Classic Audiobook Collection - Vindication Of The Rights Of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft ~ Full Audiobook [philosophy]

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

Vindication Of The Rights Of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft audiobook. Genre: philosophy Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. It was published in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, and an attack on Wollstonecraft's friend, the Rev Richard Price. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy, in which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals. Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, she believed in progress and derides Burke for re For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:01:40) Chapter 01 (00:35:14) Chapter 02 (01:19:37) Chapter 03 (02:04:38) Chapter 04 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

vindication of the rights of men in a letter to the right hon edmund burke occasioned by his reflections on the revolution in france by mary waltzancraft advertisement mr burke's reflections on the french revolution first engaged my attention as the transient topic of the day and reading it more for amusement than information my indignation was roused by the sophistical arguments that every moment crossed me in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common sense. Many pages of the following letter were the effusions of the moment, but swelling imperceptibly to a considerable size, the idea was suggested of publishing a short vindication of the rights of men. Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game,

I have confined my strictures in a great measure to the grand principles at which he has leveled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb. End of advertisement. Part 1 of Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Part 1 A letter to the right Honorable Edmund Burke, Sir. It is not necessarily. with courtly insincerity, to apologize to you for thus intruding on your precious time,

not to profess that I think it an honor to discuss an important subject with a man whose literary abilities have raised him to notice in the state. I have not yet learned to twist my periods, nor in the equivocable idiom of politeness to disguise my sentiments, and simply what I should be afraid to utter. If, therefore, in the course of this epistle, a chance to express contempt and even indignation, with some emphasis, I beseech you to believe that it is not a flight of fancy, for truth in morals has never appeared to me the essence of the sublime, and in taste, simplicity, the only criterion of the beautiful. But I war not with an individual when I contend for the rights of men and the liberty of reason. You see, I do not condescend to call my words to avoid the

invidious phrase, nor shall I be prevented from giving a manly definition of it, by the flimsyest ridicule which a lively fancy has interwoven with the present acceptation of the term. Reverencing the rights of humanity, I shall dare to assert them, not intimidated by the horse laugh that you have raised or waiting till time. has wiped away the compassionate tears which you have elaborately labored to excite. From the many just sentiments interspersed through the letter before me, and from the whole tendency of it, I should believe you to be a good, though a vain man, if some circumstances in your conduct did not render the inflexibility of your integrity doubtful.

And for this vanity, a knowledge of human nature, enables me to discover such a extenuating circumstances in the very texture of your mind that I am ready to call it amiable and separate the public from the private character I know that a lively imagination renders a man particularly calculated to shine in conversation and in those desultory productions where method is disregarded and the instantaneous applause which his eloquence extorts is at once a reward and a spur Once a wit, and always a wit, is an aphorism that has received the sanction of experience, yet I am apt to conclude that the man who, with scrupulous anxiety,

endeavors to support that shining character, can never nourish by reflection in a profound, or, if you please, metaphysical passion. Ambition becomes only the tool of vanity, and his reason, the weathercock of unrestrained feelings, is only employed to varnish over the faults which it ought to have corrected. Sacred, however, would the infirmities and errors of a good man be, in my eyes, if they were only displayed in a private circle, if the venial fault only rendered the wit, anxious, like a celebrated beauty, to raise admiration on every occasion, and excite emotion, instead of the calm reciprocation of mutual esteem and unimpassioned respect.

Such vanity enlivenes social intercourse and forces the little great man to be always on his guard to secure his throne. And an ingenious man, who is ever on the watch for conquest, will, in his eagerness to exhibit his whole store of knowledge, furnish an attentive observer with some useful information calcined by fancy and formed by taste. And though some dry reasoner might whisper that the arguments were superficial, and should even add that the feelings which are thus ostentatiously displayed, are often the cold declamation of the head, and not the effusions of the heart. What will these shrewd remarks avail when the witty-witted, arguments and ornamental feelings are on a level with the comprehension of the fashionable

world and a book is found very amusing even the lady sir may repeat your sprightly sallies and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations sensibility is the mani of the day and the compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain. In life, an honest man with a confined understanding is frequently the slave of his habits and the dupe of his feelings, whilst the man with a clearer head and colder heart makes the passions of others bend to his interest. But truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their

vigor, whose feelings give vital heat to his resolves, but never hurry him into feverish eccentricities. However, as you have informed us that respect Chills love, it is natural to conclude that all your pretty flights arise from your pampered sensibility, and that, vein of this fancied preeminence of organs, you foster every emotion till the fumes, mounting to your brain, dispel the sober suggestions of reason. It is not in this view surprising that when you should argue you become impassioned, and that reflection inflames your imagination, instead of enlightening your understanding. Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, sir, reason together, and believe me,

I should not have meddled with these troubled waters, in order to point out your inconsistencies if your wit had not burnished up some rusty, baneful opinions, and swelled the shallow current of ridicule till it resembled the flow of reason, and presumed to be the test of truth. I shall not attempt to follow you through horse's way and footpath, but attacking the foundation of your opinions, I shall leave the superstructure to find a centre of gravity on which it may lean till some strong blast puffs it into air. Or your teeming fancy, which the ripening judgment of sixty years has not tamed, produces another Chinese erection, to stare at every turn the plain country people in the face who bluntly calls such an airy edifice a folly.

The birthright of man, to give you, sir, a short definition of this disputed right, is such a degree of liberty, civil, and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact. Liberty, in this simple, unsophisticated sense, I acknowledge, is a fair idea that has never yet received a form in the various governments that have been established on our beauteous globe. The demon of property has ever been at hand to encroach on the sacred rights of men and to fence round with awful pomp laws that war with justice. But that it results from the eternal foundation of right, from immutable truth, who will presume to deny

that pretends to rationality, if reason has led them to build their morality and religion on an everlasting foundation, the attributes of God. I glow with indignation when I attempt methodically to unravel your slavish paradoxes, in which I can find no fixed first principle to refute. I shall not, therefore, condescend to show where you affirm in one page what you deny in another, and how frequently you draw conclusions without any previous premises. It would be something like cowardice to fight with a man who had never exercised the weapons with which his opponent chose to combat, and irksome to refute sentence after sentence in which

the latent spirit of tyranny appeared. I perceive from the whole tenor of your reflections that you have a mortal antipathy to reason, but if there is anything like argument or first principles in your wild declamation, behold the result, that we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience, nay, that if we do discover some errors, our feelings should lead us to excuse with blind love or unprincipled filial affection the venerable vestige of ancient days. These are Gothic notions of beauty.

The ivy is beautiful, but when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up? Further, that we ought cautiously to remain forever and frozen inactivity, because a thaw, whilst it nourishes the soil, spreads a temporary inundation, and the fear of risking any personal present convenience should prevent a struggle for the most estimable advantages. This is sound reasoning, I grant, in the mouth of the rich, and short-sighted. Yes, sir, the strong-gained riches, the few have sacrificed the many, to their vices,

and to be able to pamper their appetites and supinely exist without exercising mind or body, they have ceased to be men. Lost to the relish of true pleasure, such beings would indeed deserve competition. passion if injustice was not softened by the tyrant's plea, necessity, if prescription was not raised as an immortal boundary against innovation. Their minds, in fact, instead of being cultivated, have been so warped by education that it may require some ages to bring them back to nature and enable them to see their true interest with that degree of conviction which is necessary to influence their conscience.

The civilization which has taken place in Europe has been very partial, and like every custom that an arbitrary point of honor has established, refines the manners at the expense of morals, by making sentiments and opinions current in conversation that have no root in the heart or weight in the cooler resolves of the mind. And what has stopped its progress? Hereditary property, hereditary honors. The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedoes touch, or a being with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals, and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms,

but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits founded on respect for justice and humanity. Governed by these principles, the poor wretch whose in elegant distress extorted from a mixed feeling of disgust and animal sympathy present relief would have been considered as a man whose misery to make a part of his birthright, supposing him to be industrious. But should his vices have reduced him to poverty,

he could only have addressed his fellow men as weak beings, subject to like passions, who ought to forgive because they expect to be forgiven, for suffering the impulse of the moment to silence these suggestions of conscience, or reason which you will, for in my view of things they are synonymous terms. Will Mr. Burke be at the trouble to inform us how far we are to go back to discover the rights of men, since the light of reason is such a fallacious guide that none but fools trust to its cold investigation?

In the infancy of society, confining our view to our own country, customs were established by the lawless power of an ambitious individual, or a weak prince was obliged to comply with every demand of the licentious barbarous insurgents who disputed his authority with irrefragable arguments at the point of their swords, or the more specious requests of the Parliament who only allowed him conditional supplies. Are these the venerable pillars of our constitution, and is Magna Carta to rest for its chief support on a former grant which reverts to another till chaos becomes the base of the mighty structure. Or we cannot tell what, for coherence,

without some pervading principle of order, is a solacism. Speaking of Edward III, Eum observes that he was a prince of great capacity, not governed by favorites, not led astray by any unruly passion, sensible that nothing could be more essential to his interests than to keep on good terms with his people.

Yet on the whole, it appears, that the government at best was only a barbarous monarchy, not regulated by any fixed maxims or bounded by any certain or undisputed rights, which in practice were regularly observed. The king conducted himself by one set of principles, the barons by another, the commons by a third, the clergy by a fourth. All these systems of government were opposite and incompatible. of them prevailed in its turn as incidents were favorable to it. A great prince rendered the monarchical power predominant.

The weakness of a king gave reigns to the aristocracy. A superstitious age saw the clergy triumphant. The people for whom chiefly government was instituted and who chiefly deserved consideration were the weakest of the whole. And just before that most auspicious era the 14th century during the reign of Richard II, whose total incapacity to manage the reigns of power, and keep in subjection his haughty barons, rendered him a mere cipher. The House of Commons, to whom he was obliged frequently to apply, not only for subsidies, but

assistance to quell the insurrection that the contempt in which he was held naturally produced, gradually rose into power. For whenever they granted supplies to the King, they were to the King, they were to the King. demanded in return, though it bore the name of petition, a confirmation or the renewal of former charters, which had been infringed and even utterly disregarded by the king and his seditious barons, who principally held their independence of the crown by force of arms, and the encouragement which they gave to robbers and villains, who infested the country, and lived by rapine and violence.

To what dreadful extremities were the the poorer sort reduced their property, the fruit of their industry, being entirely at the disposal of their lords, who were so many petty tyrants. In return for the supplies and assistance which the king received from the commons, they demanded privileges, which Edward, in his distress for money to prosecute the numerous wars in which he was engaged during the greater part of his reign, was constrained to grant them. So that, by degrees, they rose to power, and became a check on both king and nobles. Thus was the foundation of our liberty established,

chiefly through the pressing necessities of the king, who was more intent on being supplied for the moment in order to carry on his wars and ambitious projects, than aware of the blow he gave to kingly power, by thus making a body of men feel their importance, who afterwards might strenuously oppose tyranny and oppression, and effectually guard the subject's property from seizure and confiscation. Richard's weakness completed what Edward's ambition began.

At this period it is true, Wycliffe opened a vista for reason by attacking some of the most pernicious tenets of the Church of Rome. Still, the prospect was sufficiently misty to authorize the question, where was the dignity of thinking of the 14th century? A Roman Catholic, it is true, enlightened by the Reformation, might with singular propriety celebrate the epoch that preceded it to turn our thoughts from former atrocious enormities. But a Protestant must acknowledge that this faint dawn of liberty only made the subsiding darkness more visible, and that the boasted virtues of that century all bear the stamp of

stupid bride and headstrong barbarism. Civility was then called condescension and ostentatious almsgiving humanity, and men were content to borrow their virtues, or to speak with more propriety, their consequence, from posterity rather than undertake the arduous task of acquiring it for themselves. The imperfection of all modern governments must, without waiting to repeat the trite remark, that all human institutions are unavoidably imperfect, in a great measure, have arisen from this simple circumstance, that the Constitution, if such an heterogeneous mass, deserve that name, was settled in the dark days of ignorance, when the minds of men were shackled by the grossest prejudices and most immoral superstition. And do you, sir, a sagacious philosopher, recommend night as the fittest time to analyze a ray of light?

Are we to seek for the rights of men in the ages when a few marks were the only penalty imposed for the life of a man, and death for death when the property of the rich was touched? When, I blush to discover the depravity of our nature, when a deer was killed, are these the laws that it is natural to love and sacrilegious to invade? Were the rights of men understood when the law authorized or tolerated murder? Or is power and right the same in your creed? But in fact all your declamation leads so directly to this conclusion that I beseech you to ask your own heart when you call yourself a friend of liberty whether it would not

be more consistent to style yourself the champion of property. the adorer of the golden image which power has set up. And when you are examining your heart, if it would not be too much like mathematical drudgery, to which a fine imagination very reluctantly stoop, inquire further how it is consistent with the vulgar notions of honesty and the foundation of morality, truth. For a man to boast of his virtue and independence when he cannot forget that he is at the moment enjoying the wages of falsehood, and that, in a skulking unmanly way, he has secured himself a pension of fifteen hundred pounds per annum on the Irish establishment.

Do honest men, sir, for I am not rising to the refined principle of honor, ever receive the reward of their public services, or secret assistance in the name of another? But to return from a digression which you will more perfectly understand than any of my readers on what principle you, sir, can justify the reformation which tore up by the roots and old establishment, I cannot guess, but I beg your pardon, perhaps you do not wish to justify it and have some mental reservation to excuse you to yourself for not openly abowing your reverence. Or, to go further back, had you been a Jew, you would have joined in the cry, crucify him, crucify him, the promulgator of a new doctrine and the violator of old laws and customs,

that not melting like ours, rested on divine authority, must have been a dangerous innovator in your eyes, particularly if you had not been informed that the carpenter's son was of the stock and lineage of David. But there is no end to the arguments which might be deduced to combat such palpable absurdities by showing the manifest inconsistencies which are necessarily involved in a direfled train of false opinions. It is necessary emphatically to repeat that there are rights which men inherit at their birth as rational creatures who were raised above the brute creation by their improvable faculties, and that in receiving these,

not from their forefathers, but from God, prescription can ever undermine natural rights. A father may dissipate his property without his child having any right to complain, but should he attempt to sell him for a slave or fetter him with laws contrary to reason, nature, in enabling him to discern good from evil, teaches him to break the ignoble chain and not to believe that bread becomes flesh and wine blood,

because his parents swallowed the Eucharist with this blind persuasion. There is no end to this implicit submission to authority. Somewhere it must stop, or we return to barbarism, and the capacity of improvement, which gives us a natural scepter on earth, is a cheat, an ignees fatuice, that leads to us. us from inviting meadows into bogs and dung hills. And if it be allowed that many of the precautions with which any alteration was made in our government were prudent, it rather proves its weakness than substantiates an opinion of the soundness of the stamina, or the excellence

of the Constitution. But on what principle, Mr. Burke, could defend American independence, I cannot conceive, for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments, settled slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity and prudent attention to self-interest to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished. And because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom and term an atrocious insult to humanity,

the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured. Security of property. Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty. And to this selfish principle, every nobler one is sacrificed. The Britain takes place of the man, and the image of God is lost in the zealpherson. citizen. But it is not that enthusiastic flame which in Greece and Rome consumed every sordid passion. No, self is the focus, and the disparting rays rise not above our foggy atmosphere. But softly, it is only the property of the rich that is secure. The man who lives by the sweat

of his brow has no asylum from oppression. The strong man may enter, when was the castle of the poor sacred, and the base informer steal him from the family that depend on his industry for substance. Fully sensible, as you must be, of the baneful consequences that inevitably follow this notorious infringement on the dearest rights of men, and that it is an infernal blot on the very face of our immaculate constitution, I cannot avoid expressing my surprise that when you recommended our form of government as a model, you did not caution the French against the arbitrary custom of pressing men for the sea service. You should have hinted to them that property in England

is much more secure than liberty, and not have concealed that the liberty of an honest mechanic, his all, is often sacrificed to secure the property of the rich. For it is a farce to pretend that a man fights for his country, his hearth, or his hearth, or his altars, when he has neither liberty nor property. His property is in his nervous arms, and they are compelled to pull a strange rope at the surly command of a tyrannic boy who probably obtained his rank on account of his family connections,

or the prostituted vote of his father, whose interest in a borough, or voice as a senator, was acceptable to the minister. Our penal laws punish with death the thief who steals a few pounds, but to take by violence or trepan a man is no such anus offense, for who shall dare to complain of the venerable vestige of the law that rendered the life of a deer more sacred than that of a man? But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed, and only metaphysical softists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form. It is a work of abstraction,

and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or pity a man. Misery to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its cap and bells. Your tears are reserved very naturally considering your character for the declamation of the theater. or for the downfall of queens, whose rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity, whilst the distress of many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration, though they might extort an alms. The tears that are shed for fictitious sorrow or,

admirably adapted, says Rousseau, to make us proud of all the virtues which we do not possess. The baneful effects of the despotic practice of pressing, we shall, in all probability, soon feel. For a number of men who have been taken from their daily employments will shortly be let loose on society, now that there is no longer any apprehension of a war. The vulgar, and by this epithet, I mean not only, to describe a class of people who, working to support the body, have not had time to cultivate their minds. But likewise, those who, born in the lap of affluence, have never had their invention sharpened

by necessity, are nine out of ten, the creatures of habit and impulse. If I were not afraid to derange your nervous system by the bare mention of a metaphysical inquiry, I should observe, sir, that self-preservation is literally speaking the first law of nature, and that the care necessary to support and guard the body is the first step to unfold the mind and inspire a manly spirit of independence. The mewing babe in swaddling clothes, who is treated like a superior being, may perchance become a gentleman, but nature must have given him uncommon faculties if, when a pleasure hangs on every bow, he has sufficient fortitude, either to exercise his mind or body in order to acquire personal merit.

The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason. A present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chase, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, a habit of thinking. The exercise of our faculties is the great end, though not the goal we had in view when we started with such eagerness. It would be straying still further into metaphysics to add that this is one of the strongest arguments for the natural immortality of the soul. Everything looks like a means, nothing like an end or point of rest, when we can say, now let us sit down, and enjoy the

present moment. Our faculties and wishes are proportioned to the present scene. We may return without repining to our sister Claude. And if no conscious dignity whisper that we are capable of relishing more refined pleasures, the thirst of truth appears to be allayed, and thought, the faint type of an immaterial energy, no longer bounding it knows not where, is confined to the tenement, that affords its sufficient variety. The rich man may then thank his God that he is not like other men. But when is retribution to be made to the miserable who cry day and night for help, and there is no one at hand to help them?

And not only misery but immorality proceeds from this stretch of arbitrary authority. The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they emmerality. imbibed whilst their hands were employed. They cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another. Pressing them entirely unhinges their minds. They acquire new habits, and cannot return to their old occupations with their former readiness. Consequently, they fall into idleness, drunkenness, and the whole train of vices which you stigmatize as gross. A government that acts in this manner cannot be called a good parent. nor inspire natural habitual is the proper word affection in the breasts of children who are thus disregarded the game laws are almost as oppressive to the peasantry as press warrants to the mechanic

in this land of liberty what is to secure the property of the poor farmer when his noble landlord chooses to plant a decoy field near his little property game devour the fruit of his labor but find and imprisonment await him if he dares to kill any, or lift up his hand to interrupt the pleasure of his lord. How many families have been plunged in the sporting countries into misery and vice for some paltry transgression of these coercive laws by the natural consequence of that anger which a man feels when he sees the reward of his industry laid waste by unfeeling luxury? when his children's bread is given to the dogs. End of Part 2 of Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Walsdencraft.

This Libervox recording is in the public domain. You have shown, sir, by your silence on these subjects that your respect for rank has swallowed up the common feelings of humanity. You seem to consider the poor as only the livestock of an estate, the feather of hereditary nobility. When you had so little respect for the silent majesty of misery, I am not surprised at your manner of treating an individual whose brow a mitre will never grace, and whose popularity may have wounded your vanity, for vanity is ever for. Even in France, sir, before the revolution, literary celebrity procured a man the treatment of a gentleman. But you are going back for

your credentials of politeness to more distant times. gothic affability is the mode you think proper to adopt the condescension of a baron not the civility of a liberal man politeness is indeed the only substitute for humanity or what distinguished the civilized man from the unlettered savage and he who is not governed by reason should square his behaviour by an arbitrary standard but by what rule your attack on dr price was regulated we have yet to learn I agree with you, sir, that the pulpit is not the place for political discussions, though it might be more excusable to enter on such a subject when the day was set apart merely to commemorate a political revolution, and no stated duty was encroached upon. I will, however, waive this point and allow that Dr. Price's zeal may have carried him further than sound reason can justify.

I do also most cordially coincide with you that to be able to beckyceal that Until we can see the remote consequences of things, present calamities must appear in the ugly form of evil and excite our commiseration. The good that time slowly educes from them may be hid from mortal eye, or dimly seen, whilst sympathy compels man to feel for man, and almost restrains the hand that would amputate a limb to save the whole body. But after making this concession, allow me to expostulate with you, and calmly hold up the glass which will show you your partial

feelings. In reprobating Dr. Price's opinions, you might have spared the man. And if you had had but half as much reverence for the grey hairs of virtue as for the accidental distinctions of rank, you would not have treated with such indecent familiarity and supercilious contempt, a member of the community whose talents and modest virtues place him high in the scale of moral excellence. I am not accustomed to look up with vulgar awe, even when mental superiority exalts a man above his fellows. But still the sight of a man whose habits are fixed by piety and reason, and whose virtues are

consolidated into goodness, commands my homage, and I should touch his errors with a tender hand when I made a parade of my sensibility. Granting for a moment that Dr. Price's political opinions are utopian reveries, and that the world is not yet sufficiently civilized to adopt such a sublime system of morality, they could, however, only be the reveries of a benevolent mind. Tottering on the verge of the grave, that worthy man in his whole life never dreamt of struggling for power or riches. And if a glimpse of the glad dawn of liberty rekindle the fire of youth in his veins,

you who could not stand the fascinating glance of a great lady's eyes, when neither virtue nor sense beamed in them, might have pardoned his unseemly transport, if such it might be deemed. I could almost fancy that I now see this respectable old man in his pulpit with hands clasped and eyes devoutly fixed, praying with all the simple energy of unaffected piety, or when more erect, inculcating the dignity of virtue, and enforcing the doctrines, his life adorns.

Benevolence animated each feature and persuasion attuned his accents. The preacher grew eloquent, who only labored to be clear, and the respect that he extorted seemed only the respect due to personified virtue and matured wisdom. Is this the man you brand with so many opprobrious epithets? He whose private life will stand the test of the strictest inquiry, away with such unmanly sarcasms and pure isle conceits. But before I close this part of my animadversons, I must convict you of willful misrepresentation and wanton abuse.

after price when he reasons on the necessity of men attending some place of public worship concisely obviates an objection that has been made in the form of an apology by advising those who do not approve of our liturgy and cannot find any mode of worship out of the church in which they can conscientiously join to establish one for themselves this plain advice you have tortured into a very different meaning and represented the preacher as actuated by a dissenting frenzy recommending dissensions not to diffuse truth but to spread contradictions a simple question will silence this impertinent declamation what is truth a few fundamental truths meet the first inquiry of reason and appear as clear to an unworped mind as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfill its vital functions. But the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles, or who can discriminate the vagaries of the imagination, or scrupulosity of weakness from the verdict of reason. Let all these points be demonstrated and not determined by arbitrary authority and dark traditions, lest a dangerous supineness should take place.

For probably in ceasing to inquire, our reason would remain dormant, and delivered up without a curb to every impulse of passion, we might soon lose sight of the clear light which the exercise of our understanding no longer kept alive. To argue from experience, it would seem as if the human mind of very human mind of verse to thought, could only be opened by necessity, for when it can take opinions on trust, it gladly lets the spirit lie quiet in its gross tenement. Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless inquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch

over the dark abyss of uncertainty. These lively conjectures are the breezes that preserve the still lake from stagnating. We should be aware of confining all moral excellence to one channel, however capacious. Or if we are so narrow-minded, we should not forget how much we owe to chance that our inheritance was not Muhammadism, and that the iron hand of destiny in the shape of a deeply rooted authority has not suspended the sword of destruction over our heads. But to return to the misrepresentation, Blackstone, to whom Mr. Burke pays great deference, seems to agree with Dr. Price, that the succession of the King of Great Britain depends on the

choice of the people, or that they have a power to cut it off. But this power, as you have fully proved, has been cautiously exerted, and might with more propriety be termed a right than a power. Be it so. Yet when you elaborate cited precedents to show that our forefathers paid great respect to hereditary claims, you might have gone back to your favorite epoch and shown their respect for a church that fulminating laws have since loaded with a probium. The preponderance of inconsistencies, when weighed with precedents, should lessen the most bigoted veneration for antiquity

and force men of the 18th century to acknowledge that our canonized, forefathers were unable or afraid to revert to reason without resting on the crutch of authority and should not be brought as a proof that their children are never to be allowed to walk alone when we doubt the infallible wisdom of our ancestors it is only advancing on the same ground to doubt the sincerity of the law and the propriety of that servile appellation our sovereign lord the king who was the dictators of this adjutory language of the law? Were they not courtly parasites and worldly priests? Besides, whoever at divine service whose feelings were not deadened by habit

or their understandings quiescent ever repeated without horror the same epithets applied to a man and his creator. If this is confused jargon, say what are the dictates of sober reason, or the criterion to distinguish nonsense. You further sarcastically Anamad Verde on the consistency of the democratists by arresting the obvious meaning of a common phrase, the dregs of the people, or your contempt for poverty may have led you into an error. Be that as it may, an unprejudiced man would have directly perceived the single sense of the word, and an old member of parliament could scarcely have missed it.

He who had so often felt the pulse of the electors needed not have gone beyond his own experience to discover that the dregs alluded to were the vicious and not the lower class of the community. Again, sir, I must doubt your sincerity or your discernment. You have been behind the curtain, and though it might be difficult to bring back your sophisticated heart to nation,

and make you feel like a man, yet the awestruck confusion in which you were plunged must have gone off when the vulgar emotion of wonder excited by finding yourself a senator had subsided. Then you must have seen the clogged wheels of corruption continually oiled by the sweat of the laborious poor squeezed out of them by unceasing taxation. You must have discovered that the majority in the House of Commons was often purchased by the Crown, and that the people were oppressed by the influence of their own money, extorted by the venal voice of a pact representation. You must have known that a man of merit cannot rise in the Church, the Army, or Navy, unless he has some interest in a borough, and that even a paltry excise man's place can only

be secured by electioneering interest. I will go further, and assert that few bishops, though there have been learned and good bishops, have gained the mitre without submitting to a servility of dependence that degrades the man. All these circumstances you must have known, yet you talk of virtue and liberty as the vulgar talk of the letter of the law, and the polite of propriety. It is true that these ceremonial observances produced decorum. The sepulchres are whitewashed, and do not offend the squeamish eyes of high rank, but virtue is out of the question when you only worship a shadow and worship it to secure your property.

Man has been termed with strict propriety a microcosm, a little world in himself. He is so, yet must, however, be reckoned an ephemera, or to adopt your figure of rhetoric a a summers fly. The perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges you most warmly contend for, yet it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolences to such a narrow circle, which with great propriety may be included in assorted calculations of blind self-love. A brutal attachment to children has appeared most concerned.

inspicuous in parents who have treated them like slaves, and demanded due homage for all the property they transferred to them during their lives. It has led them to force their children to break the most sacred ties, to do violence to a natural impulse, and run into legal prostitution to increase wealth or shun poverty. And still worse, the dread of parental malediction has made many weak characters violate truth in the face of heaven, and to avoid a father's angry curse, the most sacred promises have been broken. It appears to be a natural suggestion of reason

that a man should be freed from implicit obedience to parents and private punishments when he is of an age to be subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of his country, and that the barbarous cruelty of allowing parents to imprisonment, and their children to prevent their contaminating their noble blood by following the dictates of nature when they chose to marry, or for any misdemeanor that does not come under the cognizance of public justice, is one of the most arbitrary violations of liberty. Who can recount all the unnatural crimes which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced? The younger Your children have been sacrificed to the eldest son, sent into exile or confined in convents,

that they might not encroach on what was called, with shameful falsehood, the family estate. Will Mr. Burke call this parental affection reasonable or virtuous? No, it is the spurious offspring of overweening mistaken pride, and not that first source of civilization, natural parental affection, that makes no difference between child and child but what reason justifies by pointing out superior merit another pernicious consequence which unavoidably arises from this artificial affection is the insuperable bar which it puts in the way of early marriages it would be difficult to determine whether the minds or

bodies of our youth are most injured by this impediment our young men become selfish Coxcoms, and gallantry with modest women, and intrigues with those of another description, weaken both mind and body before either has arrived at maturity. The character of a master of a family, a husband, and a father, forms the citizen imperceptibly by producing a sober manliness of thought and orderly behavior. But from the lax morals and depraved affections of the libertine, what resists? results, a finical man of taste who is only anxious to secure his own private gratifications, and to maintain his rank in society.

The same system has an equally pernicious effect on female morals. Girls are sacrificed to family convenience, or else marry to settle themselves in a superior rank, and coquette without restraint, with the fine gentleman whom I have already described, and To such lengths has this vanity, this desire of shining, carried them that it is not now necessary to guard girls against imprudent love-matches, for if some widows did not now and then fall in love, love and Hyman would seldom meet unless at a village church. I do not intend to be sarcastically paradoxical when I say that women of fashion take husbands that they may have it in their power to coquette, and grand business of genteel

life with a number of admirers, and thus flutter the spring of life away without laying up any store for the winter of age, or being of any use to society. Affection in the marriage state can only be founded on respect, and are these weak beings respectable? Children are neglected for lovers, and we express surprise that they are not only be founded on respect that adulteries are so common. A woman never forgets to adorn herself to make an impression on the senses of the other sex, and to extort the homage which it is gallant to pay, and yet we wonder that they have such

confined understandings. Have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters, an immoderate desire to please, contracts the faculties, and emerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation. It would be an arduous task to trace all the vice and misery that arise in society from the middle class of people aping the manners of the great. All are aiming to procure respect on account of their property, and most places are considered as sinecures that enable men to start into notice. The great concern of three parts out of

for is to contrive to live above their equals and to appear to be richer than they are. How much domestic comfort and private satisfaction is sacrificed to this irrational ambition. It is a destructive mildew that blights the fairest virtues, benevolence, friendship, generosity, and all those endearing charities which bind human hearts together, and the pursuits which raise the mind to higher contemplation. all that were not cankered in the pud by the false notions that grew with its growth and strengthened with its strength are crushed by the iron hand of property property i do not scruple to aver it should it be fluctuating which would be the case if it were more equally divided amongst all the children of a family else it is an everlasting rampart in consequence of a barbarous feudal institution that enables the elder son to overpower talents and depress virtue. Besides, an unmanly servility, most inimical to true dignity of character,

is by this means fostered in society. Men of some abilities play on the follies of the rich, and mounting to fortune as they degrade themselves, they stand in the way of men of superior talents, who cannot advance in such crooked paths, or weighed through the filth which parasites never boggle at. Pursuing their way straightforward, their spirit is either bent or broken by the rich man's contumelies

or the difficulties they have to encounter. The only security of property that nature authorizes and reasoned sanctions is the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired, and to bequeath them to bequeath them to. whom he chooses. Happy would it be for the world if there were no other road to wealth or honor, if pride in the shape of parental affection did not absorb the man and prevent friendship from having

the same weight as relationship. Luxury and effeminacy would not then introduce so much idiotism into the noble families which form one of the pillars of our state. The ground would not lie fallow, nor would not lie fallow, nor would a little. undirected activity of mind spread the contagion of restless idleness and its concomitant vice through the whole mass of society. Instead of gaming, they might nourish a virtuous ambition, and love might take place of the gallantry which you with nightly fealty venerate. Women would probably then act like mothers, and the fine lady, become a rational woman, might think it necessary to superintendence,

intend her family and suckle her children in order to fulfill her part of the social compact. But vain is the hope whilst great masses of property are hedged round by hereditary honors. For numerous vices forced in the hotbed of wealth, assume a sightly form to dazzle the senses and cloud the understanding. The respect paid to rank and fortune damps every generous purpose of the soul, and stifles the natural affections on which human contentment ought to be built who will venturously ascend the steeps of virtue or explore the great deep for knowledge when the one thing needful attained by less arduous exertions if not inherited procures the attention man naturally pants after and vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness What a sentiment to come from a moral pen!

A surgeon would tell you that by skinning over a wound, you spread disease through the whole frame, and surely they indirectly aim at destroying all purity of morals who poison the very source of virtue by smearing a sentimental varnish over vice to hide its natural deformity. Stealing, hoaring, and drunkenness are gross vices, I presume, though they may not obliterate every moral sentiment, and have a vulgar brand that makes them appear with all their native deformity. But overreaching, adultery, and coquetry are venial offenses, though they reduce virtue to an empty name, and make wisdom consist in saving appearances. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,

and an animal not of the highest order. All true, sir, if she is not more attentive to the duties of humanity than queens and fashionable ladies in general are. I will still further accede to the opinion you have so justly conceived of the spirit which begins to animate this age. All homage paid to the sex in general as such and without distinct views is to be regarded as romance and folly. Undoubtedly, because such homage viciates them, prevents their endeavoring to obtain solid personal merit, and, in short, makes those beings vain inconsiderate dolls,

who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society. Regicide and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king or a queen or a bishop are only common homicide. Again, I agree with you, but you perceive, sir, that by leaving out the word father, I think the whole extent of the comparison invidious. You further proceed grossly to misrepresent Dr. Price's meaning, and with an affectation of holy fervor, express your indignation at his profaning a beautiful rapturous ejaculation when alluding to the King of France's submission to the National Assembly. He rejoiced to hail a glorious revolution which promised an universal diffusion of liberty and happiness. Observe, sir, that I called

your piety affectation, a rant to enable you to point your venomous dart and round your period. I speak with warmth, because of all hypocrites my soul most indignantly spurns a religious one, and I very cautiously bring forward such a heavy charge to strip you of your cloak of sanctity. Your speech at the time the bill for a regency was agitated now lies before me. Then you could in direct terms to promote ambitious or interested views, exclaim without any pious qualms, ought they to make a mockery of him, putting a crown of thorns on his head,

a reed in his hand, and dressing him in a raiment of purple, cry hail, king of the British. Where was your sensibility when you could utter this cruel mockery, equally insulting to God and man? Go hence, thou slave of impulse, look into the private recesses of thy heart,

and take not a moat from thy brother's eye, till thou hast removed the beam from thine own. Of your own partial feelings, I shall take another view, and show that following nature, which is, you say, wisdom without reflection, and above it, has led you into great inconsistencies to use the softest phrase. When, on a late melancholy occasion, a very important question was agitated, with what indecent warmth did you treat a woman, for I shall not lay any stress on her title,

whose conduct in life has deserved praise, though not perhaps. the servile eologiums which have been lavished on the queen. But sympathy, and you tell us that you have a heart of flesh, was made to give way two-party spirit, and the feelings of a man, not to allude to your romantic gallantry to the views of the statesman. When you descanted on the horrors of the 6th of October, and gave a glowing, and in some instances a most exaggerated description of that infernal night, without having troubled yourself to clean your palate, you might have returned home and indulged us with a sketch of the misery you personally aggravated. With what eloquence might you not have insinuated that the sight of unexpected misery

and strange reverses of fortune makes the mind recoil on itself, and pondering traced the uncertainty of all human hope, the frail foundation. of sublunary grandeur. What a climax lay before you, a father torn from his children, a husband from an affectionate wife, a man from himself, and not torn by the resistless stroke of death,

for time would then have lent its aid to mitigate remedialess sorrow. But that living death, which only kept hope alive in the corroding form of suspense, was a calamity that called, for all your pity. The sight of august ruins of a depopulated country,

what are they to a disordered soul, when all the faculties are mixed in wild confusion? It is then indeed we tremble for humanity, and if some wild fancy chance to cross the brain, we fearfully start

and pressing our hand against our brow, ask if we are yet men, if our reason is undisturbed, if judgment hold the helm. Marius might sit with dignity on the ruins of Carthage and the wretch in the vast steel, who longed in vain to see the human face divine, might yet view the operations of his own mind and vary the leaden prospect by new combinations of thought. Poverty, shame, and even slavery may be endured by the virtuous man he has still a world to range in,

But the loss of reason appears a monstrous flaw in the moral world that eludes all investigation and humbles without enlightening. In this state was the king when you, with unfeeling disrespect, an indecent haste wished to strip him of all his hereditary honors. You were so eager to taste the sweets of power that you could not wait till time had determined whether a great dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness, but prying into the secrets of omnipotence, you thundered out that God had hurled him from his throne, and that it was the most insulting mockery to recollect that he had been a king, or to treat him with any particular respect on account of his former dignity. And who was the monster whom heaven had thus awfully deposed, and smitten with such an angry blow?

surely as harmless a character as Louis the sixteenth, and the Queen of Great Britain, though her heart may not be enlarged by generosity, who will presume to compare her character with that of the Queen of France. Where then was the infallibility of that extolled instinct which rises above reason? Was it warped by vanity, or hurled from its throne by self-interest? To your own heart answer these questions in the sober hours of reflection, and after reviewing this gust of passion, learn to respect the sovereignty of reason. I have, sir, been reading with a scrutinizing comparative eye, several of your insensible and profane speeches during the king's illness. I disdain to take advantage of a man's weak side or draw consequences from an unguarded transport. A lion preys not on carcasses, but on this occasion you acted systematically.

It was not the passion of the moment, over which humanity draws a veil. No, what but the odious maxims of Machiavellian policy could have led you to have searched in the varied greggs of misery for forcible arguments to support your party. Had not vanity or interest steeled your heart, you might have been shot, at the cold insensibility which could carry a man to those dreadful mansions where human weakness appears in its most awful form to calculate the chances against the king's recovery impressed as you are with respect for royalty i am astonished that you did not tremble at every step lest heaven should avenge on your guilty head the insult offered to its vice-regent but the conscience that is under the direction of transient ebullitions of feeling, is not very tender or consistent when the current runs another

way. Had you been in a philosophizing mood, had your heart or your reason been at home, you might have been convinced by ocular demonstration that madness is only the absence of reason. The ruling angel leaving its seat, wild anarchy, ensues. You would have seen that the uncontrolled imagination often pursues the most regular course in its most daring flight, and that the eccentricities are boldly relieved when judgment no longer officiously arranges the sentiments by bringing them to the test of principles. You would have seen everything out of nature in that strange

chaos of levity and ferocity and of all sorts of follies jumbled together. You would have seen in that monstrous, tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind. Alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror. This is a true picture of that chaotic state of mind, called madness. When reason gone, we know not where, the wild elements of passion clash and all is horror and confusion. You might have heard the best turned conceits, flash following flash, and doubted whether the rhapsody was not eloquent if it had not been delivered in an equivocal language. Neither verse nor prose if the sparkling periods had not stood alone wanting force because they wanted

concatenation. It is a proverbial observation that a very thin partitioned by the wit and madness. Poetry, therefore, naturally addresses the fancy, and the language of passion is with great felicity borrowed from the heightened picture which the imagination draws of sensible objects consented by impassioned reflection. And during this fine frenzy, reason has no right to rein in the imagination, unless to prevent the introduction of supernumerary images. if the passion is real the head will not be ransacked for stale tropes and cold rhod i now speak of the genuine enthusiasm of genius

which perhaps seldom appears but in the infancy of civilization for as this light becomes more luminous reason clips the wing of fancy the youth becomes a man whether the glory of europe is set i shall not not now inquire, but probably the spirit of romance and chivalry is in the wane, and reason will gain by its extinction. From observing several cold romantic characters, I have been led to confine the term romantic to one definition, faults or rather artificial feelings. Works of genius are read with a prepossession in their favor, and sentiments imitated because they were fashionable and pretty, and not because they were forcibly felt. In modern poetry, the understanding and memory

often fabricate the pretended effusions of the heart, and romance destroys all simplicity, which in works of taste is but a synonymous word for truth. This romantic spirit has extended to our prose and scattered artificial flowers over the most barren heath, or a mixture of verse and prose, producing the strangest incongruities. The turgid bombast of some of your periods fully proves these assertions, for when the heart speaks we are seldom shocked by hyperbole or dry raptures.

I speak in this decided tone, because from turning over the pages of your late publication, with more attention than I did when I first read it cursorily over, and comparing the sentiments it contains with your conduct on many important occasions, I am led very often to doubt your sincerity, and to suppose that you have said many things merely for the sake of saying them well, or to throw some pointed obloquy on characters and opinions that jostled with your vanity. It is an arduous task to follow the doublings of cunning, or the subterfuges of inconsistency, for in controversy,

as in battle, the brave man who wishes to face his enemy and fight on the same ground. Knowing, however, the influence of a ruling passion and how often it assumes the form of reason when there is much sensibility in the heart, I respect an opponent, though he tenaciously maintain opinions in which I cannot coincide. But if I once discover that many of those opinions are empty rhetorical flourishes, my respect is soon changed into that pity which borders on contempt, and the mock dignity and haughty stalk only reminds me of the ass in the lion's skin. A sentiment of this kind glanced across my mind when I read the following exclamation. Whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along

amidst the horrid yells and shrilling screams and frantic dances and infamous contemned, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women. Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education, or their vices might have lost part of their abominable deformity by losing part of their grossness. The Queen of France, the great and small vulgar, claim our pity. They have almost insuperable obstacles to surmount in their progress towards true dignity of character.

Still, I have such a plain, downright understanding, that I do not like to make a distinction without a difference. But it is not very extraordinary that you should, for throughout your letter you frequently advert to a sentimental jargon, which has long been current in conversation, and even in books of morals, though it never received the regal stamp of reason. A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul that instantaneously discerns truth without the tedious labor of ratitionation. This instinct, for I know not what other name to give it,

has been termed common sense and more frequently sensibility, and by a kind of indefeasible right, it has been supposed for rights of this kind, are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind, and to be an authority from which there is no appeal. This subtle magnetic fluid that runs round the whole circle of society is not subject to any known rule, or to use an obnoxious phrase, in spite of the sneers of mock humility, or the timid fears of some well-meaning Christians who shrink from any freedom of thought, lest they should rouse the old serpent to the eternal fitness of things.

It dips, we know not why, granting it to be an infallible instinct, and though supposed always to point to truth its pole star, the point is always shifting and seldom stands due north. It is to this instinct without doubt that you allude when you talk of the moral constitution of the heart. To it, I allow, for I consider it as a congregate of sensations and passions, poets must apply, who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men. They must, it is clear, often cloud the understanding, whilst they move the heart by a kind of mechanical spring. But that in the theatre, the first intuitive glance of feeling should discriminate the form of truth and see her fairer.

proportion, I must beg leave to doubt. Sacred be the feelings of the heart, concentred in a glowing flame, they become the son of life, and without his invigorating impregnation, reason would probably lie in helpless inactivity, and never bring forth her only legitimate offspring, virtue. But to prove that virtue is really an acquisition of the individual,

and not the blind impulse of unerring insult, instinct, the bastard vice has often been begotten by the same father. In what respect are we superior to the brute creation if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes, hope and fear, love and hate, but without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom. Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason.

But the cultivation of reason is an arduous task, and men of lively fancy, finding it easier to follow the impulses of passion, endeavor to persuade themselves and others that it is most natural. And happy is it for those who indolently let that heaven-lighted spark rest like the ancient lamps in sepulchres, that some virtuous habits with which the reason of others shackled them supplies its place. Affection for parents, reverence for superiors or antiquity, notions of honor, or that worldly self-interest that shrewdly shows them that honesty is the best policy.

All proceed from the reason for which they serve as substitutes, but it is reason at second-hand. Children are born ignorant, consequently innocent. The passions are neither good nor evil dispositions till they receive a direction, and either bound over the feeble barrier raised by a faint glimmering of unexercised reason called conscience, or strengthen her wavering dictates till sound principles are deeply rooted, and able to cope with the headstrong passions that often assume her awful form. What moral purpose can be answered by extolling good, dispositions, as they are called, when these good dispositions are described as instincts,

for instinct moves in a direct line to its ultimate end, and asks not for a guide or support. But if virtue is to be acquired by experience or taught by example, reason perfected by reflection must be thy director of the whole host of passions, which produce a fruitifying heat, but no light that you would exalt into her place she must hold the rudder or let the wind blow which way at least the vessel will never advance smoothly to us destined port for the time lost in tacking about would dreadfully impede its progress end of part two part three of vindication of the rights of men by mary waltzancraft this liver-box recording is in the public domain in the name of the people of england you say that we know we have made no discoveries and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality nor many in the great principles of government nor in the ideas of liberty which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mold upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been

completely embolled of our natural entrails, we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. What do you mean by inbred sentiments? From whence do they come? How were they bred? Are they the brood of folly, which swarm like the insects on the banks of the Nile,

when mud and putrefaction have enriched the languid soil? Were these inbred sentiments, faithful guardians of our duty, when the church was an asylum for murderers, and men worshipped bread as a god. When slavery was authorized by law to fasten her fangs on human flesh, and the iron eat into the very soul, if these sentiments are not acquired,

if our passive dispositions do not expand into virtuous affections and passions, why are not the tartars in the first rude horde endowed with sentiments white and elegant as the driven snow? Why is passion or heroism the child of reflection the consequence of dwelling with intent contemplation on one object? The appetites are the only perfect inbred powers that I can discern, and they, like instincts, have a certain aim. They can be satisfied, but improvable reason has not yet discovered the perfection

it may arrive at. God forbid. First, however, it is necessary to make what we know. practical. Who can deny that has marked the slow progress of civilization that men may become more virtuous and happy without any new discovery and morals? Who will venture to assert that virtue would not be promoted by the more extensive cultivation of reason? If nothing more is to be done, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, and die forever. Who will pretend to say that there is as much happiness diffused

on this globe as it is capable of affording. As many social virtues as reason would foster, if she could gain the strength she is able to acquire even in this imperfect state. If the voice of nature was allowed to speak audibly from the bottom of the heart, and the native unalienable rights of men were recognized in their full force, if factitious merit did not take place of genuine acquired virtue, and enable men to build their enjoyment on the misery of their fellow creatures. If men were more under the dominion of reason than opinion, and did not cherish their prejudices because they were prejudices. I am not, sir, aware of your sneers, hailing a millennium, though a state of greater purity of morals may not be a mere poetic fiction,

Nor did my fancy ever create a heaven on earth, since reason threw off her swaddling clothes. I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here, and that we wander to and fro in a veil of darkness as well as tears. I perceive that my passions pursue objects that the imagination enlarges till they become only a sublime idea that shrinks from the inquiry of sense, mocks the experimental philosophers who would confine this spiritual flogistone in their material crucibles. I know that the human understanding is diluted with vain shadows, and that when we eagerly pursue any study we only reach the boundary set to human inquiries. Thus far shalt

thou go, and no further, says some stern difficulty, and the cause we were pursuing melts into utter darkness. But these are only the trials of contemplative minds, the foundation of virtue remains firm. The power of exercising our understanding raises us above the brutes, and this exercise produces that primary morality which you term untaught feelings. If virtue be an instinct, I renounce all hope of immortality, and with it all these sublime reveries and dignified sentiments that have smoothed the rugged path of life. It is all a cheat, a lying vision. I have disquieted myself in vain, for in my eye all feelings are false and spurious that

do not rest on justice as their foundation, and are not consented by universal love. I reverence the rights of men, sacred rights, for which I acquire a more profound respect the more I look into my own mind, and professing these heterodox opinions, I still preserve my bowels, my heart is human, beats quick with human sympathies, and I fear God. I bend with awful reverence when I inquire on what my fear is built. I fear that sublime power, whose motive for creating me, must have been wise and good, and I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces from this view, of my dependence on him. It is not his power that I fear. It is not to an arbitrary will,

but to unerring reason I submit. Submit, yes. I disregard the charge of arrogance, to the law that regulates his just resolves, and the happiness I pant after must be the same in kind, and produced by the same exertion as his, though unfeigned humility overwhelms every idea, that would presume to compare the goodness which the most exalted created being could acquire, with the grand source of life and bliss. This fear of God makes me reverence myself. Yes, sir, the regard I have for honest fame and the friendship of the virtuous falls far short of the respect which I have for myself.

And this enlightened self-love, if an epithet, the meaning of which has been grossly perverted, will convey my idea, forces me to see. And if I may venture to borrow a prostituted term, to feel that happiness is reflected, and that in communicating good my soul receives its noble ailment. I do not trouble myself, therefore, to inquire whether this is the fear the people of England feel, and if it be natural to include all the modifications which you have annexed,

it is not. Besides, I cannot help suspecting that if you had the enlightened respect for yourself, which you affect to despise, you would not have said that the Constitution of our church and state formed, like most other modern ones, by degrees, as Europe was emerging out of barbarism, was formed under the auspices and was confirmed by the sanction of religion and piety. You have turned over the historic page, have been hackneyed in the ways of men, and must know that private cabals and public feuds, private virtues and vices, religion and superstition, have all concurred to foment the mass and swell it to its present form. Nay, more that it in part owes its sightly appearance to bold rebellion and insidious innovation. factions sir have been the leaven and private interest has produced public good these general reflections are not thrown out to insinuate that virtue was a creature of yesterday

no she had her share in the grand drama i guard against misrepresentation but the man who cannot modify general assertions has scarcely learned the first rudiments of reasoning i know that there is a gray portion of virtue in the romish Church, yet I should not choose to neglect clothing myself with a garment of my own righteousness depending on a kind donative of works of supererogation. I know that there are many clergymen of all denominations, wise and virtuous, yet I have not that respect for the whole body, which you say characterizes our nation, emanating from a certain blameness and directness of understanding. Now, we are stumbling on inbred feelings and secret lights again, or I beg your pardon, it may be the furbished up face which you choose to give to the argument. It is a well-known fact that when we, the people of England, have a son whom we scarcely know

what to do with, we make a clergyman of him. When a living is in the gift of a family, a son is brought up to the church, but not always. ways with hopes full of immortality. Such sublime principles are not constantly infused into persons of exalted birth. They sometimes think of the paltry pelf of the moment, and the vulgar care of preaching the gospel or practicing self-denial is left to the poor curates, who, arguing on your ground, cannot have from the scanty stipend they receive a very high and worthy notion of their function and destination. This consecration forever, a word that from lips of flesh is big with a mighty nothing,

has not purged the sacred temple from all the impurities of fraud, violence, injustice, and tyranny. Human passions still lurk in her sanctum sanctum, and without the profane exertions of reason, vain would be her ceremonial ablutions. Morality would still stand aloof from this national religion, this ideal consecration of a state, and men would rather choose to give the goods of their body when on their deathbeds to clear the narrow way to heaven than restrain the mad career of passions during life. Such a curious paragraph occurs in this part of your letter that I am tempted to transcribe it, and must beg you to elucidate it if I misconceive your meaning. The only way in which the people interfere in government, religious or civil, is in electing

representatives, and, sir, let me ask you, with manly plainness, are these holy nominations? Where is the booth of religion? Does she mix her awful mandates, or lift her persuasive voice, in those scenes of drunken riot and beastly gluttony? Does she preside over those nocturnal abominations, which so evidently tend to deprave the manners of the lower class of people? The pestilence stops not here. The rich and poor have one common nature, and many of the great families,

which, on this side adoration you venerate, date their misery, I speak of stubborn matters of fact, from the thoughtless extravagance of an electioneering frolic. Yet after the effervescence of spirits, raised by opposition, and all the little and tyrannic arts of canvassing are over, quiet souls they only intend to march, rank, and file to say, Yes or No.

Experience, I believe, will show that sorted interest or licentious thoughtlessness is the spring of action at most. elections. Again, I beg you not to lose sight of my modification of general rules. So far are the people from being habitually convinced of the sanctity of the charge they are conferring, that the venality of their votes must admonish them that they have no right to expect disinterested conduct. But to return to the Church and the habitual conviction of the people of England. So far are the people from being habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable, either in the act or the permission, to him whose essence is good, that

the sermons which they hear are to them almost as unintelligible, as if they were preached in a foreign tongue. The language and sentiments rising above their capacities, very orthodox Christians are driven to fanatical meetings for amusement, if not for edification. The clergy, I speak of the body, not forgetting the respect and affection, which I have for individuals, perform the duty of their profession as a kind of fee simple, to entitle them to the emoluments accruing from it, and their ignorant flock think that merely going to church is meritorious.

So defective, in fact, are our laws respecting religious establishments that I have heard many rational pious clergymen complain that they had no method of receiving their stipends, that did not clog their endeavors to be useful, whilst the lives of many less conscientious rectors are passed in litigious disputes with the people they engage to instruct, or in distant cities in all the ease of luxurious idleness. But you return to your old firm ground. Art thou there, true, penny?

Must we swear to secure property and make assurance doubly sure, to give your perturbed spirit rest? Peace, peace to the monies of thy patriotic frenzy, which contributed to deprive some of thy fellow-citizens of their property in America. Another spirit now walks abroad to secure the property of the Church. The tithes are safe, we will not say forever, because the time may come when the traveler may ask where proud London stood. When its temples, its laws, and its trade, may be buried in one common ruin, and only serve as a byword to point a moral or furnish senators who wage a wordy war on the other side of the Atlantic, with tropes to swell their thundering bursts of

eloquence. Who shall dare to accuse you of inconsistency anymore? When you have so staunchly supported the despotic principles which agree so perfectly, with the unerring interest of a large body of your fellow citizens. Not the largest, for when you venerate parliaments, I presume it is not the majority, as you have had the presumption to dissent and loudly explain your reasons. But it was not my intention when I began this letter

to descend to the minutiae of your conduct, or to weigh your infirmities in a balance. It is only some of your pernicious opinions that I wish, to hunt out of their lurking holes, and to show you to yourself stripped of the gorgeous drapery in which you have enrapped your tyrannic principles. That the people of England respect the national establishment, I do not deny. I recollect the melancholy proof which they gave in this very century of their enlightened zeal and reasonable affection.

I likewise know that, according to the dictates of a prudent law, in a commercial state, truth is reckoned a libel. Yet I acknowledge, having never made my humanity give place to Gothic gallantry, that I should have been better pleased to have heard that Lord George Gordon was confined on account of the calamities which he brought on his country than for a libel on the Queen of France. But one argument which you adduce to strengthen your assertion appears to carry the preponderancy towards the other side. You observe that our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression, respect for the religious establishment, and that our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood.

Far from agreeing with you, sir, that these regulations render the clergy a more useful and respectable body, experience convinces me that the very contrary is the fact. In schools and colleges, they may in some degree support their dignity within the monastic walls, but in paying due respect to the parents of the young nobility under their tutelage, they do not forget, obsequiously, to respect their noble patrons. The little respect paid in great houses to tutors and chaplains proves, sir, the fallacy of your reasoning. It would be almost invidious to remark that they sometimes are only modern substitutes for the jesters of Gothic memory, and serve as whetstones for the

blunt wit of the noble peer who patronizes them. And what respect a boy can imbibe for a but at which the shaft of ridicule is daily glanced. I leave those to determine who can distinguished depravity of morals under the specious mask of refined manners. Besides the custom of sending clergymen to travel with their noble pupils as humble companions, instead of exulting, tends inevitably to degrade the clerical character, it is notorious that they meanly submit to the most servile dependence and gloss over the most capricious follies, to use a soft phrase of the boys to whom they look. up for preferment. An airy mitre dances before them, and they wrap their sheep's clothing

more closely about them, and make their spirits bend till it is prudent to claim the rights of men and the honest freedom of speech of an Englishman. How indeed could they venture to reprove for his vices their patron? The clergy only give the true feudal emphasis to this word. It has been observed by men who have not superficially investigated the human heart that when a man makes his spirit bend to any power but reason, his character is soon degraded, and his mind shackled by the very prejudices to which he submits with reluctance. The observations of experience have been carried still further, and the servility to superiors and tyranny to inferiors, said to characterize our clergy, have rationally been supposed to

rise naturally from their associating with the nobility. Among unequals there can be no society, giving a manly meaning to the term. From such intimacies, friendship can never grow, if the basis of friendship is mutual respect and not a commercial treaty. Taken thus out of their sphere and enjoying their tithes at a distance from their flocks, is it not natural for them to become courtly parasites and intriguing dependence on great patrons, or the treasury? Observing all this, for these things have not been transacted in the dark, our young men of fashion by a common, though erroneous association of ideas, have conceived a contempt for religion as they sucked in.

in with their milk a contempt for the clergy. The people of England, sir, in the 13th and 14th centuries, I will not go any further back to insult the ashes of departed popery, did not settle the establishment and endow it with princely revenues to make it proudly rear its head, as a part of the constitutional body, to guard the liberties of the community. But like some of the laborious commentators on Shakespeare, you have affixed a meaning to laws that chance, or to speak more philosophically, the interested views of men, settled, not dreaming of your ingenious elucidations. What but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to

save himself from the dark torments of purgatory, and found it more convenient to indulge his depraved appetites, and pay an exorbitant price for absolution, then listen to the suggestions of reason, and work out his own salvation. In a word was not the separation of religion from morality the work of the priests, and, partly achieved in those honorable days which you so piously deplore. that civilization that the cultivation of the understanding and refinement of the affections naturally make a man religious i am proud to acknowledge what else can fill the aching void in the heart that human pleasures human friendships can never fill what else can render us resigned to live though condemned to ignorance what but a profound reverence for the model of all perfection and the mysterious style of all perfection and the mysterious style of which arises from a love of goodness. What can make us reverence ourselves, but a reverence for that

being, of whom we are a faint image? That mighty spirit moves on the waters. Confusion hears his voice, and the troubled heart ceases to beat with anguish, for trust in him bad it be still. Conscious dignity may make us rise superior to calumny, and sternly brave the winds of adverse fortune, raised in our own esteem by the very storms of which we are the sport. But when friends are unkind, and the heart has not the prop on which it fondly leaned, where can a tender suffering being fly but to the searcher of hearts? And when death has desolated the present scene and torn from us the friend of our youth, When we walk along the accustomed path, and almost fancying nature dead,

ask, where art thou who gave life to these well-known scenes? When memory heightens former pleasures to contrast our present prospects, there is but one source of comfort within our reach, and in this sublime solitude the world appears to contain only the creator and the creature of whose happiness he is the source. These are human feelings, but I know not of any common nature or common relation amongst men, but that results from reason. The common affections and passions equally bind brutes together, and it is only the continuity

of those relations that entitles us to the denomination of rational creatures, and this continuity arises from reflection, from the operations of that reason which you contemn't with flippant disrespect. If then it appears, arguing from analogy, that reflection must be the natural foundation of rational affections and of that experience which enables one man to rise above another, a phenomenon that has never been seen in the brute creation, it may not be stretching the argument further than it will go to suppose that those men who are obliged to exercise their reason have have the most reason, and are the persons pointed out by nature to direct the society

of which they make a part on any extraordinary emergency? Time only will show whether the general censure, which you afterwards qualify, if not contradict, and the unmerited contempt that you have ostentatiously displayed of the National Assembly Be founded on reason, the offspring of conviction, or the spawn of envy. Time may show that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank emasculated by hereditary effeminacy. It is not, perhaps, of a very great consequence, who were the founders of a state, savages, thieves, curates, or practitioners in the law.

It is true, you might sarcastically remark, that the Romans had always a smack of the old leaven, and that the private robbers, supposing the tradition to be true, only became public depredators. You might have added that their civilization must have been very partial, and had more influence on the manners than morals of the people. Or the amusements of the amphitheater would not have remained an everlasting blot, not only on their humanity, but on their refinement, if abysious elegance of behavior and luxurious mode of life is not a prostitution of the term. However, the thundering censures which you have cast with a ponderous arm and the more playful bush-firing of ridicule are not arguments that

will ever depreciate the National Assembly, for applying to their understanding rather than to their imagination when they met to settle the newly acquired liberty of the state on a solid foundation. If you had given the same advice to a young history painter of abilities, I should have admired your judgment and re-echoed your sentiments. Study, you might have said, the noble models of antiquity till your imagination is inflamed, and rising above the vulgar practice of the hour, you may imitate without copying those great originals. A glowing picture of some interesting moment would probably have been produced by these natural means, particularly if one little circumstance is not overlooked, that the painter

had noble models to revert to, calculated to excite admiration and stimulate exertion. But in settling a constitution that involves the happiness of millions, that stretch beyond the computation of science, it was perhaps necessary for the Assembly to have a higher model in view than the imagined virtues of their forefathers, and wise to deduce their respect for themselves from the only legitimate source respect for justice. Why was it a duty to repair an ancient castle built in barbarous ages of Gothic materials? Why were the legislators of the legislators obliged to rake amongst heterogeneous ruins, to rebuild old walls whose foundations could scarcely be explored, when a simple structure might be raised on the foundation of experience,

the only valuable inheritance our forefathers could bequeath. Yet of this bequest we can make little use till we have gained a stock of our own, and even then their inherited experience would rather serve as lighthouses to warn us against dangerous rocks or sandbanks than as finger posts that stand at every turning to point out the right road. No, was it absolutely necessary that they should be diffident of themselves when they were dissatisfied with or could not discern the almost obliterated constitution of their ancestors? They should first have been convinced that our constitution, was not only the best modern but the best possible one,

and that our social compact was the surest foundation of all the possible liberty a mass of men could enjoy, that the human understanding could form. They should have been certain that our representation answered all the purposes of representation, and that an established inequality of rank and property secured the liberty of the whole community, instead of rendering it a sounding epithet of subjection when applied to the nation at large.

They should have had the same respect for our House of Commons that you, wantingly, intrude on us, though your conduct throughout life has spoken a very different language, before they made a point of not deviating from the model which first engaged their attention, that the British House of Commons is filled with everything illustrious in rank in descent in heredity and acquiring opulence may be true, but that it contains everything respectable in talents in military, civil, naval, and political distinction is very problematical. Arguing from natural causes, the very contrary would appear to the speculators to be the fact, and let experience say whether these speculations are built on shore ground. It is true you lay great stress on the effects produced by the bare idea of a liberal descent,

but from the conduct of men of rank, men of discernment, would rather be led to conclude that this idea obliterated instead of inspiring native dignity and substituted a factitious pride that disemboweled the man. The liberty of the rich has its incense armorial to puff the individual out with insubstantial honors. But where are blassened the struggles of virtuous poverty? Who indeed would dare to blasson

that would blur the pompous monumental inscription you boast of, and make us view with horror as monsters in human shape, the superb gallery of portraits proudly set in battle array. But to examine the subject more closely, is it among the list of possibilities that a man of rank and fortune can have received a good education? How can he discover that he is a man when all his wants are instantly supplied, and invention is never sharpened by

necessity? Will he labor? For everything valuable must be the fruit of laborious exertions to attain knowledge and virtue in order to merit the affection of his equals, when the flattering attention of sycophants is a more luscious cordial. Health can only be secured by temperance, but is it easy to persuade a man to live on plain food, even to recover his health, who has been accustomed to fare sumptuously every day? Can a man relish the simple food of friendship,

who has been habitually pampered, by flattery, and when the blood boils and the senses meet allurements on every side, will knowledge be pursued on account of its abstract beauty? No, it is well known that talents are only to be unfolded by industry, and that we must have made some advances led by an inferior motive before we discover that they are their own reward. But full-blown talents may, according to your own. system be hereditary and as independent of ripening judgment as the inbred

feelings that rising above reason naturally guard Englishmen from error noble franchises what a groveling mind must that man have who can pardon his step-dame nature for not having made him at least a lord and who will after your description of senatorial virtues dare to say that our house of commons, has often resembled a bare garden, and appeared rather like a committee of ways and means, than a dignified legislative body, though the concentrated wisdom and virtue of the whole nation blazed in one superb constellation, that it contains a dead weight of benumbing opulence I readily allow, and of ignoble ambition, nor is there anything surpassing

belief in a supposition that the raw recruits when properly drilled by the minister would gladly march to the upper house to unite hereditary honors to fortune but talents knowledge and virtue must be a part of the man and cannot be put as rogues of state often are on a servant or a block to render a pageant more magnificent our house of commons it is true has been celebrated as a school of eloquence a hotbed for wit even when party intrigues narrow the understanding and contract the heart yet from the few proficients it has accomplished this inferior praise is not of great magnitude nor of great consequence mr locke would have added who was ever of opinion that eloquence was oftener employed to make the worse appears the better part than to support the dictates of cool judgment. However, the greater number who have gained a seat by their fortune and hereditary rank are content with their preeminence and struggle not for more hazardous honors. But you are an exception. You have raised yourself by the exertion of abilities and thrown the automaton's of rank into the background. Your exertions

have been a generous contest for secondary honors, or a grateful tribute of respect, due to the noble ashes that lent a hand to raise you into notice by introducing you into the house of which you have ever been an ornament, if not a support. But unfortunately you have lately lost a great part of your popularity. Members were tired of listening to declamation, or had not sufficient taste to be amused, when you ingeniously wandered from the question, and said certainly many good things, if they were not to the present purpose, you were the cicero of one side of the house for years, and then to sink into oblivion, to see your blooming honors fade before you, was enough to rouse

that was human in you, and make you produce the impassioned reflections, which have been a glorious revivification of your fame. Richard is himself again. He is still a great man, though he has deserted his post, and buried in elogiums on church establishment, the enthusiasm that forced him to throw the weight of his talents on the side of liberty and natural rights, when the will of the nation oppressed the Americans. There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition, that the present crisis carries you out of yourself, and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer. Full of yourself, you made as much noise to convince

the world that you despise the revolution, as Rousseau did to persuade his contemporaries to let him live in obscurity. reading your reflections warily over, It has continually and forcibly struck me that had you been a Frenchman, you would have been, in spite of your respect for rank and antiquity, a violent revolutionist, and deceived, as you now probably are,

by the passions that cloud your reason, have termed your romantic enthusiasm and enlightened love of your country, a benevolent respect for the rights of men, Your imagination would have taken fire and have found arguments, full as ingenious as those you now offer, to prove that the Constitution, of which so few pillars remain, that Constitution which time had almost obliterated, was not a model sufficiently noble to deserve close adherence. And for the English Constitution you might not have had such a profound veneration as you

have lately acquired. Nay, it is not impossible that you might have entertained the same opinion of the English Parliament that you professed to have during the American War. Another observation, which by frequently occurring, has almost grown into a conviction, is simply this, that had the English and general reprobated the French Revolution, you would have stood forth alone and been the avowed Goliah of liberty. But not liking to see so many brothers near the throne of fame, you have turned the current of your passions, and consequently of your reasoning, another way. Had Dr. Price's sermon not lighted some sparks very like envy in your bosom, I shrewdly suspect that he would have been treated with more candor.

Nor is it charitable to suppose that anything but personal peak and hurt vanity could have dictated such bitter sarcastic. and reiterated expressions of contempt as occur in your reflections. But without fixed principles, even goodness of heart, is no security from inconsistency, and mild affectionate sensibility only renders a man more ingeniously cruel when the pangs of hurt vanity are mistaken for virtuous indignation, and the gall of bitterness for the milk of Christian charity. where is the dignity the infallibility of sensibility in the fair ladies whom if the voice of rumour is to be credited the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain for the unheard of tortures they invent it is probably that some of them after the sight of a flagellation compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel

how true these tears are to nature i leave you to determine but these ladies may have read your inquiry concerning the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful and convinced by your arguments may have laboured to be pretty by counterfeit weakness. You may have convinced them that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty, and that the supreme being in giving women beauty in the most supereminent degree seemed to command them by the powerful voice of nature not to cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite respect and interfere with the pleasing sensations they were created to inspire. Thus, confining true, Truth, fortitude, and humanity, within the rigid pale of manly morals, they might justly argue that to be loved, women's high end and great distinction, they should learn to lisp,

to totter in their walk, and nickname God's creatures. Never they might repeat after you was any man, much less a woman, rendered amiable, by the force of those exalted qualities, fortitude, justice, wisdom and truth. And thus forewarned of the sacrifice they must make to those austere, unnatural virtues, they would be authorized to turn all their attention to their persons, systematically neglecting morals to secure beauty. Some rational old woman indeed might chance to stumble at this doctrine, and hint that in

avoiding atheism you had not steered clear of the Muslim's creed. But you could readily exculpate yourself by turning the charge on nature who made our idea of beauty independent of reason. Nor would it be necessary for you to recollect that if virtue has any other foundation than worldly utility, you have clearly proved that one half of the human species at least have not souls, and that nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason to acquire the virtues that produce opposite, if not contradictory feelings.

The affection they excite to be uniform and perfect should not be tinctured with the respect which moral virtues inspire, lest pain should be blended with pleasure, and admiration disturb the soft intimacy of love. This laxity of morals in the female world is certain more captivating to a libertine imagination than the cold arguments of reason that give no sex to virtue. If beautiful weakness be interwoven in a woman's frame, if the chief business of her life be as you insinuate to inspire love, and nature has made an eternal distinction between the qualities that dignify a rational being and this animal perfection, her duty and

happiness in this life must clash with any preparation for a more exalted state, so that Plato and Milton were grossly mistaken in asserting that human love led to heavenly, and was only an exaltation of the same affection. For the love of the deity, which is mixed with the most profound reverence, must be love of perfection, and not compassion for weakness. To say the truth, I not only tremble for the souls of women, but for the good-natured man, whom everyone loves. The amiable weakness of his mind is a strong argument against its immateriality, and seems to prove that beauty relaxes the solids of the soul as well as the body. End of Part 3

Part 4 of Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft. Provox recording is in the public domain. It follows then immediately from your own reasoning that respect and love are antagonist principles, and that, if we really wish to render men more virtuous, we must endeavor to banish all innovating modifications of beauty from civil society. We must, to carry your argument a little further, return to the Spartan regulation, and settled the virtues of men on the stern foundation of mortification and self-denial. For any attempt to civilize the heart, to make it humane by implanting reasonable principles,

is a mere philosophic dream. If refinement inevitably lessens respect for virtue by rendering beauty the grand tempter more seductive, if these relaxing feelings are incompatible with the nervous-exemptive, of morality, the sun of Europe is not set. It begins to dawn when cold metaphysicians try to make the head give laws to the heart. But should experience prove that there is a beauty and virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily implies exertion, a depraved sensual taste may give way to a more manly one and melting feelings to rational satisfactions. Both may be equally natural to man, the test is their moral difference, and that point reason alone can decide.

Such a glorious change can only be produced by liberty. Inequality of rank must ever impede the growth of virtue by vitiating the mind that submits or dominers that is ever employed to procure nourishment for the body or amusement for the mind. And if this grand example be set by an essential, of unlettered clowns, if they can produce a crisis that may involve the fate of Europe and more than Europe, you must allow us to respect unsophisticated reason and reverence the active exertions that were not relaxed by a fastidious respect for the beauty of rank, or a dread of the deformity produced by any void in the social structure.

after your contemptuous manner of speaking of the National Assembly, after discounting on the coarse vulgarity of their proceedings, which according to your own definition of virtue, is a proof of its genuineness, was it not a little inconsistent, not to say absurd, to assert that a dozen people of quality were not a sufficient counterpoise to the vulgar mob

with whom they condescended to associate. have we half a dozen leaders of eminence in our house of commons or even in the fashionable world yet the sheep obsequiously pursue their steps with all the undeviating sagacity of instinct in order that liberty should have a firm foundation an acquaintance with the world would naturally lead cool men to conclude that it must be laid knowing the weakness of the human heart and the deceitfulness of riches either by poor men or philosophers if a sufficient number of men disinterested from principle or truly wise could be found was it natural to expect that sensual prejudices should give way to reason or present feelings to enlarged views no i am afraid that human nature is still in such a weak state that the abolition of titles the corner-stone of despotism could only have to have to be able to-aute nature could only have to be able to-aute nature is still in such a weak state that the abolition of titles the corner-conner-stone of despotism could only have have been the work of men who had no titles to sacrifice. The National Assembly, it is true, contains some honorable exceptions, but the majority had not such powerful feelings to struggle with when reason led them to respect the naked dignity of virtue. Weak minds are always timid,

and what can equal the weakness of mine produced by servile flattery, and the vapid pleasures that neither hope nor fear seasoned. Had the Constitution of France been new-mottled or more cautiously repaired by the lovers of elegance and beauty, it is natural to suppose that the imagination would have erected a fragile temporary building, or the power of one tyrant, divided amongst a hundred, might have rendered the struggle for liberty only a choice of masters.

And the glorious chance that is now given to, human nature of attaining more virtue and happiness than has hitherto blessed our globe might have been sacrificed to a meteor of the imagination, a bubble of passion. The ecclesiastics indeed would probably have remained in quiet possession of their sinecures, and your gall might not have been mixed with your ink on account of the daring sacrilege that brought them more on a level. The nobles would have had bowels for their younger sons, if not for the misery of their fellow creatures. An august mass of property would have been transmitted to posterity to guard the temple of superstition and prevent reason from entering with her officious light.

And the pomp of religion would have continued to impress the senses if she were unable to subjugate the passions. Is hereditary weakness necessary to render religion lovely, and will her form have lost the smooth delicacy that inspires love when stripped of its Gothic drapery? Must every grand model be placed on the pedestal of property, and is there no beauty as proportion in virtue when not clothed in a sensuous garb? Of these questions there would be no end, though they lead to the same conclusion, that your politics and morals, when simplified, would undermine religion and virtue to set up a spurious

sensual beauty that has long debauched your imagination under the species form of natural feelings. And what is this mighty revolution in property? The present incumbents only are injured, or the hierarchy of the clergy, an ideal part of the constitution which you have personified to render your affection most tender how has posterity been injured by a distribution of the property snatched perhaps from innocent hands but accumulated by the most abominable violation of every sentiment of justice and piety was the monument of former ignorance and iniquity to be held sacred to enable the present possessors of enormous benefices to dissolve in indolent pleasure was not their convenience for they have not been turned adrift in the world to give place to a just partition of the land belonging to the state and did not the respect due to the natural quality of men require this triumph over monkish rapacity were those monsters to be reverenced on account of their antiquity and their unjust claims perpetuated to their ideal children the clergy merely to preserve the sacred majesty of property in violet, and to enable the church to retain her pristine

splendor. Can posterity be injured by individuals losing the chance of obtaining great wealth without meriting it by its being diverted from a narrow channel, and disembogued into the sea that affords clouds to water all the land? Besides, the clergy not brought up with the expectation of great revenues will not feel the loss, and if bishops should happen to be chosen on account of their personal merit, religion may be benefited by the vulgar nomination. The sophistry of asserting that nature leads us to reverence our civil institutions

from the same principle that we venerate aged individuals is a palpable fallacy that is so like truth it will serve the turn as well. And when you add that we have chosen our nature rather than, than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, the pretty jargon seems equally unintelligible. But it was the downfall of the visible power and dignity of the church that roused your ire. You could have excused a little squeezing of the individuals to supply present exudencies. The actual possessors of the property might have been oppressed with something like impunity,

if the church had not been spoiled of its gaudy trappings. You love the church, your country, and its laws. You repeatedly tell us, because they deserve to be loved. But from you, this is not a panegyric. Weakness and indulgence are the only incitements to love and confidence that you can discern, and it cannot be denied that the tender mother you venerate deserves on this score all your affection.

It would be as vain a task to attempt to obviate all your passionate objections as to unravel all your plausible arguments, often illustrated by known truths, and rendered forcible by pointed invectives. I only attack the foundation. On the natural principles of justice, I build my plea for disseminating the property artfully said to be appropriated to religious purposes, but in reality to support idle tyrants amongst the society whose ancestors were cheated or forced into illegal grants. Can there be an opinion more subversive of morality than that time sanctifies crimes

and silences the blood that calls out for retribution if not for vengeance? If the revenue annexed to the Gallic Church was greater than the most bigoted Protestant would now allow, to be its reasonable share, would it not have been trampling on the right of men to perpetuate such an arbitrary appropriation of the common stock, because time had rendered the fraudulent seizure venerable? Besides, if reason had suggested, as surely she must, if the imagination had not been allowed to dwell on the fascinating pomp of ceremonial grandeur, that the clergy would be rendered both more virtuous and useful by being put more on a par with each other, and the mass of the people it was their duty to instruct. Where was their room for hesitation? The charge of

presumption thrown by you on the most reasonable innovations may, without any violence to truth, be retorted on every reformation that has meliorated our condition, and even on the improvable faculty that gives us a claim to the preeminence of intelligent beings. Plausibility, I know, can only be unmasked by showing the absurdities it glosses over, and the simple truths it involves with specious errors. Eloquence has often confounded triumphant villainy, but it is probable that it has more frequently rendered the boundary that separates virtue and vice doubtful. Poisons may be only medicines in judicious hands, but they should not be administered by the ignorant

because they have sometimes seen great cures performed by their powerful aid. The many sensible remarks and pointed observations which you have mixed with opinions that strike at our dearest interests fortify those opinions, and give them a degree of strength that render them formidable to the wise and convincing to the superficial. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of your book without admiring your ingenuity or indignantly spurning your sophisms. Words are heaped on words till the understanding is confused by endeavoring to disentangle the sense, and the memory by tracing contradictions.

After observing a host of these contradictions, it can scarcely be a breach of charity to think that you have often sacrificed your sincerity to enforce your favorite arguments, and called in your judgment to adjust the arrangement of words that could not convey its dictates. A fallacy of this kind, I think, could not have escaped you when you were treating the subject that called forth your bitterest animadversions, the confiscation of the ecclesiastical revenue. Who of the vindicators of the rights of men ever venture to assert that the clergy of the present day should be punished on account of the intolerable pride and inhumane cruelty of many of their predecessors? No, such a thought never entered the mind of those who

ward with inveterate prejudices. A desperate disease required a powerful remedy. Injustice had no right to rest on prescription, nor has the character of the present clergy any weight in the argument. You find it very difficult to separate policy from justice. In the political world, they have frequently been separated with shameful dexterity. To mention a recent instance, according to the limited views of timid or interested politicians, an abolition of the infernal slave trade would not only be unsound, policy but a flagrant infringement of the laws which are allowed to have been infamous that induced the planters to purchase their estates but is it not consonant with

justice with the common principles of humanity not to mention Christianity to abolish this abominable mischief there is not one argument one invective leveled by you at the confiscators of the church revenue which could not with the strictest propriety be applied by the planters and negro drivers to our parliament if it gloriously dared to show the world that British senators were men. If the natural feelings of humanity silenced the cold cautions of timidity, till this stigma on our nature was wiped off, and all men were allowed to enjoy their birthright. Liberty till by their crimes they had authorized society to deprive them of the blessing they had abused.

The same arguments might be used in India, if any attempt were made to bring back things to nature, to prove that a man ought never to quit the caste that confined him to the profession of his lineal forefathers. The Brahmins would doubtless find many ingenious reasons to justify this debasing, though venerable prejudice, and would not, it is to be supposed, forget to observe that time by interweaving the oppressive law with many useful customs, had rendered it for the present very convenient and consequently legal. Almost every vice that has degraded our nature might be justified by showing that it had been productive of some benefit to society, for it would be as

difficult to point out positive evil as unallayed good in this imperfect state. What indeed would become of morals if they had no other test than prescription? The manners of men may change without end, but wherever reason receives the least cultivation, wherever men rise above brutes, morality must rest on the same base. And the more man discovers of the nature of his mind and body, the more clearly he is convinced that to act according to the dictates of reason is to conform to the law of God. The test of honor may be arbitrary and fallacious, and retiring into subterfuge, elude close inquiry, but true morality shuns not the day, nor shrinks from the ordeal of investigation. Most of the happy revolutions that have taken place in the world have happened when weak princes held the reigns,

they could not manage, but are they on that account to be canonized as saints or demigods and pushed forward to notice on the throne of ignorance? Pleasure wants a zest if experience cannot compare it with pain. But who courts pain to heighten his pleasures? A transient view of society will further illustrate arguments which appears so obvious that I am almost ashamed to produce illustrations. How many children have been taught economy and many other virtues by the extravagant thoughtlessness of their parents?

Yet a good education is allowed to be an inestinable blessing. The tenderest mothers are often the most unhappy wives, but can the good that accrues from the private distress that produces a sober dignity of mind justify the inflictor? Right or wrong may be estimated according to the point of of sight and other adventitious circumstances. But to discover its real nature, the inquiry must go deeper than the surface and beyond the local consequences that confound good and evil together. The rich and weak, a numerous train, will certainly applaud your system and loudly celebrate

your pious reverence for authority and establishments. They find it pleasanter to enjoy than to think. to justify oppression than correct abuses. The rights of men are grating sounds that set their teeth on edge, the impertinent inquiry of philosophic meddling innovation. If the poor are in distress, they will make some benevolent exertions to assist them. They will confer obligations but not do justice. Benevolence is a very amiable species quality, yet the aversion

which men feel to accept a right as a favor should rather be extolled as a vestige of native dignity than stigmatized as the odious offspring of ingratitude the poor consider the rich as their lawful prey but we ought not too severely to animad vert on their ingratitude when they receive an alms they are commonly grateful at the moment but old habits quickly return and cunning has ever been a substitute for force. That both physical and moral evil were not only foreseen but entered into the scheme of Providence when this world was contemplated in the divine mind, who can doubt, without robbing omnipotence of a most exalted attribute. But the business of the life of a good man should be to separate light from darkness, to diffuse happiness whilst he submits to unavoidable misery. And a conviction that there is much unavoidable wretchedness

appointed by the grand disposer of all events should not slacken his exertions. The extent of what is possible can only be discerned by God. The justice of God may be vindicated by a belief in a future state, but only by believing that evil is educing good for the individual and not for an imaginary whole. The happiness of the whole must arise from the happiness of the constituent parts, or the essence of justice is sacrificed to a supposed grand arrangement.

And that may be good for the whole of a creature's existence that disturbs the comfort of a small portion. The evil which an individual suffers for the good of the community is partial. It must be allowed if the account is safe. settled by death. But the partial evil which it suffers during one stage of existence to render another stage more perfect is strictly just. The father of all only can regulate the education of his children. To suppose that during the whole or part of its existence the happiness of any individual is sacrificed to promote the welfare of ten or ten thousand other beings is impious. But to suppose that the happiness or animal enjoyment of one portion of existence is sacrificed

to improve and ennoble the being itself and render it capable of more perfect happiness is not to reflect on either the goodness or wisdom of God. It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good, he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes is the ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that philosophy invigorates. To endeavor to make unhappy men resigned to their fate is the tender endeavor of short-sighted benevolence of transient yearnings of humanity. But to labor to increase human happiness by extirpating

error is a masculine god-like affection. This remark may be carried still further. Men who possess uncommon sensibility, whose quick emotions show how closely the eye and heart are connected, soon forget the most forcible sensations. Not tearing long enough in the brain to be subject to reflection, the next sensations, of course, obliterate them. Memory, however, treasures up these proofs of native goodness, and the being who is not spurred on to any virtuous act, still thinks itself of consequence and boasts of its feelings. Why? Because the sight of distress, or an affecting narrative, made its blood flow with more velocity,

and the heart, literally speaking, beat with sympathetic emotion. We ought to beware of confounding mechanical instinctive sensations with emotions that reason deepens and justly terms the feelings of humanity. This word discriminates the active exertions of virtue from the vague declamation of sensibility. The declaration of the National Assembly, when they recognized the rights of men, was calculated to touch the humane heart. The downfall of the clergy to agitate the pupil of impulse. On the watch to find fault, faults met your prying eye. A different preposition might have produced a different conviction. When we read a book that supports our favorite opinions, how eagerly do we suck in the doctrines

and suffer our minds placidly to reflect the images that illustrate the tenets we have previously embraced? We indolently acquiesce in the conclusion, and our spirit animates and corrects, the various subjects. But when, on the contrary, we peruse a skillful writer with whom we do not coincide in opinion, how attentive is the mind to detect fallacy? And this suspicious coolness often prevents our being carried away by a stream of natural eloquence, which the prejudiced mind terms declamation, a pomp of words. We never allow ourselves to be warmed, and after contending with the writer are more confirmed in our opinion, as much perhaps from a spirit of contradiction as from reason. A lively imagination is ever in danger of being betrayed into

error by favorite opinions, which it almost personifies the more effectually to intoxicate the understanding. Always tending to extremes, truth is left behind in the heat of the chase, things are viewed as positively good or bad, though they wear an equivocable face. Some celebrated writers have supposed that wit and judgment were incompatible, opposite qualities that in a kind of elementary strife destroyed each other, and many men of wit have endeavored to prove that they were mistaken. Much may be adduced by wits and metaphysicians on both sides of the question, But from experience, I am apt to believe that they do weaken each other, and that great quickness of comprehension and facile association of ideas naturally preclude profundity of research.

Witt is often a lucky hit, the result of a momentary inspiration. We know not whence it comes and it blows where it lists. The operations of judgment, on the contrary, are cool and circumspect. and coolness and deliberation are great enemies to enthusiasm. If wit is of so fine a spirit that it almost evaporates when translated into another language, why may not the temperature have an influence over it? This remark may be thought derogatory to the inferior qualities of the mind, but it is not a hasty one, and I mention it as a prelude to a conclusion I have frequently drawn

that the cultivation of reason damps fancy. The blessings of heaven lie on each side. We must choose if we wish to attain any degree of superiority and not lose our lives in laborious idleness. If we mean to build our knowledge or happiness on a rational basis, we must learn to distinguish the possible and not fight against the stream. And if we are careful to guard ourselves from imaginary sources, sorrows and vain fears, we must also resign many enchanting illusions, for shallow must be the

discernment which fails to discover that raptures and ecstasies arise from error. Whether it will always be so is not now to be discussed. Suffice it to observe that truth is seldom arrayed by the graces, and if she charms it is only by inspiring a sober satisfaction, which takes its rise from a calm contemplation of proportion and simplicity. But though it is allowed that one man has by nature more fancy than another, in each individual there is a springtide when fancy should govern and amalgamate materials for the understanding, and a grave period when those materials should be employed by the judgment. For example, I am inclined to have a better opinion of the heart of an old man, who speaks of Stern as his favorite author, than of his understanding.

There are times and seasons for all things, and moralists appear to me to err when they would confound the gaiety of youth with the seriousness of age. For the virtues of age look not only more imposing, but more natural, when they appear rather rigid. He who has not exercised his judgment to curb his imagination during the meridian of life becomes in its decline too often the prey of childish feelings. Age demands respect, youth, love. If this order is disturbed, the emotions are not pure, and when love for a man in his general climacteric takes place of respect, it, generally speaking, borders on contempt. judgment is sublime, wit, beautiful, and according to your own theory, they cannot exist together

without impairing each other's power. The predominancy of the latter in your endless reflections should lead hasty readers to suspect that it may, in a great degree, exclude the former. But among all your plausible arguments and witty illustrations, your contempt for the poor always appears conspicuous and rouses my indignation. The following paragraph in particular struck me as breathing the most tyrannic spirit and displaying the most factitious feelings. Good order is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire the people without being servile must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws, their authority. The body

of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained, and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them, deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. He that does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched, at the same time that by his wicked speculations he exposes the fruits of successful industry and the accumulation of fortune, Ah, there's the rub, to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the unprosperous.

This is contemptible, hard-hearted sophistry in the specious form of humility and submission to the will of heaven. It is, sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world without depriving them of the consolation which eugutuously grant them in the next. They have a right to more comfort than they at present enjoy, and more comfort might be afforded them without encroaching on the pleasures of the rich, not now waiting to inquire whether the rich have any right to exclusive pleasures. What do I say? Encroaching? No, if an intercourse were established between them, it would impart the only true pleasure

that can be snatched in this land of shadows, this hard school of moral. discipline. I know indeed that there is often something disgusting in the distresses of poverty, at which the imagination revolts and starts back to exercise itself in the more attractive arcadia of fiction. The rich man builds a house, art, and taste give it the highest finish. His gardens are planted, and the trees grow to recreate the fancy of the planter, though the temperature of the climate may rather force him, to avoid the dangerous damps they exhale, then seek the umbrageous retreat. Everything on the estate is cherished but man, yet to contribute to the happiness of man

is the most sublime of all enjoyments. But if, instead of sweeping pleasure grounds, obelists, temples, and elegant cottages, as objects for the eye, the heart was allowed to beat true to nature, decent farms would be scattered over the estate, and plenty smile around. Instead of the poor being subject to the griping hand of an avaricious steward, they would be watched over with fatherly solicitude by the man whose duty and pleasure it was to guard their happiness, and shield from rapacity beings who, by the sweat of their brow, exalted him above his fellows. I could almost imagine, I see a man thus gathering blessings, as he mounted the hill of life, or consolation, in these days when the spirits lag, and the tired heart finds no pleasure in them. It is not by

squandering alms that the poor can be relieved or improved. It is the fostering son of kindness, the wisdom that finds them employments, calculated to give them habits of virtue, that mealyer their condition. Love is only the fruit of love. Condescension and authority may produce the obedience you applaud, but he has lost his heart of flesh who can see a fellow creature humbled before him, and trembling at the frown of a being whose heart is supplied by the same vital current and whose pride ought to be checked by a consciousness of having the same infirmities. What salutary dues might not be shed to refresh this thirsty land if men were more enlightened. Smiles and premiums might encourage cleanliness, industry, and emulation.

A garden more inviting than Eden would then meet the eye, and springs of joy murmur on every side. The clergyman would superintend his own flock. The shepherd would then love the sheep he daily tended. the school might rear its decent head and the buzzing tribe let loose to play impart a portion of their vivacious spirits to the heart that longed to open their minds and lead them to taste the pleasures of men domestic comfort the civilizing relations of husband brother and father would soften labor and render life contented returning once from a despotic country to a part of england well cultivated but not very picturesque with what delight did i not observe the poor man's garden the homely palings and twining woodbine with all the rustic contrivances of simple unlettered taste was a sight which relieved the eye that had wandered indignant from the stately palace to the pestiferous hovel and returned from the awful contrast into itself to mourn the fate of man and curse the arts of civilization. Why cannot large estates be divided into small farms?

These dwellings would indeed grace our land. Why, our huge forests still allowed to stretch out with idle pomp and all the indolence of eastern grandeur? Why does the brown waste meet the traveler's view when men want work? But commons cannot be enclosed without acts of parliament to increase the property of the rich. Why might not the industrious peasant be allowed to steal a farm from the heath? This sight I have seen, the cow that supported the children grazed near the hut,

and the cheerful poultry were fed by the chubby babies, who breathed a bracing air, far from the diseases and vices of cities. Domination blasts all these prospects. Virtue can only flourish amongst equals, and the man who submits to a fellow creature because it promotes his worldly interest, and he who relieves, only because it is his duty to lay up a treasure in heaven, are much on a par,

for both are radically degraded by the habits of their life. In this great city that proudly rears its head and boasts of its population and commerce, how much misery lurks in pestilential corners, whilst idle mendicants assail on every side, the man who hates to ink, encourage importers or repress with angry frowns, the plaints of the poor. How many mechanics by a flux of trade or fashion lose their employment, whom misfortunes,

not to be warded off, lead to the idleness that vitiates their character, and renders them afterwards averse to honest labor? Where is the eye that marks these evils, more gigantic than any of the infringements of property, you piously deprecate. Are these remedeless evils, and is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world to receive the blessings this can afford? If society was regulated on a more enlarged plan, if man was contented to be the friend of man and did not seek to bury the sympathies of humanity in the servile appellation of master, if turning his eyes from ideal regions of taste and elegance, he labored to give the earth he inhabited all the beauty

it is capable of receiving, and was ever on the watch to shed abroad all the happiness which human nature can enjoy. He, who, respecting the rights of men, wishes to convince or persuade society that this is true happiness and dignity is not the cruel oppressor of the poor, nor a short-sighted philosopher. He fears God and loves his fellow creatures. Behold, the whole duty of man, the citizen who acts differently, is a sophisticated being. Surveying civilized life and seeing with undazzled eye the polished vices of the rich, their end sincerity, want of natural affections, with all the specious train that luxury introduces, I have turned to impatiently to the poor to look for man undeboughted by riches or power.

But alas, what did I see? A being scarcely above the brutes, over which he tyrannized, a broken spirit, worn out body, and all those gross vices which the examples of the rich rudely copied could produce. Envy built a wall of separation that made the poor hate, whilst they bent to their superiors, who, on their part, stepped aside to avoid the loathsome sight of human misery. What were the outrages of a day to these continued miseries?

Let those sorrows hide their diminished head before the tremendous mountain of woe that thus defaces our globe. Man prays on man, and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a Gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name when slavery flaps her wing, and the sick heart retires to die in lonely wiles, far from the abodes of men. Did the pangs you felt for insulted nobility, the anguish that rent your heart when the gorgeous robes were torn off the idle human weakness had set up, deserve to be compared

with the long-drawn sigh of melancholy reflection, when misery and vice are thus seen to haunt our steps and swim on the top of every cheering prospect. Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? Hell stalks abroad, the lash resounds on the slave's naked sides, and the sick wretch who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremittingly. labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night, or neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes his last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendance. Such misery demands more than tears. I pause to recollect myself, and smother the contempt I feel rising for your rhetorical

flourishes, an infantine sensibility. Taking a retrospective view of my hasty answer, and casting a cursory glance over your reflections, I perceive that I have not alluded to several reprehensible passages in your elaborate work, which I marked for censor when I first perused it with a steady eye, and now I find it almost impossible, candidly, to refute your sophisms without quoting your own words and putting the numerous contradictions I observed in opposition to each other. This would be an effectual refutation, but after such a tedious drudgery,

I fear that I should only be read by the patient eye that scarcely wanted my assistance to detect the flagrant errors. It would be a tedious process to show that often the most just and forcible illustrations are warped to color over opinions you must sometimes have secret, despised, or at least have discovered that which you asserted without limitation required the greatest. Some subjects of exaggeration may have been superficially viewed.

Depth of judgment is perhaps incompatible with the predominant features of your mind. Your reason may have often been the dupe of your imagination. But say did you not sometimes angrily bid her be still when she whispered that you, you were departing from strict truth. Or, when assuming the awful form of conscience and only smiling at the vagaries of vanity, did she not austerely bid you recollect your own errors before you lifted the avenging stone? Did she not sometimes wave her hand when you poured forth a torrent of shining sentences and beseech you to concatenate them, plainly telling you that the impassioned eloquence of the heart was calculated rather to affect than dazzle the reader,

whom it hurried along to conviction. Did she not anticipate the remark of the wise, who drank not at a shallow, sparkling dream, and tell you that they would discover when, with the dignity of sincerity, you supported an opinion that only appeared to you with one face, or when superannuated vanity made you torture your invention. But I forbear. I have before Animad Verted on our method of electing representatives convinced that it debauches both the morals of the people and the candidates without rendering the member really responsible or attached to his constituents.

But amongst your other contradictions, you blame the National Assembly for expecting any exertions from the servile principle of responsibility, and afterwards insult them for not rendering themselves responsible. Whether the one the French have adopted will answer the purpose better and be more than a shadow of representation, time only can show. In theory, it appears more promising. Your real or artificial affection for the English constitution seems to me to resemble the brutal affection of some weak characters.

They think it a duty to love their relations with a blind, indolent tenderness that will not see the faults it might assist to correct if their affection had been built on rational grounds. They love, they know not why, and they will love to the end of the chapter. It is absolute blasphemy to doubt of the omnipotence of the law, or to suppose that religion might be more pure, if there were fewer bates for hypocrites in the church. But our manners, you tell us, are drawn from the French,

though you had before celebrated our native plainness. If they were, it is time we broke loose from dependence, time that Englishmen drew water from their own springs. For if manners are not a painted substitute for morals, we have only to cultivate our reason, and we shall not feel the want of an arbitrary model. Nature will suffice, but I forget myself. Nature and reason, according to your system, are all to give place to authority,

and the gods, as Shakespeare makes a frantic wretch exclaim, seem to kill us for their sport, as men do flies. Before I conclude my cursory remarks, it is but just to acknowledge that I coincide with you, in your opinion, respecting the sincerity. of many modern philosophers. Your consistency in avowing a veneration for rank and riches deserves praise, but I must own that I have often indignantly observed that some of the enlightened philosophers,

who talk most vehemently of the native rights of men, borrow many noble sentiments to adorn their conversation which have no influence on their conduct. They bow down to rank and are careful to secure purpose, property, for virtue without this adventitious drapery is seldom very respectable in their eyes, nor are they very quick-sighted to discern real dignity of character when no sounding names exalts the man above his fellows. But neither open enmity nor the hollow homage destroys the intrinsic value of these principles

which rest on an eternal foundation, and revert for a stander for a standerable. to the immutable attributes of god end of part four end of vindication of the rights of men in a letter to the right hon edmund burke occasioned by his reflections on the revolution in france by mary waltzancraft