and the cries of despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter, went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace.  I have it from good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was hired out for a show of dancing dogs.  I think, without concert, we have made the very same remark, on reading some of their pieces, which, being written for other purposes, let us into a view of their social life.  It struck us that the habits of Paris had no resemblance to the finished virtues, or to the polished vice, and elegant, though not blameless luxury, of the capital of a great empire.  Their society was more like that of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier,—­of a lewd tavern for the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs proper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort of wretches.  This system of manners in itself is at war with all orderly and moral society, and is in its neighborhood unsafe.  If great bodies of that kind were anywhere established in a bordering territory, we should have a right to demand of their governments the suppression of such a nuisance.  What are we to do, if the government and the whole community is of the same description?  Yet that government has thought proper to invite ours to lay by its unjust hatred, and to listen to the voice of humanity as taught by their example.

The operation of dangerous and delusive first principles obliges us to have recourse to the true ones.  In the intercourse between nations, we are apt to rely too much on the instrumental part.  We lay too much weight upon the formality of treaties and compacts.  We do not act much more wisely, when we trust to the interests of men as guaranties of their engagements.  The interests frequently tear to pieces the engagements, and the passions trample upon both.  Entirely to trust to either is to disregard our own safety, or not to know mankind.  Men are not tied to one another by papers and seals.  They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.  It is with nations as with individuals.  Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nation and nation as correspondence in laws, customs, manners, and habits of life.  They have more than the force of treaties in themselves.  They are obligations written in the heart.  They approximate men to men without their knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions.  The secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to equivocate, scuffle, and fight about the terms of their written obligations.