bly be considered by other nations as the crime of treason.

For my part, I would sooner put my hand into the fire than sign an invitation to oppressed men to fight under my standard, and then, on every sinister event of war, cruelly give them up to be punished as the basest of traitors, as long as I had one of the common enemy in my hands to be put to death in order to secure those under my protection, and to vindicate the common honor of sovereigns. We hear nothing of this kind of security in favor of those whom we invite to the support of our cause. Without it, I am not a little apprehensive that the proclamations of the combined powers might (contrary to their intention, no doubt) be looked upon as frauds, and cruel traps laid for their lives.

So far as to the correspondence between our declarations and our conduct: let the declaration be worded as it will, the conduct is the practical comment by which, and which alone, it can be understood. This conduct, acting on the declaration, leaves a monarchy without a monarch, and without any representative or trustee for the monarch and the monarchy. It supposes a kingdom without states and orders, a territory without proprietors, and faithful subjects who are to be left to the fate of rebels and traitors.

The affair of the establishment of a government is a very difficult undertaking for foreign powers to act in as principals; though as auxiliaries and mediators it has been not at all unusual, and may be a measure full of policy and humanity and true dignity.

The first thing we ought to do, supposing us not giving the law as conquerors, but acting as friendly

powers applied to for counsel and assistance in the settlement of a distracted country, is well to consider the composition, nature, and temper of its objects, and particularly of those who actually do or who ought to exercise power in that state. It is material to know who they are, and how constituted, whom we consider as the people of France.

The next consideration is, through whom our ar rangements are to be made, and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.

The first question on the people is this: Whether we are to consider the individuals now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into Jacobin clubs, as the body politic, constituting the nation of France, or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities, the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation, and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.

In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is evident that an abuse of the term people has been the original, fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy, is the present object of all the states of Europe.

If we consider the acting power in France, in any legal construction of public law, as the people, the question is decided in favor of the republic one and indivisible. But we have decided for monarchy. If so, we have a king and subjects; and that king and

subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home: for I do not suppose that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.

As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree of which I am incapable. On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.

Since, then, we have decided for monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also to settle who is to be the monarch, who is to be the guardian of a minor, and how the monarch and monarchy is to be modified and supported; if the monarch is to be elected, who the electors are to be, if hereditary, what order is established, corresponding with an hereditary monarchy, and fitted to maintain it; who are to modify it in its exercise; who are to restrain its powers, where they ought to be limited, to strengthen them, where they are to be supported, or, to enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances may demand their extension. These are things which, in the outline, ought to be made distinct and clear; for if they are not, (especially with regard to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is the corporation of the kingdom,) there is nothing to hinder the complete establishment of a Jacobin republic, (such as that formed in 1790 and

1791,) under the name of a Démocratie Royale. Jacobinism does not consist in the having or not having a certain pageant under the name of a king, but "in taking the people as equal individuals, without any corporate name or description, without attention to property, without division of powers, and forming the government of delegates from a number of men so constituted, in destroying or confiscating property, and bribing the public creditors, or the poor, with the spoils, now of one part of the community, now of another, without regard to prescription or possession."

I hope no one can be so very blind as to imagine that monarchy can be acknowledged and supported in France upon any other basis than that of its property, corporate and individual, or that it can enjoy a moment's permanence or security upon any scheme of things which sets aside all the ancient corporate capacities and distinctions of the kingdom, and subverts the whole fabric of its ancient laws and usages, political, civil, and religious, to introduce a system founded on the supposed rights of man, and the absolute equality of the human race. Unless, therefore, we declare clearly and distinctly in favor of the resto ration of property, and confide to the hereditary property of the kingdom the limitation and qualifications of its hereditary monarchy, the blood and treasure of Europe is wasted for the establishment of Jacobinism in France. There is no doubt that Danton and Robespierre, Chaumette and Barère, that Condorcet, that Thomas Paine, that La Fayette, and the ex-Bishop of Autun, the Abbé Grégoire, with all the gang of the Sieyèses, the Henriots, and the Santerres, if they could secure themselves in the fruits of their rebel

lion and robbery, would be perfectly indifferent, whether the most unhappy of all infants, whom by the lessons of the shoemaker, his governor and guardian, they are training up studiously and methodically to be an idiot, or, what is worse, the most wicked and base of mankind, continues to receive his civic education in the Temple or the Tuileries, whilst they, and such as they, really govern the kingdom.

It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that monarchy and property must, in France, go together, or neither can exist. To think of the possibility of the existence of a permanent and hereditary royalty, where nothing else is hereditary or permanent in point either of personal or corporate dignity, is a ruinous chimera, worthy of the Abbé Sieyès, and those wicked fools, his associates, who usurped power by the murders of the 19th of July and the 6th of October, 1789, and who brought forth the monster which they called Démocratie Royale, or the Constitution.

I believe that most thinking men would prefer infinitely some sober and sensible form of a republic, in which there was no mention at all of a king, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and personal freedom, to a scheme of things like this Démocratie Royale, founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation of innocent individuals, and the pretended rights of man, and which, in effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy, and landed property of a great nation, threw everything into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind and bloody band of sans-culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail, of this sys