This separation, as I have already taken the liberty of suggesting to you, I conceive to be one principal cause of the destruction of the old nobility.  The military, particularly, was too exclusively reserved for men of family.  But, after all, this was an error of opinion, which a conflicting opinion would have rectified.  A permanent Assembly, in which the commons had their share of power, would soon abolish whatever was too invidious and insulting in these distinctions; and even the faults in the morals of the nobility would have been probably corrected, by the greater varieties of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by orders would have given rise.

All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art.  To be honored and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of ages, has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man.  Even to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime.  The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature.  It operates as an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled state.  What is there to shock in this?  Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.  It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. “Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus,” was the saying of a wise and good man.  It is, indeed, one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with some sort of partial propensity.  He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem.  It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long nourished in splendor and in honor.  I do not like to see anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land.  It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any incorrigible vices in the noblesse of France, or any abuse which could not be removed by a reform very short of abolition.  Your noblesse did not deserve punishment; but to degrade is to punish.

It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar.  It is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt.  It is not with much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder.  I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment.  An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse.  Vices and abuses there were undoubtedly in that order, and must be.  It was an old establishment, and not frequently revised.  But I saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their substance, nor those cruel insults and degradations, and that unnatural persecution, which have been substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.