a Regicide peace, he is the man to save us.  If the finances in such a case can be repaired, he is the man to repair them.  If I should lament any of his acts, it is only when they appear to me to have no resemblance to acts of his.  But let him not have a confidence in himself which no human abilities can warrant.  His abilities are fully equal (and that is to say much for any man) to those which are opposed to him.  But if we look to him as our security against the consequences of a Regicide peace, let us be assured that a Regicide peace and a constitutional ministry are terms that will not agree.  With a Regicide peace the king cannot long have a minister to serve him, nor the minister a king to serve.  If the Great Disposer, in reward of the royal and the private virtues of our sovereign, should call him from the calamitous spectacles which will attend a state of amity with Regicide, his successor will surely see them, unless the same Providence greatly anticipates the course of Nature.  Thinking thus, (and not, as I conceive, on light grounds,) I dare not flatter the reigning sovereign, nor any minister he has or can have, nor his successor apparent, nor any of those who may be called to serve him, with what appears to me a false state of their situation.  We cannot have them and that peace together.

I do not forget that there had been a considerable difference between several of our friends (with my insignificant self) and the great man at the head of ministry, in an early stage of these discussions.  But I am sure there was a period in which we agreed better in the danger of a Jacobin existence in France.  At one time he and all Europe seemed to feel it.  But why am not I converted with so many great powers and so many great ministers?  It is because I am old and slow.  I am in this year, 1796, only where all the powers of Europe were in 1793.  I cannot move with this precession of the equinoxes, which is preparing for us the return of some very old, I am afraid no golden era, or the commencement of some new era that must be denominated from some new metal.  In this crisis I must hold my tongue or I must speak with freedom.  Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever:  but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.  It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.  But as the same rules do not hold in all cases, what would be right for you, who may presume on a series of years before you, would have no sense for me, who cannot, without absurdity, calculate on six months of life.  What I say I must say at once.  Whatever I write is in its nature testamentary.  It may have the weakness, but it has the sincerity, of a dying declaration.  For the few days I have to linger here I am removed completely from the busy scene of the world; but I hold myself to be still responsible for everything that I have done whilst I continued on the place of action.  If the rawest tyro in politics has been influenced by the authority of my gray hairs, and led by anything in my speeches or my writings to enter into this war, he has a right to call upon me to know why I have changed my opinions, or why, when those I voted with have adopted better notions, I persevere in exploded error.