arnestly striving to restore a true order and solid citizenship in
France, as the foul-mouthed scurrility of an Irish Orangeman is unjust
to millions of devout Catholics.

Burke was the man who might have been expected before all others to
know that in every system of government, whatever may have been the
crimes of its origin, there is sure, by the bare necessity of things,
to rise up a party or an individual, whom their political instinct
will force into resistance to the fatalities of anarchy. Man is too
strongly a political animal for it to be otherwise. It was so at each
period and division in the Revolution. There was always a party of
order, and by 1795, when Burke penned these reckless philippics, order
was only too easy in France. The Revolution had worn out the passion
and moral enthusiasm of its first years, and all the best men of the
revolutionary time had been consumed in a flame of fire. When Burke
talked about this war being wholly unlike any war that ever was waged
in Europe before, about its being a war for justice on the one side,
and a fanatical bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes to
the plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk to the
moral level of Frederick and Catherine, or for that matter, of Louis
the Fourteenth himself. This war was only too like the other great
wars of European history. The French Government had become political,
exactly in the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herzberg
were political. The French Republic in 1797 was neither more nor
less aggressive, immoral, piratical, than the monarchies which had
partitioned Poland, and had intended to redistribute the continent of
Europe to suit their own ambitions. The Coalition began the game, but
France proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of their
game. Jacobinism may have inspired the original fire which made her
armies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp had now gone out of
fashion, and to denounce a peace with the Directory because the origin
of their government was regicidal, was as childish as it would have
been in Mazarin to decline a treaty of regicide peace with the Lord
Protector.

What makes the _Regicide Peace_ so repulsive is not that it recommends
energetic prosecution of the war, and not that it abounds in glaring
fallacies in detail, but that it is in direct contradiction with that
strong, positive, rational, and sane method which had before uniformly
marke