ces who, in the
conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were
engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests, or
that they can make peace in the spirit of their former arrangements of
pacification. Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road.

As to me, I was always steadily of opinion that this disorder was not in
its nature intermittent. I conceived that the contest, once begun, could
not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion, but that our
first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we
could make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of an
object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself
that we were at war. As I understood the matter, we were at war, not
with its conduct, but with its existence,--convinced that its existence
and its hostility were the same.

The faction is not local or territorial. It is a general evil. Where it
least appears in action, it is still full of life. In its sleep it
recruits its strength and prepares its exertion. Its spirit lies deep in
the corruptions of our common nature. The social order which restrains
it feeds it. It exists in every country in Europe, and among all orders
of men in every country, who look up to France as to a common head. The
centre is there. The circumference is the world of Europe, wherever the
race of Europe may be settled. Everywhere else the faction is militant;
in France it is triumphant. In France is the bank of deposit and the
bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in
every state. It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too
mischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other
country whilst it is predominant there. War, instead of being the cause
of its force, has suspended its operation. It has given a reprieve, at
least, to the Christian world.

The true nature of a Jacobin war, in the beginning, was by most of the
Christian powers felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precise manner
declared. In the joint manifesto published by the Emperor and the King
of Prussia, on the 4th of August, 1792, it is expressed in the clearest
terms, and on principles which could not fail, if they had adhered to
them, of classing those monarchs with the first benefactors of mankind.
This manifesto was published, as they themselves express it, "to lay
open to the present generation,