d be a fight at all, and not an
ignominious surrender of everything which has made our country venerable
in our eyes and dear to our hearts,) we shall have to light with but a
portion of our strength against the whole of theirs. Gentlemen who not
long since thought with us, but who now recommend a Jacobin peace, were
at that time sufficiently aware of the existence of a dangerous Jacobin
faction within this kingdom. Awhile ago they seemed to be tremblingly
alive to the number of those who composed it, to their dark subtlety, to
their fierce audacity, to their admiration of everything that passes in
France, to their eager desire of a close communication with the mother
faction there. At this moment, when the question is upon the opening of
that communication, not a word of our English Jacobins. That faction is
put out of sight and out of thought. "It vanished at the crowing of the
cock." Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light begun to
utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor Tory geese to
alarm the garrison of the Capitol was forgot.[11] There was enough of
indemnity before. Now a complete act of oblivion is passed about the
Jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would make a
principal object in all fair deliberation upon the merits of a project
of amity with the Jacobins of France. But however others may choose to
forget the faction, the faction does not choose to forget itself, nor,
however gentlemen may choose to flatter themselves, it does not forget
them.
Never, in any civil contest, has a part been taken with more of the
warmth, or carried on with more of the arts of a party. The Jacobins are
worse than lost to their country. Their hearts are abroad. Their
sympathy with the Regicides of France is complete. Just as in a civil
contest, they exult in all their victories, they are dejected and
mortified in all their defeats. Nothing that the Regicides can do (and
they have labored hard for the purpose) can alienate them from their
cause. You and I, my dear Lord, have often observed on the spirit of
their conduct. When the Jacobins of France, by their studied,
deliberated, catalogued files of murders with the poniard, the sabre,
and the tribunal, have shocked whatever remained of human sensibility
in our breasts, then it was they distinguished the resources of party
policy. They did not venture directly to confront the public sentiment;
for a very short time they seemed
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