Duke d’Aiguillon had been snatched (as it was generally thought) from the block by the hand of a protecting despotism.  He was a minister, and had some concern in the affairs of that prodigal period.  Why do I not see his estate delivered up to the municipalities in which it is situated?  The noble family of Noailles have long been servants (meritorious servants I admit) to the crown of France, and have had of course some share in its bounties.  Why do I hear nothing of the application of their estates to the public debt?  Why is the estate of the Duke de Rochefoucault more sacred than that of the Cardinal de Rochefoucault?  The former is, I doubt not, a worthy person; and (if it were not a sort of profaneness to talk of the use, as affecting the title to property) he makes a good use of his revenues; but it is no disrespect to him to say, what authentic information well warrants me in saying, that the use made of a property equally valid, by his brother,[101] the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, was far more laudable and far more public-spirited.  Can one hear of the proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects, without indignation, and horror?  He is not a man who does not feel such emotions on such occasions.  He does not deserve the name of a free man who will not express them.

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property.  None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they established crudelem illam hastam in all their auctions of rapine, have ever set up to sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount.  It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity, that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood.  Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings confused with the spirit of revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine.  They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return of power with the return of property to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness.

These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the elements of tyranny, and were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise all sorts of cruelties on each other without provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of color over their injustice.  They considered the vanquished party as composed of traitors, who had borne arms, or otherwise had acted with hostility, against the commonwealth.  They regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property by their crimes.  With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no such formality.  You seized upon five millions sterling of annual rent, and turned forty or fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses, because “such was your pleasure.”  The tyrant Harry the Eighth of England, as he was not better enlightened than the Roman Mariuses and Syllas, and had not studied in