I defy the most refining
ingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of the
Jacobin Republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious,
legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing
herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed
resolution of keeping no terms with that world. It has not been, as has
been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only
broke with their old government. They made a schism with the whole
universe, and that schism extended to almost everything, great and
small. For one, I wish, since it is gone thus far, that the breach had
been so complete as to make all intercourse impracticable: but, partly
by accident, partly by design, partly from the resistance of the matter,
enough is left to preserve intercourse, whilst amity is destroyed or
corrupted in its principle.

This violent breach of the community of Europe we must conclude to have
been made (even if they had not expressly declared it over and over
again) either to force mankind into an adoption of their system or to
live in perpetual enmity with a community the most potent we have ever
known. Can any person imagine, that, in offering to mankind this
desperate alternative, there is no indication of a hostile mind, because
men in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a right
to act without coercion in their own territories? As to the right of
men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie,
no such right exists. Men are never in a state of _total_ independence
of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it
conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action
without its having some effect upon others, or, of course, without
producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct. The
_situations_ in which men relatively stand produce the rules and
principles of that responsibility, and afford directions to prudence in
exacting it.

Distance of place does not extinguish the duties or the rights of men;
but it often renders their exercise impracticable. The same circumstance
of distance renders the noxious effects of an evil system in any
community less pernicious. But there are situations where this
difficulty does not occur, and in which, therefore, those duties are
obligatory and these rights are to be asserted. It has ever been the
method of public jurists to draw a great par