This strong hand is the law, and the sole law, in their state.  I defy any person to show any other law,—­or if any such should be found on paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance, regarded or practised.  In all their successions, not one magistrate, or one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult; everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one revolutionary cabal, operating within itself upon itself.  That cabal is all in all.  France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of, where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest and most recondite parts of their household concerns.  The helots of Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery.  Much would these servile wretches call for our pity under that unheard-of yoke, if for their perfidious and unnatural rebellion, and for their murder of the mildest of all monarchs, they did not richly deserve a punishment not greater than their crime.

On the whole, therefore, I take it to be a great mistake to think that the want of power in the government furnished a natural cause of war; whereas the greatness of its power, joined to its use of that power, the nature of its system, and the persons who acted in it, did naturally call for a strong military resistance to oppose them, and rendered it not only just, but necessary.  But at present I say no more on the genius and character of the power set up in France.  I may probably trouble you with it more at large hereafter:  this subject calls for a very full exposure:  at present it is enough for me, if I point it out as a matter well worthy of consideration, whether the true ground of hostility was not rightly conceived very early in this war, and whether anything has happened to change that system, except our ill success in a war which in no principal instance had its true destination as the object of its operations.  That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted; but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted, dispirited, and must submit.  This would be intelligible.  The world would be inclined to pardon the abject conduct of an undone nation.  But let us not conceal from ourselves our real situation, whilst, by every species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of it to the enemy.

The writer of the Remarks in the Last Week of October appears to think that the present government in France contains many of the elements which, when properly arranged, are known to form the best practical governments,—­and that the system, whatever may become its particular form, is no longer likely to be an obstacle to negotiation.  If its form now be no obstacle to such negotiation, I do not know why it was ever so.  Suppose that