this government promised greater permanency than any of the former, (a point on which I can form no judgment,) still a link is wanting to couple the permanence of the government with the permanence of the peace.  On this not one word is said:  nor can there be, in my opinion.  This deficiency is made up by strengthening the first ringlet of the chain, that ought to be, but that is not, stretched to connect the two propositions.  All seems to be done, if we can make out that the last French edition of Regicide is like to prove stable.

As a prognostic of this stability, it is said to be accepted by the people.  Here again I join issue with the fraternizers, and positively deny the fact.  Some submission or other has been obtained, by some means or other, to every government that hitherto has been set up.  And the same submission would, by the same means, be obtained for any other project that the wit or folly of man could possibly devise.  The Constitution of 1790 was universally received.  The Constitution which followed it, under the name of a Convention, was universally submitted to.  The Constitution of 1793 was universally accepted.  Unluckily, this year’s Constitution, which was formed, and its genethliacon sung by the noble author while it was yet in embryo, or was but just come bloody from the womb, is the only one which in its very formation has been generally resisted by a very great and powerful party in many parts of the kingdom, and particularly in the capital.  It never had a popular choice even in show:  those who arbitrarily erected the new building out of the old materials of their own Convention were obliged to send for an army to support their work:  like brave gladiators, they fought it out in the streets of Paris, and even massacred each other in their house of assembly, in the most edifying manner, and for the entertainment and instruction of their Excellencies the foreign ambassadors, who had a box in this constitutional amphitheatre of a free people.

At length, after a terrible struggle, the troops prevailed over the citizens.  The citizen soldiers, the ever-famed national guards, who had deposed and murdered their sovereign, were disarmed by the inferior trumpeters of that rebellion.  Twenty thousand regular troops garrison Paris.  Thus a complete military government is formed.  It has the strength, and it may count on the stability, of that kind of power.  This power is to last as long as the Parisians think proper.  Every other ground of stability, but from military force and terror, is clean out of the question.  To secure them further, they have a strong corps of irregulars, ready-armed.  Thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution, as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people.  The whole of their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force:  a forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced requisition of soldiers, a forced loan of money.