anufacture, to destroy the circulation of
money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture, even to
burn a city or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost them
a moment's anxiety. To them the will, the wish, the want, the liberty,
the toil, the blood of individuals, is as nothing. Individuality is left
out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Everything
is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is
trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its
maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominion
and conquest for its sole objects,--dominion over minds by proselytism,
over bodies by arms.

Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means, which are
lessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, France
has, since the accomplishment of the Revolution, a complete unity in its
direction. It has destroyed every resource of the state which depends
upon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of convention
disappear. The advantages of Nature in some measure remain; even these,
I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what remains is
complete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats will expire,
and we laugh at the last price of them. But what signifies the fate of
those tickets of despotism? The despotism will find despotic means of
supply. They have found the short cut to the productions of Nature,
while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged to wind through the
labyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon the
fruit of the labor; they seize upon the laborer himself. Were France but
half of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability of
its force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be too
strong for most of the states of Europe, constituted as they are, and
proceeding as they proceed. Would it be wise to estimate what the world
of Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khan,
upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in the
remotest Tartary from whence first issued that scourge of the human
race? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks,
or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which
Mahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful
empires of the world, beat one of them totally to the ground, broke to
pieces th