I believe that most thinking men would prefer infinitely some sober and sensible form of a republic, in which there was no mention at all of a king, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and personal freedom, to a scheme of tilings like this Democratie Royale, founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation of innocent individuals, and the pretended rights of man,—­and which, in effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy, and landed property of a great nation, threw everything into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind and bloody band of sans-culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail, of this system was a miserable pageant, as its ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses of an hired, frantic, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a scaffold.

This is the Constitution, or Democratie Royale; and this is what infallibly would be again set up in France, to run exactly the same round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to receive the name of a king, leaving it to the Jacobins (that is, to those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the one and to distribute the other as spoil.  By the Jacobins I mean indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of difference between them.  As to any other party, none exists in that unhappy country.  The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or Democrates Royaux, they never had an existence of the smallest degree of power, consideration, or authority, nor, if they differ at all from the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and systematic regicides.  Several attempts have been made to support this chimerical Democratie Royale:  the first was by La Fayette, the last by Dumouriez:  they tended only to show that this absurd project had no party to support it.  The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bordeaux, have made some struggle.  The Constitutionalists never could make any, and for a very plain reason:  they were leaders in rebellion.  All their principles and their whole scheme of government being republican, they could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favor of the unhappy monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the executive officer in their new commonwealth.  They only appeared as traitors to their own Jacobin cause, not as faithful adherents to the king.