On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,—­and an animal not of the highest order.  All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.  Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.  The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide,—­and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.  In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows.  Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.  On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons,—­so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.  But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.  These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law.  The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states:—­“Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto.”  There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish.  To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support.  The usurpation, which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it.  When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it.  Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated.  From that moment we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.  Europe, undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your Revolution was completed.  How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial.