Your government in France, though usually, and I think justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified monarchies, was still full of abuses. These abuses accumulated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular representative. I am no stranger to the faults and defects of the subverted government of France; and I think I am not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric upon any thing which is a just and natural object of 17- REFLECTIONS ON THE (•ensure. But the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy, but of its existence. Is it then true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform; so that it was of absolute necessity that the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place? All France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789. The instructions to the representatives to the states-general, from every district in that kingdom, were filled with projects for the reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it. Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach. When those instructions were given, there was no question but that abuses existed, and that they demanded a reform; nor is there now. In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution, tilings changed their shape; and, in consequence of thai change, the true question at present is, Whether those who would have reformed, or those who have destroyed, are in the right?
To hear some men speak of the late monarchy of France, you would imagine that they were talking of Persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of Tahmas Konli khan; or at least describing the barbarous anarchic despotism of Turkey, "here REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 173 the finest countries in the most genial climates in the world are wasted by peace more than any countries have been worried by war; where arts are unknown, where manufactures languish, where science is extinguished, where agriculture decays, where the human race itself melts away and perishes under the eye of. the observer. Was this the case of France? I have no way of determining the question but by a reference to facts. Facts do not support this resemblance. Along with much evil there is some good in monarchy itself; and some corrective to its evil from religion, from laws, from manners, from opinions, the French mo- narchy must have received; which rendered it (though by no means a free, and therefore by no means a good constitution) a despotism rather in appearance than in reality.
Among the standards upon which the effects of government on any country are to be estimated, I must consider the state of its population as not the least certain. No country in which population flourishes, and is in progressive improvement, can be under a very mischievous government. About sixty years ago, the Intendants of the generalities of France made, with other matters, a report of the population of their several districts. I have not the books, which are very voluminous, by me, nor do I know where to procure them, (I am obliged to speak by memory, and therefore the less positively,) but I think the population of France was by them, even at that period, estimated at twenty-two millions of souls. At the end of the last century it had been generally calculated at q3 174 INFLECTIONS ON THE eighteen. On either of these estimations France was not ill - peopled. M. Necker, who is an authority for his own time at least equal to the Intendants for theirs, reckons, and upon apparently sure principles, the people of France, in the year 1780, at twenty-four millions six hundred and seventy thousand. But was this the probable ultimate term under the old establishment? Dr. Price is of opinion, that the growth of population in France was by no means at its acme in that year. I certainly defer to Dr. Price's authority a good deal more in these speculations than 1 do in his general politics. This gentleman, taking ground on M. Necker's data, is very confident, that since the period of that minister's calculation, the French population has increased rapidly; so rapidly that in the year 1789 he will not consent to rate the people of that kingdom at a lower number than thirty millions. After abating much (anil much 1 think ought to be abated) from the sanguine calculation of Dr. Price, I have no doubt that the population of France did increase considerably during this latter period: but supposing that it increased to nothing more than will be sufficient t>> complete the 24,670,000 to 25 millions, still a population of 25 millions, and that in an increasing progress, on a space of about twenty-seven thousand square leagues, is immense. It is, for instance. a good deal more than the proportionable population of this island, or even than that of England, the best-peopled part of the united kingdom.
It is in>t universally true, that France i> a fertile country. Considerable tracts of it are barren, REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 175 and labour under other natural disadvantages. In the portions of that territory, where things are more favourable, as far as I am able to discover, the numbers of the people correspond to the indul- gence of nature.* The Generality of Lisle (this I admit is the strongest example) upon an extent of 4044 leagues, about ten years ago, contained 734,600 souls, which is 1772 inhabitants to each square league. The middle term for the fest of France is about 900 inhabitants to the same ad- measurement.
I do not attribute this population to the deposed government; because I do not like to compliment the contrivances of men, with what is due in a great degree to the bounty of Providence. But that decried government could not have obstructed, most probably it favoured, the operation of those causes, (whatever they were,) whether of nature in the soil, or habits of industry among the people, which has produced so large a number of the species throughout that whole kingdom, and exhibited in some particular places such prodigies of population. I never will suppose that fabric of a state to be the worst of all political institutions, which, by experience, is found to contain a principle favour- able (however latent it may be) to the increase of mankind.
The wealth of a country is another, and no con- temptible standard, by which we may judge whether, on the whole, a government be protecting or destructive. France far exceeds England in the ♦ T)q l'Adminigtration des Finances de la France, pai Mons. Ncckcr. vol. i. p. 288.
1/6 REFLECTIONS ON THE multitude of her people; but I apprehend that her comparative wealth is much inferior to ours; ] that it is not so equal in the distribution, nor so ready in the circulation. I believe the difference in the form of the two governments to be amongst the causes of this advantage on the side of England. I speak of England, not of the whole British do- minions; which, if compared with those of France, will, in some degree, weaken the comparative rate of wealth upon our side. But that wealth, which will not endure a comparison with the riches of England, may constitute a very respectable degree of opulence. M. Necker's book, published in 17 contains an accurate and interesting collection of facts relative to public economy and to political arithmetic; and his speculations on the subject are in general wise and liberal. In that work he gives an idea of the state of France, very remote from the portrait of a country whose government was a perfect grievance, an absolute evil, admitting no cure but through the violent and uncertain remedy of a total revolution. He affirms, that from the year 1726 to the year 1784, there was coined at the mint of France, in the species of gold and silver, to the amount of about one hundred millions of pounds sterling.!
It is impossible that M. Necker should be mis- taken in the amount of the bullion which has been coined in the mint. It is a matter of official record. The reasonings of this able financier, concerning the quantity of gold and silver which remained for • Dc 1'Administration des Finances de la France, par M. Ni t Vol, iii. chap. 8. and cli REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 177 circulation, when he wrote in 1785, that is, about four years before the deposition and imprisonment of the French king, are not of equal certainty; but they are laid on grounds so apparently solid, that it is not easy to refuse a considerable degree of assent to his calculation. He calculates the numeraire, or what we call specie, then actually existing in France, at about eighty-eight millions of the same English money. A great accumulation of wealth for one country, large as that country is! M. Necker was so far from considering this influx of wealth as likely to cease, when he wrote in 1785, that he presumes upon a future annual increase of two per cent, upon the money brought into France during the periods from which he computed.
Some adequate cause must have originally intro- duced all the money coined at its mint into that kingdom; and some cause as operative must have kept at home, or returned into its bosom, such a vast flood of treasure as M. Necker calculates to remain for domestic circulation. Suppose any reasonable deductions from M. Necker's computation; the remainder must still amount to an immense sum. Causes thus powerful to acquire and to retain, cannot be found in discouraged industry, insecure property, and a positively destructive government. Indeed, when I consider the face of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of her cities; the useful magnificence of her spacious high roads and bridges; the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations opening the conveniences of maritime communication through a solid continent of so im- mense an extent; when I turn my eyes to the 178 REFLECTIONS ON THE stupcndous works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before my view the number of her fortifications, constructed with so bold and masterl] a skill, and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when I recollect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what complete perfection the culture of many of the best pro- ductions of the earth have been brought in France; when I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theo- logians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her orators, sacred and profane, I behold in all this something which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscrimi- nate censure, and which demands that we should very seriously examine, what and how great are the latent vices that could authorize us at once to level so specious a fabric with the ground. I do not recognize, in this view of things, the despotism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the charai tor of a government that has been, on the whole, so oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all reformation. I must think such REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 179 a government well deserved to have its excellencies heightened; its faults corrected; and its capacities improved into a British constitution.
Whoever has examined into the proceedings of that deposed government for several years hack, cannot fail to have observed, amidst the inconstancy and fluctuation natural to courts, an earnest en- deavour towards the prosperity and improvement of the country; he must admit, that it had long been employed, in some instances, wholly to remove, in many considerably to correct, the abusive prac- tices and usages that had prevailed in the state; and that even the unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his subjects, inconsistent, as undoubtedly it was, with law and liberty, had yet been every day growing more mitigated in the exercise. So far from refusing itself to reformation, that government was open, with a censurable degree of facility, to all sorts of projects and projectors on the subject. Rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, which soon was turned against those who fostered it, and ended in their ruin. It is but cold and no very flattering justice to that fallen monarchy, to say, that, for many years, it trespassed more by levity and want of judgment in several of its schemes, than from any defect in diligence or in public spirit. To com- pare the government of France for the last fifteen or sixteen years with wise and well-constituted establishments, during that, or during any period, is not to act with fairness. But if in point of pro- digality in the expenditure of money, or in point of rigour in the exercise of power, it be compared 1<SII REFLECTIONS UN THE with any of the former reigns, 1 believe candid indues will give little credit to the good intentions of those who dwell perpetually on the donations to favourites, or on the expenses of the court, or on the horrors of the bastile in the reign of Louis the Sixteenth.
Whether the system, if it deserves such a name, now built on the ruins of that ancient monarchy, will be able to give a better account of the popula- tion and wealth of the country, which it has taken under its care, is a matter very doubtful. Instead of improving by the change, I apprehend that a long series of years must be told before it can recover in any degree the effects of this philosophic revolution, and before the nation can be replaced on its former footing. If Dr. Price should think fit, a few years hence, to favour us with an estimate of the population of France, he will hardly be able to make up his tale of thirty millions of souls, as computed in 1789, or the Assembly's computation of twenty-six millions of that year; or even M. Necker's twenty-five millions in 1780. I hear that there are considerable emigrations from France; and that many quitting that voluptuous climate, and that seductive Circean liberty, have taken refuge in the frozen regions, and under the British des- potism, of Canada.
In the present disappearance of coin, no person could think it the same country, in which the present minister of the finances has been able to discover fourscore millions sterling in specie. Prom its general aspect one would conclude that it had been for some time past under the special direction REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 181 of the learned academicians of Lapnta and Balni- barbi.* Already the population of Paris has so declined, that M. Necker stated to the National Assembly the provision to be made for its subsistence at a fifth less than what had formerly been found requisite. It is said (and I have never heard it con- tradicted) that a hundred thousand people are out of employment in that city, though it is become the seat of the imprisoned court and National As- sembly. Nothing, I am credibly informed, can ex- ceed the shocking and disgusting spectacle of men- dicancy displayed in that capital. Indeed, the votes of the National Assembly leave no doubt of the fact. They have lately appointed a standing committee of mendicancy. They are contriving at once a vigorous police on this subject, and, for the first time, the imposition of a tax to maintain the poor, for whose present relief great sums appear on the face of the public accounts of the year.f In the * See Gulliver's Travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers.
t Travaux de charite pour subvenir au manque de travail a Litres. £. s. d.
Paris et dans les provinces --- 3,8G6,920.. 161,121 13 4 Destruction de vagabondage et de \s I am not quite satisfied with 11,210,244 467,093 10 0 the nature and extent of the an- nexed article in the public ac- counts, I do not insert it in the above reference; but if it be un- derstood of the purchase of pro- vision for the poor, it is immense indeed, and swells the total to a formidable bulk.
Depenses relatives aux subsist- ences, deduction fait des re- couvremens qui out eu lieu - 39,871,790.. 1,661,324 11 8 It Ks'-! hi: i i.i ■ TIONS OH THE moan time, the leaders of the legislative eluhs and coffee-houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability. They speak with the most sovereign contempt of the rest of the world. They tell tip' people, to comfort them in the ragg with which they have clothed them, that they are a nation of philosophers; ami. sometimes by all the arts of quackish parade, by show, tumult, and bustle, sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions, they attempt to drown the cries of in- digence, and to divert the eyes of the observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state. A brave people will certainly prefer liberty accom- panied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which i^ purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.
The advocates for this Revolution, not sati.-tied with exaggerating; the vices of their ancient govern- ment, strike at the fame of their country itself, by painting almost all that could have attracted the attention of strangers — I mean their nobility and their clergy — as objects of horror. If this were only a libel, there had not been much in it. But it has practical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who formed the great body of your landed men, and the whole of your military officers, re- sembled those of Germany, at the period when the Hanse-towns were necessitated to confederate against the nobles in defence of their property — had they been like the Orsiiri and Vitelli in Italy, who used to sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller — had they been such as the Mamelukes in Egypt, or the Nayres on the coast I of Malabar, I do admit, that too critical an inquiry might not be advisable into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance. The statues of Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds, confounded with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in favour of its own principles, might turn aside whilst fraud and violence were accom- plishing the destruction of a pretended nobility, which disgraced whilst it persecuted human nature. The persons most abhorrent from blood, and treason, and arbitrary confiscation, might remain silent spec- tators of this civil war between the vices.
But did the privileged nobility who met under the king's precept at Versailles, in 1789, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of ancient times? If I had then asked the question, I should have passed for a madman. What have they since done that they were to be driven into exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled, and tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in ashes, and that their order should be abolished, and the memory of it, if possible, extinguished, by ordaining them to change the very Domes by which they were usually known? Read their instructions to their representatives. They 184 REFLEI TIONS on nil breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privileges relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered; as the king, from the be- ginning, surrendered all pretence to a right of taxa- tion. Upon a free constitution there was but one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy was at an end. It breathed its last, without a groan, without struggle, without convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension, arose afterwards upon the preference of a despotic democracy to a government of reciprocal control. The triumph of the victorious party was over the principles of a British constitution.
I have observed the affectation, which for many years past has prevailed in Paris, even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If any thing could put one out of humour with that ornament to the kingly cha- racter, it would be this overdone style of insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this engine the most busily, are those who have ended their panegyrics in dethroning his successor and descendant; a man as good-natured at the least as Henry the Fourth; altogether as fond of his people; and who has done infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that great monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it is for his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with. For Henry of Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince. He possessed indeed great hu- manity and mildness; but a humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his interests. He never sought to be loved without putting himself REVOLUTION IN FRANC1'.. 185 first in a condition to be feared. He used suit language with determined conduct. He asserted and maintained his authority in the gross, and dis- tributed his acts of concession only in the detail. He spent the income of his prerogative nobly; but he took care not to break in upon the capital; never abandoning for a moment any of the claims which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field, sometimes upon the scaffold. Because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has merited the praises of those whom, if they had lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to punish- ment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished Paris into a surrender.
If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admira- tion of Henry the Fourth, they must rememher that they cannot think more highly of him, than he did of the noblesse of France; whose virtue, honour, courage, patriotism, and loyalty, were his constant theme.
But the nobility of France are degenerated since the days of Henry the Fourth. This is possible. But it is more than I can believe to be true in any great degree. I do not pretend to know France as correctly as some others; but I have endeavoured through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature; otherwise I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind. In that study I could not pass by a vast portion of our nature, as it appeared modified in a country but twenty-four miles from the shore of this island. On lH(i REFLECTIONS ON THE my best observation, compared with my best in- quiries, I found your nobility for the greater part composed of men of a high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour, both with regard to themselves individually, and with regard to their whole corps, over whom they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a censorial eye. They were tolera- bly well-bred; very officious, humane, and hospit- able; in their conversation frank and open; with a good military tone; and reasonably tinctured with literature, particularly of the authors in their own language. Many had pretensions far above this description. I speak of those who were generally met with.
As to their behaviour to the inferior classes, they appeared to me to comport themselves towards them with good-nature, and with something more nearly approaching to familiarity, than is generally practised with us in the intercourse between the higher and lower ranks of life. To strike any person, even in the most abject condition, was a thing in a man- ner unknown, and would be highly disgraceful. Instances of other ill-treatment of the humble part of the community were rare: and as to attacks made upon the property or the personal liberty of the commons, I never heard of any whatsoever from them; nor, whilst the laws were in vigour under the ancient government, would such tyranny in subjects have been permitted. As men of landed estates, I had no fault to find with their conduct, though much to reprehend, and much to wish changed, in many of the old tenures. Where the letting of their land was by rent. I could not discover that their REVOLUTION IX FRANCE. 187