Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it,--that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks. That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of _France_. The word France is slipped in just as if the government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author, "will do this,"--"it is the interest of France,"--"the returning honor and generosity of France," &c., &c.--always merely France: just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe,--and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of _abstraction_. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with _rebels_ against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the _concrete_, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,--if we were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and tender-hearted Sieyes, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer, Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord,--nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional _douceur_, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be