Adieu—­the subject is too humiliating to dwell on.  I feel for myself, I feel for human nature, when I see the fastidiousness of wealth, the more liberal pride of birth, and the yet more allowable pretensions of beauty, degraded into the most abject submission to such a being as Dumont.  Are our principles every where the mere children of circumstance, or is it in this country only that nothing is stable?  For my own part I love inflexibility of character; and pride, even when ill founded, seems more respectable while it sustains itself, than concessions which, refused to the suggestions of reason, are yielded to the dictates of fear.—­Yours.

February 12, 1794.

I was too much occupied by my personal distresses to make any remarks on the revolutionary government at the time of its adoption.  The text of this political phoenomenon must be well known in England—­I shall, therefore, confine myself to giving you a general idea of its spirit and tendency,—­It is, compared to regular government, what force is to mechanism, or the usual and peaceful operations of nature to the ravages of a storm—­it substitutes violence for conciliation, and sweeps with precipitate fury all that opposes its devastating progress.  It refers every thing to a single principle, which is in itself not susceptible of definition, and, like all undefined power, is continually vibrating between despotism and anarchy.  It is the execrable shape of Milton’s Death, “which shape hath none,” and which can be described only by its effects.—­For instance, the revolutionary tribunal condemns without evidence, the revolutionary committees imprison without a charge, and whatever assumes the title of revolutionary is exonerated from all subjection to humanity, decency, reason, or justice.—­Drowning the insurgents, their wives and children, by boatloads, is called, in the dispatch to the Convention, a revolutionary measure—­*

* The detail of the horrors committed in La Vendee and at Nantes were not at this time fully known.  Carrier had, however, acknowledged, in a report read to the Convention, that a boat-load of refractory priests had been drowned, and children of twelve years old condemned by a military commission!  One Fabre Marat, a republican General, wrote, about the same period, I think from Angers, that the Guillotine was too slow, and powder scarce, so that it was concluded more expedient to drown the rebels, which he calls a patriotic baptism!—­The following is a copy of a letter addressed to the Mayor of Paris by a Commissary of the Government: 

“You will give us pleasure by transmitting the details of your fete at Paris last decade, with the hymns that were sung.  Here we all cried "Vive la Republique!" as we ever do, when our holy mother Guillotine is at work.  Within these three days she has shaved eleven priests, one ci-devant noble, a nun, a general, and a superb Englishman, six feet high, and as he was too tall by a head, we have put that into the sack!  At the same time eight hundred rebels were shot at the Pont du Ce, and their carcases thrown into the Loire!—­I understand the army is on the track of the runaways.  All we overtake we shoot on the spot, and in such numbers that the ways are heaped with them!”