6586. PEOPLE, French.—[continued].
It is difficult to conceive
how so good a people, with so good a King, so
well-disposed rulers in general, so genial a
climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so
ineffectual for producing human happiness by
one single curse,—that of a bad form of government.
But it is a fact. In spite of the mildness
of their governors, the people are ground
to powder by the vices of the form of government.
Of twenty millions of people supposed
to be in France, I am of opinion there are
nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed
in every circumstance of human existence than
the most conspicuously wretched individual of
the whole United States.—
To Mrs. Trist. Washington ed. i, 394.
(P.
1785)
