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Part XV.
Part XV.
Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society which is
to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true principles of military
subordination, and to render them machines in the hands of the supreme power
of the country! Such are the distempers of the French troops! Such is their
cure! As the army is, so is the navy. The municipalities supersede the orders
of the Assembly, and the seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the
municipalities. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of
the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the
Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the
fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like
proportions coming from a man of fifty years` wear and tear amongst mankind.
They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in
politics, who shorten the road to their degrees in the state; and have a
certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all subjects; upon
the credit of which one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause,
and greater success, to caution the Assembly not to attend to old men, or to
any persons who valued themselves upon their experience. I suppose all the
ministers of state must qualify, and take this test; wholly abjuring the
errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own
relish. But I think if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least
preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen
deal in regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres
to be regenerated by them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in
their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of
their barbarous metaphysics. ^52 Si isti mihi largiantur ut repueriscam, et in
eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!
[Footnote 52: This war minister has since quitted the school, and resigned his
office.]
The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system, which they
call a constitution, cannot be laid open without discovering the utter
insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact,
or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose a remedy for
the incompetence of the crown, without displaying the debility of the
Assembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state,
without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities. The
military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military, anarchy. I
wish everybody carefully to peruse the eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons.
de la Tour du Pin. He attributes the salvation of the municipalities to the
good behaviour of some of the troops. These troops are to preserve the
well-disposed part of those municipalities, which is confessed to be the
weakest, from the pillage of the worst disposed, which is the strongest. But
the municipalities affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which
are necessary for their protection. Indeed they must command them or court
them. The municipalities, by the necessity of their situation, and by the
republican powers they have obtained, must, with relation to the military, be
the masters, or the servants, or the confederates, or each succesively; or
they must make a jumble of all together, according to circumstances. What
government is there to coerce the army but the municipality, or the
municipality but the army? To preserve concord where authority is
extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the Assembly attempts to cure
the distempers by the distempers themselves; and they hope to preserve
themselves from a purely military democracy, by giving it a debauched interest
in the municipal.
If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs,
cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the lowest
and most desperate part. With them will be their habits, affections, and
sympathies. The military conspiracies, which are to be remedied by civic
confederacies; the rebellious municipalities, which are to be rendered
obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing the very armies of the
state that are to keep them in order; all these chimeras of a monstrous and
portentous policy must aggravate that confusion from which they have arisen.
There must be blood. The want of common judgment manifested in the
construction of all their descriptions of forces, and in all their kinds of
civil and judicial authorities, will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in
one time and in one part. They will break out others; because the evil is
radical and intrinsic. All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with
seditious citizens must weaken still more and more the military connexion of
soldiers with their officers, as well as add military and mutinous audacity to
turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army, the officer should
be first and last in the eye of the soldier; first and last in his attention,
observance, and esteem. Officers it seems there are to be, whose chief
qualification must be temper and patience. They are to manage their troops by
electioneering arts. They must bear themselves as candidates, not as
commanders. But as by such means power may be occasionally in their hands, the
authority by which they are to be nominated becomes of high importance.
What you may do finally does not appear; not is it of much moment, whislt
the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all the parts of
your republic, as well as the puzzled relation of those parts to each other
and to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to have given the provisional
nomination of the officers, in the first instance, to the king, with a reserve
of approbation by the National Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue
are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. They must soon
perceive that those, who can negative indefinitely, in reality appoint. The
officers must therefore look to their intrigues in that Assembly, as the sole,
certain road to promotion. Still, however, by your new constitution they must
begin their solicitation at court. This double negotiation for military rank
seems to me a contrivance as well adapted, as if it were studied for no other
end, to promote faction in the Assembly itself, relative to this vast military
patronage; and then to poison the corps of officers with factions of a nature
still more dangerous to the safety of government, upon any bottom on which it
can be placed, and destructive in the end to the efficiency of the army
itself. Those officers, who lose the promotions intended for them by the
crown, must become of a faction opposite to that of the Assembly, which has
rejected their claims, and must nourish discontents in the heart of the army
against the ruling powers. Those officers, on the other hand, who, by carrying
their point through an interest in the Assembly, feel themselves to be at best
only second in the good-will of the crown, though first in that of the
Assembly, must slight an authority which would not advance and could not
retard their promotion. If to avoid these evils you will have no other rule
for command or promotion than seniority, you will have an army of formality;
at the same time it will become more independent, and more of a military
republic. Not they, but the king is the machine. A king is not to be deposed
by halves. If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing.
What is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head of the army, who to
that army is no object of gratitude, or of fear? Such a cipher is not fit for
the administration of an object, of all things the most delicate, the supreme
command of military men. They must be constrained (and their inclinations lead
them to what their necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective,
decided, personal authority. The authority of the Assembly itself suffers by
passing through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen. The army will
not long look to an assembly acting through the organ of false show, and
palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience to a prisoner.
They will either despise a pageant, or they will pity a captive king. This
relation of your army to the crown will, if I am not greatly mistaken, become
a serious dilemma in your politics.
It is besides to be considered, whether an assembly like yours, even
supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ through which its
orders were to pass, is fit for promoting the obedience and discipline of an
army. It is known, that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and
uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will least
of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two
years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of
military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the
dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to
pay to an endless succession of those pleaders; whose military policy, and the
genius of whose command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as
their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in
the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time
mutinuos and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the
art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of
command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on
his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in
this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the
person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is
little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole
republic.
How came the Assembly by their present power over the army? Chiefly, to
be sure, by debauching the soldiers from their officers. They have begun by a
most terrible operation. They have touched the central point, about which the
particles that compose armies are at repose. They have destroyed the principle
of obedience in the great, essential, critical link between the offices and
the soldiers just where the chain of military subordination commences and on
which the whole of that system depends. The soldier is told he is a citizen,
and has the rights of man and citizen. The right of a man, he is told, is to
be his own governor, and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that
self-government. It is very natural he should think that he ought most of all
to have his choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience. He
will therefore, in all probability, systematically do, what he does at present
occasionally; that is, he will exercise at least a negative in the choice of
his officers. At present the officers are known at best to be only permissive,
and on their good behaviour. In fact, there have been many instances in which
they have been cashiered by their corps. Here is a second negative on the
choice of the king; a negative as effectual at least as the other of the
Assembly. The soldiers know already that it has been a question, not ill
received in the National Assembly, whether they ought not to have the direct
choice of their officers, or some proportion of them? When such matters are in
deliberation it is no extravagant supposition that they will incline to the
opinion most favourable to their pretensions. They will not bear to be deemed
the army of an imprisoned king, whilst another army in the same country, with
whom too they are to feast and confederate, is to be considered as the free
army of a free constitution. They will cast their eyes on the other and more
permanent army; I mean the municipal. That corps, they well know, does
actually elect its own officers. They may not be able to discern the grounds
of distinction on which they are not to elect a Marquis de la Fayette (or what
is his new name?) of their own. If this election of a commander-in-chief be a
part of the rights of men, why not of theirs? They see elective justices of
peace, elective judges, elective curates, elective bishops, elective
municipalities, and elective commanders of the Parisian army. - Why should
they alone be excluded? Are the brave troops of France the only men in that
nation who are not the fit judges of military merit, and of the qualifications
necessary for a commander-in-chief? Are they paid by the state, and do they
therefore lose the rights of men? They are a part of that nation themselves,
and contribute to that pay. And is not the king, is not the National Assembly,
and are not all who elect the National Assembly likewise paid? Instead of
seeing all these forfeit their rights by their receiving a salary, they
perceive that in all these cases a salary is given for the exercise of those
rights. All your resolutions, all your proceedings, all your debates, all the
works of your doctors in religion and politics, have industriously been put
into their hands; and you expect that they will apply to their own case just
as much of your doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure.
Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you
have industriously destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as
in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore the moment
any difference arises between your National Assembly and any part of the
nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you; or
rather you have left nothing else to yourselves. You see, by the report of our
war minister, that the distribution of the army is in a great measure made
with a view of internal coercion. ^53 You must rule by an army; and you have
infused into that army by which you rule, as well as into the whole body of
the nation, principles which after a time must disable you in the use you
resolve to make of it. The king is to call out troops to act against his
people, when the world has been told, and the assertion is still ringing in
our ears, that troops ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies assert to
themselves an independent constitution and a free trade. They must be
constrained by troops. In what chapter of your code of the rights of men are
they able to read, that it is a part of the rights of men to have their
commerce monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others? As the
colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again - Massacre,
torture, hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of
metaphysic declarations wantonly made, and shamefully retracted! It was but
the other day, that the farmers of land in one of your provinces refused to
pay some sort of rents to the lord of the soil. In consequence of this, you
decree, that the country people shall pay all rents and dues, except those
which as grievances you have abolished; and if they refuse, then you order the
king to march troops against them. You lay down metaphysic propositions which
infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic by
despotism. The leaders of the present system tell them of their rights, as
men, to take fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings without the least
appearance of authority even from the Assembly, whilst, as the sovereign
legislative body, that Assembly was sitting in the name of the nation - and
yet these leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in these
very disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the principles, and follow
the examples, which have been guaranteed by their own approbation.
[Footnote 53: Courier Francois, 30th July, 1790. Assemblee Nationale, Numero
210.]
The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feodality as the
barbarism of tyranny, and they tell them afterwards how much of that barbarous
tyranny they are to bear with patience. As they are prodigal of light with
regard to grievances, so the people find them sparing in the extreme with
regard to redress. They know that not only certain quit-rents and personal
duties, which you have permitted them to redeem, (but have furnished no money
for the redemption,) are as nothing to those burthens for which you have made
no provision at all. They know, that almost the whole system of landed
property in its origin is feudal; that it is the distribution of the
possessions of the original proprietors, made by a barbarous conqueror to his
barbarous instruments; and that the most grievous effects of the conquest are
the land rents of every kind, as without question they are.
The peasants, in all probability, are the descendants of these ancient
proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if they fail, in any degree, in the titles
which they make on the principles of antiquaries and lawyers, they retreat
into the citadel of the rights of men. There they find that men are equal; and
the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, ought not to be monopolized to
foster the pride and luxury of any men, who by nature are no better than
themselves, and who, if they do not labour for their bread, are worse. They
find, that by the laws of nature the occupant and subduer of the soil is the
true proprietor; that there is no prescription against nature; and that the
agreements (where any there are) which have been made with the landlords,
during the time of slavery, are only the effect of duresse and force; and that
when the people re-entered into the rights of men, those agreements were made
as void, as everything else which had been settled under the prevalence of the
old feudal and aristocratic tyranny. They will tell you that they see no
difference between an idler with a hat and a national cockade, and an idler in
a cowl, or in a rochet. If you ground the title to rents on succession and
prescription, they tell you from the speech of M. Camus, published by the
National Assembly for their information, that things ill begun cannot avail
themselves of prescription; that the title of these lords was vicious in its
origin; and that force is at least as bad as fraud. As to the title by
succession, they will tell you, that the succession of those who have
cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property, and not rotten
parchments and silly substitutions; that the lords have enjoyed their
usurpation too long; and that if they allow to these lay monks any charitable
pension, they ought to be thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor, who
is so generous towards a false claimant to his goods.
When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason, on which
you have set your image and superscription, you cry it down as base money, and
tell them you will pay for the future with French guards, and dragoons, and
hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand authority of a king,
who is only the instrument of destroying, without any power of protecting
either the people or his own person. Through him it seems you will make
yourselves obeyed. They answer, You have taught us that there are no
gentlemen; and which of your principles teach us to bow to kings whom we have
not elected? We know without your teaching, that lands were given for the
support of feudal dignities, feudal titles, and feudal offices. When you took
down the cause as a grievance, why should the more grievous effect remain? As
there are now no hereditary honours, and no distinguished families, why are we
taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have sent down our
old aristocratic landlords in no other character, and with no other title, but
that of exactors under your authority. Have you endeavoured to make these your
rent-gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us with their arms
reversed, their shields broken, their impresses defaced; and so displumed,
degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no
longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do not even go by the names
of our ancient lords. Physically they may be the same men; though we are not
quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal identity. In
all other respects they are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as
good a right to refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their
honours, titles, and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to do;
and it is one instance, among many indeed, of your assumption of undelegated
power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their clubs, their mobs, and
their national guards, directing you at their pleasure, and giving that as law
to you, which, under your authority is transmitted as law to us. Through you
these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all. Why should not you
attend as much to the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our
rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner, as you do to the
demands of these insolent burghers, relative to distinctions and titles of
honour, by which neither they nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay
more regard to their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the rights
of man to pay tribute to his equals? Before this measure of yours, we might
have thought we were not perfectly equal. We might have entertained some old,
habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favour of those landlords; but we cannot
conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to them, you
could have made the law that degrades them. You have forbidden us to treat
them with any of the old formalities of respect, and now you send troops to
sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to fear and force, which you did not
suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion.
The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all
rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics who have opened schools
for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid and
conclusive. It is obvious, that on a mere consideration of the right, the
leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled to abrogate the
rents along with the titles and family ensigns. It would be only to follow up
the principle of their reasonings, and to complete the analogy of their
conduct. But they had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed
property by confiscation. They had this commodity at market; and the market
would have been wholly destroyed, if they were to permit the husbandmen to
riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves. The
only security which property enjoys in any one of its descriptions, is from
the interests of their rapacity with regard to some other. They have left
nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure, to determine what property is to be
protected and what subverted.
Neither have they left any principle by which any of their municipalities
can be bound to obedience; or even conscientiously obliged not to separate
from the whole to become independent, or to connect itself with some other
state. The people of Lyons, it seems, have refused lately to pay taxes. Why
should they not? What lawful authority is there left to exact them? The king
imposed some of them. The old states, methodized by orders, settled the more
ancient. They may say to the Assembly, Who are you, that are not our kings,
nor the states we have elected, nor sit on the principles on which we have
elected you? And who are we, that when we see the gabelles, which you have
ordered to be paid, wholly shaken off, when we see the act of disobedience
afterwards ratified by yourselves, who are we, that we are not to judge what
taxes we ought or ought not to pay, and who are not to avail ourselves of the
same powers, the validity of which you have approved in others? To this the
answer is, We will send troops. The last reason of kings is always the first
with your Assembly. This military aid may serve for a time, whilst the
impression of the increase of pay remains, and the vanity of being umpires in
all disputes is flattered. But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the
hand that employs it. The Assembly keep a school, where, systematically, and
with unremitting perseverance, they teach principles, and form regulations,
destructive to all spirit of subordination, civil and military - and then they
expect that they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by an anarchic
army.
The municipal army which, according to the new policy, is to balance this
national army, if considered in itself only, is of a constitution much more
simple, and in every respect less exceptionable. It is a mere democratic body,
unconnected with the crown or the kingdom; armed, and trained, and officered
at the pleasure of the districts to which the corps severally belong; and the
personal service of the individuals, who compose, or the fine in lieu of
personal service, are directed by the same authority. ^54 Nothing is more
uniform. If, however, considered in any relation to the crown, to the National
Assembly, to the public tribunals, or to the other army, or considered in a
view to any coherence or connexion between its parts, it seems a monster, and
can hardly fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great national
calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general constitution, than the
systasis of Crete, or the confederation of Poland, or any other ill-devised
corrective which has yet been imagined, in the necessities produced by an
ill-constructed system of government.
[Footnote 54: I see by M. Necker`s account, that the national guards of Paris
have received, over and above the money levied within their own city, about
145,000 pounds sterling out of the public treasure. Whether this be an actual
payment for the nine months of their existence, or an estimate of their yearly
charge, I do not clearly perceive. It is of no great importance, as certainly
they may take whatever they please.]
Having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of the supreme power,
the executive, the judicature, the military, and on the reciprocal relation of
all these establishments, I shall say something of the ability showed by your
legislators with regard to the revenue.
In their proceedings relative to this object, if possible, still fewer
traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. When the states
met, it seemed to be the great object to improve the system of revenue, to
enlarge its collection, to cleanse it of oppression and vexation, and to
establish it on the most solid footing. Great were the expectations
entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was by this grand arrangement
that France was to stand or fall; and this became, in my opinion, very
properly, the test by which the skill and patriotism of those who ruled in
that Assembly would be tried. The revenue of the state is the state. In effect
all depends upon it, whether for support or for reformation. The dignity of
every occupation wholly depends upon the quantity and the kind of virtue that
may be exerted in it. As all great qualities of the mind which operate in
public, and are not merely suffering and passive, require force for their
display, I had almost said for their unequivocal existence, the revenue, which
is the spring of all power, becomes in its administration the sphere of every
active virtue. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid,
instituted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, requires
abundant scope and room and cannot spread and grow under confinement, and in
circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid. Through the revenue alone the
body politic can act in its true genius and character, and therefore it will
display just as much of its collective virtue, and as much of that virtue
which may characterize those who move it, and are, as it were, its life and
guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just revenue. For from hence not
only magnanimity, and liberality, and beneficence, and fortitude, and
providence, and the tutelary protection of all good arts, derive their food,
and the growth of their organs, but continence, and self-denial, and labour,
and vigilance, and frugality, and whatever else there is in which the mind
shows itself above the appetite, are nowhere more in their proper element than
in the provision and distribution of the public wealth. It is therefore not
without reason that the science of speculative and practical finance, which
must take to its aid so many auxiliary branches of knowledge, stands high in
the estimation not only of the ordinary sort, but of the wisest and best men;
and as this science has grown with the progress of its object, the prosperity
and improvement of nations has generally increased with the increase of their
revenues; and they will both continue to grow and flourish, as long as the
balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals, and
what is collected for the common efforts of the state, bear to each other a
due reciprocal proportion, and are kept in a close correspondence and
communication. And perhaps it may be owing to the greatness of revenues, and
to the urgency of state necessities, that old abuses in the constitution of
finances are discovered, and their true nature and rational theory comes to be
more perfectly understood; insomuch, that a smaller revenue might have been
more distressing in one period than a far greater is found to be in another;
the proportionate wealth even remaining the same. In this state of things, the
French Assembly found something in their revenues to preserve, to secure, and
wisely to administer, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud
assumption might justify the severest tests, yet in trying their abilities on
their financial proceedings, I would only consider what is the plain, obvious
duty of a common finance minister, and try them upon that, and not upon models
of ideal perfection.
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to
impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when
necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that
instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the
exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. On these heads
we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of those in
the National Assembly, who have taken to themselves the management of this
arduous concern. Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by a
report of M. Vernier, from the committee of finances, of the second of August
last, that the amount of the national revenue, as compared with its produce
before the Revolution, was diminished by the sum of two hundred millions, or
eight millions sterling of the annual income, considerably more than one-third
of the whole.
If this be the result of great ability, never surely was ability
displayed in a more distinguished manner, or with so powerful an effect. No
common folly, no vulgar incapacity, no ordinary official negligence, even no
official crime, no corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility
which we have seen in the modern world, could in so short a time have made so
complete an overthrow of the finances, and with them, of the strength of a
great kingdom. - Cedo qui vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito?
The sophisters and declaimers, as soon as the Assembly met, began with
decrying the ancient constitution of the revenue in many of its most essential
branches, such as the public monopoly of salt. They charged it, as truly as
unwisely, with being ill-contrived, oppressive, and partial. This
representation they were not satisfied to make use of in speeches preliminary
to some plan of reform; they declared it in a solemn resolution or public
sentence, as it were judicially, passed upon it; and this they dispersed
throughout the nation. At the time they passed the decree, with the same
gravity they ordered the same absurd, oppressive, and partial tax to be paid,
until they could find a revenue to replace it. The consequence was inevitable.
The provinces which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly, some of
whom were charged with other contributions, perhaps equivalent, were totally
disinclined to bear any part of the burthen, which by an equal distribution
was to redeem the others. As to the Assembly, occupied as it was with the
declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with their arrangements
for general confusion, it had neither leisure nor capacity to contrive, nor
authority to enforce, any plan of any kind relative to the replacing the tax
or equalizing it, or compensating the provinces, or for conducting their minds
to any scheme of accommodation with other districts which were to be relieved.
The people of the salt provinces, impatient under taxes, damned by the
authority which had directed their payment, very soon found their patience
exhausted. They thought themselves as skilful in demolishing as the Assembly
could be. They relieved themselves by throwing off the whole burthen. Animated
by this example, each district, or part of a district, judging of its own
grievance by its own feeling, and of its remedy by its own opinion, did as it
pleased with other taxes.
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