historical chronicle. xxiil 
_fanes which ensued, but particularly when he perceived more and more evi~ 
dently that measures, the consequenves of which he could not disguise from 
himself, must finally com;el him to relinquifh the friendly and pacific system 
which he had adopted. | he moment at length arrived whtn his majesty 
saw that it was necefsary for him not only to defend his own rights and 
those of his allies, not only to repel the unjust aggrefsion which he had re- 
cently experienced, but that ail the dearest interests of his people imposed. 
upon him a duty still more important, that of exerting his efforts for the 
preservation of civil society itselt, as happily establithed among the nations 
of Europe. 
The designs which had been profefsed of reforming. the abuses of the go- 
vernment of France, of establifhing personai liberty and the rights of pro- 
perty on a solid foundation, of securing to an extensive and populous coun- 
try, the benefit of a wise legislation, and an equitable and mild administra- 
tion of its laws, all these salutary views have unfortunately vanifhed. Ia 
their place has succeeded a system destructive of all public order, maintain- 
ed by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number, by arbitrary 
imprisonments, by matsacres, which cannot even be remembered without 
horror, and at length, by, the execrable murder of a just and beneficent so- 
vereign, and of the illustrious princefs, who, with an unfhaken frmnefs, has 
fhared all the misfottunes of her royal consort, his protracted sufferings, 
his cruel captivity, his ignominious death. The inhabitants of that unfor- 
tunate country, so long flattered by promises of happineis, renewed at the 
period of every fre, crimé, have fourid themselves plunged into an abyfs of 
uvexampled calamities; and neighbouring nations, instead of deriving a 
new security for the maintenance of general tranquillity from the establi- 
meut of a wise and moderate government, have been exposed to the repeat- 
ed attacks of a ferocious anarchy, the natural and necelsary enemy of all 
public order. They have hadto encounter acts of aggrefsion without pretest, 
open violations of all treaties, unprovoked dec!arations of war: in a word 
Whatever curruption, intrigue, or violence could effect, for the purpose so 
openly avowed of subverting all the institutions of society, and of extending 
over all the nations of Europe, that confusion which has produced the 
misery of France. 7 
This state of things cannot exist in France without involving ail the sur- 
rounding powers in one common danger, without giving them the right, 
without imposing it upon them-as aduty, to stop the progrefs of an evil 
which exists"only by the succefsive violation of all law and all property, and 
which attacks the tundamental principies by which mankind is united in 
the bonds ot civil society.— His majesty by no means disputes the right of 
France to reform its laws. It never would have been his wifh to employ 
the influence of external force with. respect to the pasticular forms of go- 
vernment to be establifhed to an independent country. Neither has he now 
7 that with, except in so far as such interference is become efsential to the 
