r if any such should be found on
paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance,
regarded or practised. In all their successions, not one magistrate, or
one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult;
everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one
revolutionary cabal, operating within itself upon itself. That cabal is
all in all. France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of,
where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all
affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest
and most recondite parts of their household concerns. The helots of
Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the
negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so
penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery. Much would these servile
wretches call for our pity under that unheard-of yoke, if for their
perfidious and unnatural rebellion, and for their murder of the mildest
of all monarchs, they did not richly deserve a punishment not greater
than their crime.

On the whole, therefore, I take it to be a great mistake to think that
the want of power in the government furnished a natural cause of war;
whereas the greatness of its power, joined to its use of that power, the
nature of its system, and the persons who acted in it, did naturally
call for a strong military resistance to oppose them, and rendered it
not only just, but necessary. But at present I say no more on the genius
and character of the power set up in France. I may probably trouble you
with it more at large hereafter: this subject calls for a very full
exposure: at present it is enough for me, if I point it out as a matter
well worthy of consideration, whether the true ground of hostility was
not rightly conceived very early in this war, and whether anything has
happened to change that system, except our ill success in a war which in
no principal instance had its true destination as the object of its
operations. That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted;
but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted,
dispirited, and must submit. This would be intelligible. The world would
be inclined to pardon the abject conduct of an undone nation. But let us
not conceal from _ourselves_ our real situation, whilst, by every
species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of
it to the enemy.

Th