I have yet to speak of the influence of such concessions upon the French Ruler and his army.  With what Satanic pride must he have contemplated the devotion of his servants and adherents to their law, the steadiness and zeal of their perverse loyalty, and the faithfulness with which they stand by him and each other!  How must his heart have distended with false glory, while he contrasted these qualities of his subjects with the insensibility and slackness of his British enemies!  This notice has, however, no especial propriety in this place; for, as far as concerns Bonaparte, his pride and depraved confidence may be equally fed by almost all the conditions of this instrument.  But, as to his army, it is plain that the permission (whether it be considered as by an express article formally granted, or only involved in the general conditions of the treaty), to bear away in triumph the harvest of its crimes, must not only have emboldened and exalted it with arrogance, and whetted its rapacity; but that hereby every soldier, of which this army was composed, must, upon his arrival in his own country, have been a seed which would give back plenteously in its kind.  The French are at present a needy people, without commerce or manufactures,—­unsettled in their minds and debased in their morals by revolutionary practices and habits of warfare; and the youth of the country are rendered desperate by oppression, which, leaving no choice in their occupation, discharges them from all responsibility to their own consciences.  How powerful then must have been the action of such incitements upon a people so circumstanced!  The actual sight, and, far more, the imaginary sight and handling of these treasures, magnified by the romantic tales which must have been spread about them, would carry into every town and village an antidote for the terrors of conscription; and would rouze men, like the dreams imported from the new world when the first discoverers and adventurers returned, with their ingots and their gold dust—­their stories and their promises, to inflame and madden the avarice of the old.  ‘What an effect,’ says the Governor of Cadiz, ’must it have upon the people,’ (he means the Spanish people,) ’to know that a single soldier was carrying away 2580 livres tournois!’ What an effect, (he might have said also,) must it have upon the French!—­I direct the reader’s attention to this, because it seems to have been overlooked; and because some of the public journals, speaking of the Convention, (and, no doubt, uttering the sentiments of several of their readers,)—­say ’that they are disgusted with the transaction, not because the French have been permitted to carry off a few diamonds, or some ingots of silver; but because we confessed, by consenting to the treaty, that an army of 35,000 British troops, aided by the Portugueze nation, was not able to compel 20,000 French to surrender at discretion.’  This is indeed the root of the evil, as hath been shewn;