is a part of the law of Nature.  He tells us that the positive ascertainment of its limits, and its security from invasion, were among the causes for which civil society itself has been instituted.  If prescription be once shaken, no species of property is secure, when it once becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent power.  I see a practice perfectly correspondent to their contempt of this great fundamental part of natural law.  I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end there.  I see the princes of the blood, who, by the oldest usages of that kingdom, held large landed estates, (hardly with the compliment of a debate,) deprived of their possessions, and, in lieu of their stable, independent property, reduced to the hope of some precarious charitable pension at the pleasure of an Assembly, which of course will pay little regard to the rights of pensioners at pleasure, when it despises those of legal proprietors.  Flushed with the insolence of their first inglorious victories, and pressed by the distresses caused by their lust of unhallowed lucre, disappointed, but not discouraged, they have at length ventured completely to subvert all property of all descriptions throughout the extent of a great kingdom.  They have compelled all men, in all transactions of commerce, in the disposal of lands, in civil dealing, and through the whole communion of life, to accept, as perfect payment and good and lawful tender, the symbols of their speculations on a projected sale of their plunder.  What vestiges of liberty or property have they left?  The tenant-right of a cabbage-garden, a year’s interest in a hovel, the good-will of an ale-house or a baker’s shop, the very shadow of a constructive property, are more ceremoniously treated in our Parliament than with you the oldest and most valuable landed possessions, in the hands of the most respectable personages, or than the whole body of the moneyed and commercial interest of your country.  We entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority; but we have never dreamt that Parliaments had any right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that which is real, and recognized by the law of nations.  But you, who began with refusing to submit to the most moderate restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of despotism.  I find the ground upon which your confiscators go is this:  that, indeed, their proceedings could not be supported in a court of justice, but that the rules of prescription cannot bind a legislative assembly.[115] So that this legislative assembly of a free nation sits, not for the security, but for the destruction of property,—­and not of property only, but of every rule and maxim which can give it stability, and of those instruments which can alone give it circulation.