which I have in vain
endeavored to resist has urged me to raise one feeble cry against this
unfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make a
coalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of the
world. No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me
with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by this
junction of parties under the soothing name of peace. We are apt to
speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by which
dubious wars terminate in humiliating treaties. It is here the direct
contrary. I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at the
intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able with
deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity.

This fraternity is, indeed, so terrible in its nature, and in its
manifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting our
apprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, by
substituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of an
ambiguous quality, and describing such a connection under the terms of
"_the usual relations of peace and amity_." By this means the proposed
fraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties which imply no
change in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system affect
the interior condition of nations. It is confounded with those
conventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers are
compromised by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender of a
frontier town or a disputed district on the one side or the other, by
pactions in which the pretensions of families are settled, (as by a
conveyancer making family substitutions and successions,) without any
alteration in the laws, manners, religion, privileges, and customs of
the cities or territories which are the subject of such arrangements.

All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous
collection called the _Corps Diplomatique_, forms the code or statute
law, as the methodized reasonings of the great publicists and jurists
form the digest and jurisprudence, of the Christian world. In these
treasures are to be found the _usual_ relations of peace and amity in
civilized Europe; and there the relations of ancient France were to be
found amongst the rest.

The present system in France is not the ancient France. It is not the
ancient France with ordinary ambition and ordinary means. It is not a
new p