le, the troops prevailed over the
citizens. The citizen soldiers, the ever-famed national guards, who had
deposed and murdered their sovereign, were disarmed by the inferior
trumpeters of that rebellion. Twenty thousand regular troops garrison
Paris. Thus a complete military government is formed. It has the
strength, and it may count on the stability, of that kind of power. This
power is to last as long as the Parisians think proper. Every other
ground of stability, but from military force and terror, is clean out of
the question. To secure them further, they have a strong corps of
irregulars, ready-armed. Thousands of those hell-hounds called
Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution,
as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people. The whole of
their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its
actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force: a
forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced
requisition of soldiers, a forced loan of money.

They differ nothing from all the preceding usurpations, but that to the
same odium a good deal more of contempt is added. In this situation,
notwithstanding all their military force, strengthened with the
undisciplined power of the Terrorists, and the nearly general disarming
of Paris, there would almost certainly have been before this an
insurrection against them, but for one cause. The people of France
languish for peace. They all despaired of obtaining it from the
coalesced powers, whilst they had a gang of professed regicides at their
head; and several of the least desperate republicans would have joined
with better men to shake them wholly off, and to produce something more
ostensible, if they had not been reiteratedly told that their sole hope
of peace was the very contrary to what they naturally imagined: that
they must leave off their cabals and insurrections, which could serve no
purpose but to bring in that royalty which was wholly rejected by the
coalesced kings; that, to satisfy them, they must tranquilly, if they
could not cordially, submit themselves to the tyranny and the tyrants
they despised and abhorred. Peace was held out by the allied monarchies
to the people of France, as a bounty for supporting the Republic of
Regicides. In fact, a coalition, begun for the avowed purpose of
destroying that den of robbers, now exists only for their support. If
evil happens to the p