were in effect sent against them.
One of those armies (that which surrendered Mentz) was very near
overpowering the Christians of Poitou, and the other (that which
surrendered at Valenciennes) has actually crushed the people whom
oppression and despair had driven to resistance at Lyons, has massacred
several thousands of them in cold blood, pillaged the whole substance of
the place, and pursued their rage to the very houses, condemning that
noble city to desolation, in the unheard-of manner we have seen it
devoted.

It is, then, plain, by a conduct which overturns a thousand
declarations, that we take the Royalists of France only as an instrument
of some convenience in a temporary hostility with the Jacobins, but that
we regard those atheistic and murderous barbarians as the _bona fide_
possessors of the soil of France. It appears, at least, that we consider
them as a fair government _de facto_, if not _de jure_, a resistance to
which, in favor of the king of Prance, by any man who happened to be
born within that country, might equitably be considered by other
nations as the crime of treason.

For my part, I would sooner put my hand into the fire than sign an
invitation to oppressed men to fight under my standard, and then, on
every sinister event of war, cruelly give them up to be punished as the
basest of traitors, as long as I had one of the common enemy in my hands
to be put to death in order to secure those under my protection, and to
vindicate the common honor of sovereigns. We hear nothing of this kind
of security in favor of those whom we invite to the support of our
cause. Without it, I am not a little apprehensive that the proclamations
of the combined powers might (contrary to their intention, no doubt) be
looked upon as frauds, and cruel traps laid for their lives.

So far as to the correspondence between our declarations and our
conduct: let the declaration be worded as it will, the conduct is the
practical comment by which, and which alone, it can be understood. This
conduct, acting on the declaration, leaves a monarchy without a monarch,
and without any representative or trustee for the monarch and the
monarchy. It supposes a kingdom without states and orders, a territory
without proprietors, and faithful subjects who are to be left to the
fate of rebels and traitors.

The affair of the establishment of a government is a very difficult
undertaking for foreign powers to act in as _principals_; though