The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from
the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been
so harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast
to the harpies of usury. But to drive men from independence to live on
alms is itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable condition
to men in one state of life, and not habituated to other things, may,
when all these circumstances are altered, be a dreadful revolution; and
one to which a virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt,
except that which would demand the life of the offender. But to many
minds this punishment of DEGRADATION and INFAMY is worse than death.
Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering, that
the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favour of religion,
by education and by the place they held in the administration of its
functions, are to receive the remnants of the property as alms from the
profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the
rest; to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the charitable
contributions of the faithful, but from the insolent tenderness of known
and avowed atheism, the maintenance of religion, measured out to them on
the standard of the contempt in which it is held; and for the purpose of
rendering those who receive the allowance vile, and of no estimation, in
the eyes of mankind.
But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in law, and
not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of
the Palais Royal and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the
possessions which they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts,
and the accumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that
ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom
at pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify in every
particular; that the goods they possess are not properly theirs, but
belong to the state which created the fiction; and we are therefore not
to trouble ourselves with what they may suffer in their natural feelings
and natural persons, on account of what is done towards them in this
their constructive character. Of what import is it under what names you
injure men, and deprive them of the just emoluments of a profession,
in which they were not only permitted but encouraged by the state to
engage; and upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had
formed the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes to
an entire dependence upon them?
You do not imagine, sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable
distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of
tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had not your
confiscators, by their early crimes, obtained a power which secures
indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or
that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but
the lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which
becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistic tyrants of
Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants,
who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold, because
they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters.
Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them
acting worse tragedies under our eyes? shall we not use the same liberty
that they do, when we can use it with the same safety? when to speak
honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinion of those whose
actions we abhor?