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 Sieyès, 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
shocking and absurd; therefore comes in _abstraction_ and