Instead of inspiring me with dislike and distrust of the
unfortunate, engaged with us in a common cause against our Jacobin
enemy, they take away all my esteem for their own characters, and all my
deference to their judgment.
There are some few French gentlemen, indeed, who talk a language not
wholly different from this jargon. Those whom I have in my eye I respect
as gallant soldiers, as much as any one can do; but on their political
judgment and prudence I have not the slightest reliance, nor on their
knowledge of their own country, or of its laws and Constitution. They
are, if not enemies, at least not friends, to the orders of their own
state,--not to the princes, the clergy, or the nobility; they possess
only an attachment to the monarchy, or rather to the persons of the late
king and queen. In all other respects their conversation is Jacobin. I
am afraid they, or some of them, go into the closets of ministers, and
tell them that the affairs of France will be better arranged by the
allied powers than by the landed proprietors of the kingdom, or by the
princes who have a right to govern; and that, if any French are at all
to be employed in the settlement of their country, it ought to be only
those who have never declared any decided opinion, or taken any active
part in the Revolution.
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