reason, honor, or conscience. The great object of your tyrants is to
destroy the gentlemen of France; and for that purpose they destroy, to
the best of their power, all the effect of those relations which may
render considerable men powerful or even safe. To destroy that order,
they vitiate the whole community. That no means may exist of
confederating against their tyranny, by the false sympathies of this
_Nouvelle Éloise_ they endeavor to subvert those principles of domestic
trust and fidelity which form the discipline of social life. They
propagate principles by which every servant may think it, if not his
duty, at least his privilege, to betray his master. By these principles,
every considerable father of a family loses the sanctuary of his house.
_Debet sua cuique domus esse perfugium tutissimum_, says the law, which
your legislators have taken so much pains first to decry, then to
repeal. They destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life:
turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father
of the family must drag out a miserable existence, endangered in
proportion to the apparent means of his safety,--where he is worse than
solitary in a crowd of domestics, and more apprehensive from his
servants and inmates than from the hired, bloodthirsty mob without
doors who are ready to pull him to the _lanterne_.

It is thus, and for the same end, that they endeavor to destroy that
tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees.
Your despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears
nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their
Voltaire, their Helvétius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only
sort of fear which generates true courage. Their object is, that their
fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe but that of their
Committee of Research and of their _lanterne_.