_ At the head, or rather at the tail,
of this system was a miserable pageant, as its ostensible instrument,
who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment
when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of
horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses
of an hired, frantic, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a
scaffold.
This is the Constitution, or _Democratie Royale_; and this is what
infallibly would be again set up in France, to run exactly the same
round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to
receive the name of a king, leaving it to the Jacobins (that is, to
those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the
one and to distribute the other as spoil. By the Jacobins I mean
indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of
difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that
unhappy country. The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished
and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or
_Democrates Royaux_, they never had an existence of the smallest degree
of power, consideration, or authority, nor, if they differ at all from
the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and
principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the
temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and
systematic regicides.
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