However that may be, I consider these things at present chiefly in one point of view, as obstructions to the war on Jacobinism, which must stand as long as the powers think its extirpation but a secondary object, and think of taking advantage, under the name of indemnity and security, to make war upon the whole nation of France, royal and Jacobin, for the aggrandizement of the allies, on the ordinary principles of interest, as if no Jacobinism existed in the world.

So far is France from being formidable to its neighbors for its domestic strength, that I conceive it will be as much as all its neighbors can do, by a steady guaranty, to keep that monarchy at all upon its basis.  It will be their business to nurse France, not to exhaust it.  France, such as it is, is indeed highly formidable:  not formidable, however, as a great republic; but as the most dreadful gang of robbers and murderers that ever was embodied.  But this distempered strength of France will be the cause of proportionable weakness on its recovery.  Never was a country so completely ruined; and they who calculate the resurrection of her power by former examples have not sufficiently considered what is the present state of things.  Without detailing the inventory of what organs of government have been destroyed, together with the very materials of which alone they can be recomposed, I wish it to be considered what an operose affair the whole system of taxation is in the old states of Europe.  It is such as never could be made but in a long course of years.  In France all taxes are abolished.  The present powers resort to the capital, and to the capital in kind.  But a savage, undisciplined people suffer a robbery with more patience than an impost.  The former is in their habits and their dispositions.  They consider it as transient, and as what, in their turn, they may exercise.  But the terrors of the present power are such as no regular government can possibly employ.  They who enter into France do not succeed to their resources.  They have not a system to reform, but a system to begin.  The whole estate of government is to be reacquired.

What difficulties this will meet with in a country exhausted by the taking of the capital, and among a people in a manner new-principled, trained, and actually disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is, and who may have occupied themselves by revolving in their thoughts what they were to do, if it fell to their lot to reestablish the affairs of France.  What support or what limitations the restored monarchy must have may be a doubt, or how it will pitch and settle at last.  But one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt:  that the settlement cannot be immediate; but that it must be preceded by some sort of power, equal at least in vigor, vigilance, promptitude, and decision, to a military government.  For such a preparatory government,