But that which especially contributed to give the clergy the opinions, the wants, the feelings, and often the passions of citizens, was the ownership of land. I have had the patience to read most of the reports and debates still remaining to us from the old Provincial Estates of France, and particularly those of Languedoc, a province in which the clergy participated even more than elsewhere in the details of the public administration; I have also examined the journals of the Provincial Assemblies which sat in 1779 and 1787. Bringing with me in this inquiry the impressions of our own times, I have been surprised to find bishops and priests, many of whom were equally eminent for their piety and for their learning, drawing up reports on the construction of a road or a canal, discussing with great science and skill the best methods to augment the produce of agriculture, to ensure the well-being of the inhabitants, and to encourage industry, these churchmen being always equal, and often superior, to all the laymen engaged with them in the transaction of the same affairs. I maintain, in opposition to an opinion which is very generally and very firmly established, that the nations which deprive the Roman Catholic clergy of all participation in landed property, and convert their incomes into salaries, do in fact only promote the interests of the Papacy, and those of the temporal Ruler, whilst they renounce an important element of freedom amongst themselves. A man who, as far as the best portion of his nature is concerned, is the subject of a foreign authority, and who in the country where he dwells can have no family, will only be linked to the soil by one durable tie--namely, landed property. Break that bond, and he belongs to no place in particular. In the place where the accident of birth may have cast him, he lives like an alien in the midst of a civil community, scarcely any of whose civil interests can directly affect him. His conscience binds him to the Pope; his maintenance to the Sovereign. His only country is the Church. In every political event he perceives little more than the advantage or the loss of his own profession. Let but the Church be free and prosperous, what matters all the rest? His most natural political state is that of indifference--an excellent member of the Christian commonwealth, but elsewhere a worthless citizen. Such sentiments and such opinions as these in a body of men who are the directors of childhood, and the guardians of morality, cannot fail to enervate the soul of the entire nation in relation to public life. A correct impression of the revolution which may be effected in the human mind by a change wrought in social conditions, may be obtained from a perusal of the Instructions given to the Delegates of the Clergy at the States-General of 1789.[54]