This is not a discouraging consideration. Our ancestors have laboured for us; and we, in our turn, must labour for posterity. It is by tracing the mistakes, and profiting from the discoveries of one generation, that the next is able to take a more elevated stand. The first inventor of any instrument has scarcely ever been able to bring it to a tolerable degree of perfection; and the discoveries of every man of genius, the optics of Newton excepted, have been improved, if not extended, by their followers.—Can it then be expected, that the science of politics and finance, the most important, and most difficult of all human improvements; a science which involves the passions, tempers, and manners of men and nations, estimates their wants, maladies, comforts, happiness, and misery, and computes the sum of good or evil flowing from social institutions; will not require the same gradations, and advance by steps equally slow to that state of perfection necessary to secure the sacred rights of every human creature? The vanity and weakness of men have continually tended to retard this progress of things: still it is going forward; and though the fatal presumption of the headstrong french, and the more destructive ambition of their foreign enemies, have given it a check, we may contemplate with complacent serenity the approximation of the glorious era, when the appellations of fool and tyrant will be synonymous. AN HISTORICAL AND MORAL VIEW OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. _BOOK V._ CHAPTER I. ERROUR OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY IN NEGLECTING TO SECURE THE FREEDOM OF FRANCE. IT’S CONDUCT COMPARED WITH THAT OF THE AMERICAN STATES. NECESSITY OF FORMING A NEW CONSTITUTION AS SOON AS AN OLD GOVERNMENT IS DESTROYED. THE DECLARING THE KING INVIOLABLE A WRONG MEASURE. SECURITY OF THE FRENCH AGAINST A COUNTERREVOLUTION. THE FLIGHT OF THE KING MEDITATED. The conduct of the assembly in losing so much time—the most precious time to secure the happiness of their country, and enable the present generation to participate in the blessings they were preparing for posterity, instead of having to encounter all the miseries of anarchy, can never be sufficiently lamented. France had already gained her freedom; the nation had already ascertained certain, and the most important, political truths: it ought, therefore, to have been the next consideration, how these were to be preserved, and the liberty of the empire consolidated on a basis that time would only render more firm.