of France and ill affected to the old Constitution here?

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except
those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual
state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not
shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this
communication. I do not except from this observation those who are
willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity.
Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in
my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other
measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief.
Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a
remedy could be at all adopted? We expel suspected foreigners from
hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pass over into France to be
initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to
be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to
return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs. In
France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to
England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who
are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them. But the worst
aliens are the ambassador and his train. These you cannot expel without
a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A
French ambassador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we
have never experienced. The mischief is by far more visible than the
remedy. But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure
of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall
bring it on. In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of
amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication. Everything done
to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Everything, when we let it
proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual
dilemma. But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken.
The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce
us to temporize with all the evils of it. By degrees our minds will be
made to our circumstances. The novelty of such things, which produces
half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off. Our ruin will be
disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a
degenerate people to