They throw the
light on one side only of their case; though it is impossible they
should not observe that the other side, which is kept in the shade, has
its importance too. They must know that France is formidable, not only
as she is France, but as she is Jacobin France. They knew from the
beginning that the Jacobin party was not confined to that country. They
knew, they felt, the strong disposition of the same faction in both
countries to communicate and to cooeperate. For some time past, these two
points have been kept, and even industriously kept, out of sight. France
is considered as merely a foreign power, and the seditious English only
as a domestic faction. The merits of the war with the former have been
argued solely on political grounds. To prevent the mischievous doctrines
of the latter from corrupting our minds, matter and argument have been
supplied abundantly, and even to surfeit, on the excellency of our own
government. But nothing has been done to make us feel in what manner the
safety of that government is connected with the principle and with the
issue of this war. For anything which in the late discussion has
appeared, the war is entirely collateral to the state of Jacobinism,--as
truly a foreign war to us and to all our home concerns as the war with
Spain in 1739, about _Guardacostas_, the Madrid Convention, and the
fable of Captain Jenkins's ears.
Whenever the adverse party has raised a cry for peace with the Regicide,
the answer has been little more than this: "That the administration
wished for such a peace full as much as the opposition, but that the
time was not convenient for making it.
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