And, in completion of these decrees, their armies found it easy to collect as many discontented or worthless persons in any country as sufficed for setting up a tree of liberty. This they held as a sufficient call for their interference.—Sometimes they performed this ceremony themselves—a representation was easily made up in the same way—and then, under the name of a free constitution, the nation was forced to acquiesce in a form dictated at the point of the bayonet, in which they had not the smallest liberty to choose—and they were plundered of all they had, by way of compensating to France for the trouble she had taken.—And this they call Liberty.—It needs no comment.—
Thus have I attempted to prove that the present awful situation of Europe, and the general fermentation of the public mind in all nations, have not been altogether the natural operations of discontent, oppression, and moral corruption, although these have been great, and have operated with fatal energy; but that this political fever has been carefully and systematically heightened by bodies of men, who professed to be the physicians of the State, and, while their open practice employed cooling medicines, and a treatment which all approved, administered in secret the most inflammatory poisons, which they made up so as to flatter the diseased fancy of the patient. Although this was not a plan begun, carried on, and completed by the same persons, it was undoubtedly an uniform and consistent scheme, proceeding on the same unvaried principle, and France undoubtedly now smarts under all the woes of German Illumination.
I beg leave to suggest a few thoughts, which may enable us to draw some advantage from this shocking mass of information.
General Reflections.
I. I may observe, in the first place, and I beg it may be particularly attended to, that in all those villainous machinations against the peace of