(Quicquid multis peccatur inultum.) It is therefore
of infinite importance that they should not be suffered to imagine that
their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right and
wrong. They ought to be persuaded that they are full as little entitled,
and far less qualified, with safety to themselves, to use any arbitrary
power whatsoever; that therefore they are not, under a false show of
liberty, but in truth, to exercise an unnatural, inverted domination,
tyranically to exact from those who officiate in the state, not an
entire devotion to their interest, which is their right, but an abject
submission to their occasional will; extinguishing thereby, in all those
who serve them, all moral principle, all sense of dignity, all use of
judgment, and all consistency of character; whilst by the very same
process they give themselves up a proper, a suitable, but a most
contemptible prey to the servile ambition of popular sycophants, or
courtly flatterers.
FATE OF LOUIS XVIII.
Let those who have the trust of political or of natural authority
ever keep watch against the desperate enterprises of innovation: let
even their benevolence be fortified and armed. They have before their
eyes the example of a monarch, insulted, degraded, confined, deposed;
his family dispersed, scattered, imprisoned; his wife insulted to his
face like the vilest of the sex, by the vilest of all populace;
himself three times dragged by these wretches in an infamous triumph;
his children torn from him, in violation of the first right of
nature, and given into the tuition of the most desperate and impious
of the leaders of desperate and impious clubs; his revenues
dilapidated and plundered; his magistrates murdered; his clergy
proscribed, persecuted, famished; his nobility degraded in their
rank, undone in their fortunes, fugitives in their persons; his
armies corrupted and ruined; his whole people impoverished,
disunited, dissolved; whilst through the bars of his prison, and
amidst the bayonets of his keepers, he hears the tumult of two
conflicting factions, equally wicked and abandoned, who agree in
principles, in dispositions, and in objects, but who tear each other
to pieces about the most effectual means of obtaining their common
end; the one contending to preserve for a while his name, and his
person, the more easily to destroy the royal authority--the other
clamouring to cut off the name, the person, and the monarchy
together, by one sacrilegious execution.
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