This day the evil is totally changed in France:  but there is an evil there.  The disease is altered; but the vicinity of the two countries remains, and must remain; and the natural mental habits of mankind are such, that the present distemper of France is far more likely to be contagious than the old one:  for it is not quite easy to spread a passion for servitude among the people; but in all evils of the opposite kind our natural inclinations are flattered.  In the case of despotism, there is the foedum crimen servitutis:  in the last, the falsa SPECIES libertatis; and accordingly, as the historian says, pronis auribus accipitur.

In the last age we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism.  It is not necessary to say anything upon that example.  It exists no longer.  Our present danger from the example of a people whose character knows no medium is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy:  a danger of being led, through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy.  On the side of religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from atheism:  a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed.

These are our present dangers from France.  But, in his opinion, the very worst part of the example set is in the late assumption of citizenship by the army, and the whole of the arrangement, or rather disarrangement, of their military.

He was sorry that his right honorable friend (Mr. Fox) had dropped even a word expressive of exultation on that circumstance, or that he seemed of opinion that the objection from standing armies was at all lessened by it.  He attributed this opinion of Mr. Fox entirely to his known zeal for the best of all causes, liberty.  That it was with a pain inexpressible he was obliged to have even the shadow of a difference with his friend, whose authority would always be great with him, and with all thinking people,—­Quae maxima semper censetur nobis, et ERIT quae maxima semper;—­his confidence in Mr. Fox was such, and so ample, as to be almost implicit.  That he was not ashamed to avow that degree of docility.  That, when the choice is well made, it strengthens, instead of oppressing our intellect.  That he who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own.  He who profits of a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior understanding he unites with.  He had found the benefit of such a junction, and would not lightly depart from it.  He wished almost, on all occasions, that his sentiments were understood to be conveyed in Mr. Fox’s words.  And