With regard to France—­I have no hesitation in declaring, that the object which the French seemed to have in view at the commencement of their revolution had my hearty approbation.  The object was to free themselves and their posterity from arbitrary power.  I hope there is not a man in Great Britain so little sensible of the blessings of that free constitution under which he has the happiness to live, so entirely dead to the interests of general humanity, as not to wish that a constitution similar to our own might be established, not only in France, but in every despotic state in Europe; not only in Europe, but in every quarter of the globe.

It is one thing to approve of an end, another to approve of the means by which an end is accomplished.  I did not approve of the means by which the first revolution was effected in France.  I thought that it would have been a wiser measure to have abridged the oppressive privileges, and to have lessened the enormous number of the nobility, than to have abolished the order.  I thought that the State ought not in justice to have seized any part of the property of the Church, till it had reverted, as it were, to the community, by the death of its immediate possessors.  I thought that the king was not only treated with unmerited indignity, but that too little authority was left him to enable him, as the chief executive magistrate, to be useful to the State.  These were some of my reasons for not approving the means by which the first revolution in France was brought about.  As to other evils which took place on the occasion, I considered them certainly as evils of importance; but at the same time as evils inseparable from a state of civil commotion, and which I conceived would be more than compensated by the establishment of a limited monarchy.

The French have abandoned the constitution they had at first established, and have changed it for another.  No one can reprobate with more truth than I do both the means and the end of this change.  The end has been the establishment of a republic.  Now a republic is a form of government which, of all others, I most dislike—­and I dislike it for this reason; because of all forms of government, scarcely excepting the most despotic, I think a republic the most oppressive to the bulk of the people:  they are deceived in it with the show of liberty; but they live in it under the most odious of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their equals.  With respect to the means by which this new republic has been erected in France, they have been sanguinary, savage, more than brutal.  They not merely fill the heart of every individual with commiseration for the unfortunate sufferers, but they exhibit to the eye of contemplation an humiliating picture of human nature, when its passions are not regulated by religion, or controlled by law.  I fly with terror and abhorrence even from the altar of Liberty, when I see it stained with the blood of the aged, of the innocent, of the defenceless sex,