Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision in a moment under the guillotine, and before the arrival of these commissioners,—­Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a sort of miracle:  and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets had not been at the door, to give them not only strong, but prompt and immediate succor, especially as neither this nor any other seaport town in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions, manners, and connections among the lower sort of people in those places.  This I take to be the true state of things in France, so far as it regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association, capable of acting or of treating in corps.

As to the oppressed individuals, they are many, and as discontented as men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts with which they are crushed.  They want no stimulus to throw off this dreadful yoke; but they do want, not manifestoes, which they have had even to surfeit, but real protection, force, and succor.

The disputes and questions of men at their ease do not at all affect their minds, or ever can occupy the minds of men in their situation.  These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have done their mischief.  The question is not between the rabble of systems, Fayettism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism, or Federalism, on the one side, and the fundamental laws of France on the other,—­or between all these systems amongst themselves.  It is a controversy (weak, indeed, and unequal, on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber, between the prisoner and the jailer, between the neck and the guillotine.  Four fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder.  But then these men can do little or nothing for themselves.  They have no arms, nor magazines, nor chiefs, nor union, nor the possibility of these things within themselves.  On the whole, therefore, I lay it down as a certainty, that in the Jacobins no change of mind is to be expected, and that no others in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative existence.

The truth is, that France is out of itself,—­the moral France is separated from the geographical.  The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession.  If we look for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public law, (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude,) they are in Flanders, and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England.  There are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the state, there are all the parliaments of the kingdom.