Were all these dreadful things necessary?  Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty?  No! nothing like it.  The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war:  they are the sad, but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.  They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible authority.  The persons who have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils, (the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of the state,) have met in their progress with little, or rather with no opposition at all.  Their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war.  Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid everything level at their feet.  Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined.  They have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of worthy men and worthy families.  Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear.  It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings, throughout their harassed land.  But the cause of all was plain from the beginning.

* * * * *

This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly unaccountable, if we did not consider the composition of the National Assembly:  I do not mean its formal constitution, which, as it now stands, is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which in a great measure it is composed, which is of ten thousand times greater consequence than all the formalities in the world.  If we were to know nothing of this assembly but by its title and function, no colors could paint to the imagination anything more venerable.  In that light, the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into one focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect.  Instead of blamable, they would appear only mysterious.  But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men, of whom any system of authority is composed, any other than God, and Nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them.  Capacities beyond these the people have not to give.  Virtue and wisdom may be the objects of their choice; but their choice confers neither the one nor the other on those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands.  They have not the engagement of Nature, they have not the promise of Revelation for any such powers.