All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work
of art. To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and
inveterate usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of ages,
has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be
too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong
struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has
found to belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the securities
against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as
an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled
state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament
to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus, was the saying of a wise and good
man. It is indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline
to it with some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling
principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial
institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion,
and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious
disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or
representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what
had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see
anything destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the face
of the land. It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction
that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any
incorrigible vices in the noblesse of France, or any abuse which could
not be removed by a reform very short of abolition. Your noblesse did
not deserve punishment: but to degrade is to punish.
It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry
concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to
my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with
much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those whom
they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or
exaggerated when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is
a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses there were
undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It was an old establishment,
and not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that
merited confiscation of their substance, nor those cruel insults
and degradations, and that unnatural persecution, which have been
substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.
If there had been any just cause for this new religious persecution, the
atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to
plunder, do not love anybody so much as not to dwell with complacence
on the vices of the existing clergy. This they have not done. They find
themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which
they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every
instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body
or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because
very illogical, principles of retaliation, their own persecutions and
their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family
distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very
just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors: but to
take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession as a ground for
punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and
general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to
the philosophy of this enlightened age. The Assembly punishes men,
many, if not most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclesiastics in
former times as much as their present persecutors can do, and who would
be as loud and as strong in the expression of that sense, if they
were not well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation is
employed. Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, but
not for their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations.
As well might we in England think of waging inexpiable war upon all
Frenchmen for the evils which they have brought upon us in the several
periods of our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think
yourselves justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of the
unparalleled calamities brought upon the people of France by the unjust
invasions of our Henries and our Edwards. Indeed, we should be mutually
justified in this exterminatory war upon each other, full as much as you
are in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen, on account
of the conduct of men of the same name in other times.