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.--That it is
not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may
gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom;
but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be utterly incapable of
correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any
mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could publicly
declare his approbation.

If it had been permitted to Mr. Burke, he would have shown distinctly,
and in detail, that what the Assembly calling itself National had held
out as a large and liberal toleration is in reality a cruel and
insidious religious persecution, infinitely more bitter than any which
had been heard of within this century.--That it had a feature in it
worse than the old persecutions.--That the old persecutors acted, or
pretended to act, from zeal towards some system of piety and virtue:
they gave strong preferences to their own; and if they drove people from
one religion, they provided for them another, in which men might take
refuge and expect consolation.--That their new persecution is not
against a variety in conscience, but against all conscience. That it
professes contempt towards its object; and whilst it treats all religion
with scorn, is not so much as neutral about the modes: it unites the
opposite evils of intolerance and of indifference.

He could have proved that it is so far from rejecting tests, (as
unaccountably had been asserted,) that the Assembly had imposed tests of