The American alliance was produced by their republican principles and
republican policy. This new relation undoubtedly did much. The
discourses and cabals that it produced, the intercourse that it
established, and, above all, the example, which made it seem practicable
to establish a republic in a great extent of country, finished the work,
and gave to that part of the revolutionary faction a degree of strength
which required other energies than the late king possessed to resist or
even to restrain. It spread everywhere; but it was nowhere more
prevalent than in the heart of the court. The palace of Versailles, by
its language, seemed a forum of democracy. To have pointed out to most
of those politicians, from their dispositions and movements, what has
since happened, the fall of their own monarchy, of their own laws, of
their own religion, would have been to furnish a motive the more for
pushing forward a system on which they considered all these things as
incumbrances. Such in truth they were. And we have seen them succeed,
not only in the destruction of their monarchy, but in all the objects
of ambition that they proposed from that destruction.
When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when I
compare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be in
conflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the very
things which make me tremble. The states of the Christian world have
grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by a
great variety of accidents.
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