tored in France, may be
restored in too great strength for the liberty and happiness of the
natives, and for the tranquillity of other states. They are therefore of
opinion that terms ought to be made for the modification of that
monarchy. They are persons too considerable, from the powers of their
mind, and from their situation, as well as from the real respect I have
for them, who seem to entertain these apprehensions, to let me pass them
by unnoticed.

As to the power of France as a state, and in its exterior relations, I
confess my fears are on the part of its extreme reduction. There is
undoubtedly something in the vicinity of France, which makes it
naturally and properly an object of our watchfulness and jealousy,
whatever form its government may take. But the difference is great
between a plan for our own security and a scheme for the utter
destruction of France. If there were no other countries in the political
map but these two, I admit that policy might justify a wish to lower our
neighbor to a standard which would even render her in some measure, if
not wholly, our dependant. But the system of Europe is extensive and
extremely complex. However formidable to us, as taken in this one
relation, France is not equally dreadful to all other states. On the
contrary, my clear opinion is, that the liberties of Europe cannot
possibly be preserved but by her remaining a very great and
preponderating power. The design at present evidently pursued by the
combined potentates, or of the two who lead, is totally to destroy her
as such a power. For Great Britain resolves that she shall have no
colonies, no commerce, and no marine. Austria means to take away the
whole frontier, from the borders of Switzerland to Dunkirk. It is their
plan also to render the interior government lax and feeble, by
prescribing, by force of the arms of rival and jealous nations, and
without consulting the natural interests of the kingdom, such
arrangements as, in the actual state of Jacobinism in France, and the
unsettled state in which property must remain for a long time, will
inevitably produce such distraction and debility in government as to
reduce it to nothing, or to throw it back into its old confusion. One
cannot conceive so frightful a state of a nation. A maritime country
without a marine and without commerce; a continental country without a
frontier, and for a thousand miles surrounded with powerful, warlike,
and ambitious neighbors! I