But as people began to take refuge from their
persecutions amongst themselves, they have driven them from that last
asylum.
The state of France is perfectly simple. It consists of but two
descriptions,--the oppressors and the oppressed.
The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands,--all the
arms, all the revenues of the public, all the confiscations of
individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their
occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a
body of janizaries to overrule and awe property. The heads of these
wretches they never suffer to cool. They supply them with a food for
fury varied by the day,--besides the sensual state of intoxication, from
which they are rarely free. They have made the priests and people
formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil,
moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and
practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it
impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous
arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name
whatsoever.
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