But then these men can
do little or nothing for themselves. They have no arms, nor magazines,
nor chiefs, nor union, nor the possibility of these things within
themselves. On the whole, therefore, I lay it down as a certainty, that
in the Jacobins no change of mind is to be expected, and that no others
in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative
existence.
The truth is, that France is out of itself,--the moral France is
separated from the geographical. The master of the house is expelled,
and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the _corporate people_
of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public law,
(that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to
decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude,) they are in
Flanders, and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There
are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the state,
there are all the parliaments of the kingdom.
This being, as I conceive, the true state of France, as it exists
_territorially_, and as it exists _morally_, the question will be, with
whom we are to concert our arrangements, and whom we are to use as our
instruments in the reduction, in the pacification, and in the settlement
of France.
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