I have never read one that made Burke obsolete.  Let it only be added that the author, who was born in 1730, was very near the end of his career—­he died next year—­when he wrote these letters, and that the peace proposals which he deprecated, and which he did not a little to avert, were dictated on the one side by the sobering down of the first Revolutionary fervour under the Directory; on the other by the persistent ill-success of the Allies, and the conflicts of interest and principle which had arisen among them._)

My dear Sir—­I closed my first letter with serious matter, and I hope it has employed your thoughts.  The system of peace must have a reference to the system of the war.  On that ground, I must therefore again recall your mind to our original opinions, which time and events have not taught me to vary.

My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France, not as a state, but as a faction.  The vast territorial extent of that country, its immense population, its riches of production, its riches of commerce and convention—­the whole aggregate mass of what, in ordinary cases, constitutes the force of a state, to me were but objects of secondary consideration.  They might be balanced; and they have been often more than balanced.  Great as these things are, they are not what make the faction formidable.  It is the faction that makes them truly dreadful.  That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France; that informs it as a soul; that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions, and the same general views, in other men and in other communities.  It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity.  Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France to shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold.  A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes, who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests; or that they can make peace in the spirit of their former arrangements of pacification.  Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road.

As to me, I was always steadily of opinion, that this disorder was not in its nature intermittent.  I conceived that the contest, once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last.  I never thought we could make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself, that we were at war.  As I understood the matter, we were at war not with its conduct, but with its existence; convinced that its existence and its hostility were the same.