CHAP. IV.

assistance."——He read some of these manifestos, and says, that "one of them recommended strongly the political education of the children, who should be taken from the parents and trained up for the state."——Another lamented the baleful influence of property, saying, that "the efforts of the Assembly would be fruitless, till the fence was removed with which the laws so anxiously secured inordinate wealth. They should rather be directed to the support of talents and virtue; because property would always support itself by the too great influence which it had in every corrupted state. The laws should prevent the too great accumulation of it in Particular families."——In short, the counsel was almost verbatim what the Abbe Cossandey declared to have been preached in the meetings of the Illuminati, which terrified him and his colleagues, and made them quit the association. Anarcharsis Cloots, born in Prussian Westphalia, a keen Illuminatus, came to Paris for the express purpose of forwarding the great work, and by intriguing in the style of the Order, he got himself made one of the Representatives of the Nation. He seems to have been one of the completest fanatics in Cosmo-politism, and just such a tool as Weishaupt would choose to employ for a coarse and arduous job. He broke out at once into all the silly extravagance of the unthinking herd, and his whole language is just the jargon of Illumination. Citizen of the world—Liberty and Equality, the imprescriptible Rights of Man—Morality, dear Morality—Kings and Priests are useless things—they are Despots and Corrupters, &c.—He declared himself an atheist, and zealously laboured to have atheism established by law. He conducted that farcical procession in the true style of the most childish ritual of Philo, where counterfeited deputies from all quarters of the world, in the dresses of their countries, came to congratulate the nation for its victory over Kings and Priests. It is also worthy of remark, that by this time Leuchtsenring, whom we have seen so zealous an Illuminatus, after having been as zealous a Protestant, tutor of Princes, Hosrath and Hosmeister, was now a secretary or clerk in one of the Bureaus of the National Assembly of France.