LETTER II. ON THE Genius and Character of the French Revolution as it regards other Nations. I MY DEAR SIR, CLOSED my first letter with serious matter, and I hope it has employed your thoughts. The fyftem of peace muft have a reference to the system of the war. On that ground, I must therefore again recal your mind to our original opinions, which time and events have not taught me to vary. My ideas and my principle led me, in this conteft, to encounter France, not as a ftate, but as a faction. The vaft territorial extent of that country, its immenfe population, its riches of production, its riches of commerce and conventionthe whole aggregate mafs of what, in ordinary cafes, conftitutes the force of a ftate, to me were but objects of fecondary confideration. They might be balanced; and they have been often more than balanced. Great as these things are, they are not what make the faction formidable. P 3 It is the the faction that makes them truly dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that poffeffes the body of France; that informs it as a foul; that ftamps upon its ambition, and upon all its purfuits, a characteristick mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the fame general paffions, and the fame general views, in other men and in other communities. It is that fpirit which infpires into them, a new, a pernicious, a defolating activity. Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France to shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold. A fure destruction impends over those infatuated princes, who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests; or that they can make peace in the fpirit of their former arrangements of pacification. Here the beaten path is the very reverfe of the fafe road. As to me, I was always fteadily of opinion, that this diforder was not in its nature intermittent. I conceived that the conteft once begun, could not be laid down again, to be refumed at our difcretion; but that our firft ftruggle with this evil would alfo be our laft. I never thought we could make peace with the fyftem; because it was not for the fake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the fyftem itself that we were at war. As I understood the matter, we were at war war not with its conduct, but with its existence; convinced that its exiftence and its hoftility were the fame. The faction is not local or territorial. It is a general evil. Where it least appears in action, it is ftill full of life. In its fleep it recruits its ftrength, and prepares its exertion. Its fpirit lies deep in the corruption of our common nature. The focial order which reftrains it, feeds it. It exifts in every country in Europe; and among all orders of men in every country, who look up to France as to a common head. The centre is there. The circumference is the world of Europe whereever the race of Europe may be settled. Every where else the faction is militant; in France it is triumphant. In France is the bank of depofit, and the bank of circulation, of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every ftate. It will be a folly scarcely deferving of pity, and too mifchiev ous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other country whilft it is predominant there. War, inftead of being the cause of its force, has fufpended its operation. It has given a reprieve, at leaft, to the Chriftian world. The true nature of a jacobin war, in the beginning, was, by most of the Chriftian powers, felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precife manner declared. In the joint manifefto, published by the emperour and the king of Pruffia, on the 4th |