When Burke talked about this war being wholly unlike any war that ever was waged in Europe before, about its being a war for justice on the one side, and a fanatical bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes to the plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk to the moral level of Frederick and Catherine, or for that matter, of Louis the Fourteenth himself.

This war was only too like the other great wars of European history.

The French Government had become political, exactly in the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herzberg were political.

The French Republic in 1797 was neither more nor less aggressive, immoral, piratical, than the monarchies which had partitioned Poland, and had intended to redistribute the continent of Europe to suit their own ambitions.

The Coalition began the game, but France proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of their game.