ve
made _the main object of the war_, is, to assist the dignity, the
religion, and the property of France to repossess themselves of the
means of their natural influence. This ought to be the primary object of
all our politics and all our military operations. Otherwise everything
will move in a preposterous order, and nothing but confusion and
destruction will follow.

I know that misfortune is not made to win respect from ordinary minds. I
know that there is a leaning to prosperity, however obtained, and a
prejudice in its favor. I know there is a disposition to hope something
from the variety and inconstancy of villany, rather than from the
tiresome uniformity of fixed principle. There have been, I admit,
situations in which a guiding person or party might be gained over, and
through him or them the whole body of a nation. For the hope of such a
conversion, and of deriving advantage from enemies, it might be politic
for a while to throw your friends into the shade. But examples drawn
from history in occasions like the present will be found dangerously to
mislead us. France has no resemblance to other countries which have
undergone troubles and been purified by them. If France, Jacobinized as
it has been for four full years, did contain any bodies of authority and
disposition to treat with you, (most assuredly she does not,) such is
the levity of those who have expelled everything respectable in their
country, such their ferocity, their arrogance, their mutinous spirit,
their habits of defying everything human and divine, that no engagement
would hold with them for three months; nor, indeed, could they cohere
together for any purpose of civilized society, if left as they now are.
There must be a means, not only of breaking their strength within
themselves, but of _civilizing_ them; and these two things must go
together, before we can possibly treat with them, not only as a nation,
but with any division of them. Descriptions of men of their own race,
but better in rank, superior in property and decorum, of honorable,
decent, and orderly habits, are absolutely necessary to bring them to
such a frame as to qualify them so much as to come into contact with a
civilized nation. A set of those ferocious savages with arms in their
hands, left to themselves in one part of the country whilst you proceed
to another, would break forth into outrages at least as bad as their
former. They must, as fast as gained, (if ever they are ga