There is another piece of policy, not more laudable than this, in reading these moral lectures, which lessens our hatred to criminals and our pity to sufferers by insinuating that it has been owing to their fault or folly that the latter have become the prey of the former.  By flattering us that we are not subject to the same vices and follies, it induces a confidence that we shall not suffer the same evils by a contact with the infamous gang of robbers who have thus robbed and butchered our neighbors before our faces.  We must not be flattered to our ruin.  Our vices are the same as theirs, neither more nor less.  If any faults we had, which wanted this French example to call us to a “softening of character, and a review of our social relations and duties,” there is yet no sign that we have commenced our reformation.  We seem, by the best accounts I have from the world, to go on just as formerly, “some to undo, and some to be undone.”  There is no change at all:  and if we are not bettered by the sufferings of war, this peace, which, for reasons to himself best known, the author fixes as the period of our reformation, must have something very extraordinary in it; because hitherto ease, opulence, and their concomitant pleasure have never greatly disposed mankind to that serious reflection and review which the author supposes to be the result of the approaching peace with vice and crime.  I believe he forms a right estimate of the nature of this peace, and that it will want many of those circumstances which formerly characterizes that state of things.

If I am right in my ideas of this new republic, the different states of peace and war will make no difference in her pursuits.  It is not an enemy of accident that we have to deal with.  Enmity to us, and to all civilized nations, is wrought into the very stamina of its Constitution.  It was made to pursue the purposes of that fundamental enmity.  The design will go on regularly in every position and in every relation.  Their hostility is to break us to their dominion; their amity is to debauch us to their principles.  In the former, we are to contend with their force; in the latter, with their intrigues.  But we stand in a very different posture of defence in the two situations.  In war, so long as government is supported, we fight with the whole united force of the kingdom.  When under the name of peace the war of intrigue begins, we do not contend against our enemies with the whole force of the kingdom.  No,—­we shall have to fight, (if it should be a fight at all, and not an ignominious surrender of everything which has made our country venerable in our eyes and dear to our hearts,) we shall have to light with but a portion of our strength against the whole of theirs.  Gentlemen who not long since thought with us, but who now recommend a Jacobin peace, were at that time sufficiently aware of the existence of a dangerous Jacobin faction within this kingdom.  Awhile ago they seemed to be tremblingly alive to