Indeed, in this good old house, where everything at least is well aired, I shall be content to put up my fatigued horses, and here take a bed for the long night that begins to darken upon me. Had I, however, the honor (I must now call it so) of being a member of any of the constitutional clubs, I should think I had carried my point most completely. It is clear, by the applauses bestowed on what the author calls this new Constitution, a mixed oligarchy, that the difference between the clubbists and the old adherents to the monarchy of this country is hardly worth a scuffle. Let it depart in peace, and light lie the earth on the British Constitution! By this easy manner of treating the most difficult of all subjects, the constitution for a great kingdom, and by letting loose an opinion that they may be made by any adventurers in speculation in a small given time, and for any country, all the ties, which, whether of reason or prejudice, attach mankind to their old, habitual, domestic governments, are not a little loosened; all communion, which the similarity of the basis has produced between all the governments that compose what we call the Christian world and the republic of Europe, would be dissolved. By these hazarded speculations France is more approximated to us in constitution than in situation; and in proportion as we recede from the ancient system of Europe, we approach to that connection which alone can remain to us, a close alliance with the new-discovered moral and political world in France.

These theories would be of little importance, if we did not only know, but sorely feel, that there is a strong Jacobin faction in this country, which has long employed itself in speculating upon constitutions, and to whom the circumstance of their government being home-bred and prescriptive seems no sort of recommendation. What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable slavery. This speculative faction had long been at work. The French Revolution did not cause it: it only discovered it, increased it, and gave fresh vigor to its operations. I have reason to be persuaded that it was in this country, and from English writers and English caballers, that France herself was instituted in this revolutionary fury. The communion of these two factions upon any pretended basis of similarity is a matter of very serious consideration. They are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution: the moral basis they consider as nothing. Very different is my opinion: I consider the moral basis as everything,—the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not the makers of them, to be of little importance. What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same? As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,—and that was enough; but this new pretended republic has given us more to apprehend from what they call their virtues than we had to dread from the vices of other men. Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature. It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we have anything to hope.

I hear another inducement to fraternity with the present rulers. They have murdered one Robespierre. This Robespierre, they tell us, was a cruel tyrant, and now that he is put out of the way, all will go well in France. Astræa will again return to that earth from which she has been an emigrant, and all nations will resort to her golden scales. It is very extraordinary, that, the very instant the mode of Paris is known here, it becomes all the fashion in London. This is their jargon. It is the old bon-ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates. I care little about the memory of this same Robespierre. I am sure he was an execrable villain. I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less than I should at the execution of the present Directory, or any of its members. But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny? The present virtuous constitution-mongers. He was a tyrant; they were his satellites and his hangmen. Their sole merit is in the murder of their colleague. They have expiated their other murders by a new murder. It has always been the case among this banditti. They have always had the knife at each other's throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man. These people thought, that, in the commerce of murder, he was like to have the better of the bargain, if any time was lost; they therefore took one of their short revolutionary methods, and massacred him in a manner so perfidious and cruel as would shock all humanity, if the stroke was not struck by the present rulers on one of their own associates. But this last act of infidelity and murder is to expiate all the rest, and to qualify them for the amity of an humane and virtuous sovereign and civilized people. I have heard that a Tartar believes, when he has killed a man, that all his estimable qualities pass with his clothes and arms to the murderer; but I have never heard that it was the opinion of any savage Scythian, that, if he kills a brother villain, he is, ipso facto, absolved of all his own offences. The Tartarian doctrine is the most tenable opinion. The murderers of Robespierre, besides what they are entitled to by being engaged in the same tontine of infamy, are his representatives, have inherited all his murderous qualities, in addition to their own private stock. But it seems we are always to be of a party with the last and victorious assassins. I confess I am of a different mind, and am rather inclined, of the two, to think and speak less hardly of a dead ruffian than to associate with the living. I could better bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world. Whilst they wait the recompense due to their ancient crimes, they merit new punishment by the new offences they commit. There is a period to the offences of Robespierre. They survive in his assassins. "Better a living dog," says the old proverb, "than a dead lion." Not so here. Murderers and hogs never look well till they are hanged. From villany no good can arise, but in the example of its fate. So I leave them their dead Robespierre, either to gibbet his memory, or to deify him in their Pantheon with their Marat and their Mirabeau.

It is asserted that this government promises stability. God of his mercy forbid! If it should, nothing upon earth besides itself can be stable. We declare this stability to be the ground of our making peace with them. Assuming it, therefore, that the men and the system are what I have described, and that they have a determined hostility against this country,—an hostility not only of policy, but of predilection,—then I think that every rational being would go along with me in considering its permanence as the greatest of all possible evils. If, therefore, we are to look for peace with such a thing in any of its monstrous shapes, which I deprecate, it must be in that state of disorder, confusion, discord, anarchy, and insurrection, such as might oblige the momentary rulers to forbear their attempts on neighboring states, or to render these attempts less operative, if they should kindle new wars. When was it heard before, that the internal repose of a determined and wicked enemy, and the strength of his government, became the wish of his neighbor, and a security, against either his malice or his ambition? The direct contrary has always been inferred from that state of things: accordingly, it has ever been the policy of those who would preserve themselves against the enterprises of such a malignant and mischievous power to cut out so much work for him in his own states as might keep his dangerous activity employed at home.

It is said, in vindication of this system, which demands the stability of the Regicide power as a ground for peace with them, that, when they have obtained, as now it is said (though not by this noble author) they have, a permanent government, they will be able to preserve amity with this kingdom, and with others who have the misfortune to be in their neighborhood. Granted. They will be able to do so, without question; but are they willing to do so? Produce the act; produce the declaration. Have they made any single step towards it? Have they ever once proposed to treat?

The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,—that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their government had not strength enough to master. This I utterly deny. I insist upon it as a fact, that, in the daring commencement of all their hostilities, and their astonishing perseverance in them, so as never once, in any fortune, high or low, to propose a treaty of peace to any power in Europe, they have never been actuated by the people: on the contrary, the people, I will not say have been moved, but impelled by them, and have generally acted under a compulsion, of which most of us are as yet, thank God, unable to form an adequate idea. The war against Austria was formally declared by the unhappy Louis the Sixteenth; but who has ever considered Louis the Sixteenth, since the Revolution, to have been the government? The second Regicide Assembly, then the only government, was the author of that war; and neither the nominal king nor the nominal people had anything to do with it, further than in a reluctant obedience. It is to delude ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a state of anarchy: it is something far worse. Anarchy it is, undoubtedly, if compared with government pursuing the peace, order, morals, and prosperity of the people; but regarding only the power that has really guided from the day of the Revolution to this time, it has been of all governments the most absolute, despotic, and effective that has hitherto appeared on earth. Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies. We do not call a republic with annual magistrates an anarchy: theirs is that kind of republic; but the succession is not effected by the expiration of the term of the magistrate's service, but by his murder. Every new magistracy, succeeding by homicide, is auspicated by accusing its predecessors in the office of tyranny, and it continues by the exercise of what they charged upon others.

This strong hand is the law, and the sole law, in their state. I defy any person to show any other law,—or if any such should be found on paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance, regarded or practised. In all their successions, not one magistrate, or one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult; everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one revolutionary cabal, operating within itself upon itself. That cabal is all in all. France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of, where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest and most recondite parts of their household concerns. The helots of Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery. Much would these servile wretches call for our pity under that unheard-of yoke, if for their perfidious and unnatural rebellion, and for their murder of the mildest of all monarchs, they did not richly deserve a punishment not greater than their crime.

On the whole, therefore, I take it to be a great mistake to think that the want of power in the government furnished a natural cause of war; whereas the greatness of its power, joined to its use of that power, the nature of its system, and the persons who acted in it, did naturally call for a strong military resistance to oppose them, and rendered it not only just, but necessary. But at present I say no more on the genius and character of the power set up in France. I may probably trouble you with it more at large hereafter: this subject calls for a very full exposure: at present it is enough for me, if I point it out as a matter well worthy of consideration, whether the true ground of hostility was not rightly conceived very early in this war, and whether anything has happened to change that system, except our ill success in a war which in no principal instance had its true destination as the object of its operations. That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted; but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted, dispirited, and must submit. This would be intelligible. The world would be inclined to pardon the abject conduct of an undone nation. But let us not conceal from ourselves our real situation, whilst, by every species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of it to the enemy.

The writer of the Remarks in the Last Week of October appears to think that the present government in France contains many of the elements which, when properly arranged, are known to form the best practical governments,—and that the system, whatever may become its particular form, is no longer likely to be an obstacle to negotiation. If its form now be no obstacle to such negotiation, I do not know why it was ever so. Suppose that this government promised greater permanency than any of the former, (a point on which I can form no judgment,) still a link is wanting to couple the permanence of the government with the permanence of the peace. On this not one word is said: nor can there be, in my opinion. This deficiency is made up by strengthening the first ringlet of the chain, that ought to be, but that is not, stretched to connect the two propositions. All seems to be done, if we can make out that the last French edition of Regicide is like to prove stable.

As a prognostic of this stability, it is said to be accepted by the people. Here again I join issue with the fraternizers, and positively deny the fact. Some submission or other has been obtained, by some means or other, to every government that hitherto has been set up. And the same submission would, by the same means, be obtained for any other project that the wit or folly of man could possibly devise. The Constitution of 1790 was universally received. The Constitution which followed it, under the name of a Convention, was universally submitted to. The Constitution of 1793 was universally accepted. Unluckily, this year's Constitution, which was formed, and its genethliacon sung by the noble author while it was yet in embryo, or was but just come bloody from the womb, is the only one which in its very formation has been generally resisted by a very great and powerful party in many parts of the kingdom, and particularly in the capital. It never had a popular choice even in show: those who arbitrarily erected the new building out of the old materials of their own Convention were obliged to send for an army to support their work: like brave gladiators, they fought it out in the streets of Paris, and even massacred each other in their house of assembly, in the most edifying manner, and for the entertainment and instruction of their Excellencies the foreign ambassadors, who had a box in this constitutional amphitheatre of a free people.

At length, after a terrible struggle, the troops prevailed over the citizens. The citizen soldiers, the ever-famed national guards, who had deposed and murdered their sovereign, were disarmed by the inferior trumpeters of that rebellion. Twenty thousand regular troops garrison Paris. Thus a complete military government is formed. It has the strength, and it may count on the stability, of that kind of power. This power is to last as long as the Parisians think proper. Every other ground of stability, but from military force and terror, is clean out of the question. To secure them further, they have a strong corps of irregulars, ready-armed. Thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution, as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people. The whole of their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force: a forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced requisition of soldiers, a forced loan of money.

They differ nothing from all the preceding usurpations, but that to the same odium a good deal more of contempt is added. In this situation, notwithstanding all their military force, strengthened with the undisciplined power of the Terrorists, and the nearly general disarming of Paris, there would almost certainly have been before this an insurrection against them, but for one cause. The people of France languish for peace. They all despaired of obtaining it from the coalesced powers, whilst they had a gang of professed regicides at their head; and several of the least desperate republicans would have joined with better men to shake them wholly off, and to produce something more ostensible, if they had not been reiteratedly told that their sole hope of peace was the very contrary to what they naturally imagined: that they must leave off their cabals and insurrections, which could serve no purpose but to bring in that royalty which was wholly rejected by the coalesced kings; that, to satisfy them, they must tranquilly, if they could not cordially, submit themselves to the tyranny and the tyrants they despised and abhorred. Peace was held out by the allied monarchies to the people of France, as a bounty for supporting the Republic of Regicides. In fact, a coalition, begun for the avowed purpose of destroying that den of robbers, now exists only for their support. If evil happens to the princes of Europe from the success and stability of this infernal business, it is their own absolute crime.

We are to understand, however, (for sometimes so the author hints,) that something stable in the Constitution of Regicide was required for our amity with it; but the noble Remarker is no more solicitous about this point than he is for the permanence of the whole body of his October speculations. "If," says he, speaking of the Regicide, "they can obtain a practicable constitution, even for a limited period of time, they will be in a condition to reestablish the accustomed relations of peace and amity." Pray let us leave this bush-fighting. What is meant by a limited period of time? Does it mean the direct contrary to the terms, an unlimited period? If it is a limited period, what limitation does he fix as a ground for his opinion? Otherwise, his limitation is unlimited. If he only requires a constitution that will last while the treaty goes on, ten days' existence will satisfy his demands. He knows that France never did want a practicable constitution, nor a government, which endured for a limited period of time. Her constitutions were but too practicable; and short as was their duration, it was but too long. They endured time enough for treaties which benefited themselves and have done infinite mischief to our cause. But, granting him his strange thesis, that hitherto the mere form or the mere term of their constitutions, and not their indisposition, but their instability, has been the cause of their not preserving the relations of amity,—how could a constitution which might not last half an hour after the noble lord's signature of the treaty, in the company in which he must sign it, insure its observance? If you trouble yourself at all with their constitutions, you are certainly more concerned with them after the treaty than before it, as the observance of conventions is of infinitely more consequence than the making them. Can anything be more palpably absurd and senseless than to object to a treaty of peace for want of durability in constitutions which had an actual duration, and to trust a constitution that at the time of the writing had not so much as a practical existence? There is no way of accounting for such discourse in the mouths of men of sense, but by supposing that they secretly entertain a hope that the very act of having made a peace with the Regicides will give a stability to the Regicide system. This will not clear the discourse from the absurdity, but it will account for the conduct, which such reasoning so ill defends. What a roundabout way is this to peace,—to make war for the destruction of regicides, and then to give them peace in order to insure a stability that will enable them to observe it! I say nothing of the honor displayed in such a system. It is plain it militates with itself almost in all the parts of it. In one part, it supposes stability in their Constitution, as a ground of a stable peace; in another part, we are to hope for peace in a different way,—that is, by splitting this brilliant orb into little stars, and this would make the face of heaven so fine! No, there is no system upon which the peace which in humility we are to supplicate can possibly stand.

I believe, before this time, that the more form of a constitution, in any country, never was fixed as the sole ground of objecting to a treaty with it. With other circumstances it may be of great moment. What is incumbent on the assertors of the Fourth Week of October system to prove is not whether their then expected Constitution was likely to be stable or transitory, but whether it promised to this country and its allies, and to the peace and settlement of all Europe, more good-will or more good faith than any of the experiments which have gone before it. On these points I would willingly join issue.

Observe first the manner in which the Remarker describes (very truly, as I conceive) the people of France under that auspicious government, and then observe the conduct of that government to other nations. "The people without any established constitution; distracted by popular convulsions; in a state of inevitable bankruptcy; without any commerce; with their principal ports blockaded; and without a fleet that could venture to face one of our detached squadrons." Admitting, as fully as he has stated it, this condition of France, I would fain know how he reconciles this condition with his ideas of any kind of a practicable constitution, or duration for a limited period, which are his sine qua non of peace. But passing by contradictions, as no fair objections to reasoning, this state of things would naturally, at other times, and in other governments, have produced a disposition to peace, almost on any terms. But, in that state of their country, did the Regicide government solicit peace or amity with other nations, or even lay any specious grounds for it, in propositions of affected moderation, or in the most loose and general conciliatory language? The direct contrary. It was but a very few days before the noble writer had commenced his Remarks, as if it were to refute him by anticipation, that his France thought fit to lay out a new territorial map of dominion, and to declare to us and to all Europe what territories she was willing to allot to her own empire, and what she is content (during her good pleasure) to leave to others.

This their law of empire was promulgated without any requisition on that subject, and proclaimed in a style and upon principles which never had been heard of in the annals of arrogance and ambition. She prescribed the limits to her empire, not upon principles of treaty, convention, possession, usage, habitude, the distinction of tribes, nations, or languages, but by physical aptitudes. Having fixed herself as the arbiter of physical dominion, she construed the limits of Nature by her convenience. That was Nature which most extended and best secured the empire of France.

I need say no more on the insult offered not only to all equity and justice, but to the common sense of mankind, in deciding legal property by physical principles, and establishing the convenience of a party as a rule of public law. The noble advocate for peace has, indeed, perfectly well exploded this daring and outrageous system of pride and tyranny. I am most happy in commending him, when he writes like himself. But hear still further and in the same good strain the great patron and advocate of amity with this accommodating, mild, and unassuming power, when he reports to you the law they give, and its immediate effects:—"They amount," says he, "to the sacrifice of powers that have been the most nearly connected with us,—the direct or indirect annexation to France of all the ports of the Continent from Dunkirk to Hamburg,—an immense accession of territory,—and, in one word, THE ABANDONMENT OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF EUROPE!" This is the LAW (the author and I use no different terms) which this new government, almost as soon as it could cry in the cradle, and as one of the very first acts by which it auspicated its entrance into function, the pledge it gives of the firmness of its policy,—such is the law that this proud power prescribes to abject nations. What is the comment upon this law by the great jurist who recommends us to the tribunal which issued the decree? "An obedience to it would be" (says he) "dishonorable to us, and exhibit us to the present age and to posterity as submitting to the law prescribed to us by our enemy."

Here I recognize the voice of a British plenipotentiary: I begin to feel proud of my country. But, alas! the short date of human elevation! The accents of dignity died upon his tongue. This author will not assure us of his sentiments for the whole of a pamphlet; but, in the sole energetic part of it, he does not continue the same through an whole sentence, if it happens to be of any sweep or compass. In the very womb of this last sentence, pregnant, as it should seem, with a Hercules, there is formed a little bantling of the mortal race, a degenerate, puny parenthesis, that totally frustrates our most sanguine views and expectations, and disgraces the whole gestation. Here is this destructive parenthesis: "Unless some adequate compensation be secured to us." To us! The Christian world may shift for itself, Europe may groan in slavery, we may be dishonored by receiving law from an enemy,—but all is well, provided the compensation to us be adequate. To what are we reserved? An adequate compensation "for the sacrifice of powers the most nearly connected with us";—an adequate compensation "for the direct or indirect annexation to France of all the ports of the Continent from Dunkirk to Hamburg";—an adequate compensation "for the abandonment of the independence of Europe"! Would that, when all our manly sentiments are thus changed, our manly language were changed along with them, and that the English tongue were not employed to utter what our ancestors never dreamed could enter into an English heart!

But let us consider this matter of adequate compensation. Who is to furnish it? From what funds is it to be drawn? Is it by another treaty of commerce? I have no objections to treaties of commerce upon principles of commerce. Traffic for traffic,—all is fair. But commerce in exchange for empire, for safety, for glory! We set out in our dealing with a miserable cheat upon ourselves. I know it may be said, that we may prevail on this proud, philosophical, military Republic, which looks down with contempt on trade, to declare it unfit for the sovereign of nations to be eundem negotiatorem et dominum: that, in virtue of this maxim of her state, the English in France may be permitted, as the Jews are in Poland and in Turkey, to execute all the little inglorious occupations,—to be the sellers of new and the buyers of old clothes, to be their brokers and factors, and to be employed in casting up their debits and credits, whilst the master Republic cultivates the arts of empire, prescribes the forms of peace to nations, and dictates laws to a subjected world. But are we quite sure, that, when we have surrendered half Europe to them in hope of this compensation, the Republic will confer upon us those privileges of dishonor? Are we quite certain that she will permit us to farm the guillotine,—to contract for the provision of her twenty thousand Bastiles,—to furnish transports for the myriads of her exiles to Guiana,—to become commissioners for her naval stores,—or to engage for the clothing of those armies which are to subdue the poor relics of Christian Europe? No! She is bespoke by the Jew subjects of her own Amsterdam for all these services.

But if these, or matters similar, are not the compensations the Remarker demands, and that on consideration he finds them neither adequate nor certain, who else is to be the chapman, and to furnish the purchase-money, at this market, of all the grand principles of empire, of law, of civilization, of morals, and of religion, where British faith and honor are to be sold by inch of candle? Who is to be the dedecorum pretiosus emptor? Is it the navis Hispanæ magister? Is it to be furnished by the Prince of Peace? Unquestionably. Spain as yet possesses mines of gold and silver, and may give us in pesos duros an adequate compensation for our honor and our virtue. When these things are at all to be sold, they are the vilest commodities at market.

It is full as singular as any of the other singularities in this work, that the Remarker, talking so much as he does of cessions and compensations, passes by Spain in his general settlement, as if there were no such country on the globe,—as if there were no Spain in Europe, no Spain in America. But this great matter of political deliberation cannot be put out of our thoughts by his silence. She has furnished compensations,—not to you, but to France. The Regicide Republic and the still nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain are united,—and are united upon a principle of jealousy, if not of bitter enmity, to Great Britain. The noble writer has here another matter for meditation. It is not from Dunkirk to Hamburg that the ports are in the hands of France: they are in the hands of France from Hamburg to Gibraltar. How long the new dominion will last I cannot tell; but France the Republic has conquered Spain, and the ruling party in that court acts by her orders and exists by her power.

The noble writer, in his views into futurity, has forgotten to look back to the past. If he chooses it, he may recollect, that, on the prospect of the death of Philip the Fourth, and still more on the event, all Europe was moved to its foundations. In the treaties of partition that first were entered into, and in the war that afterwards blazed out to prevent those crowns from being actually or virtually united in the House of Bourbon, the predominance of France in Spain, and above all, in the Spanish Indies, was the great object of all these movements in the cabinet and in the field. The Grand Alliance was formed upon that apprehension. On that apprehension the mighty war was continued during such a number of years as the degenerate and pusillanimous impatience of our dwindled race can hardly bear to have reckoned: a war equal, within a few years, in duration, and not, perhaps, inferior in bloodshed, to any of those great contests for empire which in history make the most awful matter of recorded memory.

When this war was ended, (I cannot stay now to examine how,) the object of the war was the object of the treaty. When it was found impracticable, or less desirable than before, wholly to exclude a branch of the Bourbon race from that immense succession, the point of Utrecht was to prevent the mischiefs to arise from the influence of the greater upon the lesser branch. His Lordship is a great member of the diplomatic body; he has, of course, all the fundamental treaties which make the public statute law of Europe by heart: and, indeed, no active member of Parliament ought to be ignorant of their general tenor and leading provisions. In the treaty which closed that war, and of which it is a fundamental part, because relating to the whole policy of the compact, it was agreed that Spain should not give anything from her territory in the West Indies to France. This article, apparently onerous to Spain, was in truth highly beneficial. But, oh, the blindness of the greatest statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which lie hid in the dark prolific womb of futurity! The great trunk of Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the construction of a French Regicide Republic. Here we have formed a new, unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,—a double-natured monster, republic above and monarchy below. There is no centaur of fiction, no poetic satyr of the woods, nothing short of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt, dog in head and man in body, that can give an idea of it. None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical rejects.

In this metamorphosis, the first thing done by Spain, in the honey-moon of her new servitude, was, with all the hardihood of pusillanimity, utterly to defy the most solemn treaties with Great Britain and the guaranty of Europe. She has yielded the largest and fairest part of one of the largest and fairest islands in the West Indies, perhaps on the globe, to the usurped powers of France. She completes the title of those powers to the whole of that important central island of Hispaniola. She has solemnly surrendered to the regicides and butchers of the Bourbon family what that court never ventured, perhaps never wished, to bestow on the patriarchal stock of her own august house.

The noble negotiator takes no notice of this portentous junction and this audacious surrender. The effect is no less than the total subversion of the balance of power in the West Indies, and indeed everywhere else. This arrangement, considered in itself, but much more as it indicates a complete union of France with Spain, is truly alarming. Does he feel nothing of the change this makes in that part of his description of the state of France where he supposes her not able to face one of our detached squadrons? Does he feel nothing for the condition of Portugal under this new coalition? Is it for this state of things he recommends our junction in that common alliance as a remedy? It is surely already monstrous enough. We see every standing principle of policy, every old governing opinion of nations, completely gone, and with it the foundation of all their establishments. Can Spain keep herself internally where she is, with this connection? Does he dream that Spain, unchristian, or even uncatholic, can exist as a monarchy? This author indulges himself in speculations of the division of the French Republic. I only say, that with much greater reason he might speculate on the republicanism and the subdivision of Spain.

It is not peace with France which secures that feeble government; it is that peace which, if it shall continue, decisively ruins Spain. Such a peace is not the peace which the remnant of Christianity celebrates at this holy season. In it there is no glory to God on high, and not the least tincture of good-will to man. What things we have lived to see! The King of Spain in a group of Moors, Jews, and Renegadoes; and the clergy taxed to pay for his conversion! The Catholic King in the strict embraces of the most Unchristian Republic! I hope we shall never see his Apostolic Majesty, his Faithful Majesty, and the King, Defender of the Faith, added to that unhallowed and impious fraternity.

The noble author has glimpses of the consequences of peace, as well as I. He feels for the colonies of Great Britain, one of the principal resources of our commerce and our naval power, if piratical France shall be established, as he knows she must be, in the West Indies, if we sue for peace on such terms as they may condescend to grant us. He feels that their very colonial system for the interior is not compatible with the existence of our colonies. I tell him, and doubt not I shall be able to demonstrate, that, being what she is, if she possesses a rock there, we cannot be safe. Has this author had in his view the transactions between the Regicide Republic and the yet nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain?

I bring this matter under your Lordship's consideration, that you may have a more complete view than this author chooses to give of the true France you have to deal with, as to its nature, and to its force and its disposition. Mark it, my Lord, France, in giving her law to Spain, stipulated for none of her indemnities in Europe, no enlargement whatever of her frontier. Whilst we are looking for indemnities from France, betraying our own safety in a sacrifice of the independence of Europe, France secures hers by the most important acquisition of territory ever made in the West Indies since their first settlement. She appears (it is only in appearance) to give up the frontier of Spain; and she is compensated, not in appearance, but in reality, by a territory that makes a dreadful frontier to the colonies of Great Britain.

It is sufficiently alarming that she is to have the possession of this great island. But all the Spanish colonies, virtually, are hers. Is there so puny a whipster in the petty form of the school of politics who can be at a loss for the fate of the British colonies, when he combines the French and Spanish consolidation with the known critical and dubious dispositions of the United States of America, as they are at present, but which, when a peace is made, when the basis of a Regicide ascendency in Spain is laid, will no longer be so good as dubious and critical? But I go a great deal further; and on much consideration of the condition and circumstances of the West Indies, and of the genius of this new republic, as it has operated and is likely to operate on them, I say, that, if a single rock in the West Indies is in the hands of this transatlantic Morocco, we have not an hour's safety there.

The Remarker, though he slips aside from the main consideration, seems aware that this arrangement, standing as it does, in the West Indies, leaves us at the mercy of the new coalition, or rather at the mercy of the sole guiding part of it. He does not, indeed, adopt a supposition such as I make, who am confident that anything which can give them a single good port and opportune piratical station there would lead to our ruin: the author proceeds upon an idea that the Regicides may be an existing and considerable territorial power in the West Indies, and, of course, her piratical system more dangerous and as real. However, for that desperate case he has an easy remedy; but, surely, in his whole shop there is nothing so extraordinary. It is, that we three, France, Spain, and England, (there are no other of any moment,) should adopt some "analogy in the interior systems of government in the several islands which we may respectively retain after the closing of the war." This plainly can be done only by a convention between the parties; and I believe it would be the first war ever made to terminate in an analogy of the interior government of any country, or any parts of such countries. Such a partnership in domestic government is, I think, carrying fraternity as far as it will go.

It will be an affront to your sagacity to pursue this matter into all its details: suffice it to say, that, if this convention for analogous domestic government is made, it immediately gives a right for the residence of a consul (in all likelihood some negro or man of color) in every one of your islands; a Regicide ambassador in London will be at all your meetings of West India merchants and planters, and, in effect, in all our colonial councils. Not one order of Council can hereafter be made, or any one act of Parliament relative to the West India colonies even be agitated, which will not always afford reasons for protests and perpetual interference; the Regicide Republic will become an integral part of the colonial legislature, and, so far as the colonies are concerned, of the British too. But it will be still worse: as all our domestic affairs are interlaced more or less intimately with our external, this intermeddling must everywhere insinuate itself into all other interior transactions, and produce a copartnership in our domestic concerns of every description.

Such are the plain, inevitable consequences of this arrangement of a system, of analogous interior government. On the other hand, without it, the author assures us, and in this I heartily agree with him, "that the correspondence and communications between the neighboring colonies will be great, that the disagreements will be incessant, and that causes even of national quarrels will arise from day to day." Most true. But, for the reasons I have given, the case, if possible, will be worse by the proposed remedy, by the triple fraternal interior analogy,—an analogy itself most fruitful, and more foodful than the old Ephesian statue with the three tier of breasts. Your Lordship must also observe how infinitely this business must be complicated by our interference in the slow-paced Saturnian movements of Spain and the rapid parabolic flights of France. But such is the disease,—such is the cure,—such is, and must be, the effect of Regicide vicinity.

But what astonishes me is, that the negotiator, who has certainly an exercised understanding, did not see that every person habituated to such meditations must necessarily pursue the train of thought further than he has carried it, and must ask himself whether what he states so truly of the necessity of our arranging an analogous interior government, in consequence of the vicinity of our possessions, in the West Indies, does not as extensively apply, and much more forcibly, to the circumstance of our much nearer vicinity with the parent and author of this mischief. I defy even his acuteness and ingenuity to show me any one point in which the cases differ, except that it is plainly more necessary in Europe than in America. Indeed, the further we trace the details of the proposed peace, the more your Lordship will be satisfied that I have not been guilty of any abuse of terms, when I use indiscriminately (as I always do, in speaking of arrangements with Regicide) the words peace and fraternity. An analogy between our interior governments must be the consequence. The noble negotiator sees it as well as I do. I deprecate this Jacobin interior analogy. But hereafter, perhaps, I may say a good deal more upon this part of the subject.

The noble lord insists on very little more than on the excellence of their Constitution, the hope of their dwindling into little republics, and this close copartnership in government. I hear of others, indeed, that offer by other arguments to reconcile us to this peace and fraternity. The Regicides, they say, have renounced the creed of the Rights of Man, and declared equality a chimera. This is still more strange than all the rest. They have apostatized from their apostasy. They are renegadoes from that impious faith for which they subverted the ancient government, murdered their king, and imprisoned, butchered, confiscated, and banished their fellow-subjects, and to which they forced every man to swear at the peril of his life. And now, to reconcile themselves to the world, they declare this creed, bought by so much blood, to be an imposture and a chimera. I have no doubt that they always thought it to be so, when they were destroying everything at home and abroad for its establishment. It is no strange thing, to those who look into the nature of corrupted man, to find a violent persecutor a perfect unbeliever of his own creed. But this is the very first time that any man or set of men were hardy enough to attempt to lay the ground of confidence in them by an acknowledgment of their own falsehood, fraud, hypocrisy, treachery, heterodox doctrine, persecution, and cruelty. Everything we hear from them is new, and, to use a phrase of their own, revolutionary; everything supposes a total revolution in all the principles of reason, prudence, and moral feeling. If possible, this their recantation of the chief parts in the canon of the Rights of Man is more infamous and causes greater horror than their originally promulgating and forcing down the throats of mankind that symbol of all evil. It is raking too much into the dirt and ordure of human nature to say more of it.

I hear it said, too, that they have lately declared in favor of property. This is exactly of the same sort with the former. What need had they to make this declaration, if they did not know that by their doctrines and practices they had totally subverted all property? What government of Europe, either in its origin or its continuance, has thought it necessary to declare itself in favor of property? The more recent ones were formed for its protection against former violations; the old consider the inviolability of property and their own existence as one and the same thing, and that a proclamation for its safety would be sounding an alarm on its danger. But the Regicide banditti knew that this was not the first time they have been obliged to give such assurances, and had as often falsified them. They knew, that, after butchering hundreds of men, women, and children, for no other cause than to lay hold on their property, such a declaration might have a chance of encouraging other nations to run the risk of establishing a commercial house amongst them. It is notorious, that these very Jacobins, upon an alarm of the shopkeeper of Paris, made this declaration in favor of property. These brave fellows received the apprehensions expressed on that head with indignation, and said that property could be in no danger, because all the world knew it was under the protection of the sans-culottes. At what period did they not give this assurance? Did they not give it; when they fabricated their first Constitution? Did they not then solemnly declare it one of the rights of a citizen (a right, of course, only declared, and not then fabricated) to depart from his country, and choose another domicilium, without detriment to his property? Did they not declare that no property should be confiscated from the children for the crime of the parent? Can they now declare more fully their respect for property than they did at that time? And yet was there ever known such horrid violences and confiscations as instantly followed under the very persons now in power, many of them leading members of that Assembly, and all of them violators of that engagement which was the very basis of their republic,—confiscations in which hundreds of men, women, and children, not guilty of one act of duty in resisting their usurpation, were involved? This keeping of their old is, then, to give us a confidence in their new engagements. But examine the matter, and you will see that the prevaricating sons of violence give no relief at all, where at all it can be wanted. They renew their old fraudulent declaration against confiscations, and then they expressly exclude all adherents to their ancient lawful government from any benefit of it: that is to say, they promise that they will secure all their brother plunderers in their share of the common plunder. The fear of being robbed by every new succession of robbers, who do not keep even the faith of that kind of society, absolutely required that they should give security to the dividends of spoil, else they could not exist a moment. But it was necessary, in giving security to robbers, that honest men should be deprived of all hope of restitution; and thus their interests were made utterly and eternally incompatible. So that it appears that this boasted security of property is nothing more than a seal put upon its destruction; this ceasing of confiscation is to secure the confiscators against the innocent proprietors. That very thing which is held out to you as your cure is that which makes your malady, and renders it, if once it happens, utterly incurable. You, my Lord, who possess a considerable, though not an invidious estate, may be well assured, that, if, by being engaged, as you assuredly would be, in the defence of your religion, your king, your order, your laws, and liberties, that estate should be put under confiscation, the property would be secured, but in the same manner, at your expense.

But, after all, for what purpose are we told of this reformation in their principles, and what is the policy of all this softening in ours, which is to be produced by their example? It is not to soften us to suffering innocence and virtue, but to mollify us to the crimes and to the society of robbers and ruffians. But I trust that our countrymen will not be softened to that kind of crimes and criminals; for, if we should, our hearts will be hardened to everything which has a claim on our benevolence. A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

There is another piece of policy, not more laudable than this, in reading these moral lectures, which lessens our hatred to criminals and our pity to sufferers by insinuating that it has been owing to their fault or folly that the latter have become the prey of the former. By flattering us that we are not subject to the same vices and follies, it induces a confidence that we shall not suffer the same evils by a contact with the infamous gang of robbers who have thus robbed and butchered our neighbors before our faces. We must not be flattered to our ruin. Our vices are the same as theirs, neither more nor less. If any faults we had, which wanted this French example to call us to a "softening of character, and a review of our social relations and duties," there is yet no sign that we have commenced our reformation. We seem, by the best accounts I have from the world, to go on just as formerly, "some to undo, and some to be undone." There is no change at all: and if we are not bettered by the sufferings of war, this peace, which, for reasons to himself best known, the author fixes as the period of our reformation, must have something very extraordinary in it; because hitherto ease, opulence, and their concomitant pleasure have never greatly disposed mankind to that serious reflection and review which the author supposes to be the result of the approaching peace with vice and crime. I believe he forms a right estimate of the nature of this peace, and that it will want many of those circumstances which formerly characterizes that state of things.

If I am right in my ideas of this new republic, the different states of peace and war will make no difference in her pursuits. It is not an enemy of accident that we have to deal with. Enmity to us, and to all civilized nations, is wrought into the very stamina of its Constitution. It was made to pursue the purposes of that fundamental enmity. The design will go on regularly in every position and in every relation. Their hostility is to break us to their dominion; their amity is to debauch us to their principles. In the former, we are to contend with their force; in the latter, with their intrigues. But we stand in a very different posture of defence in the two situations. In war, so long as government is supported, we fight with the whole united force of the kingdom. When under the name of peace the war of intrigue begins, we do not contend against our enemies with the whole force of the kingdom. No,—we shall have to fight, (if it should be a fight at all, and not an ignominious surrender of everything which has made our country venerable in our eyes and dear to our hearts,) we shall have to light with but a portion of our strength against the whole of theirs. Gentlemen who not long since thought with us, but who now recommend a Jacobin peace, were at that time sufficiently aware of the existence of a dangerous Jacobin faction within this kingdom. Awhile ago they seemed to be tremblingly alive to the number of those who composed it, to their dark subtlety, to their fierce audacity, to their admiration of everything that passes in France, to their eager desire of a close communication with the mother faction there. At this moment, when the question is upon the opening of that communication, not a word of our English Jacobins. That faction is put out of sight and out of thought. "It vanished at the crowing of the cock." Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light begun to utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor Tory geese to alarm the garrison of the Capitol was forgot.[11] There was enough of indemnity before. Now a complete act of oblivion is passed about the Jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would make a principal object in all fair deliberation upon the merits of a project of amity with the Jacobins of France. But however others may choose to forget the faction, the faction does not choose to forget itself, nor, however gentlemen may choose to flatter themselves, it does not forget them.

Never, in any civil contest, has a part been taken with more of the warmth, or carried on with more of the arts of a party. The Jacobins are worse than lost to their country. Their hearts are abroad. Their sympathy with the Regicides of France is complete. Just as in a civil contest, they exult in all their victories, they are dejected and mortified in all their defeats. Nothing that the Regicides can do (and they have labored hard for the purpose) can alienate them from their cause. You and I, my dear Lord, have often observed on the spirit of their conduct. When the Jacobins of France, by their studied, deliberated, catalogued files of murders with the poniard, the sabre, and the tribunal, have shocked whatever remained of human sensibility in our breasts, then it was they distinguished the resources of party policy. They did not venture directly to confront the public sentiment; for a very short time they seemed to partake of it. They began with a reluctant and sorrowful confession; they deplored the stains which tarnished the lustre of a good cause. After keeping a decent time of retirement, in a few days crept out an apology for the excesses of men cruelly irritated by the attacks of unjust power. Grown bolder, as the first feeling of mankind decayed and the color of these horrors began to fade upon the imagination, they proceeded from apology to defence. They urged, but still deplored, the absolute necessity of such a proceeding. Then they made a bolder stride, and marched from defence to recrimination. They attempted to assassinate the memory of those whose bodies their friends had massacred, and to consider their murder as a less formal act of justice. They endeavored even to debauch our pity, and to suborn it in favor of cruelty. They wept over the lot of those who were driven by the crimes of aristocrats to republican vengeance. Every pause of their cruelty they considered as a return of their natural sentiments of benignity and justice. Then they had recourse to history, and found out all the recorded cruelties that deform the annals of the world, in order that the massacres of the Regicides might pass for a common event, and even that the most merciful of princes, who suffered by their hands, should bear the iniquity of all the tyrants who have at any time infested the earth. In order to reconcile us the better to this republican tyranny, they confounded the bloodshed of war with the murders of peace; and they computed how much greater prodigality of blood was exhibited in battles and in the storm of cities than in the frugal, well-ordered massacres of the revolutionary tribunals of France.

As to foreign powers, so long as they were conjoined with Great Britain in this contest, so long they were treated as the most abandoned tyrants, and, indeed, the basest of the human race. The moment any of them quits the cause of this government, and of all governments, he is rehabilitated, his honor is restored, all attainders are purged. The friends of Jacobins are no longer despots; the betrayers of the common cause are no longer traitors.

That you may not doubt that they look on this war as a civil war, and the Jacobins of France as of their party, and that they look upon us, though locally their countrymen, in reality as enemies, they have never failed to run a parallel between our late civil war and this war with the Jacobins of France. They justify their partiality to those Jacobins by the partiality which was shown by several here to the Colonies, and they sanction their cry for peace with the Regicides of France by some of our propositions for peace with the English in America.

This I do not mention as entering into the controversy how far they are right or wrong in this parallel, but to show that they do make it, and that they do consider themselves as of a party with the Jacobins of France. You cannot forget their constant correspondence with the Jacobins, whilst it was in their power to carry it on. When the communication is again opened, the interrupted correspondence will commence. We cannot be blind to the advantage which such a party affords to Regicide France in all her views,—and, on the other hand, what an advantage Regicide France holds out to the views of the republican party in England. Slightly as they have considered their subject, I think this can hardly have escaped the writers of political ephemerides for any month or year. They have told us much of the amendment of the Regicides of France, and of their returning honor and generosity. Have they told anything of the reformation and of the returning loyalty of the Jacobins of England? Have they told us of their gradual softening towards royalty? Have they told us what measures they are taking for "putting the crown in commission," and what approximations of any kind they are making towards the old Constitution of their country? Nothing of this. The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive. They dare not touch the subject. But it is not annihilated by their silence, nor by our indifference. It is but too plain that our Constitution cannot exist with such a communication. Our humanity, our manners, our morals, our religion, cannot stand with such a communication. The Constitution is made by those things, and for those things: without them it cannot exist; and without them it is no matter whether it exists or not.

It was an ingenious Parliamentary Christmas play, by which, in both Houses, you anticipated the holidays; it was a relaxation from your graver employment; it was a pleasant discussion you had, which part of the family of the Constitution was the elder branch,—whether one part did not exist prior to the others, and whether it might exist and flourish, if "the others were cast into the fire."[12] In order to make this Saturnalian amusement general in the family, you sent it down stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment. The unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the butt of all this sport may suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants' hall. But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed, in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created or uncreated, and were ready to massacre the holders of the unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach into the capital of the Christian world. I may possibly suffer much more than Mr. Reeves (I shall certainly give much more general offence) for breaking in upon this constitutional amusement concerning the created or uncreated nature of the two Houses of Parliament, and by calling their attention to a problem which may entertain them less, but which concerns them a great deal more,—that is, whether, with this Gallic Jacobin fraternity, which they are desired by some writers to court, all the parts of the government, about whose combustible or incombustible qualities they are contending, may "not be cast into the fire" together. He is a strange visionary (but he is nothing worse) who fancies that any one part of our Constitution, whatever right of primogeniture it may claim, or whatever astrologers may divine from its horoscope, can possibly survive the others. As they have lived, so they will die, together. I must do justice to the impartiality of the Jacobins. I have not observed amongst them the least predilection for any of those parts. If there has been any difference in their malice, I think they have shown a worse disposition to the House of Commons than to the crown. As to the House of Lords, they do not speculate at all about it, and for reasons that are too obvious to detail.

The question will be concerning the effect of this French fraternity on the whole mass. Have we anything to apprehend from Jacobin communication, or have we not? If we have not, is it by our experience before the war that we are to presume that after the war no dangerous communion can exist between those who are well affected to the new Constitution of France and ill affected to the old Constitution here?

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this communication. I do not except from this observation those who are willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity. Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief. Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a remedy could be at all adopted? We expel suspected foreigners from hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pass over into France to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs. In France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them. But the worst aliens are the ambassador and his train. These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A French ambassador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we have never experienced. The mischief is by far more visible than the remedy. But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall bring it on. In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication. Everything done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Everything, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual dilemma. But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken. The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce us to temporize with all the evils of it. By degrees our minds will be made to our circumstances. The novelty of such things, which produces half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off. Our ruin will be disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a degenerate people to barter away the most precious jewel of their souls. Our Constitution is not made for this kind of warfare. It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence. It is formed, in a great measure, upon the principle of jealousy of the crown,—and as things stood, when it took that turn, with very great reason. I go farther: it must keep alive some part of that fire of jealousy eternally and chastely burning, or it cannot be the British Constitution. At various periods we have had tyranny in this country, more than enough. We have had rebellions with more or less justification. Some of our kings have made adulterous connections abroad, and trucked away for foreign gold the interests and glory of their crown. But, before this time, our liberty has never been corrupted. I mean to say, that it has never been debauched from its domestic relations. To this time it has been English liberty, and English liberty only. Our love of liberty and our love of our country were not distinct things. Liberty is now, it seems, put upon a larger and more liberal bottom. We are men,—and as men, undoubtedly, nothing human is foreign to us. We cannot be too liberal in our general wishes for the happiness of our kind. But in all questions on the mode of procuring it for any particular community, we ought to be fearful of admitting those who have no interest in it, or who have, perhaps, an interest against it, into the consultation. Above all, we cannot be too cautious in our communication with those who seek their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion, and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those restraints which are imposed by the virtues upon the passions.

When we invite danger from a confidence in defensive measures, we ought, first of all, to be sure that it is a species of danger against which any defensive measures that can be adopted will be sufficient. Next, we ought to know that the spirit of our laws, or that our own dispositions, which are stronger than laws, are susceptible of all those defensive measures which the occasion may require. A third consideration is, whether these measures will not bring more odium than strength to government; and the last, whether the authority that makes them, in a general corruption of manners and principles, can insure their execution. Let no one argue, from the state of things, as he sees them at present, concerning what will be the means and capacities of government, when the time arrives which shall call for remedies commensurate to enormous evils.

It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men. These are what no constitution can give: they are the gifts of God; and He alone knows whether we shall possess such gifts at the time we stand in need of them. Constitutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural: it is all that in this case they can do. But our Constitution has more impediments than helps. Its excellencies, when they come to be put to this sort of proof, may be found among its defects.

Nothing looks more awful and imposing than an ancient fortification. Its lofty, embattled walls, its bold, projecting, rounded towers, that pierce the sky, strike the imagination and promise inexpugnable strength. But they are the very things that make its weakness. You may as well think of opposing one of these old fortresses to the mass of artillery brought by a French irruption into the field as to think of resisting by your old laws and your old forms the new destruction which the corps of Jacobin engineers of to-day prepare for all such forms and all such laws. Besides the debility and false principle of their construction to resist the present modes of attack, the fortress itself is in ruinous repair, and there is a practicable breach in every part of it.

Such is the work. But miserable works have been defended by the constancy of the garrison. Weather-beaten ships have been brought safe to port by the spirit and alertness of the crew. But it is here that we shall eminently fail. The day that, by their consent, the seat of Regicide has its place among the thrones of Europe, there is no longer a motive for zeal in their favor; it will at best be cold, unimpassioned, dejected, melancholy duty. The glory will seem all on the other side. The friends of the crown will appear, not as champions, but as victims; discountenanced, mortified, lowered, defeated, they will fall into listlessness and indifference. They will leave things to take their course, enjoy the present hour, and submit to the common fate.

Is it only an oppressive nightmare with which we have been loaded? Is it, then, all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the world? Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian who would not suffer his benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped for execution, to say one parting word to his deluded people,—of Santerre, who commanded the drums and trumpets to strike up to stifle his voice, and dragged him backward to the machine of murder! This nefarious villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in a republic of robbers and murderers he ought. What hinders this monster from being sent as ambassador to convey to his Majesty the first compliments of his brethren, the Regicide Directory? They have none that can represent them more properly. I anticipate the day of his arrival. He will make his public entry into London on one of the pale horses of his brewery. As he knows that we are pleased with the Paris taste for the orders of knighthood,[13] he will fling a bloody sash across his shoulders, with the order of the holy guillotine surmounting the crown appendant to the riband. Thus adorned, he will proceed from Whitechapel to the further end of Pall Mall, all the music of London playing the Marseillaise Hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of the Légion de l'Échafaud. It were only to be wished that no ill-fated loyalist, for the imprudence of his zeal, may stand in the pillory at Charing Cross, under the statue of King Charles the First, at the time of this grand procession, lest some of the rotten eggs which the Constitutional Society shall let fly at his indiscreet head may hit the virtuous murderer of his king. They might soil the state dress which the ministers of so many crowned heads have admired, and in which Sir Clement Cotterel is to introduce him at St. James's.

If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home, Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage. He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of the Departments. Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall at the next Sheriff's feast. He may open the ball with my Lady Mayoress. But this will be after he has retired from the public table, and gone into the private room for the enjoyment of more social and unreserved conversation with the ministers of state and the judges of the bench. There these ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain the worthy aldermen with an instructing and pleasing narrative of the manner in which he made the rich citizens of Bordeaux squeak, and gently led them by the public credit of the guillotine to disgorge their anti-revolutionary pelf.

All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendor of the Hôtel de la République. There another scene of gaudy grandeur will be opened. When his Citizen Excellency keeps the festival, which every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a grand ball of course will be given on the occasion. Then what a hurly-burly! what a crowding! what a glare of a thousand flambeaux in the square! what a clamor of footmen contending at the door! what a rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys, choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle who should be first to pay her court to the Citoyenne, the spouse of the twenty-first husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the rank of honorable matrons before the four days' duration of marriage is expired!—Morals, as they were, decorum, the great outguard of the sex, and the proud sentiment of honor, which makes virtue more respectable, where it is, and conceals human frailty, where virtue may not be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve.

We had before an ambassador from the most Christian King. We shall have then one, perhaps two, as lately, from the most Anti-Christian Republic. His chapel will be great and splendid, formed on the model of the Temple of Reason at Paris; while the famous ode of the infamous Chénier will be sung, and a prostitute of the street adored as a goddess. We shall then have a French ambassador without a suspicion of Popery. One good it will have: it will go some way in quieting the minds of that synod of zealous Protestant lay elders who govern Ireland on the pacific principles of polemic theology, and who now, from dread of the Pope, cannot take a cool bottle of claret, or enjoy an innocent Parliamentary job, with any tolerable quiet.

So far as to the French communication here:—what will be the effect of our communication there? We know that our new brethren, whilst they everywhere shut up the churches, increased in Paris, at one time at least fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in that place, that has not been increased,—brothels, gaming-houses, everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to their utmost perfection, and cover them with every species of imposing magnificence. They have all along avowed them as a part of their policy; and whilst they corrupt young minds through pleasure, they form them to crimes. Every idea of corporal gratification is carried to the highest excess, and wooed with all the elegance that belongs to the senses. All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. Any one, who attends to all their own descriptions, narratives, and dissertations, will find in that whole place more of the air of a body of assassins, banditti, housebreakers, and outlawed smugglers, joined to that of a gang of strolling players expelled from and exploded orderly theatres, with their prostitutes in a brothel, at their debauches and bacchanals, than anything of the refined and perfected virtues, or the polished, mitigated vices of a great capital.