and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine, drew the King on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will for ever stain the pages of modern history.  I have ever believed, that had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.  No force would have been provoked, nor exercised.  The King would have gone hand in hand with the wisdom of his sounder counsellors, who, guided by the increased lights of the age, wished only, with the same pace, to advance the principles of their social constitution.  The deed which closed the mortal course of these sovereigns, I shall neither approve nor condemn.  I am not prepared to say, that the first magistrate of a nation cannot commit treason against his country, or is unamenable to its punishment:  nor yet, that where there is no written law, no regulated tribunal, there is not a law in our hearts, and a power in our hands, given for righteous employment in maintaining right, and redressing wrong.  Of those who judged the King, many thought him wilfully criminal; many, that his existence would keep the nation in perpetual conflict with the horde of Kings, who would war against a regeneration which might come home to themselves, and that it were better that one should die than all.  I should not have voted with this portion of the legislature.  I should have shut up the Queen in a convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the King in his station, investing him with limited powers, which, I verily believe, he would have honestly exercised, according to the measure of his understanding.  In this way, no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer, nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy, millions and millions of its inhabitants.  There are three epochs in history, signalized by the total extinction of national morality.  The first was of the successors of Alexander, not omitting himself:  the next, the successors of the first Caesar:  the third, our own age.  This was begun by the partition of Poland, followed by that of the treaty of Pilnitz; next the conflagration of Copenhagen; then the enormities of Bonaparte, partitioning the earth at his will, and devastating it with fire and sword; now the conspiracy of Kings, the successors of Bonaparte, blasphemously calling themselves ’The Holy Alliance,’ and treading in the footsteps of their incarcerated leader; not yet, indeed, usurping the government of other nations, avowedly and in detail, but controlling by their armies the forms in which they will permit them to be governed; and reserving, in petto, the order and extent of the usurpations further meditated.  But I will return from a digression, anticipated, too, in time, into which I have been led by reflection on the criminal passions which refused to the world a favorable occasion of saving it from the afflictions it has since suffered.