But the constitution of any political being, as well as
that of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture to
say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic. That
bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned
for the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened her
traffic with the world.
The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced
manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and
half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and
famished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course,
from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actually
conquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited,
deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of
the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to
them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a
display of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatest
military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem
not to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of what
subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition is only to be admitted to
a more favored class in the order of servitude under that domineering
power.
This seems the temper of the day.
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