people: an act of
justice which appeared to them indispensable, to restrain by terror
those legions of traitors whom they must have left behind when they
departed for the army. There is no doubt but the whole nation,
after such multiplied treasons, will hasten to adopt the same
salutary measure!"--Signed by the Commune of Paris and the Minister
of Justice.

Who, after this mandate, would venture to oppose a member
recommended by the Commune of Paris?

--The French, then, neither chose the republican form of government,
nor the men who adopted it; and are, therefore, not republicans on
principle.--Let us now consider whether, not being republicans on
principle, experience may have rendered them such.

The first effects of the new system were an universal consternation,
the disappearance of all the specie, an extravagant rise in the price of
provisions, and many indications of scarcity. The scandalous quarrels of
the legislature shocked the national vanity, by making France the
ridicule of all Europe, until ridicule was suppressed by detestation at
the subsequent murder of the King. This was followed by the efforts of
one faction to strengthen itself against another, by means of a general
war--the leaders of the former presuming, that they alone were capable of
conducting it.

To the miseries of war were added revolutionary tribunals, revolutionary
armies and committees, forced loans, requisitions, maximums, and every
species of tyranny and iniquity man could devise or suffer; or, to use
the expression of Rewbell, [One of the Directory in 1796.] "France was in
mourning and desolation; all her families plunged in despair; her whole
surface covered with Bastilles, and the republican government become so
odious, that the most wretched slave, bending beneath the weight of his
chains, would have refused to live under it!"

Such were the means by which France was converted into a land of
republicans, and such the government to which your patriots assert the
French people were attached: yet so little was this attachment
appreciated here, that the mere institutions for watching and suppressing
disaffection amount, by the confession of Cambon, the financier, to
twenty-four millions six hundred and thirty-one thousand pounds sterling
a year!

To suppose, then, that the French are devoted to a system which has
served as a pretext for so many crimes, and has been the cause of so many