Otherwise everything
will move in a preposterous order, and nothing but confusion and
destruction will follow.
I know that misfortune is not made to win respect from ordinary minds. I
know that there is a leaning to prosperity, however obtained, and a
prejudice in its favor. I know there is a disposition to hope something
from the variety and inconstancy of villany, rather than from the
tiresome uniformity of fixed principle. There have been, I admit,
situations in which a guiding person or party might be gained over, and
through him or them the whole body of a nation. For the hope of such a
conversion, and of deriving advantage from enemies, it might be politic
for a while to throw your friends into the shade. But examples drawn
from history in occasions like the present will be found dangerously to
mislead us. France has no resemblance to other countries which have
undergone troubles and been purified by them. If France, Jacobinized as
it has been for four full years, did contain any bodies of authority and
disposition to treat with you, (most assuredly she does not,) such is
the levity of those who have expelled everything respectable in their
country, such their ferocity, their arrogance, their mutinous spirit,
their habits of defying everything human and divine, that no engagement
would hold with them for three months; nor, indeed, could they cohere
together for any purpose of civilized society, if left as they now are.
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