If, only twenty-eight years ago, any man in England had said that the Government of France was one that ought to be suffered to exist, he would have been hooted out of any company.  It is notorious that that Government was a cruel despotism; and that we and our forefathers always called it such.  This description of that Government is to be found in all our histories, in all our Parliamentary debates, in all our books on Government and politics.  It is notorious, that the family of Bourbon has produced the most perfidious and bloody monsters that ever disgraced the human form.  It is notorious that millions of Frenchmen have been butchered, and burnt, and driven into exile by their commands.  It is recorded, even in the history of France, that one of them said that the putrid carcass of a Protestant smelt sweet to him.  Even in these latter times, so late as the reign of Louis XIV., it is notorious that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were put to the most cruel death.  In some instances, they were burnt in their houses; in others they were shut into lower rooms, while the incessant noise of kettle-drums over their heads, day and night, drove them to raving madness.  To enumerate all the infernal means employed by this tyrant to torture and kill the people, would fill a volume.  Exile was the lot of those who escaped the swords, the wheels, the axes, the gibbets, the torches of his hell-hounds.  England was the place of refuge for many of these persecuted people.  The grandfather of the present Earl of Radnor, and the father of the venerable Baron Maseres were amongst them; and it is well known that England owes no inconsiderable part of her manufacturing skill and industry to that atrocious persecution.  Enemies of freedom, wherever it existed, this family of Bourbon, in the reign of Louis XIV. and XV., fitted out expeditions for the purpose of restoring the Stuarts to the throne of England, and thereby caused great expense and blood-shed to this nation; and, even the Louis who was beheaded by his subjects, did, in the most perfidious manner, make war upon England, during her war with America.  No matter what was the nature of the cause, his conduct was perfidious; he professed peace while he was preparing for war.  His object could not be to assist freedom, because his own subjects were slaves.

Such was the family that were ruling in France when the French Revolution began.  After it was resolved to go to war against the people of France, all the hirelings of corruption were set to work to gloss over the character and conduct of the old Government, and to paint in the most horrid colours the acts of vengeance which the people were inflicting on the numerous tyrants, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, whom the change of things had placed at their mercy.  The people’s turn was now come, and, in the days of their power, they justly bore in mind the oppressions which they and their forefathers had endured.  The taxes imposed by the Government became at last