Talk not to me of what swarm of republics may come from this carcass!  It is no carcass.  Now, now, whilst we are talking, it is full of life and action.  What say you to the Regicide empire of to-day?  Tell me, my friend, do its terrors appall you into an abject submission, or rouse you to a vigorous defence?  But do—­I no longer prevent it—­do go on,—­look into futurity.  Has this empire nothing to alarm you when all struggle against it is over, when mankind shall be silent before it, when all nations shall be disarmed, disheartened, and truly divided by a treacherous peace?  Its malignity towards humankind will subsist with undiminished heat, whilst the means of giving it effect must proceed, and every means of resisting it must inevitably and rapidly decline.

Against alarm on their politic and military empire these are the writer’s sedative remedies.  But he leaves us sadly in the dark with regard to the moral consequences, which he states have threatened to demolish a system of civilization under which his country enjoys a prosperity unparalleled in the history of man.  We had emerged from our first terrors, but here we sink into them again,—­however, only to shake them off upon the credit of his being a man of very sanguine hopes.

Against the moral terrors of this successful empire of barbarism, though he has given us no consolation here, in another place he has formed other securities,—­securities, indeed, which will make even the enormity of the crimes and atrocities of France a benefit to the world.  We are to be cured by her diseases.  We are to grow proud of our Constitution upon, the distempers of theirs.  Governments throughout all Europe are to become much stronger by this event.  This, too, comes in the favorite mode of doubt and perhaps.  “To those,” he says, “who meditate on the workings of the human mind, a doubt may perhaps arise, whether the effects which I have described,” (namely, the change he supposes to be wrought on the public mind with regard to the French doctrines,) “though at present a salutary check to the dangerous spirit of innovation, may not prove favorable to abuses of power, by creating a timidity in the just cause of liberty.”  Here the current of our apprehensions takes a contrary course.  Instead of trembling for the existence of our government from the spirit of licentiousness and anarchy, the author would make us believe we are to tremble for our liberties from the great accession of power which is to accrue to government.

I believe I have read in some author who criticized the productions of the famous Jurieu, that it is not very wise in people who dash away in prophecy, to fix the time of accomplishment at too short a period.  Mr. Brothers may meditate upon this at his leisure.  He was a melancholy prognosticator, and has had the fate of melancholy men.  But they who prophesy pleasant things get great present applause; and in days of calamity people have something else to think