of these regicides and robbers upon principle justify their acts, and establish them as precedents.  It is a question not between France and England; it is a question between property and force.  The property claims; and its claim has been allowed.  The property of the nation is the nation.  They who massacre, plunder, and expel the body of the proprietary are murderers and robbers.  The state, in its essence, must be moral and just:  and it may be so, though a tyrant or usurper should be accidentally at the head of it.  This is a thing to be lamented:  but this notwithstanding, the body of the commonwealth may remain in all its integrity and be perfectly sound in its composition.  The present case is different.  It is not a revolution in government.  It is not the victory of party over party.  It is a destruction and decomposition of the whole society; which never can be made of right by any faction, however powerful, nor without terrible consequences to all about it, both in the act and in the example.  This pretended republic is founded in crimes, and exists by wrong and robbery; and wrong and robbery, far from a title to anything, is war with mankind.  To be at peace with robbery is to be an accomplice with it.

Mere locality does not constitute a body politic.  Had Cade and his gang got possession of London, they would not have been the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council.  The body politic of France existed in the majesty of its throne, in the dignity of its nobility, in the honor of its gentry, in the sanctity of its clergy, in the reverence of its magistracy, in the weight and consideration due to its landed property in the several bailliages, in the respect due to its movable substance represented by the corporations of the kingdom.  All these particular molecules united form the great mass of what is truly the body politic in all countries.  They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice; because they can only exist by justice.  Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator.  France, though out of her territorial possession, exists; because the sole possible claimant, I mean the proprietary, and the government to which the proprietary adheres, exists and claims.  God forbid, that if you were expelled from your house by ruffians and assassins, that I should call the material walls, doors, and windows of ——­ the ancient and honorable family of ——!  Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all the esteem and respect I owe to you?  The Regicides in France are not France.  France is out of her bounds, but the kingdom is the same.