: Ibid. 75.]

[Footnote 577: Ibid. 166.]

[Footnote 578: Burke's "Reflections," V. 167.]

[Footnote 579: Ibid. 188.]

[Footnote 580: Ibid. 172.]

[Footnote 581: Ibid. 175.]

[Footnote 582: Burke's Works, VI. 201; "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs."]

[Footnote 583: "A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions.... As to the share of power, authority, direction, which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society."--Ibid. v. 109; "Reflections."]

[Footnote 584: Ibid. VI. 219; "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs."]

[Footnote 585: Ibid. V. 181 "Reflections."]

[Footnote 586: Burke's Works, V. 151; "Reflections."]

[Footnote 587: Ibid. 154.]

[Footnote 588: Ibid. VI. 5; "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly."]

[Footnote 589: Ibid. V. 349; "Reflections."]

[Footnote 590: "The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.... Strange chaos of levity and ferocity,... monstrous tragicomic scene.... After I have read the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the Tiers-État, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing.... Of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. The majority was composed of practitioners in the law,... active chicaners,... obscure provincial advocates, stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, etc."--Ibid. V. 37 and 90. That which offends Burke, and even makes him very uneasy, was, that no representatives of the "natural landed interests" were among the representatives of the Tiers-État. Let us give one quotation more, for really this political clairvoyance is akin to genius: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."]

[Footnote 591: Pitt's Speeches, 3 vols. 1808, II. p. 81, on negotiating for peace with France, January 26, 1795. Pitt says, however, in the same speech: "God forbid that we should look on the body of the people of France as atheists."--Tr.]

[Footnote 592: "Letters to a Noble Lord; Letters on a Regicide Peace."]

CHAPTER FOURTH

Addison