As the observance of the Sabbath advances, the _Decadis_ sink into contempt. I had heard much of civic feasts and other patriotic institutions celebrated upon them; but since I have been here, nothing of the sort has occurred. The national flag is displayed on the public offices, and if there is no pressure of business, the clerks have a holiday. A few zealous republicans also shut up their shops; but at present for one shop shut on a Decadi, there are six on a Sunday; for, however their owners may differ on political questions, a sense of religion is not extinguished in the mass of the people, even of the town. I have, nevertheless, been assured, that six months ago, to have shewn this mark of respect for the Sabbath would have been a certain mean of drawing down the resentment of the predominant faction. On every Decadi the laws are appointed to be read in the cathedral, and the municipality attend. I had once the curiosity to go to this meeting, and found the number of auditors, which I counted, exclusive of the reader, and those who attended officially, to be twenty-seven persons, of whom, to my surprize, five were old women. Were I not bound to attend an appointment at twelve o’clock, in the event of which I am deeply interested, methinks it were a curious speculation (to which I incline) to try to develope what will be the probable state of France, when peace with all her neighbours shall be restored to her. The thinking part of the nation survey, not without alarming anticipation, the consequence of a million and a half of armed men, to whom a habit of indolence is become familiar, being turned loose upon a country whose specie has disappeared, whose foreign commerce is annihilated, and whose manufactures must be _born again_, for hardly a trace of their having ever existed remains: add to this, that the government, by being no longer revolutionary, will lose its strong executive spring: and that the people are split into innumerable parties, which hate each other with irreconcileable inveteracy. National prejudices and political antipathies I consider as a vile state engine, which, in the hands of a few crafty men, has for more than five thousand years wrought the misery of the human race. Englishmen and Frenchmen, the Charib and the Hindoo, the philosopher of Europe and the naked savage whose wanderings I have witnessed at Botany Bay, shall one day, I presume in humble confidence to trust, be assembled before the “living throne,” of a common Father; and look back on that diminutive speck, which in the boundless ocean of infinity nothing short of divine irradiation could make visible to their eyes;----to review with unqualified contempt, sorrow, and repentance, those false principles, and sanguinary conclusions, which rendered it unto them a theatre of contention and horror, and caused their days to be “few and evil!”