ul
government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly
France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by
sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we
have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented
sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten
thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification,
and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics.
Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the
_concrete_, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals
who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,--if we
were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of
amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and
tender-hearted Sieyes, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the
humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek
butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that
had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer,
Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity
and concord,--nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional
_douceur_, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious
and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be
shocking and absurd; therefore comes in _abstraction_ and
personification. "Make your peace with France." That word _France_
sounds quite as well as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a
very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd
and shocking in amity and good correspondence with _France_. Permit me
to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France,
and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency
in place of the old Louis-d'or.

Having, therefore, slipped the persons with whom we are to treat out of
view, we are next to be satisfied that the French Revolution, which this
peace is to fix and consolidate, ought to give us no just cause of
apprehension. Though the author labors this point, yet he confesses a
fact (indeed, he could not conceal it) which renders all his labors
utterly fruitless. He confesses that the Regicide means to _dictate_ a
pacification, and that this pacification, according to their decree
passed but a very few days before his publication appeared, is to "unite
to the