The reader has perceived, from the last lines of this curious state-paper, how well the National Assembly has copied its union of the profession of universal peace with the practice of murder and confusion, and the blast of the trumpet of sedition in all nations.
Burke comments on the hypocrisy of the National Assembly, highlighting their contradiction between professing peace and engaging in violence.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.
Of this consolation whoever deprives them deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation.
They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.
The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance.
Other voices in this conversation
