These are my inferences. In one word, with this republic nothing
independent can coexist. The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were more
pardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which the
allied courts may fall. They have the benefit of his dreadful example.
The unhappy Louis the Sixteenth was a man of the best intentions that
probably ever reigned. He was by no means deficient in talents. He had a
most laudable desire to supply by general reading, and even by the
acquisition of elemental knowledge, an education in all points
originally defective; but nobody told him (and it was no wonder he
should not himself divine it) that the world of which he read and the
world in which he lived were no longer the same. Desirous of doing
everything for the best, fearful of cabal, distrusting his own judgment,
he sought his ministers of all kinds upon public testimony. But as
courts are the field for caballers, the public is the theatre for
mountebanks and impostors. The cure for both those evils is in the
discernment of the prince. But an accurate and penetrating discernment
is what in a young prince could not be looked for.
His conduct in its principle was not unwise; but, like most other of his
well-meant designs, it failed in his hands. It failed partly from mere
ill fortune, to which speculators are rarely pleased to assign that very
large share to which she is justly entitled in all human affairs.
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