ly remain covered with an impenetrable and
truly oracular obscurity.

The great, general, pervading purpose, of the whole pamphlet is to
reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France. In this
general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken. The other
purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to
show, first, that the time of the Remarks was the favorable time for
making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy's side
their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms as he is pleased
to offer was rationally to be expected; the third purpose was, to make
some sort of disclosure of the terms which, if the Regicides are pleased
to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept: these form
the basis of the negotiation which the author, whoever he is, proposes
to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I
hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the
observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to
attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or
fraternity, or whatever you may call it,--that is, the real quality and
character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of
no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks.
That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has
been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the
first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple
name of _France_. The word France is slipped in just as if the
government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished,
terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author,
"will do this,"--"it is the interest of France,"--"the returning honor
and generosity of France," &c., &c.--always merely France: just as if
we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the
commonwealth of Christian Europe,--and as if our dispute had turned upon
a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace
might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain
or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one
side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without
the hocus-pocus of _abstraction_. We have been in a grievous error: we
thought that we had been at war with _rebels_ against the lawf