In their fortune there has been some fluctuation.  We are to see how their minds have been affected with a change.  Some impression it made on them, undoubtedly.  It produced some oblique notice of the submissions that were made by suppliant nations.  The utmost they did was to make some of those cold, formal, general professions of a love of peace which no power has ever refused to make, because they mean little and cost nothing.  The first paper I have seen (the publication at Hamburg) making a show of that pacific disposition discovered a rooted animosity against this nation, and an incurable rancor, even more than any one of their hostile acts.  In this Hamburg declaration they choose to suppose that the war, on the part of England, is a war of government, begun and carried on against the sense and interests of the people,—­thus sowing in their very overtures towards peace the seeds of tumult and sedition:  for they never have abandoned, and never will they abandon, in peace, in war, in treaty, in any situation, or for one instant, their old, steady maxim of separating the people from their government.  Let me add, (and it is with unfeigned anxiety for the character and credit of ministers that I do add,) if our government perseveres in its as uniform course of acting under instruments with such preambles, it pleads guilty to the charges made by our enemies against it, both on its own part and on the part of Parliament itself.  The enemy must succeed in his plan for loosening and disconnecting all the internal holdings of the kingdom.

It was not enough that the speech from the throne, in the opening of the session in 1795, threw out oglings and glances of tenderness.  Lest this coquetting should seem too cold and ambiguous, without waiting for its effect, the violent passion for a relation to the Regicides produced a direct message from the crown, and its consequences from the two Houses of Parliament.  On the part of the Regicides these declarations could not be entirely passed by without notice; but in that notice they discovered still more clearly the bottom of their character.  The offer made to them by the message to Parliament was hinted at in their answer,—­but in an obscure and oblique manner, as before.  They accompanied their notice of the indications manifested on our side with every kind of insolent and taunting reflection.  The Regicide Directory, on the day which, in their gypsy jargon, they call the 5th of Pluviose, in return for our advances, charge us with eluding our declarations under “evasive formalities and frivolous pretexts.”  What these pretexts and evasions were they do not say, and I have never heard.  But they do not rest there.  They proceed to charge us, and, as it should seem, our allies in the mass, with direct perfidy; they are so conciliatory in their language as to hint that this perfidious character is not new in our proceedings.  However, notwithstanding this our habitual perfidy,