overnment began
its wars against that people.

If, only twenty-eight years ago, any man in England had said that the
Government of France was one that ought to be suffered to exist, he
would have been hooted out of any company. It is notorious that that
Government was a cruel despotism; and that we and our forefathers
always called it such. This description of that Government is to be
found in all our histories, in all our Parliamentary debates, in all
our books on Government and politics. It is notorious, that the family
of Bourbon has produced the most perfidious and bloody monsters that
ever disgraced the human form. It is notorious that millions of
Frenchmen have been butchered, and burnt, and driven into exile by
their commands. It is recorded, even in the history of France, that
one of them said that the putrid carcass of a Protestant smelt sweet
to him. Even in these latter times, so late as the reign of Louis
XIV., it is notorious that hundreds of thousands of innocent people
were put to the most cruel death. In some instances, they were burnt
in their houses; in others they were shut into lower rooms, while the
incessant noise of kettle-drums over their heads, day and night, drove
them to raving madness. To enumerate all the infernal means employed
by this tyrant to torture and kill the people, would fill a volume.
Exile was the lot of those who escaped the swords, the wheels, the
axes, the gibbets, the torches of his hell-hounds. England was the
place of refuge for many of these persecuted people. The grandfather
of the present Earl of Radnor, and the father of the venerable Baron
Maseres were amongst them; and it is well known that England owes no
inconsiderable part of her manufacturing skill and industry to that
atrocious persecution. Enemies of freedom, wherever it existed, this
family of Bourbon, in the reign of Louis XIV. and XV., fitted out
expeditions for the purpose of restoring the Stuarts to the throne of
England, and thereby caused great expense and blood-shed to this
nation; and, even the Louis who was beheaded by his subjects, did, in
the most perfidious manner, make war upon England, during her war
with America. No matter what was the nature of the cause, his conduct
was perfidious; he professed peace while he was preparing for war. His
object could not be to assist freedom, because his own subjects were
slaves.

Such was the family that were ruling in France when the French
Revolution began.