fortunes, and, I may say, their very beings, to the poor, that the rich
are to learn, that their "fortunes are for the aid and benefit of the
whole"? I say nothing of the liberal persons of great rank and property,
lay and ecclesiastic, men and women, to whom we have had the honor and
happiness of affording an asylum: I pass by these, lest I should never
have done, or lest I should omit some as deserving as any I might
mention. Why will the author, then, suppose that the nobles and men of
property in France have been banished, confiscated, and murdered, on
account of the savageness and ferocity of their character, and their
being tainted with vices beyond those of the same order and description
in other countries? No judge of a revolutionary tribunal, with his hands
dipped in their blood and his maw gorged with their property, has yet
dared to assert what this author has been pleased, by way of a moral
lesson, to insinuate.

Their nobility, and their men of property, in a mass, had the very same
virtues, and the very same vices, and in the very same proportions, with
the same description of men in this and in other nations. I must do
justice to suffering honor, generosity, and integrity. I do not know
that any time or any country has furnished more splendid examples of
every virtue, domestic and public. I do not enter into the councils of
Providence; but, humanly speaking, many of these nobles and men of
property, from whose disastrous fate we are, it seems, to learn a
general softening of character, and a revision of our social situations
and duties, appear to me full as little deserving of that fate as the
author, whoever he is, can be. Many of them, I am sure, were such as I
should be proud indeed to be able to compare myself with, in knowledge,
in integrity, and in every other virtue. My feeble nature might shrink,
though theirs did not, from the proof; but my reason and my ambition
tell me that it would be a good bargain to purchase their merits with