Can I resist this?  Am I responsible for it, if, with a torch in his hand, and a rope about his neck, he makes amende honorable to the sans-culotterie of the Republic one and indivisible?  In that humiliating attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplicate pardon for his menacing proclamations, and, as an expiation to those whom he failed to terrify with his threats, he may abandon those whom he had seduced by his promises.  He may sacrifice the royalists of France, whom he had called to his standard, as a salutary example to those who shall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any other who undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects.

How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to the invectives which the regicides have made against all kings, and particularly against himself?  How can I help it, if this royal propagandist will preach the doctrine of the Rights of Men?  Is it my fault, if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in all his academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers in his dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals?  Can it be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers and all his hussars in these high mysteries?  Am I responsible, if he will make Le Droit de l’Homme, or La Souverainte du Peuple the favorite parole of his military orders?  Now that his troops are to act with the brave legions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity.  He will teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to act like them, and to emulate the glories of the regiment de l’echafaud.  He will employ the illustrious Citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instruct the dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who, like Louis the Sixteenth, (whose cause and person he once took into his protection,) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it, to consider themselves as hereditary kings.  Can I arrest this great potentate in his career of glory?  Am I blamable in recommending virtue and religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because the protector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, to ingratiate himself with the Republic of Philosophy, shall abolish all the three?  It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of the Reformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinistic sabbath, and establishing the decadi of atheism in all his states.  He may even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple of Reason.  In these things, at least, he is truly despotic.  He has now shaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him with horror.  It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall not, however, travel so far to see) the ingenious devices and the elegant transparencies which, on the restoration of peace and the commencement of Prussian liberty, are to decorate Potsdam and Charlottenburg