“We are ourselves compelled,
    Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
    To give in evidence.”

Whence is their amendment?  Why, the author writes, that, on their murderous insurrectionary system, their own lives are not sure for an hour; nor has their power a greater stability.  True.  They are convinced of it; and accordingly the wretches have done all they can to preserve their lives, and to secure their power; but not one step have they taken to amend the one or to make a more just use of the other.  Their wicked policy has obliged them to make a pause in the only massacres in which their treachery and cruelty had operated as a kind of savage justice,—­that is, the massacre of the accomplices of their crimes:  they have ceased to shed the inhuman blood of their fellow-murderers; but when they take any of those persons who contend for their lawful government, their property, and their religion, notwithstanding the truth which this author says is making its way into their bosoms, it has not taught them the least tincture of mercy.  This we plainly see by their massacre at Quiberon, where they put to death, with every species of contumely, and without any exception, every prisoner of war who did not escape out of their hands.  To have had property, to have been robbed of it, and to endeavor to regain it,—­these are crimes irremissible, to which every man who regards his property or his life, in every country, ought well to look in all connection with those with whom to have had property was an offence, to endeavor to keep it a second offence, to attempt to regain it a crime that puts the offender out of all the laws of peace or war.  You cannot see one of those wretches without an alarm for your life as well as your goods.  They are like the worst of the French and Italian banditti, who, whenever they robbed, were sure to murder.

Are they not the very same ruffians, thieves, assassins, and regicides that they were from the beginning?  Have they diversified the scene by the least variety, or produced the face of a single new villany? Taedet harum quotidianarum formarum.  Oh! but I shall be answered, “It is now quite another thing;—­they are all changed.  You have not seen them in their state dresses;—­this makes an amazing difference.  The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed a Constitution;—­the costume of the sans-culotte Constitution of 1793 was absolutely insufferable.  The Committee for Foreign Affairs were such slovens, and stunk so abominably, that no muscadin ambassador of the smallest degree of delicacy of nerves could come within ten yards of them; but now they are so powdered, and perfumed, and ribanded, and sashed, and plumed, that, though they are grown infinitely more insolent in their fine clothes even than they were in their rags, (and that was enough,) as they now appear, there is something