Having found the advantage of assassination in the formation of their
tyranny, it is the grand resource in which they trust for the support of
it. Whoever opposes any of their proceedings, or is suspected of a
design to oppose them, is to answer it with his life, or the lives of
his wife and children. This infamous, cruel, and cowardly practice of
assassination they have the impudence to call _merciful_. They boast
that they operated their usurpation rather by terror than by force, and
that a few seasonable murders have prevented the bloodshed of many
battles. There is no doubt they will extend these acts of mercy whenever
they see an occasion. Dreadful, however, will be the consequences of
their attempt to avoid the evils of war by the merciful policy of
murder. If, by effectual punishment of the guilty, they do not wholly
disavow that practice, and the threat of it too, as any part of their
policy, if ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as
into a country of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not be
practised: nor are the French who act on the present system entitled to
expect it. They whose known policy it is to assassinate every citizen
whom they suspect to be discontented by their tyranny, and to corrupt
the soldiery of every open enemy, must look for no modified hostility.
All war, which is not battle, will be military execution. This will
beget acts of retaliation from you; and every retaliation will beget a
new revenge. The hell-hounds of war, on all sides, will be uncoupled and
unmuzzled. The new school of murder and barbarism set up in Paris,
having destroyed (so far as in it lies) all the other manners and
principles which have hitherto civilized Europe, will destroy also the
mode of civilized war, which, more than anything else, has distinguished
the Christian world. Such is the approaching golden age which the
Virgil[5] of your Assembly has sung to his Pollios!

In such a situation of your political, your civil, and your social