relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not desired, by their ancestors,—­such a prince, though he should be subject to the common frailties attached to men and to princes, though he should have once thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on against his person and the remnants of his authority,—­though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of Paris, and of Dr. Price.  I tremble for the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings.  I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind.  But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and, by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism, to guard against the very first approaches of freedom.  Against such as these they never elevate their voice.  Deserters from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.

If it could have been made clear to me that the king and queen of France (those, I mean, who were such before the triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National Assembly, (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in certain publications,) I should think their captivity just.  If this be true, much more ought to have been done, but done, in my opinion, in another manner.  The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind.  But if I were to punish a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the crime.  Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice.  Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the Ninth been the subject,—­if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, after the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor, Christina, after the murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, Sir, or into mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different.

If the French king, or king of the French, (or by whatever name he is known in the new vocabulary of your Constitution,) has in his own person and that of his queen really deserved these unavowed, but unavenged, murderous attempts, and those frequent indignities more cruel than murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate executory trust which I understand is to be placed in him; nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed.  A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could not possibly be