It is notorious, that these very Jacobins, upon an
alarm of the shopkeeper of Paris, made this declaration in favor of
property. These brave fellows received the apprehensions expressed on
that head with indignation, and said that property could be in no
danger, because all the world knew it was under the protection of the
_sans-culottes_. At what period did they not give this assurance? Did
they not give it; when they fabricated their first Constitution? Did
they not then solemnly declare it one of the rights of a citizen (a
right, of course, only declared, and not then fabricated) to depart from
his country, and choose another _domicilium_, without detriment to his
property? Did they not declare that no property should be confiscated
from the children for the crime of the parent? Can they now declare more
fully their respect for property than they did at that time? And yet was
there ever known such horrid violences and confiscations as instantly
followed under the very persons now in power, many of them leading
members of that Assembly, and all of them violators of that engagement
which was the very basis of their republic,--confiscations in which
hundreds of men, women, and children, not guilty of one act of duty in
resisting their usurpation, were involved? This keeping of their old is,
then, to give us a confidence in their new engagements.
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