This fraternity is indeed so terrible in its nature, and in its manifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting our apprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, by substituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of an ambiguous quality, and describing such a connexion under the terms of ‘the usual relations of peace and amity.’  By this means the proposed fraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties, which imply no change in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system affect the interior condition of nations.  It is confounded with those conventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers are compromised, by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender of a frontier town, or a disputed district, on the one side or the other; by pactions in which the pretensions of families are settled, (as by a conveyancer, making family substitutions and successions,) without any alterations in the laws, manners, religion, privileges, and customs, of the cities, or territories, which are the subject of such arrangements.

All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous collection called the corps diplomatique, forms the code or statute law, as the methodised reasonings of the great publicists and jurists from the digest and jurisprudence of the Christian world.  In these treasures are to be found the usual relations of peace and amity in civilised Europe; and there the relations of ancient France were to be found amongst the rest.

The present system in France is not the ancient France.  It is not the ancient France with ordinary ambition and ordinary means.  It is not a new power of an old kind.  It is a new power of a new species.  When such a questionable shape is to be admitted for the first time into the brotherhood of Christendom, it is not a mere matter of idle curiosity to consider how far it is in its nature alliable with the rest, or whether ‘the relations of peace and amity’ with this new state are likely to be of the same nature with the usual relations of the states of Europe.

The Revolution in France had the relation of France to other nations as one of its principal objects.  The changes made by that Revolution were not the better to accommodate her to the old and usual relations, but to produce new ones.  The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable; not to make her a neighbour, but a mistress; not to make her more observant of laws, but to put her in a condition to impose them.  To make France truly formidable it was necessary that France should be new modelled.  They, who have not followed the train of the late proceedings, have been led by deceitful representations (which deceit made a part in the plan) to conceive that this totally new model of a state, in which nothing escaped a change, was made with a view to its internal relations only.