to wear them, and with the crowns to smite off the
sacred heads themselves, this is a just war.

If a war to prevent Louis the Fourteenth from imposing his religion was
just, a war to prevent the murderers of Louis the Sixteenth from
imposing their irreligion upon us is just: a war to prevent the
operation of a system which makes life without dignity and death without
hope is a just war.

If to preserve political independence and civil freedom to nations was a
just ground of war, a war to preserve national independence, property,
liberty, life, and honor from certain universal havoc is a war just
necessary, manly, pious; and we are bound to persevere in it by every
principle, divine and human, as long as the system which menaces them
all, and all equally, has an existence in the world.

You, who have looked at this matter with as fair and impartial an eye as
can be united with a feeling heart, you will not think it an hardy
assertion, when I affirm that it were far better to be conquered by any
other nation than to have this faction for a neighbor. Before I felt
myself authorized to say this, I considered the state of all the
countries in Europe for these last three hundred years, which have been
obliged to submit to a foreign law. In most of those I found the
condition of the annexed countries even better, certainly not worse,
than the lot of those which were the patrimony of the conqueror. They
wanted some blessings, but they were free from many very great evils.
They were rich and tranquil. Such was Artois, Flanders, Lorraine,
Alsatia, under the old government of France. Such was Silesia under the
King of Prussia. They who are to live in the vicinity of this new fabric
are to prepare to live in perpetual conspiracies and seditions, and to
end at last in being conquered, if not to her dominion, to her
resemblance. But when we talk of conquest by other nations, it is only
to put a case. This is the only power in Europe by which it is
_possible_ we should be conquered. To live under the continual dread of
such immeasurable evils is itself a grievous calamity. To live without
the dread of them is to turn the danger into the disaster. The influence
of such a France is equal to a war, its example more wasting than an
hostile irruption. The hostility with any other power is separable and
accidental: this power, by the very condition of its existence, by its
very essential constitution, is in a state of hostility with us,