If to preserve political independence and civil freedom to nations was a just ground of war, a war to preserve national independence, property, liberty, life, and honor from certain universal havoc is a war just necessary, manly, pious; and we are bound to persevere in it by every principle, divine and human, as long as the system which menaces them all, and all equally, has an existence in the world.

You, who have looked at this matter with as fair and impartial an eye as can be united with a feeling heart, you will not think it an hardy assertion, when I affirm that it were far better to be conquered by any other nation than to have this faction for a neighbor.  Before I felt myself authorized to say this, I considered the state of all the countries in Europe for these last three hundred years, which have been obliged to submit to a foreign law.  In most of those I found the condition of the annexed countries even better, certainly not worse, than the lot of those which were the patrimony of the conqueror.  They wanted some blessings, but they were free from many very great evils.  They were rich and tranquil.  Such was Artois, Flanders, Lorraine, Alsatia, under the old government of France.  Such was Silesia under the King of Prussia.  They who are to live in the vicinity of this new fabric are to prepare to live in perpetual conspiracies and seditions, and to end at last in being conquered, if not to her dominion, to her resemblance.  But when we talk of conquest by other nations, it is only to put a case.  This is the only power in Europe by which it is possible we should be conquered.  To live under the continual dread of such immeasurable evils is itself a grievous calamity.  To live without the dread of them is to turn the danger into the disaster.  The influence of such a France is equal to a war, its example more wasting than an hostile irruption.  The hostility with any other power is separable and accidental:  this power, by the very condition of its existence, by its very essential constitution, is in a state of hostility with us, and with all civilized people.[30]

A government of the nature of that set up at our very door has never been hitherto seen or even imagined in Europe.  What our relation to it will be cannot be judged by other relations.  It is a serious thing to have a connection with a people who live only under positive, arbitrary, and changeable institutions,—­and those not perfected nor supplied nor explained by any common, acknowledged rule of moral science.  I remember, that, in one of my last conversations with the late Lord Camden, we were struck much in the same manner with the abolition in France of the law as a science of methodized and artificial equity.  France, since her Revolution, is under the sway of a sect whose leaders have deliberately, at one stroke, demolished the whole body of that jurisprudence which France had pretty nearly in common with other civilized countries.  In that jurisprudence were contained