They leave the luxuries of servitude to the mean and dastardly hypocrites, to the Belials and Mammons of the infernal faction. They pursue their old end of tyranny under their old pretext of liberty. The recollection of their unbounded power renders every inferior condition irksome and vapid; and their former atrocities form, if I may so speak, a sort of moral destiny which irresistibly impels them to the perpetration of new crimes. They have no place left for penitence on earth. They labor under the most awful proscription of opinion that ever was pronounced against human beings. They have cut down every bridge by which they could retreat into the society of men. Awakened from their dreams of Democracy, the noise subsided that deafened their ears to the voice of humanity; the film fallen from their eyes which hid from them the blackness of their own deeds; haunted by the memory of their inexpiable guilt; condemned daily to look on the faces of those whom their hands made widows and orphans, they are goaded and scourged by these _real_ furies, and hurried into the tumult of new crimes, which will drown the cries of remorse, or, if they be too depraved for remorse, will silence the curses of mankind. Tyrannical power is their only refuge from the just vengeance of their fellow-creatures. Murder is their only means of usurping power. They have no taste, no occupation, no pursuit but power and blood. If their hands are tied, they must at least have the luxury of murderous projects. They have drunk too deeply of human blood ever to relinquish their cannibal appetite. Such a faction exists in France. It is numerous; it is powerful; and it has a principle of fidelity stronger than any that ever held together a society. _They are banded together by despair of forgiveness, by the unanimous detestation of mankind._ They are now contained by a severe and stern government. But they still meditate the renewal of insurrection and massacre; and they are prepared to renew the worst and most atrocious of their crimes, that crime against posterity and against human nature itself, that crime of which the latest generations of mankind may feel the fatal consequences—the crime of degrading and prostituting the sacred name of liberty. I must own that, however paradoxical it may appear, I should almost think not worse, but more meanly of them if it were otherwise. I must then think them destitute of that which I will not call courage, because that is the name of a virtue; but of that ferocious energy which alone rescues ruffians from contempt. If they were destitute of that which is the heroism of murderers, they would be the lowest as well as the most abominable of beings.