The great means, therefore, of restoring the monarchy, which we have made the main object of the war, is, to assist the dignity, the religion, and the property of France to repossess themselves of the means of their natural influence.  This ought to be the primary object of all our politics and all our military operations.  Otherwise everything will move in a preposterous order, and nothing but confusion and destruction will follow.

I know that misfortune is not made to win respect from ordinary minds.  I know that there is a leaning to prosperity, however obtained, and a prejudice in its favor.  I know there is a disposition to hope something from the variety and inconstancy of villany, rather than from the tiresome uniformity of fixed principle.  There have been, I admit, situations in which a guiding person or party might be gained over, and through him or them the whole body of a nation.  For the hope of such a conversion, and of deriving advantage from enemies, it might be politic for a while to throw your friends into the shade.  But examples drawn from history in occasions like the present will be found dangerously to mislead us.  France has no resemblance to other countries which have undergone troubles and been purified by them.  If France, Jacobinized as it has been for four full years, did contain any bodies of authority and disposition to treat with you, (most assuredly she does not,) such is the levity of those who have expelled everything respectable in their country, such their ferocity, their arrogance, their mutinous spirit, their habits of defying everything human and divine, that no engagement would hold with them for three months; nor, indeed, could they cohere together for any purpose of civilized society, if left as they now are.  There must be a means, not only of breaking their strength within themselves, but of civilizing them; and these two things must go together, before we can possibly treat with them, not only as a nation, but with any division of them.  Descriptions of men of their own race, but better in rank, superior in property and decorum, of honorable, decent, and orderly habits, are absolutely necessary to bring them to such a frame as to qualify them so much as to come into contact with a civilized nation.  A set of those ferocious savages with arms in their hands, left to themselves in one part of the country whilst you proceed to another, would break forth into outrages at least as bad as their former.  They must, as fast as gained, (if ever they are gained,) be put under the guide, direction, and government of better Frenchmen than themselves, or they will instantly relapse into a fever of aggravated Jacobinism.

We must not judge of other parts of France by the temporary submission of Toulon, with two vast fleets in its harbor, and a garrison far more numerous than all the inhabitants able to bear arms.  If they were left to themselves, I am quite sure they would not retain their attachment to monarchy of any name for a single week.