be understood, that, in the delusion of this amiable error, you had gone further than your wise ancestors,—­that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; or if, diffident of yourselves, and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated Constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbors in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe, meliorated and adapted to its present state,—­by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world.  You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation.  You would have shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as, when well disciplined, it is, auxiliary to law.  You would have had an unoppressive, but a productive revenue.  You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it.  You would have had a free Constitution, a potent monarchy, a disciplined army, a reformed and venerated clergy,—­a mitigated, but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions,—­in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.  You had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond anything recorded in the history of the world; but you have shown that difficulty is good for man.

Compute your gains; see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable.  By following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings.  France has bought poverty by crime.  France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest; but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.  All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or other of religion.  All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more austere