If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony, it is
in the voluntary production of evil. Every revolution contains in it
something of evil.
It must always be, to those who are the greatest amateurs, or even
professors, of revolutions, a matter very hard to prove, that the late
French government was so bad that nothing worse in the infinite devices
of men could come in its place. They who have brought France to its
present condition ought to prove also, by something better than
prattling about the Bastile, that their subverted government was as
incapable as the present certainly is of all improvement and
correction. How dare they to say so who have never made that experiment?
They are experimenters by their trade. They have made an hundred others,
infinitely more hazardous.
The English admirers of the forty-eight thousand republics which form
the French federation praise them not for what they are, but for what
they are to become. They do not talk as politicians, but as prophets.
But in whatever character they choose to found panegyric on prediction,
it will be thought a little singular to praise any work, not for its own
merits, but for the merits of something else which may succeed to it.
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