God forbid that we should speak lightly of the calamities which such general warfare must bring in its train. None know them better, or deplore them more deeply than ourselves. But they are light in comparison of the evils of successful revolution. War, even in its bloodiest form, is under some control; it is conducted according to fixed usages, and by men subject to discipline. But revolutions have no customs: happily they have not been so frequent in history as to have induced any consuetudinary usage. They are subject to no discipline; the principle on which they proceed is the negation of all authority. They are preceded by the destruction of all those barriers which experience had erected, and found necessary to restrain vice's baneful influence. If they bear any resemblance to war, it is to the universal burst of passion which follows the storming of a fortress or sack of a city. The murder, rape, and conflagration which then invariably ensue, are but faint images of the wide-spread ruin which never fails to follow even the least bloody successful revolution. The evils of pillage, massacre, or storm affect only the immediate sufferers under the soldiers' violence: even the dread of plunder by a victorious host extends only as far as the arm of the marauder can reach. But the shock to credit, the destruction of capital, the wasting of industry by a successful revolution, are confined to no such limits; it devastates like a conflagration every thing within its reach, and spreads its baneful influence over the whole extent of the civilised world. There are few operatives in Britain who are not suffering at this moment under the effects of the French revolution. Who ever heard of a war which, in two months, destroyed _two-thirds_ of the capital of a nation, and subjected thirty-four millions of men to the despotism of two hundred thousand armed janizaries in the capital, as the recent revolution has done in France?