in these very
Letters, he became a mere raving Gallophobe, with no sense of
proportion or circumstance. For my part, I have read scores, probably
hundreds, of books--English, French, and German--on the French
Revolution; I have never read one that made Burke obsolete. Let it
only be added that the author, who was born in 1730, was very near the
end of his career--he died next year--when he wrote these letters,
and that the peace proposals which he deprecated, and which he did not
a little to avert, were dictated on the one side by the sobering down
of the first Revolutionary fervour under the Directory; on the other
by the persistent ill-success of the Allies, and the conflicts of
interest and principle which had arisen among them._)

My dear Sir--I closed my first letter with serious matter, and I hope
it has employed your thoughts. The system of peace must have a
reference to the system of the war. On that ground, I must therefore
again recall your mind to our original opinions, which time and events
have not taught me to vary.

My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter
France, not as a state, but as a faction. The vast territorial extent
of that country, its immense population, its riches of production, its
riches of commerce and convention--the whole aggregate mass of what,
in ordinary cases, constitutes the force of a state, to me were but
objects of secondary consideration. 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. It is the faction that makes
them truly dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses
the body of France; that informs it as a soul; that stamps upon its
ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which
strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions, and the
same general views, in other men and in other communities. It is that
spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating
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 sure 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 spirit of
their former arrangements of pacification. Here th