I _cannot_ love the Republic.
The third point, which they have more clearly expressed than ever, is of
equal importance with the rest, and with them furnishes a complete view
of the Regicide system. For they demand as a condition, without which
our ambassador of obedience cannot be received with any hope of success,
that he shall be "provided with full powers to negotiate a peace between
the French Republic and Great Britain, and to conclude it _definitively_
between the TWO powers." With their spear they draw a circle about us.
They will hear nothing of a joint treaty. We must make a peace
separately from our allies. We must, as the very first and preliminary
step, be guilty of that perfidy towards our friends and associates with
which they reproach us in our transactions with them, our enemies. We
are called upon scandalously to betray the fundamental securities to
ourselves and to all nations. In my opinion, (it is perhaps but a poor
one,) if we are meanly bold enough to send an ambassador such as this
official note of the enemy requires, we cannot even dispatch our
emissary without danger of being charged with a breach of our alliance.
Government now understands the full meaning of the passport.
Strange revolutions have happened in the ways of thinking and in the
feelings of men; but it is a very extraordinary coalition of parties
indeed, and a kind of unheard-of unanimity in public councils, which can
impose this new-discovered system of negotiation, as sound national
policy, on the understanding of a spectator of this wonderful scene, who
judges on the principles of anything he ever before saw, read, or heard
of, and, above all, on the understanding of a person who has in his eye
the transactions of the last seven years.
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