The other sort of men were the politicians.  To them, who had little or not at all reflected on the subject, religion was in itself no object of love or hatred.  They disbelieved it, and that was all.  Neutral with regard to that object, they took the side which in the present state of things might best answer their purposes.  They soon found that they could not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made them sensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with means of conquest, first at home, and then abroad.  The philosophers were the active internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and principles:  the second gave the practical direction.  Sometimes the one predominated in the composition, sometimes the other.  The only difference between them was in the necessity of concealing the general design for a time, and in their dealing with foreign nations:  the fanatics going straight forward and openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zigzag.  In the course of events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloody contentions between them; but at the bottom they thoroughly agreed in all the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all the means of promoting these ends.

Without question, to bring about the unexampled event of the French Revolution, the concurrence of a very great number of views and passions was necessary.  In that stupendous work, no one principle by which the human mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and depraved was left unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and support it by undoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who acted in the Revolution as statesmen, had the exterior aggrandizement of France as their ultimate end in the most minute part of the internal changes that were made.  We, who of late years have been drawn from an attention to foreign affairs by the importance of our domestic discussions, cannot easily form a conception of the general eagerness of the active and energetic part of the French nation, itself the most active and energetic of all nations, previous to its Revolution, upon that subject.  I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the old government, were twenty to one of the same description then or now in England; and few of that description there were who did not emulously set forward the Revolution.  The whole official system, particularly in the diplomatic part, the regulars, the irregulars, down to the clerks in office, (a corps without all comparison more numerous than the same amongst us,) cooeperated in it.  All the intriguers in foreign politics, all the spies, all the intelligencers, actually or late in function, all the candidates for that sort of employment, acted solely upon that principle.