the will, the
wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individuals, is as
nothing. Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The
state is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of
force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is
military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all
its movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its sole
objects; dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.

Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means which are
lessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, France
has, since the accomplishment of the Revolution, a complete unity in
its direction. It has destroyed every resource of the state which
depends upon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of
convention disappear. The advantages of nature in some measure remain:
even these, I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what
remains is complete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats
will expire, and we laugh at the last price of them. But what
signifies the fate of those tickets of despotism? The despotism will
find despotic means of supply. They have found the short cut to the
productions of nature, while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged
to wind through the labyrinth of a very intricate state of society.
They seize upon the fruit of the labour; they seize upon the labourer
himself. Were France but half of what it is in population, in
compactness, in applicability of its force, situated as it is, and
being what it is, it would be too strong for most of the states of
Europe, constituted as they are, and proceeding as they proceed. Would
it be wise to estimate what the world of Europe, as well as the world
of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khan, upon a contemplation of the
resources of the cold and barren spot in the remotest Tartary, from
whence first issued that scourge of the human race? Ought we to judge
from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper
circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which Mahomet and his
tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful empires of the
world; beat one of them totally to the ground, broke to pieces the
other, and, in not much longer space of time than I have lived,
overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an
empire from the Indus to the Pyrenees?

Material resources never have supplied,