m as the breaking of a
bubble. Regard to decency, or to rank, might have taught you better; or
pride inspired you, though virtue could not. There is not left a step in
the degradation of character to which you can now descend; you have put
your foot on the ground floor, and the key of the dungeon is turned upon
you.

That the invitation may want nothing of being a complete monster,
you have thought proper to finish it with an assertion which has no
foundation, either in fact or philosophy; and as Mr. Ferguson, your
secretary, is a man of letters, and has made civil society his study,
and published a treatise on that subject, I address this part to him.

In the close of the paragraph which I last quoted, France is styled the
"natural enemy" of England, and by way of lugging us into some strange
idea, she is styled "the late mutual and natural enemy" of both
countries. I deny that she ever was the natural enemy of either; and
that there does not exist in nature such a principle. The expression
is an unmeaning barbarism, and wholly unphilosophical, when applied to
beings of the same species, let their station in the creation be what
it may. We have a perfect idea of a natural enemy when we think of the
devil, because the enmity is perpetual, unalterable and unabateable. It
admits, neither of peace, truce, or treaty; consequently the warfare is
eternal, and therefore it is natural. But man with man cannot arrange
in the same opposition. Their quarrels are accidental and equivocally
created. They become friends or enemies as the change of temper, or the
cast of interest inclines them. The Creator of man did not constitute
them the natural enemy of each other. He has not made any one order of
beings so. Even wolves may quarrel, still they herd together. If any two
nations are so, then must all nations be so, otherwise it is not nature
but custom, and the offence frequently originates with the accuser.
England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as France is of
England, and perhaps more so. Separated from the rest of Europe, she
has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and imagines in others the
jealousy she creates in herself. Never long satisfied with peace,
she supposes the discontent universal, and buoyed up with her own
importance, conceives herself the only object pointed at. The expression
has been often used, and always with a fraudulent design; for when the
idea of a natural enemy is conceived, it prevents a