made any single step towards it? Have they ever once proposed
to treat?

The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their
system, proceeds on this hypothesis,--that their hostility to other
nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the
prevalence of a populace which their government had not strength enough
to master. This I utterly deny. I insist upon it as a fact, that, in the
daring commencement of all their hostilities, and their astonishing
perseverance in them, so as never once, in any fortune, high or low, to
propose a treaty of peace to any power in Europe, they have never been
actuated by the people: on the contrary, the people, I will not say have
been moved, but impelled by them, and have generally acted under a
compulsion, of which most of us are as yet, thank God, unable to form an
adequate idea. The war against Austria was formally declared by the
unhappy Louis the Sixteenth; but who has ever considered Louis the
Sixteenth, since the Revolution, to have been the government? The second
Regicide Assembly, then the only government, was the author of that war;
and neither the nominal king nor the nominal people had anything to do
with it, further than in a reluctant obedience. It is to delude
ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a
state of anarchy: it is something far worse. Anarchy it is, undoubtedly,
if compared with government pursuing the peace, order, morals, and
prosperity of the people; but regarding only the power that has really
guided from the day of the Revolution to this time, it has been of all
governments the most absolute, despotic, and effective that has hitherto
appeared on earth. Never were the views and politics of any government
pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent
observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs.
Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies. We
do not call a republic with annual magistrates an anarchy: theirs is
that kind of republic; but the succession is not effected by the
expiration of the term of the magistrate's service, but by his murder.
Every new magistracy, succeeding by homicide, is auspicated by accusing
its predecessors in the office of tyranny, and it continues by the
exercise of what they charged upon others.

This strong hand is the law, and the sole law, in their state. I defy
any person to show any other law,--o