Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/34

 that Tom Paine was quite in the right; but then he would add, 'What am I to do? If the country is overrun with all these men, full of vice and folly, I cannot exterminate them. It would be very well, to be sure, if everybody had sense enough to act as they ought; but, as things are, if I were to encourage Tom Paine’s opinions, we should have a bloody revolution; and, after all, matters would return pretty much as they were.' But I always asked, 'What do these men want? They will destroy what we have got, without giving us anything else in its place. Let them give us something good before they rob us of what we have. As for systems of equality, everybody is not a Tom Paine. Tom Paine was a clever man, and not one of your hugger-mugger people, who have one day one set of ideas, and another set the next, and never know what they mean.'

"I am an aristocrat, and I make a boast of it. We shall see what will come of people’s conundrums about equality. I hate a pack of dirty Jacobins, that only want to get people out of a good place to get into it themselves. Horne Tooke always liked me, with all my aristocratical principles, because he said he knew what I meant.

"No, doctor, Bouverie was right: I liked the country. At the back of the inn, on Sevenoaks common, stood a house, which, for a residence for myself, I should