While we were thus advancing by degrees into the wide field of extended humanity, the alliance with France was concluded; an alliance not formed for the mere purpose of a day, but on just and generous grounds, and with equal and mutual advantages; and the easy affectionate manner in which the parties have since communicated, has made it an alliance, not of courts only, but of countries.  There is now an union of mind as well as of interest; and our hearts as well as our prosperity, call on us to support it.

The people of England not having experienced this change, had likewise no ideas of it, they were hugging to their bosoms the same prejudices we were trampling beneath our feet; and they expected to keep a hold upon America, by that narrowness of thinking which America disdained.  What they were proud of, we despised:  and this is a principal cause why all their negotiations, constructed on this ground, have failed.  We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice.  The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.  There is no possibility, neither is there any term to express the supposition by, of the mind unknowing any thing it already knows; and therefore all attempts on the part of England, fitted to the former habit of America, and on the expectation of their applying now, will be like persuading a seeing man to become blind, and a sensible one to turn an idiot.  The first of which is unnatural and the other impossible.

As to the remark which the Abbe makes on the one country being a monarchy and the other a republic, it can have no essential meaning.  Forms of government have nothing to do with treaties.  The former are the internal police of the countries severally; the latter their external police jointly:  and so long as each performs its part, we have no more right or business to know how the one or the other conducts its domestic affairs, than we have to inquire into the private concerns of a family.

But had the Abbe reflected for a moment, he would have seen that courts, or the governing powers of all countries, be their forms what they may, are relatively republics with each other.  It is the first and true principle of alliancing.  Antiquity may have given precedence, and power will naturally create importance, but their equal right is never disputed.  It may likewise be worthy of remarking, that a monarchical country can suffer nothing in its popular happiness by an alliance with a republican one; and republican governments have never been destroyed by their external connections, but by some internal convulsion or contrivance.  France has been in alliance with the republic of Switzerland for more than two hundred years, and still Switzerland retains her original form as entire as if she had allied with a republic like herself; therefore this remark of the Abbe should go for nothing.—­Besides, it is best mankind should mix.  There is ever something to learn, either of manners or principle; and it is by a free communication, without regard to domestic matters, that friendship is to be extended, and prejudice destroyed all over the world.