made on the 29th of October, 1793,[27] and still ringing in my ears.  This Declaration was transmitted not only to all our commanders by sea and land, but to our ministers in every court of Europe.  It is the most eloquent and highly finished in the style, the most judicious in the choice of topics, the most orderly in the arrangement, and the most rich in the coloring, without employing the smallest degree of exaggeration, of any state-paper that has ever yet appeared.  An ancient writer (Plutarch, I think it is) quotes some verses on the eloquence of Pericles, who is called “the only orator that left stings in the minds of his hearers.”  Like his, the eloquence of the Declaration, not contradicting, but enforcing, sentiments of the truest humanity, has left stings that have penetrated more than skin-deep into my mind and never can they be extracted by all the surgery of murder; never can the throbbings they have created be assuaged by all the emollient cataplasms of robbery and confiscation.  I cannot love the Republic.

The third point, which they have more clearly expressed than ever, is of equal importance with the rest, and with them furnishes a complete view of the Regicide system.  For they demand as a condition, without which our ambassador of obedience cannot be received with any hope of success, that he shall be “provided with full powers to negotiate a peace between the French Republic and Great Britain, and to conclude it definitively between the TWO powers.”  With their spear they draw a circle about us.  They will hear nothing of a joint treaty.  We must make a peace separately from our allies.  We must, as the very first and preliminary step, be guilty of that perfidy towards our friends and associates with which they reproach us in our transactions with them, our enemies.  We are called upon scandalously to betray the fundamental securities to ourselves and to all nations.  In my opinion, (it is perhaps but a poor one,) if we are meanly bold enough to send an ambassador such as this official note of the enemy requires, we cannot even dispatch our emissary without danger of being charged with a breach of our alliance.  Government now understands the full meaning of the passport.

Strange revolutions have happened in the ways of thinking and in the feelings of men; but it is a very extraordinary coalition of parties indeed, and a kind of unheard-of unanimity in public councils, which can impose this new-discovered system of negotiation, as sound national policy, on the understanding of a spectator of this wonderful scene, who judges on the principles of anything he ever before saw, read, or heard of, and, above all, on the understanding of a person who has in his eye the transactions of the last seven years.