they will offer peace “on conditions as moderate”—­as what? as reason and as equity require?  No,—­as moderate “as are suitable to their national dignity.”  National dignity in all treaties I do admit is an important consideration:  they have given us an useful hint on that subject:  but dignity hitherto has belonged to the mode of proceeding, not to the matter of a treaty.  Never before has it been mentioned as the standard for rating the conditions of peace,—­no, never by the most violent of conquerors.  Indemnification is capable of some estimate; dignity has no standard.  It is impossible to guess what acquisitions pride and ambition may think fit for their dignity.  But lest any doubt should remain on what they think for their dignity, the Regicides in the next paragraph tell us “that they will have no peace with their enemies, until they have reduced them to a state which will put them under an impossibility of pursuing their wretched projects,”—­that is, in plain French or English, until they have accomplished our utter and irretrievable ruin.  This is their pacific language.  It flows from their unalterable principle, in whatever language they speak or whatever steps they take, whether of real war or of pretended pacification.  They have never, to do them justice, been at much trouble in concealing their intentions.  We were as obstinately resolved to think them not in earnest:  but I confess, jests of this sort, whatever their urbanity may be, are not much to my taste.

To this conciliatory and amicable public communication our sole answer, in effect, is this:—­“Citizen Regicides! whenever you find yourselves in the humor, you may have a peace with us.  That is a point you may always command.  We are constantly in attendance, and nothing you can do shall hinder us from the renewal of our supplications.  You may turn us out at the door, but we will jump in at the window.”

To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, I do not know a more mortifying spectacle than to see the assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in the antechamber of Regicide.  They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood of his sovereign.  Then, when, sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall have sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shall next glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his pleasure to be awake, and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them.  At the opening of those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their degradation, sneaking