rough, ill-kept, broken-up,
treacherous French causeway!

The Declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid before
Parliament contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attempts
and all our failures,--a concise, but correct narrative of the painful
steps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris,--a clear
exposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of that
experiment,--an honest confession of our departure from all the rules
and all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudence
in the conduct of it,--and to crown the whole, a fair account of the
atrocious manner in which the Regicide enemies had broken up what had
been so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, and
with all scorn, driving our suppliant ambassador out of the limits of
their usurpation.

Even after all that I have lately seen, I was a little surprised at this
exposure. A minute display of hopes formed without foundation and of
labors pursued without fruit is a thing not very flattering to
self-estimation. But truth has its rights, and it will assert them. The
Declaration, after doing all this with a mortifying candor, concludes
the whole recapitulation with an engagement still more extraordinary
than all the unusual matter it contains. It says that "His Majesty, who
had entered into the negotiation with _good faith_, who had suffered
_no_ impediment to prevent his prosecuting it with _earnestness and
sincerity_, has now _only to lament_ its abrupt termination, and to
renew _in the face of all Europe the solemn declaration_, that, whenever
his enemies shall be _disposed_ to enter on the work of general
pacification in a spirit of conciliation and equity, nothing shall be
wanting on his part to contribute to the accomplishment of that great
object."

If the disgusting detail of the accumulated insults we have received, in
what we have very properly called our "solicitation" to a gang of felons
and murderers, had been produced as a proof of the utter inefficacy of
that mode of proceeding with that description of persons, I should have
nothing at all to object to it. It might furnish matter conclusive in
argument and instructive in policy; but, with all due submission to high
authority, and with all decent deference to superior lights, it does not
seem quite clear to a discernment no better than mine that the premises
in that piece conduct irresistibly to the conclusion. A labored d