Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a
great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there,
and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify,
exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform,
insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give
their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality,
they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this
the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method,
and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most
licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at
the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing in
the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion of
a hat or a shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result of
design; all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could be
devised in favor of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that
has not been employed. The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love
of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its
propagation. All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame
and vitiate the imagination and pervert the moral sense, have been
contrived. They have sometimes brought forth five or six hundred drunken
women calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their own
children, as being Royalists or Constitutionalists.
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