are the lowest of our species.  There is no trade so vile and mechanical as government in their hands.  Virtue is not their habit.  They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory.  A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of states passes with them for romance, and the principles that recommend it for the wanderings of a disordered imagination.  The calculators compute them out of their senses.  The jesters and buffoons shame them out of everything grand and elevated.  Littleness in object and in means to them appears soundness and sobriety.  They think there is nothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle, which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers.

Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles at all, they played the game of that faction.  There was a beaten road before them.  The powers of Europe were armed; France had always appeared dangerous; the war was easily diverted from France as a faction to France as a state.  The princes were easily taught to slide back into their old, habitual course of politics.  They were easily led to consider the flames that were consuming France, not as a warning to protect their own buildings, (which were without any party-wall, and linked by a contignation into the edifice of France,) but as an happy occasion for pillaging the goods, and for carrying off the materials of their neighbor’s house.  Their provident fears were changed into avaricious hopes.  They carried on their new designs without seeming to abandon the principles of their old policy.  They pretended to seek, or they flattered themselves that they sought, in the accession of new fortresses and new territories a defensive security.  But the security wanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly dangerous in its fortresses nor in its territories as in its spirit and its principles.  They aimed, or pretended to aim, at defending themselves against a danger from which there can be no security in any defensive plan.  If armies and fortresses were a defence against Jacobinism, Louis the Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful monarch over an happy people.

This error obliged them, even in their offensive operations, to adopt a plan of war against the success of which there was something little short of mathematical demonstration.  They refused to take any step which might strike at the heart of affairs.  They seemed unwilling to wound the enemy in any vital part.  They acted through the whole as if they really wished the conservation of the Jacobin power, as what might be more favorable than the lawful government to the attainment of the petty objects they looked for.  They always kept on the circumference; and the wider and remoter the circle was, the more eagerly they chose it as their sphere of action in this centrifugal war.  The plan they pursued in its nature demanded great length