society is a ground of war.  But the exercise of that competent jurisdiction is a matter of moral prudence.  As suits in civil society, so war in the political, must ever be a matter of great deliberation.  It is not this or that particular proceeding, picked out here and there, as a subject of quarrel, that will do.  There must be an aggregate of mischief.  There must be marks of deliberation; there must be traces of design; there must be indications of malice; there must be tokens of ambition.  There must be force in the body where they exist; there must be energy in the mind.  When all these circumstances combine, or the important parts of them, the duty of the vicinity calls for the exercise of its competence:  and the rules of prudence do not restrain, but demand it.

In describing the nuisance erected by so pestilential a manufactory, by the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of the evil.  No man who has attended to the particulars of what has been done in France, and combined them with the principles there asserted, can possibly doubt it.  When I compare with this great cause of nations the trifling points of honor, the still more contemptible points of interest, the light ceremonies, the undefinable punctilios, the disputes about precedency, the lowering or the hoisting of a sail, the dealing in a hundred or two of wildcat-skins on the other side of the globe, which have often kindled up the flames of war between nations, I stand astonished at those persons who do not feel a resentment, not more natural than politic, at the atrocious insults that this monstrous compound offers to the dignity of every nation, and who are not alarmed with what it threatens to their safety.

I have therefore been decidedly of opinion, with our declaration at Whitehall in the beginning of this war, that the vicinage of Europe had not only a right, but an indispensable duty and an exigent interest, to denunciate this new work, before it had produced the danger we have so sorely felt, and which we shall long feel.  The example of what is done by France is too important not to have a vast and extensive influence; and that example, backed with its power, must bear with great force on those who are near it, especially on those who shall recognize the pretended republic on the principle upon which it now stands.  It is not an old structure, which you have found as it is, and are not to dispute of the original end and design with which it had been so fashioned.  It is a recent wrong, and can plead no prescription.  It violates the rights upon which not only the community of France, but those on which all communities are founded.  The principles on which they proceed are general principles, and are as true in England as in any other country.  They who (though with the purest intentions) recognize the authority