But we are not secondary parties in this war; _we are principals
in the danger, and ought to be principals in the exertion_. If any
Englishman asks whether the designs of the French assassins are confined
to the spot of Europe which they actually desolate, the citizen Brissot,
the author of this book, and the author of the declaration of war
against England, will give him his answer. He will find in this book,
that the republicans are divided into factions full of the most furious
and destructive animosity against each other; but he will find also that
there is one point in which they perfectly agree: that they are all
enemies alike to the government of all other nations, and only contend
with each other about the means of propagating their tenets and
extending their empire by conquest.
It is true that in this present work, which the author professedly
designed for an appeal to foreign nations and posterity, he has dressed
up the philosophy of his own faction in as decent a garb as he could to
make her appearance in public; but through every disguise her hideous
figure may be distinctly seen. If, however, the reader still wishes to
see her in all her naked deformity, I would further refer him to a
private letter of Brissot, written towards the end of the last year, and
quoted in a late very able pamphlet of Mallet Du Pan. "We must" (says
our philosopher) "_set fire to the four corners of Europe_"; in that
alone is our safety.
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