"After entering the service of France, you returned to see your relations; you found the tyrants beaten, the national government established, and the Corsicans, animated by the most generous sentiments, emulating each other in making daily sacrifices for the public weal. You, Monsieur, did not allow yourself to be led astray by the general ferment; far from it; you listened only with compassion to the babble of fatherland, freedom, independence, and constitution, with which the demagogues had been puffing up our meanest peasants. Profound reflection had taught you to estimate at its proper value this artificial excitement, which can only be maintained at the expense of the community. Of course the peasant must labour, and not act the hero, if he is not to die of hunger, but to bring up his family, and respect the authorities. As regards the persons who by their rank or good fortune are called to rule, it is impossible that they can for any length of time be so stupid as to sacrifice their ease and their influence to a chimera, and that they should stoop to pay court to a cobbler, for the sake of playing the Brutus. However, when you fell upon the project of gaining the friendship of Monsieur Paoli, it was necessary you should dissemble. Monsieur Paoli was the centre of all national movement. We will not deny him talent, nor even genius, of a certain kind; he had for a while made the affairs of the island flourish; he had founded a university, in which, for the first time since the creation, perhaps, those sciences which further the development of the mind were taught among our mountains; he had increased our means of defence by establishing an iron-foundry and powder-mills, and by erecting fortifications; he had opened ports which by encouraging commerce enlivened agriculture; he had created a marine which favoured our communications, while it was destructive to our enemies—and all that he had thus begun, was but the indication of what he would one day have accomplished. Harmony, peace, and freedom were the forerunners of national prosperity—had it not been, that, as _you_ had discovered, an ill-organized government, constructed on a false basis, was the still surer omen of the misfortunes into which the nation was to be plunged. "Paoli's dream was to play the Solon, but he copied his model badly. He had put everything into the hands of the people, or its representatives, so that one could not exist except at its pleasure. Strange mistake, to subordinate to a day-labourer, a man who by education, birth, and fortune, is destined to rule! Such a palpable perversion of reason cannot fail, in the long-run, to produce the ruin and dissolution of the body politic, after it has brought it into uproar by every species of abuse.