It is impossible to conceive any thing more despicable than wretches who, after hectoring and bullying over their meek and blameless sovereign and his defenceless family, whom they kept so long in a dungeon trembling for their existence—whom they put to death by a slow torture of three years, after playing the Republican and the tyrannicide to women and children, become the supple and fawning slaves of the first government that knows how to wield the scourge with a firm hand. I have used the word Republican because it is the name by which this atrocious faction describes itself. The assumption of that name is one of their crimes. They are no more Republicans than Royalists. They are the common enemies of all human society. God forbid that by the use of that word I should be supposed to reflect on the members of those respectable Republican communities which did exist in Europe before the French Revolution. That Revolution has spared many monarchies, but it has spared no republic within the sphere of its destructive energy. One republic only now exists in the world—a republic of English blood, which was originally composed of Republican societies, under the protection of a monarchy, which had, therefore, no great and perilous change in their internal constitution to effect; and of which, I speak it with pleasure and pride, the inhabitants, even in the convulsions of a most deplorable separation, displayed the humanity as well as valor which, I trust I may say, they inherited from their forefathers. Nor do I mean by the use of the word “Republican” to confound this execrable faction with all those who, in the liberty of private speculation, may prefer a Republican form of government. I own that, after much reflection, I am not able to conceive an error more gross than that of those who believe in the possibility of erecting a republic in any of the old monarchical countries of Europe, who believe that in such countries an elective supreme magistracy can produce any thing but a succession of stern tyrannies and bloody civil wars. It is a supposition which is belied by all experience, and which betrays the greatest ignorance of the first principles of the constitution of society. It is an error which has a false appearance of superiority over vulgar prejudice; it is, therefore, too apt to be attended with the most criminal rashness and presumption, and too easy to be inflamed into the most immoral and anti-social fanaticism. But as long as it remains a mere quiescent error, it is not the proper subject of moral disapprobation.