persons on account of what is done towards them in this their constructive character.  Of what import is it, under what names you injure men, and deprive them of the just emoluments of a profession in which they were not only permitted, but encouraged by the state to engage, and upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had formed the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes to an entire dependence upon them?

You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable distinction of persons with any long discussion.  The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful.  Had not your confiscators by their early crimes obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder.  The sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants who in former ages have vexed the world.  They are thus bold, because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters.  Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies under our eyes?  Shall we not use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it with the same safety, when to speak honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we abhor?

This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts,—­a regard to national faith.  The enemies to property at first pretended a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king’s engagements with the public creditor.  These professors of the rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure to learn anything themselves; otherwise they would have known that it is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged.  The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity.  The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor’s security, expressed or implied.  They never so much as entered into his head, when he made his bargain.  He well knew that the public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate, except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large.  This was engaged, and nothing else could be engaged, to the public creditor.  No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.