When to these establishments of regicide, of jacobinism, and of atheism,
you add the CORRESPONDENT SYSTEM OF MANNERS, no doubt can be left on
the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the
human race. Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a
great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there,
and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify,
exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform,
insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give
their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality,
they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this
the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method,
and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most
licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at
the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing in
the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or gesture, not to the fashion of a
hat or a shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result of design;
all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could be devised
in favour of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that has
not been employed. The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love
of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its
propagation. All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame
and vitiate the imagination, and pervert the moral sense, have been
contrived. They have sometimes brought forth five or six hundred drunken
women, calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their own
children, as being royalists or constitutionalists. Sometimes they have
got a body of wretches, calling themselves fathers, to demand the murder
of their sons, boasting that Rome had but one Brutus, but that they
could show five hundred. There were instances in which they inverted,
and retaliated the impiety, and produced sons, who called for the
execution of their parents. The foundation of their republic is laid in
moral paradoxes. Their patriotism is always prodigy. All those instances
to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public
spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from
which affrighted nature recoils, are their chosen, and almost sole
examples for the instruction of their youth.
The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise
legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into
morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural
affections. They, on the contrary, have omitted no pains to eradicate
every benevolent and noble propensity in the mind of men. In their
culture it is a rule always to graft virtues on vices. They think
everything unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicates
violence on the private. All their new institutions (and with them
everything is new) strike at the root of our social nature. Other
legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and
consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavoured, by every
art, to make it sacred. The Christian religion, by confining it to the
pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these
two things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and
civilization of the world, than by any other part in this whole scheme
of Divine Wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in the
synagogue of antichrist, I mean in that forge and manufactury of all
evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789.
Those monsters employed the same, or greater industry, to desecrate and
degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy
and honourable.