“We are sure, therefore, that at the meeting of the ensuing diet, your majesty will not confine yourself to the objects mentioned in your rescript, but will also restore our freedom to us, in like manner as to the Belgians, who have conquered theirs with the sword.  It would be an example big with danger, to teach the world that a people can only protect or regain their liberties by the sword and not by obedience.”

But Leopold, trembling at the progress which freedom was making in France, determined to crush this spirit with an iron heel.  Their petition was rejected with scorn and menace.

With great splendor Leopold entered Presburg, and was crowned King of Hungary on the 10th of November, 1790.  Having thus silenced the murmurs in Hungary, and established his authority there, he next turned his attention to the recovery of the Netherlands.  The people there, breathing the spirit of French liberty, had, by a simultaneous rising, thrown off the detestable Austrian yoke.  Forty-five thousand men were sent to effect their subjugation.  On the 20th of November, the army appeared before Brussels.  In less than one year all the provinces were again brought under subjection to the Austrian power.

Leopold, thus successful, now turned his attention to France.  Maria Antoinette was his sister.  He had another sister in the infamous Queen Caroline of Naples.  The complaints which came incessantly from Versailles and the Tuilleries filled his ear, touched his affections, and roused his indignation.  Twenty-five millions of people had ventured to assert their rights against the intolerable arrogance of the French court.  Leopold now gathered his armies to trample those people down, and to replace the scepter of unlimited despotism in the hands of the Bourbons.  With sleepless zeal Leopold cooeperated with nearly all the monarchs in Europe, in combining a resistless force to crush out from the continent of Europe the spirit of popular liberty.  An army of ninety thousand men was raised to cooeperate with the French emigrants and all the royalists in France.  The king was to escape from Paris, place himself at the head of the emigrants, amounting to more than twenty thousand, rally around his banners all the advocates of the old regime, and then, supported by all the powers of combined Europe, was to march upon Paris, and take a bloody vengeance upon a people who dared to wish to be free.  The arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes deranged this plan.  Leopold, alarmed not only by the impending fate of his sister, but lest the principles of popular liberty, extending from France, should undermine his own throne, wrote as follows to the King of England: