It is here the direct
contrary. I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at the
intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able with
deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity.
This fraternity is, indeed, so terrible in its nature, and in its
manifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting our
apprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, by
substituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of an
ambiguous quality, and describing such a connection under the terms of
"_the usual relations of peace and amity_." By this means the proposed
fraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties which imply no
change in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system affect
the interior condition of nations. It is confounded with those
conventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers are
compromised by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender of a
frontier town or a disputed district on the one side or the other, by
pactions in which the pretensions of families are settled, (as by a
conveyancer making family substitutions and successions,) without any
alteration in the laws, manners, religion, privileges, and customs of
the cities or territories which are the subject of such arrangements.
All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous
collection called the _Corps Diplomatique_, forms the code or statute
law, as the methodized reasonings of the great publicists and jurists
form the digest and jurisprudence, of the Christian world.
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