Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/73

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AT THE BAR OF THE ASSEMBLY.
53

country, pending the time when he should be able to take the field (November 1792).

Robert Rayment, economist and statistician, offered his treatise on English finances (August 1792). Eight days later he joined with Watt, Gamble, and Anviside (Handyside?) in a gift of 1315 francs for the families of those who fell in the attack on the Tuileries. Major Cartwright sent a bundle of political tracts to the committee which was drafting the Constitution (August 1789). Cartwright was grievously disappointed at the excesses of the Revolution. Jeremy Bentham sent his book on prisons (December 1791), expressing a wish to come over and establish a prison on his own system, and to act gratuitously as keeper. The Revolution was destined to multiply prisons, but not on Bentham's system. Dr. George Edwards, an admirer of Franklin's theories of medicine, presented the Convention in 1793 with his political and economic works, and with an outline of a Constitution. Sir Joseph Banks is said to have presented as a tree of liberty the bean-tree which, till about five years ago, flourished in the quadrangle of the Paris National Library. I have not been able to verify this statement, but in 1802, when elected an Associate of the Institute, Banks scandalised his colleagues of the Eoyal Society by a letter of acknowledgment, in which he stated that France, during the most frightful convulsions of the Revo-