ld certainly make ourselves less a match for her
when it became our concern to arm.

It was said, that, as she had speedily fallen, she might speedily rise
again. He doubted this. That the fall from an height was with an
accelerated velocity; but to lift a weight up to that height again was
difficult, and opposed by the laws of physical and political
gravitation.

In a political view, France was low indeed. She had lost everything,
even to her name.

Jacet ingens littore truncus,
Avolsumque humeris _caput_, et sine _nomine_ corpus.[75]

He was astonished at it; he was alarmed at it; he trembled at the
uncertainty of all human greatness.

Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in
France. The French had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin
that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time
they had completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their
church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their
navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures. They had done
their business for us as rivals in a way in which twenty Ramillies or
Blenheims could never have done it. Were we absolute conquerors, and
France to lie prostrate at our feet, we should be ashamed to send a
commission to settle their affairs which could impose so hard a law upon
the French, and so destructive of all their consequence as a nation, as
that they had imposed upon themselves.

France, by the mere circumstance of its vicinity, had been, and in a
degree always must be, an object of our vigilance, either with regard to
her actual power or to her influence and example. As to the former he
had spoken; as to the latter (her example) he should say a few words:
for by this example our friendship and our intercourse with that nation
had once been, and might again become, more dangerous to us than their
worst hostility.

In the last century, Louis the Fourteenth had established a greater and
better disciplined military force than ever had been before seen in
Europe, and with it a perfect despotism. Though that despotism was
proudly arrayed in manners, gallantry, splendor, magnificence, and even
covered over with the imposing robes of science, literature, and arts,
it was, in government, nothing better than a painted and gilded
tyranny,--in religion, a hard, stern intolerance, the fit companion and
auxiliary to the despotic tyranny which prevailed in