world. No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me
with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by
this junction of parties, under the soothing name of peace. We are apt
to speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by
which dubious wars terminated in humiliating treaties. It is here the
direct contrary. I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of
character, at the intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those
who are able with deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin
fraternity.

This fraternity is indeed so terrible in its nature, and in its
manifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting our
apprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, by
substituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of an
ambiguous quality, and describing such a connexion under the terms of
'_the usual relations of peace and amity_.' By this means the proposed
fraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties, which imply no
change in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system
affect the interior condition of nations. It is confounded with those
conventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers are
compromised, by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender
of a frontier town, or a disputed district, on the one side or the
other; by pactions in which the pretensions of families are settled,
(as by a conveyancer, making family substitutions and successions,)
without any alterations in the laws, manners, religion, privileges,
and customs, of the cities, or territories, which are the subject of
such arrangements.

All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous
collection called the _corps diplomatique_, forms the code or statute
law, as the methodised reasonings of the great publicists and jurists
from the digest and jurisprudence of the Christian world. In these
treasures are to be found the _usual_ relations of peace and amity in
civilised Europe; and there the relations of ancient France were to
be found amongst the rest.

The present system in France is not the ancient France. It is not the
ancient France with ordinary ambition and ordinary means. It is not a
new power of an old kind. It is a new power of a new species. When
such a questionable shape is to be admitted for the first time into
the brotherhood of Christendom, it is not a mere matter of idle
curiosity to consider