In the course
of events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloody
contentions between them; but at the bottom they thoroughly agreed in
all the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all the
means of promoting these ends.
Without question, to bring about the unexampled event of the French
Revolution, the concurrence of a very great number of views and passions
was necessary. In that stupendous work, no one principle by which the
human mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and depraved was
left unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and support it by
undoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who acted in the
Revolution _as statesmen_, had the exterior aggrandizement of France as
their ultimate end in the most minute part of the internal changes that
were made. We, who of late years have been drawn from an attention to
foreign affairs by the importance of our domestic discussions, cannot
easily form a conception of the general eagerness of the active and
energetic part of the French nation, itself the most active and
energetic of all nations, previous to its Revolution, upon that subject.
I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the old
government, were twenty to one of the same description then or now in
England; and few of that description there were who did not emulously
set forward the Revolution. The whole official system, particularly in
the diplomatic part, the regulars, the irregulars, down to the clerks in
office, (a corps without all comparison more numerous than the same
amongst us,) cooeperated in it.
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