ege, to betray his master. By these principles,
every considerable father of a family loses the sanctuary of his house.
_Debet sua cuique domus esse perfugium tutissimum_, says the law, which
your legislators have taken so much pains first to decry, then to
repeal. They destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life:
turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father
of the family must drag out a miserable existence, endangered in
proportion to the apparent means of his safety,--where he is worse than
solitary in a crowd of domestics, and more apprehensive from his
servants and inmates than from the hired, bloodthirsty mob without
doors who are ready to pull him to the _lanterne_.

It is thus, and for the same end, that they endeavor to destroy that
tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees.
Your despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears
nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their
Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only
sort of fear which generates true courage. Their object is, that their
fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe but that of their
Committee of Research and of their _lanterne_.

Having found the advantage of assassination in the formation of their
tyranny, it is the grand resource in which they trust for the support of
it. Whoever opposes any of their proceedings, or is suspected of a
design to oppose them, is to answer it with his life, or the lives of
his wife and children. This infamous, cruel, and cowardly practice of
assassination they have the impudence to call _merciful_. They boast
that they operated their usurpation rather by terror than by force, and
that a few seasonable murders have prevented the bloodshed of many
battles. There is no doubt they will extend these acts of mercy whenever
they see an occasion. Dreadful, however, will be the consequences of
their attempt to avoid the evils of war by the merciful policy of
murder. If, by effectual punishment of the guilty, they do not wholly
disavow that practice, and the threat of it too, as any part of their
policy, if ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as
into a country of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not be
practised: nor are the French who act on the present system entitled to
expect it. They whose known policy it is to assassinate every citizen
whom t