The English reader will draw from this work of Brissot, and from the result of the last struggles of this party, some useful lessons.  He will be enabled to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to guide and enlighten us, and who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to paint the French Revolution and its consequences in brilliant and flattering colors.  They will know how to appreciate the liberty of France, which has been so much magnified in England.  They will do justice to the wisdom and goodness of their sovereign and his Parliament, who have put them into a state of defence, in the war audaciously made upon us in favor of that kind of liberty.  When we see (as here we must see) in their true colors the character and policy of our enemies, our gratitude will become an active principle.  It will produce a strong and zealous cooeperation with the efforts of our government in favor of a Constitution under which we enjoy advantages the full value of which the querulous weakness of human nature requires sometimes the opportunity of a comparison to understand and to relish.

Our confidence in those who watch for the public will not be lessened.  We shall be sensible that to alarm us in the late circumstances of our affairs was not for our molestation, but for our security.  We shall be sensible that this alarm was not ill-timed,—­and that it ought to have been given, as it was given, before the enemy had time fully to mature and accomplish their plans for reducing us to the condition of France, as that condition is faithfully and without exaggeration described in the following work.  We now have our arms in our hands; we have the means of opposing the sense, the courage, and the resources of England to the deepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined, and the most extensive design that ever was carried on, since the beginning of the world, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and all real freedom.

The reader is requested to attend to the part of this pamphlet which relates to the conduct of the Jacobins with regard to the Austrian Netherlands, which they call Belgia or Belgium.  It is from page seventy-two to page eighty-four of this translation.  Here their views and designs upon all their neighbors are fully displayed.  Here the whole mystery of their ferocious politics is laid open with the utmost clearness.  Here the manner in which they would treat every nation into which they could introduce their doctrines and influence is distinctly marked.  We see that no nation was out of danger, and we see what the danger was with which every nation was threatened.  The writer of this pamphlet throws the blame of several of the most violent of the proceedings on the other party.  He and his friends, at the time alluded to, had a majority in the National Assembly.  He admits that neither he nor they ever publicly opposed these measures; but he attributes their silence to a fear of rendering themselves suspected.  It is most certain, that, whether from fear or from approbation, they never discovered any dislike of those proceedings till Dumouriez was driven from the Netherlands.  But whatever their motive was, it is plain that the most violent is, and since the Revolution has always been, the predominant party.