All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the
rewards, all the distinctions, remained. But your present confusion,
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in
your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is
disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except
in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this generation will
quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble the
artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be
always their fellows, sometimes their masters. Believe me, Sir, those
who attempt to level, never equalise. In all societies, consisting of
various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.
The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of
things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what
the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
associations of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris,
for instance), is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which,
by the worst of usurpations, a usurpation on the prerogatives of nature,
you attempt to force them.
The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the states, said, in a tone
of oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honourable.
Pages:
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222