The coolness with which Sir Henry Bulwer states this desecration can only be compared with the absurdity in the line of argument with which Talleyrand advocated the measure. If some Bishop Colenso in the House of Lords should propose the seizure and confiscation of the wealth of the Anglican Establishment, the question would appear in a different aspect to the British diplomatist. He would view it with horror. { 98} In either case, however, the measure would be infamous. Governments are instituted to protect property, not to squander it; and the only difference between that which is held by an individual for himself and that which is held in trust for the benefit of others, is in the circumstance that whatever is in trust is, in the public estimation, more sacred, because it is preserved for the welfare of the poor, the weak, the ignorant or infirm of mind, who cannot provide for themselves; just as the state extends a more paternal care over the property of infants, idiots, or orphans, than over the interests of men and women of full growth and sound mind. If a call must be made in a sudden exigency for funds, what government, not demented, would spare the mercantile houses of the rich, to sequestrate and spoliate the hospitals for the helpless?
Talleyrand considered the church property as public property; but this view, plausible at first sight, is found on reflection to be fallacious. It was not derived from the nation, nor from the public, but from individuals, and from its own accumulations; it was not designed for the benefit of the public, but for a specific class of the people--the needy--to which class the mass of the community did not belong, and, furthermore, hoped they never would. So much for the bishop's premises and argument. But a stronger objection remains: it is the broad principle of the invasion of private rights, of common justice; and when that principle is once rendered unstable by common consent, the stability of all public opinion, of all civil institutions, of all organized government, is shaken; the state is liable to be overturned. When the National Assembly deemed it proper for the public good to confiscate the church property, the Legislative Assembly followed the example set to deprive persons of their liberty, and the National Convention next voted away lives by the hecatomb daily; under the same plea, the king himself was decapitated. When the public morality was once vitiated, who could foretell where the national criminality would terminate, who or how many would not be its victims?