--He offered to make out that those who
have led in that business had conducted themselves with the utmost
perfidy to their colleagues in function, and with the most flagrant
perjury both towards their king and their constituents: to the one of
whom the Assembly had sworn fealty; and to the other, when under no sort
of violence or constraint, they had sworn a full obedience to
instructions.--That, by the terror of assassination, they had driven
away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false
appearance of a majority.--That this fictitious majority had fabricated
a Constitution, which, as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any
example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age;
that therefore the lovers of it must be lovers, not of liberty, but, if
they really understand its nature, of the lowest and basest of all
servitude.
He proposed to prove that the present state of things in France is not a
transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably represented it,
of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of
producing future and (if that were possible) worse evils.
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