to its neighbors for its domestic
strength, that I conceive it will be as much as all its neighbors can
do, by a steady guaranty, to keep that monarchy at all upon its basis.
It will be their business to nurse France, not to exhaust it. France,
such as it is, is indeed highly formidable: not formidable, however, as
a great republic; but as the most dreadful gang of robbers and murderers
that ever was embodied. But this distempered strength of France will be
the cause of proportionable weakness on its recovery. Never was a
country so completely ruined; and they who calculate the resurrection of
her power by former examples have not sufficiently considered what is
the present state of things. Without detailing the inventory of what
organs of government have been destroyed, together with the very
materials of which alone they can be recomposed, I wish it to be
considered what an operose affair the whole system of taxation is in the
old states of Europe. It is such as never could be made but in a long
course of years. In France all taxes are abolished. The present powers
resort to the capital, and to the capital in kind. But a savage,
undisciplined people suffer a _robbery_ with more patience than an
_impost_. The former is in their habits and their dispositions. They
consider it as transient, and as what, in their turn, they may exercise.
But the terrors of the present power are such as no regular government
can possibly employ. They who enter into France do not succeed to
_their_ resources. They have not a system to reform, but a system to
begin. The whole estate of government is to be reacquired.

What difficulties this will meet with in a country exhausted by the
taking of the capital, and among a people in a manner new-principled,
trained, and actually disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and
impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is, and
who may have occupied themselves by revolving in their thoughts what
they were to do, if it fell to their lot to reestablish the affairs of
France. What support or what limitations the restored monarchy must have
may be a doubt, or how it will pitch and settle at last. But one thing I
conceive to be far beyond a doubt: that the settlement cannot be
immediate; but that it must be preceded by some sort of power, equal at
least in vigor, vigilance, promptitude, and decision, to a military
government. For such a _preparatory_ government, no slow-paced,
met