ublican policy. This new relation undoubtedly did much. The
discourses and cabals that it produced, the intercourse that it
established, and, above all, the example, which made it seem practicable
to establish a republic in a great extent of country, finished the work,
and gave to that part of the revolutionary faction a degree of strength
which required other energies than the late king possessed to resist or
even to restrain. It spread everywhere; but it was nowhere more
prevalent than in the heart of the court. The palace of Versailles, by
its language, seemed a forum of democracy. To have pointed out to most
of those politicians, from their dispositions and movements, what has
since happened, the fall of their own monarchy, of their own laws, of
their own religion, would have been to furnish a motive the more for
pushing forward a system on which they considered all these things as
incumbrances. Such in truth they were. And we have seen them succeed,
not only in the destruction of their monarchy, but in all the objects
of ambition that they proposed from that destruction.

When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when I
compare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be in
conflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the very
things which make me tremble. The states of the Christian world have
grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by a
great variety of accidents. They have been improved to what we see them
with greater or less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has
been formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As their
constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any
_peculiar_ end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.
The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, and
have become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries, the state
has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state.
Every state has pursued not only every sort of social advantage, but it
has cultivated the welfare of every individual. His wants, his wishes,
even his tastes, have been consulted. This comprehensive scheme
virtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the most
adverse to it. That liberty was found, under monarchies styled absolute,
in a degree unknown to the ancient commonwealths. From hence the powers
of all our modern states meet, in