parts of the nation, and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France?

In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ ; because it is evident, that an abuse of the term, people, has been the original fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy, is the present object of all the states of Europe.

If we consider the acting power in France, in any legal construction of publick law, as the people, the question is decided in favour of the republick one and indivisible. But we have decided for monarchy. If so, we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home; for I do not suppose that the government of that kingdom can, or ought to be regulated, by the arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.

As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order by clubs of jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree of which I am incapable. On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.

Since, then, we have decided for monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also to settle who is to be the monarch, who is to be the guardian of a minor, and how the monarch and monarchy is to be modified and supported? If the monarch is to be elected, who the electors are to be? if hereditary, what order is established corresponding with an hereditary monarchy, and fitted to maintain it? Who are to modify it in its exercise? Who are to restrain its powers where they ought to be limited, to strengthen them where they are to be supported, or to enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances, may demand their extension? These are things which, in the outline, ought to be made distinct and clear; for if they are not (especially with regard to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is the corporation of the kingdom) there is nothing to hinder the complete establishment of a jacobin republick, (such as that formed in 1790 and 1791) under the name of a Democracie Royale. Jacobinism does not consist in the having, or not having, a certain pageant under the name of a king, but "in taking the people as "equal individuals, without any corporate name

or description, without attention to property, "without division of powers, and forming the government of delegates from a number of men, so constituted; in destroying or confiscating

"property,,

"property, and bribing the publick creditors, or "the poor, with the spoils, now of one part of the "community, now of another, without regard to prescription or profession."

I hope no one can be so very blind as to imagine that monarchy can be acknowledged and supported in France upon any other basis than that of its property, corporate and individual, or that it can enjoy a moment's permanence or security upon any scheme of things, which sets aside all the ancient corporate capacities and distinctions of the kingdom, and subverts the whole fabrick of its ancient laws and usages, political, civil, and religious, to introduce a system founded on the supposed rights of man, and the absolute equality of the human race. Unless, therefore, we declare clearly and distinctly in favour of the restoration of property, and confide to the hereditary property of the kingdom, the limitation and qualifications of its hereditary monarchy, the blood and treasure of Europe is wasted for the establishment of jacobinism in France. There is no doubt that Danton and Robespierre, Chaumette and Barrere, that Condorcet, that Thomas Paine, that La Fayette, and the ex-bishop of Autun, the abbé Gregoire, with all the gang of the Syeyeses, the Henriots, and the Santerres, if they could secure themselves in the fruits of their rebellion and robbery,

would be perfectly indifferent; whether the most unhappy

VOL. VII.

K

unhappy of all infants, whom by the lessons of the shoemaker, his governor and guardian, they are training up studiously and methodically to be an idiot, or what is worse, the most wicked and base of mankind, continues to receive his civick education in the Temple or the Tuilleries, whilst they, and such as they, really govern the kingdom.

It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that monarchy and property must, in France, go together; or neither can exist. To think of the possibility of the existence of a permanent and hereditary royalty, where nothing else is hereditary or permanent in point either of personal or corporate dignity, is a ruinous chimera worthy of the abbé Syeyes and those wicked fools his associates, who usurped power by the murders of the 19th of July and the 6th of October 1789, and who brought forth the monster which they called Democracie Royale, or the Constitution.

I believe that most thinking men would prefer infinitely some sober and sensible form of a republick, in which there was no mention at all of a king, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and personal freedom, to a scheme of things like this Democracie Royale, founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation of innocent individuals, and the pretended rights of man; and which, in effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy,

and

and landed property of a great nation, threw every thing into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind and bloody band of sans-culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail of this system, was a miserable pageant as its ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment, when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of horrour, and thence led by a brewer of his capital through the applauses of an hired, frantick, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a scaffold.

This is the Constitution, or Democracie Royale; and this is what infallibly would be again set up in France to run exactly the same round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to receive the name of a king, leaving it to the jacobins, (that is to those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the one, and to distribute the other as spoil. By the jacobins I mean indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that unhappy country. The royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or Democratus Royaur, they never had an existence of the smallest degree of power, consideration, or authority; nor, if they differ at all from the rest of