principles and republican policy.  This new relation undoubtedly did much.  The discourses and cabals that it produced, the intercourse that it established, and, above all, the example, which made it seem practicable to establish a republic in a great extent of country, finished the work, and gave to that part of the revolutionary faction a degree of strength which required other energies than the late king possessed to resist or even to restrain.  It spread everywhere; but it was nowhere more prevalent than in the heart of the court.  The palace of Versailles, by its language, seemed a forum of democracy.  To have pointed out to most of those politicians, from their dispositions and movements, what has since happened, the fall of their own monarchy, of their own laws, of their own religion, would have been to furnish a motive the more for pushing forward a system on which they considered all these things as incumbrances.  Such in truth they were.  And we have seen them succeed, not only in the destruction of their monarchy, but in all the objects of ambition that they proposed from that destruction.

When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when I compare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be in conflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the very things which make me tremble.  The states of the Christian world have grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by a great variety of accidents.  They have been improved to what we see them with greater or less degrees of felicity and skill.  Not one of them has been formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design.  As their constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any peculiar end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.  The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, and have become in a manner infinite.  In all these old countries, the state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state.  Every state has pursued not only every sort of social advantage, but it has cultivated the welfare of every individual.  His wants, his wishes, even his tastes, have been consulted.  This comprehensive scheme virtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the most adverse to it.  That liberty was found, under monarchies styled absolute, in a degree unknown to the ancient commonwealths.  From hence the powers of all our modern states meet, in all their movements, with some obstruction.  It is therefore no wonder, that when these states are to be considered as machines to operate for some one great end, that this dissipated and balanced force is not easily concentred, or made to bear with the whole force of the nation upon one point.