y point their murderous
designs at the martyr king as at the royal heroine. It was accident,
and the momentary depression of that part of the faction, that gave to
the husband the happy priority in death.

From this their restless desire of an over-ruling influence, they bent
a very great part of their designs and efforts to revive the old
French party, which was a democratic party in Holland, and to make a
revolution there. They were happy at the troubles which the singular
imprudence of Joseph the Second had stirred up in the Austrian
Netherlands. They rejoiced when they saw him irritate his subjects,
profess philosophy, send away the Dutch garrisons, and dismantle his
fortifications. As to Holland, they never forgave either the king or
the ministry, for suffering that object, which they justly looked on
as principal in their design of reducing the power of England, to
escape out of their hands. This was the true secret of the commercial
treaty, made, on their part, against all the old rules and principles
of commerce, with a view of diverting the English nation, by a pursuit
of immediate profit, from an attention to the progress of France in
its designs upon that republic. The system of the economists, which
led to the general opening of commerce, facilitated that treaty, but
did not produce it. They were in despair when they found that by the
vigour of Mr. Pitt, supported in this point by Mr. Fox and the
opposition, the object to which they had sacrificed their manufactures
was lost to their ambition.

This eager desire of raising France from the condition into which she
had fallen, as they conceived, from her monarchical imbecility, had
been the main-spring of their precedent interference in that unhappy
American quarrel, the bad effects of which to this nation have not, as
yet, fully disclosed themselves. These sentiments had been long
lurking in their breasts, though their views were only discovered now
and then, in heat and as by escapes; but on this occasion they
exploded suddenly. They were professed with ostentation and propagated
with zeal. These sentiments were not produced, as some think, by
their American alliance. 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