"
[27] "In their place has succeeded a system destructive of all public
order, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without
number,--by arbitrary imprisonments,--by massacres which cannot be
remembered without horror,--and at length by the execrable murder of a
just and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who
with, an unshaken firmness has shared all the misfortunes of her royal
consort, his protracted sufferings, his cruel captivity, his ignominious
death."--"They [the Allies] have had to encounter acts of aggression
without pretext, open violations of all treaties, unprovoked
declarations of war,--in a word, whatever corruption, intrigue, or
violence could effect, for the purpose, so openly avowed, of subverting
all the institutions of society, and of extending' over all the nations
of Europe that confusion which has produced the misery of France. This
state of things cannot exist in France, without involving all the
surrounding powers in one common danger,--without giving them the right,
without imposing it upon them as a duty, to stop the progress of an evil
which exists only by the successive violation of all law and all
property, and which attacks the Fundamental principles by which mankind
is united in the bonds of civil society."--"The king would propose none
other than equitable and moderate conditions: not such as the expenses,
the risks, and the sacrifices of the war might justify, but such as his
Majesty thinks himself under the indispensable necessity of requiring,
with a view to these considerations, and still more to that of his own
security and of the future tranquillity of Europe.
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