There is no trade so
vile and mechanical as government in their hands. Virtue is not their
habit. They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended
only by conscience and glory. A large, liberal, and prospective view of
the interests of states passes with them for romance, and the principles
that recommend it for the wanderings of a disordered imagination. The
calculators compute them out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons
shame them out of everything grand and elevated. Littleness in object
and in means to them appears soundness and sobriety. They think there is
nothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle, which they can
measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers.
Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles
at all, they played the game of that faction. There was a beaten road
before them. The powers of Europe were armed; France had always appeared
dangerous; the war was easily diverted from France as a faction to
France as a state. The princes were easily taught to slide back into
their old, habitual course of politics. They were easily led to consider
the flames that were consuming France, not as a warning to protect their
own buildings, (which were without any party-wall, and linked by a
contignation into the edifice of France,) but as an happy occasion for
pillaging the goods, and for carrying off the materials of their
neighbor's house.
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