My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France,
not as a state, but as a faction. The vast territorial extent of that
country, its immense population, its riches of production, its riches of
commerce and convention, the whole aggregate mass of what in ordinary
cases constitutes the force of a state, to me were but objects of
secondary consideration. They might be balanced; and they have been
often more than balanced. Great as these things are, they are not what
make the faction formidable. It is the faction that makes them truly
dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of
France,--that informs it as a soul,--that stamps upon its ambition, and
upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly
distinguishes them from the same general passions and the same general
views in other men and in other communities. It is that spirit which
inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity.
Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France to
shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold.
A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes who, in the
conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were
engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests, or
that they can make peace in the spirit of their former arrangements of
pacification. Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road.
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