In Italy the
same family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were
equally visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the French
monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature and
fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give
life or vigor or consistency, but in a republic? Out the word came: and
it never went back.
Whether they reasoned right or wrong, or that there was some mixture of
right and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure that in this manner they
felt and reasoned. The different effects of a great military and
ambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description were
constantly in their mouths. The principle was ready to operate, when
opportunities should offer, which few of them, indeed, foresaw in the
extent in which they were afterwards presented; but these opportunities,
in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for.
When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria and
France was deplored as a national, calamity; because it united France in
friendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope any
Continental aggrandizement. When the first partition of Poland was made,
in which France had no share, and which had farther aggrandized every
one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in
a perfect frenzy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the
shocking and uncolored violence and injustice of that partition, but at
the debility, improvidence, and want of activity in their government, in
not preventing it as a means of aggrandizement to their rivals, or in
not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their
share of advantage from that robbery.
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