y which ever yet have overpowered the imagination
and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end,
unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims
and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could
not believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on the
principles which habit rather than Nature had persuaded them were
necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary
modes of action. But the constitution of any political being, as well as
that of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture to
say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic. That
bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned
for the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened her
traffic with the world.

The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced
manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and
half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and
famished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course,
from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actually
conquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited,
deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of
the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to
them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a
display of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatest
military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem
not to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of what
subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition is only to be admitted to
a more favored class in the order of servitude under that domineering
power.

This seems the temper of the day. At first the French force was too much
despised. Now it is too much dreaded. As inconsiderate courage has given
way to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that, through the medium of
deliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude. Who
knows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival of
high sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the
expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair which
has often subdued distempers in the state for which no remed