“The expenses of the navy department are enormous. The navy of the United States has already been cited to you; that navy, whose flag, since its establishment and during two spirited wars against the flag of Britain, has never once failed with equal, and often with inferior, force, to gain the advantage. The provisions, the pay,—everything there, as has been observed to you,—are higher than with us. Its cruisers amounted lately to two ships of the line, nine frigates and fifteen smaller vessels, protecting a commerce of more than 1,200,000 tons, without including the fisheries or the coasting trade. The expenses of their navy department were fixed last session at two and one-half millions of dollars, and half a million more to build new vessels, making sixteen millions of francs, calculated, indeed, for twelve vessels of the line and twenty frigates, etc. But what a difference between this sum and fifty millions of francs, which are said to be insufficient for our navy!... “I shall not consider it as a departure from the question under discussion as to the general administration of the kingdom, if, by a rapid examination of the ancient régime, I shall endeavor to furnish an answer to the wishes and regrets of which it still seems the object. It was from the destruction of this régime that we saw disappear that corporation of clergy which, exercising all sorts of influences and refusing all share in the common burdens, increased continually and never alienated its immense riches, but divided them among themselves; which, rendering the law an accomplice in vows too frequently forced, covering France with monastic orders devoted to a foreign head, collected contributions both in the garb of wealth and mendicity; and which, in its secular organization, formed so considerable a portion of the idle and unproductive class that the daily ministers of the altar were the most insignificant portion of what was called the first order of the state. “We saw disappear that corporation of sovereign courts where the privilege of judging was venal of right, and, in fact, hereditary in the nobility; when feudal judges, chosen and revocable by their _seigneurs_, presided; when the diversity of codes and the laws of arrests made you lose before one tribunal the cause you had gained before another. “We saw disappear that financial corporation oppressing France beyond endurance, and by leases, whose monstrous government exceeded in expense and profit the receipts of the royal treasury, whose immense code, now here recorded, formed an occult science which its agents alone had the right or the means of interpreting, and which, in rewarding perjury and informers, exercised over all unprotected men a boundless and remorseless tyranny.