They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice;
because they can only exist by justice. Nation is a moral essence, not a
geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator. France,
though out of her territorial possession, exists; because the sole
possible claimant, I mean the proprietary, and the government to which
the proprietary adheres, exists and claims. God forbid, that if you were
expelled from your house by ruffians and assassins, that I should call
the material walls, doors, and windows of ---- the ancient and honorable
family of ----! Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to
turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all
the esteem and respect I owe to you? The Regicides in France are not
France. France is out of her bounds, but the kingdom is the same.
To illustrate my opinions on this subject, let us suppose a case, which,
after what has happened, we cannot think absolutely impossible, though
the augury is to be abominated, and the event deprecated with our most
ardent prayers. Let us suppose, then, that our gracious sovereign was
sacrilegiously murdered; his exemplary queen, at the head of the
matronage of this land, murdered in the same manner; that those
princesses whose beauty and modest elegance are the ornaments of the
country, and who are the leaders and patterns of the ingenuous youth of
their sex, were put to a cruel and ignominious death, with hundreds of
others, mothers and daughters, ladies of the first distinction; that the
Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, princes the hope and pride of the
nation, with all their brethren, were forced to fly from the knives of
assassins; that the whole body of our excellent clergy were either
massacred or robbed of all and transported; the Christian religion, in
all its denominations, forbidden and persecuted; the law totally,
fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed; the judges put to death
by revolutionary tribunals; the peers and commons robbed to the last
acre of their estates, massacred, if they stayed, or obliged to seek
life in flight, in exile, and in beggary; that the whole landed property
should share the very same fate; that every military and naval officer
of honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the same
description of confiscation and exile; that the principal merchants and
bankers should be drawn out, as from an hen-coop, for slaughter; that
the citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the hand
and the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should have
been collected in the public squares and massacred by thousands with
cannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to a
situation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons.
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