The question will be concerning the effect of this French fraternity on the whole mass.  Have we anything to apprehend from Jacobin communication, or have we not?  If we have not, is it by our experience before the war that we are to presume that after the war no dangerous communion can exist between those who are well affected to the new Constitution of France and ill affected to the old Constitution here?

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this communication.  I do not except from this observation those who are willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity.  Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief.  Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a remedy could be at all adopted?  We expel suspected foreigners from hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pass over into France to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs.  In France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them.  But the worst aliens are the ambassador and his train.  These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state.  A French ambassador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we have never experienced.  The mischief is by far more visible than the remedy.  But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall bring it on.  In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication.  Everything done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war.  Everything, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction.  We shall be in a perpetual dilemma.  But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken.  The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce us to temporize with all the evils of it.  By degrees our minds will be made to our circumstances.  The novelty of such things, which produces half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off.  Our ruin will be disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a degenerate people to barter away the most precious jewel of their souls.  Our Constitution is not made for this kind of warfare.  It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence.