do not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most dangerous of all parties:  I mean an extensive, discontented moneyed interest, injured and not destroyed.  The men who compose this interest look for their security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, to its power.  If they find the old governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy; and this energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt of justice.  Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorized.  I am sure that the principles predominant in France extend to very many persons, and descriptions of persons, in all countries, who think their innoxious indolence their security.  This kind of innocence in proprietors may be argued into inutility; and inutility into an unfitness for their estates.  Many parts of Europe are in open disorder.  In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world.  Already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries.[119] In such a state of things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard.  In all mutations (if mutations must be) the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of property.

But it will be argued, that this confiscation in France ought not to alarm other nations.  They say it is not made from wanton rapacity; that it is a great measure of national policy, adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief.—­It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice.  Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation,—­when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their habits to it,—­when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty,—­I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor.  If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotic sport made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.