scaffold.

This is the Constitution, or _Democratie Royale_; and this is what
infallibly would be again set up in France, to run exactly the same
round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to
receive the name of a king, leaving it to the Jacobins (that is, to
those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the
one and to distribute the other as spoil. By the Jacobins I mean
indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of
difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that
unhappy country. The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished
and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or
_Democrates Royaux_, they never had an existence of the smallest degree
of power, consideration, or authority, nor, if they differ at all from
the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and
principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the
temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and
systematic regicides. Several attempts have been made to support this
chimerical _Democratie Royale_: the first was by La Fayette, the last by
Dumouriez: they tended only to show that this absurd project had no
party to support it. The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bordeaux, have
made some struggle. The Constitutionalists never could make any, and
for a very plain reason: they were _leaders in rebellion_. All their
principles and their whole scheme of government being republican, they
could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favor of the
unhappy monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the
executive officer in their new commonwealth. They only appeared as
traitors to their own Jacobin cause, not as faithful adherents to the
king.

In an address to France, in an attempt to treat with it, or in
considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should
mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political
country. I believe we shall be in a great error, if we act upon an idea
that there exists in that country any organized body of men who might be
willing to treat on equitable terms for the restoration of their
monarchy, but who are nice in balancing those terms, and who would
accept such as to them appeared reasonable, but who would quietly submit
to the predominant power, if they were not gratified in the fashion of
some constit