He had undertaken to demonstrate by arguments which he thought could not
be refuted, and by documents which he was sure could not be denied,
that no comparison was to be made between the British government and the
French usurpation. That they who endeavoured madly to compare them, were
by no means making the comparison of one good system with another good
system, which varied only in local and circumstantial differences;
much less, that they were holding out to us a superior pattern of legal
liberty, which we might substitute in the place of our old, and, as they
described it, superannuated constitution. He meant to demonstrate that
the French scheme was not a comparative good, but a positive evil. That
the question did not at all turn, as had been stated, on a parallel
between a monarchy and a republic. He denied that the present scheme of
things in France did at all deserve the respectable name of a republic:
he had therefore no comparison between monarchies and republics to make.
That what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy;
to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious, monstrous
thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature. He undertook to prove
that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, and
unprovoked murder. He offered to make out that those who had led in
that business had conducted themselves with the utmost perfidy to their
colleagues in function, and with the most flagrant perjury both towards
their king and their constituents; to the one of whom the Assembly
had sworn fealty, and to the other, when under no sort of violence or
constraint, they had sworn a full obedience to instructions.--That, by
the terror of assassination, they had driven away a very great number
of the members, so as to produce a false appearance of a majority.--That
this fictitious majority had fabricated a constitution, which, as now
it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any example that can be found in the
civilized European world of our age; that therefore the lovers of
it must be lovers, not of liberty, but if they really understand its
nature, of the lowest and basest of all servitude.
He proposed to prove that the present state of things in France is not a
transient evil, productive, as some have too favourably represented
it, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of
producing future and (if that were possible) worse evils.--That it is
not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may
gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom;
but that it is so fundamentally wrong, as to be utterly incapable of
correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any
mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could publicly
declare his approbation.