If the luxury of carriages be an evil, it must be because the horses employed in them consume the produce of land which might be more beneficially cultivated:  but the gilding, fringe, salamanders, and lions, in all their heraldic positions, afford an easy livelihood to manufacturers and artisans, who might not be capable of more laborious occupations.

I believe it will generally be found, that most of the republican reforms are of this description—­calculated only to impose on the people, and disguising, by frivolous prohibitions, their real inutility.  The affectation of simplicity in a nation already familiarized with luxury, only tends to divert the wealth of the rich to purposes which render it more destructive.  Vanity and ostentation, when they are excluded from one means of gratification, will always seek another; and those who, having the means, cannot distinguish themselves by ostensible splendour, will often do so by domestic profusion.*

* “Sectaries (says Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting, speaking of the republicans under Cromwell) have no ostensible enjoyments; their pleasures are private, comfortable and gross.  The arts of civilized society are not calculated for men who mean to rise on the ruins of established order.”  Judging by comparison, I am persuaded these observations are yet more applicable to the political, than the religious opinions of the English republicans of that period; for, in these respects, there is no difference between them and the French of the present day, though there is a wide one between an Anabaptist and the disciples of Boulanger and Voltaire.

—­Nor can it well be disputed, that a gross luxury is more pernicious than an elegant one; for the former consumes the necessaries of life wantonly, while the latter maintains numerous hands in rendering things valuable by the workmanship which are little so in themselves.

Every one who has been a reflecting spectator of the revolution will acknowledge the justice of these observations.  The agents and retainers of government are the general monopolizers of the markets, and these men, who are enriched by peculation, and are on all occasions retailing the cant phrases of the Convention, on the purete des moeurs republicains, et la luxe de la ci-devant Noblesse, [The purity of republican manners, and the luxury of the ci-devant Noblesse.] exhibit scandalous exceptions to the national habits of oeconomy, at a time too when others more deserving are often compelled to sacrifice even their essential accommodations to a more rigid compliance with them.*