He felt that nothing else can
protect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of the
multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of
hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity,
fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves" who began to
forge in 1789 the false money of the French Constitution; that it is one
fatal objection to all _new_ fancied and _new fabricated_ republics,
(among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly
and insolently rejected it,) that the _prejudice_ of an old nobility is
a thing that _cannot_ be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected,
it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but
_the thing itself_ is matter of _inveterate_ opinion, and therefore
_cannot_ be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this
nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state,
but by them, and for them.
I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine the future out of what
we collect from the past, no person living would look with more scorn
and horror on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and
on the desperate attainder passed on all their posterity, by the
Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de
Noailles, and the false Perigords, and the long _et cetera_ of the
perfidious _sans-culottes_ of the court, who, like demoniacs possessed
with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, abdicated their
dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of all
trusts, and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and all the
cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and
desolation on their country.
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