in every section of his remarks.  For this reason, amongst others, I follow the advice which the able writer gives in his last page, which is, “to consider the impression of what he has urged, taken from the whole, and not from detached paragraphs.”  That caution was not absolutely necessary.  I should think it unfair to the author and to myself to have proceeded otherwise.  This author’s whole, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be again referred to the whole.  Without this latter attention, several of the passages would certainly remain covered with an impenetrable and truly oracular obscurity.

The great, general, pervading purpose, of the whole pamphlet is to reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France.  In this general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken.  The other purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to show, first, that the time of the Remarks was the favorable time for making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy’s side their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms as he is pleased to offer was rationally to be expected; the third purpose was, to make some sort of disclosure of the terms which, if the Regicides are pleased to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept:  these form the basis of the negotiation which the author, whoever he is, proposes to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it,—­that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with.  This I find, as a thing of no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks.  That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation.  In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of France.  The word France is slipped in just as if the government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe.  “France,” says the author, “will do this,”—­“it is the interest of France,”—­“the returning honor and generosity of France,” &c., &c.—­always merely France:  just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe,—­and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other.  This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction.