We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld.  Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with, civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined:  I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.  The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, and the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed.  Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds.  Happy, if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place!  Happy, if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master!  Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.[93]

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth.  Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures, are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship.  They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished.  They, too, may decay with their natural protecting principles.  With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together.  Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter?

I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation.  Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors.  Their liberty is not liberal.  Their science is presumptuous ignorance.  Their humanity is savage and brutal.