at will.  There was no longer any means of arresting a principle in its course.  When Louis the Sixteenth, under the influence of the enemies to monarchy, meant to found but one republic, he set up two; when he meant to take away half the crown of his neighbor, he lost the whole of his own.  Louis the Sixteenth could not with impunity countenance a new republic.  Yet between his throne and that dangerous lodgment for an enemy, which he had erected, he had the whole Atlantic for a ditch.  He had for an outwork the English nation itself, friendly to liberty, adverse to that mode of it.  He was surrounded by a rampart of monarchies, most of them allied to him, and generally under his influence.  Yet even thus secured, a republic erected under his auspices, and dependent on his power, became fatal to his throne.  The very money which he had lent to support this republic, by a good faith which to him operated as perfidy, was punctually paid to his enemies, and became a resource in the hands of his assassins.

With this example before their eyes, do any ministers in England, do any ministers in Austria, really flatter themselves that they can erect, not on the remote shores of the Atlantic, but in their view, in their vicinity, in absolute contact with one of them, not a commercial, but a martial republic,—­a republic not of simple husbandmen or fishermen, but of intriguers, and of warriors,—­a republic of a character the most restless, the most enterprising, the most impious, the most fierce and bloody, the most hypocritical and perfidious, the most bold and daring, that ever has been seen, or indeed that can be conceived to exist, without bringing on their own certain ruin?

Such is the republic to which we are going to give a place in civilized fellowship,—­the republic which, with joint consent, we are going to establish in the centre of Europe, in a post that overlooks and commands every other state, and which eminently confronts and menaces this kingdom.

You cannot fail to observe that I speak as if the allied powers were actually consenting, and not compelled by events, to the establishment of this faction in France.  The words have not escaped me.  You will hereafter naturally expect that I should make them good.  But whether in adopting this measure we are madly active or weakly passive or pusillanimously panic-struck, the effects will be the same.  You may call this faction, which has eradicated the monarchy, expelled the proprietary, persecuted religion, and trampled upon law,[36]—­you may call this Prance, if you please; but of the ancient France nothing remains but its central geography, its iron frontier, its spirit of ambition, its audacity of enterprise, its perplexing intrigue.  These, and these alone, remain:  and they remain heightened in their principle and augmented in their means.  All the former correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone.  No single new corrective is to be found in the whole body of the new institutions.  How should such a thing be found there, when everything has been chosen with care and selection to forward all those ambitious designs and dispositions, not to control them?  The whole is a body of ways and means for the supply of dominion, without one heterogeneous particle in it.