Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles at all, they played the game of that faction.  There was a beaten road before them.  The powers of Europe were armed; France had always appeared dangerous; the war was easily diverted from France as a faction, to France as a state.  The princes were easily taught to slide back into their old, habitual course of politics.  They were easily led to consider the flames that were consuming France, not as a warning to protect their own buildings (which were without any party wall, and linked by a contignation into the edifice of France,) but as a happy occasion for pillaging the goods, and for carrying off the materials, of their neighbour’s house.  Their provident fears were changed into avaricious hopes.  They carried on their new designs without seeming to abandon the principles of their old policy.  They pretended to seek, or they flattered themselves that they sought, in the accession of new fortresses, and new territories, a defensive security.  But the security wanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly dangerous in its fortresses nor in its territories, as in its spirit and its principles.  The aimed, or pretended to aim, at defending themselves against a danger from which there can be no security in any defensive plan.  If armies and fortresses were a defence against Jacobinism, Louis the Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful monarch over a happy people.

This error obliged them, even in their offensive operations, to adopt a plan of war, against the success of which there was something little short of mathematical demonstration.  They refused to take any step which might strike at the heart of affairs.  They seemed unwilling to wound the enemy in any vital part.  They acted through the whole, as if they really wished the conservation of the Jacobin power, as what might be more favourable than the lawful government to the attainment of the petty objects they looked for.  They always kept on the circumference; and the wider and remoter the circle was, the more eagerly they chose it as their sphere of action in this centrifugal war.  The plan they pursued, in its nature demanded great length of time.  In its execution, they, who went the nearest way to work, were obliged to cover an incredible extent of country.  It left to the enemy every means of destroying this extended line of weakness.  Ill success in any part was sure to defeat the effect of the whole.  This is true of Austria.  It is still more true of England.  On this false plan, even good fortune, by further weakening the victor, put him but the further off from his object.

As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit of aggrandisement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all the coalesced powers.  Some sought an accession of territory at the expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of faith and friendship.