your new schools, did not know what an effectual instrument of despotism was to be found in that grand magazine of offensive weapons, the rights of men.  When he resolved to rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a commission to examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in those communities.  As it might be expected, his commission reported truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods.  But truly or falsely, it reported abuses and offences.  However, as abuses might be corrected, as every crime of persons does not infer a forfeiture with regard to communities, and as property, in that dark age, was not discovered to be a creature of prejudice, all those abuses (and there were enough of them) were hardly thought sufficient ground for such a confiscation as it was for his purposes to make.  He therefore procured the formal surrender of these estates.  All these operose proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history, as necessary preliminaries, before he could venture, by bribing the members of his two servile Houses with a share of the spoil, and holding out to them an eternal immunity from taxation, to demand a confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an act of Parliament.  Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of incantation:—­“Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men.”

I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors; yet in these false colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice.  The power which was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame.  Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections with our political poet on that occasion, and will pray to avert the omen, whenever these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his view or his imagination:—­

                      “May no such storm
    Fall on our times, where rain must reform! 
    Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous, dire offence,
    What crime could any Christian king incense
    To such a rage?  Was’t luxury, or lust
    Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just? 
    Were these their crimes?  They were his own much more: 
    But wealth is crime enough to him that’s poor."[102]