(...) Far
am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding
in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights
of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure
those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally
destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the
advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution
of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule.
Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to do justice,
as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function
or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their
industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have
a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and
improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation
in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon
others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair
portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and
force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights,
but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership
has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to
his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in
the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority,
and direction which each individual ought to have in the management
of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights
of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social
man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.
If civil
society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its
law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution
which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory
power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of
things; and how can any man claim under the conventions of civil society
rights which do not so much as suppose its existence- rights which are
absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society,
and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should
be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested
himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is,
to judge for himself and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right
to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons
the right of self-defense, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy
the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may
obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points
the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes
a surrender in trust of the whole of it.
Government
is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total
independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a much
greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection
is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want
everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for
human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for
by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of
civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society
requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected,
but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the
inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled,
and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by
a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function,
subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to
bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties
and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances and admit to
infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule;
and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.
The moment
you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern himself,
and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, from
that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration
of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a state and
the due distribution of its powers a matter of the most delicate and
complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and
human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the
various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions.
The state is to have recruits to its strength, and remedies to its distempers.
What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine?
The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.
In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the
farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.
The science
of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is,
like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor
is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science,
because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but
that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in
its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill
effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and
very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often
shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some
obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view
of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity
may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore
so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes- a matter
which requires experience, and even more experience than any person
can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be-
it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling
down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages
the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having
models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.
These metaphysic
rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into
a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted from their straight
line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and
concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions
and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued
in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is
intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity;
and, therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable
either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear
the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political
constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly
ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple
governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If
you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, all these
simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating. In effect each would
answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able
to attain all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole
should be imperfectly and anomalously answered than that, while some
parts are provided for with great exactness, others might be totally
neglected or perhaps materially injured by the over-care of a favorite
member.
The pretended
rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they
are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The
rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but
not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are
their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences
of good, in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes
between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding,
subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically
or mathematically, true moral denominations.
By these
theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded
with their power. The body of the community, whenever it can come to
act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right
are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with
virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to
what is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit; for though
a pleasant writer said, liceat perire poetis, when one of them, in cold
blood, is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution,
ardentem frigidus Aetnam insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as
an unjustifiable poetic license than as one of the franchises of Parnassus;
and whether he was a poet, or divine, or politician that chose to exercise
this kind of right, I think that more wise, because more charitable,
thoughts would urge me rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen
slippers as the monuments of his folly. (...)
...
I was not
sorry to give myself leisure to observe whether, in the proceedings
of the National Assembly, I might not find reasons to change or to qualify
some of my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more strongly
in my first opinions. It was my original purpose to take a view of the
principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great and fundamental
establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have substituted
in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of
our British constitution. But this plan is of a greater extent than
at first I computed, and I find that you have little desire to take
the advantage of any examples. At present I must content myself with
some remarks upon your establishments, reserving for another time what
I proposed to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy, as practically they exist.
I have
taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in France.
I have certainly spoken of it with freedom. Those whose principle it
is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind and to set up
a scheme of society on new principles must naturally expect that such
of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs
should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon
their trial. They must take it for granted that we attend much to their
reason, but not at all to their authority. They have not one of the
great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor. They avow their
hostility to opinion. Of course, they must expect no support from that
influence which, with every other authority, they have deposed from
the seat of its jurisdiction.
I can never
consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary association
of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the
power of the state. They have not the sanction and authority of the
character under which they first met. They have assumed another of a
very different nature and have completely altered and inverted all the
relations in which they originally stood. They do not hold the authority
they exercise under any constitutional law of the state. They have departed
from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent, which instructions,
as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled
law, were the sole source of their authority. The most considerable
of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and in this sort
of near divisions, which carry only the constructive authority of the
whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions.
If they
had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute
for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription
which, through long usage, mellows into legality governments that were
violent in their commencement. All those who have affections which lead
them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its
cradle, the child as legitimate which has been produced from those principles
of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth,
and on which they justify their continuance. But they will be late and
reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power
which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which,
on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices
by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed.
This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription. We have their own word
for it that they have made a revolution. To make a revolution is a measure
which, prima fronte, requires an apology. To make a revolution is to
subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are
called for to justify so violent a proceeding. The sense of mankind
authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to
criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence
than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.
In obtaining
and securing their power the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most
opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use of it. An observation
on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct.
Everything which they have done, or continue to do. in order to obtain
and keep their power is by the most common arts. They proceed exactly
as their ancestors of ambition have done before them.- Trace them through
all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at
all that is new. They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious
exactness of a pleader. They never depart an iota from the authentic
formulas of tyranny and usurpation. But in all the regulations relative
to the public good, the spirit has been the very reverse of this. There
they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon
the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which
none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.
They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and
securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in
the beaten road. The public interests, because about them they have
no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance; I say to chance,
because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency
beneficial.
We must
always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of those
who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein
the happiness of mankind is concerned. But in these gentlemen there
is nothing of the tender, parental solicitude which fears to cut up
the infant for the sake of an experiment. In the vastness of their promises
and the confidence of their predictions, they far outdo all the boasting
of empirics. The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes
and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.
I AM convinced
that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in
the National Assembly. Some of them display eloquence in their speeches
and their writings. This cannot be without powerful and cultivated talents.
But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom. When
I speak of ability, I am obliged to distinguish. What they have done
toward the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men. In the
system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring
the prosperity and security of the citizen, and for promoting the strength
and grandeur of the state, I confess myself unable to find out anything
which displays in a single instance the work of a comprehensive and
disposing mind or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence. Their purpose
everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty.
This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront,
and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to
turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties,
thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science and even to
push forward, beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the landmarks
of the human understanding itself. Difficulty is a severe instructor,
set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator,
who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better, too.
Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with
us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is
our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an
intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it
in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is
the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate
fondness for tricking shortcuts and little fallacious facilities that
has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary
powers. They have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. They
have created the arbitrary republic of Paris. With them defects in wisdom
are to be supplied by the plenitude of force. They get nothing by it.
Commencing their labors on a principle of sloth, they have the common
fortune of slothful men. The difficulties, which they rather had eluded
than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken
on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail,
in an industry without limit and without direction; and, in conclusion,
the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure.
It is this
inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary
Assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with abolition
and total destruction.* But is it in destroying and pulling down that
skill is displayed? Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies.
The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand is more than equal to
that task. Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than
prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable.
It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power
is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the
establishment together. The same lazy but restless disposition which
loves sloth and hates quiet directs the politicians when they come to
work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed. To make everything
the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy. No
difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost
baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager
enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination
in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition. (...)
...
IT IS IN
THE MODEL of the sovereign and presiding part of this new republic that
we should expect their grand display. Here they were to prove their
title to their proud demands. For the plan itself at large, and for
the reasons on which it is grounded, I refer to the journals of the
Assembly of the 29th of September, 1789, and to the subsequent proceedings
which have made any alterations in the plan. So far as in a matter somewhat
confused I can see light, the system remains substantially as it has
been originally framed. My few remarks will be such as regard its spirit,
its tendency, and its fitness for framing a popular commonwealth, which
they profess theirs to be, suited to the ends for which any commonwealth,
and particularly such a commonwealth, is made. At the same time I mean
to consider its consistency with itself and its own principles.
Old establishments
are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy,
and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from
whence good is derived. In old establishments various correctives have
been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed, they are the results
of various necessities and expediencies. They are not often constructed
after any theory; theories are rather drawn from them. In them we often
see the end best obtained where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable
to what we may fancy was the original scheme. The means taught by experience
may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original
project. They again react upon the primitive constitution, and sometimes
improve the design itself, from which they seem to have departed. I
think all this might be curiously exemplified in the British constitution.
At worst, the errors and deviations of every kind in reckoning are found
and computed, and the ship proceeds in her course. This is the case
of old establishments; but in a new and merely theoretic system, it
is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the face of it,
to answer its ends, especially where the projectors are no way embarrassed
with an endeavor to accommodate the new building to an old one, either
in the walls or on the foundations.
The French
builders, clearing away as mere rubbish whatever they found and, like
their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level,
propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases
of three different kinds: one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the
third financial; the first of which they call the basis of territory;
the second, the basis of population; and the third, the basis of contribution.
For the accomplishment of the first of these purposes they divide the
area of their country into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of
eighteen leagues by eighteen. These large divisions are called Departments.
These they portion, proceeding by square measurement, into seventeen
hundred and twenty districts called Communes. These again they subdivide,
still proceeding by square measurement, into smaller districts called
Cantons, making in all 6400.
At first
view this geometrical basis of theirs presents not much to admire or
to blame. It calls for no great legislative talents. Nothing more than
an accurate land surveyor, with his chain, sight, and theodolite, is
requisite for such a plan as this. In the old divisions of the country,
various accidents at various times and the ebb and flow of various properties
and jurisdictions settled their bounds. These bounds were not made upon
any fixed system, undoubtedly. They were subject to some inconveniences,
but they were inconveniences for which use had found remedies, and habit
had supplied accommodation and patience. In this new pavement of square
within square, and this organization and semi-organization, made on
the system of Empedocles and Buffon, and not upon any politic principle,
it is impossible that innumerable local inconveniences, to which men
are not habituated, must not arise. But these I pass over, because it
requires an accurate knowledge of the country, which I do not possess,
to specify them.
When these
state surveyors came to take a view of their work of measurement, they
soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical
demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress)
to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It
was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people,
their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution made such infinite
variations between square and square as to render mensuration a ridiculous
standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry the
most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men. However, they
could not give it up. But dividing their political and civil representation
into three parts, they allotted one of those parts to the square measurement,
without a single fact or calculation to ascertain whether this territorial
proportion of representation was fairly assigned, and ought upon any
principle really to be a third. Having, however, given to geometry this
portion (of a third for her dower) out of compliment, I suppose, to
that sublime science, they left the other two to be scuffled for between
the other parts, population and contribution.
When they
came to provide for population, they were not able to proceed quite
so smoothly as they had done in the field of their geometry. Here their
arithmetic came to bear upon their juridical metaphysics. Had they stuck
to their metaphysic principles, the arithmetical process would be simple
indeed. Men, with them, are strictly equal and are entitled to equal
rights in their own government. Each head, on this system, would have
its vote, and every man would vote directly for the person who was to
represent him in the legislature. "But soft- by regular degrees,
not yet". This metaphysic principle to which law, custom, usage,
policy, reason were to yield is to yield itself to their pleasure. There
must be many degrees, and some stages, before the representative can
come in contact with his constituent. Indeed, as we shall soon see,
these two persons are to have no sort of communion with each other.
First, the voters in the Canton, who compose what they call "primary
assemblies", are to have a qualification. What! a qualification
on the indefeasible rights of men? Yes; but it shall be a very small
qualification. Our injustice shall be very little oppressive: only the
local valuation of three days' labor paid to the public. Why, this is
not much, I readily admit, for anything but the utter subversion of
your equalizing principle. As a qualification it might as well be let
alone, for it answers no one purpose for which qualifications are established;
and, on your ideas, it excludes from a vote the man of all others whose
natural equality stands the most in need of protection and defense-
I mean the man who has nothing else but his natural equality to guard
him. You order him to buy the right which you before told him nature
had given to him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no authority
on earth could lawfully deprive him. With regard to the person who cannot
come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy, as against him, is
established at the very outset by you who pretend to be its sworn foe.
The gradation
proceeds. These primary assemblies of the Canton elect deputies to the
Commune; one for every two hundred qualified inhabitants. Here is the
first medium put between the primary elector and the representative
legislator; and here a new turnpike is fixed for taxing the rights of
men with a second qualification; for none can be elected into the Commune
who does not pay the amount of ten days' labor. Nor have we yet done.
There is still to be another gradation.* These Communes, chosen by the
Canton, choose to the Department; and the deputies of the Department
choose their deputies to the National Assembly. Here is a third barrier
of a senseless qualification. Every deputy to the National Assembly
must pay, in direct contribution, to the value of a mark of silver.
Of all these qualifying barriers we must think alike- that they are
impotent to secure independence, strong only to destroy the rights of
men.
* The
Assembly, in executing the plan of their committee, made some alterations.
They have struck out one stage in these gradations; this removes a part
of the objection; but the main objection, namely, that in their scheme
the first constituent voter has no connection with the representative
legislator, remains in all its force. There are other alterations, some
possibly for the better, some certainly for the worse; but to the author
the merit or demerit of these smaller alterations appears to be of no
moment where the scheme itself is fundamentally vicious and absurd.
In all
this process, which in its fundamental elements affects to consider
only population upon a principle of natural right, there is a manifest
attention to property, which, however just and reasonable on other schemes,
is on theirs perfectly unsupportable. (...)
...
The legislators
who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous
to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of
an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman.
They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature.
They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects
of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil
life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on
the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities
amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions,
the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country,
their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according
to the quality of the property itself- all which rendered them as it
were so many different species of animals. From hence they thought themselves
obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place them
in such situations in the state, as their peculiar habits might qualify
them to fill, and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might
secure to them what their specific occasions required, and which might
furnish to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict
caused by the diversity of interests that must exist and must contend
in all complex society; for the legislator would have been ashamed that
the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his
sheep, horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common sense not
to abstract and equalize them all into animals without providing for
each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment, whilst he, the
economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself
into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks
but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed
very justly that in their classification of the citizens the great legislators
of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared
above themselves. It is here that your modern legislators have gone
deep into the negative series, and sunk even below their own nothing.
As the first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of
citizens and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical
and alchemistical legislators, have taken the direct contrary course.
They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they
could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this their amalgama
into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose counters,
merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures whose power
is to arise from their place in the table. The elements of their own
metaphysics might have taught them better lessons. The troll of their
categorical table might have informed them that there was something
else in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They
might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there were eight
heads more* in every complex deliberation which they have never thought
of, though these, of all the ten, are the subjects on which the skill
of man can operate anything at all.
* Qualitas,
relatio, actio, passio, ubi, quando, situs, habitus.
So far
from this able disposition of some of the old republican legislators,
which follows with a solicitous accuracy the moral conditions and propensities
of men, they have leveled and crushed together all the orders which
they found, even under the coarse unartificial arrangement of the monarchy,
in which mode of government the classing of the citizens is not of so
much importance as in a republic. It is true, however, that every such
classification, if properly ordered, is good in all forms of government,
and composes a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism, as
well as it is the necessary means of giving effect and permanence to
a republic. For want of something of this kind, if the present project
of a republic should fail, all securities to a moderated freedom fail
along with it; all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism
are removed, insomuch that if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire
ascendancy in France, under this or under any other dynasty, it will
probably be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise
and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power
that has ever appeared on earth. This is to play a most desperate game.
The confusion
which attends on all such proceedings they even declare to be one of
their objects, and they hope to secure their constitution by a terror
of a return of those evils which attended their making it. "By
this," say they, "its destruction will become difficult to
authority, which cannot break it up without the entire disorganization
of the whole state." They presume that, if this authority should
ever come to the same degree of power that they have acquired, it would
make a more moderate and chastised use of it, and would piously tremble
entirely to disorganize the state in the savage manner that they have
done. They expect, from the virtues of returning despotism, the security
which is to be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices. (...)