[353]: I am satisfied beyond a doubt that the project of turning a great empire into a vestry or into a collection of vestries, and of governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration is senseless and absurd, in any mode, or with any qualifications. I can never be convinced that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in church-wardens and constables and other such officers, guided by the prudence of litigious attornies and jew-brokers, and set in action by shameless women of the lowest condition, by keepers of hotels, taverns and brothels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop-boys, hairdressers, fiddlers and dancers of the stage (who in such a commonwealth as yours will in future overbear, as already they have overborne, the sober incapacity of dull uninstructed men, of useful but laborious occupations) can never be put into any shape, that might not be both disgraceful and destructive.
[354]: If monarchy should ever obtain an entire ascendancy in France, it will probably be.... the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth.
France will be governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats.... attornies, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people.
[355]: The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please.... We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.... Strange chaos of levity and ferocity, monstrous tragi-comic scene.... After I have read the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the Tiers-État, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing. Of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. The majority was composed of practitioners in the law.... active chicaners.... obscure provincial advocates, stewards of petty local juridictions, country attornies, notaries, etc.
Ce qui choque et inquiète Burke au plus haut degré, c'est qu'on n'y voyait pas de représentants du natural landed interest.
Encore une phrase, car véritablement cette clairvoyance politique touche au génie.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
[356]: "The leading features of this government are the abolition of religion and the abolition of property." (Tome II, 17. Discours de Pitt, 1795.) He desired the house to look at the state of religion in France and asked them if they would willingly treat with a nation of atheists. (Ibid.)
[357]: Letter to a noble lord.—Letters on a regicide peace.
[358]: Humour.