hope, and there is no medium for them betwixt the highest elevation and death with infamy.  Never can they, who, from the miserable servitude of the desk, have been raised to empire, again submit to the bondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying music, or writing plaidoyers by the sheet.  It has made me often smile in bitterness, when I have heard talk of an indemnity to such men, provided they returned to their allegiance.

From all this what is my inference?  It is, that this new system of robbery in France cannot be rendered safe by any art; that it must be destroyed, or that it will destroy all Europe; that to destroy that enemy, by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerable parts.  These are my inferences.  In one word, with this republic nothing independent can coexist.  The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were more pardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which the allied courts may fall.  They have the benefit of his dreadful example.

The unhappy Louis the Sixteenth was a man of the best intentions that probably ever reigned.  He was by no means deficient in talents.  He had a most laudable desire to supply by general reading, and even by the acquisition of elemental knowledge, an education in all points originally defective; but nobody told him (and it was no wonder he should not himself divine it) that the world of which he read and the world in which he lived were no longer the same.  Desirous of doing everything for the best, fearful of cabal, distrusting his own judgment, he sought his ministers of all kinds upon public testimony.  But as courts are the field for caballers, the public is the theatre for mountebanks and impostors.  The cure for both those evils is in the discernment of the prince.  But an accurate and penetrating discernment is what in a young prince could not be looked for.

His conduct in its principle was not unwise; but, like most other of his well-meant designs, it failed in his hands.  It failed partly from mere ill fortune, to which speculators are rarely pleased to assign that very large share to which she is justly entitled in all human affairs.  The failure, perhaps, in part, was owing to his suffering his system to be vitiated and disturbed by those intrigues which it is, humanly speaking, impossible wholly to prevent in courts, or indeed under any form of government.  However, with these aberrations, he gave himself over to a succession of the statesmen of public opinion.  In other things he thought that he might be a king on the terms of his predecessors.  He was conscious of the purity of his heart and the general good tendency of his government.  He flattered himself, as most men in his situation will, that he might consult his ease without danger to his safety.  It is not