It is impossible to read Morris's shrewd comments on the events of the day, and his plans in reference to them, without wondering that France herself should at the crisis have failed to produce any statesmen to be compared with him for force, insight, and readiness to do what was practically best under the circumstances; but her past history for generations had been such as to make it out of the question for her to bring forth such men as the founders of our own government. Warriors, lawgivers, and diplomats she had in abundance. Statesmen who would be both hard-headed and true-hearted, who would be wise and yet unselfish, who would enact laws for a free people that would make that people freer still, and yet hinder them from doing wrong to their neighbors,--statesmen of this order she neither had nor could have had. Indeed, had there been such, it may well be doubted if they could have served France. With a people who made up in fickle ferocity what they lacked in self-restraint, and a king too timid and short-sighted to turn any crisis to advantage, the French statesmen, even had they been as wise as they were foolish, would hardly have been able to arrest or alter the march of events. Morris said bitterly that France was the country where everything was talked of, and where hardly anything was understood.
He told Lafayette that he thought the only hope of the kingdom lay in a foreign war; it is possible that the idea may have been suggested to him by Lafayette's naive remark that he believed his troops would readily follow him into action, but that they would not mount guard when it rained. Morris not only constantly urged the French ministers to make war, but actually drew up a plan of campaign for them. He believed it would turn the popular ardor, now constantly inflamed against the aristocrats, into a new channel, and that "there was no word perhaps in the dictionary which would take the place of _aristocrat_ so readily as _Anglais_." In proof of the wisdom of his propositions he stated, with absolute truthfulness: "If Britain had declared war in 1774 against the house of Bourbon, the now United States would have bled freely in her cause." He was disgusted with the littleness of the men who, appalled at their own surroundings, and unable to make shift even for the moment, found themselves thrown by chance to the helm, and face to face with the wildest storm that had ever shaken a civilized government. Speaking of one of the new ministers, he remarked: "They say he is a good kind of man, which is saying very little;" and again, "You want just now great men, to pursue great measures." Another time, in advising a war,--a war of men, not of money,--and speaking of the efforts made by the neighboring powers against the revolutionists in Flanders, he told his French friends that they must either suffer for or with their allies; and that the latter was at once the noblest and the safest course.