As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permit
them to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights of
sepulture, which indicate hope, and which mere nature has taught to
mankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions, and to cover the
infirmity, of mortal condition. They disgrace men in the entry into
life, they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and
they deprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonoured
and depraved existence. Endeavouring to persuade the people that they
are no better than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends
to make them beasts of prey, furious and savage. For this purpose
the active part of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has
no parallel. To this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude,
unfashioned virtues, which accompany the vices, where the whole are left
to grow up together in the rankness of uncultivated nature. But nothing
is left to nature in their systems.
The same discipline which hardens their hearts relaxes their morals.
Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolutionary tribunals, and
silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion,
there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small,
most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded
every night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness,
amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of
despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter,
went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it
from good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the
gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was
hired out for a show of dancing dogs. I think, without concert, we have
made the very same remark on reading some of their pieces, which being
written for other purposes, let us into a view of their social life. It
struck us that the habits of Paris had no resemblance to the finished
virtues, or to the polished vice, and elegant, though not blameless,
luxury, of the capital of a great empire. Their society was more like
that of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier; of a lewd tavern for
the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravos, smugglers, and
their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse
and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses
about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs, proper
to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort of
wretches. This system of manners in itself is at war with all orderly
and moral society, and is in its neighbourhood unsafe. If great bodies
of that kind were anywhere established in a bordering territory, we
should have a right to demand of their governments the suppression of
such a nuisance.