There were, in the time of our civil troubles in England, (I do not know whether you have any such in your Assembly in France,) several persons, like the then Earl of Holland, who by themselves or their families had brought an odium on the throne by the prodigal dispensation of its bounties towards them, who afterwards joined in the rebellions arising from the discontents of which they were themselves the cause:  men who helped to subvert that throne to which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor.  If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice.  Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and perplexed,—­to others inexplicable, to themselves uncertain.  They find, on all sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things; but in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit.

When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base.  Does not something like this now appear in France?  Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious:  a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy; a tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state?  Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled.  They had long views.  They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction of their country.  They were men of great civil and great military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age.  They were not like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.  The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favorite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished in the success of his ambition:—­

    “Still as you rise, the state, exalted too,
    Finds no distemper whilst ’t is changed by you;
    Changed like the world’s great scene, when without noise
    The rising sun night’s vulgar lights destroys.”