natives have not thought of it,) as an excuse for their infernal system of murder, have so represented them.  It is on this principle that the massacres in the month of September, 1792, were justified by a writer in the Morning Chronicle. He says, indeed, that “the whole French nation is to be given up to the hands of an irritated and revengeful noblesse";—­and, judging of others by himself and his brethren, he says, “Whoever succeeds in a civil war will be cruel.  But here the emigrants, flying to revenge in the cars of military victory, will almost insatiably call for their victims and their booty; and a body of emigrant traitors were attending the King of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick, to suggest the most sanguinary counsels.”  So says this wicked Jacobin; but so cannot say the King of Prussia nor the Duke of Brunswick, who never did receive any sanguinary counsel; nor did the king’s brothers, or that great body of gentlemen who attended those princes, commit one single cruel action, or hurt the person or property of one individual.  It would be right to quote the instance.  It is like the military luxury attributed to these unfortunate sufferers in our common cause.

If these princes had shown a tyrannic disposition, it would be much to be lamented.  We have no others to govern France.  If we screened the body of murderers from their justice, we should only leave the innocent in future to the mercy of men of fierce and sanguinary dispositions, of which, in spite of all our intermeddling in their Constitution, we could not prevent the effects.  But as we have much more reason to fear their feeble lenity than any blamable rigor, we ought, in my opinion, to leave the matter to themselves.

If, however, I were asked to give an advice merely as such, here are my ideas.  I am not for a total indemnity, nor a general punishment.  And first, the body and mass of the people never ought to be treated as criminal.  They may become an object of more or less constant watchfulness and suspicion, as their preservation may best require, but they can never become an object of punishment.  This is one of the few fundamental and unalterable principles of politics.

To punish them capitally would be to make massacres.  Massacres only increase the ferocity of men, and teach them to regard their own lives and those of others as of little value; whereas the great policy of government is, to teach the people to think both of great importance in the eyes of God and the state, and never to be sacrificed or even hazarded to gratify their passions, or for anything but the duties prescribed by the rules of morality, and under the direction of public law and public authority.  To punish them with lesser penalties would be to debilitate the commonwealth, and make the nation miserable, which it is the business of government to render happy and flourishing.

As to crimes, too, I would draw a strong line of limitation.  For no one offence, politically an offence of rebellion, by council, contrivance, persuasion, or compulsion, for none properly a military offence of rebellion, or anything done by open hostility in the field, should any man at all be called in question; because such seems to be the proper and natural death of civil dissensions.  The offences of war are obliterated by peace.