to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions, which distinguish benevolence from imbecillity; and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immu|nities.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their suc|cess. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impove|rished; a church pillaged, and a state not re|lieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; every thing hu|man and divine sacrificed to the idol of pub|lic credit, and national bankruptcy the conse|quence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredit|ed paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting con|ventional credit of mankind, which disappeared
