ish, mean, and jealous policy on our side, all the
Royalists whom the English might select as most practicable, and most
subservient to honest views, are totally excluded. Of those admitted the
Spaniards are masters. As to the inhabitants, they are a nest of
Jacobins, which is delivered into our hands, not from principle, but
from fear. The inhabitants of Toulon may be described in a few words. It
is _differtum nautis, cauponibus atque malignis_. The rest of the
seaports are of the same description.

Another thing which I cannot account for is, the sending for the Bishop
of Toulon and afterwards forbidding his entrance. This is as directly
contrary to the declaration as it is to the practice of the allied
powers. The king of Prussia did better. When he took Verdun, he actually
reinstated the bishop and his chapter. When he thought he should be the
master of Chalons, he called the bishop from Flanders, to put him into
possession. The Austrians have restored the clergy wherever they
obtained possession. We have proposed to restore religion as well as
monarchy; and in Toulon we have restored neither the one nor the other.
It is very likely that the Jacobin _sans-culottes_, or some of them,
objected to this measure, who rather choose to have the atheistic
buffoons of clergy they have got to sport with, till they are ready to
come forward, with the rest of their worthy brethren, in Paris and other
places, to declare that they are a set of impostors, that they never
believed in God, and never will preach any sort of religion. If we give
way to our Jacobins in this point, it is fully and fairly putting the
government, civil and ecclesiastical, not in the king of France, to
whom, as the protector and governor, and in substance the head of the
Gallican Church, the nomination to the bishoprics belonged, and who made
the Bishop of Toulon,--it does not leave it with him, or even in the
hands of the king of England, or the king of Spain,--but in the basest
Jacobins of a low seaport, to exercise, _pro tempore_, the sovereignty.
If this point of religion is thus given up, the grand instrument for
reclaiming France is abandoned. We cannot, if we would, delude ourselves
about the true state of this dreadful contest. _It is a religious war_.
It includes in its object, undoubtedly, every other interest of society
as well as this; but this is the principal and leading feature. It is
through this destruction of religion that our enemies prop