enemy into whose hands we may chance to
fall. The genius of this faction is easily discerned, by observing with
what a very different eye they have viewed the late foreign revolutions.
Two have passed before them: that of France, and that of Poland. The
state of Poland was such, that there could scarcely exist two opinions,
but that a reformation of its Constitution, even at some expense of
blood, might be seen without much disapprobation. No confusion could be
feared in such an enterprise; because the establishment to be reformed
was itself a state of confusion. A king without authority; nobles
without union or subordination; a people without arts, industry,
commerce, or liberty; no order within, no defence without; no effective
public force, but a foreign force, which entered, a naked country at
will, and disposed of everything at pleasure. Here was a state of things
which seemed to invite, and might perhaps justify, bold enterprise and
desperate experiment. But in what manner was this chaos brought into
order? The means were as striking to the imagination as satisfactory to
the reason and soothing to the moral sentiments. In contemplating that
change, humanity has everything to rejoice and to glory in,--nothing to
be ashamed of, nothing to suffer. So far as it has gone, it probably is
the most pure and defecated public good which ever has been conferred on
mankind. We have seen anarchy and servitude at once removed; a throne
strengthened for the protection of the people, without trenching on
their liberties; all foreign cabal banished, by changing the crown from
elective to hereditary; and what was a matter of pleasing wonder, we
have seen a reigning king, from an heroic love to his country, exerting
himself with all the toil, the dexterity, the management, the intrigue,
in favor of a family of strangers, with which ambitious men labor for
the aggrandizement of their own. Ten millions of men in a way of being
freed gradually, and therefore safely to themselves and the state, not
from civil or political chains, which, bad as they are, only fetter the
mind, but from substantial personal bondage. Inhabitants of cities,
before without privileges, placed in the consideration which belongs to
that improved and connecting situation of social life. One of the most
proud, numerous, and fierce bodies of nobility and gentry ever known in
the world arranged only in the foremost rank of free and generous
citizens. Not one man incu