They disgrace men in the entry into life,
they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and they
deprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonored and
depraved existence. Endeavoring to persuade the people that they are no
better than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends to make
them beasts of prey, furious and savage. For this purpose the active
part of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel. To
this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtues
which accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up together
in the rankness of uncultivated Nature. But nothing is left to Nature in
their systems.
The same discipline which hardens their hearts relaxes their morals.
Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolutionary tribunals, and
silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion,
there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small,
most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded
every night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness,
amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of
despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter,
went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it from
good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the
gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was
hired out for a show of dancing dogs.
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