be of the greatest advantage, will be the greatest misfortune that ever happened to this nation.  The more we multiply troops there, the more we shall multiply causes and means of quarrel amongst ourselves.  I know but one way of avoiding it, which is, to give a greater degree of simplicity to our politics.  Our situation does necessarily render them a good deal involved.  And to this evil, instead of increasing it, we ought to apply all the remedies in our power.

See what is in that place the consequence (to say nothing of every other) of this complexity.  Toulon has, as it were, two gates,—­an English and a Spanish.  The English gate is by our policy fast barred against the entrance of any Royalists.  The Spaniards open theirs, I fear, upon no fixed principle, and with very little judgment.  By means, however, of this foolish, mean, and jealous policy on our side, all the Royalists whom the English might select as most practicable, and most subservient to honest views, are totally excluded.  Of those admitted the Spaniards are masters.  As to the inhabitants, they are a nest of Jacobins, which is delivered into our hands, not from principle, but from fear.  The inhabitants of Toulon may be described in a few words.  It is differtum nautis, cauponibus atque malignis.  The rest of the seaports are of the same description.

Another thing which I cannot account for is, the sending for the Bishop of Toulon and afterwards forbidding his entrance.  This is as directly contrary to the declaration as it is to the practice of the allied powers.  The king of Prussia did better.  When he took Verdun, he actually reinstated the bishop and his chapter.  When he thought he should be the master of Chalons, he called the bishop from Flanders, to put him into possession.  The Austrians have restored the clergy wherever they obtained possession.  We have proposed to restore religion as well as monarchy; and in Toulon we have restored neither the one nor the other.  It is very likely that the Jacobin sans-culottes, or some of them, objected to this measure, who rather choose to have the atheistic buffoons of clergy they have got to sport with, till they are ready to come forward, with the rest of their worthy brethren, in Paris and other places, to declare that they are a set of impostors, that they never believed in God, and never will preach any sort of religion.  If we give way to our Jacobins in this point, it is fully and fairly putting the government, civil and ecclesiastical, not in the king of France, to whom, as the protector and governor, and in substance the head of the Gallican Church, the nomination to the bishoprics belonged, and who made the Bishop of Toulon,—­it does not leave it with him, or even in the hands of the king of England, or the king of Spain,—­but in the basest Jacobins of a low seaport, to exercise, pro tempore, the sovereignty.  If this point of religion is thus given up, the grand instrument for reclaiming France