affectionate manner in which the parties have since communicated, has
made it an alliance, not of courts only, but of countries. There is
now an union of mind as well as of interest; and our hearts as well as
our prosperity, call on us to support it.

The people of England not having experienced this change, had likewise
no ideas of it, they were hugging to their bosoms the same prejudices
we were trampling beneath our feet; and they expected to keep a hold
upon America, by that narrowness of thinking which America disdained.
What they were proud of, we despised: and this is a principal cause
why all their negotiations, constructed on this ground, have failed.
We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to
ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot again become
dark. There is no possibility, neither is there any term to express
the supposition by, of the mind unknowing any thing it already knows;
and therefore all attempts on the part of England, fitted to the
former habit of America, and on the expectation of their applying now,
will be like persuading a seeing man to become blind, and a sensible
one to turn an idiot. The first of which is unnatural and the other
impossible.

As to the remark which the Abbe makes on the one country being a
monarchy and the other a republic, it can have no essential meaning.
Forms of government have nothing to do with treaties. The former are
the internal police of the countries severally; the latter their
external police jointly: and so long as each performs its part, we
have no more right or business to know how the one or the other
conducts its domestic affairs, than we have to inquire into the
private concerns of a family.