t, it will have its full
operation. Whilst kings stand firm on their base, though under that base
there is a sure-wrought mine, there will not be wanting to their levees
a single person of those who are attached to their fortune, and not to
their persons or cause; but hereafter none will support a tottering
throne. Some will fly for fear of being crushed under the ruin; some
will join in making it. They will seek, in the destruction of royalty,
fame and power and wealth and the homage of kings, with Reubell, with
Carnot, with Revelliere, and with the Merlins and the Talliens, rather
than suffer exile and beggary with the Condes, or the Broglies, the
Castries, the D'Avarays, the Serents, the Cazales, and the long line of
loyal, suffering, patriot nobility, or to be butchered with the oracles
and the victims of the laws, the D'Ormessons, the D'Espremesnils, and
the Malesherbes. This example we shall give, if, instead of adhering to
our fellows in a cause which is an honor to us all, we abandon the
lawful government and lawful corporate body of France, to hunt for a
shameful and ruinous fraternity with this odious usurpation that
disgraces civilized society and the human race.

And is, then, example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school
of mankind, and they will learn at no other. This war is a war against
that example. It is not a war for Louis the Eighteenth, or even for the
property, virtue, fidelity of France. It is a war for George the Third,
for Francis the Second, and for all the dignity, property, honor,
virtue, and religion of England, of Germany, and of all nations.

I know that all I have said of the systematic unsociability of this
new-invented species of republic, and the impossibility of preserving
peace, is answered by asserting that the scheme of manners, morals, and
even of maxims and principles of state, is of no weight in a question of
peace or war between communities. This doctrine is supported by example.
The case of Algiers is cited, with an hint, as if it were the stronger
case. I should take no notice of this sort of inducement, if I had found
it only where first it was. I do not want respect for those from whom I
first heard it; but, having no controversy at present with them, I only
think it not amiss to rest on it a little, as I find it adopted, with
much more of the same kind, by several of those on whom such reasoning
had formerly made no apparent impression. If it had no force to pr