THE WORKS

OF

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

EDMUND BURKE

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME THE FIFTH

JOHN C. NIMMO

14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W. C. 

MDCCCLXXXVII

CONTENTS OF VOL. V. 

OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONDUCT OF THE MINORITY, PARTICULARLY IN THELAST SESSION OF PARLIAMENT, 1793 1

PREFACE TO THE ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT TO HIS CONSTITUENTS; WITH AN APPENDIX 65

LETTER TO WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ. , OCCASIONED BY A SPEECH MADE INTHE HOUSE OF LORDS BY THE **** OF *******, IN THE DEBATE CONCERNINGLORD FITZWILLIAM, 1795 107

THOUGHTS AND DETAILS ON SCARCITY 131

LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD ON THE ATTACKS MADE UPON MR. BURKE AND HISPENSION, IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, BY THE DUKE OF BEDFORD AND THEEARL OF LAUDERDALE, 1796 171

THREE LETTERS TO A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT ON THE PROPOSALS FORPEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE. 

 LETTER I. ON THE OVERTURES OF PEACE 233

 LETTER II. ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS IT REGARDS OTHER NATIONS 342

 LETTER III. ON THE RUPTURE OF THE NEGOTIATION; THE TERMS OF PEACE PROPOSED; AND THE RESOURCES OF THE COUNTRY FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF THE WAR 384

OBSERVATIONS

ON THE

CONDUCT OF THE MINORITY

PARTICULARLY IN THE

LAST SESSION OF PARLIAMENT. 

ADDRESSED TO

THE DUKE OF PORTLAND AND LORD FITZWILLIAM. 

1793. 

LETTER

TO

HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF PORTLAND. 

MY DEAR LORD, --The paper which I take the liberty of sending to yourGrace was, for the greater part, written during the last session. A fewdays after the prorogation some few observations were added. I was, however, resolved to let it lie by me for a considerable time, that, onviewing the matter at a proper distance, and when the sharpness ofrecent impressions had been worn off, I might be better able to form ajust estimate of the value of my first opinions. 

I have just now read it over very coolly and deliberately. My latestjudgment owns my first sentiments and reasonings, in their full force, with regard both to persons and things. 

During a period of four years, the state of the world, except for somefew and short intervals, has filled me with a good deal of seriousinquietude. I considered a general war against Jacobins and Jacobinismas the only possible chance of saving Europe (and England as included inEurope) from a truly frightful revolution. For this I have beencensured, as receiving through weakness, or spreading through fraud andartifice, a false alarm. Whatever others may think of the matter, thatalarm, in my mind, is by no means quieted. The state of affairs_abroad_ is not so much mended as to make me, for one, full ofconfidence. At _home_, I see no abatement whatsoever in the zeal of thepartisans of Jacobinism towards their cause, nor any cessation in theirefforts to do mischief. What is doing by Lord Lauderdale on the firstscene of Lord George Gordon's actions, and in his spirit, is notcalculated to remove my apprehensions. They pursue their first objectwith as much eagerness as ever, but with more dexterity. Under theplausible name of peace, by which they delude or are deluded, they woulddeliver us unarmed and defenceless to the confederation of Jacobins, whose centre is indeed in France, but whose rays proceed in everydirection throughout the world. I understand that Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, has been lately very busy in spreading a disaffection to this war (whichwe carry on for our being) in the country in which his property giveshim so great an influence. It is truly alarming to see so large a partof the aristocratic interest engaged in the cause of the new species ofdemocracy, which is openly attacking or secretly undermining the systemof property by which mankind has hitherto been governed. But we are notto delude ourselves. No man can be connected with a party whichprofesses publicly to admire or may be justly suspected of secretlyabetting this French Revolution, who must not be drawn into its vortex, and become the instrument of its designs. 

What I have written is in the manner of apology. I have given it thatform, as being the most respectful; but I do not stand in need of anyapology for my principles, my sentiments, or my conduct. I wish thepaper I lay before your Grace to be considered as my most deliberate, solemn, and even testamentary protest against the proceedings anddoctrines which have hitherto produced so much mischief in the world, and which will infallibly produce more, and possibly greater. It is myprotest against the delusion by which some have been taught to look uponthis Jacobin contest at home as an ordinary party squabble about placeor patronage, and to regard this Jacobin war abroad as a common warabout trade or territorial boundaries, or about a political balance ofpower among rival or jealous states. Above all, it is my protest againstthat mistake or perversion of sentiment by which they who agree with usin our principles may on collateral considerations be regarded asenemies, and those who, in this perilous crisis of all human affairs, differ from us fundamentally and practically, as our best friends. Thuspersons of great importance may be made to turn the whole of theirinfluence to the destruction of their principles. 

I now make it my humble request to your Grace, that you will not giveany sort of answer to the paper I send, or to this letter, except barelyto let me know that you have received them. I even wish that at presentyou may not read the paper which I transmit: lock it up in the drawer ofyour library-table; and when a day of compulsory reflection comes, thenbe pleased to turn to it. Then remember that your Grace had a truefriend, who had, comparatively with men of your description, a verysmall interest in opposing the modern system of morality and policy, butwho, under every discouragement, was faithful to public duty and toprivate friendship. I shall then probably be dead. I am sure I do notwish to live to see such things. But whilst I do live, I shall pursuethe same course, although my merits should be taken for unpardonablefaults, and as such avenged, not only on myself, but on my posterity. 

Adieu, my dear Lord; and do me the justice to believe me ever, with mostsincere respect, veneration, and affectionate attachment, Your Grace's most faithful friend, And most obedient humble servant, EDMUND BURKE. 

BEACONSFIELD, Sept. 29, 1793. 

OBSERVATIONS. 

Approaching towards the close of a long period of public service, it isnatural I should be desirous to stand well (I hope I do stand tolerablywell) with that public which, with whatever fortune, I have endeavoredfaithfully and zealously to serve. 

I am also not a little anxious for some place in the estimation of thetwo persons to whom I address this paper. I have always acted with them, and with those whom they represent. To my knowledge, I have notdeviated, no, not in the minutest point, from their opinions andprinciples. Of late, without any alteration in their sentiments or inmine, a difference of a very unusual nature, and which, under thecircumstances, it is not easy to describe, has arisen between us. 

In my journey with them through life, I met Mr. Fox in my road; and Itravelled with him very cheerfully, as long as he appeared to me topursue the same direction with those in whose company I set out. In thelatter stage of our progress a new scheme of liberty and equality wasproduced in the world, which either dazzled his imagination, or wassuited to some new walks of ambition which were then opened to his view. The whole frame and fashion of his politics appear to have sufferedabout that time a very material alteration. It is about three yearssince, in consequence of that extraordinary change, that, after apretty long preceding period of distance, coolness, and want ofconfidence, if not total alienation on his part, a complete publicseparation has been made between that gentleman and me. Until lately thebreach between us appeared reparable. I trusted that time andreflection, and a decisive experience of the mischiefs which have flowedfrom the proceedings and the system of France, on which our differencehad arisen, as well as the known sentiments of the best and wisest ofour common friends upon that subject, would have brought him to a saferway of thinking. Several of his friends saw no security for keepingthings in a proper train after this excursion of his, but in the reunionof the party on its old grounds, under the Duke of Portland. Mr. Fox, ifhe pleased, might have been comprehended in that system, with the rankand consideration to which his great talents entitle him, and indeedmust secure to him in any party arrangement that _could_ be made. TheDuke of Portland knows how much I wished for, and how earnestly Ilabored that reunion, and upon terms that might every way be honorableand advantageous to Mr. Fox. His conduct in the last session hasextinguished these hopes forever. 

Mr. Fox has lately published in print a defence of his conduct. Ontaking into consideration that defence, a society of gentlemen, calledthe Whig Club, thought proper to come to the followingresolution:--"That their confidence in Mr. Fox is confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against him. "

To that resolution my two noble friends, the Duke of Portland and LordFitzwilliam, have given their concurrence. 

The calumnies supposed in that resolution can be nothing else than theobjections taken to Mr. Fox's conduct in this session of Parliament; forto them, and to them alone, the resolution refers. I am one of those whohave publicly and strongly urged those objections. I hope I shall bethought only to do what is necessary to my justification, thus publicly, solemnly, and heavily censured by those whom I most value and esteem, when I firmly contend that the objections which I, with many others ofthe friends to the Duke of Portland, have made to Mr. Fox's conduct, arenot _calumnies_, but founded on truth, --that they are not _few_, butmany, --and that they are not _light and trivial_, but, in a very highdegree, serious and important. 

That I may avoid the imputation of throwing out, even privately, anyloose, random imputations against the public conduct of a gentleman forwhom I once entertained a very warm affection, and whose abilities Iregard with the greatest admiration, I will put down, distinctly andarticulately, some of the matters of objection which I feel to his latedoctrines and proceedings, trusting that I shall be able to demonstrateto the friends whose good opinion I would still cultivate, that notlevity, nor caprice, nor less defensible motives, but that very gravereasons, influence my judgment. I think that the spirit of his lateproceedings is wholly alien to our national policy, and to the peace, tothe prosperity, and to the legal liberties of this nation, _according toour ancient domestic and appropriated mode of holding them_. 

Viewing things in that light, my confidence in him is not increased, buttotally destroyed, by those proceedings. I cannot conceive it a matterof honor or duty (but the direct contrary) in any member of Parliamentto continue systematic opposition for the purpose of putting governmentunder difficulties, until Mr. Fox (with all his present ideas) shallhave the principal direction of affairs placed in his hands, and untilthe present body of administration (with their ideas and measures) is ofcourse overturned and dissolved. 

To come to particulars. 

1. The laws and Constitution of the kingdom intrust the sole andexclusive right of treating with foreign potentates to the king. This isan undisputed part of the legal prerogative of the crown. However, notwithstanding this, Mr. Fox, without the knowledge or participation ofany one person in the House of Commons, with whom he was bound by everyparty principle, in matters of delicacy and importance, confidentiallyto communicate, thought proper to send Mr. Adair, as his representative, and with his cipher, to St. Petersburg, there to frustrate the objectsfor which the minister from the crown was authorized to treat. Hesucceeded in this his design, and did actually frustrate the king'sminister in some of the objects of his negotiation. 

This proceeding of Mr. Fox does not (as I conceive) amount to absolutehigh treason, --Russia, though on bad terms, not having been thendeclaredly at war with this kingdom. But such a proceeding is in law notvery remote from that offence, and is undoubtedly a mostunconstitutional act, and an high treasonable misdemeanor. 

The legitimate and sure mode of communication between this nation andforeign powers is rendered uncertain, precarious, and treacherous, bybeing divided into two channels, --one with the government, one with thehead of a party in opposition to that government; by which means theforeign powers can never be assured of the real authority or validity ofany public transaction whatsoever. 

On the other hand, the advantage taken of the discontent which at thattime prevailed in Parliament and in the nation, to give to an individualan influence directly against the government of his country, in aforeign court, has made a highway into England for the intrigues offoreign courts in our affairs. This is a sore evil, --an evil from which, before this time, England was more free than any other nation. Nothingcan preserve us from that evil--which connects cabinet factions abroadwith popular factions here--but the keeping sacred the crown as the onlychannel of communication with every other nation. 

This proceeding of Mr. Fox has given a strong countenance and anencouraging example to the doctrines and practices of the Revolution andConstitutional Societies, and of other mischievous societies of thatdescription, who, without any legal authority, and even without anycorporate capacity, are in the habit of proposing, and, to the best oftheir power, of forming, leagues and alliances with France. 

This proceeding, which ought to be reprobated on all the generalprinciples of government, is in a more narrow view of things not lessreprehensible. It tends to the prejudice of the whole of the Duke ofPortland's late party, by discrediting the principles upon which theysupported Mr. Fox in the Russian business, as if they of that party alsohad proceeded in their Parliamentary opposition on the same mischievousprinciples which actuated Mr. Fox in sending Mr. Adair on his embassy. 

2. Very soon after his sending this embassy to Russia, that is, in thespring of 1792, a covenanting club or association was formed in London, calling itself by the ambitious and invidious title of "_The Friends ofthe People_. " It was composed of many of Mr. Fox's own most intimatepersonal and party friends, joined to a very considerable part of themembers of those mischievous associations called the Revolution Societyand the Constitutional Society. Mr. Fox must have been well apprised ofthe progress of that society in every one of its steps, if not of thevery origin of it. I certainly was informed of both, who had noconnection with the design, directly or indirectly. His influence overthe persons who composed the leading part in that association was, andis, unbounded. I hear that he expressed some disapprobation of this clubin one case, (that of Mr. St. John, ) where his consent was formallyasked; yet he never attempted seriously to put a stop to theassociation, or to disavow it, or to control, check, or modify it in anyway whatsoever. If he had pleased, without difficulty, he might havesuppressed it in its beginning. However, he did not only not suppress itin its beginning, but encouraged it in every part of its progress, atthat particular time when Jacobin clubs (under the very same or similartitles) were making such dreadful havoc in a country not thirty milesfrom the coast of England, and when every motive of moral prudencecalled for the discouragement of societies formed for the increase ofpopular pretensions to power and direction. 

3. When the proceedings of this society of the Friends of the People, aswell as others acting in the same spirit, had caused a very seriousalarm in the mind of the Duke of Portland, and of many good patriots, he publicly, in the House of Commons, treated their apprehensions andconduct with the greatest asperity and ridicule. He condemned andvilified, in the most insulting and outrageous terms, the proclamationissued by government on that occasion, --though he well knew that it hadpassed through the Duke of Portland's hands, that it had received hisfullest approbation, and that it was the result of an actual interviewbetween that noble Duke and Mr. Pitt. During the discussion of itsmerits in the House of Commons, Mr. Fox countenanced and justified thechief promoters of that association; and he received, in return, apublic assurance from them of an inviolable adherence to him singly andpersonally. On account of this proceeding, a very great number (Ipresume to say not the least grave and wise part) of the Duke ofPortland's friends in Parliament, and many out of Parliament who are ofthe same description, have become separated from that time to this fromMr. Fox's particular cabal, --very few of which cabal are, or ever have, so much as pretended to be attached to the Duke of Portland, or to payany respect to him or his opinions. 

4. At the beginning of this session, when the sober part of the nationwas a second time generally and justly alarmed at the progress of theFrench arms on the Continent, and at the spreading of their horridprinciples and cabals in England, Mr. Fox did not (as had been usual incases of far less moment) call together any meeting of the Duke ofPortland's friends in the House of Commons, for the purpose of takingtheir opinion on the conduct to be pursued in Parliament at thatcritical juncture. He concerted his measures (if with any persons atall) with the friends of Lord Lansdowne, and those calling themselvesFriends of the People, and others not in the smallest degree attached tothe Duke of Portland; by which conduct he wilfully gave up (in myopinion) all pretensions to be considered as of that party, and muchmore to be considered as the leader and mouth of it in the House ofCommons. This could not give much encouragement to those who had beenseparated from Mr. Fox, on account of his conduct on the firstproclamation, to rejoin that party. 

5. Not having consulted any of the Duke of Portland's party in the Houseof Commons, --and not having consulted them, because he had reason toknow that the course he had resolved to pursue would be highlydisagreeable to them, --he represented the alarm, which was a second timegiven and taken, in still more invidious colors than those in which hepainted the alarms of the former year. He described those alarms in thismanner, although the cause of them was then grown far less equivocal andfar more urgent. He even went so far as to treat the supposition of thegrowth of a Jacobin spirit in England as a libel on the nation. As tothe danger from _abroad_, on the first day of the session he said littleor nothing upon the subject. He contented himself with defending theruling factions in France, and with accusing the public councils of thiskingdom of every sort of evil design on the liberties of thepeople, --declaring distinctly, strongly, and precisely, that the wholedanger of the nation was from the growth of the power of the crown. Thepolicy of this declaration was obvious. It was in subservience to thegeneral plan of disabling us from taking any steps against France. Tocounteract the alarm given by the progress of Jacobin arms andprinciples, he endeavored to excite an opposite alarm concerning thegrowth of the power of the crown. If that alarm should prevail, he knewthat the nation never would be brought by arms to oppose the growth ofthe Jacobin empire: because it is obvious that war does, in its verynature, necessitate the Commons considerably to strengthen the hands ofgovernment; and if that strength should itself be the object of terror, we could have no war. 

6. In the extraordinary and violent speeches of that day, he attributedall the evils which the public had suffered to the proclamation of thepreceding summer; though he spoke in presence of the Duke of Portland'sown son, the Marquis of Tichfield, who had seconded the address on thatproclamation, and in presence of the Duke of Portland's brother, LordEdward Bentinck, and several others of his best friends and nearestrelations. 

7. On that day, that is, on the 13th of December, 1792, he proposed anamendment to the address, which stands on the journals of the House, andwhich is, perhaps, the most extraordinary record which ever did standupon them. To introduce this amendment, he not only struck out the partof the proposed address which alluded to insurrections, upon the groundof the objections which he took to the legality of calling togetherParliament, (objections which I must ever think litigious andsophistical, ) but he likewise struck out _that part which related to thecabals and conspiracies of the French faction in England_, althoughtheir practices and correspondences were of public notoriety. Mr. Cooperand Mr. Watt had been deputed from Manchester to the Jacobins. Theseambassadors were received by them as British representatives. Otherdeputations of English had been received at the bar of the NationalAssembly. They had gone the length of giving supplies to the Jacobinarmies; and they, in return, had received promises of militaryassistance to forward their designs in England. A regular correspondencefor fraternizing the two nations had also been carried on by societiesin London with a great number of the Jacobin societies in France. Thiscorrespondence had also for its object the pretended improvement of theBritish Constitution. What is the most remarkable, and by much the moremischievous part of his proceedings that day, Mr. Fox likewise struckout everything in the address which _related to the tokens of ambitiongiven by France, her aggressions upon our allies, and the sudden anddangerous growth of her power upon every side_; and instead of all thoseweighty, and, at that time, necessary matters, by which the House ofCommons was (in a crisis such as perhaps Europe never stood) to giveassurances to our allies, strength to our government, and a check to thecommon enemy of Europe, he substituted nothing but a criminal charge onthe conduct of the British government for calling Parliament together, and an engagement to inquire into that conduct. 

8. If it had pleased God to suffer him to succeed in this his projectfor the amendment to the address, he would forever have ruined thisnation, along with the rest of Europe. At home all the Jacobinsocieties, formed for the utter destruction of our Constitution, wouldhave lifted up their heads, which had been beaten down by the twoproclamations. Those societies would have been infinitely strengthenedand multiplied in every quarter; their dangerous foreign communicationswould have been left broad and open; the crown would not have beenauthorized to take any measure whatever for our immediate defence by seaor land. The closest, the most natural, the nearest, and at the sametime, from many internal as well as external circumstances, the weakestof our allies, Holland, would have been given up, bound hand and foot, to France, just on the point of invading that republic. A generalconsternation would have seized upon all Europe; and all alliance withevery other power, except France, would have been forever renderedimpracticable to us. I think it impossible for any man, who regards thedignity and safety of his country, or indeed the common safety ofmankind, ever to forget Mr. Fox's proceedings in that tremendous crisisof all human affairs. 

9. Mr. Fox very soon had reason to be apprised of the general dislike ofthe Duke of Portland's friends to this conduct. Some of those who hadeven voted with him, the day after their vote, expressed theirabhorrence of his amendment, their sense of its inevitable tendency, andtheir total alienation from the principles and maxims upon which it wasmade; yet the very next day, that is, on Friday, the 14th of December, he brought on what in effect was the very same business, and on the sameprinciples, a _second_ time. 

10. Although the House does not usually sit on Saturday, he a _third_time brought on another proposition in the same spirit, and pursued itwith so much heat and perseverance as to sit into Sunday: a thing notknown in Parliament for many years. 

11. In all these motions and debates he wholly departed from all thepolitical principles relative to France (considered merely as a state, and independent of its Jacobin form of government) which had hithertobeen held fundamental in this country, and which he had himself heldmore strongly than any man in Parliament. He at that time studiouslyseparated himself from those to whose sentiments he used to profess nosmall regard, although those sentiments were publicly declared. I hadthen no concern in the party, having been, for some time, with alloutrage, excluded from it; but, on general principles, I must say that aperson who assumes to be leader of a party composed of freemen and ofgentlemen ought to pay some degree of deference to their feelings, andeven to their prejudices. He ought to have some degree of management fortheir credit and influence in their country. He showed so very little ofthis delicacy, that he compared the alarm raised in the minds of theDuke of Portland's party, (which was his own, ) an alarm in which theysympathized with the greater part of the nation, to the panic producedby the pretended Popish plot in the reign of Charles theSecond, --describing it to be, as that was, a contrivance of knaves, andbelieved only by well-meaning dupes and madmen. 

12. The Monday following (the 17th of December) he pursued the sameconduct. The means used in England to coöperate with the Jacobin army inpolitics agreed with their modes of proceeding: I allude to themischievous writings circulated with much industry and success, as wellas the seditious clubs, which at that time added not a little to thealarm taken by observing and well-informed men. The writings and theclubs were two evils which marched together. Mr. Fox discovered thegreatest possible disposition to favor and countenance the one as wellas the other of these two grand instruments of the French system. Hewould hardly consider any political writing whatsoever as a libel, or asa fit object of prosecution. At a time in which the press has been thegrand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion, and, I may say, of human society itself, to carry the doctrines of itsliberty higher than ever it has been known by its most extravagantassertors, even in France, gave occasion to very serious reflections. Mr. Fox treated the associations for prosecuting these libels as tendingto prevent the improvement of the human mind, and as a mobbish tyranny. He thought proper to compare them with the riotous assemblies of LordGeorge Gordon in 1780, declaring that he had advised his friends inWestminster to sign the associations, whether they agreed to them ornot, in order that they might avoid destruction to their persons ortheir houses, or a desertion of their shops. This insidious advicetended to confound those who wished well to the object of theassociation with the seditious against whom the association wasdirected. By this stratagem, the confederacy intended for preserving theBritish Constitution and the public peace would be wholly defeated. Themagistrates, utterly incapable of distinguishing the friends from theenemies of order, would in vain look for support, when they stood in thegreatest need of it. 

13. Mr. Fox's whole conduct, on this occasion, was without example. Thevery morning after these violent declamations in the House of Commonsagainst the association, (that is, on Tuesday, the 18th, ) he wenthimself to a meeting of St. George's parish, and there signed anassociation of the nature and tendency of those he had the night beforeso vehemently condemned; and several of his particular and most intimatefriends, inhabitants of that parish, attended and signed along with him. 

14. Immediately after this extraordinary step, and in order perfectly todefeat the ends of that association against Jacobin publications, (which, contrary to his opinions, he had promoted and signed, ) amischievous society was formed under his auspices, called _The Friendsof the Liberty of the Press_. Their title groundlessly insinuated thatthe freedom of the press had lately suffered, or was now threatenedwith, some violation. This society was only, in reality, anothermodification of the society calling itself _The Friends of the People_, which in the preceding summer had caused so much uneasiness in the Dukeof Portland's mind, and in the minds of several of his friends. This newsociety was composed of many, if not most, of the members of the club ofthe Friends of the People, with the addition of a vast multitude ofothers (such as Mr. Horne Tooke) of the worst and most seditiousdispositions that could be found in the whole kingdom. In the firstmeeting of this club Mr. Erskine took the lead, and directly (withoutany disavowal ever since on Mr. Fox's part) _made use of his name andauthority in favor of its formation and purposes_. In the same meetingMr. Erskine had thanks for his defence of Paine, which amounted to acomplete avowal of that Jacobin incendiary; else it is impossible toknow how Mr. Erskine should have deserved such marked applauses foracting merely as a lawyer for his fee, in the ordinary course of hisprofession. 

15. Indeed, Mr. Fox appeared the general patron of all such persons andproceedings. When Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and other persons, forpractices of the most dangerous kind, in Paris and in London, wereremoved from the King's Guards, Mr. Fox took occasion in the House ofCommons heavily to censure that act, as unjust and oppressive, andtending to make officers bad citizens. There were few, however, who didnot call for some such measures on the part of government, as ofabsolute necessity for the king's personal safety, as well as that ofthe public; and nothing but the mistaken lenity, with which suchpractices were rather discountenanced than punished, could possiblydeserve reprehension in what was done with regard to those gentlemen. 

16. Mr. Fox regularly and systematically, and with a diligence longunusual to him, did everything he could to countenance the sameprinciple of fraternity and connection with the Jacobins abroad, and theNational Convention of France, for which these officers had been removedfrom the Guards. For when a bill (feeble and lax, indeed, and far shortof the vigor required by the conjuncture) was brought in for removingout of the kingdom the emissaries of France, Mr. Fox opposed it with allhis might. He pursued a vehement and detailed opposition to it throughall its stages, describing it as a measure contrary to the existingtreaties between Great Britain and France, as a violation of the law ofnations, and as an outrage on the Great Charter itself. 

17. In the same manner, and with the same heat, he opposed a bill which(though awkward and inartificial in its construction) was right and wisein its principle, and was precedented in the best times, and absolutelynecessary at that juncture: I mean the Traitorous Correspondence Bill. By these means the enemy, rendered infinitely dangerous by the links ofreal faction and pretended commerce, would have been (had Mr. Foxsucceeded) enabled to carry on the war against us by our own resources. For this purpose that enemy would have had his agents and traitors inthe midst of us. 

18. When at length war was actually declared by the usurpers in Franceagainst this kingdom, and declared whilst they were pretending anegotiation through Dumouriez with Lord Auckland, Mr. Fox stillcontinued, through the whole of the proceedings, to discredit thenational honor and justice, and to throw the entire blame of the war onParliament, and on his own country, as acting with violence, haughtiness, and want of equity. He frequently asserted, both at thetime and ever since, that the war, though declared by France, wasprovoked by us, and that it was wholly unnecessary and fundamentallyunjust. 

19. He has lost no opportunity of railing, in the most virulent mannerand in the most unmeasured language, at every foreign power with whom wecould now, or at any time, contract any useful or effectual allianceagainst France, --declaring that he hoped no alliance with those powerswas made, or was in a train of being made. [1] He always expressedhimself with the utmost horror concerning such alliances. So did allhis phalanx. Mr. Sheridan in particular, after one of his invectivesagainst those powers, sitting by him, said, with manifest marks of hisapprobation, that, if we must go to war, he had rather go to war alonethan with such allies. 

20. Immediately after the French declaration of war against us, Parliament addressed the king in support of the war against them, asjust and necessary, and provoked, as well as formally declared againstGreat Britain. He did not divide the House upon this measure; yet heimmediately followed this our solemn Parliamentary engagement to theking with a motion proposing a set of resolutions, the effect of whichwas, that the two Houses were to load themselves with every kind ofreproach for having made the address which they had just carried to thethrone. He commenced this long string of criminatory resolutions againsthis country (if King, Lords, and Commons of Great Britain, and a decidedmajority without doors are his country) _with a declaration againstintermeddling in the interior concerns of France_. The purport of thisresolution of non-interference is a thing unexampled in the history ofthe world, when one nation has been actually at war with another. Thebest writers on the law of nations give no sort of countenance to hisdoctrine of non-interference, in the extent and manner in which he usedit, _even when there is no war_. When the war exists, not one authorityis against it in all its latitude. His doctrine is equally contrary tothe enemy's uniform practice, who, whether in peace or in war, makes ithis great aim not only to change the government, but to make an entirerevolution in the whole of the social order in every country. 

The object of the last of this extraordinary string of resolutions movedby Mr. Fox was to advise the crown not to enter into such an engagementwith any foreign power so as to hinder us from making a _separate_ peacewith France, or which might tend to enable any of those powers tointroduce a government in that country other than such as those personswhom he calls the people of France shall choose to establish. In short, the whole of these resolutions appeared to have but one drift, namely, the sacrifice of our own domestic dignity and safety, and theindependency of Europe, to the support of this strange mixture ofanarchy and tyranny which prevails in France, and which Mr. Fox and hisparty were pleased to call a government. The immediate consequence ofthese measures was (by an example the ill effects of which on the wholeworld are not to be calculated) to secure the robbers of the innocentnobility, gentry, and ecclesiastics of France in the enjoyment of thespoil they have made of the estates, houses, and goods of theirfellow-citizens. 

21. Not satisfied with moving these resolutions, tending to confirm thishorrible tyranny and robbery, and with actually dividing the House onthe first of the long string which they composed, in a few daysafterwards he encouraged and supported Mr. Grey in producing the verysame string in a new form, and in moving, under the shape of an addressof Parliament to the crown, another virulent libel on all its ownproceedings in this session, in which not only all the ground of theresolutions was again travelled over, but much new inflammatory matterwas introduced. In particular, a charge was made, that Great Britain hadnot interposed to prevent the last partition of Poland. On this headthe party dwelt very largely and very vehemently. Mr. Fox's intention, in the choice of this extraordinary topic, was evident enough. He wellknows two things: first, that no wise or honest man can approve of thatpartition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischieffrom it to all countries at some future time; secondly, he knows quiteas well, that, let our opinions on that partition be what they will, England, by itself, is not in a situation to afford to Poland anyassistance whatsoever. The purpose of the introduction of Polishpolitics into this discussion was not for the sake of Poland; it was tothrow an odium upon those who are obliged to decline the cause ofjustice from their impossibility of supporting a cause which theyapprove: as if we, who think more strongly on this subject than he does, were of a party against Poland, because we are obliged to act with someof the authors of that injustice against our common enemy, France. Butthe great and leading purpose of this introduction of Poland into thedebates on the French war was to divert the public attention from whatwas in our power, that is, from a steady coöperation against France, toa quarrel with the allies for the sake of a Polish war, which, for anyuseful purpose to Poland, he knew it was out of our power to make. IfEngland can touch Poland ever so remotely, it must be through the mediumof alliances. But by attacking all the combined powers together fortheir supposed unjust aggression upon France, he bound them by a nowcommon interest not separately to join England for the rescue of Poland. The proposition could only mean to do what all the writers of his partyin the Morning Chronicle have aimed at persuading the public to, throughthe whole of the last autumn and winter, and to this hour: that is, toan alliance with the Jacobins of France, for the pretended purpose ofsuccoring Poland. This curious project would leave to Great Britain noother ally in all Europe except its old enemy, France. 

22. Mr. Fox, after the first day's discussion on the question for theaddress, was at length driven to admit (to admit rather than to urge, and that very faintly) that France had discovered ambitious views, whichnone of his partisans, that I recollect, (Mr. Sheridan excepted, ) did, however, either urge or admit. What is remarkable enough, all the pointsadmitted against the Jacobins were brought to bear in their favor asmuch as those in which they were defended. For when Mr. Fox admittedthat the conduct of the Jacobins did discover ambition, he always endedhis admission of their ambitious views by an apology for them, insistingthat the universally hostile disposition shown to them rendered theirambition a sort of defensive policy. Thus, on whatever roads hetravelled, they all terminated in recommending a recognition of theirpretended republic, and in the plan of sending an ambassador to it. Thiswas the burden of all his song:--"Everything which we could reasonablyhope from war would be obtained from treaty. " It is to be observed, however, that, in all these debates, Mr. Fox never once stated to theHouse upon what ground it was he conceived that all the objects of theFrench system of united fanaticism and ambition would instantly be givenup, whenever England should think fit to propose a treaty. On proposingso strange a recognition and so humiliating an embassy as he moved, hewas bound to produce his authority, if any authority he had. He ought tohave done this the rather, because Le Brun, in his first propositions, and in his answers to Lord Grenville, defended, _on principle, not ontemporary convenience_, everything which was objected to France, andshowed not the smallest disposition to give up any one of the points indiscussion. Mr. Fox must also have known that the Convention had passedto the order of the day, on a proposition to give some sort ofexplanation or modification to the hostile decree of the 19th ofNovember for exciting insurrections in all countries, --a decree known tobe peculiarly pointed at Great Britain. The whole proceeding of theFrench administration was the most remote that could be imagined fromfurnishing any indication of a pacific disposition: for at the very timein which it was pretended that the Jacobins entertained those boastedpacific intentions, at the very time in which Mr. Fox was urging atreaty with them, not content with refusing a modification of the decreefor insurrections, they published their ever-memorable decree of the15th of December, 1792, for disorganizing every country in Europe intowhich they should on any occasion set their foot; and on the 25th andthe 30th of the same month, they solemnly, and, on the last of thesedays, practically, confirmed that decree. 

23. But Mr. Fox had himself taken good care, in the negotiation heproposed, that France should not be obliged to make any very greatconcessions to her presumed moderation: for he had laid down onegeneral, comprehensive rule, with him (as he said) constant andinviolable. This rule, in fact, would not only have left to the factionin France all the property and power they had usurped at home, but most, if not all, of the conquests which by their atrocious perfidy andviolence they had made abroad. The principle laid down by Mr. Fox isthis, --"_That every state, in the conclusion of a war, has a right toavail itself of its conquests towards an indemnification_. " Thisprinciple (true or false) is totally contrary to the policy which thiscountry has pursued with France at various periods, particularly at theTreaty of Ryswick, in the last century, and at the Treaty ofAix-la-Chapelle, in this. Whatever the merits of his rule may be in theeyes of neutral judges, it is a rule which no statesman before him everlaid down in favor of the adverse power with whom he was to negotiate. The adverse party himself may safely be trusted to take care of his_own_ aggrandizement. But (as if the black boxes of the several partieshad been exchanged) Mr. Fox's English ambassador, by some odd mistake, would find himself charged with the concerns of France. If we were toleave France as she stood at the time when Mr. Fox proposed to treatwith her, that formidable power must have been infinitely strengthened, and almost every other power in Europe as much weakened, by theextraordinary basis which he laid for a treaty. For Avignon must go fromthe Pope; Savoy (at least) from the King of Sardinia, if not Nice. Liege, Mentz, Salm, Deux-Ponts, and Basle must be separated fromGermany. On this side of the Rhine, Liege (at least) must be lost to theEmpire, and added to France. Mr. Fox's general principle fully coveredall this. How much of these territories came within his rule he neverattempted to define. He kept a profound silence as to Germany. As tothe Netherlands he was something more explicit. He said (if I recollectright) that France on that side might expect something towardsstrengthening her frontier. As to the remaining parts of theNetherlands, which he supposed France might consent to surrender, hewent so far as to declare that England ought not to permit the Emperorto be repossessed of the remainder of the ten Provinces, but that _thepeople_ should choose such a form of independent government as theyliked. This proposition of Mr. Fox was just the arrangement which theusurpation in France had all along proposed to make. As thecircumstances were at that time, and have been ever since, hisproposition fully indicated what government the Flemings _must_ have inthe stated extent of what was left to them. A government so set up inthe Netherlands, whether compulsory, or by the choice of the_sans-culottes_, (who he well knew were to be the real electors, and thesole electors, ) in whatever name it was to exist, must evidently dependfor its existence, as it had done for its original formation, on France. In reality, it must have ended in that point to which, piece by piece, the French were then actually bringing all the Netherlands, --that is, anincorporation with France as a body of new Departments, just as Savoyand Liege and the rest of their pretended independent popularsovereignties have been united to their republic. Such an arrangementmust have destroyed Austria; it must have left Holland always at themercy of France; it must totally and forever cut off all politicalcommunication between England and the Continent. Such must have been thesituation of Europe, according to Mr. Fox's system of politics, howeverlaudable his personal motives may have been in proposing so complete achange in the whole system of Great Britain with regard to all theContinental powers. 

24. After it had been generally supposed that all public business wasover for the session, and that Mr. Fox had exhausted all the modes ofpressing this French scheme, he thought proper to take a step beyondevery expectation, and which demonstrated his wonderful eagerness andperseverance in his cause, as well as the nature and true character ofthe cause itself. This step was taken by Mr. Fox immediately after hisgiving his assent to the grant of supply voted to him by Mr. SerjeantAdair and a committee of gentlemen who assumed to themselves to act inthe name of the public. In the instrument of his acceptance of thisgrant, Mr. Fox took occasion to assure them that he would alwayspersevere _in the same conduct_ which had procured to him so honorable amark of the public approbation. He was as good as his word. 

25. It was not long before an opportunity was found, or made, forproving the sincerity of his professions, and demonstrating hisgratitude to those who had given public and unequivocal marks of theirapprobation of his late conduct. One of the most virulent of the Jacobinfaction, Mr. Gurney, a banker at Norwich, had all along distinguishedhimself by his French politics. By the means of this gentleman, and ofhis associates of the same description, one of the most insidious anddangerous handbills that ever was seen had been circulated at Norwichagainst the war, drawn up in an hypocritical tone of compassion for thepoor. This address to the populace of Norwich was to play in concertwith an address to Mr. Fox; it was signed by Mr. Gurney and the higherpart of the French fraternity in that town. In this paper Mr. Fox isapplauded for his conduct throughout the session, and requested, beforethe prorogation, to make a motion for an immediate peace with France. 

26. Mr. Fox did not revoke to this suit: he readily and thankfullyundertook the task assigned to him. Not content, however, with merelyfalling in with their wishes, he proposed a task on his part to thegentlemen of Norwich, which was, _that they should move the peoplewithout doors to petition against the war_. He said, that, without suchassistance, little good could be expected from anything he might attemptwithin the walls of the House of Commons. In the mean time, to animatehis Norwich friends in their endeavors to besiege Parliament, hesnatched the first opportunity to give notice of a motion which he verysoon after made, namely, to address the crown to make peace with France. The address was so worded as to coöperate with the handbill in bringingforward matter calculated to inflame the manufacturers throughout thekingdom. 

27. In support of his motion, he declaimed in the most virulent strain, even beyond any of his former invectives, against every power with whomwe were then, and are now, acting against France. In the _moral_ forumsome of these powers certainly deserve all the ill he said of them; butthe _political_ effect aimed at, evidently, was to turn our indignationfrom France, with whom we were at war, upon Russia, or Prussia, orAustria, or Sardinia, or all of them together. In consequence of hisknowledge that we _could_ not effectually do _without_ them, and hisresolution that we _should_ not act _with_ them, he proposed, that, having, as he asserted, "obtained the only avowed object of the war (theevacuation of Holland) we ought to conclude an instant peace. "

28. Mr. Fox could not be ignorant of the mistaken basis upon which hismotion was grounded. He was not ignorant, that, though the attempt ofDumouriez on Holland, (so very near succeeding, ) and the navigation ofthe Scheldt, (a part of the same piece, ) were among the _immediate_causes, they were by no means the only causes, alleged for Parliament'staking that offence at the proceedings of France, for which the Jacobinswere so prompt in declaring war upon this kingdom. Other full as weightycauses had been alleged: they were, --1. The general overbearing anddesperate ambition of that faction; 2. Their actual attacks on everynation in Europe; 3. Their usurpation of territories in the Empire withthe governments of which they had no pretence of quarrel; 4. Theirperpetual and irrevocable consolidation with their own dominions ofevery territory of the Netherlands, of Germany, and of Italy, of whichthey got a temporary possession; 5. The mischiefs attending theprevalence of their system, which would make the success of theirambitious designs a new and peculiar species of calamity in the world;6. Their formal, public decrees, particularly those of the 19th ofNovember and 15th and 25th of December; 7. Their notorious attempts toundermine the Constitution of this country; 8. Their public reception ofdeputations of traitors for that direct purpose; 9. Their murder oftheir sovereign, declared by most of the members of the Convention, whospoke with their vote, (without a disavowal from any, ) to be perpetratedas an example to _all_ kings and a precedent for _all_ subjects tofollow. All these, and not the Scheldt alone, or the invasion ofHolland, were urged by the minister, and by Mr. Windham, by myself, andby others who spoke in those debates, as causes for bringing France to asense of her wrong in the war which she declared against us. Mr. Foxwell knew that not one man argued for the necessity of a vigorousresistance to France, who did not state the war as being for the veryexistence of the social order here, and in every part of Europe, --whodid not state his opinion that this war was not at all a foreign war ofempire, but as much for our liberties, properties, laws, and religion, and even more so, than any we had ever been engaged in. This was the warwhich, according to Mr. Fox and Mr. Gurney, we were to abandon beforethe enemy had felt in the slightest degree the impression of our arms. 

29. Had Mr. Fox's disgraceful proposal been complied with, this kingdomwould have been stained with a blot of perfidy hitherto without anexample in our history, and with far less excuse than any act of perfidywhich we find in the history of any other nation. The moment when, bythe incredible exertions of Austria, (very little through ours, ) thetemporary deliverance of Holland (in effect our own deliverance) hadbeen achieved, he advised the House instantly to abandon her to thatvery enemy from whose arms she had freed ourselves and the closest ofour allies. 

30. But we are not to be imposed on by forms of language. We must act onthe substance of things. To abandon Austria in this manner was toabandon Holland itself. For suppose France, encouraged and strengthenedas she must have been by our treacherous desertion, --suppose France, Isay, to succeed against Austria, (as she had succeeded the very yearbefore, ) England would, after its disarmament, have nothing in the worldbut the inviolable faith of Jacobinism and the steady politics ofanarchy to depend upon, against France's renewing the very same attemptsupon Holland, and renewing them (considering what Holland was and is)with much better prospects of success. Mr. Fox must have been wellaware, that, if we were to break with the greater Continental powers, and particularly to come to a rupture with them, in the violent andintemperate mode in which he would have made the breach, the defence ofHolland against a foreign enemy and a strong domestic faction musthereafter rest solely upon England, without the chance of a single ally, either on that or on any other occasion. So far as to the pretended soleobject of the war, which Mr. Fox supposed to be so completely obtained(but which then was not at all, and at this day is not completelyobtained) as to leave us nothing else to do than to cultivate apeaceful, quiet correspondence with those quiet, peaceable, and moderatepeople, the Jacobins of France. 

31. To induce us to this, Mr. Fox labored hard to make it appear thatthe powers with whom we acted were full as ambitious and as perfidiousas the French. This might be true as to _other_ nations. They had not, however, been so to _us_ or to Holland. He produced no proof of activeambition and ill faith against Austria. But supposing the combinedpowers had been all thus faithless, and been all alike so, there was onecircumstance which made an essential difference between them andFrance. I need not, therefore, be at the trouble of contesting thispoint, --which, however, in this latitude, and as at all affecting GreatBritain and Holland, I deny utterly. Be it so. But the great monarchieshave it in their power to keep their faith, _if they please_, becausethey are governments of established and recognized authority at home andabroad. France had, in reality, no government. The very factions whoexercised power had no stability. The French Convention had no powers ofpeace or war. Supposing the Convention to be free, (most assuredly itwas not, ) they had shown no disposition to abandon their projects. Though long driven out of Liege, it was not many days before Mr. Fox'smotion that they still continued to claim it as a country which theirprinciples of fraternity bound them to protect, --that is, to subdue andto regulate at their pleasure. That party which Mr. Fox inclined most tofavor and trust, and from which he must have received his assurances, (if any he did receive, ) that is, the _Brissotins_, were then eitherprisoners or fugitives. The party which prevailed over them (that ofDanton and Marat) was itself in a tottering condition, and was disownedby a very great part of France. To say nothing of the royal party, whowere powerful and growing, and who had full as good a right to claim tobe the legitimate government as any of the Parisian factions with whomhe proposed to treat, --or rather, (as it seemed to me, ) to surrender atdiscretion. 

32. But when Mr. Fox began to come from his general hopes of themoderation of the Jacobins to particulars, he put the case that theymight not perhaps be willing to surrender Savoy. He certainly was notwilling to contest that point with them, but plainly and explicitly (asI understood him) proposed to let them keep it, --though he knew (or hewas much worse informed than he would be thought) that England had atthe very time agreed on the terms of a treaty with the King of Sardinia, of which the recovery of Savoy was the _casus fœderis_. In the teeth ofthis treaty, Mr. Fox proposed a direct and most scandalous breach of ourfaith, formally and recently given. But to surrender Savoy was tosurrender a great deal more than so many square acres of land or so muchrevenue. In its consequences, the surrender of Savoy was to make asurrender to France of Switzerland and Italy, of both which countriesSavoy is the key, --as it is known to ordinary speculators in politics, though it may not be known to the weavers in Norwich, who, it seems, areby Mr. Fox called to be the judges in this matter. 

A sure way, indeed, to encourage France not to make a surrender of thiskey of Italy and Switzerland, or of Mentz, the key of Germany, or of anyother object whatsoever which she holds, is to let her see _that thepeople of England raise a clamor against the war before terms are somuch as proposed on any side_. From that moment the Jacobins would bemasters of the terms. They would know that Parliament, at all hazards, would force the king to a separate peace. The crown could not, in thatcase, have any use of its judgment. Parliament could not possess morejudgment than the crown, when besieged (as Mr. Fox proposed to Mr. Gurney) by the cries of the manufacturers. This description of men Mr. Fox endeavored in his speech by every method to irritate and inflame. Ineffect, his two speeches were, through the whole, nothing more than anamplification of the Norwich handbill. He rested the greatest part ofhis argument on the distress of trade, which he attributed to the war;though it was obvious to any tolerably good observation, and, much more, must have been clear to such an observation as his, that the thendifficulties of the trade and manufacture could have no sort ofconnection with our share in it. The war had hardly begun. We hadsuffered neither by spoil, nor by defeat, nor by disgrace of any kind. Public credit was so little impaired, that, instead of being supportedby any extraordinary aids from individuals, it advanced a credit toindividuals to the amount of five millions for the support of trade andmanufactures under their temporary difficulties, a thing before neverheard of, --a thing of which I do not commend the policy, but only stateit, to show that Mr. Fox's ideas of the effects of war were without anytrace of foundation. 

33. It is impossible not to connect the arguments and proceedings of aparty with that of its leader, --especially when not disavowed orcontrolled by him. Mr. Fox's partisans declaim against all the powers ofEurope, except the Jacobins, just as he does; but not having the samereasons for management and caution which he has, they speak out. Hesatisfies himself merely with making his invectives, and leaves othersto draw the conclusion. But they produce their Polish interposition forthe express purpose of leading to a French alliance. They urge theirFrench peace in order to make a junction with the Jacobins to oppose thepowers, whom, in their language, they call despots, and their leagues, acombination of despots. Indeed, no man can look on the present postureof Europe with the least degree of discernment, who will not bethoroughly convinced that England must be the fast friend or thedetermined enemy of France. There is no medium; and I do not think Mr. Fox to be so dull as not to observe this. His peace would have involvedus instantly in the most extensive and most ruinous wars, at the sametime that it would have made a broad highway (across which no humanwisdom could put an effectual barrier) for a mutual intercourse with thefraternizing Jacobins on both sides, the consequences of which thosewill certainly not provide against who do not dread or dislike them. 

34. It is not amiss in this place to enter a little more fully into thespirit of the principal arguments on which Mr. Fox thought proper torest this his grand and concluding motion, particularly such as weredrawn from the internal state of our affairs. Under a speciousappearance, (not uncommonly put on by men of unscrupulous ambition, )that of tenderness and compassion to the poor, he did his best to appealto the judgments of the meanest and most ignorant of the people on themerits of the war. He had before done something of the same dangerouskind in his printed letter. The ground of a political war is of allthings that which the poor laborer and manufacturer are the leastcapable of conceiving. This sort of people know in general that theymust suffer by war. It is a matter to which they are sufficientlycompetent, because it is a matter of feeling. The _causes_ of a war arenot matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remoteconsiderations, and of a very great combination of circumstances which_they_ are utterly incapable of comprehending: and, indeed, it is notevery man in the highest classes who is altogether equal to it. Nothing, in a general sense, appears to me less fair and justifiable (even if noattempt were made to inflame the passions) than to submit a matter ondiscussion to a tribunal incapable of judging of more than _one side_ ofthe question. It is at least as unjustifiable to inflame the passions ofsuch judges against _that side_ in favor of which they cannot so much ascomprehend the arguments. Before the prevalence of the French system, (which, as far as it has gone, has extinguished the salutary prejudicecalled our country, ) nobody was more sensible of this important truththan Mr. Fox; and nothing was more proper and pertinent, or was morefelt at the time, than his reprimand to Mr. Wilberforce for aninconsiderate expression which tended to call in the judgment of thepoor to estimate the policy of war upon the standard of the taxes theymay be obliged to pay towards its support. 

35. It is fatally known that the great object of the Jacobin system is, to excite the lowest description of the people to range themselves underambitious men for the pillage and destruction of the more eminent ordersand classes of the community. The thing, therefore, that a man notfanatically attached to that dreadful project would most studiouslyavoid is, to act a part with the French _Propagandists_, in attributing(as they constantly do) all wars, and all the consequences of wars, tothe pride of those orders, and to their contempt of the weak andindigent part of the society. The ruling Jacobins insist upon it, thateven the wars which they carry on with so much obstinacy against allnations are made to prevent the poor from any longer being theinstruments and victims of kings, nobles, and the aristocracy ofburghers and rich men. They pretend that the destruction of kings, nobles, and the aristocracy of burghers and rich men is the only meansof establishing an universal and perpetual peace. This is the greatdrift of all their writings, from the time of the meeting of the statesof France, in 1789, to the publication of the last Morning Chronicle. They insist that even the war which with so much boldness they havedeclared against all nations is to prevent the poor from becoming theinstruments and victims of these persons and descriptions. It is but tooeasy, if you once teach poor laborers and mechanics to defy theirprejudices, and, as this has been done with an industry scarcelycredible, to substitute the principles of fraternity in the room of thatsalutary prejudice called our country, --it is, I say, but too easy topersuade them, agreeably to what Mr. Fox hints in his public letter, that this war is, and that the other wars have been, the wars of kings;it is easy to persuade them that the terrors even of a foreign conquestare not terrors for _them_; it is easy to persuade them, that, for theirpart, _they_ have nothing to lose, --and that their condition is notlikely to be altered for the worse, whatever party may happen to prevailin the war. Under any circumstances this doctrine is highly dangerous, as it tends to make separate parties of the higher and lower orders, andto put their interests on a different bottom. But if the enemy you haveto deal with should appear, as France now appears, under the very nameand title of the deliverer of the poor and the chastiser of the rich, the former class would readily become not an indifferent spectator ofthe war, but would be ready to enlist in the faction of theenemy, --which they would consider, though under a foreign name, to bemore connected with them than an adverse description in the same land. All the props of society would be drawn from us by these doctrines, andthe very foundations of the public defence would give way in an instant. 

36. There is no point which the faction of fraternity in England havelabored more than to excite in the poor the horror of any war withFrance upon any occasion. When they found that their open attacks uponour Constitution in favor of a French republic were for the presentrepelled, they put that matter out of sight, and have taken up the moreplausible and popular ground of general peace, upon merely generalprinciples; although these very men, in the correspondence of theirclubs with those of France, had reprobated the neutrality which now theyso earnestly press. But, in reality, their maxim was, and is, "Peace andalliance with France, and war with the rest of the world. "

37. This last motion of Mr. Fox bound up the whole of his politicsduring the session. This motion had many circumstances, particularly inthe Norwich correspondence, by which the mischief of all the others wasaggravated beyond measure. Yet this last motion, far the worst of Mr. Fox's proceedings, was the best supported of any of them, except hisamendment to the address. The Duke of Portland had directly engaged tosupport the war;--here was a motion as directly made to force the crownto put an end to it before a blow had been struck. The efforts of thefaction have so prevailed that some of his Grace's nearest friends haveactually voted for that motion; some, after showing themselves, wentaway; others did not appear at all. So it must be, where a man is forany time supported from personal considerations, without reference tohis public conduct. Through the whole of this business, the spirit offraternity appears to me to have been the governing principle. It mightbe shameful for any man, above the vulgar, to show so blind a partialityeven to his own country as Mr. Fox appears, on all occasions, thissession, to have shown to France. Had Mr. Fox been a minister, andproceeded on the principles laid down by him, I believe there is littledoubt he would have been considered as the most criminal statesman thatever lived in this country. I do not know why a statesman out of placeis not to be judged in the same manner, unless we can excuse him bypleading in his favor a total indifference to principle, and that hewould act and think in quite a different way, if he were in office. ThisI will not suppose. One may think better of him, and that, in case ofhis power, he might change his mind. But supposing, that, from better orfrom worse motives, he might change his mind on his acquisition of thefavor of the crown, I seriously fear, that, if the king should to-morrowput power into his hands, and that his good genius would inspire himwith maxims very different from those he has promulgated, he would notbe able to get the better of the ill temper and the ill doctrines he hasbeen the means of exciting and propagating throughout the kingdom. Fromthe very beginning of their inhuman and unprovoked rebellion andtyrannic usurpation, he has covered the predominant faction in France, and their adherents here, with the most exaggerated panegyrics; neitherhas he missed a single opportunity of abusing and vilifying those who, in uniform concurrence with the Duke of Portland's and LordFitzwilliam's opinion, have maintained the true grounds of theRevolution Settlement in 1688. He lamented all the defeats of theFrench; he rejoiced in all their victories, --even when these victoriesthreatened to overwhelm the continent of Europe, and, by facilitatingtheir means of penetrating into Holland, to bring this most dreadful ofall evils with irresistible force to the very doors, if not into thevery heart, of our country. To this hour he always speaks of everythought of overturning the French Jacobinism by force, on the part ofany power whatsoever, as an attempt unjust and cruel, and which hereprobates with horror. If any of the French Jacobin leaders are spokenof with hatred or scorn, he falls upon those who take that liberty withall the zeal and warmth with which men of honor defend their particularand bosom friends, when attacked. He always represents their cause as acause of liberty, and all who oppose it as partisans of despotism. Heobstinately continues to consider the great and growing vices, crimes, and disorders of that country as only evils of passage, which are toproduce a permanently happy state of order and freedom. He representsthese disorders exactly in the same way and with the same limitationswhich are used by one of the two great Jacobin factions: I mean that ofPétion and Brissot. Like them, he studiously confines his horror andreprobation only to the massacres of the 2d of September, and passes bythose of the 10th of August, as well as the imprisonment and depositionof the king, which were the consequences of that day, as indeed were themassacres themselves to which he confines his censure, though they werenot actually perpetrated till early in September. Like that faction, hecondemns, not the deposition, or the proposed exile or perpetualimprisonment, but only the murder of the king. Mr. Sheridan, on everyoccasion, palliates all their massacres committed in every part ofFrance, as the effects of a natural indignation at the exorbitances ofdespotism, and of the dread of the people of returning under that yoke. He has thus taken occasion to load, not the actors in this wickedness, but the government of a mild, merciful, beneficent, and patrioticprince, and his suffering, faithful subjects, with all the crimes of thenew anarchical tyranny under which the one has been murdered and theothers are oppressed. Those continual either praises or palliatingapologies of everything done in France, and those invectives asuniformly vomited out upon all those who venture to express theirdisapprobation of such proceedings, coming from a man of Mr. Fox's fameand authority, and one who is considered as the person to whom a greatparty of the wealthiest men of the kingdom look up, have been the causewhy the principle of French fraternity formerly gained the ground whichat one time it had obtained in this country. It will infallibly recoveritself again, and in ten times a greater degree, if the kind of peace, in the manner which he preaches, ever shall be established with thereigning faction in France. 

38. So far as to the French practices with regard to France and theother powers of Europe. As to their principles and doctrines withregard to the constitution of states, Mr. Fox studiously, on alloccasions, and indeed when no occasion calls for it, (as on the debateof the petition for reform, ) brings forward and asserts theirfundamental and fatal principle, pregnant with every mischief and everycrime, namely, that "in every country the people is the legitimatesovereign": exactly conformable to the declaration of the French clubsand legislators:--"La souveraineté est _une, indivisible, inalienable, et imprescriptible_; elle appartient à la nation; aucune _section_ dupeuple ni aucun _individu_ ne peut s'en attribuer l'exercise. " Thisconfounds, in a manner equally mischievous and stupid, the origin of agovernment from the people with its continuance in their hands. Ibelieve that no such doctrine has ever been heard of in any public actof any government whatsoever, until it was adopted (I think from thewritings of Rousseau) by the French Assemblies, who have made it thebasis of their Constitution at home, and of the matter of theirapostolate in every country. These and other wild declarations ofabstract principle, Mr. Fox says, are in themselves perfectly right andtrue; though in some cases he allows the French draw absurd consequencesfrom them. But I conceive he is mistaken. The consequences are mostlogically, though most mischievously, drawn from the premises andprinciples by that wicked and ungracious faction. The fault is in thefoundation. 

39. Before society, in a multitude of men, it is obvious thatsovereignty and subjection are ideas which cannot exist. It is thecompact on which society is formed that makes both. But to suppose thepeople, contrary to their compacts, both to give away and retain thesame thing is altogether absurd. It is worse, for it supposes in anystrong combination of men a power and right of always dissolving thesocial union; which power, however, if it exists, renders them again aslittle sovereigns as subjects, but a mere unconnected multitude. It isnot easy to state for what good end, at a time like this, when thefoundations of all ancient and prescriptive governments, such as ours, (to which people submit, not because they have chosen them, but becausethey are born to them, ) are undermined by perilous theories, that Mr. Fox should be so fond of referring to those theories, upon alloccasions, even though speculatively they might be true, --which Godforbid they should! Particularly I do not see the reason why he shouldbe so fond of declaring that the principles of the Revolution have madethe crown of Great Britain _elective_, --why he thinks it seasonable topreach up with so much earnestness, for now three years together, thedoctrine of resistance and revolution at all, --or to assert that ourlast Revolution, of 1688, stands on the same or similar principles withthat of France. We are not called upon to bring forward these doctrines, which are hardly ever resorted to but in cases of extremity, and wherethey are followed by correspondent actions. We are not called upon byany circumstance, that I know of, which can justify a revolt, or whichdemands a revolution, or can make an election of a successor to thecrown necessary, whatever latent right may be supposed to exist foreffectuating any of these purposes. 

40. Not the least alarming of the proceedings of Mr. Fox and his friendsin this session, especially taken in concurrence with their wholeproceedings with regard to France and its principles, is their eagernessat this season, under pretence of Parliamentary reforms, (a projectwhich had been for some time rather dormant, ) to discredit and disgracethe House of Commons. For this purpose these gentlemen had found a wayto insult the House by several atrocious libels in the form ofpetitions. In particular they brought up a libel, or rather a completedigest of libellous matter, from the club called the Friends of thePeople. It is, indeed, at once the most audacious and the most insidiousof all the performances of that kind which have yet appeared. It is saidto be the penmanship of Mr. Tierney, to bring whom into Parliament theDuke of Portland formerly had taken a good deal of pains, and expended, as I hear, a considerable sum of money. 

41. Among the circumstances of danger from that piece, and from itsprecedent, it is observable that this is the first petition (if Iremember right) _coming from a club or association, signed byindividuals, denoting neither local residence nor corporate capacity_. This mode of petition, not being strictly illegal or informal, though inits spirit in the highest degree mischievous, may and will lead to otherthings of that nature, tending to bring these clubs and associations tothe French model, and to make them in the end answer French purposes: Imean, that, without legal names, these clubs will be led to assumepolitical capacities; that they may debate the forms of Constitution;and that from their meetings they may insolently dictate their will tothe regular authorities of the kingdom, in the manner in which theJacobin clubs issue their mandates to the National Assembly or theNational Convention. The audacious remonstrance, I observe, is signedby all of that association (the Friends of the People) _who are not inParliament_, and it was supported most strenuously by all theassociators _who are members_, with Mr. Fox at their head. He and theycontended for referring this libel to a committee. Upon the question ofthat reference they grounded all their debate for a change in theconstitution of Parliament. The pretended petition is, in fact, aregular charge or impeachment of the House of Commons, digested into anumber of articles. This plan of reform is not a criminal impeachment, but a matter of prudence, to be submitted to the public wisdom, whichmust be as well apprised of the facts as petitioners can be. But thoseaccusers of the House of Commons have proceeded upon the principles of acriminal process, and have had the effrontery to offer proof on eacharticle. 

42. This charge the party of Mr. Fox maintained article by article, beginning with the first, --namely, the interference of peers atelections, and their nominating in effect several of the members of theHouse of Commons. In the printed list of grievances which they made outon the occasion, and in support of their charge, is found the boroughfor which, under Lord Fitzwilliam's influence, I now sit. By thisremonstrance, and its object, they hope to defeat the operation ofproperty in elections, and in reality to dissolve the connection andcommunication of interests which makes the Houses of Parliament a mutualsupport to each other. Mr. Fox and the Friends of the People are not soignorant as not to know that peers do not interfere in elections aspeers, but as men of property; they well know that the House of Lordsis by itself the feeblest part of the Constitution; they know that theHouse of Lords is supported only by its connections with the crown andwith the House of Commons, and that without this double connection theLords could not exist a single year. They know that all these parts ofour Constitution, whilst they are balanced as opposing interests, arealso connected as friends; otherwise nothing but confusion could be theresult of such a complex Constitution. It is natural, therefore, thatthey who wish the common destruction of the whole and of all its partsshould contend for their total separation. But as the House of Commonsis that link which connects both the other parts of the Constitution(the Crown and the Lords) _with the mass of the people_, it is to thatlink (as it is natural enough) that their incessant attacks aredirected. That artificial representation of the people being oncediscredited and overturned, all goes to pieces, and nothing but a plain_French_ democracy or arbitrary monarchy can possibly exist. 

43. Some of these gentlemen who have attacked the House of Commons leanto a representation of the people by the head, --that is, to _individualrepresentation_. None of them, that I recollect, except Mr. Fox, directly rejected it. It is remarkable, however, that he only rejectedit by simply declaring an opinion. He let all the argument go againsthis opinion. All the proceedings and arguments of his reforming friendslead to individual representation, and to nothing else. It deserves tobe attentively observed, _that this individual representation is theonly plan of their reform which has been explicitly proposed_. In themean time, the conduct of Mr. Fox appears to be far more inexplicable, on any good ground, than theirs, who propose the individualrepresentation; for he neither proposes anything, nor even suggests thathe has anything to propose, in lieu of the present mode of constitutingthe House of Commons; on the contrary, he declares against all the planswhich have yet been suggested, either from himself or others: yet, thusunprovided with any plan whatsoever, he pressed forward this unknownreform with all possible warmth; and for that purpose, in a speech ofseveral hours, he urged the referring to a committee the libellousimpeachment of the House of Commons by the association of the Friends ofthe People. But for Mr. Fox to discredit Parliament _as it stands_, tocountenance leagues, covenants, and associations for its furtherdiscredit, to render it perfectly odious and contemptible, and at thesame time to propose nothing at all in place of what he disgraces, isworse, if possible, than to contend for personal individualrepresentation, and is little less than demanding, in plain terms, tobring on plain anarchy. 

44. Mr. Fox and these gentlemen have for the present been defeated; butthey are neither converted nor disheartened. They have solemnly declaredthat they will persevere until they shall have obtained theirends, --persisting to assert that the House of Commons not only is notthe true representative of the people, but that it does not answer thepurpose of such representation: most of them insist that all the debts, the taxes, and the burdens of all kinds on the people, with every otherevil and inconvenience which we have suffered since the Revolution, havebeen owing solely to an House of Commons which does not speak the senseof the people. 

45. It is also not to be forgotten, that Mr. Fox, and all who hold withhim, on this, as on all other occasions of pretended reform, mostbitterly reproach Mr. Pitt with treachery, in declining to support thescandalous charges and indefinite projects of this infamous libel fromthe Friends of the People. By the animosity with which they persecuteall those who grow cold in this cause of pretended reform, they hope, that, if, through levity, inexperience, or ambition, any young person(like Mr. Pitt, for instance) happens to be once embarked in theirdesign, they shall by a false shame keep him fast in it forever. Manythey have so hampered. 

46. I know it is usual, when the peril and alarm of the hour appears tobe a little overblown, to think no more of the matter. But, for my part, I look back with horror on what we have escaped, and am full of anxietywith regard to the dangers which in my opinion are still to beapprehended both at home and abroad. This business has cast deep roots. Whether it is necessarily connected in theory with Jacobinism is notworth a dispute. The two things are connected in fact. The partisans ofthe one are the partisans of the other. I know it is common with thosewho are favorable to the gentlemen of Mr. Fox's party and to theirleader, though not at all devoted to all their reforming projects ortheir Gallican politics, to argue, in palliation of their conduct, thatit is not in their power to do all the harm which their actionsevidently tend to. It is said, that, as the people will not supportthem, they may safely be indulged in those eccentric fancies of reform, and those theories which lead to nothing. This apology is not very muchto the honor of those politicians whose interests are to be adhered toin defiance of their conduct. I cannot flatter myself that theseincessant attacks on the constitution of Parliament are safe. It is notin my power to despise the unceasing efforts of a confederacy of aboutfifty persons of eminence: men, for the far greater part, of very amplefortunes either in possession or in expectancy; men of decidedcharacters and vehement passions; men of very great talents of allkinds, of much boldness, and of the greatest possible spirit ofartifice, intrigue, adventure, and enterprise, all operating withunwearied activity and perseverance. These gentlemen are much stronger, too, without doors than some calculate. They have the more active partof the Dissenters with them, and the whole clan of speculators of alldenominations, --a large and growing species. They have that floatingmultitude which goes with events, and which suffers the loss or gain ofa battle to decide its opinions of right and wrong. As long as by everyart this party keeps alive a spirit of disaffection against the veryConstitution of the kingdom, and attributes, as lately it has been inthe habit of doing, all the public misfortunes to that Constitution, itis absolutely _impossible_ but that some moment must arrive in whichthey will be enabled to produce a pretended reform and a realrevolution. If ever the body of this _compound Constitution_ of ours issubverted, either in favor of unlimited monarchy or of wild democracy, that ruin will _most certainly_ be the result of this very sort ofmachinations against the House of Commons. It is not from a confidencein the views or intentions of any statesman that I think he is to beindulged in these perilous amusements. 

47. Before it is made the great object of any man's political life toraise another to power, it is right to consider what are the realdispositions of the person to be so elevated. We are not to form ourjudgment on those dispositions from the rules and principles of a courtof justice, but from those of private discretion, --not looking for whatwould serve to criminate another, but what is sufficient to directourselves. By a comparison of a series of the discourses and actions ofcertain men for a reasonable length of time, it is impossible not toobtain sufficient indication of the general tendency of their views andprinciples. There is no other rational mode of proceeding. It is true, that in some one or two perhaps not well-weighed expressions, or someone or two unconnected and doubtful affairs, we may and ought to judgeof the actions or words by our previous good or ill opinion of the man. But this allowance has its bounds. It does not extend to any regularcourse of systematic action, or of constant and repeated discourse. Itis against every principle of common sense, and of justice to one's selfand to the public, to judge of a series of speeches and actions from theman, and not of the man from the whole tenor of his language andconduct. I have stated the above matters, not as inferring a criminalcharge of evil intention. If I had meant to do so, perhaps they arestated with tolerable exactness. But I have no such view. The intentionsof these gentlemen may be very pure. I do not dispute it. But I thinkthey are in some great error. If these things are done by Mr. Fox andhis friends with good intentions, they are not done less dangerously;for it shows these good intentions are not under the direction of safemaxims and principles. 

48. Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, and the gentlemen who call themselves thePhalanx, have not been so very indulgent to others. They have thoughtproper to ascribe to those members of the House of Commons, who, inexact agreement with the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, abhorand oppose the French system, the basest and most unworthy motives fortheir conduct;--as if none could oppose that atheistic, immoral, andimpolitic project set up in France, so disgraceful and destructive, as Iconceive, to human nature itself, but with some sinister intentions. They treat those members on all occasions with a sort of lordlyinsolence, though they are persons that (whatever homage they may pay tothe eloquence of the gentlemen who choose to look down upon them withscorn) are not their inferiors in any particular which calls for andobtains just consideration from the public: not their inferiors inknowledge of public law, or of the Constitution of the kingdom; nottheir inferiors in their acquaintance with its foreign and domesticinterests; not their inferiors in experience or practice of business;not their inferiors in moral character; not their inferiors in theproofs they have given of zeal and industry in the service of theircountry. Without denying to these gentlemen the respect andconsideration which it is allowed justly belongs to them, we see noreason why they should not as well be obliged to defer something to ouropinions as that we should be bound blindly and servilely to followthose of Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, Mr. Courtenay, Mr. Lambton, Mr. Whitbread, Mr. Taylor, and others. We are members of Parliament andtheir equals. We never consider ourselves as their followers. Thesegentlemen (some of them hardly born when some of us came intoParliament) have thought proper to treat us as deserters, --as if we hadbeen listed into their phalanx like soldiers, and had sworn to live anddie in their French principles. This insolent claim of superiority ontheir part, and of a sort of vassalage to them on that of other members, is what no liberal mind will submit to bear. 

49. The society of the Liberty of the Press, the Whig Club, and theSociety for Constitutional Information, and (I believe) the Friends ofthe People, as well as some clubs in Scotland, have, indeed, declared, "that their confidence in and attachment to Mr. Fox has lately beenconfirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies" (as they arecalled) "against him. " It is true, Mr. Fox and his friends have thosetestimonies in their favor, against certain old friends of the Duke ofPortland. Yet, on a full, serious, and, I think, dispassionateconsideration of the whole of what Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan and theirfriends have acted, said, and written, in this session, instead of doinganything which might tend to procure power, or any share of itwhatsoever, to them or to their phalanx, (as they call it, ) or toincrease their credit, influence, or popularity in the nation, I thinkit one of my most serious and important public duties, in whatsoeverstation I may be placed for the short time I have to live, effectuallyto employ my best endeavors, by every prudent and every lawful means, totraverse all their designs. I have only to lament that my abilities arenot greater, and that my probability of life is not better, for themore effectual pursuit of that object. But I trust that neither theprinciples nor exertions will die with me. I am the rather confirmed inthis my resolution, and in this my wish of transmitting it, becauseevery ray of hope concerning a possible control or mitigation of theenormous mischiefs which the principles of these gentlemen, and whichtheir connections, full as dangerous as their principles, might receivefrom the influence of the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, onbecoming their colleagues in office, is now entirely banished from themind of every one living. It is apparent, even to the world at large, that, so far from having a power to direct or to guide Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, and the rest, in any important matter, they havenot, through this session, been able to prevail on them to forbear, orto delay, or mitigate, or soften, any one act, or any one expression, upon subjects on which they essentially differed. 

50. Even if this hope of a possible control did exist, yet the declaredopinions, and the uniform line of conduct conformable to those opinions, pursued by Mr. Fox, must become a matter of serious alarm, if he shouldobtain a power either at court or in Parliament or in the nation atlarge, and for this plain reason: he must be the most active andefficient member in any administration of which he shall form a part. That a man, or set of men, are guided by such not dubious, but deliveredand avowed principles and maxims of policy, as to need a watch and checkon them in the exercise of the highest power, ought, in my opinion, tomake every man, who is not of the same principles and guided by thesame maxims, a little cautious how he makes himself one of thetraverses of a ladder to help such a man, or such a set of men, to climbup to the highest authority. A minister of this country is to becontrolled by the House of Commons. He is to be trusted, not_controlled_, by his colleagues in office: if he were to be controlled, government, which ought to be the source of order, would itself become ascene of anarchy. Besides, Mr. Fox is a man of an aspiring andcommanding mind, made rather to control than to be controlled, and henever will be nor can be in any administration in which he will beguided by any of those whom I have been accustomed to confide in. It isabsurd to think that he would or could. If his own opinions do notcontrol him, nothing can. When we consider of an adherence to a manwhich leads to his power, we must not only see what the man is, but howhe stands related. It is not to be forgotten that Mr. Fox acts in closeand inseparable connection with another gentleman of exactly the samedescription as himself, and who, perhaps, of the two, is the leader. Therest of the body are not a great deal more tractable; and over them, ifMr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan have authority, most assuredly the Duke ofPortland has not the smallest degree of influence. 

51. One must take care that a blind partiality to some persons, and asblind an hatred to others, may not enter into our minds under a color ofinflexible public principle. We hear, as a reason for clinging to Mr. Fox at present, that nine years ago Mr. Pitt got into power bymischievous intrigues with the court, with the Dissenters, and withother factious people out of Parliament, to the discredit and weakeningof the power of the House of Commons. His conduct nine years ago I stillhold to be very culpable. There are, however, many things very culpablethat I do not know how to punish. My opinion on such matters I mustsubmit to the good of the state, as I have done on other occasions, --andparticularly with regard to the authors and managers of the Americanwar, with whom I have acted, both in office and in opposition, withgreat confidence and cordiality, though I thought many of their actscriminal and impeachable. Whilst the misconduct of Mr. Pitt and hisassociates was yet recent, it was not possible to get Mr. Fox of himselfto take a single step, or even to countenance others in taking any step, upon the ground of that misconduct and false policy; though, if thematters had been then taken up and pursued, such a step could not haveappeared so evidently desperate as now it is. So far from pursuing Mr. Pitt, I know that then, and for some time after, some of Mr. Fox'sfriends were actually, and with no small earnestness, looking out to acoalition with that gentleman. For years I never heard this circumstanceof Mr. Pitt's misconduct on that occasion mentioned by Mr. Fox, eitherin public or in private, as a ground for opposition to that minister. All opposition, from that period to this very session, has proceededupon the separate measures as they separately arose, without anyvindictive retrospect to Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784. My memory, however, may fail me. I must appeal to the printed debates, which (so far as Mr. Fox is concerned) are unusually accurate. 

52. Whatever might have been in our power at an early period, at thisday I see no remedy for what was done in 1784. I had no great hopeseven at the time. I was therefore very eager to record a remonstrance onthe journals of the House of Commons, as a caution against such apopular delusion in times to come; and this I then feared, and now amcertain, is all that could be done. I know of no way of animadverting onthe crown. I know of no mode of calling to account the House of Lords, who threw out the India Bill in a way not much to their credit. Aslittle, or rather less, am I able to coerce the people at large, whobehaved very unwisely and intemperately on that occasion. Mr. Pitt wasthen accused, by me as well as others, of attempting to be ministerwithout enjoying the confidence of the House of Commons, though he didenjoy the confidence of the crown. That House of Commons, whoseconfidence he did not enjoy, unfortunately did not itself enjoy theconfidence (though we well deserved it) either of the crown or of thepublic. For want of that confidence, the then House of Commons did notsurvive the contest. Since that period Mr. Pitt has enjoyed theconfidence of the crown, and of the Lords, and _of the House ofCommons_, through two successive Parliaments; and I suspect that he hasever since, and that he does still, enjoy as large a portion, at least, of the confidence of the people without doors as his great rival. Beforewhom, then, is Mr. Pitt to be impeached, and by whom? The more Iconsider the matter, the more firmly I am convinced that the idea ofproscribing Mr. Pitt _indirectly_, when you cannot _directly punish_him, is as chimerical a project, and as unjustifiable, as it would be tohave proscribed Lord North. For supposing that by indirect ways ofopposition, by opposition upon measures which do not relate to thebusiness of 1784, but which on other grounds might prove unpopular, youwere to drive him from his seat, this would be no example whatever ofpunishment for the matters we charge as offences in 1784. On a cool anddispassionate view of the affairs of this time and country, it appearsobvious to me that one or the other of those two great men, that is, Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, must be minister. They are, I am sorry for it, irreconcilable. Mr. Fox's conduct _in this session_ has rendered theidea of his power a matter of serious alarm to many people who were verylittle pleased with the proceedings of Mr. Pitt in the beginning of hisadministration. They like neither the conduct of Mr. Pitt in 1784, northat of Mr. Fox in 1793; but they estimate which of the evils is mostpressing at the time, and what is likely to be the consequence of achange. If Mr. Fox be wedded, they must be sensible that his opinionsand principles on the now existing state of things at home and abroadmust be taken as his portion. In his train must also be taken the wholebody of gentlemen who are pledged to him and to each other, and to theircommon politics and principles. I believe no king of Great Britain everwill adopt, for his confidential servants, that body of gentlemen, holding that body of principles. Even if the present king or hissuccessor should think fit to take that step, I apprehend a generaldiscontent of those who wish that this nation and that Europe shouldcontinue in their present state would ensue, --a discontent which, combined with the principles and progress of the new men in power, wouldshake this kingdom to its foundations. I do not believe any onepolitical conjecture can be more certain than this. 

53. Without at all defending or palliating Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784, Imust observe, that the crisis of 1793, with regard to everything at homeand abroad, is full as important as that of 1784 ever was, and, if forno other reason, by being present, is much more important. It is not tonine years ago we are to look for the danger of Mr. Fox's and Mr. Sheridan's conduct, and that of the gentlemen who act with them. It isat _this_ very time, and in _this_ very session, that, if they had notbeen strenuously resisted, they would not only have discredited theHouse of Commons, (as Mr. Pitt did in 1784, when he persuaded the kingto reject their advice, and to appeal from them to the people, ) but, inmy opinion, would have been the means of wholly subverting the House ofCommons and the House of Peers, and the whole Constitution actual andvirtual, together with the safety and independence of this nation, andthe peace and settlement of every state in the now Christian world. Itis to our opinion of the nature of Jacobinism, and of the probability, by corruption, faction, and force, of its gaining ground everywhere, that the question whom and what you are to support is to be determined. For my part, without doubt or hesitation, I look upon Jacobinism as themost dreadful and the most shameful evil which ever afflicted mankind, athing which goes beyond the power of all calculation in itsmischief, --and that, if it is suffered to exist in France, we must inEngland, and speedily too, fall into that calamity. 

54. I figure to myself the purpose of these gentlemen accomplished, andthis ministry destroyed. I see that the persons who in that case mustrule can be no other than Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, the Marquisof Lansdowne, Lord Thurlow, Lord Lauderdale, and the Duke of Norfolk, with the other chiefs of the Friends of the People, the Parliamentaryreformers, and the admirers of the French Revolution. The principal ofthese are all formally pledged to their projects. If the Duke ofPortland and Lord Fitzwilliam should be admitted into that system, (asthey might and probably would be, ) it is quite certain they could nothave the smallest weight in it, --less, indeed, than what they nowpossess, if less were possible: because they would be less wanted thanthey now are; and because all those who wished to join them, and to actunder them, have been rejected by the Duke of Portland and LordFitzwilliam themselves; and Mr. Fox, finding them thus by themselvesdisarmed, has built quite a new fabric, upon quite a new foundation. There is no trifling on this subject. We see very distinctly before usthe ministry that would be formed and the plan that would be pursued. Ifwe like the plan, we must wish the power of those who are to carry itinto execution; but to pursue the political exaltation of those whosepolitical measures we disapprove and whose principles we dissent from isa species of modern politics not easily comprehensible, and which mustend in the ruin of the country, if it should continue and spread. Mr. Pitt may be the worst of men, and Mr. Fox may be the best; but, atpresent, the former is in the interest of his country, and of the orderof things long established in Europe: Mr. Fox is not. I have, for one, been born in this order of things, and would fain die in it. I am sureit is sufficient to make men as virtuous, as happy, and as knowing asanything which Mr. Fox, and his friends abroad or at, home, wouldsubstitute in its place; and I should be sorry that any set ofpoliticians should obtain power in England whose principles or schemesshould lead them to countenance persons or factions whose object is tointroduce some new devised order of things into England, or to supportthat order where it is already introduced, in France, --a place in whichif it can be fixed, in my mind, it must have a certain and decidedinfluence in and upon this kingdom. 

This is my account of my conduct to my private friends. I have alreadysaid all I wish to say, or nearly so, to the public. I write this withpain and with an heart full of grief. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is an exception, that in one of his last speeches (but notbefore) Mr. Fox seemed to think an alliance with Spain might be proper. 

PREFACE

TO THE

ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT

TO HIS CONSTITUENTS. 

TRANSLATED BY

THE LATE WILLIAM BURKE, ESQ. 

1794. 

PREFACE TO BRISSOT'S ADDRESS. 

The French Revolution has been the subject of various speculations andvarious histories. As might be expected, the royalists and therepublicans have differed a good deal in their accounts of theprinciples of that Revolution, of the springs which have set it inmotion, and of the true character of those who have been, or still are, the principal actors on that astonishing scene. 

They who are inclined to think favorably of that event will undoubtedlyobject to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of aroyalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmlyattached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and notof friends to despotism, the royal party is composed, )--that their veryaffection to this generous and manly cause, and their abhorrence of aRevolution not less fatal to liberty than to government, may possiblylead them in some particulars to a more harsh representation of theproceedings of their adversaries than would be allowed by the coldneutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of error arises from asource highly laudable; but the exactness of truth may suffer even fromthe feelings of virtue. History will do justice to the intentions ofworthy men, but it will be on its guard against their infirmities; itwill examine with great strictness of scrutiny whatever appears from awriter in favor of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapeshim, and makes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight. 

In this important controversy, the translator of the following workbrings forward to the English tribunal of opinion the testimony of awitness beyond all exception. His competence is undoubted. He knowseverything which concerns this Revolution to the bottom. He is a chiefactor in all the scenes which he presents. No man can object to him as aroyalist: the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a moredetermined enemy. In a word, it is BRISSOT. It is Brissot, therepublican, the Jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give anaccount of Jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy. 

It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius ofJacobinism and its effects is not confined to the period in which thatfaction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those veryimportant particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of thepreceding period before the great schism, and whilst the Jacobins actedas one body; insomuch that the far greater part of the proceedings ofthe ruling powers since the commencement of the Revolution in France, sostrikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot, were the acts of Brissot himself and his associates. All the members ofthe Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountaincould possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horridtransactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with thegreatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for thecommon liberty and safety. 

A question will very naturally be asked, --What could induce Brissot todraw such a picture? He must have been sensible it was his own. Theanswer is, --The inducement was the same with that which led him topartake in the perpetration of all the crimes the calamitous effects ofwhich he describes with the pen of a master, --ambition. His faction, having obtained their stupendous and unnatural power by rooting out ofthe minds of his unhappy countrymen every principle of religion, morality, loyalty, fidelity, and honor, discovered, that, when authoritycame into their hands, it would be a matter of no small difficulty forthem to carry on government on the principles by which they haddestroyed it. 

The rights of men and the new principles of liberty and equality werevery unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system oftranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respectin the title and in the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a princesucceeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of asuccession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, foundnothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity and dutifulallegiance to Messrs. Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Anacharsis Clootz, and Thomas Paine. 

In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern thepeople, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult, but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials andby such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplishthe purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from theprinciples of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. Ill as the disguisebecame them, they began to assume the mask of an austere and rigidvirtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in someof them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult andconfusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order, discipline, quiet, and obedience to authority; they even showed somesort of disposition to protect such property as had not beenconfiscated. They who on every occasion had discovered a sort of furiousthirst of blood and a greedy appetite for slaughter, who avowed andgloried in the murders and massacres of the 14th of July, of the 5th and6th of October, and of the 10th of August, now began to be squeamish andfastidious with regard to those of the 2nd of September. 

In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the 10thof August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained notthe smallest credit for humanity. They endeavored to establish adistinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit ofmurder safely bottled up and sealed for their own purposes, withoutendangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they preparedfor their enemies. 

Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction. His moralshad furnished little matter of exception against him. Old, domestic, anduxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was thereforeset up as the _Cato_ of the republican party, which did not abound insuch characters. 

This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, inwhich he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal presentmade by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministersunder the new Constitution. Amongst his colleagues were Clavière andServan. All the three have since that time either lost their heads bythe axe of their associates in rebellion, or, to evade their ownrevolutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands. 

These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethronehim. Nobody who considers the circumstances which preceded thedeposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequentconduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such aconspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himselfobliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him tochoose such regicide ministers constrained him to replace them byDumouriez the Jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of abetter description. 

A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy, Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent, seditious, and atrocious libel that has probably ever been penned. Thispaper Roland a few days after delivered to the National Assembly, [2] whoinstantly published and dispersed it over all France; and in order togive it the stronger operation, they declared that he and his brotherministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of thewritings which have inflamed the Jacobin spirit to a savage fury everworked up a fiercer ferment through the whole mass of the republicansin every part of France. 

Under the thin veil of _prediction_, he strongly _recommends_ all theabominable practices which afterwards followed. In particular, heinflamed the minds of the populace against the respectable andconscientious clergy, who became the chief objects of the massacre, andwho were to him the chief objects of a malignity and rancor that onecould hardly think to exist in an human heart. 

We have the relics of his fanatical persecution here. We are in acondition to judge of the merits of the persecutors and of thepersecuted: I do not say the accusers and accused; because, in all thefurious declamations of the atheistic faction against these men, not onespecific charge has been made upon any one person of those who sufferedin their massacre or by their decree of exile. 

The king had declared that he would sooner perish under their axe (hetoo well saw what was preparing for him) than give his sanction to theiniquitous act of proscription under which those innocent people were tobe transported. 

On this proscription of the clergy a principal part of the ostensiblequarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the timeof the authorized publication of this libel, some of the manoeuvres longand uniformly pursued for the king's deposition became more and moreevident and declared. 

The 10th of August came on, and in the manner in which Roland hadpredicted: it was followed by the same consequences. The king wasdeposed, after cruel massacres in the courts and the apartments of hispalace and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason tohis old master, Roland was by his new masters named Minister of the HomeDepartment. 

The massacres of the 2nd of September were begotten by the massacres ofthe 10th of August. They were universally foreseen and hourly expected. During this short interval between the two murderous scenes, the furies, male and female, cried out havoc as loudly and as fiercely as ever. Theordinary jails were all filled with prepared victims; and when theyoverflowed, churches were turned into jails. At this time the relentlessRoland had the care of the general police;--he had for his colleague thebloody Danton, who was Minister of Justice; the insidious Pétion wasMayor of Paris; the treacherous Manuel was Procurator of the CommonHall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authorsof this massacre. Lest the national guard should, by their very name, bereminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow-citizens, the Common Council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think ofresisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers northeir arms were at all formidable, ) obliged those guards to draw thecharges from their muskets, and took away their bayonets. One of theirjournalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leadingstatesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which heformerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to thepaper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to thegalleys; but, by the benignity of the late king, this felon (to be oneday advanced to the rank of a regicide) had been pardoned and releasedat the intercession of the ambassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitudewas such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately beenrewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, inmockery of all criminal law, to be Minister of Justice: he became fromhis elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has sincereceived the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death. 

It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employedat this crisis. The day after the massacre had commenced, Rolandappeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protectingmagistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the firstday: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day afterthe commencement of the massacre, [3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, accordingto the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloodyproceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of thatday as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a fullknowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have beenformed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which he more thaninsinuates was the work of his late unhappy master, --who was universallyknown to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guiltysubjects to an excess. 

"Without the day of the 10th, " says he, "it is evident that we shouldhave been lost. The court, prepared for a long time, waited for thehour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris thestandard of death, and to reign there by terror. The sense of thepeople, (_le sentiment_, ) always just and ready when their opinion isnot corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, andrendered it fatal to the conspirators. " He then proceeds, in the cantwhich has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th ofJuly, 1789, to the present time:--"It is in the nature of things, "continues he, "and in that of the human heart, that victory should bringwith it _some_ excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars_long_ after the tempest; but _everything has bounds_, which ought _atlength_ to be observed. "

In this memorable epistle, he considers such _excesses_ as fatalitiesarising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to bepunished. He allows a space of time for the duration of theseagitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in hismeasure, he thinks it may be _long_. But he would have things to cease_at length_. But when? and where?--When they may approach his ownperson. 

"_Yesterday_, " says he, "the ministers _were denounced: vaguely_, indeed, as to the _matter_, because subjects of reproach were wanting;but with that warmth and force of assertion which strike the imaginationand seduce it for a moment, and which mislead and destroy confidence, without which no man should remain in place in a free government. _Yesterday, again_, in an assembly of the presidents of all thesections, convoked by the ministers, with the view of conciliating allminds, and of mutual explanation, I perceived _that distrust whichsuspects, interrogates, and fetters operations_. "

In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) thisvirtuous Minister of the Home Department, and all the magistracy ofParis, spent the first day of the massacre, the atrocity of which hasspread horror and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that theputting a stop to the massacre had any part in the object of theirmeeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was aminister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of hisfellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferentabout its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says "thattheir hidden enemies may make use of this _agitation_" (the tenderappellation which he gives to horrid massacre) "to hurt _their bestfriends and their most able defenders. Already the example begins_: letit restrain and arrest a _just_ rage. Indignation carried to its heightcommences proscriptions which fall only on the _guilty_, but in whicherror and particular passions may shortly involve the _honest man_. "

He saw that the able artificers in the trade and mystery of murder didnot choose that their skill should be unemployed after their first work, and that they were full as ready to cut off their rivals as theirenemies. This gave him _one_ alarm that was serious. This letter ofRoland, in every part of it, lets out the secret of all the parties inthis Revolution. _Plena rimarum est; hoc atque illac perfluit_. We seethat none of them condemn the occasional practice of murder, --providedit is properly applied, --provided it is kept within the bounds whicheach of those parties think proper to prescribe. In this case Rolandfeared, that, if what was occasionally useful should become habitual, the practice might go further than was convenient. It might involve thebest friends of the last Revolution, as it had done the heroes of thefirst Revolution: he feared that it would not be confined to the LaFayettes and Clermont-Tonnerres, the Duponts and Barnaves, but that itmight extend to the Brissots and Vergniauds, to the Condorcets, thePétions, and to himself. Under this apprehension there is no doubt thathis humane feelings were altogether unaffected. 

His observations on the massacre of the preceding day are such as cannotbe passed over. "Yesterday, " said he, "was a day upon the events ofwhich it is perhaps necessary to leave a _veil_. I know that the peoplewith their vengeance _mingled a sort of justice_: they did not take forvictims _all_ who presented themselves to their fury; they directed itto _them who had for a long time been spared by the sword of the law_, and who they _believed_, from the peril of circumstances, should besacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to _villains andtraitors_ to misrepresent this _effervescence_, and that it must bechecked; I know that we owe to all France the declaration, that the_executive power_ could not foresee or prevent this excess; I know thatit is due to the constituted authorities to place a limit to it, orconsider themselves as abolished. "

In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veilover it, --which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and toextinguish all compassion for the sufferers. He apologizes for it; infact, he justifies it. He who (as the reader has just seen in what isquoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at "vaguedenunciations, " when made against himself, and from which he then fearednothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed toconsider the charge of a conspiracy to massacre the Parisians, broughtagainst his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or ratherupon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrousproceedings against him. He is not ashamed to call the murder of theunhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciationwhatsoever, a "_vengeance_ mingled with a _sort of justice_"; heobserves that they "had been a long time spared by the sword of thelaw, " and calls by anticipation all those who should represent this"_effervescence_" in other colors _villains and traitors_: he did notthan foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under thenecessity of assuming the pretended character of this new sort of"_villany and treason_", in the hope of obliterating the memory of theirformer real _villanies and treasons_; he did not foresee that in thecourse of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and hisfaction, written by his confederate Brissot, was to represent this"_effervescence_" as another "_St. Bartholomew_" and speak of it as"_having made humanity shudder, and sullied the Revolution forever_. "[4]

It is very remarkable that he takes upon himself to know the motives ofthe assassins, their policy, and even what they "believed. " How couldthis be, if he had no connection with them? He praises the murderers fornot having taken as yet _all_ the lives of those who had, as he callsit, "_presented themselves_ as victims to their fury. " He paints themiserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another inthe Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as _presenting themselves_as victims to their fury, --as if death was their choice, or (allowingthe idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were bysome accident _presented_ to the fury of their assassins: whereas heknew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocentvictims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure tofind them. The very selection, which he praises as a _sort of justice_tempering their fury, proves beyond a doubt the foresight, deliberation, and method with which this massacre was made. He knew that circumstanceon the very day of the commencement of the massacres, when, in allprobability, he had begun this letter, --for he presented it to theAssembly on the very next. 

Whilst, however, he defends these acts, he is conscious that they willappear in another light to the world. He therefore acquits the executivepower, that is, he acquits himself, (but only by his own assertion, ) ofthose acts of "_vengeance mixed with a sort of justice_, " as an"_excess_ which he could neither foresee nor prevent. " He could not, hesays, foresee these acts, when he tells us the people of Paris hadsagacity so well to foresee the designs of the court on the 10th ofAugust, --to foresee them so well as to mark the precise epoch on whichthey were to be executed, and to contrive to anticipate them on the veryday: he could not foresee these events, though he declares in this veryletter that victory _must_ bring with it some _excess_, --that "the searoars _long_ after the tempest. " So far as to his foresight. As to hisdisposition to prevent, if he had foreseen, the massacres of thatday, --this will be judged by his care in putting a stop to the massacrethen going on. This was no matter of foresight: he was in the very midstof it. He does not so much as pretend that he had used any force to puta stop to it. But if he had used any, the sanction given under his handto a sort of justice in the murderers was enough to disarm theprotecting force. 

That approbation of what they had already done had its natural effect onthe executive assassins, then in the paroxysm of their fury, as well ason their employers, then in the midst of the execution of theirdeliberate, cold-blooded system of murder. He did not at all differ fromeither of them in the principle of those executions, but only in thetime of their duration, --and that only as it affected himself. This, though to him a great consideration, was none to his confederates, whowere at the same time his rivals. They were encouraged to accomplish thework they had in hand. They did accomplish it; and whilst this gravemoral epistle from a grave minister, recommending a cessation of theirwork of "vengeance mingled with a sort of justice, " was before a graveassembly, the authors of the massacres proceeded without interruption intheir business for four days together, --that is, until the seventh ofthat month, and until all the victims of the first proscription in Parisand at Versailles and several other places were immolated at the shrineof the grim Moloch of liberty and equality. All the priests, all theloyalists, all the first essayists and novices of revolution in 1789, that could be found, were promiscuously put to death. 

Through the whole of this long letter of Roland, it is curious to remarkhow the nerve and vigor of his style, which had spoken so potently tohis sovereign, is relaxed when he addresses himself to the_sans-culottes, _--how that strength and dexterity of arm, with which heparries and beats down the sceptre, is enfeebled and lost when he comesto fence with the poniard. When he speaks to the populace, he can nolonger be direct. The whole compass of the language is tried to findsynonymes and circumlocutions for massacre and murder. Things are nevercalled by their common names. Massacre is sometimes _agitation_, sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_, sometimes too continuedan exercise of a _revolutionary power_. 

However, after what had passed had been praised, or excused, orpardoned, he declares loudly against such proceedings _in future_. Crimes had pioneered and made smooth the way for the march of thevirtues, and from that time order and justice and a sacred regard forpersonal property were to become the rules for the new democracy. HereRoland and the Brissotins leagued for their own preservation, byendeavoring to preserve peace. This short story will render many of theparts of Brissot's pamphlet, in which Roland's views and intentions areso often alluded to, the more intelligible in themselves, and the moreuseful in their application by the English reader. 

Under the cover of these artifices, Roland, Brissot, and their partyhoped to gain the bankers, merchants, substantial tradesmen, hoarders ofassignats, and purchasers of the confiscated lands of the clergy andgentry to join with their party, as holding out some sort of security tothe effects which they possessed, whether these effects were theacquisitions of fair commerce, or the gains of jobbing in themisfortunes of their country and the plunder of their fellow-citizens. In this design the party of Roland and Brissot succeeded in a greatdegree. They obtained a majority in the National Convention. Composed, however, as that assembly is, their majority was far from steady. Butwhilst they appeared to gain the Convention, and many of the outlyingdepartments, they lost the city of Paris entirely and irrecoverably: itwas fallen into the hands of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton. Theirinstruments were the _sans-culottes_, or rabble, who domineered in thatcapital, and were wholly at the devotion of those incendiaries, andreceived their daily pay. The people of property were of no consequence, and trembled before Marat and his janizaries. As that great man had notobtained the helm of the state, it was not yet come to his turn to actthe part of Brissot and his friends in the assertion of subordinationand regular government. But Robespierre has survived both these rivalchiefs, and is now the great patron of Jacobin order. 

To balance the exorbitant power of Paris, (which threatened to leavenothing to the National Convention but a character as insignificant asthat which the first Assembly had assigned to the unhappy Louis theSixteenth, ) the faction of Brissot, whose leaders were Roland, Pétion, Vergniaud, Isnard, Condorcet, &c. , &c. , &c. , applied themselves to gainthe great commercial towns, Lyons, Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, andBordeaux. The republicans of the Brissotin description, to whom theconcealed royalists, still very numerous, joined themselves, obtained atemporary superiority in all these places. In Bordeaux, on account ofthe activity and eloquence of some of its representatives, thissuperiority was the most distinguished. This last city is seated on theGaronne, or Gironde; and being the centre of a department named fromthat river, the appellation of Girondists was given to the whole party. These, and some other towns, declared strongly against the principles ofanarchy, and against the despotism of Paris. Numerous addresses weresent to the Convention, promising to maintain its authority, which theaddressers were pleased to consider as legal and constitutional, thoughchosen, not to compose an executive government, but to form a plan for aConstitution. In the Convention measures were taken to obtain an armedforce from the several departments to maintain the freedom of that body, and to provide for the personal safety of the members: neither of which, from the 14th of July, 1789, to this hour, have been really enjoyed bytheir assemblies sitting under any denomination. 

This scheme, which was well conceived, had not the desired success. Paris, from which the Convention did not dare to move, though somethreats of such a departure were from time to time thrown out, was toopowerful for the party of the Gironde. Some of the proposed guards, butneither with regularity nor in force, did indeed arrive: they weredebauched as fast as they came, or were sent to the frontiers. The gameplayed by the revolutionists in 1789, with respect to the French guardsof the unhappy king, was now played against the departmental guards, called together for the protection of the revolutionists. Every part oftheir own policy comes round, and strikes at their own power and theirown lives. 

The Parisians, on their part, were not slow in taking the alarm. Theyhad just reason to apprehend, that, if they permitted the smallestdelay, they should see themselves besieged by an army collected from allparts of France. Violent threats were thrown out against that city inthe Assembly. Its total destruction was menaced. A very remarkableexpression was used in these debates, --"that in future times it might beinquired on what part of the Seine Paris had stood. " The faction whichruled in Paris, too bold to be intimidated and too vigilant to besurprised, instantly armed themselves. In their turn, they accused theGirondists of a treasonable design to break _the republic one andindivisible_ (whose unity they contended could only be preserved by thesupremacy of Paris) into a number of _confederate_ commonwealths. TheGirondin faction on this account received also the name of_Federalists_. 

Things on both sides hastened fast to extremities. Paris, the mother ofequality, was herself to be equalized. Matters were come to thisalternative: either that city must be reduced to a mere member of thefederative republic, or the Convention, chosen, as they said, by allFrance, was to be brought regularly and systematically under thedominion of the Common Hall, and even of any one of the sections ofParis. 

In this awful contest, thus brought to issue, the great mother club ofthe Jacobins was entirely in the Parisian interest. The Girondins nolonger dared to show their faces in that assembly. Nine tenths at leastof the Jacobin clubs, throughout France, adhered to the greatpatriarchal Jacobinière of Paris, to which they were (to use their ownterm) _affiliated_. No authority of magistracy, judicial or executive, had the least weight, whenever these clubs chose to interfere: and theychose to interfere in everything, and on every occasion. All hope ofgaining them to the support of property, or to the acknowledgment of anylaw but their own will, was evidently vain and hopeless. Nothing but anarmed insurrection against their anarchical authority could answer thepurpose of the Girondins. Anarchy was to be cured by rebellion, as ithad been caused by it. 

As a preliminary to this attempt on the Jacobins and the commons ofParis, which it was hoped would be supported by all the remainingproperty of France, it became absolutely necessary to prepare amanifesto, laying before the public the whole policy, genius, character, and conduct of the partisans of club government. To make this expositionas fully and clearly as it ought to be made, it was of the sameunavoidable necessity to go through a series of transactions, in whichall those concerned in this Revolution were, at the several periods oftheir activity, deeply involved. In consequence of this design, andunder these difficulties, Brissot prepared the following declaration ofhis party, which he executed with no small ability; and in this mannerthe whole mystery of the French Revolution was laid open in all itsparts. 

It is almost needless to mention to the reader the fate of the design towhich this pamphlet was to be subservient. The Jacobins of Paris weremore prompt than their adversaries. They were the readiest to resort towhat La Fayette calls the _most sacred of all duties, that ofinsurrection_. Another era of holy insurrection commenced the 31st oflast May. As the first fruits of that insurrection grafted oninsurrection, and of that rebellion improving upon rebellion, thesacred, irresponsible character of the members of the Convention waslaughed to scorn. They had themselves shown in their proceedings againstthe late king how little the most fixed principles are to be reliedupon, in their revolutionary Constitution. The members of the Girondinparty in the Convention were seized upon, or obliged to save themselvesby flight. The unhappy author of this piece, with twenty of hisassociates, suffered together on the scaffold, after a trial theiniquity of which puts all description to defiance. 

The English reader will draw from this work of Brissot, and from theresult of the last struggles of this party, some useful lessons. He willbe enabled to judge of the information of those who have undertaken toguide and enlighten us, and who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to paint the French Revolution and its consequences inbrilliant and flattering colors. They will know how to appreciate theliberty of France, which has been so much magnified in England. Theywill do justice to the wisdom and goodness of their sovereign and hisParliament, who have put them into a state of defence, in the waraudaciously made upon us in favor of that kind of liberty. When we see(as here we must see) in their true colors the character and policy ofour enemies, our gratitude will become an active principle. It willproduce a strong and zealous coöperation with the efforts of ourgovernment in favor of a Constitution under which we enjoy advantagesthe full value of which the querulous weakness of human nature requiressometimes the opportunity of a comparison to understand and to relish. 

Our confidence in those who watch for the public will not be lessened. We shall be sensible that to alarm us in the late circumstances of ouraffairs was not for our molestation, but for our security. We shall besensible that this alarm was not ill-timed, --and that it ought to havebeen given, as it was given, before the enemy had time fully to matureand accomplish their plans for reducing us to the condition of France, as that condition is faithfully and without exaggeration described inthe following work. We now have our arms in our hands; we have the meansof opposing the sense, the courage, and the resources of England to thedeepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined, and the mostextensive design that ever was carried on, since the beginning of theworld, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and allreal freedom. 

The reader is requested to attend to the part of this pamphlet whichrelates to the conduct of the Jacobins with regard to the AustrianNetherlands, which they call Belgia or Belgium. It is from pageseventy-two to page eighty-four of this translation. Here their viewsand designs upon all their neighbors are fully displayed. Here the wholemystery of their ferocious politics is laid open with the utmostclearness. Here the manner in which they would treat every nation intowhich they could introduce their doctrines and influence is distinctlymarked. We see that no nation was out of danger, and we see what thedanger was with which every nation was threatened. The writer of thispamphlet throws the blame of several of the most violent of theproceedings on the other party. He and his friends, at the time alludedto, had a majority in the National Assembly. He admits that neither henor they _ever publicly_ opposed these measures; but he attributes theirsilence to a fear of rendering themselves suspected. It is most certain, that, whether from fear or from approbation, they never discovered anydislike of those proceedings till Dumouriez was driven from theNetherlands. But whatever their motive was, it is plain that the mostviolent is, and since the Revolution has always been, the predominantparty. 

If Europe could not be saved without our interposition, (most certainlyit could not, ) I am sure there is not an Englishman who would not blushto be left out of the general effort made in favor of the generalsafety. But we are not secondary parties in this war; _we are principalsin the danger, and ought to be principals in the exertion_. If anyEnglishman asks whether the designs of the French assassins are confinedto the spot of Europe which they actually desolate, the citizen Brissot, the author of this book, and the author of the declaration of waragainst England, will give him his answer. He will find in this book, that the republicans are divided into factions full of the most furiousand destructive animosity against each other; but he will find also thatthere is one point in which they perfectly agree: that they are allenemies alike to the government of all other nations, and only contendwith each other about the means of propagating their tenets andextending their empire by conquest. 

It is true that in this present work, which the author professedlydesigned for an appeal to foreign nations and posterity, he has dressedup the philosophy of his own faction in as decent a garb as he could tomake her appearance in public; but through every disguise her hideousfigure may be distinctly seen. If, however, the reader still wishes tosee her in all her naked deformity, I would further refer him to aprivate letter of Brissot, written towards the end of the last year, andquoted in a late very able pamphlet of Mallet Du Pan. "We must" (saysour philosopher) "_set fire to the four corners of Europe_"; in thatalone is our safety. "_Dumouriez cannot suit us_. I always distrustedhim. Miranda is the general for us: he understands the _revolutionarypower_; he has _courage, lights_, " &c. [5] Here everything is fairlyavowed in plain language. The triumph of philosophy is the universalconflagration of Europe; the only real dissatisfaction with Dumouriez isa suspicion of his moderation; and the secret motive of that preferencewhich in this very pamphlet the author gives to Miranda, though withoutassigning his reasons, is declared to be the superior fitness of thatforeign adventurer for the purposes of subversion and destruction. Onthe other hand, if there can be any man in this country so hardy as toundertake the defence or the apology of the present monstrous usurpersof France, and if it should be said in their favor, that it is not justto credit the charges of their enemy Brissot against them, who haveactually tried and condemned him on the very same charges among others, we are luckily supplied with the best possible evidence in support ofthis part of his book against them: it comes from among themselves. Camille Desmoulins published the History of the Brissotins in answer tothis very address of Brissot. It was the counter-manifesto of the lastholy revolution of the 31st of May; and the flagitious orthodoxy of hiswritings at that period has been admitted in the late scrutiny of him bythe Jacobin Club, when they saved him from that guillotine "which hegrazed. " In the beginning of his work he displays "the task of glory, "as he calls it, which presented itself at the opening of the Convention. All is summed up in two points: "To create the French Republic; _todisorganize Europe; perhaps to purge it of its tyrants by the eruptionof the volcanic principles of equality_. "[6] The coincidence is exact;the proof is complete and irresistible. 

In a cause like this, and in a time like the present, there is noneutrality. They who are not actively, and with decision and energy, against Jacobinism are its partisans. They who do not dread it love it. It cannot be viewed with indifference. It is a thing made to produce apowerful impression on the feelings. Such is the nature of Jacobinism, such is the nature of man, that this system must be regarded either withenthusiastic admiration, or with the highest degree of detestation, resentment, and horror. 

Another great lesson may be taught by this book, and by the fortune ofthe author and his party: I mean a lesson drawn from the consequences ofengaging in daring innovations from an hope that we may be able to limittheir mischievous operation at our pleasure, and by our policy to secureourselves against the effect of the evil examples we hold out to theworld. This lesson is taught through almost all the important pages ofhistory; but never has it been taught so clearly and so awfully as atthis hour. The revolutionists who have just suffered an ignominiousdeath, under the sentence of the revolutionary tribunal, (a tribunalcomposed of those with whom they had triumphed in the total destructionof the ancient government, ) were by no means ordinary men, or withoutvery considerable talents and resources. But with all their talents andresources, and the apparent momentary extent of their power, we see thefate of their projects, their power, and their persons. We see beforeour eyes the absurdity of thinking to establish order upon principles ofconfusion, or with the materials and instruments of rebellion to buildup a solid and stable government. 

Such partisans of a republic amongst us as may not have the worstintentions will see that the principles, the plans, the manners, themorals, and the whole system of France is altogether as adverse to theformation and duration of any rational scheme of a republic as it is tothat of a monarchy, absolute or limited. It is, indeed, a system whichcan only answer the purposes of robbers and murderers. 

The translator has only to say for himself, that he has found somedifficulty in this version. His original author, through haste, perhaps, or through the perturbation of a mind filled with a great and arduousenterprise, is often obscure. There are some passages, too, in which hislanguage requires to be first translated into French, --at least intosuch French as the Academy would in former times have tolerated. Hewrites with great force and vivacity; but the language, like everythingelse in his country, has undergone a revolution. The translator thoughtit best to be as literal as possible, conceiving such a translationwould perhaps be the most fit to convey the author's peculiar mode ofthinking. In this way the translator has no credit for style, but hemakes it up in fidelity. Indeed, the facts and observations are so muchmore important than the style, that no apology is wanted for producingthem in any intelligible manner. 

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Presented to the king June 13; delivered to him the precedingMonday. --TRANSLATOR. 

[3] Letter to the National Assembly, signed, _The Minister of theInterior_, ROLAND; dated Paris, Sept. 3rd, _4th year of Liberty_. 

[4] See p. 12 and p. 13 of this translation. 

[5] See the translation of Mallet Du Pan's work, printed for Owen, p. 53. 

[6] See the translation of the History of the Brissotins by CamilleDesmoulins, printed for Owen, p. 2. 

APPENDIX. 

 [The Address of M. Brissot to his Constituents being now almost forgotten, it has been thought right to add, as an Appendix, that part of it to which Mr. Burke points our particular attention and upon which he so forcibly comments in his Preface. ]

Three sorts of anarchy have ruined our affairs in Belgium. 

The anarchy of the administration of Pache, which has completelydisorganized the supply of our armies; which by that disorganizationreduced the army of Dumouriez to stop in the middle of its conquests;which struck it motionless through the months of November and December;which hindered it from joining Beurnonville and Custine, and fromforcing the Prussians and Austrians to repass the Rhine, and afterwardsfrom putting themselves in a condition to invade Holland sooner thanthey did. 

To this state of ministerial anarchy it is necessary to join that otheranarchy which disorganized the troops, and occasioned their habits ofpillage; and lastly, that anarchy which created the revolutionary power, and forced the union to France of the countries we had invaded, beforethings were ripe for such a measure. 

Who could, however, doubt the frightful evils that were occasioned inour armies by that doctrine of anarchy which, under the shadow ofequality of _right_, would establish equality of fact? This is universalequality, the scourge of society, as the other is the support ofsociety: an anarchical doctrine which would level all things, talentsand ignorance, virtues and vices, places, usages, and services; adoctrine which begot that fatal project of organizing the army, presented by Dubois de Crancé, to which it will be indebted for acomplete disorganization. 

Mark the date of the presentation of the system of this equality offact, entire equality. It had been projected and decreed even at thevery opening of the Dutch campaign. If any project could encourage thewant of discipline in the soldiers, any scheme could disgust and banishgood officers, and throw all things into confusion at the moment whenorder alone could give victory, it is this project, in truth, sostubbornly defended by the anarchists, and transplanted into theirordinary tactic. 

How could they expect that there should exist any discipline, anysubordination, when even in the camp they permit motions, censures, anddenunciations of officers and of generals? Does not such a disorderdestroy all the respect that is due to superiors, and all the mutualconfidence without which success cannot be hoped for? For the spirit ofdistrust makes the soldier suspicious, and intimidates the general. Thefirst discerns treason in every danger; the second, always placedbetween the necessity of conquest and the image of the scaffold, daresnot raise himself to bold conception, and those heights of courage whichelectrify an army and insure victory. Turenne, in our time, would havecarried his head to the scaffold; for he was sometimes beat: but thereason why he more frequently conquered was, that his discipline wassevere; it was, that his soldiers, confiding in his talents, nevermuttered discontent instead of fighting. Without reciprocal confidencebetween the soldier and the general, there can be no army, no victory, especially in a free government. 

Is it not to the same system of anarchy, of equalization, and want ofsubordination, which has been recommended in some clubs and defendedeven in the Convention, that we owe the pillages, the murders, theenormities of all kinds, which it was difficult for the officers to puta stop to, from the general spirit of insubordination, --excesses whichhave rendered the French name odious to the Belgians? Again, is it notto this system of anarchy, and of robbery, that we are indebted for the_revolutionary power_, which has so justly aggravated the hatred of theBelgians against France?

What did enlightened republicans think before the 10th of August, menwho wished for liberty, _not only for their own country, but for allEurope? They believed that they could generally establish it by excitingthe governed against the governors, in letting the people see thefacility and the advantages of such insurrections_. 

But how can the people be led to that point? By the example of goodgovernment established among us; by the example of order; by the care ofspreading nothing but moral ideas among them: to respect theirproperties and their rights; to respect their prejudices, even when wecombat them: by disinterestedness in defending the people; by a zeal toextend the spirit of liberty amongst them. 

This system was at first followed. [7] Excellent pamphlets from the penof Condorcet prepared the people for liberty; the 10th of August, therepublican decrees, the battle of Valmy, the retreat of the Prussians, the victory of Jemappes, all spoke in favor of France: all was rapidlydestroyed by _the revolutionary power_. Without doubt, good intentionsmade the majority of the Assembly adopt it; they would plant the tree ofliberty in a foreign soil, under the shade of a people already free. Tothe eyes of the people of Belgium it seemed but the mask of a newforeign tyranny. This opinion was erroneous; I will suppose it so for amoment; but still this opinion of Belgium deserved to be considered. Ingeneral, we have always considered our own opinions and our ownintentions rather than the people whose cause we defend. We have giventhose people a will: that is to say, we have more than ever alienatedthem from liberty. 

How could the Belgic people believe themselves free, since we exercisefor them, and over them, the rights of sovereignty, --when, withoutconsulting them, we suppress, all in a mass, their ancient usages, theirabuses, their prejudices, those classes of society which without doubtare contrary to the spirit of liberty, but the utility of whosedestruction was not as yet proved to them? How could they believethemselves free and sovereign, when we made them take such an oath as wethought fit, as a test to give them the right of voting? How could theybelieve themselves free, when openly despising their religious worship, which religious worship that superstitious people valued beyond theirliberty, beyond even their life; when we proscribed their priests; whenwe banished them from their assemblies, where they were in the practiceof seeing them govern; when we seized their revenues, their domains, andriches, to the profit of the nation; when we carried to the very censerthose hands which they regarded as profane? Doubtless these operationswere founded on principles; but those principles ought to have had theconsent of the Belgians, before they were carried into practice;otherwise they necessarily became our most cruel enemies. 

Arrived ourselves at the last bounds of liberty and equality, tramplingunder our feet all human superstitions, (after, however, a four years'war with them, ) we attempt all at once to raise to the same eminencemen, strangers even to the first elementary principles of liberty, andplunged for fifteen hundred years in ignorance and superstition; wewished to force men to see, when a thick cataract covered their eyes, even before we had removed that cataract; we would force men to see, whose dulness of character had raised a mist before their eyes, andbefore that character was altered. [8]

Do you believe that the doctrine which now prevails in France would havefound many partisans among us in 1789? No: a revolution in ideas and inprejudices is not made with that rapidity; it moves gradually; it doesnot escalade. 

Philosophy does not inspire by violence, nor by seduction; nor is it thesword that begets love of liberty. 

Joseph the Second also borrowed the language of philosophy, when hewished to suppress the monks in Belgium, and to seize upon theirrevenues. There was seen on him a mask only of philosophy, covering thehideous countenance of a greedy despot; and the people ran to arms. Nothing better than another kind of despotism has been seen in the_revolutionary power_. 

We have seen in the commissioners of the National Convention nothing butproconsuls working the mine of Belgium for the profit of the Frenchnation, seeking to conquer it for the sovereign of Paris, --either toaggrandize his empire, or to share the burdens of the debts, and furnisha rich prize to the robbers who domineered in France. 

Do you believe the Belgians have ever been the dupes of thosewell-rounded periods which they vended in the pulpit in order tofamiliarize them to the idea of an union with France? Do you believethey were ever imposed upon by those votes and resolutions, made by whatis called acclamation, for their union, of which corruption paid onepart, [9] and fear forced the remainder? Who, at this time of day, isunacquainted with the springs and wires of their miserable puppet-show?_Who does not know the farces of primary assemblies, composed of apresident, of a secretary, and of some assistants, whose day's work waspaid for?_ No: it is not by means which belong only to thieves anddespots that the foundations of liberty can be laid in an enslavedcountry. It is not by those means, that a new-born republic, a peoplewho know not yet the elements of republican governments, can be unitedto us. Even slaves do not suffer themselves to be seduced by suchartifices; and if they have not the strength to resist, they have atleast the sense to know how to appreciate the value of such an attempt. 

If we would attach the Belgians to us, we must at least enlighten theirminds by _good writings_; we must send to them _missionaries_, and notdespotic commissioners. [10] We ought to give them time to see, --toperceive by themselves the advantages of liberty, the unhappy effects ofsuperstition, the fatal spirit of priesthood. And whilst we waited forthis moral revolution, we should have accepted the offers which theyincessantly repeated to join to the French army an army of fiftythousand men, to entertain them at their own expense, and to advance toFrance the specie of which she stood in need. 

But have we ever seen those fifty thousand soldiers who were to join ourarmy as soon as the standard of liberty should be displayed in Belgium?Have we ever seen those treasures which they were to count into ourhands? Can we either accuse the sterility of their country, or thepenury of their treasure, or the coldness of their love for liberty? No!despotism and anarchy, these are the benefits which we have transplantedinto their soil. We have acted, we have spoken, like masters; and fromthat time we have found the Flemings nothing but jugglers, who made thegrimace of liberty for money, or slaves, who in their hearts cursedtheir new tyrants. Our commissioners address them in this sort: "Youhave nobles and priests among you: drive them out without delay, or wewill neither be your brethren nor your patrons. " They answered: "Give usbut time; only leave to us the care of reforming these institutions. "Our answer to them was: "No! it must be at the moment, it must be on thespot; or we will treat you as enemies, we will abandon you to theresentment of the Austrians. "

What could the disarmed Belgians object to all this, surrounded as theywere by seventy thousand men? They had only to hold their tongues, andto bow down their heads before their masters. They did hold theirtongues, and their silence is received as a sincere and free assent. 

Have not the strangest artifices been adopted to prevent that peoplefrom retreating, and to constrain them to an union? It was foreseen, that, as long as they were unable to effect an union, the States wouldpreserve the supreme authority amongst themselves. Under pretence, therefore, of relieving the people, and of exercising the sovereignty intheir right, at one stroke they abolished all the duties and taxes, theyshut up all the treasuries. From that time no more receipts, no morepublic money, no more means of paying the salaries of any man in officeappointed by the States. Thus was anarchy organized amongst the people, that they might be compelled to throw themselves into our arms. Itbecame necessary for those who administered their affairs, under thepenalty of being exposed to sedition, and in order to avoid theirthroats being cut, to have recourse to the treasury of France. What didthey find in this treasury? ASSIGNATS. --These assignats were advanced atpar to Belgium. By this means, on the one hand, they naturalized thiscurrency in that country, and on the other, they expected to make a goodpecuniary transaction. Thus it is that covetousness cut its throat withits own hands. _The Belgians have seen in this forced introduction ofassignats nothing but a double robbery_; and they have only the moreviolently hated the union with France. 

Recollect the solicitude of the Belgians on that subject. With whatearnestness did they conjure you to take off a retroactive effect fromthese assignats, and to prevent them from being applied to the paymentof debts that were contracted anterior to the union!

Did not this language energetically enough signify that they lookedupon the assignats as a leprosy, and the union as a deadly contagion?

And yet what regard was paid to so just a demand? It was buried in theCommittee of Finance. That committee wanted to make anarchy the means ofan union. They only busied themselves in making the Belgic Provincessubservient to their finances. 

Cambon said loftily before the Belgians themselves: The Belgian warcosts us hundreds of millions. Their ordinary revenues, and even someextraordinary taxes, will not answer to our reimbursements; and yet wehave occasion for them. The mortgage of our assignats draws near itsend. What must be done? Sell the Church property of Brabant. There is amortgage of two thousand millions (eighty millions sterling). How shallwe get possession of them? By an immediate union. Instantly they decreedthis union. Men's minds were not disposed to it. What does it signify?Let us make them vote by means of money. Without delay, therefore, theysecretly order the Minister of Foreign Affairs to dispose of four orfive hundred thousand livres (20, 000_l. _ sterling) _to make thevagabonds of Brussels drunk, and to buy proselytes to the union in allthe States_. But even these means, it was said, will obtain but a weakminority in our favor. What does that signify? _Revolutions_, said they, _are made only by minorities. It is the minority which has made theRevolution of France; it is a minority which, has made the peopletriumph_. 

The Belgic Provinces were not sufficient to satisfy the voraciouscravings of this financial system. Cambon wanted to unite everything, that he might sell everything. Thus he forced the union of Savoy. Inthe war with Holland, he saw nothing but gold to seize on, andassignats to sell at par. [11] "Do not let us dissemble, " said he one dayto the Committee of General Defence, in presence even of the patriotdeputies of Holland, "you have no ecclesiastical goods to offer us forour indemnity. IT IS A REVOLUTION IN THEIR COUNTERS AND IRON CHESTS[12]that must be made amongst the DUTCH. " The word was said, and the bankersAbema and Van Staphorst understood it. 

Do you think that that word has not been worth an army to theStadtholder? that it has not cooled the ardor of the Dutch patriots?that it has not commanded the vigorous defence of Williamstadt?

Do you believe that the patriots of Amsterdam, when they read thepreparatory decree which gave France an execution on their goods, --doyou believe that those patriots would not have liked better to haveremained under the government of the Stadtholder, who took from them nomore than a fixed portion of their property, than to pass under that ofa revolutionary power, which would make a complete revolution in theirbureaus and strong-boxes, and reduce them to wretchedness and rags?[13]Robbery and anarchy, instead of encouraging, will always stiflerevolutions. 

"But why, " they object to me, "have not you and your friends chosen toexpose these measures in the rostrum of the National Convention? Whyhave you not opposed yourself to all these fatal projects of union?"

There are two answers to make here, --one general, one particular. 

You complain of the silence of honest men! You quite forget, then, honest men are the objects of your suspicion. Suspicion, if it does notstain the soul of a courageous man, at least arrests his thoughts intheir passage to his lips. The suspicions of a good citizen freeze thosemen whom the calumny of the wicked could not stop in their progress. 

You complain of their silence! You forget, then, that you have oftenestablished an insulting equality between them and men covered withcrimes and made up of ignominy. 

You forget, then, that you have twenty times left them covered withopprobrium by your galleries. 

You forget, then, that you have not thought yourself sufficientlypowerful to impose silence upon these galleries. 

What ought a wise man to do in the midst of these circumstances? He issilent. He waits the moment when the passions give way; he waits tillreason shall preside, and till the multitude shall listen to her voice. 

What has been the tactic displayed during all these unions? Cambon, incapable of political calculation, boasting his ignorance in thediplomatic, flattering the ignorant multitude, lending his name andpopularity to the anarchists, seconded by their vociferations, denouncedincessantly, as counter-revolutionists, those intelligent persons whowere desirous at least of having things discussed. To oppose the acts ofunion appeared to Cambon an overt act of treason. The wish so much as toreflect and to deliberate was in his eyes a great crime. He calumniatedour intentions. The voice of every deputy, especially my voice, wouldinfallibly have been stifled. There were spies on the very monosyllablesthat escaped our lips. 

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The most seditious libels upon all governments, in order to exciteinsurrection in Spain, Holland, and other countries, --TRANSLATOR. 

[8] It may not be amiss, once for all, to remark on the style of all thephilosophical politicians of France. Without any distinction in theirseveral sects and parties, they agree in treating all nations who willnot conform their government, laws, manners, and religion to the newFrench fashion, as _an herd of slaves_. They consider the content withwhich men live under those governments as stupidity, and all attachmentto religion as the effect of the grossest ignorance. 

The people of the Netherlands, by their Constitution, are as muchentitled to be called free as any nation upon earth. The Austriangovernment (until some wild attempts the Emperor Joseph made on theFrench principle, but which have been since abandoned by the court ofVienna) has been remarkably mild. No people were more at their ease thanthe Flemish subjects, particularly the lower classes. It is curious tohear this great oculist talk of couching the _cataract_ by which theNetherlands were _blinded_, and hindered from seeing in its propercolors the beautiful vision of the French republic, which he has himselfpainted with so masterly an hand. That people must needs be dull, blind, and brutalized by fifteen hundred years of superstition, (the timeelapsed since the introduction of Christianity amongst them, ) who couldprefer their former state to the _present state of France_! The readerwill remark, that the only difference between Brissot and hisadversaries is in the _mode_ of bringing other nations into the pale ofthe French republic. _They_ would abolish the order and classes ofsociety, and all religion, at a stroke: Brissot would have just the samething done, but with more address and management. --TRANSLATOR. 

[9] See the correspondence of Dumouriez, especially the letter of the12th of March. 

[10] They have not as yet proceeded farther with regard to the Englishdominions. Here we only see as yet _the good writings_ of Paine, and ofhis learned associates, and the labors of the _missionary clubs_, andother zealous instructors. --TRANSLATOR. 

[11] The same thing will happen in Savoy. The persecution of the clergyhas soured people's minds. The commissaries represent them to us as goodFrenchmen. I put them to the proof. Where are the legions? How! thirtythousand Savoyards, --are they not armed to defend, in concert with us, their liberty?--BRISSOT. 

[12] _Portefeuille_ is the word in the original. It signifies allmovable property which may be represented in bonds, notes, bills, stocks, or any sort of public or private securities. I do not know of asingle word in English that answers it: I have therefore substitutedthat of _Iron Chests_, as coming nearest to the idea. --TRANSLATOR. 

[13] In the original _les reduire à la sansculotterie_. 

A

LETTER

TO

WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ. , OCCASIONED BY

THE ACCOUNT GIVEN IN A NEWSPAPER OF THE SPEECH MADE IN THE HOUSE OFLORDS BY THE **** OF *******

IN THE DEBATE

CONCERNING LORD FITZWILLIAM. 

1795. 

LETTER. 

BEACONSFIELD, May 28, 1795. 

My dear sir, --I have been told of the voluntary which, for theentertainment of the House of Lords, has been lately played by his Gracethe **** of *******, a great deal at my expense, and a little at hisown. I confess I should have liked the composition rather better, if ithad been quite new. But every man has his taste, and his Grace is anadmirer of ancient music. 

There may be sometimes too much even of a good thing. A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad: but the best toasts may be so often repeated asto disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate andoverload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians mayat last be stunned with "three times three. " I am sure I have been verygrateful for the flattering remembrance made of me in the toasts of theRevolution Society, and of other clubs formed on the same laudable plan. After giving the brimming honors to Citizen Thomas Paine and to CitizenDr. Priestley, the gentlemen of these clubs seldom failed to bring meforth in my turn, and to drink, "Mr. Burke, and thanks to him for thediscussion he has provoked. "

I found myself elevated with this honor; for, even by the collision ofresistance, to be the means of striking out sparkles of truth, if notmerit, is at least felicity. 

Here I might have rested. But when I found that the great advocate, Mr. Erskine, condescended to resort to these bumper toasts, as the pure andexuberant fountains of politics and of rhetoric, (as I hear he did, inthree or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens, ) Iwas rather let down a little. Though still somewhat proud of myself, Iwas not quite so proud of my voucher. Though he is no idolater of fame, in some way or other Mr. Erskine will always do himself honor. Methinks, however, in following the precedents of these toasts, he seemed to domore credit to his diligence as a special pleader than to his inventionas an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources, both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicatedthe want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, inthe magazine of topics and commonplaces which I suppose he keeps by him, in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity. 

Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of hisimagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemnspecial arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, Imust still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts atthe first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even whenthe toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down withstill older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made someamends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Gracegave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuffwhich had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made upof the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the corkand of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and whenthat sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution ofthe Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummedagain into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all thehigh flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale. Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine. 

I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this ageto the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, andhis Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to putthese two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic ofletters; but "the field of glory is a field for all. " It is a large one, indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over theboundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies beforeus. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so, )whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, thatCitizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and whoonly moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in his ownnative benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead forhimself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and tolibel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from meor any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not beguilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work againstreligion and human society upon his Grace's excellent speech in theHouse of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neitherencouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in thedecrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in theguillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he couldfind in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy OldBailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effectsof his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a freeagent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government, loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers and its beef, its parsons and its pudding, its commons and its beer, and its dullslavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something toprovoke a jockey of Norfolk, [14] who was inspired with the resoluteambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which mightrender him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecutedmerit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate ofthe adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, Isay, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his GraceI say it, ) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he actedsolely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart. 

His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins with giving me a greatdeal of praise for talents which I do not possess. He does this toentitle himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness, toexaggerate my abuse of the parts which his bounty, and not that ofNature, has bestowed upon me. In this, too, he has condescended to copyMr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priestsof the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and theirfillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to theirknocking me on the head with their consecrated axes. I have injured, saythey, the Constitution; and I have abandoned the Whig party and the Whigprinciples that I professed. I do not mean, my dear Sir, to defendmyself against his Grace. I have not much interest in what the worldshall think or say of me; as little has the world an interest in what Ishall think or say of any one in it; and I wish that his Grace hadsuffered an unhappy man to enjoy, in his retreat, the melancholyprivileges of obscurity and sorrow. At any rate, I have spoken and Ihave written on the subject. If I have written or spoken so poorly as tobe quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lastingimpression. "I must let the tree lie as it falls. " Perhaps I must takesome shame to myself. I confess that I have acted on my own principlesof government, and not on those of his Grace, which are, I dare say, profound and wise, but which I do not pretend to understand. As to theparty to which he alludes, and which has long taken its leave of me, Ibelieve the principles of the book which he condemns are veryconformable to the opinions of many of the most considerable and mostgrave in that description of politicians. A few, indeed, who, I admit, are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk hisGrace's language. I am too feeble to contend with them. They have thefield to themselves. There are others, very young and very ingeniouspersons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, Ibelieve, is pleased to consider as that party. Some of them were notborn into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered intothat connection. I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broadphylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbinsand doctors in the cabala of political science. I admit that "wisdom isas the gray hair to man, and that learning is like honorable old age. "But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked of, perhaps I might beexcused, if I caught something of the general indocility. It might notbe surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two, and, in an age ofrelaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions. Ifthat could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, andwithout an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful andvery laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as totheir soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern libertyis a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. Itbelongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditaryrepresentation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no, not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race. 

Amongst those gentlemen who came to authority as soon or sooner thanthey came of age I do not mean to include his Grace. With all thosenative titles to empire over our minds which distinguish the others, hehas a large share of experience. He certainly ought to understand theBritish Constitution better than I do. He has studied it in thefundamental part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned intwenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn hisspeculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintendwith more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "Withthrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear. " Often have his candlesbeen burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilsthe grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights hashe wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and greatsums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence, and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to theruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right ofelection itself. 

Amidst these his labors, his Grace will be pleased to forgive me, if myzeal, less enlightened, to be sure, than his by midnight lamps andstudies, has presumed to talk too favorably of this Constitution, andeven to say something sounding like approbation of that body which hasthe honor to reckon his Grace at the head of it, Those who dislike thispartiality, or, if his Grace pleases, this flattery of mine, have acomfort at hand. I may be refuted and brought to shame by the mostconvincing of all refutations, a practical refutation. Every individualpeer for himself may show that I was ridiculously wrong; the whole bodyof those noble persons may refute me for the whole corps. If theyplease, they are more powerful advocates against themselves than athousand scribblers like me can be in their favor. If I were evenpossessed of those powers which his Grace, in order to heighten myoffence, is pleased to attribute to me, there would be littledifference. The eloquence of Mr. Erskine might save Mr. ***** from thegallows, but no eloquence could save Mr. Jackson from the effects of hisown potion. 

In that unfortunate book of mine, which is put in the _IndexExpurgatorius_ of the modern Whigs, I might have spoken too favorablynot only of those who wear coronets, but of those who wear crowns. Kings, however, have not only long arms, but strong ones too. A greatNorthern potentate, for instance, is able in one moment, and with onebold stroke of his diplomatic pen, to efface all the volumes which Icould write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists ofGermany ever carried to the fair of Leipsic, as an apology for monarchsand monarchy. Whilst I, or any other poor, puny, private sophist, wasdefending the Declaration of Pilnitz, his Majesty might refute me by theTreaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republic because it hada king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act byfounding another republic that has cut off the head of its king. Idefended that great potentate for associating in a grand alliance forthe preservation of the old governments of Europe; but he puts me tosilence by delivering up all those governments (his own virtuallyincluded) to the new system of France. If he is accused before theParisian tribunal (constituted for the trial of kings) for havingpolluted the soil of liberty by the tracks of his disciplined slaves, heclears himself by surrendering the finest parts of Germany (with ahandsome cut of his own territories) to the offended majesty of theregicides of France. Can I resist this? Am I responsible for it, if, with a torch in his hand, and a rope about his neck, he makes _amendehonorable_ to the _sans-culotterie_ of the Republic one and indivisible?In that humiliating attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplicatepardon for his menacing proclamations, and, as an expiation to thosewhom he failed to terrify with his threats, he may abandon those whom hehad seduced by his promises. He may sacrifice the royalists of France, whom he had called to his standard, as a salutary example to those whoshall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any otherwho undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects. 

How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to theinvectives which the regicides have made against all kings, andparticularly against himself? How can I help it, if this royalpropagandist will preach the doctrine of the Rights of Men? Is it myfault, if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in allhis academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers inhis dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals? Canit be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers and allhis hussars in these high mysteries? Am I responsible, if he will make_Le Droit de l'Homme_, or _La Souverainté du Peuple_ the favorite paroleof his military orders? Now that his troops are to act with the bravelegions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity. Hewill teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to act like them, and toemulate the glories of the _régiment de l'échafaud_. He will employ theillustrious Citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instructthe dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who, like Louis the Sixteenth, (whose cause and person he once took into hisprotection, ) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it, to consider themselves as hereditary kings. Can I arrest this greatpotentate in his career of glory? Am I blamable in recommending virtueand religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because theprotector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, toingratiate himself with the Republic of Philosophy, shall abolish allthe three? It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of theReformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinisticsabbath, and establishing the _décadi_ of atheism in all his states. Hemay even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple ofReason. In these things, at least, he is truly despotic. He has nowshaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him withhorror. It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall not, however, travel so far to see) the ingenious devices and the eleganttransparencies which, on the restoration of peace and the commencementof Prussian liberty, are to decorate Potsdam and Charlottenburg_festeggianti_. What shades of his armed ancestors of the House ofBrandenburg will the committee of _Illuminés_ raise up in theopera-house of Berlin, to dance a grand ballet in the rejoicings forthis auspicious event? Is it a grand master of the Teutonic order, or isit the great Elector? Is it the first king of Prussia, or the last? oris the whole long line (long, I mean, _a parte ante_) to appear likeBanquo's royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?

How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displaysof royal magnificence? How can I prevent the successor of Frederick theGreat from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind ofglory? Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessionsin the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume thecharacter of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery onphilosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbsin the sackcloth and the _hair-shirt_, and exercise on his broadshoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the_Sans-Culottes_? It is not in me to hinder kings from making new ordersof religious and martial knighthood. I am not Hercules enough to upholdthose orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shiftingfrom their weary shoulders. What can be done against the magnanimousresolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin oftheir own character and situation?

What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignitiesand all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. If they have amind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence andtheir advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It isvery true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as humanwisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and thepowerful, --for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws, and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived forextirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts ofthat vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not beinclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses intowhich human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some oftheir _conclusums_ should taste of the prejudices of country or offaction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruptionshould not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could supposethat the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum, listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to thepublic voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post, and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it, should give a judgment so shameless and so prostitute, of such monstrousand even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of humandepravity, or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possiblymatch it, --if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeelingcruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocentpeople to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some ofthe finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation, --does any onethink that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullyinginsolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell onall institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted fromtheir purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to itsdisgrace in themselves? As the wisdom of men mates such institutions, the folly of men destroys them. Whatever we may pretend, there is alwaysmore in the soundness of the materials than in the fashion of the work. The order of a good building is something. But if it be wholly declinedfrom its perpendicular, if the cement is loose and incoherent, if thestones are scaling with every change of the weather, and the wholetoppling on our heads, what matter is it whether we are crushed by aCorinthian or a Doric ruin? The fine form of a vessel is a matter of useand of delight. It is pleasant to see her decorated with cost and art. But what signifies even the mathematical truth of her form, --whatsignify all the art and cost with which she can be carved, and painted, and gilded, and covered with decorations from stem to stern, --whatsignify all her rigging and sails, her flags, her pendants, and herstreamers, --what signify even her cannon, her stores, and herprovisions, if all her planks and timbers be unsound and rotten?

 Quamvis Pontica pinus, Silvæ filia nobilis, Jactes et genus et nomen inutile. 

I have been stimulated, I know not how, to give you this trouble by whatvery few except myself would think worth any trouble at all. In a speechin the House of Lords, I have been attacked for the defence of a schemeof government in which that body inheres, and in which alone it canexist. Peers of Great Britain may become as penitent as the sovereign ofPrussia. They may repent of what they have done in assertion of thehonor of their king, and in favor of their own safety. But never thegloom that lowers over the fortune of the cause, nor anything which thegreat may do towards hastening their own fall, can make me repent ofwhat I have done by pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favor ofthe order of things into which I was born and in which I fondly hoped todie. 

In the long series of ages which have furnished the matter of history, never was so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moraleye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolution in France. I knew, indeed, that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its owndanger. In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in theother it produced bold spirits and dark designs. A false philosophypassed from academies into courts; and the great themselves wereinfected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the two last centuries either did not exist at all, or existedsolidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted. General wealth loosened morals, relaxedvigilance, and increased presumption. Men of talent began to compare, inthe partition of the common stock of public prosperity, the proportionsof the dividends with the merits of the claimants. As usual, they foundtheir portion not equal to their estimate (or perhaps to the publicestimate) of their own worth. When it was once discovered by theRevolution in France that a struggle between establishment and rapacitycould be maintained, though but for one year and in one place, I wassure that a practicable breach was made in the whole order of things, and in every country. Religion, that held the materials of the fabrictogether, was first systematically loosened. All other opinions, underthe name of prejudices, must fall along with it; and property, leftundefended by principles, became a repository of spoils to temptcupidity, and not a magazine to furnish arms for defence. I knew, that, attacked on all sides by the infernal energies of talents set in actionby vice and disorder, authority could not stand upon authority alone. Itwanted some other support than the poise of its own gravity. Situationsformerly supported persons. It now became necessary that personalqualities should support situations. Formerly, where authority wasfound, wisdom and virtue were presumed. But now the veil was torn, and, to keep off sacrilegious intrusion, it was necessary that in thesanctuary of government something should be disclosed not onlyvenerable, but dreadful. Government was at once to show itself full ofvirtue and full of force. It was to invite partisans, by making itappear to the world that a generous cause was to be asserted, one fitfor a generous people to engage in. From passive submission was it toexpect resolute defence? No! It must have warm advocates and passionatedefenders, which an heavy, discontented acquiescence never couldproduce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated bodyof authority to say, or to act as if it said, "I will put my trust, notin my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, inindolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicioushumors, because you cannot punish me without the hazard of ruiningyourselves. "

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils, --a blindand furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform. I was, indeed, well aware that power rarely reforms itself. So it is, undoubtedly, when all is quiet about it. But I was in hopes thatprovident fear might prevent fruitless penitence. I trusted that dangermight produce at least circumspection. I flattered myself, in a momentlike this, that nothing would be added to make authoritytop-heavy, --that the very moment of an earthquake would not be the timechosen for adding a story to our houses. I hoped to see the surest ofall reforms, perhaps the only sure reform, --the ceasing to do ill. Inthe mean time I wished to the people the wisdom of knowing how totolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render much morethan tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which everything was tobe found that could enable them to live to Nature, and, if so theypleased, to live to virtue and to honor. 

I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished wellthan they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far fromrepenting, I would to God that new faculties had been called up in me, in favor not of this or that man, or this or that system, but of thegeneral, vital principle, that, whilst it was in its vigor, produced thestate of things transmitted to us from our fathers, but which, throughthe joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perishin our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and thecommonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effeteand languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their ownconformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. Theseanalogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimesillustrate arguments, furnish no argument of themselves. They are buttoo often used, under the color of a specious philosophy, to findapologies for the despair of laziness and pusillanimity, and to excusethe want of all manly efforts, when the exigencies of our country callfor them the more loudly. 

How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin bythe seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? Iam as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind, without office, without situation, without public functions of any kind, (at a time whenthe want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is, ) I say, one suchman, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his ownfortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to himsome few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be inexistence, would appear and troop about him. 

If I saw this auspicious beginning, baffled and frustrated as I am, yeton the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate athome, stripped of my boast, my hope, my consolation, my helper, mycounsellor, and my guide, (you know in part what I have lost, and wouldto God I could clear myself of all neglect and fault in that loss, ) yetthus, even thus, I would rake up the fire under all the ashes thatoppress it. I am no longer patient of the public eye; nor am I of forceto win my way and to justle and elbow in a crowd. But, even in solitude, something may be done for society. The meditations of the closet haveinfected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with thebrands of the Furies. The cure might come from the same source with thedistemper. I would add my part to those who would animate the people(whose hearts are yet right) to new exertions in the old cause. 

Novelty is not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabæus andhis brethren arise to assert the honor of the ancient law and to defendthe temple of their forefathers with as ardent a spirit as can inspireany innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory ofancient ages? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that, when once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by actsout of the ordinary course they can alone be reëstablished. Republicanspirit can only be combated by a spirit of the same nature, --of the samenature, but informed with another principle, and pointing to anotherend. I would persuade a resistance both to the corruption and to thereformation that prevails. It will not be the weaker, but much thestronger, for combating both together. A victory over real corruptionswould enable us to baffle the spurious and pretended reformations. Iwould not wish to excite, or even to tolerate, that kind of evil spiritwhich evokes the powers of hell to rectify the disorders of the earth. No! I would add my voice with better, and, I trust, more potent charms, to draw down justice and wisdom and fortitude from heaven, for thecorrection of human vice, and the recalling of human error from thedevious ways into which it has been betrayed. I would wish to call theimpulses of individuals at once to the aid and to the control ofauthority. By this, which I call the true republican spirit, paradoxicalas it may appear, monarchies alone can be rescued from the imbecility ofcourts and the madness of the crowd. This republican spirit would notsuffer men in high place to bring ruin on their country and onthemselves. It would reform, not by destroying, but by saving, thegreat, the rich, and the powerful. Such a republican spirit we perhapsfondly conceive to have animated the distinguished heroes and patriotsof old, who knew no mode of policy but religion and virtue. These theywould have paramount to all constitutions; they would not suffermonarchs, or senates, or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignityor authority or freedom, to shake off those moral riders which reasonhas appointed to govern every sort of rude power. These, in appearanceloading them by their weight, do by that pressure augment theiressential force. The momentum is increased by the extraneous weight. Itis true in moral as it is in mechanical science. It is true, not only inthe draught, but in the race. These riders of the great, in effect, holdthe reins which guide them in their course, and wear the spur thatstimulates them to the goals of honor and of safety. The great mustsubmit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will longsubmit to the dominion of the great. _Dîs te minorem quod geris, imperas_. This is the feudal tenure which they cannot alter. 

Indeed, my dear Sir, things are in a bad state. I do not deny a goodshare of diligence, a very great share of ability, and much publicvirtue to those who direct our affairs. But they are incumbered, notaided, by their very instruments, and by all the apparatus of the state. I think that our ministry (though there are things against them whichneither you nor I can dissemble, and which grieve me to the heart) is byfar the most honest and by far the wisest system of administration inEurope. Their fall would be no trivial calamity. 

Not meaning to depreciate the minority in Parliament, whose talents arealso great, and to whom I do not deny virtues, their system seems to meto be fundamentally wrong. But whether wrong or right, they have notenough of coherence among themselves, nor of estimation with the public, nor of numbers. They cannot make up an administration. Nothing is morevisible. Many other things are against them, which I do not charge asfaults, but reckon among national misfortunes. Extraordinary things mustbe done, or one of the parties cannot stand as a ministry, nor the othereven as an opposition. They cannot change their situations, nor can anyuseful coalition be made between them. I do not see the mode of it northe way to it. This aspect of things I do not contemplate with pleasure. 

I well know that everything of the daring kind which I speak of iscritical: but the times are critical. New things in a new world! I seeno hopes in the common tracks. If men are not to be found who can be gotto feel within them some impulse, _quod nequeo monstrare, et sentiotantum_, and which makes them impatient of the present, --if none can begot to feel that private persons may sometimes assume that sort ofmagistracy which does not depend on the nomination of kings or theelection of the people, but has an inherent and self-existent powerwhich both would recognize, I see nothing in the world to hope. 

If I saw such a group beginning to cluster, such as they are, theyshould have (all that I can give) my prayers and my advice. People talkof war or cry for peace: have they to the bottom considered thequestions either of war or peace, upon the scale of the existing world?No, I fear they have not. 

Why should not you yourself be one of those to enter your name in such alist as I speak of? You are young; you have great talents; you have aclear head; you have a natural, fluent, and unforced elocution; yourideas are just, your sentiments benevolent, open, and enlarged;--butthis is too big for your modesty. Oh! this modesty, in time and place, is a charming virtue, and the grace of all other virtues. But it issometimes the worst enemy they have. Let him whose print I gave you theother day be engraved in your memory! Had it pleased Providence to havespared him for the trying situations that seem to be coming on, notwithstanding that he was sometimes a little dispirited by thedisposition which we thought shown to depress him and set him aside, yethe was always buoyed up again; and on one or two occasions he discoveredwhat might be expected from the vigor and elevation of his mind, fromhis unconquerable fortitude, and from the extent of his resources forevery purpose of speculation and of action. Remember him, my friend, whoin the highest degree honored and respected you; and remember that greatparts are a great trust. Remember, too, that mistaken or misappliedvirtues, if they are not as pernicious as vice, frustrate at least theirown natural tendencies, and disappoint the purposes of the Great Giver. 

Adieu. My dreams are finished. 

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Mr. Paine is a Norfolk man, from Thetford. 

THOUGHTS AND DETAILS

ON

SCARCITY. 

ORIGINALLY PRESENTED

TO THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM PITT, IN THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER, 1795. 

THOUGHTS AND DETAILS

ON

SCARCITY. 

Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions isthe most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are mostdisposed to it, --that is, in the time of scarcity; because there isnothing on which the passions of men are so violent, and their judgmentso weak, and on which there exists such a multitude of ill-foundedpopular prejudices. 

The great use of government is as a restraint; and there is no restraintwhich it ought to put upon others, and upon itself too, rather than thatwhich is imposed on the fury of speculating under circumstances ofirritation. The number of idle tales spread about by the industry offaction and by the zeal of foolish good-intention, and greedily devouredby the malignant credulity of mankind, tends infinitely to aggravateprejudices which in themselves are more than sufficiently strong. Inthat state of affairs, and of the public with relation to them, thefirst thing that government owes to us, the people, is _information_;the next is timely coercion: the one to guide our judgment; the other toregulate our tempers. 

To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it. The people maintain them, and not they the people. It is in the power ofgovernment to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good inthis, or perhaps in anything else. It is not only so of the state andstatesman, but of all the classes and descriptions of the rich: they arethe pensioners of the poor, and are maintained by their superfluity. They are under an absolute, hereditary, and indefeasible dependence onthose who labor and are miscalled the poor. 

The laboring people are only poor because they are numerous. Numbers intheir nature imply poverty. In a fair distribution among a vastmultitude none can have much. That class of dependent pensioners calledthe rich is so extremely small, that, if all their throats were cut, anda distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give abit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labor, andwho in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves. 

But the throats of the rich ought not to be cut, nor their magazinesplundered; because, in their persons, they are trustees for those wholabor, and their hoards are the banking-houses of these latter. Whetherthey mean it or not, they do, in effect, execute their trust, --some withmore, some with less fidelity and judgment. But, on the whole, the dutyis performed, and everything returns, deducting some very triflingcommission and discount, to the place from whence it arose. When thepoor rise to destroy the rich, they act as wisely for their own purposesas when they burn mills and throw corn into the river to make breadcheap. 

When I say that we of the people ought to be informed, inclusively Isay we ought not to be flattered: flattery is the reverse ofinstruction. The _poor_ in that case would be rendered as improvident asthe rich, which would not be at all good for them. 

Nothing can be so base and so wicked as the political canting language, "the laboring _poor_. " Let compassion be shown in action, --the more, thebetter, --according to every man's ability; but let there be nolamentation of their condition. It is no relief to their miserablecircumstances; it is only an insult to their miserable understandings. It arises from a total want of charity or a total want of thought. Wantof one kind was never relieved by want of any other kind. Patience, labor, sobriety, frugality, and religion should be recommended to them;all the rest is downright _fraud_. It is horrible to call them "the_once happy_ laborer. "

Whether what may be called the moral or philosophical happiness of thelaborious classes is increased or not, I cannot say. The seat of thatspecies of happiness is in the mind; and there are few data to ascertainthe comparative state of the mind at any two periods. Philosophicalhappiness is to want little. Civil or vulgar happiness is to want muchand to enjoy much. 

If the happiness of the animal man (which certainly goes somewheretowards the happiness of the rational man) be the object of ourestimate, then I assert, without the least hesitation, that thecondition of those who labor (in all descriptions of labor, and in allgradations of labor, from the highest to the lowest inclusively) is, onthe whole, extremely meliorated, if more and better food is any standardof melioration. They work more, it is certain; but they have theadvantage of their augmented labor: yet whether that increase of laborbe on the whole a _good_ or an _evil_ is a consideration that would leadus a great way, and is not for my present purpose. But as to the fact ofthe melioration of their diet, I shall enter into the detail of proof, whenever I am called upon: in the mean time, the known difficulty ofcontenting them with anything but bread made of the finest flour andmeat of the first quality is proof sufficient. 

I further assert, that, even under all the hardships of the last year, the laboring people did, either out of their direct gains, or fromcharity, (which it seems is now an insult to them, ) in fact, fare betterthan they did in seasons of common plenty, fifty or sixty years ago, --oreven at the period of my English observation, which is about forty-fouryears. I even assert that full as many in that class as ever were knownto do it before continued to save money; and this I can prove, so far asmy own information and experience extend. 

It is not true that the rate of wages has not increased with the nominalprice of provisions. I allow, it has not fluctuated with thatprice, --nor ought it; and the squires of Norfolk had dined, when theygave it as their opinion that it might or ought to rise and fall withthe market of provisions. The rate of wages, in truth, has no _direct_relation to that price. Labor is a commodity like every other, and risesor falls according to the demand. This is in the nature of things;however, the nature of things has provided for their necessities. Wageshave been twice raised in my time; and they hear a full proportion, oreven a greater than formerly, to the medium of provision during thelast bad cycle of twenty years. They bear a full proportion to theresult of their labor. If we were wildly to attempt to force them beyondit, the stone which we had forced up the hill would only fall back uponthem in a diminished demand, or, what indeed is the far lesser evil, anaggravated price of all the provisions which are the result of theirmanual toil. 

There is an implied contract, much stronger than any instrument orarticle of agreement between the laborer in any occupation and hisemployer, --that the labor, so far as that labor is concerned, shall besufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital and acompensation for his risk: in a word, that the labor shall produce anadvantage equal to the payment. Whatever is above that is a direct_tax_; and if the amount of that tax be left to the will and pleasure ofanother, it is an _arbitrary tax_. 

If I understand it rightly, the tax proposed on the farming interest ofthis kingdom is to be levied at what is called the discretion ofjustices of peace. 

The questions arising on this scheme of arbitrary taxation are these:Whether it is better to leave all dealing, in which there is no force orfraud, collusion or combination, entirely to the persons mutuallyconcerned in the matter contracted for, --or to put the contract into thehands of those who can have none or a very remote interest in it, andlittle or no knowledge of the subject. 

It might be imagined that there would be very little difficulty insolving this question: for what man, of any degree of reflection, canthink that a want of interest in any subject, closely connected with awant of skill in it, qualifies a person to intermeddle in any the leastaffair, --much less in affairs that vitally concern the agriculture ofthe kingdom, the first of all its concerns, and the foundation of allits prosperity in every other matter by which that prosperity isproduced?

The vulgar error on this subject arises from a total confusion in thevery idea of things widely different in themselves, --those ofconvention, and those of judicature. When a contract is making, it is amatter of discretion and of interest between the parties. In thatintercourse, and in what is to arise from it, the parties are themasters. If they are not completely so, they are not free, and thereforetheir contracts are void. 

But this freedom has no farther extent, when the contract is made: thentheir discretionary powers expire, and a new order of things takes itsorigin. Then, and not till then, and on a difference between theparties, the office of the judge commences. He cannot dictate thecontract. It is his business to see that it be _enforced_, --providedthat it is not contrary to preëxisting laws, or obtained by force orfraud. If he is in any way a maker or regulator of the contract, in somuch he is disqualified from being a judge. But this sort of confuseddistribution of administrative and judicial characters (of which we havealready as much as is sufficient, and a little more) is not the onlyperplexity of notions and passions which trouble us in the present hour. 

What is doing supposes, or pretends, that the farmer and the laborerhave opposite interests, --that the farmer oppresses the laborer, --andthat a gentleman, called a justice of peace, is the protector of thelatter, and a control and restraint on the former; and this is a pointI wish to examine in a manner a good deal different from that in whichgentlemen proceed, who confide more in their abilities than is fit, andsuppose them capable of more than any natural abilities, fed with noother than the provender furnished by their own private speculations, can accomplish. Legislative acts attempting to regulate this part ofeconomy do, at least as much as any other, require the exactest detailof circumstances, guided by the surest general principles that arenecessary to direct experiment and inquiry, in order again from thosedetails to elicit principles, firm and luminous general principles, todirect a practical legislative proceeding. 

First, then, I deny that it is in this case, as in any other, ofnecessary implication that contracting parties should originally havehad different interests. By accident it may be so, undoubtedly, at theoutset: but then the contract is of the nature of a compromise; andcompromise is founded on circumstances that suppose it the interest ofthe parties to be reconciled in some medium. The principle of compromiseadopted, of consequence the interests cease to be different. 

But in the case of the farmer and the laborer, their interests arealways the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their freecontracts can be onerous to either party. It is the interest of thefarmer that his work should be done with effect and celerity; and thatcannot be, unless the laborer is well fed, and otherwise found with suchnecessaries of animal life, according to its habitudes, as may keep thebody in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful. For of all theinstruments of his trade, the labor of man (what the ancient writershave called the _instrumentum vocale_) is that on which he is most torely for the repayment of his capital. The other two, the _semivocale_in the ancient classification, that is, the working stock of cattle, andthe _instrumentum mutum_, such as carts, ploughs, spades, and so forth, though not all inconsiderable in themselves, are very much inferior inutility or in expense, and, without a given portion of the first, arenothing at all. For, in all things whatever, the mind is the mostvaluable and the most important; and in this scale the whole ofagriculture is in a natural and just order: the beast is as an informingprinciple to the plough and cart; the laborer is as reason to the beast;and the farmer is as a thinking and presiding principle to the laborer. An attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equallyabsurd; but the absurdity is the most mischievous, in practicaloperation, where it is the most easy, --that is, where it is the mostsubject to an erroneous judgment. 

It is plainly more the farmer's interest that his men should thrive thanthat his horses should be well fed, sleek, plump, and fit for use, orthan that his wagon and ploughs should be strong, in good repair, andfit for service. 

On the other hand, if the farmer ceases to profit of the laborer, andthat his capital is not continually manured and fructified, it isimpossible that he should continue that abundant nutriment and clothingand lodging proper for the protection of the instruments he employs. 

It is therefore the first and fundamental interest of the laborer, thatthe farmer should have a full incoming profit on the product of hislabor. The proposition is self-evident; and nothing but the malignity, perverseness, and ill-governed passions of mankind, and particularly theenvy they bear to each other's prosperity, could prevent their seeingand acknowledging it, with thankfulness to the benign and wise Disposerof all things, who obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuingtheir own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their ownindividual success. 

But who are to judge what that profit and advantage ought to be?Certainly no authority on earth. It is a matter of convention, dictatedby the reciprocal conveniences of the parties, and indeed by theirreciprocal necessities. --But if the farmer is excessivelyavaricious?--Why, so much the better: the more he desires to increasehis gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those uponwhose labor his gains must principally depend. 

I shall be told by the zealots of the sect of regulation, that this maybe true, and may be safely committed to the convention of the farmer andthe laborer, when the latter is in the prime of his youth, and at thetime of his health and vigor, and in ordinary times of abundance. But incalamitous seasons, under accidental illness, in declining life, andwith the pressure of a numerous offspring, the future nourishers of thecommunity, but the present drains and blood-suckers of those who producethem, what is to be done? When a man cannot live and maintain his familyby the natural hire of his labor, ought it not to be raised byauthority?

On this head I must be allowed to submit what my opinions have everbeen, and somewhat at large. 

And, first, I premise that labor is, as I have already intimated, acommodity, and, as such, an article of trade. If I am right in thisnotion, then labor must be subject to all the laws and principles oftrade, and not to regulations foreign to them, and that may be totallyinconsistent with those principles and those laws. When any commodity iscarried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but thenecessity of the purchaser, that raises the price. The extreme want ofthe seller has rather (by the nature of things with which we shall invain contend) the direct contrary operation. If the goods at market arebeyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. Theimpossibility of the subsistence of a man who carries his labor to amarket is totally beside the question, in this way of viewing it. Theonly question is, What is it worth to the buyer?

But if authority comes in and forces the buyer to a price, what is thisin the case (say) of a farmer who buys the labor of ten or twelvelaboring men, and three or four handicrafts, --what is it but to make anarbitrary division of his property among them?

The whole of his gains (I say it with the most certain conviction) neverdo amount anything like in value to what he pays to his laborers andartificers; so that a very small advance upon what _one_ man pays to_many_ may absorb the whole of what he possesses, and amount to anactual partition of all his substance among them. A perfect equalitywill, indeed, be produced, --that is to say, equal want, equalwretchedness, equal beggary, and, on the part of the partitioners, awoful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of allcompulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above; they never raisewhat is below; and they depress high and low together beneath the levelof what was originally the lowest. 

If a commodity is raised by authority above what it will yield with aprofit to the buyer, that commodity will be the less dealt in. If asecond blundering interposition be used to correct the blunder of thefirst and an attempt is made to force the purchase of the commodity, (oflabor, for instance, ) the one of these two things must happen: eitherthat the forced buyer is ruined, or the price of the product of thelabor in that proportion is raised. Then the wheel turns round, and theevil complained of falls with aggravated weight on the complainant. Theprice of corn, which is the result of the expense of all the operationsof husbandry taken together, and for some time continued, will rise onthe laborer, considered as a consumer. The very best will be, that heremains where he was. But if the price of the corn should not compensatethe price of labor, what is far more to be feared, the most seriousevil, the very destruction of agriculture itself, is to be apprehended. 

Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarsediscrimination, a want of such classification and distribution as thesubject admits of. Increase the rate of wages to the laborer, say theregulators, --as if labor was but one thing, and of one value. But thisvery broad, generic term, _labor_, admits, at least, of two or threespecific descriptions: and these will suffice, at least, to letgentlemen discern a little the necessity of proceeding with caution intheir coercive guidance of those whose existence depends upon theobservance of still nicer distinctions and subdivisions than commonlythey resort to in forming their judgments on this very enlarged part ofeconomy. 

The laborers in husbandry may be divided, --First, Into those who areable to perform the full work of a man, --that is, what can be done by aperson from twenty-one years of age to fifty. I know no husbandry work(mowing hardly excepted) that is not equally within the power of allpersons within those ages, the more advanced fully compensating by knackand habit what they lose in activity. Unquestionably, there is a gooddeal of difference between the value of one man's labor and that ofanother, from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I amquite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, intheir total, afford a proportion of labor equal to any other five withinthe periods of life I have stated: that is, that among such five menthere will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the firstand the last. So that, in so small a platoon as that of even five, youwill find the full complement of all that five men _can_ earn. Takingfive and five throughout the kingdom, they are equal: therefore an errorwith regard to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five, as farmers do at the very least, cannot be considerable. 

Secondly, Those who are able to work, but not the complete task of aday-laborer. This class is infinitely diversified, but will aptly enoughfall into principal divisions. _Men_, from the decline, which afterfifty becomes every year more sensible, to the period of debility anddecrepitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. _Women_, whose employment on husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more ineffective labor one from another than men do, on account of gestation, nursing, and domestic management, over and above the difference theyhave in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declininglife. _Children_, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less togreater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment tolabor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visibleto those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into theinterior economy of a poor-house. 

This inferior classification is introduced to show that laws prescribingor magistrates exercising a very stiff and often inapplicable rule, or ablind and rash discretion, never can provide the just proportionsbetween earning and salary, on the one hand, and nutriment on the other:whereas interest, habit, and the tacit convention that arise from athousand nameless circumstances produce a _tact_ that regulates withoutdifficulty what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all. The firstclass of labor wants nothing to equalize it; it equalizes itself. Thesecond and third are not capable of any equalization. 

But what if the rate of hire to the laborer comes far short of hisnecessary subsistence, and the calamity of the time is so great as tothreaten actual famine? Is the poor laborer to be abandoned to theflinty heart and griping hand of base self-interest, supported by thesword of law, especially when there is reason to suppose that the veryavarice of farmers themselves has concurred with the errors ofgovernment to bring famine on the land?

In that case, my opinion is this: Whenever it happens that a man canclaim nothing according to the rules of commerce and the principles ofjustice, he passes out of that department, and comes within thejurisdiction of mercy. In that province the magistrate has nothing atall to do; his interference is a violation of the property which it ishis office to protect. Without all doubt, charity to the poor is adirect and obligatory duty upon all Christians, next in order after thepayment of debts, full as strong, and by Nature made infinitely moredelightful to us Pufendorf, and other casuists, do not, I think, denominate it quite properly, when they call it a duty of imperfectobligation. But the manner, mode, time, choice of objects, andproportion are left to private discretion; and perhaps for that veryreason it is performed with the greater satisfaction, because thedischarge of it has more the appearance of freedom, --recommending usbesides very specially to the Divine favor, as the exercise of a virtuemost suitable to a being sensible of its own infirmity. 

The cry of the people in cities and towns, though unfortunately (from afear of their multitude and combination) the most regarded, ought, in_fact_, to be the _least_ attended to, upon this subject: for citizensare in a state of utter ignorance of the means by which they are to befed, and they contribute little or nothing, except in an infinitelycircuitous manner, to their own maintenance. They are truly _frugesconsumere nati_. They are to be heard with great respect and attentionupon matters within their province, --that is, on trades andmanufactures; but on anything that relates to agriculture they are to belistened to with the same _reverence_ which we pay to the dogmas ofother ignorant and presumptuous men. 

If any one were to tell them that they were to give in an account of allthe stock in their shops, --that attempts would be made to limit theirprofits, or raise the price of the laboring manufacturers upon them, orrecommend to government, out of a capital from the public revenues, toset up a shop of the same commodities, in order to rival them, and keep, them to reasonable dealing, --they would very soon see the impudence, injustice, and oppression of such a course. They would not be mistaken:but they are of opinion that agriculture is to be subject to other laws, and to be governed by other principles. 

A greater and more ruinous mistake cannot be fallen into than that thetrades of agriculture and grazing can be conducted upon any other thanthe common principles of commerce: namely, that the producer should bepermitted, and even expected, to look to all possible profit whichwithout fraud or violence he can make; to turn plenty or scarcity to thebest advantage he can; to keep back or to bring forward his commoditiesat his pleasure; to account to no one for his stock or for his gain. Onany other terms he is the slave of the consumer: and that he should beso is of no benefit to the consumer. No slave was ever so beneficial tothe master as a freeman that deals with him on an equal footing byconvention, formed on the rules and principles of contending interestsand compromised advantages. The consumer, if he were suffered, would inthe end always be the dupe of his own tyranny and injustice. The landedgentleman is never to forget that the farmer is his representative. 

It is a perilous thing to try experiments on the farmer. The farmer'scapital (except in a few persons and in a very few places) is far morefeeble than commonly is imagined. The trade is a very poor trade; it issubject to great risks and losses. The capital, such as it is, is turnedbut once in the year; in some branches it requires three years beforethe money is paid: I believe never less than three in the turnip andgrass-land course, which is the prevalent course on the more or lessfertile sandy and gravelly loams, --and these compose the soil in thesouth and southeast of England, the best adapted, and perhaps the onlyones that are adapted, to the turnip husbandry. 

It is very rare that the most prosperous farmer, counting the value ofhis quick and dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, togetherwith his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does make twelve orfifteen per centum by the year on his capital. I speak of theprosperous. In most of the parts of England which have fallen within myobservation I have rarely known a farmer, who to his own trade has notadded some other employment or traffic, that, after a course of the mostunremitting parsimony and labor, (such for the greater part is theirs, )and persevering in his business for a long course of years, died worthmore than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in nearlythe same equal conflict between industry and want, in which the lastpredecessor, and a long line of predecessors before him, lived and died. 

Observe that I speak of the generality of farmers, who have not morethan from one hundred and fifty to three or four hundred acres. Thereare few in this part of the country within the former or much beyond thelatter extent. Unquestionably in other places there are much larger. But I am convinced, whatever part of England be the theatre of hisoperations, a farmer who cultivates twelve hundred acres, which Iconsider as a large farm, though I know there are larger, cannot proceedwith any degree of safety and effect with a smaller capital than tenthousand pounds, and that he cannot, in the ordinary course of culture, make more upon that great capital of ten thousand pounds than twelvehundred a year. 

As to the weaker capitals, an easy judgment may be formed by what verysmall errors they may be farther attenuated, enervated, renderedunproductive, and perhaps totally destroyed. 

This constant precariousness and ultimate moderate limits of a farmer'sfortune, on the strongest capital, I press, not only on account of thehazardous speculations of the times, but because the excellent and mostuseful works of my friend, Mr. Arthur Young, tend to propagate thaterror (such I am very certain it is) of the largeness of a farmer'sprofits. It is not that his account of the produce does often greatlyexceed, but he by no means makes the proper allowance for accidents andlosses. I might enter into a convincing detail, if other moretroublesome and more necessary details were not before me. 

This proposed discretionary tax on labor militates with therecommendations of the Board of Agriculture: they recommend a generaluse of the drill culture. I agree with the Board, that, where the soilis not excessively heavy, or incumbered with large loose stones, (which, however, is the case with much otherwise good land, ) that course is thebest and most productive, --provided that the most accurate eye, the mostvigilant superintendence, the most prompt activity, which has no suchday as to-morrow in its calendar, the most steady foresight andpredisposing order to have everybody and everything ready in its place, and prepared to take advantage of the fortunate, fugitive moment, inthis coquetting climate of ours, --provided, I say, all these combine tospeed the plough, I admit its superiority over the old and generalmethods. But under procrastinating, improvident, ordinary husbandmen, who may neglect or let slip the few opportunities of sweetening andpurifying their ground with perpetually renovated toil and undissipatedattention, nothing, when tried to any extent, can be worse or moredangerous: the farm may be ruined, instead of having the soil enrichedand sweetened by it. 

But the excellence of the method on a proper soil, and conducted byhusbandmen, of whom there are few, being readily granted, how, and onwhat conditions, is this culture obtained? Why, by a very great increaseof labor: by an augmentation of the third part, at least, of thehand-labor, to say nothing of the horses and machinery employed inordinary tillage. Now every man must be sensible how little becoming thegravity of legislature it is to encourage a board which recommends tous, and upon very weighty reasons unquestionably, an enlargement of thecapital we employ in the operations of the hand, and then to pass an actwhich taxes that manual labor, already at a very high rate, --thuscompelling us to diminish the quantity of labor which in the vulgarcourse we actually employ. 

What is true of the farmer is equally true of the middle-man, --whetherthe middle-man acts as factor, jobber, salesman, or speculator, in themarkets of grain. These traders are to be left to their free course;and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largelythey deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between whomthey form a natural and most useful link of connection, --though by themachinations of the old evil counsellor, _Envy_, they are hated andmaligned by both parties. 

I hear that middle-men are accused of monopoly. Without question, themonopoly of authority is, in every instance and in every degree, anevil; but the monopoly of capital is the contrary. It is a greatbenefit, and a benefit particularly to the poor. A tradesman who has buta hundred pound capital, which (say) he can turn but once a year, cannotlive upon a _profit_ of ten per cent, because he cannot live upon tenpounds a year; but a man of ten thousand pounds capital can live andthrive upon five per cent profit in the year, because he has fivehundred pounds a year. The same proportion holds in turning it twice orthrice. These principles are plain and simple; and it is not ourignorance, so much as the levity, the envy, and the malignity of ournature, that hinders us from perceiving and yielding to them: but we arenot to suffer our vices to usurp the place of our judgment. 

The balance between consumption and production makes price. The marketsettles, and alone can settle, that price. Market is the meeting andconference of the _consumer_ and _producer_, when they mutually discovereach other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflectionwhat market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants issettled. They who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fainby arbitrary regulation decree that defective production should not becompensated by increased price, directly lay their _axe_ to the root ofproduction itself. They may, even in one year of such false policy, domischiefs incalculable; because the trade of a farmer is, as I havebefore explained, one of the most precarious in its advantages, the mostliable to losses, and the least profitable of any that is carried on. Itrequires ten times more of labor, of vigilance, of attention, of skill, and, let me add, of good fortune also, to carry on the business of afarmer with success, than what belongs to any other trade. 

Seeing things in this light, I am far from presuming to censure the latecircular instruction of Council to lord-lieutenants, but I confess I donot clearly discern its object. I am greatly afraid that the inquirywill raise some alarm, as a measure leading to the French system ofputting corn into requisition. For that was preceded by an inquisitionsomewhat similar in its principle, though, according to their mode, their principles are full of that violence which _here_ is not much tobe feared. It goes on a principle directly opposite to mine: it presumesthat the market is no fair _test_ of plenty or scarcity. It raises asuspicion, which may affect the tranquillity of the public mind, "thatthe farmer keeps back, and takes unfair advantages by delay"; on thepart of the dealer, it gives rise obviously to a thousand nefariousspeculations. 

In case the return should on the whole prove favorable, is it meant toground a measure for encouraging exportation and checking the import ofcorn? If it is not, what end can it answer? And I believe it is not. 

This opinion may be fortified by a report gone abroad, that intentionsare entertained of erecting public granaries, and that this inquiry isto give government an advantage in its purchases. 

I hear that such a measure has been proposed, and is under deliberation:that is, for government to set up a granary in every market-town, at theexpense of the state, in order to extinguish the dealer, and to subjectthe farmer to the consumer, by securing corn to the latter at a certainand steady price. 

If such a scheme is adopted, I should not like to answer for the safetyof the granary, of the agents, or of the town itself in which thegranary was erected: the first storm of popular frenzy would fall uponthat granary. 

So far in a political light. 

In an economical light, I must observe that the construction of suchgranaries throughout the kingdom would be at an expense beyond allcalculation. The keeping them up would be at a great charge. Themanagement and attendance would require an army of agents, store-keepers, clerks, and servants. The capital to be employed in thepurchase of grain would be enormous. The waste, decay, and corruptionwould be a dreadful drawback on the whole dealing; and thedissatisfaction of the people, at having decayed, tainted, or corruptedcorn sold to them, as must be the case, would be serious. 

This climate (whatever others may be) is not favorable to granaries, where wheat is to be kept for any time. The best, and indeed the onlygood granary, is the rick-yard of the farmer, where the corn ispreserved in its own straw, sweet, clean, wholesome, free from verminand from insects, and comparatively at a trifle of expense. This, andthe barn, enjoying many of the same advantages, have been the solegranaries of England from the foundation of its agriculture to this day. All this is done at the expense of the undertaker, and at his sole risk. He contributes to government, he receives nothing from it butprotection, and to this he has a _claim_. 

The moment that government appears at market, all the principles ofmarket will be subverted. I don't know whether the farmer will suffer byit, as long as there is a tolerable market of competition; but I amsure, that, in the first place, the trading government will speedilybecome a bankrupt, and the consumer in the end will suffer. Ifgovernment makes all its purchases at once, it will instantly raise themarket upon itself. If it makes them by degrees, it must follow thecourse of the market. If it follows the course of the market, it willproduce no effect, and the consumer may as well buy as he wants;therefore all the expense is incurred gratis. 

But if the object of this scheme should be, what I suspect it is, todestroy the dealer, commonly called the middle-man, and by incurring avoluntary loss to carry the baker to deal with government, I am to tellthem that they must set up another trade, that of a miller or ameal-man, attended with a new train of expenses and risks. If in boththese trades they should succeed, so as to exclude those who trade onnatural and private capitals, then they will have a monopoly in theirhands, which, under the appearance of a monopoly of capital, will, inreality, be a monopoly of authority, and will ruin whatever it touches. The agriculture of the kingdom cannot stand before it. 

A little place like Geneva, of not more than from twenty-five to thirtythousand inhabitants, --which has no territory, or next to none, --whichdepends for its existence on the good-will of three neighboring powers, and is of course continually in the state of something like a _siege_, or in the speculation of it, --might find some resource in stategranaries, and some revenue from the monopoly of what was sold to thekeepers of public-houses. This is a policy for a state too small foragriculture. It is not (for instance) fit for so great a country as thePope possesses, --where, however, it is adopted and pursued in a greaterextent, and with more strictness. Certain of the Pope's territories, from whence the city of Rome is supplied, being obliged to furnish Romeand the granaries of his Holiness with corn at a certain price, thatpart of the Papal territories is utterly ruined. That ruin may be tracedwith certainty to this sole cause; and it appears indubitably by acomparison of their state and condition with that of the other part ofthe ecclesiastical dominions, not subjected to the same regulations, which are in circumstances highly flourishing. 

The reformation of this evil system is in a manner impracticable. For, first, it does keep bread and all other provisions equally subject tothe chamber of supply, at a pretty reasonable and regular price, in thecity of Rome. This preserves quiet among the numerous poor, idle, andnaturally mutinous people of a very great capital. But the quiet of thetown is purchased by the ruin of the country and the ultimatewretchedness of both. The next cause which renders this evil incurableis the jobs which have grown out of it, and which, in spite of allprecautions, would grow out of such things even under governments farmore potent than the feeble authority of the Pope. 

This example of Rome, which has been derived from the most ancienttimes, and the most flourishing period of the Roman Empire, (but not ofthe Roman agriculture, ) may serve as a great caution to all governmentsnot to attempt to feed the people out of the hands of the magistrates. If once they are habituated to it, though but for one half-year, theywill never be satisfied to have it otherwise. And having looked togovernment for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bitethe hand that fed them. To avoid that _evil_, government will redoublethe causes of it; and then it will become inveterate and incurable. 

I beseech the government (which I take in the largest sense of the word, comprehending the two Houses of Parliament) seriously to consider thatyears of scarcity or plenty do not come alternately or at shortintervals, but in pretty long cycles and irregularly, and consequentlythat we cannot assure ourselves, if we take a wrong measure, from thetemporary necessities of one season, but that the next, and probablymore, will drive us to the continuance of it; so that, in my opinion, there is no way of preventing this evil, which goes to the destructionof all our agriculture, and of that part of our internal commerce whichtouches our agriculture the most nearly, as well as the safety and verybeing of government, but manfully to resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence ofgovernment, taken as government, or even of the rich, as rich, to supplyto the poor those necessaries which it has pleased the DivineProvidence for a while to withhold from them. We, the people, ought tobe made sensible that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, whichare the laws of Nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are toplace our hope of softening the Divine displeasure to remove anycalamity under which we suffer or which hangs over us. 

So far as to the principles of general policy. 

As to the state of things which is urged as a reason to deviate fromthem, these are the circumstances of the harvest of 1794 and 1795. Withregard to the harvest of 1794, in relation to the noblest grain, wheat, it is allowed to have been somewhat short, but not excessively, --and inquality, for the seven-and-twenty years during which I have been afarmer, I never remember wheat to have been so good. The world were, however, deceived in their speculations upon it, --the farmer as well asthe dealer. Accordingly the price fluctuated beyond anything I canremember: for at one time of the year I sold my wheat at 14_l. _ a load, (I sold off all I had, as I thought this was a reasonable price, ) whenat the end of the season, if I had then had any to sell, I might havegot thirty guineas for the same sort of grain. I sold all that I had, asI said, at a comparatively low price, because I thought it a good price, compared with what I thought the general produce of the harvest; butwhen I came to consider what my own _total_ was, I found that thequantity had not answered my expectation. It must be remembered thatthis year of produce, (the year 1794, ) short, but excellent, followed ayear which was not extraordinary in production, nor of a superiorquality, and left but little in store. At first, this was not felt, because the harvest came in unusually early, --earlier than common by afull month. 

The winter, at the end of 1794 and beginning of 1795, was more thanusually unfavorable both to corn and grass, owing to the suddenrelaxation of very rigorous frosts, followed by rains, which were againrapidly succeeded by frosts of still greater rigor than the first. 

Much wheat was utterly destroyed. The clover-grass suffered in manyplaces. What I never observed before, the rye-grass, or coarse bent, suffered more than the clover. Even the meadow-grass in some places waskilled to the very roots. In the spring appearances were better than weexpected. All the early sown grain recovered itself, and came up withgreat vigor; but that which was late sown was feeble, and did notpromise to resist any blights in the spring, which, however, with allits unpleasant vicissitudes, passed off very well; and nothing lookedbetter than the wheat at the time of blooming;--but at that mostcritical time of all, a cold, dry east wind, attended with very sharpfrosts, longer and stronger than I recollect at that time of year, destroyed the flowers, and withered up, in an astonishing manner, thewhole side of the ear next to the wind. At that time I brought to townsome of the ears, for the purpose of showing to my friends the operationof those unnatural frosts, and according to their extent I predicted agreat scarcity. But such is the pleasure of agreeable prospects, that myopinion was little regarded. 

On threshing, I found things as I expected, --the ears not filled, someof the capsules quite empty, and several others containing onlywithered, hungry grain, inferior to the appearance of rye. My best earsand grain were not fine; never had I grain of so low a quality: yet Isold one load for 21_l. _ At the same time I bought my seed wheat (it wasexcellent) at 23_l. _ Since then the price has risen, and I have soldabout two load of the same sort at 23_l. _ Such was the state of themarket when I left home last Monday. Little remains in my barn. I hopesome in the rick may be better, since it was earlier sown, as well as Ican recollect. Some of my neighbors have better, some quite as bad, oreven worse. I suspect it will be found, that, wherever the blightingwind and those frosts at blooming-time have prevailed, the produce ofthe wheat crop will turn out very indifferent. Those parts which haveescaped will, I can hardly doubt, have a reasonable produce. 

As to the other grains, it is to be observed, as the wheat ripened verylate, (on account, I conceive, of the blights, ) the barley got the startof it, and was ripe first. The crop was with me, and wherever my inquirycould reach, excellent; in some places far superior to mine. 

The clover, which came up with the barley, was the finest I remember tohave seen. 

The turnips of this year are generally good. 

The clover sown last year, where not totally destroyed, gave two goodcrops, or one crop and a plentiful feed; and, bating the loss of therye-grass, I do not remember a better produce. 

The meadow-grass yielded but a middling crop, and neither of the sown ornatural grass was there in any farmer's possession any remainder fromthe year worth taking into account. In most places there was none atall. 

Oats with me were not in a quantity more considerable than in commonlygood seasons; but I have never known them heavier than they were inother places. The oat was not only an heavy, but an uncommonly abundantcrop. 

My ground under pease did not exceed an acre or thereabouts, but thecrop was great indeed. I believe it is throughout the country exuberant. It is, however, to be remarked, as generally of all the grains, soparticularly of the pease, that there was not the smallest quantity inreserve. 

The demand of the year must depend solely on its own produce; and theprice of the spring corn is not to be expected to fall very soon, or atany time very low. 

Uxbridge is a great corn market. As I came through that town, I foundthat at the last market-day barley was at forty shillings a quarter. Oats there were literally none; and the inn-keeper was obliged to sendfor them to London. I forgot to ask about pease. Potatoes were 5_s_. Thebushel. 

In the debate on this subject in the House, I am told that a leadingmember of great ability, _little conversant in these matters_, observed, that the general uniform dearness of butcher's meat, butter, and cheesecould not be owing to a defective produce of wheat; and on this groundinsinuated a suspicion of some unfair practice on the subject, thatcalled for inquiry. 

Unquestionably, the mere deficiency of wheat could not cause thedearness of the other articles, which extends not only to the provisionshe mentioned, but to every other without exception. 

The cause is, indeed, so very plain and obvious that the wonder is theother way. When a properly directed inquiry is made, the gentlemen whoare amazed at the price of these commodities will find, that, when hayis at six pound a load, as they must know it is, herbage, and for morethan one year, must be scanty; and they will conclude, that, if grass bescarce, beef, veal, mutton, butter, milk, and cheese _must_ be dear. 

But to take up the matter somewhat more in detail. --If the wheat harvestin 1794, excellent in quality, was defective in quantity, the barleyharvest was in quality ordinary enough, and in quantity deficient. Thiswas soon felt in the price of malt. 

Another article of produce (beans) was not at all plentiful. The crop ofpease was wholly destroyed, so that several farmers pretty early gave upall hopes on that head, and cut the green haulm as fodder for thecattle, then perishing for want of food in that dry and burning summer. I myself came off better than most: I had about the fourth of a crop ofpease. 

It will be recollected, that, in a manner, all the bacon and porkconsumed in this country (the far largest consumption of meat out oftowns) is, when growing, fed on grass, and on whey or skimmed milk, --andwhen fatting, partly on the latter. This is the case in the dairycountries, all of them great breeders and feeders of swine; but for themuch greater part, and in all the corn countries, they are fattened onbeans, barley-meal, and pease. When the food of the animal is scarce, his flesh must be dear. This, one would suppose, would require no greatpenetration to discover. 

This failure of so very large a supply of flesh in one species naturallythrows the whole demand of the consumer on the diminished supply of allkinds of flesh, and, indeed, on all the matters of human sustenance. Nor, in my opinion, are we to expect a greater cheapness in that articlefor this year, even though corn should grow cheaper, as it is to behoped it will. The store swine, from the failure of subsistence lastyear, are now at an extravagant price. Pigs, at our fairs, have soldlately for fifty shillings, which two years ago would not have broughtmore than twenty. 

As to sheep, none, I thought, were strangers to the general failure ofthe article of turnips last year: the early having been burned, as theycame up, by the great drought and heat; the late, and those of the earlywhich had escaped, were destroyed by the chilling frosts of the winterand the wet and severe weather of the spring. In many places a fullfourth of the sheep or the lambs were lost; what remained of the lambswere poor and ill fed, the ewes having had no milk. The calves camelate, and they were generally an article the want of which was as muchto be dreaded as any other. So that article of food, formerly soabundant in the early part of the summer, particularly in London, andwhich in a great part supplied the place of mutton for near two months, did little less than totally fail. 

All the productions of the earth link in with each other. All thesources of plenty, in all and every article, were dried or frozen up. The scarcity was not, as gentlemen seem to suppose, in wheat only. 

Another cause, and that not of inconsiderable operation, tended toproduce a scarcity in flesh provision. It is one that on many accountscannot be too much regretted, and the rather, as it was the sole _cause_of a scarcity in that article which arose from the proceedings of menthemselves: I mean the stop put to the distillery. 

The hogs (and that would be sufficient) which were fed with the wastewash of that produce did not demand the fourth part of the corn used byfarmers in fattening them. The spirit was nearly so much clear gain tothe nation. It is an odd way of making flesh cheap, to stop or check thedistillery. 

The distillery in itself produces an immense article of trade almost allover the world, --to Africa, to North America, and to various parts ofEurope. It is of great use, next to food itself, to our fisheries and toour whole navigation. A great part of the distillery was carried on bydamaged corn, unfit for bread, and by barley and malt of the lowestquality. These things could not be more unexceptionably employed. Thedomestic consumption of spirits produced, without complaints, a verygreat revenue, applicable, if we pleased, in bounties, to the bringingcorn from other places, far beyond the value of that consumed in makingit, or to the encouragement of its increased production at home. 

As to what is said, in a physical and moral view, against the homeconsumption of spirits, experience has long since taught me very littleto respect the declamations on that subject. Whether the thunder of thelaws or the thunder of eloquence "is hurled on _gin_" always I amthunder-proof. The alembic, in my mind, has furnished to the world a fargreater benefit and blessing than if the _opus maximum_ had been reallyfound by chemistry, and, like Midas, we could turn everything into gold. 

Undoubtedly there may be a dangerous abuse in the excess of spirits; andat one time I am ready to believe the abuse was great. When spirits arecheap, the business of drunkenness is achieved with little time orlabor; but that evil I consider to be wholly done away. Observation forthe last forty years, and very particularly for the last thirty, hasfurnished me with ten instances of drunkenness from other causes for onefrom this. Ardent spirit is a great medicine, often to removedistempers, much more frequently to prevent them, or to chase them awayin their beginnings. It is not nutritive in _any great_ degree. But ifnot food, it greatly alleviates the want of it. It invigorates thestomach for the digestion of poor, meagre diet, not easily alliable tothe human constitution. Wine the poor cannot touch. Beer, as applied tomany occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance, ) will byno means do the business. Let me add, what wits inspired with champagneand claret will turn into ridicule, --it is a medicine for the mind. Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, menhave at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid totheir moral consolations, --wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco. 

I consider, therefore, the stopping of the distillery, economically, financially, commercially, medicinally, and in some degree morally too, as a measure rather well meant than well considered. It is too preciousa sacrifice to prejudice. 

Gentlemen well know whether there be a scarcity of partridges, andwhether that be an effect of hoarding and combination. All the tame raceof birds live and die as the wild do. 

As to the lesser articles, they are like the greater. They have followedthe fortune of the season. Why are fowls dear? Was not this the farmer'sor jobber's fault? I sold from my yard to a jobber six young and leanfowls for four-and-twenty shillings, --fowls for which two years ago thesame man would not have given a shilling apiece. He sold them afterwardsat Uxbridge, and they were taken to London to receive the last hand. 

As to the operation of the war in causing the scarcity of provisions, Iunderstand that Mr. Pitt has given a particular answer to it; but I donot think it worth powder and shot. 

I do not wonder the papers are so full of this sort of matter, but I ama little surprised it should be mentioned in Parliament. Like all greatstate questions, peace and war may be discussed, and different opinionsfairly formed, on political grounds; but on a question of the presentprice of provisions, when peace with the Regicides is always uppermost, I can only say that great is the love of it. 

After all, have we not reason to be thankful to the Giver of all Good?In our history, and when "the laborer of England is said to have beenonce happy, " we find constantly, after certain intervals, a period ofreal famine, by which a melancholy havoc was made among the human race. The price of provisions fluctuated dreadfully, demonstrating adeficiency very different from the worst failures of the present moment. Never, since I have known England, have I known more than a comparativescarcity. The price of wheat, taking a number of years together, has hadno very considerable fluctuation; nor has it risen exceedingly untilwithin this twelvemonth. Even now, I do not know of one man, woman, orchild that has perished from famine: fewer, if any, I believe, than inyears of plenty, when such a thing may happen by accident. This is owingto a care and superintendence of the poor, far greater than any Iremember. 

The consideration of this ought to bind us all, rich and poor together, against those wicked writers of the newspapers who would inflame thepoor against their friends, guardians, patrons, and protectors. Not onlyvery few (I have observed that I know of none, though I live in a placeas poor as most) have actually died of want, but we have seen no tracesof those dreadful exterminating epidemics which, in consequence ofscanty and unwholesome food, in former times not unfrequently wastedwhole nations. Let us be saved from too much wisdom of our own, and weshall do tolerably well. 

It is one of the finest problems in legislation, and what has oftenengaged my thoughts whilst I followed that profession, --What the stateought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what itought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individualdiscretion. Nothing, certainly, can be laid down on the subject thatwill not admit of exceptions, --many permanent, some occasional. But theclearest line of distinction which I could draw, whilst I had my chalkto draw any line, was this: that the state ought to confine itself towhat regards the state or the creatures of the state: namely, theexterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; itsmilitary force by sea and land; the corporations that owe theirexistence to its fiat; in a word, to everything that is _truly andproperly_ public, --to the public peace, to the public safety, to thepublic order, to the public prosperity. In its preventive police itought to be sparing of its efforts, and to employ means, rather few, unfrequent, and strong, than many, and frequent, and, of course, asthey multiply their puny politic race, and dwindle, small and feeble. Statesmen who know themselves will, with the dignity which belongs towisdom, proceed only in this the superior orb and first mover of theirduty, steadily, vigilantly, severely, courageously: whatever remainswill, in a manner, provide for itself. But as they descend from thestate to a province, from a province to a parish, and from a parish to aprivate house, they go on accelerated in their fall. They _cannot_ dothe lower duty; and in proportion as they try it, they will certainlyfail in the higher. They ought to know the different departments ofthings, --what belongs to laws, and what manners alone can regulate. Tothese great politicians may give a leaning, but they cannot give a law. 

Our legislature has fallen into this fault, as well as othergovernments: all have fallen into it more or less. The once mighty statewhich was nearest to us locally, nearest to us in every way, and whoseruins threaten to fall upon our heads, is a strong instance of thiserror. I can never quote France without a foreboding sigh, --ΈΣΣΕΤΑΙ ΉΜΑΡScipio said it to his recording Greek friend amidst theflames of the great rival of his country. That state has fallen by thehands of the parricides of their country, called the Revolutionists andConstitutionalists of France: a species of traitors, of whose fury andatrocious wickedness nothing in the annals of the frenzy and depravationof mankind had before furnished an example, and of whom I can neverthink or speak without a mixed sensation of disgust, of horror, and ofdetestation, not easy to be expressed. These nefarious monstersdestroyed their country for what was good in it: for much good there wasin the Constitution of that noble monarchy, which, in all kinds, formedand nourished great men, and great patterns of virtue to the world. Butthough its enemies were not enemies to its faults, its faults furnishedthem with means for its destruction. My dear departed friend, whose lossis even greater to the public than to me, had often remarked, that theleading vice of the French monarchy (which he had well studied) was ingood intention ill-directed, and a restless desire of governing toomuch. The hand of authority was seen in everything and in every place. All, therefore, that happened amiss, in the course even of domesticaffairs, was attributed to the government; and as it always happens inthis kind of officious universal interference, what began in odiouspower ended always, I may say without an exception, in contemptibleimbecility. For this reason, as far as I can approve of any novelty, Ithought well of the provincial administrations. Those, if the superiorpower had been severe and vigilant and vigorous, might have been of muchuse politically in removing government from many invidious details. Butas everything is good or bad as it is related or combined, governmentbeing relaxed above as it was relaxed below, and the brains of thepeople growing more and more addle with every sort of visionaryspeculation, the shiftings of the scene in the provincial theatresbecame only preparatives to a revolution in the kingdom, and the popularactings there only the rehearsals of the terrible drama of the Republic. 

Tyranny and cruelty may make men justly wish the downfall of abusedpowers, but I believe that no government ever yet perished from anyother direct cause than its own weakness. My opinion is against anoverdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially againstthis most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, --themeddling with the subsistence of the people. 

A

LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD

ON

THE ATTACKS MADE UPON MR. BURKE AND HIS PENSION, IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, BY

THE DUKE OF BEDFORD AND THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE, EARLY IN THE PRESENT SESSION OF PARLIAMENT. 

1796. 

LETTER. 

My lord, --I could hardly flatter myself with the hope that so very earlyin the season I should have to acknowledge obligations to the Duke ofBedford and to the Earl of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost notime in conferring upon me that sort of honor which it is alone withintheir competence, and which it is certainly most congenial to theirnature and their manners, to bestow. 

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, by the zealots ofthe new sect in philosophy and politics, of which these noble personsthink so charitably, and of which others think so justly, to me is nomatter of uneasiness or surprise. To have incurred the displeasure ofthe Duke of Orleans or the Duke of Bedford, to fall under the censure ofCitizen Brissot or of his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, I ought toconsider as proofs, not the least satisfactory, that I have producedsome part of the effect I proposed by my endeavors. I have labored hardto earn what the noble Lords are generous enough to pay. Personaloffence I have given them none. The part they take against me is fromzeal to the cause. It is well, --it is perfectly well. I have to dohomage to their justice. I have to thank the Bedfords and theLauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully acquitted towards mewhatever arrear of debt was left undischarged by the Priestleys and thePaines. 

Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own wrong: I at leasthave nothing to complain of. They have gone beyond the demands ofjustice. They have been (a little, perhaps, beyond their intention)favorable to me. They have been the means of bringing out by theirinvectives the handsome things which Lord Grenville has had the goodnessand condescension to say in my behalf. Retired as I am from the world, and from all its affairs and all its pleasures, I confess it does kindlein my nearly extinguished feelings a very vivid satisfaction to be soattacked and so commended. It is soothing to my wounded mind to becommended by an able, vigorous, and well-informed statesman, and at thevery moment when he stands forth, with a manliness and resolution worthyof himself and of his cause, for the preservation of the person andgovernment of our sovereign, and therein for the security of the laws, the liberties, the morals, and the lives of his people. To be in anyfair way connected with such things is indeed a distinction. Nophilosophy can make me above it: no melancholy can depress me so low asto make me wholly insensible to such an honor. 

Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction? Are theyapprehensive, that, if an atom of me remains, the sect has something tofear? Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca's, my skin mightbe made into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle against atyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe and all the human race?

My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before this of France, the annals of all time have not furnished an instance of a _complete_revolution. That revolution seems to have extended even to theconstitution of the mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that itresembles what Lord Verulam says of the operations of Nature: It wasperfect, not only in its elements and principles, but in all its membersand its organs, from the very beginning. The moral scheme of Francefurnishes the only pattern ever known which they who admire will_instantly_ resemble. It is, indeed, an inexhaustible repertory of onekind of examples. In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classedwith the living, I am not safe from them. They have tigers to fall uponanimated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The nationalmenagerie is collected by the first physiologists of the time; and it isdefective in no description of savage nature. They pursue even such asme into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionarytribunals. Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of the tomb, issacred to them. They have so determined a hatred to all privilegedorders, that they deny even to the departed the sad immunities of thegrave. They are not wholly without an object. Their turpitude purveys totheir malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate theliving. If all revolutionists were not proof against all caution, Ishould recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were everknown in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and bytheir sorceries to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event thanthe prediction of their own disastrous fate. --"Leave me, oh, leave me torepose!"

In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me andmy mortuary pension: He cannot readily comprehend the transaction hecondemns. What I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, theproduction of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect of nosolicitation. The first suggestion of it never came from me, mediatelyor immediately, to his Majesty or any of his ministers. It was longknown that the instant my engagements would permit it, and before theheaviest of all calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity andsorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that design. Iwas entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any statesman orany party, when the ministers so generously and so nobly carried intoeffect the spontaneous bounty of the crown. Both descriptions have actedas became them. When I could no longer serve them, the ministers haveconsidered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them, therevolutionists have trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, isequal to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came to me, indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which nocircumstance of fortune could afford me any real pleasure. But this wasno fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased, inacknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the public, to assuagethe sorrows of a desolate old man. 

It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would as ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the value of a long life spent withunexampled toil in the service of my country. Since the total body of myservices, on account of the industry which was shown in them, and thefairness of my intentions, have obtained the acceptance of my sovereign, it would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the Duke ofBedford and the Corresponding Society, or, as far as in me lies, topermit a dispute on the rate at which the authority appointed by _our_Constitution to estimate such things has been pleased to set them. 

Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and contempt. By me theyhave been so always. I knew, that, as long as I remained in public, Ishould live down the calumnies of malice and the judgments of ignorance. If I happened to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not?) like allother men, I must bear the consequence of my faults and my mistakes. Thelibels of the present day are just of the same stuff as the libels ofthe past. But they derive an importance from the rank of the personsthey come from, and the gravity of the place where they were uttered. Insome way or other I ought to take some notice of them. To assert myselfthus traduced is not vanity or arrogance. It is a demand of justice; itis a demonstration of gratitude. If I am unworthy, the ministers areworse than prodigal. On that hypothesis, I perfectly agree with the Dukeof Bedford. 

For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put myself on my country. I ought to be allowed a reasonable freedom, because I stand upon mydeliverance; and no culprit ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmostlatitude of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum. Whatever it may be in the eyes of these noble persons themselves, to metheir situation calls for the most profound respect. If I should happento trespass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always besupposed that a confusion of characters may produce mistakes, --that, inthe masquerades of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical adventureshappen, odd things are said and pass off. If I should fail a singlepoint in the high respect I owe to those illustrious persons, I cannotbe supposed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale ofthe House of Peers, but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdaleof Palace Yard, --the Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There they are on thepavement; there they seem to come nearer to my humble level, and, virtually at least, to have waived their high privilege. 

Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribunals, wheremen have been put to death for no other reason than that they hadobtained favors from the crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spiritof the old English law, --that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline hisGrace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as ajuror to pass upon the value of my services. Whatever his natural partsmay be, I cannot recognize in his few and idle years the competence tojudge of my long and laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not beon the inquest of my _quantum meruit_. Poor rich man! he can hardly knowanything of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate itscompensations when its work is done. I have no doubt of his Grace'sreadiness in all the calculations of vulgar arithmetic; but I shrewdlysuspect that he is little studied in the theory of moral proportions, and has never learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy andstate. 

His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward couldpossibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them. Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, thereis no common principle of comparison: they are quantitiesincommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animallife. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, indeed, sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have nothad more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how toemploy as well as he a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a moreconfined application, I certainly stand in need of every kind of reliefand easement much more than he does. When I say I have not received morethan I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No! Far, veryfar, from it! Before that presence I claim no merit at all. Everythingtowards me is favor and bounty. One style to a gracious benefactor;another to a proud and insulting foe. 

His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt by charging my acceptance ofhis Majesty's grant as a departure from my ideas and the spirit of myconduct with regard to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy wore falseand ill-founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's ideas of economy Ihave contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to certainbills brought in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell himthat there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either theletter or the spirit of those acts. Does he mean the Pay-Office Act? Itake it for granted he does not. The act to which he alludes is, Isuppose, the Establishment Act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace hasever read the one or the other. The first of these systems cost me, withevery assistance which my then situation gave me, pains incredible. Ifound an opinion common through all the offices, and general in thepublic at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and methodizethe office of pay-master-general. I undertook it, however; and Isucceeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, or whetherthe general economy of our finances have profited by that act, I leaveto those who are acquainted with the army and with the treasury tojudge. 

An opinion full as general prevailed also, at the same time, thatnothing could be done for the regulation of the civil listestablishment. The very attempt to introduce method into it, and anylimitations to its services, was held absurd. I had not seen the man whoso much as suggested one economical principle or an economical expedientupon that subject. Nothing but coarse amputation or coarser taxationwere then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or theleast shadow of principle. Blind and headlong zeal or factious fury werethe whole contribution brought by the most noisy, on that occasion, towards the satisfaction of the public or the relief of the crown. 

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that timerequired something very different from what others then suggested orwhat his Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of themost critical periods in our annals. 

Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, whose pathintersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what)sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous cometof the Rights of Man, (which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence andwar, " and "with fear of change perplexes monarchs, ") had that cometcrossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human couldhave prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway ofheaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the FrenchRevolution. 

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility was at a gooddistance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost ourcolonies, but we kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, muchintestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savageinsurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in thename of Reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that therewas no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might notcount upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs. 

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms, went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not veryremote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of thiskingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have hadthe honor of leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution. Otherprojects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the veryexistence of the kingdom under any Constitution. There are who rememberthe blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger, --there, the sameinaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-wishers to themischief, --there, indifferent lookers-on. At the same time, a sort ofNational Convention, dubious in its nature and perilous in its example, nosed Parliament in the very seat of its authority, --sat with a sort ofsuperintendence over it, --and little less than dictated to it, not onlylaws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself. In Irelandthings ran in a still more eccentric course. Government was unnerved, confounded, and in a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. Ido not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man ofadmirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understandingfitted for every sort of business, of infinite wit and pleasantry, of adelightful temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But itwould be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honorthe memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of thevigilance and spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, adarkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over the wholeregion. For a little time the helm appeared abandoned. 

 Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere cœlo, Nec meminisse viæ mediâ Palinurus in undâ. 

At that time I was connected with men of high place in the community. They loved liberty as much as the Duke of Bedford can do; and theyunderstood it at least as well. Perhaps their politics, as usual, took atincture from their character, and they cultivated what they loved. Theliberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion, --and was neither hypocritically norfanatically followed. They did not wish that liberty, in itself one ofthe first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatestcurse which could fall upon mankind. To preserve the Constitutionentire, and practically equal to all the great ends of its formation, not in one single part, but in all its parts, was to them the firstobject. Popularity and power they regarded alike. These were with themonly different means of obtaining that object, and had no preferenceover each other in their minds, but as one or the other might afford asurer or a less certain prospect of arriving at that end. It is someconsolation to me, in the cheerless gloom which darkens the evening ofmy life, that with them I commenced my political career, and never for amoment, in reality nor in appearance, for any length of time, wasseparated from their good wishes and good opinion. 

By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy which ever has pursued me witha full cry through life, I had obtained a very considerable degree ofpublic confidence. I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind ofpopular opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no stranger tothe insecurity of its tenure. I do not boast of it. It is mentioned toshow, not how highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use Imade of it. I endeavored to turn that short-lived advantage to myselfinto a permanent benefit to my country. Far am I from detracting fromthe merit of some gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occasion. No! It is not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice tothe aids that I receive. I have through life been willing to giveeverything to others, --and to reserve nothing for myself, but the inwardconscience that I had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, todiscipline, to direct the abilities of the country for its service, andto place them in the best light to improve their age, or to adorn it. This conscience I have. I have never suppressed any man, never checkedhim for a moment in his course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I wasalways ready, to the height of my means, (and they wore alwaysinfinitely below my desires, ) to forward those abilities whichoverpowered my own. He is an ill-furnished undertaker who has nomachinery but his own hands to work with. Poor in my own faculties, Iever thought myself rich in theirs. In that period of difficulty anddanger, more especially, I consulted and sincerely coöperated with menof all parties who seemed disposed to the same ends, or to any main partof them. Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted: when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as Icould prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, soaided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand--Ido not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country importantservice. There were few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledgeit, --and that time was thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that noman in the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision should be madefor him. So much for my general conduct through the whole of theportentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense thenentertained of that conduct by my country. But my character as areformer, in the particular instances which the Duke of Bedford refersto, is so connected in principle with my opinions on the hideous changeswhich have since barbarized France, and, spreading thence, threaten thepolitical and moral order of the whole world, that it seems to demandsomething of a more detailed discussion. 

My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, the suppressionof a paltry pension or employment, more or less. Economy in my planswas, as it ought to be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental. I acted onstate principles. I found a great distemper in the commonwealth, andaccording to the nature of the evil and of the object I treated it. Themalady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contra-indicants. On one hand, government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means ofstrength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Norwas this dissolution confined to government commonly so called. Itextended to Parliament, which was losing not a little in its dignity andestimation by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives. On theother hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and partly infusedinto them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner withregard to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment thedreadful tampering with the body of the Constitution itself, ) that, iftheir petitions had literally been complied with, the state would havebeen convulsed, and a gate would have been opened through which allproperty might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved thepublic from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, whichwould soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, intodiscredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of thepeople, who would know they had failed in the accomplishment of theirwishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would impute theblame to anything rather than to their own proceedings. But there werethen persons in the world who nourished complaint, and would have beenthoroughly disappointed, if the people were ever satisfied. I was not ofthat humor. I wished that they _should_ be satisfied. It was my aim togive to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what Ithought was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had beenmodified for them into senseless petitions. I knew that there is amanifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weakmen incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, --that is, amarked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters thesubstance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essentialgood as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change isnovelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects ofreformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principleupon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the substance or in the primary modificationof the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievancecomplained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there;and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at thevery worst, is but where it was. 

All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. Itcannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept uponprecept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, --_To innovate isnot to reform_. The French revolutionists complained of everything; theyrefused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all, _unchanged_. The consequences are _before_ us, --not in remote history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. Theyshake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf thegrowth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, theystop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Ourbusiness is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures aresaddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge isrendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadfulinnovation. The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night andHell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally "allmonstrous, all prodigious things, " cuckoo-like, adulterously lay theireggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboringstate. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not whatdivine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds ofprey, (both mothers and daughters, ) flutter over our heads, and sousedown upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, orunpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal. [15]

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, _reform_, in the whole body of itssolidity and compound mass, at which, as Hamlet says, the face of heavenglows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes everyreflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought-sick, withouta thorough abhorrence of everything they say and everything they do, Iam amazed at the morbid strength or the natural infirmity of his mind. 

It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced myplan of reform. Without troubling myself with the exactness of thelogical diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite. Itwas to prevent that evil, that I proposed the measures which his Graceis pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to myrecollection. I had (what I hope that noble Duke will remember in allhis operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform. I hada people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claimhalf the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from being done. In that situation of the public mind, I did not undertake, as was thenproposed, to new-model the House of Commons or the House of Lords, orto change the authority under which any officer of the crown acted, whowas suffered at all to exist. Crown, lords, commons, judicial system, system of administration, existed as they had existed before, and in themode and manner in which they had always existed. My measures were, whatI then truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, healingand mediatorial. A complaint was made of too much influence in the Houseof Commons: I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my reasons, articleby article, for every reduction, and showed why I thought it safe forthe service of the state. I heaved the lead every inch of way I made. Adisposition to expense was complained of: to that I opposed, not mereretrenchment, but a system of economy, which would make a randomexpense, without plan or foresight, in future, not easily practicable. Iproceeded upon principles of research to put me in possession of mymatter, on principles of method to regulate it, and on principles in thehuman mind and in civil affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation. I conceived nothing arbitrarily, nor proposed anything to be done by thewill and pleasure of others or my own, --but by reason, and by reasononly. I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of my understanding tothis its obscure twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, inclination, and will, in the affairs of government, where only asovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation andadministration, should dictate. Government is made for the very purposeof opposing that reason to will and to caprice, in the reformers or inthe reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in people. 

On a careful review, therefore, and analysis of all the component partsof the civil list, and on weighing them against each other, in order tomake as much as possible all of them a subject of estimate, (thefoundation and corner-stone of all regular, provident economy, ) itappeared to me evident that this was impracticable, whilst that partcalled the pension list was totally discretionary in its amount. Forthis reason, and for this only, I proposed to reduce it, both in itsgross quantity and in its larger individual proportions, to a certainty;lest, if it were left without a _general_ limit, it might eat up thecivil list service, --if suffered to be granted in portions too great forthe fund, it might defeat its own end, and, by unlimited allowances tosome, it might disable the crown in means of providing for others. Thepension list was to be kept as a sacred fund; but it could not be keptas a constant, open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if somedemands would wholly devour it. The tenor of the act will show that itregarded the civil list _only_, the reduction of which to some sort ofestimate was my great object. 

No other of the crown funds did I meddle with, because they had not thesame relations. This of the four and a half per cents does his Graceimagine had escaped me, or had escaped all the men of business who actedwith me in those regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and thatpensions had been always granted on it, before his Grace was born. Thisfund was full in my eye. It was full in the eyes of those who workedwith me. It was left on principle. On principle I did what was thendone; and on principle what was left undone was omitted. I did not dareto rob the nation of all funds to reward merit. If I pressed this pointtoo close, I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which I went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me; but if any one thinks it worthhis while to know the rules that guided me in my plan of reform, he willread my printed speech on that subject, at least what is contained frompage 230 to page 241 in the second volume of the collection[16] which afriend has given himself the trouble to make of my publications. Be thisas it may, these two bills (though achieved with the greatest labor, andmanagement of every sort, both within and without the House) were only apart, and but a small part, of a very large system, comprehending allthe objects I stated in opening my proposition, and, indeed, many more, which I just hinted at in my speech to the electors of Bristol, when Iwas put out of that representation. All these, in some state or other offorwardness, I have long had by me. 

But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds? I think them theleast of my services. The time gave them an occasional value. What Ihave done in the way of political economy was far from confined to thisbody of measures. I did not come into Parliament to con my lesson. I hadearned my pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen's Chapel. I wasprepared and disciplined to this political warfare. The first session Isat in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interests of Great Britain andits empire. A great deal was then done; and more, far more, would havebeen done, if more had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigor ofmy manhood, my constitution sunk under my labor. Had I then died, (andI seemed to myself very near death, ) I had then earned for those whobelonged to me more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are ofpower to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am called to accountfor are not those on which I value myself the most. If I were to callfor a reward, (which I have never done, ) it should be for those in whichfor fourteen years without intermission I showed the most industry andhad the least success: I mean in the affairs of India. They are those onwhich I value myself the most: most for the importance, most for thelabor, most for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance in thepursuit. Others may value them most for the _intention_. In that, surely, they are not mistaken. 

Does his Grace think that they who advised the crown to make my retreateasy considered me only as an economist? That, well understood, however, is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not havemade political economy an object of my humble studies from my very earlyyouth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even before (at leastto any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of speculativemen in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its infancyin England, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great andlearned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and deignedto communicate with me now and then on some particulars of theirimmortal works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally insome of the earliest things I published. The House has been witness totheir effect, and has profited of them, more or less, for aboveeight-and-twenty years. 

To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his Grace ofBedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator: "_Nitor inadversum_" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of thequalities nor cultivated one of the arts that recommend men to the favorand protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. Aslittle did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on theunderstandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life, (forin every step was I traversed and opposed, ) and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my soletitle to the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I wasnot wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of itsinterests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, no tolerationeven, for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand. 

Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the person whom he hasnot thought it below him to reproach, he might have found, that, in thewhole course of my life, I have never, on any pretence of economy, or onany other pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between anyman and his reward of service or his encouragement in useful talent andpursuit, from the highest of those services and pursuits to the lowest. On the contrary, I have on an hundred occasions exerted myself withsingular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable pretensions. I havemore than once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends forcarrying the matter to something bordering on abuse. This line ofconduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly owing to naturaldisposition, but I think full as much to reason and principle. I lookedon the consideration of public service or public ornament to be real andvery justice; and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partakeof the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, theworst economy in the world. In saving money I soon can count up all thegood I do; but when by a cold penury I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyondall calculation. Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I havedone has been general and systematic. I have never entered into thosetrifling vexations and oppressive details that have been falsely andmost ridiculously laid to my charge. 

Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barré and Mr. Dunning between theproposition and execution of my plan? No! surely, no! Those pensionswere within my principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved theirpensions, their titles, --all they had; and if more they had, I shouldhave been but pleased the more. They were men of talents; they were menof service. I put the profession of the law out of the question in oneof them. It is a service that rewards itself. But their _publicservice_, though from their abilities unquestionably of more value thanmine, in its quantity and in its duration was not to be mentioned withit. But I never could drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning anymatter whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle and hucksterwith merit. Pension for myself I obtained none; nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for everything that was withheld, and withobloquy for everything that was given. I was thus left to support thegrants of a name ever dear to me and ever venerable to the world infavor of those who were no friends of mine or of his, against the rudeattacks of those who were at that time friends to the grantees and theirown zealous partisans. I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdalecomplain of these pensions. He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me. This is impartiality, in the true, modern, revolutionary style. 

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order and economy, isstable and eternal, as all principles must be. A particular order ofthings may be altered: order itself cannot lose its value. As to otherparticulars, they are variable by time and by circumstances. Laws ofregulation are not fundamental laws. The public exigencies are themasters of all such laws. They rule the laws, and are not to be ruled bythem. They who exercise the legislative power at the time must judge. 

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him that mereparsimony is not economy. It is separable in theory from it; and in factit may or it may not be a _part_ of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. Ifparsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher economy. Economy is adistributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct ofthe noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. Theother economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none butmeritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation hasnot wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding allthe service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it everwill produce. No state, since the foundation of society, has beenimpoverished by that species of profusion. Had the economy of selectionand proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had anovergrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and tolimit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown. 

His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the fargreater part of my conduct in life. It is free for him to do so. Therewill always be some difference of opinion in the value of politicalservices. But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men living, ought to be the last to call in question. I have supported with verygreat zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opinions, or, if his Grace likes another expression better, those old prejudices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and titles. Ihave omitted no exertion to prevent him and them from sinking to thatlevel to which the meretricious French faction his Grace at leastcoquets with omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could todiscountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold largeportions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own. I havestrained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situationwhich alone makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a witness ofthe use he makes of that preëminence. 

But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in thiswell-selected rigor: yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all menand at all times. There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, whichin all seasons of our existence ought to put a generous antipathy inaction, --crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warmand animated pursuit. But all things that concern what I may call thepreventive police of morality, all things merely rigid, harsh, andcensorial, the antiquated moralists at whose feet I was brought up wouldnot have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite virtuesof young men of rank. What might have been well enough, and have beenreceived with a veneration mixed with awe and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of propriety in theyoung Scipios, the ornament of the Roman nobility, in the flower oftheir life. But the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars, haveall undergone a thorough revolution. It is a vile, illiberal school, this new French academy of the _sans-culottes_. There is nothing in itthat is fit for a gentleman to learn. 

Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself that the parents ofthe growing generation will be satisfied with what is to be taught totheir children in Westminster, in Eton, or in Winchester; I stillindulge the hope that no _grown_ gentleman or nobleman of our time willthink of finishing at Mr. Thelwall's lecture whatever may have been leftincomplete at the old universities of his country. I would give to LordGrenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto what was said of a Roman censor orprætor (or what was he?) who in virtue of a _Senatusconsultum_ shut upcertain academies, --"_Cludere ludum impudentiæ jussit_. " Every honestfather of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the breaking-up forthe holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long vacation, inall such schools. 

The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own justification, ismy true object in what I now write, or in what I shall ever write orsay. It little signifies to the world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is nothingmore than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive, to convey mysentiments on matters far more worthy of your attention. It is when Istick to my apparent first subject that I ought to apologize, not when Idepart from it. I therefore must beg your Lordship's pardon for againresuming it after this very short digression, --assuring you that I shallnever altogether lose sight of such matter as persons abler than I ammay turn to some profit. 

The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to call the attentionof the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant to me, which he considersas excessive and out of all bounds. 

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst hisGrace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into asort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and asdreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced andincongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to_me_, but took the subject-matter from the crown grants _to his ownfamily_. This is "the stuff of which his dreams are made. " In that wayof putting things together his Grace is perfectly in the right. Thegrants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrageeconomy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is theleviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about hisunwieldy bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating many a rood, " he is still acreature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the veryspiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray, everything of him and about himis from the throne. Is it for _him_ to question the dispensation of theroyal favor?

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the publicmerits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, andthese services of mine, on the favorable construction of which I haveobtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life I have notat all the honor of acquaintance with the noble Duke; but I ought topresume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deservesthe esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself, inrank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his servicesand my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be grossadulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of hisown to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landedpensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original andpersonal: his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the originalpensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit which makeshis Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all othergrantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I shouldhave said, "'Tis his estate: that's enough. It is his by law: what haveI to do with it or its history?" He would naturally have said, on hisside, "'Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was twohundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; heis an old man with very young pensions: that's all. "

Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare mylittle merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies ofprofuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble andlaborious individuals? I would willingly leave him to the Herald'sCollege, which the philosophy of the _sans-culottes_ (prouder by farthan all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge-Dragonsthat ever pranced in a procession of what his friends call aristocratsand despots) will abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians, recorders, and blazoners of virtues and arms differ wholly from thatother description of historians who never assign any act of politiciansto a good motive. These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip theirpens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They seek no further formerit than the preamble of a patent or the inscription on a tomb. Withthem every man created a peer is first an hero ready-made. They judge ofevery man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and themore offices, the more ability. Every general officer with them is aMarlborough, every statesman a Burleigh, every judge a Murray or aYorke. They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all theiracquaintance make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages ofGuillim, Edmondson, and Collins. 

To these recorders, so full of good-nature to the great and prosperous, I would willingly leave the first Baron Russell and Earl of Bedford, andthe merits of his grants. But the aulnager, the weigher, the meter ofgrants will not suffer us to acquiesce in the judgment of the princereigning at the time when they were made. They are never good to thosewho earn them. Well, then, since the new grantees have war made on themby the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, letus turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasurein contemplating the heroic origin of their house. 

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being aminion of Henry the Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance ofcharacter to create these relations, the favorite was in all likelihoodmuch such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grantswas not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recentconfiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion, havingsucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal inwaiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favoritesbecame fierce and ravenous. This worthy favorite's first grant was fromthe lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity ofthe first, was from the plunder of the Church. In truth, his Grace issomewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in itsquantity, but in its kind, so different from his own. 

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign: his from Henry theEighth. 

Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person ofillustrious rank, [17] or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men. His grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgmentsiniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by thelawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. 

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that of being a promptand greedy instrument of a _levelling_ tyrant, who oppressed alldescriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury oneverything that was _great and noble_. Mine has been in endeavoring toscreen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly indefending the high and eminent, who, in the bad times of confiscatingprinces, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating demagogues, arethe most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy. 

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in givinghis hand to the work, and partaking the spoil, with a prince whoplundered a part of the national Church of his time and country. Minewas in defending the whole of the national Church of my own time and myown country, and the whole of the national Churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiasticalpillage, thence to a contempt of _all_ prescriptive titles, thence tothe pillage of _all_ property, and thence to universal desolation. 

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favoriteand chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to their nativecountry. My endeavor was to obtain liberty for the municipal country inwhich I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Minewas to support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensivecountry; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat ofempire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, and religion, in the vast domain that still is under the protection, andthe larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown. 

His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served his master andmade his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation onhis country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting thecommerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom, --in which hisMajesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is apatriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil. 

His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman raised by the arts of acourt and the protection of a Wolsey to the eminence of a great andpotent lord. His merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant toinjustice, to provoke a people to rebellion. My merit was, to awaken thesober part of the country, that they might put themselves on theirguard against any one potent lord, or any greater number of potentlords, or any combination of great leading men of any sort, if ever theyshould attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the reverseorder, --that is, by instigating a corrupted populace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing a tyranny yet worse than the tyrannywhich his Grace's ancestor supported, and of which he profited in themanner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth. 

The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's house was thatof being concerned as a counsellor of state in advising, and in hisperson executing, the conditions of a dishonorable peace withFrance, --the surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our outguard onthe Continent. By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and thebridle in the mouth of that power, was not many years afterwards finallylost. My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zealand earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it couldassume, --the worst, indeed, which the prime cause and principle of allevil could possibly give it. It was my endeavor by every means to excitea spirit in the House, where I had the honor of a seat, for carrying onwith early vigor and decision the most clearly just and necessary warthat this or any nation ever carried on, in order to save my countryfrom the iron yoke of its power, and from the more dreadful contagion ofits principles, --to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure anduntainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, andgood-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in agreat degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus ofits most intense malignity. 

The labors of his Grace's founder merited the "curses, not loud, butdeep, " of the Commons of England, on whom _he_ and his master hadeffected a _complete Parliamentary Reform_, by making them, in theirslavery and humiliation, the true and adequate representatives of adebased, degraded, and undone people. My merits were in having had anactive, though not always an ostentatious share, in every one act, without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in my time, andin having supported, on all occasions, the authority, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons of Great Britain. I ended my servicesby a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on their own journals oftheir constitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutionalconduct. I labored in all things to merit their inward approbation, and(along with the assistants of the largest, the greatest, and best of myendeavors) I received their free, unbiased, public, and solemn thanks. 

Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the crown grantswhich compose the Duke of Bedford's fortune as balanced against mine. Inthe name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that nonebut of the House of Russell are entitled to the favor of the crown? Whyshould he imagine that no king of England has been capable of judging ofmerit but King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me, he is alittle mistaken: all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford;all discernment did not lose its vision when his creator closed hiseyes. Let him remit his rigor on the disproportion between merit andreward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of hisfortune. They will regard with much more satisfaction, as he willcontemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever in his pedigree hasbeen dulcified by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flowof generations from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of thespring. It is little to be doubted that several of his forefathers inthat long series have degenerated into honor and virtue. Let the Duke ofBedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the counsels ofthe lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who wouldtempt him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormousfortune from the forfeitures of another nobility and the plunder ofanother Church. Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all theenergy of his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crushrebellious principles which have no foundation in morals, and rebelliousmovements that have no provocation in tyranny. 

Then will be forgot the rebellions which, by a doubtful priority incrime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished. On such a conduct inthe noble Duke, many of his countrymen might, and with some excusemight, give way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in thedashing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that, if the Fateshad found no other way in which they could give a[18] Duke of Bedfordand his opulence as props to a tottering world, then the butchery ofthe Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated; it might be regarded evenwith complacency, whilst in the heir of confiscation they saw thesympathizing comforter of the martyrs who suffer under the cruelconfiscation of this day, whilst they beheld with admiration his zealousprotection of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manlysupport of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry of hisnative land. Then his Grace's merit would be pure and new and sharp, asfresh from the mint of honor. As he pleased, he might reflect honor onhis predecessors, or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him. He might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the root of it, ashe thought proper. 

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I shouldhave been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age Ilive in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, inerudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, inevery liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not haveshown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whomhe traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted allplausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more tomine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, andsymmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for thatsuccessor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring ofgenerous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchasedthe bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he hadreceived. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whateverbut in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss ofa finished man is not easily supplied. 

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whosewisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in anothermanner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks whichthe late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all myhonors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth. There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divinejustice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myselfbefore God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks ofunjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. Aftersome of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submittedhimself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find himblamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbalasperity, those ill-natured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill toread moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I amalone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, Igreatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck ofrefuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. This isthe appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is anindulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made toshun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty anddisease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinctis always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought tohave succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me asposterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation(which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he wouldhave performed to me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent. 

The crown has considered me after long service: the crown has paid theDuke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any servicewhich he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let himtake care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secureshis own utility or his own insignificance, or how he discourages thosewho take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like thesun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grantsare ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoarof innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules ofprescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from whichthe jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has by degrees beenenriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very fullshare) in bringing to its perfection. [19] The Duke of Bedford will standas long as prescriptive law endures, --as long as the great, stable lawsof property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in theirintegrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They are secureagainst all changes but one. The whole Revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all thelaws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governmentsof the world. The learned professors of the Rights of Man regardprescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against oldpossession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against thepossessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be nomore than a long continued and therefore an aggravated injustice. 

Such are _their_ ideas, such _their_ religion, and such _their_ law. Butas to _our_ country and _our_ race, as long as the well-compactedstructure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies ofthat ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortressat once and a temple, [20] shall stand inviolate on the brow of theBritish Sion, --as long as the British monarchy, not more limited thanfenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep ofWindsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the doublebelt of its kindred and coëval towers, as long as this awful structureshall oversee and guard the subjected land, --so long the mounds anddikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from allthe pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereignlord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of thisrealm, --the triple cord which no man can break, --the solemn, sworn, constitutional frank-pledge of this nation, --the firm guaranties ofeach other's being and each other's rights, --the joint and severalsecurities, each in its place and order, for every kind and everyquality of property and of dignity, --as long as these ensure, so longthe Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together, --the highfrom the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity, the low fromthe iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen!and so be it! and so it will be, --

 Dum domus Æneæ Capitolî immobile saxum Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. 

But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its sophistical rights ofman to falsify the account, and its sword as a make-weight to throw intothe scale, shall be introduced into our city by a misguided populace, set on by proud great men, themselves blinded and intoxicated by afrantic ambition, we shall all of us perish and be overwhelmed in acommon ruin. If a great storm blow on our coast, it will cast the whaleson the strand, as well as the periwinkles. His Grace will not survivethe poor grantee he despises, --no, not for a twelvemonth. If the greatlook for safety in the services they render to this Gallic cause, it isto be foolish even above the weight of privilege allowed to wealth. Ifhis Grace be one of these whom they endeavor to proselytize, he ought tobe aware of the character of the sect whose doctrines he is invited toembrace. With them insurrection is the most sacred of revolutionaryduties to the state. Ingratitude to benefactors is the first ofrevolutionary virtues. Ingratitude is, indeed, their four cardinalvirtues compacted and amalgamated into one; and he will find it ineverything that has happened since the commencement of the philosophicRevolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of having performed theduty of insurrection against the order he lives in, (God forbid he evershould!) the merit of others will be to perform the duty of insurrectionagainst him. If he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do notsuspect he will) his ingratitude to the crown for its creation of hisfamily, others will plead their right and duty to pay him in kind. Theywill laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. Hisdeeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of hisevidence-room, and burnt to the tune of _Ça, ira_ in the courts ofBedford (then Equality) House. 

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile reproaches to mewith a friendly admonition to himself? Can I be blamed for pointing outto him in what manner he is like to be affected, if the sect of thecannibal philosophers of France should proselytize any considerable partof this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should conquerthat government to which his Grace does not seem to me to give all thesupport his own security demands? Surely it is proper that he, and thatothers like him, should know the true genius of this sect, --what theiropinions are, --what they have done, and to whom, --and what (if aprognostic is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of men) itis certain they will do hereafter. He ought to know that they have swornassistance, the only engagement they ever will keep, to all in thiscountry who bear a resemblance to themselves, and who think, as such, that _the whole duty of man_ consists in destruction. They are amisallied and disparaged branch of the House of Nimrod. They are theDuke of Bedford's natural hunters; and he is their natural game. Becausehe is not very profoundly reflecting, he sleeps in profound security:they, on the contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and, though far removed from any knowledge which makes men estimable oruseful, in all the instruments and resources of evil their leaders arenot meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished. In the FrenchRevolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation to meet sounlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. Never before this timewas a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers andassassins; never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume thegarb and tone of an academy of philosophers. 

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, monstrous as itseems, is not made for producing despicable enemies. But if they areformidable as foes, as friends they are dreadful indeed. The men ofproperty in France, confiding in a force which seemed to be irresistiblebecause it had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflictwith their enemies at their own weapons. They were found in such asituation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, thecavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of an handful of bearded men, whomthey did not know to exist in Nature. This is a comparison that some, Ithink, have made; and it is just. In France they had their enemieswithin their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of them. Butthey had not sagacity to discern their savage character. They seemedtame, and even caressing. They had nothing but _douce humanité_ in theirmouth. They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on thegreatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made their fleshcreep. The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed theirrepose. Military glory was no more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly would they hear of self-defence, which they reduced within suchbounds as to leave it no defence at all. All this while they meditatedthe confiscations and massacres we have seen. Had any one told theseunfortunate noblemen and gentlemen how and by whom the grand fabric ofthe French monarchy under which they flourished would be subverted, theywould not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have turned from himas what they call a _mauvais plaisant_. Yet we have seen what hashappened. The persons who have suffered from the cannibal philosophy ofFrance are so like the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace'sprobably not speaking quite so good French could enable us to find outany difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles as he, andwere of full as illustrious a race; some few of them had fortunes asample; several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to theDuke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and aswell educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of honor, ashe is; and to all this they had added the powerful outguard of amilitary profession, which, in its nature, renders men somewhat morecautious than those who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoymentof undisturbed possessions. But security was their ruin. They aredashed to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with thewrecks. If they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such athing never could have happened. 

I assure his Grace, that, if I state to him the designs of his enemiesin a manner which may appear to him ludicrous and impossible, I tell himnothing that has not exactly happened, point by point, but twenty-fourmiles from our own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified faction, more encouraged than others are warned by what has happened in France, look at him and his landed possessions as an object at once of curiosityand rapacity. He is made for them in every part of their doublecharacter. As robbers, to them he is a noble booty; as speculatists, heis a glorious subject for their experimental philosophy. He affordsmatter for an extensive analysis in all the branches of their science, geometrical, physical, civil, and political. These philosophers arefanatics: independent of any interest, which, if it operated alone, would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such anheadlong rage towards every desperate trial that they would sacrificethe whole human race to the slightest of their experiments. I am betterable to enter into the character of this description of men than thenoble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the world. Withoutany considerable pretensions to literature in myself, I have aspired tothe love of letters. I have lived for a great many years in habitudeswith those who professed them. I can form a tolerable estimate of whatis likely to happen from a character chiefly dependent for fame andfortune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and pervertedstate as in that which is sound and natural. Naturally, men so formedand finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But whenthey have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages toooften the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when inthat state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps, amore dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bredmetaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spiritthan to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of thePrinciple of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from thehuman breast. What Shakspeare calls the "compunctious visitings ofNature" will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against theirmurderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with theirnature. Their humanity is not dissolved; they only give it a longprorogation. They are ready to declare that they do not think twothousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It isremarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but bythe road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with thecontemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuriesadded to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at theirhorizon, --and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. Thegeometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones oftheir diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelingsand habitudes which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition iscome upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it hasrendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise toothers or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in theirexperiments no more than they do mice in an air-pump or in a recipientof mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look uponhim, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than theydo upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has beenlong the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs orupon four. 

His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarianexperiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They aremore extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; andthey are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There arenow republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do notpossess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope forseven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments uponHarrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of thisone Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive tospeculation, --fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to producegrain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English understanding. Abbé Sieyès has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutionsready-made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every season andevery fancy: some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and somewith the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; somedistinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity; some ofblood color, some of _boue de Paris_; some with directories, otherswithout a direction; some with councils of elders and councils ofyoungsters, some without any council at all; some where the electorschoose the representatives, others where the representatives choose theelectors; some in long coats, and some in short cloaks; some withpantaloons, some without breeches; some with five-shillingqualifications, some totally unqualified. So that noconstitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves apattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in anyshapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progressof experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly!Such are their sentiments, I assure him; such is their language, whenthey dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have themeans to act. 

Their geographers and geometricians have been some time out of practice. It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares. That figure has lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands fornew trials. It is not only the geometricians of the Republic that findhim a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after thegeometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on hisGrace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. Theyconsider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its presentstate, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning allestablishments. They have found that the gunpowder of _ruins_ is farthe fittest for making other _ruins_, and so _ad infinitum_. They havecalculated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to be foundin Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and histrustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist, InigoJones, in Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffeehouses, all alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one commonrubbish, --and, well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true, democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre. Their Academy _delCimento_, (_per antiphrasin_, ) with Morveau and Hassenfratz at its head, have computed that the brave _sans-culottes_ may make war on all thearistocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth out of the rubbish of the Dukeof Bedford's buildings. [21]

While the Morveaux and Priestleys are proceeding with these experimentsupon the Duke of Bedford's houses, the Sieyès, and the rest of theanalytical legislators and constitution-venders, are quite as busy intheir trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's vassalsinto primary assemblies, national guards, first, second, and thirdrequisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the travellingguillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legislative hangmen, supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, andassessors of the maximum. 

The din of all this smithery may some time or other possibly wake thisnoble Duke, and push him to an endeavor to save some little matter fromtheir experimental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has received them from thepillage of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them alittle, because they are enemies to all corporations and to allreligion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell hisGrace, or his learned council, that all such property belongs to the_nation_, --and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to livethe natural term of a _citizen_, (that is, according to Condorcet'scalculation, six months on an average, ) not to pass for an usurper uponthe national property. This is what the _serjeants_-at-law of the rightsof man will say to the puny _apprentices_ of the common law of England. 

Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may as well think thegarden of the Tuileries was well protected with the cords of ribboninsultingly stretched by the National Assembly to keep the sovereign_canaille_ from intruding on the retirement of the poor King of theFrench as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of theRevolution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no triflers;brave _sans-culottes_ are no formalists. They will no more regard aMarquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Woburn willnot be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; theywill make no difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nunsand of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rushwhether his coat is long or short, --whether the color be purple, or blueand buff. They will not trouble _their_ heads with what part of _his_head his hair is out from; and they will look with equal respect on atonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some oilier of their legislative butchers: How he cuts up; how hetallows in the caul or on the kidneys. 

Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the _sans-culotte_carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles are pricking theirdotted lines upon his hide, and, like the print of the poor ox that wesee in the shop-windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinkingno harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, andbriskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, andstewing, that, all the while they are measuring _him_, his Grace ismeasuring _me_, --is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown withthe deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawningon those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor innocent!

 "Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. "

No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer withresignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed, they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the otherday, that, on putting in order some things which had been brought here, on my taking leave of London forever, I looked over a number of fineportraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in mybetter days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst those was thepicture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of thesubject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliestyouth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many yearswithout a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, tothe day of our final separation. 

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of hisage, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in myheart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was afterhis trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal andanxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory, --whatpart my son, in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and thepious passion with which he attached himself to all myconnections, --with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves incourting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt such friendship on such an occasion. Ipartook, indeed, of this honor with several of the first and best andablest in the kingdom, but I was behindhand with none of them; and I amsure, that, if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the totalannihilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things had takena different turn from what they did. I should have attended him to thequarter-deck with no less good-will and more pride, though with farother feelings, than I partook of the general flow of national joy thatattended the justice that was done to his virtue. 

Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuseitself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live inretrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship, inthose only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel atall times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when Iwas attacked in the House of Lords. 

Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the favor of that gracious prince who hadhonored his virtues with the government of the navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was notundeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, andhis faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials. He wouldhave told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might bebecoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have toldhim, that, when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose everything. 

On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the public loss of him inthis awful crisis!--I speak from much knowledge of the person: he neverwould have listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this_sans-culotterie_ of France. His goodness of heart, his reason, histaste, his public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would haverepelled him forever from all connection with that horrid medley ofmadness, vice, impiety, and crime. 

Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent, and one of birth. Theirinterest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious ofboth. His family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was of theoldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a peoplerenowned above all others for love of their native land. Though it wasnever shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was somethinghigh. It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all heartshad grafted the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he wasnot disinclined to augment it with new honors. He valued the oldnobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as anincitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure forselfishness and a narrow mind, --conceiving that a man born in anelevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what wentbefore and what was to come after him. Without much speculation, but bythe sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no greatcommonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body ofsome kind or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified byprivilege. This nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of anation, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that noone generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric couldbe well made, without some such order of things as might, through aseries of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else canprotect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of themultitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else ofhereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves" who began toforge in 1789 the false money of the French Constitution; that it is onefatal objection to all _new_ fancied and _new fabricated_ republics, (among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedlyand insolently rejected it, ) that the _prejudice_ of an old nobility isa thing that _cannot_ be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but_the thing itself_ is matter of _inveterate_ opinion, and therefore_cannot_ be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that thisnobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them. 

I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine the future out of whatwe collect from the past, no person living would look with more scornand horror on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, andon the desperate attainder passed on all their posterity, by theOrléans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes deNoailles, and the false Périgords, and the long _et cetera_ of theperfidious _sans-culottes_ of the court, who, like demoniacs possessedwith a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, abdicated theirdignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of alltrusts, and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and all thecramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion anddesolation on their country. For the fate of the miscreant parricidesthemselves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished inprisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leaveno room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. Weare not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed. 

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold hiskindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, more than all the canals, meres, andinundations of their country, protected their independence, to beholdthem bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the humanrace, --in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignityor could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants towhose sceptred pride they had opposed an elevation of soul thatsurmounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness ofAustria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?

Could he with patience bear that the children of that nobility who wouldhave deluged their country and given it to the sea rather than submit toLouis the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory, when his armswere conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers, when his councils were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, whenhis tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the D'Aguesseaus, --thatthese should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, theJourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas, and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges, that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have pouredout innumerable swarms of the lowest and at once the most destructive ofthe classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laidwaste the fairest part of the world?

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous patricians, thathappy union of the noble and the burgher, who with signal prudence andintegrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, thecherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce tothemselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under theirprotection? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totallydestroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracyfounded on the spurious rights of man?

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interestsof Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country ofGrotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richestrepositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorantflippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, withhis stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue andturbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in hisinsolent addresses to the Batavian Republic. 

Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau, who was himself given toEngland along with the blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which consolidated andmarried the liberties and the interests of the two nationsforever, --could he see the fountain of British liberty itself inservitude to France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orangeexpelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of contumely, from the country which that family of deliverers had so often rescuedfrom slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, whichowes its liberty to his house?

Would Keppel have heard with patience that the conduct to be held onsuch occasions was to become short by the knees to the faction of thehomicides, to entreat them quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of warshould drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, thatno security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, noalliance entered into for the security of that which under a foreignname is the most precious part of England? What would he have said, ifit was even proposed that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be abarrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance to protect her againstany species of rule that might be erected or even be restored in France)should be formed into a republic under her influence and dependent uponher power?

But above all, what would he have said, if he had heard it made a matterof accusation against me, by his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I wasthe author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction tomyself, (as from pride I might, but from justice I dare not, ) he wouldhave snatched his share of it from my hand, and held it with the graspof a dying convulsion to his end. 

It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to assume to myself theglory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to his ministers, and to hisParliament, and to the far greater majority of his faithful people: buthad I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined to be guidedby my advice, and to follow it implicitly, then I should have been thesole author of a war. But it should have been a war on my ideas and myprinciples. However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits withregard to the war with Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to thatalone. He never shall, with the smallest color of reason, accuse me ofbeing the author of a peace with Regicide. --But that is high matter, andought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment as what maybelong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford. 

I have the honor to be, &c. 

EDMUND BURKE. 

FOOTNOTES:

[15]

 Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec sævior ulla Pestis et ira Deûm Stygiis sese extulit undis. Virginei volucrum vultus, fœdissima ventris Proluvies, uncæque manus, et pallida semper Ora fame. 

Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that _he_ is Virgil) hadnot verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceivedher. Had he lived to our time, he would have been more overpowered withthe reality than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew thehorror of the times before him. Had he lived to see the revolutionistsand constitutionalists of France, he would have had more horrid anddisgusting features of his harpies to describe, and more frequentfailures in the attempt to describe them. 

[16] London, J. Dodsley, 1792, 3 vols. 4to. --Vol. II. Pp. 324-336, inthe present edition. 

[17] See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke ofBuckingham. Temp. Hen. VIII. 

[18] At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, etc. 

[19] Sir George Savile's act, called The _Nullum Tempus_ Act. 

[20] "Templum in modum arcis. "--TACITUS, of the temple of Jerusalem. 

[21] There is nothing on which the leaders of the Republic one andindivisible value themselves more than on the chemical operations bywhich; through science, they convert the pride of aristocracy to aninstrument of its own destruction, --on the operations by which theyreduce the magnificent ancient country-seats of the nobility, decoratedwith the _feudal_ titles of Duke, Marquis, or Earl, into magazines ofwhat they call _revolutionary_ gunpowder. They tell us, that hithertothings "had not yet been properly and in a _revolutionary_ mannerexplored, "--"The strong _chateaus_, those _feudal_ fortresses, that_were ordered to be demolished_ attracted next the attention of yourcommittee. _Nature_ there had _secretly_ regained her _rights_, and hadproduced saltpetre, for the _purpose_, as it should seem, _offacilitating the execution of your decree by preparing the means ofdestruction_. From these _ruins_, which _still frown_ on the libertiesof the Republic, we have extracted the means of producing good; andthose piles which have hitherto glutted the _pride of despots_, andcovered the plots of La Vendée, will soon furnish wherewithal to tamethe traitors and to overwhelm the disaffected, "--"The _rebelliouscities_, also, have afforded a large quantity of saltpetre. _CommuneAffranchie_" (that is, the noble city of Lyons, reduced in many parts toan heap of ruins) "and Toulon will pay a _second_ tribute to ourartillery. "--_Report, 1st February_, 1794. 

THREE LETTERS

ADDRESSED TO

A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT, ON THE

PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE. 

1796-7. 

LETTER I. 

ON THE OVERTURES OF PEACE. 

My Dear Sir, --Our last conversation, though not in the tone of absolutedespondency, was far from cheerful. We could not easily account for someunpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating thestate of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should haveexpected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the Englishcharacter. The disastrous events which have followed one upon another ina long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed tohave no end, --these were not the principal causes of our dejection. Wefeared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced tooppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud and great, and great because they were proud, a change in the national spirit isthe most terrible of all revolutions. 

I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot whichsaddens and perplexes the awful drama of Providence now acting on themoral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am atthe end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part ofits orbit the nation with which we are carried along moves at thisinstant it is not easy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advancedin its aphelion, --but when to return?

Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, ourbusiness is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or theworse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations uponmen and human affairs, it is of no small moment to distinguish things ofaccident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered. It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviationfrom our course. I am not quite of the mind of those speculators whoseem assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of things, allstates have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude thatare found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sortrather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn than supplyanalogies from whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to beforced into an analogy are not found in the same classes of existence. Individuals are physical beings, subject to laws universal andinvariable. The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure: thegeneral results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealthsare not physical, but moral essences. They are artificial combinations, and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions ofthe human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws whichnecessarily influence the stability of that kind of work made by thatkind of agent. There is not in the physical order (with which they donot appear to hold any assignable connection) a distinct cause by whichany of those fabrics must necessarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, inmy opinion, does the moral world produce anything more determinate onthat subject than what may serve as an amusement (liberal, indeed, andingenious, but still only an amusement) for speculative men. I doubtwhether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can beso, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes whichnecessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying theoperation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and muchmore obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causesthat tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community. 

It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find anyproportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assignand their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up thatoperation to mere chance, or, more piously, (perhaps more rationally, )to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the GreatDisposer. We have seen states of considerable duration, which for ageshave remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebbor flow. Some appear to have spent their vigor at their commencement. Some have blazed out in their glory a little before their extinction. The meridian of some has been the most splendid. Others, and they thegreatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periodsof their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment whensome of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace anddisaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course andopened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity and onthe very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a toweringand durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparentprevious change in the general circumstances which had brought on theirdistress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, hisretreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a wholenation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, havechanged the face of fortune, and almost of Nature. 

Such, and often influenced by such causes, has commonly been the fate ofmonarchies of long duration. They have their ebbs and their flows. Thishas been eminently the fate of the monarchy of France. There have beentimes in which no power has ever been brought so low. Few have everflourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that powerhad been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued notonly powerful, but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of themonarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by anyexterior symptoms of decline. The interior were not visible to everyeye; and a thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of whatthe most clear-sighted were not able to discern nor the most providentto divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there wasa kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the crown, which usuallyadds to government strength and authority at home. The crown seemed thento have obtained some of the most splendid objects of state ambition. None of the Continental powers of Europe were the enemies of France. They were all either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected withher; and in those who kept the most aloof there was little appearance ofjealousy, --of animosity there was no appearance at all. The Britishnation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to allappearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting off avery large and by far the most growing part of her empire. In that itsacme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high and palmy state ofthe monarchy of France, it fell to the ground without a struggle. Itfell without any of those vices in the monarch which have sometimes beenthe causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which existed, without anyvisible effect on the state, in the highest degree in many otherprinces, and, far from destroying their power, had only left some slightstains on their character. The financial difficulties were only pretextsand instruments of those who accomplished the ruin of that monarchy;they were not the causes of it. 

Deprived of the old government, deprived in a manner of all government, France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appearedmore likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to thedisposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge andterror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy inFrance has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far moreterrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imaginationand subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maximsand all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who couldnot believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on theprinciples which habit rather than Nature had persuaded them werenecessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinarymodes of action. But the constitution of any political being, as well asthat of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture tosay what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of itspower. The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic. Thatbankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assignedfor the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened hertraffic with the world. 

The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defacedmanufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated andhalf-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved, andfamished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course, from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actuallyconquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds ofthe rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself tothem, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by adisplay of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatestmilitary efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seemnot to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of whatsubsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition is only to be admitted toa more favored class in the order of servitude under that domineeringpower. 

This seems the temper of the day. At first the French force was too muchdespised. Now it is too much dreaded. As inconsiderate courage has givenway to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that, through the medium ofdeliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude. Whoknows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival ofhigh sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at theexpense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair whichhas often subdued distempers in the state for which no remedy could befound in the wisest councils?

Other great states having been without any regular, certain course ofelevation or decline, we may hope that the British fortune may fluctuatealso; because the public mind, which greatly influences that fortune, may have its changes. We are therefore never authorized to abandon ourcountry to its fate, or to act or advise as if it had no resource. Thereis no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means threaten to fail, thatno others can spring up. Whilst our heart is whole, it will find means, or make them. The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energyto the state. Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presumethat it will cease instantly to beat. The public must never be regardedas incurable. I remember, in the beginning of what has lately beencalled the Seven Years' War, that an eloquent writer and ingeniousspeculator, Dr. Brown, upon some reverses which happened in thebeginning of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse toprove that the distinguishing features of the people of England had beentotally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the nationalcharacter. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thoughta great consolation to us, the light people of this country, (who wereand are light, but who were not and are not effeminate, ) that we hadfound the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could notbe more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst, in thatsplenetic mood, we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, ofwhich we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost hisparticular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of thedistemper, --whilst, as in the Alps, goitre kept goitre incountenance, --whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a directconfession of our inferiority to France, and whilst many, very many, were ready to act upon a sense of that inferiority, --a few monthseffected a total change in our variable minds. We emerged from the gulfof that speculative despondency, and wore buoyed up to the highest pointof practical vigor. Never did the masculine spirit of England displayitself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouderpreëminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacyhad been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character bythe good people of this kingdom. 

For one, (if they be properly treated, ) I despair neither of the publicfortune nor of the public mind. There is much to be done, undoubtedly, and much to be retrieved. We must walk in new ways, or we can neverencounter our enemy in his devious march. We are not at an end of ourstruggle, nor near it. Let us not deceive ourselves: we are at thebeginning of great troubles. I readily acknowledge that the state ofpublic affairs is infinitely more unpromising than at the period I havejust now alluded to; and the position of all the powers of Europe, inrelation to us, and in relation to each other, is more intricate andcritical beyond all comparison. Difficult indeed is our situation. Inall situations of difficulty, men will be influenced in the part theytake, not only by the reason of the case, but by the peculiar turn oftheir own character. The same ways to safety do not present themselvesto all men, nor to the same men in different tempers. There is acourageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear. Under misfortunes, it often happens thatthe nerves of the understanding are so relaxed, the pressing peril ofthe hour so completely confounds all the faculties, that no futuredanger can be properly provided for, can be justly estimated, can be somuch as fully seen. The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished. Anabject distrust of ourselves, an extravagant admiration of the enemy, present us with no hope but in a compromise with his pride by asubmission to his will. This short plan of policy is the only counselwhich will obtain a hearing. We plunge into a dark gulf with all therash precipitation of fear. The nature of courage is, without aquestion, to be conversant with danger: but in the palpable night oftheir terrors, men under consternation suppose, not that it is thedanger which by a sure instinct calls out the courage to resist it, butthat it is the courage which produces the danger. They therefore seekfor a refuge from their fears in the fears themselves, and consider atemporizing meanness as the only source of safety. 

The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact, neveruniversal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timelycompromise with power has often been the means, and the only means; ofdrawling out their puny existence; but a great state is too muchenvied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are thingsnot to be begged; they must be commanded: and they who supplicate formercy from others can never hope for justice through themselves. Whatjustice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy, depends upon hischaracter; and that they ought well to know before they implicitlyconfide. 

Much controversy there has been in Parliament, and not a little amongstus out of doors, about the instrumental means of this nation towards themaintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights. On the mostelaborate and correct detail of facts, the result seems to be, that atno time has the wealth and power of Great Britain been so considerableas it is at this very perilous moment. We have a, vast interest topreserve, and we possess great means of preserving it: but it is to beremembered that the artificer may be incumbered by his tools, and thatresources may be among impediments. If wealth is the obedient andlaborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in itsplace and has its use; but if this order is changed, and honor is to besacrificed to the conservation of riches, riches, which have neithereyes nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot long survivethe being of their vivifying powers, their legitimate masters, and theirpotent protectors. If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free:if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. We are bought by theenemy with the treasure from our own coffers. Too great a sense of thevalue of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, aswell as the certain ruin of interests of a superior order. Often has aman lost his all because he would not submit to hazard all in defendingit. A display of our wealth before robbers is not the way to restraintheir boldness or to lessen their rapacity. This display is made, Iknow, to persuade the people of England that thereby we shall awe theenemy and improve the terms of our capitulation: it is made, not that weshould fight with more animation, but that we should supplicate withbetter hopes. We are mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who neverregarded our contest as a measuring and weighing of purses. He is theGaul that puts his _sword_ into the scale. He is more tempted with ourwealth as booty than terrified with it as power. But let us be rich orpoor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false orthis is true, that, where the essential public force (of which money isbut a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than toabandon its objects must have an infinite advantage over that which isresolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certainpoint. Humanly speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only withits being must give the law to that nation which will not push itsopposition beyond its convenience. 

If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of thenation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country canlong maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community ofmankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pityas insane. 

I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deservesthe discussion which perhaps I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannotarrange with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without abandoningthe interest of mankind. If we look only to our own petty _peculium_ inthe war, we have had some advantages, --advantages ambiguous in theirnature, and dearly bought. We have not in the slightest degree impairedthe strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which hisparticular force consists, --at the same time that new enemies toourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out ofthe wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy. So far as to theselfish part. As composing a part of the community of Europe, andinterested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of thingsmore doubtful and perplexing. When Louis the Fourteenth had made himselfmaster of one of the largest and most important provinces ofSpain, --when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering atthe gates of Turin, --when he had mastered almost all Germany on thisside the Rhine, --when he was on the point of ruining the august fabricof the Empire, --when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance, hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna, --when the Turk hungwith a mighty force over the Empire on the other side, --I do not knowthat in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of therenovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was sotruly alarming. To England it certainly was not. Holland (and Holland isa matter to England of value inestimable) was then powerful, was thenindependent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy andspirit. But the great resource of Europe was in England: not in a sortof England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herselfwith the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst allthe sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious, )but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied withEurope, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversityor the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs wasforeign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the onehand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist againstFrance, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neithercan England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the bodyof Christendom. 

Our account of the war, _as a war of communion_, to the very point inwhich we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was awar of disaster, and of little else. The independent advantages obtainedby us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense ofthat common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surestinterest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses. 

The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest, (and perhaps amongst theforemost, ) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error:that it was in our power to make peace with this monster of a state, whenever we chose to forget the crimes that made it great and thedesigns that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing toresist was the sure way to be secure. This "pale cast of thought"sicklied over all their enterprises, and turned all their politics awry. They could not, or rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocaldeclarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safetywas to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of thatkind of being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms that do notimply an inability hereafter to resist its designs. This great, prolificerror (I mean that peace was always in our power) has been the causethat rendered the Allies indifferent about the _direction_ of the war, and persuaded them that they might always risk a choice and even achange in its objects. They seldom improved any advantage, --hoping thatthe enemy, affected by it, would make a proffer of peace. Hence it wasthat all their early victories have been followed almost immediatelywith the usual effects of a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtainedby the Regicides have been followed by the consequences that werenatural. The discomfitures which the Republic of Assassins has sufferedhave uniformly called forth new exertions, which not only repaired oldlosses, but prepared new conquests. The losses of the Allies, on thecontrary, (no provision having been made on the speculation of such anevent, ) have been followed by desertion, by dismay, by disunion, by adereliction of their policy, by a flight from their principles, by anadmiration of the enemy, by mutual accusations, by a distrust in everymember of the Alliance of its fellow, of its cause, its power, and itscourage. 

Great difficulties in consequence of our erroneous policy, as I havesaid, press upon every side of us. Far from desiring to conceal or evento palliate the evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as myfoundation, that never greater existed. In a moment when sudden panic isapprehended, it may be wise for a while to conceal some great publicdisaster, or to reveal it by degrees, until the minds of the people havetime to be re-collected, that their understanding may have leisure torally, and that more steady councils may prevent their doing somethingdesperate under the first impressions of rage or terror. But with regardto a _general_ state of things, growing out of events and causes alreadyknown in the gross, there is no piety in the fraud that covers its truenature; because nothing but erroneous resolutions can be the result offalse representations. Those measures, which in common distress might beavailable, in greater are no better than playing with the evil. That theeffort may bear a proportion to the exigence, it is fit it should beknown, --known in its quality, in its extent, and in all thecircumstances which attend it. Great reverses of fortune there havebeen, and great embarrassments in council: a principled regicide enemypossessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for therest; within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority, whilst a cryis raised against it, as if it were the most ferocious of all despotism. A worse phenomenon: our government disowned by the most efficient memberof its tribunals, --ill-supported by any of their constituent parts, --andthe highest tribunal of all (from causes not for our present purpose toexamine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency whichmight enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supplythe want of every other court. Public prosecutions are become littlebetter than schools for treason, --of no use but to improve the dexterityof criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what completeimpunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safetyassassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except whatthe laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that isnot fury and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibreprognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the bodyof the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the veryaspect of the disease. [22] The doctor of the Constitution, pretending tounderrate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his ownoperation. He doubts and questions the salutary, but critical, terrorsof the cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even from hisdefeat, and covers impotence under the mask of lenity. He praises themoderation of the laws, as in his hands he sees them baffled anddespised. Is all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom arenot engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black andlegible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter. Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent toinfect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and of equity andjustice, (as it is, or it should not exist, ) ought to be severe, andawful too, --or the words of menace, whether written on the parchmentroll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne, will excitenothing but contempt. How comes it that in all the state prosecutions ofmagnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, thecrown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts?Whence this alarming change? By a connection easily felt, and notimpossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts of the state havetheir correspondence and consent. They who bow to the enemy abroad willnot be of power to subdue the conspirator at home. It is impossible notto observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jawsof anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as we areattracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperateenterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state areawakened into life. The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelledand burned up before them. Our most salutary and most beautifulinstitutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law isno more than stubble. It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases inthe state to sink in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the maladyremains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest degree mitigated inits malignity, though it waits the favorable moment of a freercommunication with the source of regicide to exert and to increase itsforce. 

Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot beprotected by its laws? I hardly think it. On the contrary, I conceivethat these things happen because men are not changed, but remain alwayswhat they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be, when abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, orcontrol: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; todespise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; tofind no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a presentinconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow tofortune; to admire successful, though wicked enterprise, and to imitatewhat we admire; to contemn the government which announces danger fromsacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in their infancy and theirstruggle, but which finds nothing that can alarm in their adult state, and in the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a masswe cannot be left to ourselves. We must have leaders. If none willundertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive toconduct us to shame and ruin. 

We are in a war of a _peculiar_ nature. It is not with an ordinarycommunity, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest mayveer about, --not with a state which makes war through wantonness, andabandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system which by itsessence is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace orwar as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is withan _armed doctrine_ that we are at war. It has, by its essence, afaction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country. To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel. It has one foot on aforeign shore, the other upon the British soil. Thus advantaged, if itcan at all exist, it must finally prevail. Nothing can so completelyruin any of the old governments, ours in particular, as theacknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiorityin this new power. This acknowledgment we make, if, in a bad or doubtfulsituation of our affairs, we solicit peace, or if we yield to the modesof new humiliation in which alone she is content to give us an hearing. By that means the terms cannot be of our choosing, --no, not in any part. 

It is laid in the unalterable constitution of things, --None can aspireto act greatly but those who are of force greatly to suffer. They whomake their arrangements in the first run of misadventure, and in atemper of mind the common fruit of disappointment and dismay, put a sealon their calamities. To their power they take a security against anyfavors which they might hope from the usual inconstancy of fortune. I amtherefore, my dear friend, invariably of your opinion, (though full ofrespect for those who think differently, ) that neither the time chosenfor it, nor the manner of soliciting a negotiation, were properlyconsidered, --even though I had allowed (I hardly shall allow) that withthe horde of Regicides we could by any selection of time or use of meansobtain anything at all deserving the name of peace. 

In one point we are lucky. The Regicide has received our advances withscorn. We have an enemy to whose virtues we can owe nothing, but on thisoccasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more tohis insolence than to our own precaution. The haughtiness by which theproud repel us has this of good in it, --that, in making us keep ourdistance, they must keep their distance too. In the present case, thepride of the Regicide may be our safety. He has given time for ourreason to operate, and for British dignity to recover from its surprise. From first to last he has rejected all our advances. Far as we havegone, he has still left a way open to our retreat. 

There is always an augury to be taken of what a peace is likely to befrom the preliminary steps that are made to bring it about. We maygather something from the time in which the first overtures are made, from the quarter whence they come, from the manner in which they arereceived. These discover the temper of the parties. If your enemyoffers peace in the moment of success, it indicates that he is satisfiedwith something. It shows that there are limits to his ambition or hisresentment. If he offers nothing under misfortune, it is probable thatit is more painful to him to abandon the prospect of advantage than toendure calamity. If he rejects solicitation, and will not give even anod to the suppliants for peace, until a change in the fortune of thewar threatens him with ruin, then I think it evident that he wishesnothing more than to disarm his adversary to gain time. Afterwards aquestion arises, Which of the parties is likely to obtain the greateradvantages by continuing disarmed and by the use of time?

With these few plain indications in our minds, it will not be improperto reconsider the conduct of the enemy together with our own, from theday that a question of peace has been in agitation. In considering thispart of the question, I do not proceed on my own hypothesis. I suppose, for a moment, that this body of Regicide, calling itself a Republic, isa politic person, with whom something deserving the name of peace may bemade. On that supposition, let us examine our own proceeding. Let uscompute the profit it has brought, and the advantage that it is likelyto bring hereafter. A peace too eagerly sought is not always the soonerobtained. The discovery of vehement wishes generally frustrates theirattainment, and your adversary has gained a great advantage over youwhen he finds you impatient to conclude a treaty. There is in reservenot only something of dignity, but a great deal of prudence too. A sortof courage belongs to negotiation, as well as to operations of thefield. A negotiator must often seem willing to hazard the whole issueof his treaty, if he wishes to secure any one material point. 

The Regicides were the first to declare war. We are the first to sue forpeace. In proportion to the humility and perseverance we have shown inour addresses has been the obstinacy of their arrogance in rejecting oursuit. The patience of their pride seems to have been worn out with theimportunity of our courtship. Disgusted as they are with a conduct sodifferent from all the sentiments by which they are themselves filled, they think to put an end to our vexatious solicitation by redoublingtheir insults. 

It happens frequently that pride may reject a public advance, whileinterest listens to a secret suggestion of advantage. The opportunityhas been afforded. At a very early period in the diplomacy ofhumiliation, a gentleman was sent on an errand, [23] of which, from themotive of it, whatever the event might be, we can never be ashamed. Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation. It is its very character tosubmit to such things. There is a consanguinity between benevolence andhumility. They are virtues of the same stock. Dignity is of as good arace; but it belongs to the family of fortitude. In the spirit of thatbenevolence, we sent a gentleman to beseech the Directory of Regicidenot to be quite so prodigal as their republic had been of judicialmurder. We solicited them to spare the lives of some unhappy persons ofthe first distinction, whose safety at other times could not have beenan object of solicitation. They had quitted France on the faith of thedeclaration of the rights of citizens. They never had been in theservice of the Regicides, nor at their hands had received any stipend. The very system and constitution of government that now prevails wassettled subsequent to their emigration. They were under the protectionof Great Britain, and in his Majesty's pay and service. Not an hostileinvasion, but the disasters of the sea, had thrown them upon a shoremore barbarous and inhospitable than the inclement ocean under the mostpitiless of its storms. Here was an opportunity to express a feeling forthe miseries of war, and to open some sort of conversation, which, (after our public overtures had glutted their pride, ) at a cautious andjealous distance, might lead to something like an accommodation. --Whatwas the event? A strange, uncouth thing, a theatrical figure of theopera, his head shaded with three-colored plumes, his body fantasticallyhabited, strutted from the back scenes, and, after a short speech, inthe mock-heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered the gentleman whocame to make the representation into the custody of a guard, withdirections not to lose sight of him for a moment, and then ordered himto be sent from Paris in two hours. 

Here it is impossible that a sentiment of tenderness should not strikeathwart the sternness of politics, and make us recall to painful memorythe difference between this insolent and bloody theatre and thetemperate, natural majesty of a civilized court, where the afflictedfamily of Asgill did not in vain solicit the mercy of the highest inrank and the most compassionate of the compassionate sex. 

In this intercourse, at least, there was nothing to promise a great dealof success in our future advances. Whilst the fortune of the field waswholly with the Regicides, nothing was thought of but to follow where itled: and it led to everything. Not so much as a talk of treaty. Lawswere laid down with arrogance. The most moderate politician in theirclan[24] was chosen as the organ, not so much for prescribing limits totheir claims as to mark what for the present they are content to leaveto others. They made, not laws, not conventions, not late possession, but physical Nature and political convenience the sole foundation oftheir claims. The Rhine, the Mediterranean, and the ocean were thebounds which, for the time, they assigned to the Empire of Regicide. What was the Chamber of Union of Louis the Fourteenth, which astonishedand provoked all Europe, compared to this declaration? In truth, withthese limits, and their principle, they would not have left even theshadow of liberty or safety to any nation. This plan of empire was nottaken up in the first intoxication of unexpected success. You mustrecollect that it was projected, just as the report has stated it, fromthe very first revolt of the faction against their monarchy; and it hasbeen uniformly pursued, as a standing maxim of national policy, fromthat time to this. It is generally in the season of prosperity that mendiscover their real temper, principles, and designs. But this principle, suggested in their first struggles, fully avowed in their prosperity, has, in the most adverse state of their affairs, been tenaciouslyadhered to. The report, combined with their conduct, forms an infalliblecriterion of the views of this republic. 

In their fortune there has been some fluctuation. We are to see howtheir minds have been affected with a change. Some impression it made onthem, undoubtedly. It produced some oblique notice of the submissionsthat were made by suppliant nations. The utmost they did was to makesome of those cold, formal, general professions of a love of peace whichno power has ever refused to make, because they mean little and costnothing. The first paper I have seen (the publication at Hamburg) makinga show of that pacific disposition discovered a rooted animosity againstthis nation, and an incurable rancor, even more than any one of theirhostile acts. In this Hamburg declaration they choose to suppose thatthe war, on the part of England, _is a war of government, begun andcarried on against the sense and interests of the people_, --thus sowingin their very overtures towards peace the seeds of tumult and sedition:for they never have abandoned, and never will they abandon, in peace, inwar, in treaty, in any situation, or for one instant, their old, steadymaxim of separating the people from their government. Let me add, (andit is with unfeigned anxiety for the character and credit of ministersthat I do add, ) if our government perseveres in its as uniform course ofacting under instruments with such preambles, it pleads guilty to thecharges made by our enemies against it, both on its own part and on thepart of Parliament itself. The enemy must succeed in his plan forloosening and disconnecting all the internal holdings of the kingdom. 

It was not enough that the speech from the throne, in the opening of thesession in 1795, threw out oglings and glances of tenderness. Lest thiscoquetting should seem too cold and ambiguous, without waiting for itseffect, the violent passion for a relation to the Regicides produced adirect message from the crown, and its consequences from the two Housesof Parliament. On the part of the Regicides these declarations could notbe entirely passed by without notice; but in that notice they discoveredstill more clearly the bottom of their character. The offer made to themby the message to Parliament was hinted at in their answer, --but in anobscure and oblique manner, as before. They accompanied their notice ofthe indications manifested on our side with every kind of insolent andtaunting reflection. The Regicide Directory, on the day which, in theirgypsy jargon, they call the 5th of _Pluviose_, in return for ouradvances, charge us with eluding our declarations under "evasiveformalities and frivolous pretexts. " What these pretexts and evasionswere they do not say, and I have never heard. But they do not restthere. They proceed to charge us, and, as it should seem, our allies inthe mass, with direct _perfidy_; they are so conciliatory in theirlanguage as to hint that this perfidious character is not new in ourproceedings. However, notwithstanding this our habitual perfidy, theywill offer peace "on conditions _as_ moderate"--as what? as reason andas equity require? No, --as moderate "as are suitable to their _nationaldignity_. " National dignity in all treaties I do admit is an importantconsideration: they have given us an useful hint on that subject: butdignity hitherto has belonged to the mode of proceeding, not to thematter of a treaty. Never before has it been mentioned as the standardfor rating the conditions of peace, --no, never by the most violent ofconquerors. Indemnification is capable of some estimate; dignity has nostandard. It is impossible to guess what acquisitions pride and ambitionmay think fit for their _dignity_. But lest any doubt should remain onwhat they think for their dignity, the Regicides in the next paragraphtell us "that they will have no peace with their enemies, until theyhave reduced them to a state which will put them under an_impossibility_ of pursuing their wretched projects, "--that is, in plainFrench or English, until they have accomplished our utter andirretrievable ruin. This is their _pacific_ language. It flows fromtheir unalterable principle, in whatever language they speak or whateversteps they take, whether of real war or of pretended pacification. Theyhave never, to do them justice, been at much trouble in concealing theirintentions. We were as obstinately resolved to think them not inearnest: but I confess, jests of this sort, whatever their urbanity maybe, are not much to my taste. 

To this conciliatory and amicable public communication our sole answer, in effect, is this:--"Citizen Regicides! whenever _you_ find yourselvesin the humor, you may have a peace with _us_. That is a point you mayalways command. We are constantly in attendance, and nothing you can doshall hinder us from the renewal of our supplications. You may turn usout at the door, but we will jump in at the window. "

To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, Ido not know a more mortifying spectacle than to see the assembledmajesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in theantechamber of Regicide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinarytyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested bloodof his sovereign. Then, when, sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shallhave sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shallnext glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is hispleasure to be awake, and that he is at leisure to receive the proposalsof his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite theexecution of the sentence he has passed upon them. At the opening ofthose doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries ofroyal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of theirdegradation, sneaking into the Regicide presence, and, with the relicsof the smile which they had dressed up for the levee of their mastersstill flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains oftheir courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin ofa bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuringthem with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of hisguillotine! These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers asthey went; but can they ever return from that degrading residence loyaland faithful subjects, or with any true affection to their master, ortrue attachment to the constitution, religion, or laws of their country?There is great danger that they, who enter smiling into this Trophoniancave, will come out of it sad and serious conspirators, and such willcontinue as long as they live. They will become true conductors ofcontagion to every country which has had the misfortune to send them tothe source of that electricity. At best, they will become totallyindifferent to good and evil, to one institution or another. Thisspecies of indifference is but too generally distinguishable in thosewho have been much employed in foreign courts, but in the present casethe evil must be aggravated without measure: for they go from theircountry, not with the pride of the old character, but in a state of thelowest degradation; and what must happen in their place of residence canhave no effect in raising them to the level of true dignity or of chasteself-estimation, either as men or as representatives of crowned heads. 

Our early proceeding, which has produced these returns of affront, appeared to me totally new, without being adapted to the newcircumstances of affairs. I have called to my mind the speeches andmessages in former times. I find nothing like these. You will look inthe journals to find whether my memory fails me. Before this time, neverwas a ground of peace laid, (as it were, in a Parliamentary record, )until it had been as good as concluded. This was a wise homage paid tothe discretion of the crown. It was known how much a negotiation mustsuffer by having anything in the train towards it prematurely disclosed. But when those Parliamentary declarations were made, not so much as astep had been taken towards a negotiation in any mode whatever. Themeasure was an unpleasant and unseasonable discovery. 

I conceive that another circumstance in that transaction has been aslittle authorized by any example, and that it is as little prudent initself: I mean the formal recognition of the French Republic. Withoutentering, for the present, into a question on the good faith manifestedin that measure, or on its general policy, I doubt, upon mere temporaryconsiderations of prudence, whether it was perfectly advisable. It isnot within, the rules of dexterous conduct to make an acknowledgment ofa contested title in your enemy before you are morally certain that yourrecognition will secure his friendship. Otherwise it is a measure worsethan thrown away. It adds infinitely to the strength, and consequentlyto the demands, of the adverse party. He has gained a fundamental pointwithout an equivalent. It has happened as might have been foreseen. Nonotice whatever was taken of this recognition. In fact, the Directorynever gave themselves any concern about it; and they received ouracknowledgment with perfect scorn. With them it is not for the states ofEurope to judge of their title: the very reverse. In their eye the titleof every other power depends wholly on their pleasure. 

Preliminary declarations of this sort, thrown out at random, and sown, as it wore, broadcast, were never to be found in the mode of ourproceeding with France and Spain, whilst the great monarchies of Franceand Spain existed. I do not say that a diplomatic measure ought to be, like a parliamentary or a judicial proceeding, according to strictprecedent: I hope I am far from that pedantry. But this I know: that agreat state ought to have some regard to its ancient maxims, especiallywhere they indicate its dignity, where they concur with the rules ofprudence, and, above all, where the circumstances of the time requirethat a spirit of innovation should be resisted which leads to thehumiliation of sovereign powers. It would be ridiculous to assert thatthose powers have suffered nothing in their estimation. I admit thatthe greater interests of state will for a moment supersede all otherconsiderations; but if there was a rule, that a sovereign never shouldlet down his dignity without a sure payment to his interest, the dignityof kings would be held high enough. At present, however, fashion governsin more serious things than furniture and dress. It looks as ifsovereigns abroad were emulous in bidding against their estimation. Itseems as if the preëminence of regicide was acknowledged, --and thatkings tacitly ranked themselves below their sacrilegious murderers, asnatural magistrates and judges over them. It appears as if dignity werethe prerogative of crime, and a temporizing humiliation the proper partfor venerable authority. If the vilest of mankind are resolved to be themost wicked, they lose all the baseness of their origin, and take theirplace above kings. This example in foreign princes I trust will notspread. It is the concern of mankind, that the destruction of ordershould not, be a claim to rank, that crimes should not be the only titleto preëminence and honor. 

At this second stage of humiliation, (I mean the insulting declarationin consequence of the message to both Houses of Parliament, ) it mightnot have been amiss to pause, and not to squander away the fund of oursubmissions, until we knew what final purposes of public interest theymight answer. The policy of subjecting ourselves to further insults isnot to me quite apparent. It was resolved, however, to hazard a thirdtrial. Citizen Barthélemy had been established, on the part of the newrepublic, at Basle, --where, with his proconsulate of Switzerland and theadjacent parts of Germany, he was appointed as a sort of factor to dealin the degradation of the crowned heads of Europe. At Basle it wasthought proper, in order to keep others, I suppose, in countenance, thatGreat Britain should appear at this market, and bid with the rest forthe mercy of the People-King. 

On the 6th of March, 1796, Mr. Wickham, in consequence of authority, wasdesired to sound France on her disposition towards a generalpacification, --to know whether she would consent to send ministers to acongress at such a place as might be hereafter agreed upon, --whetherthere would be a disposition to communicate the general grounds of apacification, such as France (the diplomatic name of the Regicide power)would be willing to propose, as a foundation for a negotiation for peacewith his Majesty _and his allies_, or to suggest any other way ofarriving at the same end of a general pacification: but he had noauthority to enter into any negotiation or discussion with CitizenBarthélemy upon these subjects. 

On the part of Great Britain this measure was a voluntary act, whollyuncalled for on the part of Regicide. Suits of this sort are at leaststrong indications of a desire for accommodation. Any other body of menbut the Directory would be somewhat soothed with such advances. Theycould not, however, begin their answer, which was given without muchdelay, and communicated on the 28th of the same month, without apreamble of insult and reproach. "They doubt the sincerity of thepacific intentions of this court. " She did not begin, say they, yet to"know her real interests. " "She did not seek peace _with good faith_. "This, or something to this effect, has been the constant preliminaryobservation (now grown into a sort of office form) on all our overturesto this power: a perpetual charge on the British government of fraud, evasion, and habitual perfidy. 

It might be asked, From whence did these opinions of our insincerity andill faith arise? It was because the British ministry (leaving to theDirectory, however, to propose a better mode) proposed a _congress_ forthe purpose of a general pacification, and this they said "would rendernegotiation endless. " From hence they immediately inferred a fraudulentintention in the offer. Unquestionably their mode of giving the lawwould bring matters to a more speedy conclusion. As to any other methodmore agreeable to them than a congress, an alternative expresslyproposed to them, they did not condescend to signify their pleasure. 

This refusal of treating conjointly with the powers allied against thisrepublic furnishes matter for a great deal of serious reflection. Theyhave hitherto constantly declined any other than a treaty with a singlepower. By thus dissociating every state from every other, like deerseparated from the herd, each power is treated with on the merit of hisbeing a deserter from the common cause. In that light, the Regicidepower, finding each of them insulated and unprotected, with greatfacility gives the law to them all. By this system, for the present anincurable distrust is sown amongst confederates, and in future allalliance is rendered impracticable. It is thus they have treated withPrussia, with Spain, with Sardinia, with Bavaria, with theEcclesiastical State, with Saxony; and here we see them refuse to treatwith Great Britain in any other mode. They must be worse than blind whodo not see with what undeviating regularity of system, in this case andin all cases, they pursue their scheme for the utter destruction ofevery independent power, --especially the smaller, who cannot find anyrefuge whatever but in some common cause. 

Renewing their taunts and reflections, they tell Mr. Wickham, "that_their_ policy has no guides but openness and good faith, and that theirconduct shall be conformable to these principles. " They say concerningtheir government, that, "yielding to the ardent desire by which it isanimated to procure peace for the French Republic and for all nations, it will not _fear to declare itself openly_. Charged by the Constitutionwith the execution of the _laws_, it cannot _make_ or _listen_ to anyproposal that would be contrary to them. The constitutional act does notpermit it to consent to any alienation of that which, according to theexisting laws, constitutes the territory of the Republic. "

"With respect to the countries _occupied by the French armies, and whichhave not been united to France_, they, as well as other interests, political and commercial, may become the subject of a negotiation, whichwill present to the Directory the means of proving how much it desiresto attain speedily to a happy pacification. " That "the Directory isready to receive, in this respect, any overtures that shall be just, reasonable, and compatible _with the dignity of the Republic_. "

On the head of what is _not_ to be the subject of negotiation, theDirectory is clear and open. As to what may be a matter of treaty, allthis open dealing is gone. She retires into her shell. There she expectsovertures from _you_: and you are to guess what she shall judge just, reasonable, and, above all, _compatible with her dignity_. 

In the records of pride there does not exist so insulting a declaration. It is insolent in words, in manner; but in substance it is not onlyinsulting, but alarming. It is a specimen of what may be expected fromthe masters we are preparing for our humbled country. Their openness andcandor consist in a direct avowal of their despotism and ambition. Weknow that their declared resolution had been to surrender no objectbelonging to France previous to the war. They had resolved that theRepublic was entire, and must remain so. As to what she has conqueredfrom the Allies and united to the same indivisible body, it is of thesame nature. That is, the Allies are to give up whatever conquests theyhave made or may make upon France; but all which she has violentlyravished from her neighbors, and thought fit to appropriate, are not tobecome so much as objects of negotiation. 

In this unity and indivisibility of possession are sunk ten immense andwealthy provinces, full of strong, flourishing, and opulent cities, (theAustrian Netherlands, ) the part of Europe the most necessary to preserveany communication between this kingdom and its natural allies, next toHolland the most interesting to this country, and without which Hollandmust virtually belong to France. Savoy and Nice, the keys of Italy, andthe citadel in her hands to bridle Switzerland, are in thatconsolidation. The important territory of Liege is torn out of the heartof the Empire. All these are integrant parts of the Republic, not to besubject to any discussion, or to be purchased by any equivalent. Why?Because there is a law which prevents it. What law? The law of nations?The acknowledged public law of Europe? Treaties and conventions ofparties? No, --not a pretence of the kind. It is a declaration not madein consequence of any prescription on her side, --not on any cession ordereliction, actual or tacit, of other powers. It is a declaration, _pendente lite_, in the middle of a war, one principal object of whichwas originally the defence, and has since been the recovery, of thesevery countries. 

This strange law is not made for a trivial object, not for a single portor for a single fortress, but for a great kingdom, --for the religion, the morals, the laws, the liberties, the lives and fortunes of millionsof human creatures, who, without their consent or that of their lawfulgovernment, are, by an arbitrary act of this regicide and homicidegovernment which they call a law, incorporated into their tyranny. 

In other words, their will is the law, not only at home, but as to theconcerns of every nation. Who has made that law but the RegicideRepublic itself, whose laws, like those of the Medes and Persians, theycannot alter or abrogate, or even so much as take into consideration?Without the least ceremony or compliment, they have sent out of theworld whole sets of laws and lawgivers. They have swept away the veryconstitutions under which the legislatures acted and the laws were made. Even the fundamental sacred rights of man they have not scrupled toprofane. They have set this holy code at nought with ignominy and scorn. Thus they treat all their domestic laws and constitutions, and even whatthey had considered as a law of Nature. But whatever they have put theirseal on, for the purposes of their ambition, and the ruin of theirneighbors, this alone is invulnerable, impassible, immortal. Assuming tobe masters of everything human and divine, here, and here alone, itseems, they are limited, "cooped and cabined in, " and this omnipotentlegislature finds itself wholly without the power of exercising itsfavorite attribute, the love of peace. In other words, they are powerfulto usurp, impotent to restore; and equally by their power and theirimpotence they aggrandize themselves, and weaken and impoverish you andall other nations. 

Nothing can be more proper or more manly than the state publication, called a _Note_, on this proceeding, dated Downing Street, the 10th ofApril, 1796. Only that it is better expressed, it perfectly agrees withthe opinion I have taken the liberty of submitting to yourconsideration. I place it below at full length, [25] as my justificationin thinking that this astonishing paper from the Directory is not only adirect negative to all treaty, but is a rejection of every principleupon which treaties could be made. To admit it for a moment were toerect this power, usurped at home, into a legislature to govern mankind. It is an authority that on a thousand occasions they have asserted inclaim, and, whenever they are able, exerted in practice. Thedereliction, of this whole scheme of policy became, therefore, anindispensable previous condition to all renewal of treaty. The remark ofthe British Cabinet on this arrogant and tyrannical claim is natural andunavoidable. Our ministry state, that, "_while these dispositions shallbe persisted in, nothing is left for the king but to prosecute a warthat is just and necessary_. "

It was of course that we should wait until the enemy showed some sort ofdisposition on his part to fulfil this condition. It was hoped, indeed, that our suppliant strains might be suffered to steal into the augustear in a more propitious season. That season, however, invoked by somany vows, conjurations, and prayers, did not come. Every declaration ofhostility renovated, and every act pursued with double animosity, --theoverrunning of Lombardy, --the subjugation of Piedmont, --the possessionof its impregnable fortresses, --the seizing on all the neutral states ofItaly, --our expulsion from Leghorn, --instances forever renewed for ourexpulsion from Genoa, --Spain rendered subject to them and hostile tous, --Portugal bent under the yoke, --half the Empire overrun andravaged, --were the only signs which this mild Republic thought proper tomanifest of her pacific sentiments. Every demonstration of an implacablerancor and an untamable pride were the only encouragements we receivedto the renewal of our supplications. 

Here, therefore, they and we were fixed. Nothing was left to the Britishministry but "to prosecute a war just and necessary, "--a war equallyjust as at the time of our engaging in it, --a war become ten times morenecessary by everything which happened afterwards. This resolution wassoon, however, forgot. It felt the heat of the season and melted away. New hopes were entertained from supplication. No expectations, indeed, were then formed from renewing a direct application to the FrenchRegicides through the agent-general for the humiliation of sovereigns. At length a step was taken in degradation which even went lower than allthe rest. Deficient in merits of our own, a mediator was to besought, --and we looked for that mediator at Berlin! The King ofPrussia's merits in abandoning the general cause might have obtained forhim some sort of influence in favor of those whom he had deserted; but Ihave never heard that his Prussian Majesty had lately discovered somarked an affection for the Court of St. James's, or for the Court ofVienna, as to excite much hope of his interposing a very powerfulmediation to deliver them from the distresses into which he had broughtthem. 

If humiliation is the element in which we live, if it is become not onlyour occasional policy, but our habit, no great objection can be made tothe modes in which it may be diversified, --though I confess I cannot becharmed with the idea of our exposing our lazar sores at the door ofevery proud servitor of the French Republic, where the court dogs willnot deign to lick them. We had, if I am not mistaken, a minister at thatcourt, who might try its temper, and recede and advance as he foundbackwardness or encouragement. But to send a gentleman there on no othererrand than this, and with no assurance whatever that he should notfind, what he did find, a repulse, seems to me to go far beyond all thedemands of a humiliation merely politic. I hope it did not arise from apredilection for that mode of conduct. 

The cup of bitterness was not, however, drained to the dregs. Basle andBerlin were not sufficient. After so many and so diversified repulses, we were resolved to make another experiment, and to try anothermediator. Among the unhappy gentlemen in whose persons royalty isinsulted and degraded at the seat of plebeian pride and upstartinsolence, there is a minister from Denmark at Paris. Without anyprevious encouragement to that, any more than the other steps, we sentthrough, this turnpike to demand a passport for a person who on our partwas to solicit peace in the metropolis, at the footstool of Regicideitself. It was not to be expected that any one of those degraded beingscould have influence enough to settle any part of the terms in favor ofthe candidates for further degradation; besides, such intervention wouldbe a direct breach in their system, which did not permit one sovereignpower to utter a word in the concerns of his equal. --Another repulse. Wewere desired to apply directly in our persons. We submitted, and madethe application. 

It might be thought that here, at length, we had touched the bottom ofhumiliation; our lead was brought up covered with mud. But "in thelowest deep, a lower deep" was to open for us still more profoundabysses of disgrace and shame. However, in we leaped. We came forward inour own name. The passport, such a passport and safe-conduct as would begranted to thieves who might come in to betray their accomplices, and nobetter, was granted to British supplication. To leave no doubt of itsspirit, as soon as the rumor of this act of condescension could getabroad, it was formally announced with an explanation from authority, containing an invective against the ministry of Great Britain, theirhabitual frauds, their proverbial _Punic_ perfidy. No such state-paper, as a preliminary to a negotiation for peace, has ever yet appeared. Veryfew declarations of war have ever shown so much and so unqualifiedanimosity. I place it below, [26] as a diplomatic curiosity, and inorder to be the better understood in the few remarks I have to make upona peace which, indeed, defies all description. "None but itself can beits parallel. "

I pass by all the insolence and contumely of the performance, as itcomes from them. The present question is not, how we are to be affectedwith it in regard to our dignity. That is gone. I shall say no moreabout it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride! I shallonly observe upon it _politically_, and as furnishing a direction forour own conduct in this low business. 

The very idea of a negotiation for peace, whatever the inward sentimentsof the parties may be, implies some confidence in their faith, somedegree of belief in the professions which are made concerning it. Atemporary and occasional credit, at least, is granted. Otherwise menstumble on the very threshold. I therefore wish to ask what hope we canhave of their good faith, who, as the very basis of the negotiation, assume the ill faith and treachery of those they have to deal with? Theterms, as against us, must be such as imply a full security against atreacherous conduct, --that is, such terms as this Directory stated inits first declaration, to place us "in an utter impossibility ofexecuting our wretched projects. " This is the omen, and the sole omen, under which we have consented to open our treaty. 

The second observation I have to make upon it (much connected, undoubtedly, with the first) is, that they have informed you of theresult they propose from the kind of peace they mean to grant you, --that is to say, the union they propose among nations with the view ofrivalling our trade and destroying our naval power; and this theysuppose (and with good reason, too) must be the inevitable effect oftheir peace. It forms one of their principal grounds for suspecting ourministers could not be in good earnest in their proposition. They makeno scruple beforehand to tell you the whole of what they intend; andthis is what we call, in the modern style, the acceptance of aproposition for peace! In old language it would be called a mosthaughty, offensive, and insolent rejection of all treaty. 

Thirdly, they tell you what they conceive to be the perfidious policywhich dictates your delusive offer: that is, the design of cheating notonly them, but the people of England, against whose interest andinclination this war is supposed to be carried on. 

If we proceed in this business, under this preliminary declaration, itseems to me that we admit, (now for the third time, ) by something agreat deal stronger than words, the truth of the charges of every kindwhich they make upon the British ministry, and the grounds of those foulimputations. The language used by us, which in other circumstances wouldnot be exceptionable, in this case tends very strongly to confirm andrealize the suspicion of our enemy: I mean the declaration, that, if wedo not obtain such terms of peace as suits our opinion of what ourinterests require, _then_, and in _that_ case, we shall continue the warwith vigor. This offer, so reasoned, plainly implies, that, without it, our leaders themselves entertain great doubts of the opinion and goodaffections of the British people; otherwise there does not appear anycause why we should proceed, under the scandalous construction of ourenemy, upon the former offer made by Mr. Wickham, and on the new offermade directly at Paris. It is not, therefore, from a sense of dignity, but from the danger of radicating that false sentiment in the breasts ofthe enemy, that I think, under the auspices of this declaration, wecannot, with the least hope of a good event, or, indeed, with anyregard to the common safety, proceed in the train of this negotiation. I wish ministry would seriously consider the importance of their seemingto confirm the enemy in an opinion that his frequent use of appeals tothe people against their government has not been without its effect. Ifit puts an end to this war, it will render another impracticable. 

Whoever goes to the Directorial presence under this passport, with thisoffensive comment and foul explanation, goes, in the avowed sense of thecourt to which he is sent, as the instrument of a government dissociatedfrom the interests and wishes of the nation, for the purpose of cheatingboth the people of France and the people of England. He goes out thedeclared emissary of a faithless ministry. He has perfidy for hiscredentials. He has national weakness for his full powers. I yet doubtwhether any one can be found to invest himself with that character. Ifthere should, it would be pleasant to read his instructions on theanswer which he is to give to the Directory, in case they should repeatto him the substance of the manifesto which he carries with him in hisportfolio. 

So much for the _first_ manifesto of the Regicide Court which went alongwith the passport. Lest this declaration should seem the effect ofhaste, or a mere sudden effusion of pride and insolence, on fulldeliberation, about a week after comes out a second. This manifesto isdated the 5th of October, one day before the speech from the throne, onthe vigil of the festive day of cordial unanimity so happily celebratedby all parties in the British Parliament. In this piece the Regicides, our worthy friends, (I call them by advance and by courtesy what by lawI shall be obliged to call them hereafter, ) our worthy friends, I say, renew and enforce the former declaration concerning our faith andsincerity, which they pinned to our passport. On three other points, which run through all their declarations, they are more explicit thanever. 

First, they more directly undertake to be the real representatives ofthe people of this kingdom: and on a supposition, in which they agreewith our Parliamentary reformers, that the House of Commons is not thatrepresentative, the function being vacant, they, as our trueconstitutional organ, inform his Majesty and the world of the sense ofthe nation. They tell us that "the English people see with regret hisMajesty's government squandering away the funds which had been grantedto him. " This astonishing assumption of the public voice of England isbut a slight foretaste of the usurpation which, on a peace, we may beassured they will make of all the powers in all the parts of our vassalConstitution. "If they do these things in the green tree, what shall bedone in the dry?"

Next they tell us, as a condition to our treaty, that "this governmentmust abjure the unjust hatred it bears to them, and at last open itsears to the voice of humanity. " Truly, this is, even from them, anextraordinary demand. Hitherto, it seems, we have put wax into our ears, to shut them up against the tender, soothing strains, in the_affettuoso_ of humanity, warbled from the throats of Reubell, Carnot, Tallien, and the whole chorus of confiscators, domiciliary visitors, committee-men of research, jurors and presidents of revolutionarytribunals, regicides, assassins, massacrers, and Septembrisers. It isnot difficult to discern what sort of humanity our government is tolearn from these Siren singers. Our government also; I admit, with somereason, as a step towards the proposed fraternity, is required to abjurethe unjust hatred which it bears to this body of honor and virtue. Ithank God I am neither a minister nor a leader of opposition. I protestI cannot do what they desire. I could not do it, if I were under theguillotine, --or, as they ingeniously and pleasantly express it, "lookingout of the little national window. " Even at that opening I could receivenone of their light. I am fortified against all such affections by thedeclaration of the government, which I must yet consider as lawful, madeon the 29th of October, 1793, [27] and still ringing in my ears. ThisDeclaration was transmitted not only to all our commanders by sea andland, but to our ministers in every court of Europe. It is the mosteloquent and highly finished in the style, the most judicious in thechoice of topics, the most orderly in the arrangement, and the most richin the coloring, without employing the smallest degree of exaggeration, of any state-paper that has ever yet appeared. An ancient writer(Plutarch, I think it is) quotes some verses on the eloquence ofPericles, who is called "the only orator that left stings in the mindsof his hearers. " Like his, the eloquence of the Declaration, notcontradicting, but enforcing, sentiments of the truest humanity, hasleft stings that have penetrated more than skin-deep into my mind andnever can they be extracted by all the surgery of murder; never can thethrobbings they have created be assuaged by all the emollient cataplasmsof robbery and confiscation. I _cannot_ love the Republic. 

The third point, which they have more clearly expressed than ever, is ofequal importance with the rest, and with them furnishes a complete viewof the Regicide system. For they demand as a condition, without whichour ambassador of obedience cannot be received with any hope of success, that he shall be "provided with full powers to negotiate a peace betweenthe French Republic and Great Britain, and to conclude it _definitively_between the TWO powers. " With their spear they draw a circle about us. They will hear nothing of a joint treaty. We must make a peaceseparately from our allies. We must, as the very first and preliminarystep, be guilty of that perfidy towards our friends and associates withwhich they reproach us in our transactions with them, our enemies. Weare called upon scandalously to betray the fundamental securities toourselves and to all nations. In my opinion, (it is perhaps but a poorone, ) if we are meanly bold enough to send an ambassador such as thisofficial note of the enemy requires, we cannot even dispatch ouremissary without danger of being charged with a breach of our alliance. Government now understands the full meaning of the passport. 

Strange revolutions have happened in the ways of thinking and in thefeelings of men; but it is a very extraordinary coalition of partiesindeed, and a kind of unheard-of unanimity in public councils, which canimpose this new-discovered system of negotiation, as sound nationalpolicy, on the understanding of a spectator of this wonderful scene, whojudges on the principles of anything he ever before saw, read, or heardof, and, above all, on the understanding of a person who has in his eyethe transactions of the last seven years. 

I know it is supposed, that, if good terms of capitulation are notgranted, after we have thus so repeatedly hung out the white flag, thenational spirit will revive with tenfold ardor. This is an experimentcautiously to be made. _Reculer pour mieux sauter_, according to theFrench byword, cannot be trusted to as a general rule of conduct. Todiet a man into weakness and languor, afterwards to give him the greaterstrength, has more of the empiric than the rational physician. It istrue that some persons have been kicked into courage, --and this is nobad hint to give to those who are too forward and liberal in bestowinginsults and outrages on their passive companions; but such a course doesnot at first view appear a well-chosen discipline to form men to a nicesense of honor or a quick resentment of injuries. A long habit ofhumiliation does not seem a very good preparative to manly and vigoroussentiment. It may not leave, perhaps, enough of energy in the mindfairly to discern what are good terms or what are not. Men low anddispirited may regard those terms as not at all amiss which in anotherstate of mind they would think intolerable: if they grow peevish in thisstate of mind, they may be roused, not against the enemy whom they havebeen taught to fear, but against the ministry, [28] who are more withintheir reach, and who have refused conditions that are not unreasonable, from power that they have been taught to consider as irresistible. 

If all that for some months I have heard have the least foundation, (Ihope it has not, ) the ministers are, perhaps, not quite so much to beblamed as their condition is to be lamented. I have been given tounderstand that these proceedings are not in their origin properlytheirs. It is said that there is a secret in the House of Commons. It issaid that ministers act, not according to the votes, but according tothe dispositions, of the majority. I hear that the minority has longsince spoken the general sense of the nation; and that to prevent thosewho compose it from having the open and avowed lead in that House, orperhaps in both Houses, it was necessary to preoccupy their ground, andto take their propositions out of their mouths, even with the hazard ofbeing afterwards reproached with a compliance which it was foreseenwould be fruitless. 

If the general disposition of the people be, as I hear it is, for animmediate peace with Regicide, without so much as considering our publicand solemn engagements to the party in France whose cause we hadespoused, or the engagements expressed in our general alliances, notonly without an inquiry into the terms, but with a certain knowledgethat none but the worst terms will be offered, it is all over with us. It is strange, but it may be true, that, as the danger from Jacobinismis increased in my eyes and in yours, the fear of it is lessened in theeyes of many people who formerly regarded it with horror. It seems, theyact under the impression of terrors of another sort, which havefrightened them out of their first apprehensions. But let their fears, or their hopes, or their desires, be what they will, they shouldrecollect that they who would make peace without a previous knowledge ofthe terms make a surrender. They are conquered. They do not treat; theyreceive the law. Is this the disposition of the people of England? Thenthe people of England are contented to seek in the kindness of aforeign, systematic enemy, combined with a dangerous faction at home, asecurity which they cannot find in their own patriotism and their owncourage. They are willing to trust to the sympathy of regicides theguaranty of the British monarchy. They are content to rest theirreligion on the piety of atheists by establishment. They are satisfiedto seek in the clemency of practised murderers the security of theirlives. They are pleased to confide their property to the safeguard ofthose who are robbers by inclination, interest, habit, and system. Ifthis be our deliberate mind, truly we deserve to lose, what it isimpossible we should long retain, the name of a nation. 

In matters of state, a constitutional competence to act is in many casesthe smallest part of the question. Without disputing (God forbid Ishould dispute!) the sole competence of the king and the Parliament, each in its province, to decide on war and peace, I venture to say nowar _can_ be long carried on against the will of the people. This war, in particular, cannot be carried on, unless they are enthusiastically infavor of it. Acquiescence will not do. There must be zeal. Universalzeal in such a cause, and at such a time as this is, cannot be lookedfor; neither is it necessary. Zeal in the larger part carries the forceof the whole. Without this, no government, certainly not ourgovernment, is capable of a great war. None of the ancient, regulargovernments have wherewithal to fight abroad with a foreign foe, and athome to overcome repining, reluctance, and chicane. It must be someportentous thing, like Regicide France, that can exhibit such a prodigy. Yet even she, the mother of monsters, more prolific than the country ofold called _ferax monstrorum_, shows symptoms of being almost effetealready; and she will be so, unless the fallow of a peace comes torecruit her fertility. But whatever may be represented concerning themeanness of the popular spirit, I, for one, do not think so desperatelyof the British nation. Our minds, as I said, are light, but they are notdepraved. We are dreadfully open to delusion and to dejection; but weare capable of being animated and undeceived. 

It cannot be concealed: we are a divided people. But in divisions, wherea part is to be taken, we are to make a muster of our strength. I haveoften endeavored to compute and to class those who, in any politicalview, are to be called the people. Without doing something of this sort, we must proceed absurdly. We should not be much wiser, if we pretendedto very great accuracy in our estimate; but I think, in the calculationI have made, the error cannot be very material. In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerableleisure for such discussions, and of some means of information, more orless, and who are above menial dependence, (or what virtually is such, )may amount to about four hundred thousand. There is such a thing as anatural representative of the people. This body is that representative;and on this body, more than on the legal constituent, the artificialrepresentative depends. This is the British public; and it is a publicvery numerous. The rest, when feeble, are the objects ofprotection, --when strong, the means of force. They who affect toconsider that part of us in any other light insult while they cajole us;they do not want us for counsellors in deliberation, but to list us assoldiers for battle. 

Of these four hundred thousand political citizens, I look upon onefifth, or about eighty thousand, to be pure Jacobins, utterly incapableof amendment, objects of eternal vigilance, and, when they break out, oflegal constraint. On these, no reason, no argument, no example, novenerable authority, can have the slightest influence. They desire achange; and they will have it, if they can. If they cannot have it byEnglish cabal, they will make no sort of scruple of having it by thecabal of France, into which already they are virtually incorporated. Itis only their assured and confident expectation of the advantages ofFrench fraternity, and the approaching blessings of Regicideintercourse, that skins over their mischievous dispositions with amomentary quiet. 

This minority is great and formidable. I do not know whether, if I aimedat the total overthrow of a kingdom, I should wish to be incumbered witha larger body of partisans. They are more easily disciplined anddirected than if the number were greater. These, by their spirit ofintrigue, and by their restless agitating activity, are of a force farsuperior to their numbers, and, if times grew the least critical, havethe means of debauching or intimidating many of those who are now sound, as well as of adding to their force large bodies of the more passivepart of the nation. This minority is numerous enough to make a mightycry for peace, or for war, or for any object they are led vehemently todesire. By passing from place to place with a velocity incredible, anddiversifying their character and description, they are capable ofmimicking the general voice. We must not always judge of the generalityof the opinion by the noise of the acclamation. 

The majority, the other four fifths, is perfectly sound, and of the bestpossible disposition to religion, to government, to the true andundivided interest of their country. Such men are naturally disposed topeace. They who are in possession of all they wish are languid andimprovident. With this fault, (and I admit its existence in all itsextent, ) they would not endure to hear of a peace that led to the ruinof everything for which peace is dear to them. However, the desire ofpeace is essentially the weak side of that kind of men. All men that areruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities. There theyare unguarded. Above all, good men do not suspect that their destructionis attempted through their virtues. This their enemies are perfectlyaware of; and accordingly they, the most turbulent of mankind, who nevermade a scruple to shake the tranquillity of their country to its centre, raise a continual cry for peace with France. "Peace with Regicide, andwar with the rest of the world, " is their motto. From the beginning, andeven whilst the French gave the blows, and we hardly opposed the _visinertiæ_ to their efforts, from that day to this hour, like importunateGuinea-fowls, crying one note day and night, they have called forpeace. 

In this they are, as I confess in all things they are, perfectlyconsistent. They who wish to unite themselves to your enemies naturallydesire that you should disarm yourself by a peace with these enemies. But it passes my conception how they who wish well to their country onits ancient system of laws and manners come not to be doubly alarmed, when they find nothing but a clamor for peace in the mouths of the menon earth the least disposed to it in their natural or in their habitualcharacter. 

I have a good opinion of the general abilities of the Jacobins: not thatI suppose them better born than others; but strong passions awaken thefaculties; they suffer not a particle of the man to be lost. The spiritof enterprise gives to this description the full use of all their nativeenergies. If I have reason to conceive that my enemy, who, as such, musthave an interest in my destruction, is also a person of discernment andsagacity, then I must be quite sure, that, in a contest, the object heviolently pursues is the very thing by which my ruin is likely to be themost perfectly accomplished. Why do the Jacobins cry for peace? Becausethey know, that, this point gained, the rest will follow of course. Onour part, why are all the rules of prudence, as sure as the laws ofmaterial Nature, to be, at this time reversed? How comes it, that now, for the first time, men think it right to be governed by the counsels oftheir enemies? Ought they not rather to tremble, when they are persuadedto travel on the same road and to tend to the same place of rest?

The minority I speak of is not susceptible of an impression from thetopics of argument to be used to the larger part of the community. Itherefore do not address to them any part of what I have to say. Themore forcibly I drive my arguments against their system, so as to makean impression where I wish to make it, the more strongly I rivet them intheir sentiments. As for us, who compose the far larger, and what I callthe far better part of the people, let me say, that we have not beenquite fairly dealt with, when called to this deliberation. The Jacobinminority have been abundantly supplied with stores and provisions of allkinds towards their warfare. No sort of argumentative materials, suitedto their purposes, have been withheld. False they are, unsound, sophistical; but they are regular in their direction. They all bear oneway, and they all go to the support of the substantial merits of theircause. The others have not had the question so much as fairly stated tothem. 

There has not been in this century any foreign peace or war, in itsorigin the fruit of popular desire, except the war that was made withSpain in 1739. Sir Robert Walpole was forced into the war by the people, who were inflamed to this measure by the most leading politicians, bythe first orators, and the greatest poets of the time. For that war Popesang his dying notes. For that war Johnson, in more energetic strains, employed the voice of his early genius. For that war Gloverdistinguished himself in the way in which his muse was the most naturaland happy. The crowd readily followed the politicians in the cry for awar which threatened little bloodshed, and which promised victories thatwere attended with something more solid than glory. A war with Spain wasa war of plunder. In the present conflict with Regicide, Mr. Pitt hasnot hitherto had, nor will perhaps for a few days have, many prizes tohold out in the lottery of war, to tempt the lower part of ourcharacter. He can only maintain it by an appeal to the higher; and tothose in whom that higher part is the most predominant he must look themost for his support. Whilst he holds out no inducements to the wise norbribes to the avaricious, he may be forced by a vulgar cry into a peaceten times more ruinous than the most disastrous war. The weaker he is inthe fund of motives which apply to our avarice, to our laziness, and toour lassitude, if he means to carry the war to any end at all, thestronger he ought to be in his addresses to our magnanimity and to ourreason. 

In stating that Walpole was driven by a popular clamor into a measurenot to be justified, I do not mean wholly to excuse his conduct. My timeof observation did not exactly coincide with that event, but I read muchof the controversies then carried on. Several years after the contestsof parties had ceased, the people were amused, and in a degree warmedwith them. The events of that era seemed then of magnitude, which therevolutions of our time have reduced to parochial importance; and thedebates which then shook the nation now appear of no higher moment thana discussion in a vestry. When I was very young, a general fashion toldme I was to admire some of the writings against that minister; a littlemore maturity taught me as much to despise them. I observed one fault inhis general proceeding. He never manfully put forward the entirestrength of his cause. He temporized, be managed, and, adopting verynearly the sentiments of his adversaries, he opposed their inferences. This, for a political commander, is the choice of a weak post. Hisadversaries had the better of the argument as he handled it, not as thereason and justice of his cause enabled him to manage it. I say this, after having seen, and with some care examined, the original documentsconcerning certain important transactions of those times. They perfectlysatisfied me of the extreme injustice of that war, and of the falsehoodof the colors which, to his own ruin, and guided by a mistaken policy, he suffered to be daubed over that measure. Some years after, it was myfortune to converse with many of the principal actors against thatminister, and with those who principally excited that clamor. None ofthem, no, not one, did in the least defend the measure, or attempt tojustify their conduct. They condemned it as freely as they would havedone in commenting upon any proceeding in history in which they weretotally unconcerned. Thus it will be. They who stir up the people toimproper desires, whether of peace or war, will be condemned bythemselves. They who weakly yield to them will be condemned by history. 

In my opinion, the present ministry are as far from doing full justiceto their cause in this war as Walpole was from doing justice to thepeace which at that time he was willing to preserve. They throw thelight on one side only of their case; though it is impossible theyshould not observe that the other side, which is kept in the shade, hasits importance too. They must know that France is formidable, not onlyas she is France, but as she is Jacobin France. They knew from thebeginning that the Jacobin party was not confined to that country. Theyknew, they felt, the strong disposition of the same faction in bothcountries to communicate and to coöperate. For some time past, these twopoints have been kept, and even industriously kept, out of sight. Franceis considered as merely a foreign power, and the seditious English onlyas a domestic faction. The merits of the war with the former have beenargued solely on political grounds. To prevent the mischievous doctrinesof the latter from corrupting our minds, matter and argument have beensupplied abundantly, and even to surfeit, on the excellency of our owngovernment. But nothing has been done to make us feel in what manner thesafety of that government is connected with the principle and with theissue of this war. For anything which in the late discussion hasappeared, the war is entirely collateral to the state of Jacobinism, --astruly a foreign war to us and to all our home concerns as the war withSpain in 1739, about _Guardacostas_, the Madrid Convention, and thefable of Captain Jenkins's ears. 

Whenever the adverse party has raised a cry for peace with the Regicide, the answer has been little more than this: "That the administrationwished for such a peace full as much as the opposition, but that thetime was not convenient for making it. " Whatever else has been said wasmuch in the same spirit. Reasons of this kind never touched thesubstantial merits of the war. They were in the nature of dilatorypleas, exceptions of form, previous questions. Accordingly, all thearguments against a compliance with what was represented as the populardesire (urged on with all possible vehemence and earnestness by theJacobins) have appeared flat and languid, feeble and evasive. Theyappeared to aim only at gaining time. They never entered into thepeculiar and distinctive character of the war. They spoke neither to theunderstanding nor to the heart. Cold as ice themselves, they never couldkindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal which is necessary to aconflict with an adverse zeal; much less were they made to infuse intoour minds that stubborn, persevering spirit which alone is capable ofbearing up against those vicissitudes of fortune which will probablyoccur, and those burdens which must be inevitably borne, in a long war. I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked, --ina _long_ war; because, without such a war, no experience has yet told usthat a dangerous power has ever been reduced to measure or to reason. Ido not throw back my view to the Peloponnesian War of twenty-sevenyears; nor to two of the Punic Wars, the first of twenty-four, thesecond of eighteen; nor to the more recent war concluded by the Treatyof Westphalia, which continued, I think, for thirty. I go to what is butjust fallen behind living memory, and immediately touches our owncountry. Let the portion of our history from the year 1689 to 1713 bebrought before us. We shall find that in all that period of twenty-fouryears there were hardly five that could be called a season of peace; andthe interval between the two wars was in reality nothing more than avery active preparation for renovated hostility. During that period, every one of the propositions of peace came from the enemy: the first, when they were accepted, at the Peace of Ryswick; the second, where theywere rejected, at the Congress at Gertruydenberg; the last, when the warended by the Treaty of Utrecht. Even then, a very great part of thenation, and that which contained by far the most intelligent statesmen, was against the conclusion of the war. I do not enter into the merits ofthat question as between the parties. I only state the existence of thatopinion as a fact, from whence you may draw such an inference as youthink properly arises from it. 

It is for us at present to recollect what we have been, and to considerwhat, if we please, we may be still. At the period of those wars ourprincipal strength was found in the resolution of the people, and thatin the resolution of a part only of the then whole, which bore noproportion to our existing magnitude. England and Scotland were notunited at the beginning of that mighty struggle. When, in the course ofthe contest, they were conjoined, it was in a raw, an ill-cemented, anunproductive, union. For the whole duration of the war, and long after, the names and other outward and visible signs of approximation ratheraugmented than diminished our insular feuds. They were rather the causesof new discontents and new troubles than promoters of cordiality andaffection. The now single and potent Great Britain was then not only twocountries, but, from the party heats in both, and the divisions formedin each of them, each of the old kingdoms within itself, in effect, wasmade up of two hostile nations. Ireland, now so large a source of thecommon opulence and power, and which, wisely managed, might be made muchmore beneficial and much more effective, was then the heaviest of theburdens. An army, not much less than forty thousand men, was drawn fromthe general effort, to keep that kingdom in a poor, unfruitful, andresourceless subjection. 

Such was the state of the empire. The state of our finances was worse, if possible. Every branch of the revenue became less productive afterthe Revolution. Silver, not as now a sort of counter, but the body ofthe current coin, was reduced so low as not to have above three parts infour of the value in the shilling. In the greater part the value hardlyamounted to a fourth. It required a dead expense of three millionssterling to renew the coinage. Public credit, that great, but ambiguousprinciple, which has so often been predicted as the cause of our certainruin, but which for a century has been the constant companion, and oftenthe means, of our prosperity and greatness, had its origin, and wascradled, I may say, in bankruptcy and beggary. At this day we have seenparties contending to be admitted, at a moderate premium, to advanceeighteen millions to the exchequer. For infinitely smaller loans, theChancellor of the Exchequer of that day, Montagu, the father of publiccredit, counter-securing the state by the appearance of the city withthe Lord Mayor of London at his side, was obliged, like a solicitor foran hospital, to go cap in hand from shop to shop, to borrow an hundredpound, and even smaller sums. When made up in driblets as they could, their best securities were at an interest of twelve per cent. Even thepaper of the Bank (now at par with cash, and generally preferred to it)was often at a discount of twenty per cent. By this the state of therest may be judged. 

As to our commerce, the imports and exports of the nation, nowsix-and-forty million, did not then amount to ten. The inland trade, which is commonly passed by in this sort of estimates, but which, inpart growing out of the foreign, and connected with it, is moreadvantageous and more substantially nutritive to the state, is not onlygrown in a proportion of near five to one as the foreign, but has beenaugmented at least in a tenfold proportion. When I came to England, Iremember but one river navigation, the rate of carriage on which waslimited by an act of Parliament. It was made in the reign of William theThird. I mean that of the Aire and Calder. The rate was settled atthirteen pence. So high a price demonstrated the feebleness of thesebeginnings of our inland intercourse. In my time, one of the longest andsharpest contests I remember in your House, and which rather resembled aviolent contention amongst national parties than a local dispute, was, as well as I can recollect, to hold the price up to threepence. Eventhis, which a very scanty justice to the proprietors required, was donewith infinite difficulty. As to private credit, there were not, as Ibelieve, twelve bankers' shops at that time out of London. In this theirnumber, when I first saw the country, I cannot be quite exact; butcertainly those machines of domestic credit were then very few. They arenow in almost every market-town: and this circumstance (whether thething be carried to an excess or not) demonstrates the astonishingincrease of private confidence, of general circulation, and of internalcommerce, --an increase out of all proportion to the growth of theforeign trade. Our naval strength in the time of King William's war wasnearly matched by that of France; and though conjoined with Holland, then a maritime power hardly inferior to our own, even with that forcewe were not always victorious. Though finally superior, the alliedfleets experienced many unpleasant reverses on their own element. In twoyears three thousand vessels were taken from the English trade. On theContinent we lost almost every battle we fought. 

In 1697, (it is not quite an hundred years ago, ) in that state ofthings, amidst the general debasement of the coin, the fall of theordinary revenue, the failure of all the extraordinary supplies, theruin of commerce, and the almost total extinction of an infant credit, the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, whom we have just seen beggingfrom door to door, came forward to move a resolution full of vigor, inwhich, far from being discouraged by the generally adverse fortune andthe long continuance of the war, the Commons agreed to address the crownin the following manly, spirited, and truly animating style:--

"This is the EIGHTH year in which your Majesty's most dutiful and loyalsubjects, the Commons in Parliament assembled, have assisted yourMajesty with large supplies for carrying on a just and necessary war, indefence of our religion, preservation of our laws, and vindication ofthe rights and liberties of the people of England. "

Afterwards they proceed in this manner:--

"And to show to your Majesty and all Christendom that the Commons ofEngland will not be _amused_ or diverted from their firm resolutions ofobtaining by WAR a safe and honorable peace, we do, in the name of allthose we represent, renew our assurances to your Majesty that this Housewill support your Majesty and your government against all your enemies, both at home and abroad, and that they will effectually assist you inthe prosecution and carrying on the present war against France. "

The amusement and diversion they speak of was the suggestion of a treaty_proposed by the enemy_, and announced from the throne. Thus the peopleof England felt in the _eighth_, not in the _fourth_ year of the war. Nosighing or panting after negotiation; no motions from the opposition toforce the ministry into a peace; no messages from ministers to palsy anddeaden the resolution of Parliament or the spirit of the nation. Theydid not so much as advise the king to listen to the propositions of theenemy, nor to seek for peace, but through the mediation of a vigorouswar. This address was moved in an hot, a divided, a factious, and, in agreat part, disaffected House of Commons; and it was carried, _neminecontradicente_. 

While that first war (which was ill smothered by the Treaty of Ryswick)slept in the thin ashes of a seeming peace, a new conflagration was inits immediate causes. A fresh and a far greater war was in preparation. A year had hardly elapsed, when arrangements were made for renewing thecontest with tenfold fury. The steps which were taken, at that time, tocompose, to reconcile, to unite, and to discipline all Europe againstthe growth of France, certainly furnish to a statesman the finest andmost interesting part in the history of that great period. It formed themasterpiece of King William's policy, dexterity, and perseverance. Fullof the idea of preserving not only a local civil liberty united withorder to our country, but to embody it in the political liberty, theorder, and the independence of nations united under a natural head, theking called upon his Parliament to put itself into a posture "_topreserve to England the weight and influence it at present had on thecouncils and affairs_ ABROAD. It will be requisite _Europe_ Should seeyou will not be wanting to yourselves. "

Baffled as that monarch was, and almost heartbroken at thedisappointment he met with in the mode he first proposed for that greatend, he held on his course. He was faithful to his object; and incouncils, as in arms, over and over again repulsed, over and over againhe returned to the charge. All the mortifications he had suffered fromthe last Parliament, and the greater he had to apprehend from that newlychosen, were not capable of relaxing the vigor of his mind. He was inHolland when he combined the vast plan of his foreign negotiations. Whenhe came to open his design to his ministers in England, even the soberfirmness of Somers, the undaunted resolution of Shrewsbury, and theadventurous spirit of Montagu and Orford were staggered. They were notyet mounted to the elevation of the king. The cabinet, then the regency, met on the subject at Tunbridge Wells, the 28th of August, 1698; andthere, Lord Somers holding the pen, after expressing doubts on the stateof the Continent, which they ultimately refer to the king, as bestinformed, they give him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit ofthis nation. "So far as relates to England, " say these ministers, "itwould be want of duty not to give your Majesty this clear account: thatthere is _a deadness and want of spirit in the nation universally_, soas not at all to be disposed to _the thought of entering into a newwar_; and that they seem to be _tired out with taxes_ to a degree beyondwhat was discerned, till it appeared upon the occasion of _the lateelections_. This is the truth of the fact, upon which your Majesty willdetermine what resolutions are proper to be taken. "

His Majesty did determine, --and did take and pursue his resolution. Inall the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with Parliamenttotally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears ofhis people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by hisconstancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, tosink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious, --to make England, inclinedto shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelaryangel of the human race. In spite of the ministers, who staggered underthe weight that his mind imposed upon theirs, unsupported as they feltthemselves by the popular spirit, he infused into them his own soul, herenewed in them their ancient heart, he rallied them in the same cause. 

It required some time to accomplish this work. The people were firstgained, and, through them, their distracted representatives. Under theinfluence of King William, Holland had rejected the allurements of everyseduction, and had resisted the terrors of every menace. With Hannibalat her gates, she had nobly and magnanimously refused all separatetreaty, or anything which might for a moment appear to divide heraffection or her interest or even to distinguish her in identity fromEngland. Having settled the great point of the consolidation (which hehoped would be eternal) of the countries made for a common interest andcommon sentiment, the king, in his message to both Houses, calls theirattention to the affairs of the _States General_. The House of Lordswas perfectly sound, and entirely impressed with the wisdom and dignityof the king's proceedings. In answer to the message, which you willobserve was narrowed to a single point, (the danger of the StatesGeneral, ) after the usual professions of zeal for his service, the Lordsopened themselves at large. They go far beyond the demands of themessage. They express themselves as follows. 

"We take this occasion _further_ to assure your Majesty we are verysensible of _the great and imminent danger to which the States Generalare at present exposed; and we do perfectly agree with them in believingthat their safety and ours are so inseparably united that whatsoever isruin to the one must be fatal to the other_. 

"And we humbly desire your Majesty will be pleased _not only_ to makegood all the articles of any _former_ treaty to the States General, butthat you will enter into a strict league offensive and defensive withthem _for our common preservation; and that you will invite into it allprinces and states who are concerned in the present visible dangerarising from the union of France and Spain_. 

"And we further desire your Majesty, that you will be pleased to enterinto such alliances with the _Emperor_ as your Majesty shall think fit, pursuant to the ends of the treaty of 1689: towards all which we assureyour Majesty of our hearty and sincere assistance; not doubting, but, whenever your Majesty shall be obliged to engage for the defence of yourallies, _and for securing the liberty and quiet of Europe_, Almighty Godwill protect your sacred person in so righteous a cause, and that theunanimity, wealth, and courage of your subjects will carry your Majestywith honor and success _through all the difficulties of a_ JUST WAR. "

The House of Commons was more reserved. The late popular disposition wasstill in a great degree prevalent in the representative, after it hadbeen made to change in the constituent body. The principle of the GrandAlliance was not directly recognized in the resolution of the Commons, nor the war announced, though they were well aware the alliance wasformed for the war. However, compelled by the returning sense of thepeople, they went so far as to fix the three great immovable pillars ofthe safety and greatness of England, as they were then, as they are now, and as they must ever be to the end of time. They asserted in generalterms the necessity of supporting Holland, of keeping united with ourallies, and maintaining the liberty of Europe; though they restrictedtheir vote to the succors stipulated by actual treaty. But now they werefairly embarked, they were obliged to go with the course of the vessel;and the whole nation, split before into an hundred adverse factions, with a king at its head evidently declining to his tomb, the wholenation, lords, commons, and people, proceeded as one body informed byone soul. Under the British union, the union of Europe was consolidated;and it long held together with a degree of cohesion, firmness, andfidelity not known before or since in any political combination of thatextent. 

Just as the last hand was given to this immense and complicated machine, the master workman died. But the work was formed on true mechanicalprinciples, and it was as truly wrought. It went by the impulse it hadreceived from the first mover. The man was dead; but the Grand Alliancesurvived, in which King William lived and reigned. That heartless anddispirited people, whom Lord Somers had represented about two yearsbefore as dead in energy and operation, continued that war, to which itwas supposed they were unequal in mind and in means, for near thirteenyears. 

For what have I entered into all this detail? To what purpose have Irecalled your view to the end of the last century? It has been done toshow that the British nation was then a great people, --to point out howand by what means they came to be exalted above the vulgar level, and totake that lead which they assumed among mankind. To qualify us for thatpreëminence, we had then an high mind and a constancy unconquerable; wewere then inspired with no flashy passions, but such as were durable aswell as warm, such as corresponded to the great interests we had atstake. This force of character was inspired, as all such spirit mustever be, from above. Government gave the impulse. As well may we fancythat of itself the sea will swell, and that without winds the billowswill insult the adverse shore, as that the gross mass of the people willbe moved, and elevated, and continue by a steady and permanent directionto bear upon one point, without the influence of superior authority orsuperior mind. 

This impulse ought, in my opinion, to have been given in this war; andit ought to have been continued to it at every instant. It is made, ifever war was made, to touch all the great springs of action in the humanbreast. It ought not to have been a war of apology. The minister had, inthis conflict, wherewithal to glory in success, to be consoled inadversity, to hold high his principle in all fortunes. If it were notgiven him to support the falling edifice, he ought to bury himself underthe ruins of the civilized world. All the art of Greece and all thepride and power of Eastern monarchs never heaped upon their ashes sogrand a monument. 

There were days when his great mind was up to the crisis of the world heis called to act in. [29] His manly eloquence was equal to the elevatedwisdom of such sentiments. But the little have triumphed over the great:an unnatural, (as it should seem, ) not an unusual victory. I am sure youcannot forget with how much uneasiness we heard, in conversation, thelanguage of more than one gentleman at the opening of thiscontest, --"that he was willing to try the war for a year or two, and, ifit did not succeed, then to vote for peace. " As if war was a matter ofexperiment! As if you could take it up or lay it down as an idle frolic!As if the dire goddess that presides over it, with her murderous spearin her hand and her Gorgon at her breast, was a coquette to be flirtedwith! We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, thatloves courage, but commands counsel. War never leaves where it found anation. It is never to be entered into without a maturedeliberation, --not a deliberation lengthened out into a perplexingindecision, but a deliberation leading to a sure and fixed judgment. When so taken up, it is not to be abandoned without reason as valid, asfully and as extensively considered. Peace may be made as unadvisedly aswar. Nothing is so rash as fear; and the counsels of pusillanimity veryrarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate, the evilsfrom which they would fly. 

In that great war carried on against Louis the Fourteenth for neareighteen years, government spared no pains to satisfy the nation, that, though they were to be animated by a desire of glory, glory was nottheir ultimate object; but that everything dear to them, in religion, inlaw, in liberty, everything which as freemen, as Englishmen, and ascitizens of the great commonwealth of Christendom, they had at heart, was then at stake. This was to know the true art of gaining theaffections and confidence of an high-minded people; this was tounderstand human nature. A danger to avert a danger, a presentinconvenience and suffering to prevent a foreseen future and a worsecalamity, --these are the motives that belong to an animal who in hisconstitution is at once adventurous and provident, circumspect anddaring, --whom his Creator has made, as the poet says, "of largediscourse, looking before and after. " But never can a vehement andsustained spirit of fortitude be kindled in a people by a war ofcalculation. It has nothing that can keep the mind erect under the gustsof adversity. Even where men are willing, as sometimes they are, tobarter their blood for lucre, to hazard their safety for thegratification of their avarice, the passion which animates them to thatsort of conflict, like all the shortsighted passions, must see itsobjects distinct and near at hand. The passions of the lower order arehungry and impatient. Speculative plunder, --contingent spoil, --future, long adjourned, uncertain booty, --pillage which must enrich a lateposterity, and which possibly may not reach to posterity at all, --these, for any length of time, will never support a mercenary war. The peopleare in the right. The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugarare purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man shouldnever be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for ourfamily, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. Therest is vanity; the rest is crime. 

In the war of the Grand Alliance most of these considerationsvoluntarily and naturally had their part. Some were pressed into theservice. The political interest easily went in the track of the naturalsentiment. In the reverse course the carriage does not follow freely. Iam sure the natural feeling, as I have just said, is a far morepredominant ingredient in this war than in that of any other that everwas waged by this kingdom. 

If the war made to prevent the union of two crowns upon one head was ajust war, this, which is made to prevent the tearing all crowns from allheads which ought to wear them, and with the crowns to smite off thesacred heads themselves, this is a just war. 

If a war to prevent Louis the Fourteenth from imposing his religion wasjust, a war to prevent the murderers of Louis the Sixteenth fromimposing their irreligion upon us is just: a war to prevent theoperation of a system which makes life without dignity and death withouthope is a just war. 

If to preserve political independence and civil freedom to nations was ajust ground of war, a war to preserve national independence, property, liberty, life, and honor from certain universal havoc is a war justnecessary, manly, pious; and we are bound to persevere in it by everyprinciple, divine and human, as long as the system which menaces themall, and all equally, has an existence in the world. 

You, who have looked at this matter with as fair and impartial an eye ascan be united with a feeling heart, you will not think it an hardyassertion, when I affirm that it were far better to be conquered by anyother nation than to have this faction for a neighbor. Before I feltmyself authorized to say this, I considered the state of all thecountries in Europe for these last three hundred years, which have beenobliged to submit to a foreign law. In most of those I found thecondition of the annexed countries even better, certainly not worse, than the lot of those which were the patrimony of the conqueror. Theywanted some blessings, but they were free from many very great evils. They were rich and tranquil. Such was Artois, Flanders, Lorraine, Alsatia, under the old government of France. Such was Silesia under theKing of Prussia. They who are to live in the vicinity of this new fabricare to prepare to live in perpetual conspiracies and seditions, and toend at last in being conquered, if not to her dominion, to herresemblance. But when we talk of conquest by other nations, it is onlyto put a case. This is the only power in Europe by which it is_possible_ we should be conquered. To live under the continual dread ofsuch immeasurable evils is itself a grievous calamity. To live withoutthe dread of them is to turn the danger into the disaster. The influenceof such a France is equal to a war, its example more wasting than anhostile irruption. The hostility with any other power is separable andaccidental: this power, by the very condition of its existence, by itsvery essential constitution, is in a state of hostility with us, andwith all civilized people. [30]

A government of the nature of that set up at our very door has neverbeen hitherto seen or even imagined in Europe. What our relation to itwill be cannot be judged by other relations. It is a serious thing tohave a connection with a people who live only under positive, arbitrary, and changeable institutions, --and those not perfected nor supplied norexplained by any common, acknowledged rule of moral science. I remember, that, in one of my last conversations with the late Lord Camden, we werestruck much in the same manner with the abolition in France of the lawas a science of methodized and artificial equity. France, since herRevolution, is under the sway of a sect whose leaders have deliberately, at one stroke, demolished the whole body of that jurisprudence whichFrance had pretty nearly in common with other civilized countries. Inthat jurisprudence were contained the elements and principles of the lawof nations, the great ligament of mankind. With the law they have ofcourse destroyed all seminaries in which jurisprudence was taught, aswell as all the corporations established for its conservation. I havenot heard of any country, whether in Europe or Asia, or even in Africaon this side of Mount Atlas, which is wholly without some such collegesand such corporations, except France. No man, in a public or privateconcern, can divine by what rule or principle her judgments are to bedirected: nor is there to be found a professor in any university, or apractitioner in any court, who will hazard an opinion of what is or isnot law in France, in any case whatever. They have not only annulled alltheir old treaties, but they have renounced the law of nations, fromwhence treaties have their force. With a fixed design they have outlawedthemselves, and to their power outlawed all other nations. 

Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a greatpolitic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed theirrepublic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on whichthe communities of Europe are built. Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles abody of systematic manners which secures their operation. 

If I am asked how I would be understood in the use of these terms, Regicide, Jacobinism, Atheism, and a system of correspondent manners, and their establishment, I will tell you. 

I call a commonwealth _Regicide_ which lays it down as a fixed law ofNature and a fundamental right of man, that all government, not being ademocracy, is an usurpation, [31]--that all kings, as such, are usurpers, and, for being kings, may and ought to be put to death, with theirwives, families, and adherents. The commonwealth which acts uniformlyupon those principles, and which, after abolishing every festival ofreligion, chooses the most flagrant act of a murderous regicide treasonfor a feast of eternal commemoration, and which forces all her people toobserve it, --this I call _Regicide by Establishment_. 

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a countryagainst its property. When private men form themselves into associationsfor the purpose of destroying the preëxisting laws and institutions oftheir country, --when they secure to themselves an army by dividingamongst the people of no property the estates of the ancient and lawfulproprietors, --when a state recognizes those acts, --when it does not makeconfiscations for crimes, but makes crimes for confiscations, --when ithas its principal strength and all its resources in such a violation ofproperty, --when it stands chiefly upon such a violation, massacring byjudgments, or otherwise, those who make any struggle for their old legalgovernment, and their legal, hereditary, or acquired possessions, --Icall this _Jacobinism by Establishment_. 

I call it _Atheism by Establishment_, when any state, as such, shall notacknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world, --whenit shall offer to Him no religious or moral worship, --when it shallabolish the Christian religion by a regular decree, --when it shallpersecute, with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode ofconfiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers, --whenit shall generally shut up or pull down churches, --when the fewbuildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purposeof making a profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes haveno parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects ofgeneral detestation and the severest animadversion of law. When, in theplace of that religion of social benevolence and of individualself-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their owncorrupted and bloody republic, --when schools and seminaries are foundedat public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, withthe horrible maxims of this impiety, --when, wearied out with incessantmartyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting forreligion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil, --I call this _Atheismby Establishment_. 

When to these establishments of Regicide, of Jacobinism, and of Atheism, you add the _correspondent system of manners_, no doubt can be left onthe mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to thehuman race. Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in agreat measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They givetheir whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of thisthe new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method, and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the mostlicentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and atthe same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing inthe Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion ofa hat or a shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result ofdesign; all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could bedevised in favor of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, thathas not been employed. The noblest passions, the love of glory, the loveof country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and itspropagation. All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflameand vitiate the imagination and pervert the moral sense, have beencontrived. They have sometimes brought forth five or six hundred drunkenwomen calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their ownchildren, as being Royalists or Constitutionalists. Sometimes they havegot a body of wretches, calling themselves fathers, to demand the murderof their sons, boasting that Rome had but one Brutus, but that theycould show five hundred. There were instances in which they inverted andretaliated the impiety, and produced sons who called for the executionof their parents. The foundation of their republic is laid in moralparadoxes. Their patriotism is always prodigy. All those instances to befound in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from whichaffrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples forthe instruction of their youth. 

The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wiselegislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts intomorals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the naturalaffections. They, on the contrary, have omitted no pains to eradicateevery benevolent and noble propensity in the mind of men. In theirculture it is a rule always to graft virtues on vices. They thinkeverything unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicatesviolence on the private. All their new institutions (and with themeverything is new) strike at the root of our social nature. Otherlegislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, andconsequently the first element of all duties, have endeavored by everyart to make it sacred. The Christian religion, by confining it to thepairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these twothings done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, andcivilization of the world than by any other part in this whole scheme ofDivine wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in thesynagogue of Antichrist, --I mean in that forge and manufactory of allevil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789. Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate anddegrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holyand honorable. By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronouncedthat marriage was no better than a common civil contract. It was one oftheir ordinary tricks, to put their sentiments into the mouths ofcertain personated characters, which they theatrically exhibited at thebar of what ought to be a serious assembly. One of these was brought outin the figure of a prostitute, whom they called by the affected name of"a mother without being a wife. " This creature they made to call for arepeal of the incapacities which in civilized states are put uponbastards. The prostitutes of the Assembly gave to this their puppet thesanction of their greater impudence. In consequence of the principleslaid down, and the manners authorized, bastards were not long after puton the footing of the issue of lawful unions. Proceeding in the spiritof the first authors of their Constitution, succeeding Assemblies wentthe full length of the principle, and gave a license to divorce at themere pleasure of either party, and at a month's notice. With them thematrimonial connection is brought into so degraded a state ofconcubinage, that I believe none of the wretches in London who keepwarehouses of infamy would give out one of their victims to privatecustody on so short and insolent a tenure. There was, indeed, a kind ofprofligate equity in giving to women the same licentious power. Thereason they assigned was as infamous as the act: declaring that womenhad been too long under the tyranny of parents and of husbands. It isnot necessary to observe upon the horrible consequences of taking onehalf of the species wholly out of the guardianship and protection of theother. 

The practice of divorce, though in some countries permitted, has beendiscouraged in all. In the East, polygamy and divorce are in discredit;and the manners correct the laws. In Rome, whilst Rome was in itsintegrity, the few causes allowed for divorce amounted in effect to aprohibition. They were only three. The arbitrary was totally excluded;and accordingly some hundreds of years passed without a single exampleof that kind. When manners were corrupted, the laws were relaxed; as thelatter always follow the former, when they are not able to regulate themor to vanquish them. Of this circumstance the legislators of vice andcrime were pleased to take notice, as an inducement to adopt theirregulation: holding out an hope that the permission would as rarely bemade use of. They knew the contrary to be true; and they had taken goodcare that the laws should be well seconded by the manners. Their law ofdivorce, like all their laws, had not for its object the relief ofdomestic uneasiness, but the total corruption of all morals, the totaldisconnection of social life. 

It is a matter of curiosity to observe the operation of thisencouragement to disorder. I have before me the Paris papercorrespondent to the usual register of births, marriages, and deaths. Divorce, happily, is no regular head of registry amongst civilizednations. With the Jacobins it is remarkable that divorce is not only aregular head, but it has the post of honor. It occupies the first placein the list. In the three first months of the year 1793 the number ofdivorces in that city amounted to 562; the marriages were 1785: so thatthe proportion of divorces to marriages was not much less than one tothree: a thing unexampled, I believe, among mankind. I caused an inquiryto be made at Doctors' Commons concerning the number of divorces, andfound that all the divorces (which, except by special act of Parliament, are separations, and not proper divorces) did not amount in all thosecourts, and in an hundred years, to much more than one fifth of thosethat passed in the single city of Paris in three months. I followed upthe inquiry relative to that city through several of the subsequentmonths, until I was tired, and found the proportions still the same. Since then I have heard that they have declared for a revisal of theselaws: but I know of nothing done. It appears as if the contract thatrenovates the world was under no law at all. From this we may take ourestimate of the havoc that has been made through all the relations oflife. With the Jacobins of France, vague intercourse is withoutreproach; marriage is reduced to the vilest concubinage; children areencouraged to cut the throats of their parents; mothers are taught thattenderness is no part of their character, and, to demonstrate theirattachment to their party, that they ought to make no scruple to rakewith their bloody hands in the bowels of those who came from their own. 

To all this let us join the practice of _cannibalism_, with which, inthe proper terms, and with the greatest truth, their several factionsaccuse each other. By cannibalism I mean their devouring, as a nutrimentof their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered, their drinking the blood of their victims, and forcing the victimsthemselves to drink the blood of their kindred slaughtered before theirfaces. By cannibalism I mean also to signify all their nameless, unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter. 

As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permitthem to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights ofsepulture which indicate hope, and which mere Nature has taught tomankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions and to cover theinfirmity of mortal condition. They disgrace men in the entry into life, they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and theydeprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonored anddepraved existence. Endeavoring to persuade the people that they are nobetter than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends to makethem beasts of prey, furious and savage. For this purpose the activepart of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel. Tothis ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtueswhich accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up togetherin the rankness of uncultivated Nature. But nothing is left to Nature intheir systems. 

The same discipline which hardens their hearts relaxes their morals. Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolutionary tribunals, andsilent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion, there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small, most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowdedevery night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness, amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries ofdespair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter, went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it fromgood authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and thegaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space washired out for a show of dancing dogs. I think, without concert, we havemade the very same remark, on reading some of their pieces, which, beingwritten for other purposes, let us into a view of their social life. Itstruck us that the habits of Paris had no resemblance to the finishedvirtues, or to the polished vice, and elegant, though not blamelessluxury, of the capital of a great empire. Their society was more likethat of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier, --of a lewd tavern forthe revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers, and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, therefuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sortedverses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songsproper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sortof wretches. This system of manners in itself is at war with all orderlyand moral society, and is in its neighborhood unsafe. If great bodies ofthat kind were anywhere established in a bordering territory, we shouldhave a right to demand of their governments the suppression of such anuisance. What are we to do, if the government and the whole communityis of the same description? Yet that government has thought proper toinvite ours to lay by its unjust hatred, and to listen to the voice ofhumanity as taught by their example. 

The operation of dangerous and delusive first principles obliges us tohave recourse to the true ones. In the intercourse between nations, weare apt to rely too much on the instrumental part. We lay too muchweight upon the formality of treaties and compacts. We do not act muchmore wisely, when we trust to the interests of men as guaranties oftheir engagements. The interests frequently tear to pieces theengagements, and the passions trample upon both. Entirely to trust toeither is to disregard our own safety, or not to know mankind. Men arenot tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associateby resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. It is with nations aswith individuals. Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nation andnation as correspondence in laws, customs, manners, and habits of life. They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They areobligations written in the heart. They approximate men to men withouttheir knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions. The secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds themtogether, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them toequivocate, scuffle, and fight about the terms of their writtenobligations. 

As to war, if it be the means of wrong and violence, it is the solemeans of justice amongst nations. Nothing can banish it from the world. They who say otherwise, intending to impose upon us, do not impose uponthemselves. But it is one of the greatest objects of human wisdom tomitigate those evils which we are unable to remove. The conformity andanalogy of which I speak, incapable, like everything else, of preservingperfect trust and tranquillity among men, has a strong tendency tofacilitate accommodation, and to produce a generous oblivion of therancor of their quarrels. With this similitude, peace is more of peace, and war is less of war. I will go further. There have been periods oftime in which communities apparently in peace with each other have beenmore perfectly separated than in later times many nations in Europe havebeen in the course of long and bloody wars. The cause must be sought inthe similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws, and manners. Atbottom, these are all the same. The writers on public law have oftencalled this _aggregate_ of nations a commonwealth. They had reason. Itis virtually one great state, having the same basis of general law, withsome diversity of provincial customs and local establishments. Thenations of Europe have had the very same Christian religion, agreeing inthe fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in thesubordinate doctrines. The whole of the polity and economy of everycountry in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawnfrom the old Germanic or Gothic Custumary, --from the feudalinstitutions, which must be considered as an emanation from thatCustumary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system anddiscipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, withor without a monarch, (which are called States, ) in every Europeancountry; the strong traces of which, where monarchy predominated, werenever wholly extinguished or merged in despotism. In the few placeswhere monarchy was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was stillleft. Those countries still continued countries of States, --that is, ofclasses, orders, and distinctions, such as had before subsisted, ornearly so. Indeed, the force and form of the institution called Statescontinued in greater perfection in those republican communities thanunder monarchies. From all those sources arose a system of manners andof education which was nearly similar in all this quarter of theglobe, --and which softened, blended, and harmonized the colors of thewhole. There was little difference in the form of the universities forthe education of their youth, whether with regard to faculties, tosciences, or to the more liberal and elegant kinds of erudition. Fromthis resemblance in the modes of intercourse, and in the whole form andfashion of life, no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile inany part of it. There was nothing more than a pleasing variety torecreate and instruct the mind, to enrich the imagination, and tomeliorate the heart. When a man travelled or resided, for health, pleasure, business, or necessity, from his own country, he never felthimself quite abroad. 

The whole body of this new scheme of manners, in support of the newscheme of polities, I consider as a strong and decisive proof ofdetermined ambition and systematic hostility. I defy the most refiningingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of theJacobin Republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious, legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearingherself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formedresolution of keeping no terms with that world. It has not been, as hasbeen falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had onlybroke with their old government. They made a schism with the wholeuniverse, and that schism extended to almost everything, great andsmall. For one, I wish, since it is gone thus far, that the breach hadbeen so complete as to make all intercourse impracticable: but, partlyby accident, partly by design, partly from the resistance of the matter, enough is left to preserve intercourse, whilst amity is destroyed orcorrupted in its principle. 

This violent breach of the community of Europe we must conclude to havebeen made (even if they had not expressly declared it over and overagain) either to force mankind into an adoption of their system or tolive in perpetual enmity with a community the most potent we have everknown. Can any person imagine, that, in offering to mankind thisdesperate alternative, there is no indication of a hostile mind, becausemen in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a rightto act without coercion in their own territories? As to the right ofmen to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie, no such right exists. Men are never in a state of _total_ independenceof each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is itconceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of actionwithout its having some effect upon others, or, of course, withoutproducing some degree of responsibility for his conduct. The_situations_ in which men relatively stand produce the rules andprinciples of that responsibility, and afford directions to prudence inexacting it. 

Distance of place does not extinguish the duties or the rights of men;but it often renders their exercise impracticable. The same circumstanceof distance renders the noxious effects of an evil system in anycommunity less pernicious. But there are situations where thisdifficulty does not occur, and in which, therefore, those duties areobligatory and these rights are to be asserted. It has ever been themethod of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on whichthey form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail incivil community. Civil laws are not all of them merely positive. Thosewhich are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutableprovision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable. Almost the whole prætorian law is such. There is a _law of neighborhood_which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground. When aneighbor sees a _new erection_, in the nature of a nuisance, set up athis door, he has a right to represent it to the judge, who, on his part, has a right to order the work to be stayed, or, if established, to beremoved. On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has mademany wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrainthe right of _ownership_ by the right of _vicinage_. No _innovation_ ispermitted that may redound, even secondarily, to the prejudice of aneighbor. The whole doctrine of that important head of prætorian law, "_De novi operis nunciatione_, " is founded on the principle, that no_new_ use should be made of a man's private liberty of operating uponhis private property, from whence a detriment may be justly apprehendedby his neighbor. This law of denunciation is prospective. It is toanticipate what is called _damnum infectum_ or _damnum nondum factum_, that is, a damage justly apprehended, but not actually done. Even beforeit is clearly known whether the innovation be damageable or not, thejudge is competent to issue a prohibition to innovate until the pointcan be determined. This prompt interference is grounded on principlesfavorable to both parties. It is preventive of mischief difficult to berepaired, and of ill blood difficult to be softened. The rule of law, therefore, which comes before the evil is amongst the very best parts ofequity, and justifies the promptness of the remedy; because, as it iswell observed, "_Res damni infecti celeritatem desiderat, et periculosaest dilatio_. " This right of denunciation does not hold, when thingscontinue, however inconveniently to the neighborhood, according to the_ancient_ mode. For there is a sort of presumption against novelty, drawn out of a deep consideration of human nature and human affairs; andthe maxim of jurisprudence is well laid down, "_Vetustas pro lege semperhabetur_. "

Such is the law of civil vicinity. Now where there is no constitutedjudge, as between independent states there is not, the vicinage itselfis the natural judge. It is, preventively, the assertor of its ownrights, or, remedially, their avenger. Neighbors are presumed to takecognizance of each other's acts. "_Vicini vicinorum facta præsumunturseire_. " This principle, which, like the rest, is as true of nations asof individual men, has bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe a dutyto know and a right to prevent any capital innovation which may amountto the erection of a dangerous nuisance. [32] Of the importance of thatinnovation, and the mischief of that nuisance, they are, to be sure, bound to judge not litigiously: but it is in their competence to judge. They have uniformly acted on this right. What in civil society is aground of action in politic society is a ground of war. But the exerciseof that competent jurisdiction is a matter of moral prudence. As suitsin civil society, so war in the political, must ever be a matter ofgreat deliberation. It is not this or that particular proceeding, pickedout here and there, as a subject of quarrel, that will do. There must bean aggregate of mischief. There must be marks of deliberation; theremust be traces of design; there must be indications of malice; theremust be tokens of ambition. There must be force in the body where theyexist; there must be energy in the mind. When all these circumstancescombine, or the important parts of them, the duty of the vicinity callsfor the exercise of its competence: and the rules of prudence do notrestrain, but demand it. 

In describing the nuisance erected by so pestilential a manufactory, bythe construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar forsuch thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of theevil. No man who has attended to the particulars of what has been donein France, and combined them with the principles there asserted, canpossibly doubt it. When I compare with this great cause of nations thetrifling points of honor, the still more contemptible points ofinterest, the light ceremonies, the undefinable punctilios, the disputesabout precedency, the lowering or the hoisting of a sail, the dealing ina hundred or two of wildcat-skins on the other side of the globe, whichhave often kindled up the flames of war between nations, I standastonished at those persons who do not feel a resentment, not morenatural than politic, at the atrocious insults that this monstrouscompound offers to the dignity of every nation, and who are not alarmedwith what it threatens to their safety. 

I have therefore been decidedly of opinion, with our declaration atWhitehall in the beginning of this war, that the vicinage of Europe hadnot only a right, but an indispensable duty and an exigent interest, todenunciate this new work, before it had produced the danger we have sosorely felt, and which we shall long feel. The example of what is doneby France is too important not to have a vast and extensive influence;and that example, backed with its power, must bear with great force onthose who are near it, especially on those who shall recognize thepretended republic on the principle upon which it now stands. It is notan old structure, which you have found as it is, and are not to disputeof the original end and design with which it had been so fashioned. Itis a recent wrong, and can plead no prescription. It violates the rightsupon which not only the community of France, but those on which allcommunities are founded. The principles on which they proceed are_general_ principles, and are as true in England as in any othercountry. They who (though with the purest intentions) recognize theauthority of these regicides and robbers upon principle justify theiracts, and establish them as precedents. It is a question not betweenFrance and England; it is a question between property and force. Theproperty claims; and its claim has been allowed. The property of thenation is the nation. They who massacre, plunder, and expel the body ofthe proprietary are murderers and robbers. The state, in its essence, must be moral and just: and it may be so, though a tyrant or usurpershould be accidentally at the head of it. This is a thing to belamented: but this notwithstanding, the body of the commonwealth mayremain in all its integrity and be perfectly sound in its composition. The present case is different. It is not a revolution in government. Itis not the victory of party over party. It is a destruction anddecomposition of the whole society; which never can be made of right byany faction, however powerful, nor without terrible consequences to allabout it, both in the act and in the example. This pretended republic isfounded in crimes, and exists by wrong and robbery; and wrong androbbery, far from a title to anything, is war with mankind. To be atpeace with robbery is to be an accomplice with it. 

Mere locality does not constitute a body politic. Had Cade and his ganggot possession of London, they would not have been the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council. The body politic of France existed in themajesty of its throne, in the dignity of its nobility, in the honor ofits gentry, in the sanctity of its clergy, in the reverence of itsmagistracy, in the weight and consideration due to its landed propertyin the several bailliages, in the respect due to its movable substancerepresented by the corporations of the kingdom. All these particular_molecules_ united form the great mass of what is truly the body politicin all countries. They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice;because they can only exist by justice. Nation is a moral essence, not ageographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator. France, though out of her territorial possession, exists; because the solepossible claimant, I mean the proprietary, and the government to whichthe proprietary adheres, exists and claims. God forbid, that if you wereexpelled from your house by ruffians and assassins, that I should callthe material walls, doors, and windows of ---- the ancient and honorablefamily of ----! Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content toturn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, allthe esteem and respect I owe to you? The Regicides in France are notFrance. France is out of her bounds, but the kingdom is the same. 

To illustrate my opinions on this subject, let us suppose a case, which, after what has happened, we cannot think absolutely impossible, thoughthe augury is to be abominated, and the event deprecated with our mostardent prayers. Let us suppose, then, that our gracious sovereign wassacrilegiously murdered; his exemplary queen, at the head of thematronage of this land, murdered in the same manner; that thoseprincesses whose beauty and modest elegance are the ornaments of thecountry, and who are the leaders and patterns of the ingenuous youth oftheir sex, were put to a cruel and ignominious death, with hundreds ofothers, mothers and daughters, ladies of the first distinction; that thePrince of Wales and the Duke of York, princes the hope and pride of thenation, with all their brethren, were forced to fly from the knives ofassassins; that the whole body of our excellent clergy were eithermassacred or robbed of all and transported; the Christian religion, inall its denominations, forbidden and persecuted; the law totally, fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed; the judges put to deathby revolutionary tribunals; the peers and commons robbed to the lastacre of their estates, massacred, if they stayed, or obliged to seeklife in flight, in exile, and in beggary; that the whole landed propertyshould share the very same fate; that every military and naval officerof honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the samedescription of confiscation and exile; that the principal merchants andbankers should be drawn out, as from an hen-coop, for slaughter; thatthe citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the handand the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should havebeen collected in the public squares and massacred by thousands withcannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to asituation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons. In sucha case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired, honored, loved, and cherished? Would not the exiles of England alone bemy government and my fellow-citizens? Would not their places of refugebe my temporary country? Would not all my duties and all my affectionsbe there, and there only? Should I consider myself as a traitor to mycountry, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart ofevery potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge themon their enemies? Could I in any way show myself more a patriot? Whatshould I think of those potentates who insulted their sufferingbrethren, --who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants, --andcould find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?What ought I to think and feel, if, being geographers instead of kings, they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the riverspolluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement, as the honorablemember of Europe called England? In that condition, what should we thinkof Sweden, Denmark, or Holland, or whatever power afforded us a churlishand treacherous hospitality, if they should invite us to join thestandard of our king, our laws, and our religion, --if they should giveus a direct promise of protection, --if, after all this, taking advantageof our deplorable situation, which left us no choice, they were to treatus as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries, --if they were to send usfar from the aid of our king and our suffering country, to squander usaway in the most pestilential climates for a venal enlargement of theirown territories, for the purpose of trucking them, when obtained, withthose very robbers and murderers they had called upon us to oppose withour blood? What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service wewere not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes, but as outcasts of the human race? Whilst we were fighting those battlesof their interest and as their soldiers, how should we feel, if we wereto be excluded from all their cartels? How must we feel, if the prideand flower of the English nobility and gentry, who might escape thepestilential clime and the devouring sword, should, if taken prisoners, be delivered over as rebel subjects, to be condemned as rebels, astraitors, as the vilest of all criminals, by tribunals formed of Maroonnegro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters, who weremade free and organized into judges for their robberies and murders?What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarousprotection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders? Should we not obtestHeaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth? Oppression makeswise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, whichis better than the sobriety of fools. Their cry is the voice of sacredmisery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy ofprophecy and inspiration. In that bitterness of soul, in thatindignation of suffering virtue, in that exaltation of despair, wouldnot persecuted English loyalty cry out with an awful warning voice, anddenounce the destruction that waits on monarchs who consider fidelityto them as the most degrading of all vices, who suffer it to be punishedas the most abominable of all crimes, and who have no respect but forrebels, traitors, regicides, and furious negro slaves, whose crimes havebroke their chains? Would not this warm language of high indignationhave more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of trueattachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers who would hush monarchsto sleep in the arms of death? Let them be well convinced, that, if everthis example should prevail in its whole extent, it will have its fulloperation. Whilst kings stand firm on their base, though under that basethere is a sure-wrought mine, there will not be wanting to their leveesa single person of those who are attached to their fortune, and not totheir persons or cause; but hereafter none will support a totteringthrone. Some will fly for fear of being crushed under the ruin; somewill join in making it. They will seek, in the destruction of royalty, fame and power and wealth and the homage of kings, with Reubell, withCarnot, with Révellière, and with the Merlins and the Talliens, ratherthan suffer exile and beggary with the Condés, or the Broglies, theCastries, the D'Avarays, the Sérents, the Cazalès, and the long line ofloyal, suffering, patriot nobility, or to be butchered with the oraclesand the victims of the laws, the D'Ormessons, the D'Esprémesnils, andthe Malesherbes. This example we shall give, if, instead of adhering toour fellows in a cause which is an honor to us all, we abandon thelawful government and lawful corporate body of France, to hunt for ashameful and ruinous fraternity with this odious usurpation thatdisgraces civilized society and the human race. 

And is, then, example nothing? It is everything. Example is the schoolof mankind, and they will learn at no other. This war is a war againstthat example. It is not a war for Louis the Eighteenth, or even for theproperty, virtue, fidelity of France. It is a war for George the Third, for Francis the Second, and for all the dignity, property, honor, virtue, and religion of England, of Germany, and of all nations. 

I know that all I have said of the systematic unsociability of thisnew-invented species of republic, and the impossibility of preservingpeace, is answered by asserting that the scheme of manners, morals, andeven of maxims and principles of state, is of no weight in a question ofpeace or war between communities. This doctrine is supported by example. The case of Algiers is cited, with an hint, as if it were the strongercase. I should take no notice of this sort of inducement, if I had foundit only where first it was. I do not want respect for those from whom Ifirst heard it; but, having no controversy at present with them, I onlythink it not amiss to rest on it a little, as I find it adopted, withmuch more of the same kind, by several of those on whom such reasoninghad formerly made no apparent impression. If it had no force to preventus from submitting to this necessary war, it furnishes no better groundfor our making an unnecessary and ruinous peace. 

This analogical argument drawn from the case of Algiers would lead us agood way. The fact is, we ourselves with a little cover, others moredirectly, pay a _tribute_ to the Republic of Algiers. Is it meant toreconcile us to the payment of a _tribute_ to the French Republic? Thatthis, with other things more ruinous, will be demanded, hereafter, Ilittle doubt; but for the present this will not be avowed, --though ourminds are to be gradually prepared for it. In truth, the arguments fromthis case are worth little, even to those who approve the buying anAlgerine forbearance of piracy. There are many things which men do notapprove, that they must do to avoid a greater evil. To argue from thencethat they are to act in the same manner in all cases is turningnecessity into a law. Upon what is matter of prudence, the argumentconcludes the contrary way. Because we have done one humiliating act, weought with infinite caution to admit more acts of the same nature, lesthumiliation should become our habitual state. Matters of prudence areunder the dominion of circumstances, and not of logical analogies. It isabsurd to take it otherwise. 

I, for one, do more than doubt the policy of this kind of conventionwith Algiers. On those who think as I do the argument _ad hominem_ canmake no sort of impression. I know something of the constitution andcomposition of this very extraordinary republic. It has a constitution, I admit, similar to the present tumultuous military tyranny of France, by which an handful of obscure ruffians domineer over a fertile countryand a brave people. For the composition, too, I admit the Algerinecommunity resembles that of France, --being formed out of the very scum, scandal, disgrace, and pest of the Turkish Asia. The Grand Seignior, todisburden the country, suffers the Dey to recruit in his dominions thecorps of janizaries, or asaphs, which form the Directory and Council ofElders of the African Republic one and indivisible. But notwithstandingthis resemblance, which I allow, I never shall so far injure theJanizarian Republic of Algiers as to put it in comparison, for everysort of crime, turpitude, and oppression, with the Jacobin Republic ofParis. There is no question with me to which of the two I should chooseto be a neighbor or a subject. But. Situated as I am, I am in no dangerof becoming to Algiers either the one or the other. It is not so in myrelation to the atheistical fanatics of France. I _am_ their neighbor; I_may_ become their subject. Have the gentlemen who borrowed this happyparallel no idea of the different conduct to be held with regard to thevery same evil at an immense distance and when it is at your door? whenits power is enormous, as when it is comparatively as feeble as itsdistance is remote? when there is a barrier of language and usages, which prevents corruption through certain old correspondences andhabitudes, from the contagion of the horrible novelties that areintroduced into everything else? I can contemplate without dread a royalor a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with aneasy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the Tower. But if, by _Habeas Corpus_, or otherwise, he was to come into the lobbyof the House of Commons whilst your door was open, any of you would bemore stout than wise who would not gladly make your escape out of theback windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in mybedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behindAlgiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, andthe lions and tigers that are in our antechambers and our lobbies. Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not ourneighbor; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be, is anold creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to beapprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I willtell you what I think of that point. In the mean time, the case quotedfrom the Algerine Reports will not apply as authority. We shall put itout of court; and so far as that goes, let the counsel for the Jacobinpeace take nothing by their motion. 

When we voted, as you and I did, with many more whom you and I respectand love, to resist this enemy, we were providing for dangers that weredirect, home, pressing, and not remote, contingent, uncertain, andformed upon loose analogies. We judged of the danger with which we weremenaced by Jacobin France from the whole tenor of her conduct, not fromone or two doubtful or detached acts or expressions. I not onlyconcurred in the idea of combining with Europe in this war, but to thebest of my power even stimulated ministers to that conjunction ofinterests and of efforts. I joined them with all my soul, on theprinciples contained in that manly and masterly state-paper which I havetwo or three times referred to, [33] and may still more frequentlyhereafter. The diplomatic collection never was more enriched than withthis piece. The historic facts justify every stroke of the master. "Thuspainters write their names at Co. "

Various persons may concur in the same measure on various grounds. Theymay be various, without being contrary to or exclusive of each other. Ithought the insolent, unprovoked aggression of the Regicide upon ourally of Holland a good ground of war. I think his manifest attempt tooverturn the balance of Europe a good ground of war. As a good groundof war I consider his declaration of war on his Majesty and his kingdom. But though I have taken all these to my aid, I consider them as nothingmore than as a sort of evidence to indicate the treasonable mind within. Long before their acts of aggression and their declaration of war, thefaction in France had assumed a form, had adopted a body of principlesand maxims, and had regularly and systematically acted on them, by whichshe virtually had put herself in a posture which was in itself adeclaration of war against mankind. 

It is said by the Directory, in their several manifestoes, that we ofthe people are tumultuous for peace, and that ministers pretendnegotiation to amuse us. This they have learned from the language ofmany amongst ourselves, whose conversations have been one main cause ofwhatever extent the opinion for peace with Regicide may be. But I, whothink the ministers unfortunately to be but too serious in theirproceedings, find myself obliged to say a little more on this subject ofthe popular opinion. 

Before our opinions are quoted against ourselves, it is proper, that, from our serious deliberation, they may be worth quoting. It is withoutreason we praise the wisdom of our Constitution in putting under thediscretion of the crown the awful trust of war and peace, if theministers of the crown virtually return it again into our hands. Thetrust was placed there as a sacred deposit, to secure us against popularrashness in plunging into wars, and against the effects of populardismay, disgust, or lassitude, in getting out of them as imprudently aswe might first engage in them. To have no other measure in judging ofthose great objects than our momentary opinions and desires is to throwus back upon that very democracy which, in this part, our Constitutionwas formed to avoid. 

It is no excuse at all for a minister who at our desire takes a measurecontrary to our safety, that it is our own act. He who does not stay thehand of suicide is guilty of murder. On our part, I say, that to beinstructed is not to be degraded or enslaved. Information is anadvantage to us; and we have a right to demand it. He that is bound toact in the dark cannot be said to act freely. When it appears evident toour governors that our desires and our interests are at variance, theyought not to gratify the former at the expense of the latter. Statesmenare placed on an eminence, that they may have a larger horizon than wecan possibly command. They have a whole before them, which we cancontemplate only in the parts, and often without the necessaryrelations. Ministers are not only our natural rulers, but our naturalguides. Reason, clearly and manfully delivered, has in itself a mightyforce; but reason in the mouth of legal authority is, I may fairly say, irresistible. 

I admit that reason of state will not, in many circumstances, permit thedisclosure of the true ground of a public proceeding. In that casesilence is manly, and it is wise. It is fair to call for trust, when theprinciple of reason itself suspends its public use. I take thedistinction to be this: the ground of a particular measure making a partof a plan it is rarely proper to divulge; all the broader grounds ofpolicy, on which the general plan is to be adopted, ought as rarely tobe concealed. They who have not the whole cause before them, call thempoliticians, call them people, call them what you will, are no judges. The difficulties of the case, as well as its fair side, ought to bepresented. This ought to be done; and it is all that can be done. Whenwe have our true situation distinctly presented to us, if then weresolve, with a blind and headlong violence, to resist the admonitionsof our friends, and to cast ourselves into the hands of our potent andirreconcilable foes, then, and not till then, the ministers standacquitted before God and man for whatever may come. 

Lamenting, as I do, that the matter has not had so full and free adiscussion as it requires, I mean to omit none of the points which seemto me necessary for consideration, previous to an arrangement which isforever to decide the form and the fate of Europe. In the course, therefore, of what I shall have the honor to address to you, I proposethe following questions to your serious thoughts. --1. Whether thepresent system, which stands for a government, in France, be such as inpeace and war affects the neighboring states in a manner different fromthe internal government that formerly prevailed in that country?--2. Whether that system, supposing its views hostile to other nations, possesses any means of being hurtful to them peculiar to itself?--3. Whether there has been lately such a change in France as to alter thenature of its system, or its effect upon other powers?--4. Whether anypublic declarations or engagements exist, on the part of the alliedpowers, which stand in the way of a treaty of peace which supposes theright and confirms the power of the Regicide faction in France?--5. Whatthe state of the other powers of Europe will be with respect to eachother and their colonies, on the conclusion of a Regicide peace?--6. Whether we are driven to the absolute necessity of making that kind ofpeace?

These heads of inquiry will enable us to make the application of theseveral matters of fact and topics of argument, that occur in this vastdiscussion, to certain fixed principles. I do not mean to confine myselfto the order in which they stand. I shall discuss them in such a manneras shall appear to me the best adapted for showing their mutual bearingsand relations. Here, then, I close the public matter of my letter; butbefore I have done, let me say one word in apology for myself. 

In wishing this nominal peace not to be precipitated, I am sure no manliving is less disposed to blame the present ministry than I am. Some ofmy oldest friends (and I wish I could say it of more of them) make apart in that ministry. There are some, indeed, "whom my dim eyes in vainexplore. " In my mind, a greater calamity could not have fallen on thepublic than the exclusion of one of them. But I drive away that, withother melancholy thoughts. A great deal ought to be said upon thatsubject, or nothing. As to the distinguished persons to whom my friendswho remain are joined, if benefits nobly and generously conferred oughtto procure good wishes, they are entitled to my best vows; and they havethem all. They have administered to me the only consolation I am capableof receiving, which is, to know that no individual will suffer by mythirty years' service to the public. If things should give us thecomparative happiness of a struggle, I shall be found, I was going tosay fighting, (that would be foolish, ) but dying, by the side of Mr. Pitt. I must add, that, if anything defensive in our domestic systemcan possibly save us from the disasters of a Regicide peace, he is theman to save us. If the finances in such a case can be repaired, he isthe man to repair them. If I should lament any of his acts, it is onlywhen they appear to me to have no resemblance to acts of his. But lethim not have a confidence in himself which no human abilities canwarrant. His abilities are fully equal (and that is to say much for anyman) to those which are opposed to him. But if we look to him as oursecurity against the consequences of a Regicide peace, let us be assuredthat a Regicide peace and a constitutional ministry are terms that willnot agree. With a Regicide peace the king cannot long have a minister toserve him, nor the minister a king to serve. If the Great Disposer, inreward of the royal and the private virtues of our sovereign, shouldcall him from the calamitous spectacles which will attend a state ofamity with Regicide, his successor will surely see them, unless the sameProvidence greatly anticipates the course of Nature. Thinking thus, (andnot, as I conceive, on light grounds, ) I dare not flatter the reigningsovereign, nor any minister he has or can have, nor his successorapparent, nor any of those who may be called to serve him, with whatappears to me a false state of their situation. We cannot have them andthat peace together. 

I do not forget that there had been a considerable difference betweenseveral of our friends (with my insignificant self) and the great man atthe head of ministry, in an early stage of these discussions. But I amsure there was a period in which we agreed better in the danger of aJacobin existence in France. At one time he and all Europe seemed tofeel it. But why am not I converted with so many great powers and somany great ministers? It is because I am old and slow. I am in thisyear, 1796, only where all the powers of Europe were in 1793. I cannotmove with this precession of the equinoxes, which is preparing for usthe return of some very old, I am afraid no golden era, or thecommencement of some new era that must be denominated from some newmetal. In this crisis I must hold my tongue or I must speak withfreedom. Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: but, asin the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It isa sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that hemay speak it the longer. But as the same rules do not hold in all cases, what would be right for you, who may presume on a series of years beforeyou, would have no sense for me, who cannot, without absurdity, calculate on six months of life. What I say I _must_ say at once. Whatever I write is in its nature testamentary. It may have theweakness, but it has the sincerity, of a dying declaration. For the fewdays I have to linger here I am removed completely from the busy sceneof the world; but I hold myself to be still responsible for everythingthat I have done whilst I continued on the place of action. If therawest tyro in politics has been influenced by the authority of my grayhairs, and led by anything in my speeches or my writings to enter intothis war, he has a right to call upon me to know why I have changed myopinions, or why, when those I voted with have adopted better notions, Ipersevere in exploded error. 

When I seem not to acquiesce in the acts of those I respect in everydegree short of superstition, I am obliged to give my reasons fully. Icannot set my authority against their authority. But to exert reason isnot to revolt against authority. Reason and authority do not move in thesame parallel. That reason is an _amicus curiæ_ who speaks _de plano_, not _pro tribunali_. It is a friend who makes an useful suggestion tothe court, without questioning its jurisdiction. Whilst he acknowledgesits competence, he promotes its efficiency. I shall pursue the plan Ihave chalked out in my letters that follow this. 

FOOTNOTES:

[22] "Mussabat tacito medicina timore. "

[23] Mr. Bird, sent to state the real situation of the Duc de Choiseul. 

[24] Boissy d'Anglas. 

[25] "This Court has seen, with regret, how far the tone and spirit ofthat answer, the nature and extent of the demands which it contains, andthe manner of announcing them, are remote from any disposition forpeace. 

"The inadmissible pretension is there avowed of appropriating to Franceall that the laws actually existing there may have comprised under thedenomination of French territory. To a demand such as this is added anexpress declaration that no proposal contrary to it will be made or evenlistened to: and this, under the pretence of an internal regulation, theprovisions of which are wholly foreign to all other nations. 

"While these dispositions shall be persisted in, nothing is left for theking but to prosecute a war equally just and necessary. 

"Whenever his enemies shall manifest more pacific sentiments, hisMajesty will at all times be eager to concur in them, by lendinghimself, in concert with his allies, to all such measures as shall bebest calculated to reëstablish general tranquillity on conditions just, honorable, and permanent: either by the establishment of a congress, which has been so often and so happily the means of restoring peace toEurope; or by a preliminary discussion of the principles which may beproposed, on either side, as a foundation of a general pacification; or, lastly, by an impartial examination of any other way which may bepointed out to him for arriving at the same salutary end. 

"_Downing Street, April 10th_, 1796. "

[26] _Official Note, extracted from the Journal of the Defenders of theCountry_. 

 "EXECUTIVE DIRECTORY. 

 "Different journals have advanced that an English plenipotentiary had reached Paris, and had presented himself to the Executive Directory, but that, his propositions not having appeared satisfactory, he had received orders instantly to quit France. 

 "All these assertions are equally false. 

 "The notices given in the English papers of a minister having been sent to Paris, there to treat of peace, bring to recollection the overtures of Mr. Wickham to the ambassador of the Republic at Basle, and the rumors circulated relative to the mission of Mr. Hammond to the Court of Prussia. The _insignificance_, or rather the _subtle duplicity_, the PUNIC _style_ of Mr. Wickham's note, is not forgotten. According to the partisans of the English ministry, it was to Paris that Mr. Hammond was to come to speak for peace. When his destination became public, and it was known that he went to Prussia, the same writer repeated that it was to accelerate a peace, and not withstanding the object, now well known, of this negotiation was to engage Prussia to break her treaties with the Republic, and to return into the coalition. The Court of Berlin, faithful to its engagements, repulsed these _perfidious_ propositions. But in converting this intrigue into a mission for peace, the English ministry joined to the hope of giving a new enemy to France _that of justifying the continuance of the war in the eyes of the English nation, and of throwing all the odium of it on the French, government_. Such was also the aim of Mr. Wickham's note. _Such is still, that of the notices given at this time in the English papers_. 

 This aim will appear evident, if we reflect how difficult it is that the ambitious government of England should sincerely wish for a, peace that would _snatch from it its maritime preponderancy, would reëstablish the freedom of the seas, would give a new impulse to the Spanish, Dutch, and French marines_, and would carry to the highest degree of prosperity the industry and commerce of those nations in, which it has always found _rivals_, and which it has considered as _enemies_ of its commerce, when they were tired of being its _dupes_. 

 "_But there will no longer be any credit given to the pacific intentions of the English ministry when it is known that its gold and its intrigues, its open practices and its insinuations, besiege more than ever the Cabinet of Vienna, and are one of the principal obstacles to the negotiation which, that Cabinet would of itself be induced to enter on for peace_. 

 "They will no longer _be credited_, finally, when the moment of the rumor of these overtures being circulated is considered. _The English nation supports impatiently the continuance of the war; a reply must be made to its complaints, its reproaches_: the Parliament is about to reopen, its sittings; the mouths of the orators who will declaim against the war must be shut, the demand of new taxes must be justified; and to obtain these results, it is necessary to be enabled to advance, that the French government refuses every reasonable proposition of peace. "

[27] "In their place has succeeded a system destructive of all publicorder, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations withoutnumber, --by arbitrary imprisonments, --by massacres which cannot beremembered without horror, --and at length by the execrable murder of ajust and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, whowith, an unshaken firmness has shared all the misfortunes of her royalconsort, his protracted sufferings, his cruel captivity, his ignominiousdeath. "--"They [the Allies] have had to encounter acts of aggressionwithout pretext, open violations of all treaties, unprovokeddeclarations of war, --in a word, whatever corruption, intrigue, orviolence could effect, for the purpose, so openly avowed, of subvertingall the institutions of society, and of extending' over all the nationsof Europe that confusion which has produced the misery of France. Thisstate of things cannot exist in France, without involving all thesurrounding powers in one common danger, --without giving them the right, without imposing it upon them as a duty, to stop the progress of an evilwhich exists only by the successive violation of all law and allproperty, and which attacks the Fundamental principles by which mankindis united in the bonds of civil society. "--"The king would propose noneother than equitable and moderate conditions: not such as the expenses, the risks, and the sacrifices of the war might justify, but such as hisMajesty thinks himself under the indispensable necessity of requiring, with a view to these considerations, and still more to that of his ownsecurity and of the future tranquillity of Europe. His Majesty desiresnothing more sincerely than thus to terminate a war which he in vainendeavored to avoid, and all the calamities of which, as now experiencedby France, are to be attributed only to the ambition, the perfidy, andthe violence of those whose crimes have involved their own country inmisery and disgraced all civilized nations. "--"The king promises on hispart the suspension of hostilities, friendship, and (as far as thecourse of events will allow, of which the will of man cannot dispose)security and protection to all those who, by declaring for a monarchicalgovernment, shall shake off the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy: of thatanarchy which, has broken all the most sacred bonds of society, dissolved all the relations of civil life, violated every right, confounded every duty; which uses the name of liberty to exercise themost cruel tyranny, to annihilate all property, to seize on allpossessions; which founds its power on the pretended consent of thepeople, and itself carries fire and sword through extensive provincesfor having demanded their laws, their religion, and their _lawfulsovereign_. "

 Declaration sent by his Majesty's command to the commanders of his Majesty's fleets and armies employed against France and to his Majesty's ministers employed at foreign courts. _Whitehall, Oct_. 29, 1793

[28] "Ut lethargicus hic, cum fit pugil, et medicum urget. "--HOB. 

[29] See the Declaration. 

[30] See Declaration, Whitehall, October 29, 1793. 

[31] Nothing could be more solemn than their promulgation of thisprinciple, as a preamble to the destructive code of their famousarticles for the decomposition of society, into whatever country theyshould enter. "La Convention Nationale, après avoir entendu le rapportde ses comités de finances, de la guerre, et diplomatiques réunis, fidèle au _principe de souveraineté de peuples, qui ne lui permet pas dereconnaître aucune institution qui y porte atteinte_" &c. , &c. --_Décreesur le Rapport de Cambon, Dec. 18, 1702_. And see the subsequentproclamation. 

[32] "This state of things cannot exist in France, without involving allthe surrounding powers in one common danger, --without giving them theright, without imposing it upon them as a duty, to stop the progress ofan evil which . . . Attacks the fundamental principles by which mankind isunited in the bonds of civil society. "--_Declaration 29th Oct. , 1793_. 

[33] Declaration, Whitehall, Oct. 29, 1793. 

LETTER II. 

ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS IT REGARDS OTHERNATIONS. 

My dear Sir, --I closed my first letter with serious matter, and I hopeit has employed your thoughts. The system of peace must have a referenceto the system of the war. On that ground, I must therefore again recallyour mind to our original opinions, which time and events have nottaught me to vary. 

My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France, not as a state, but as a faction. The vast territorial extent of thatcountry, its immense population, its riches of production, its riches ofcommerce and convention, the whole aggregate mass of what in ordinarycases constitutes the force of a state, to me were but objects ofsecondary consideration. They might be balanced; and they have beenoften more than balanced. Great as these things are, they are not whatmake the faction formidable. It is the faction that makes them trulydreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body ofFrance, --that informs it as a soul, --that stamps upon its ambition, andupon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which stronglydistinguishes them from the same general passions and the same generalviews in other men and in other communities. It is that spirit whichinspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity. Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France toshake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold. A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes who, in theconflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they wereengaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests, orthat they can make peace in the spirit of their former arrangements ofpacification. Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road. 

As to me, I was always steadily of opinion that this disorder was not inits nature intermittent. I conceived that the contest, once begun, couldnot be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion, but that ourfirst struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought wecould make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of anobject we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itselfthat we were at war. As I understood the matter, we were at war, notwith its conduct, but with its existence, --convinced that its existenceand its hostility were the same. 

The faction is not local or territorial. It is a general evil. Where itleast appears in action, it is still full of life. In its sleep itrecruits its strength and prepares its exertion. Its spirit lies deep inthe corruptions of our common nature. The social order which restrainsit feeds it. It exists in every country in Europe, and among all ordersof men in every country, who look up to France as to a common head. Thecentre is there. The circumference is the world of Europe, wherever therace of Europe may be settled. Everywhere else the faction is militant;in France it is triumphant. In France is the bank of deposit and thebank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming inevery state. It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and toomischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any othercountry whilst it is predominant there. War, instead of being the causeof its force, has suspended its operation. It has given a reprieve, atleast, to the Christian world. 

The true nature of a Jacobin war, in the beginning, was by most of theChristian powers felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precise mannerdeclared. In the joint manifesto published by the Emperor and the Kingof Prussia, on the 4th of August, 1792, it is expressed in the clearestterms, and on principles which could not fail, if they had adhered tothem, of classing those monarchs with the first benefactors of mankind. This manifesto was published, as they themselves express it, "to layopen to the present generation, as well as to posterity, their motives, their intentions, and the _disinterestedness_ of their personal views:taking up arms for the purpose of preserving social and political orderamongst all civilized nations, and to secure to _each_ state itsreligion, happiness, independence, territories, and realconstitution. "--"On this ground they hoped that all empires and allstates would be unanimous, and, becoming the firm guardians of thehappiness of mankind, that they could not fail to unite their efforts torescue a numerous nation from its own fury, to preserve Europe from thereturn of barbarism, and the universe from the subversion and anarchywith which it was threatened. " The whole of that noble performance oughtto be read at the first meeting of any congress which may assemble forthe purpose of pacification. In that piece "these powers expresslyrenounce all views of personal aggrandizement, " and confine themselvesto objects worthy of so generous, so heroic, and so perfectly wise andpolitic an enterprise. It was to the principles of this confederation, and to no other, that we wished our sovereign and our country to accede, as a part of the commonwealth of Europe. To these principles, with sometrifling exceptions and limitations, they did fully accede. [34] And allour friends who took office acceded to the ministry, (whether wisely ornot, ) as I always understood the matter, on the faith and on theprinciples of that declaration. 

As long as these powers flattered themselves that the menace of forcewould produce the effect of force, they acted on those declarations; butwhen their menaces failed of success, their efforts took a newdirection. It did not appear to them that virtue and heroism ought to bepurchased by millions of rix-dollars. It is a dreadful truth, but it isa truth that cannot be concealed: in ability, in dexterity, in thedistinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors. They sawthe thing right from the very beginning. Whatever were the first motivesto the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for itsobjects, it was a _civil war_; and as such they pursued it. It is a warbetween the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political orderof Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which meansto change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire overother nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginningwith the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured _thecentre of Europe_; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might bethe event of battles and sieges, their _cause_ was victorious. Whetherits territory had a little more or a little less peeled from itssurface, or whether an island or two was detached from its commerce, tothem was of little moment. The conquest of France was a gloriousacquisition. That once well laid as a basis of empire, opportunitiesnever could be wanting to regain or to replace what had been lost, anddreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of their adversaries. 

They saw it was _a civil war_. It was their business to persuade theiradversaries that it ought to be a _foreign_ war. The Jacobins everywhereset up a cry against the new crusade; and they intrigued with effect inthe cabinet, in the field, and in every private society in Europe. Theirtask was not difficult. The condition of princes, and sometimes of firstministers too, is to be pitied. The creatures of the desk and thecreatures of favor had no relish for the principles of the manifestoes. They promised no governments, no regiments, no revenues from whenceemoluments might arise by perquisite or by grant. In truth, the tribe ofvulgar politicians are the lowest of our species. There is no trade sovile and mechanical as government in their hands. Virtue is not theirhabit. They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommendedonly by conscience and glory. A large, liberal, and prospective view ofthe interests of states passes with them for romance, and the principlesthat recommend it for the wanderings of a disordered imagination. Thecalculators compute them out of their senses. The jesters and buffoonsshame them out of everything grand and elevated. Littleness in objectand in means to them appears soundness and sobriety. They think there isnothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle, which they canmeasure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers. 

Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principlesat all, they played the game of that faction. There was a beaten roadbefore them. The powers of Europe were armed; France had always appeareddangerous; the war was easily diverted from France as a faction toFrance as a state. The princes were easily taught to slide back intotheir old, habitual course of politics. They were easily led to considerthe flames that were consuming France, not as a warning to protect theirown buildings, (which were without any party-wall, and linked by acontignation into the edifice of France, ) but as an happy occasion forpillaging the goods, and for carrying off the materials of theirneighbor's house. Their provident fears were changed into avaricioushopes. They carried on their new designs without seeming to abandon theprinciples of their old policy. They pretended to seek, or theyflattered themselves that they sought, in the accession of newfortresses and new territories a _defensive_ security. But the securitywanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly dangerous inits fortresses nor in its territories as in its spirit and itsprinciples. They aimed, or pretended to aim, at _defending_ themselvesagainst a danger from which there can be no security in any _defensive_plan. If armies and fortresses were a defence against Jacobinism, Louisthe Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful monarch over an happypeople. 

This error obliged them, even in their offensive operations, to adopt aplan of war against the success of which there was something littleshort of mathematical demonstration. They refused to take any step whichmight strike at the heart of affairs. They seemed unwilling to wound theenemy in any vital part. They acted through the whole as if they reallywished the conservation of the Jacobin power, as what might be morefavorable than the lawful government to the attainment of the pettyobjects they looked for. They always kept on the circumference; and thewider and remoter the circle was, the more eagerly they chose it astheir sphere of action in this centrifugal war. The plan they pursued inits nature demanded great length of time. In its execution, they whowent the nearest way to work were obliged to cover an incredible extentof country. It left to the enemy every means of destroying this extendedline of weakness. Ill success in any part was sure to defeat the effectof the whole. This is true of Austria. It is still more true of England. On this false plan, even good fortune, by further weakening the victor, put him but the further off from his object. 

As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit ofaggrandizement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seizedupon all the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory atthe expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at theexpense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took itsturn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of faith andfriendship. 

The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, hasbeen employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, throughthe false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by theerrors of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues, when peace is made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because itwill be made upon the same false principle. What has been lost in thefield, in the field may be regained. An arrangement of peace in itsnature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel anddeliberation, and not of fortuitous events. If built upon a basisfundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of thoseunforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor ofthe world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin. It wouldnot be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one totrust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules ofprudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinaryprovidence of God. 

It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the leastconsiderable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not bythe sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded. It wouldanswer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war. The whole has been but one error. It was but nominally a war ofalliance. As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to holdan alliance together. There could be no tie of _honor_ in a society forpillage. There could be no tie of a common _interest_, where the objectdid not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well givethem a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, formsuch a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandona separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any othermember of the alliance. The partition of Poland offered an object ofspoil in which the parties _might_ agree. They were circumjacent, andeach might take a portion convenient to his own territory. They mightdispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity toeach of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment. Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitousmeasure, and they most who were most concerned in it, for the momentthere was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongstconfederates in wrong. But the spoil of France did not afford the samefacilities for accommodation. What might satisfy the House of Austria ina Flemish frontier afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of theKing of Prussia. What might be desired by Great Britain in the WestIndies must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest atVienna, and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interestat Madrid. Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs onItaly, could not be very much in earnest about the conservation of theold patrimony of the House of Savoy; and Sardinia, who owed to anItalian force all her means of shutting out France from Italy, of whichshe has been supposed to hold the key, would not purchase the means ofstrength upon one side by yielding it on the other: she would notreadily give the possession of Novara for the hope of Savoy. NoContinental power was willing to lose any of its Continental objects forthe increase of the naval power of Great Britain; and Great Britainwould not give up any of the objects she sought for, as the means of anincrease to her naval power, to further their aggrandizement. 

The moment this war came to be considered as a war merely of profit, theactual circumstances are such that it never could become really a war ofalliance. Nor can the peace be a peace of alliance, until things are putupon their right bottom. 

I don't find it denied, that, when a treaty is entered into for peace, ademand will be made on the Regicides to surrender a great part of theirconquests on the Continent. 'Will they, in the present state of the war, make that surrender without an equivalent? This Continental cession mustof course be made in favor of that party in the alliance that hassuffered losses. That party has nothing to furnish towards anequivalent. What equivalent, for instance, has Holland to offer, who haslost her all? What equivalent can come from the Emperor, every part ofwhose territories contiguous to France is already within the pale of theRegicide dominion? What equivalent has Sardinia to offer for Savoy, andfor Nice, --I may say, for her whole being? What has she taken from thefaction of France? She has lost very near her all, and she has gainednothing. What equivalent has Spain to give? Alas! she has already paidfor her own ransom the fund of equivalent, --and a dreadful equivalent itis, to England and to herself. But I put Spain out of the question: sheis a province of the Jacobin empire, and she must make peace or waraccording to the orders she receives from the Directory of Assassins. Ineffect and substance, her crown is a fief of Regicide. 

Whence, then, can the compensation be demanded? Undoubtedly from thatpower which alone has made some conquests. That power is England. Willthe Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England maykeep islands in the West Indies? They never can protract the war in goodearnest for that object; nor can they act in concert with us, in ourrefusal to grant anything towards their redemption. In that case we arethus situated: either we must give Europe, bound hand and foot, toFrance, or we must quit the West Indies without any one object, great orsmall, towards indemnity and security. I repeat it, without anyadvantage whatever: because, supposing that our conquest could compriseall that France ever possessed in the tropical America, it never canamount in any fair estimation to a fair equivalent for Holland, for theAustrian Netherlands, for the Lower Germany, --that is, for the wholeancient kingdom or circle of Burgundy, now under the yoke of Regicide, to say nothing of almost all Italy, under the same barbarous domination. If we treat in the present situation of things, we have nothing in ourhands that can redeem Europe. Nor is the Emperor, as I have observed, more rich in the fund of equivalents. 

If we look to our stock in the Eastern world, our most valuable andsystematic acquisitions are made in that quarter. Is it from France theyare made? France has but one or two contemptible factories, subsistingby the offal of the private fortunes of English individuals to supportthem, in any part of India. I look on the taking of the Cape of GoodHope as the securing of a post of great moment; it does honor to thosewho planned and to those who executed that enterprise; but I speak of italways as comparatively good, --as good as anything can be in a schemeof war that repels us from a centre, and employs all our forces wherenothing can be finally decisive. But giving, as I freely give, everypossible credit to these Eastern conquests, I ask one question:--On whomare they made? It is evident, that, if we can keep our Easternconquests, we keep them not at the expense of France, but at the expenseof Holland, our _ally_, --of Holland, the immediate cause of the war, thenation whom we had undertaken to protect, and not of the Republic whichit was our business to destroy. If we return the African and the Asiaticconquests, we put them into the hands of a nominal state (to thatHolland is reduced) unable to retain them, and which will virtuallyleave them under the direction of France. If we withhold them, Hollanddeclines still more as a state. She loses so much carrying trade, andthat means of keeping up the small degree of naval power she holds: forwhich policy alone, and not for any commercial gain, she maintains theCape, or any settlement beyond it. In that case, resentment, faction, and even necessity, will throw her more and more into the power of thenew, mischievous Republic. But on the probable state of Holland I shallsay more, when in this correspondence I come to talk over with you thestate in which any sort of Jacobin peace will leave all Europe. 

So far as to the East Indies. 

As to the West Indies, --indeed, as to either, if we look for matter ofexchange in order to ransom Europe, --it is easy to show that we havetaken a terribly roundabout road. I cannot conceive, even if, for thesake of holding conquests there, we should refuse to redeem Holland, and the Austrian Netherlands, and the hither Germany, that Spain, merelyas she is Spain, (and forgetting that the Regicide ambassador governs atMadrid, ) will see with perfect satisfaction Great Britain sole mistressof the isles. In truth, it appears to me, that, when we come to balanceour account, we shall find in the proposed peace only the pure, simple, and unendowed charms of Jacobin amity. We shall have the satisfaction ofknowing that no blood or treasure has been spared by the Allies forsupport of the Regicide system. We shall reflect at leisure on one greattruth: that it was ten times more easy totally to destroy the systemitself than, when established, it would be to reduce its power, --andthat this republic, most formidable abroad, was of all things theweakest at home; that her frontier was terrible, her interior feeble;that it was matter of choice to attack her where she is invincible, andto spare her where she was ready to dissolve by her own internaldisorders. We shall reflect that our plan was good neither for offencenor defence. 

It would not be at all difficult to prove that an army of an hundredthousand men, horse, foot, and artillery, might have been employedagainst the enemy, on the very soil which he has usurped, at a far lessexpense than has been squandered away upon tropical adventures. In theseadventures it was not an enemy we had to vanquish, but a cemetery toconquer. In carrying on the war in the West Indies, the hostile sword ismerciful, the country in which we engage is the dreadful enemy. Therethe European conqueror finds a cruel defeat in the very fruits of hissuccess. Every advantage is but a new demand on England for recruits tothe West Indian grave. In a West India war, the Regicides have for theirtroops a race of fierce barbarians, to whom the poisoned air, in whichour youth inhale certain death, is salubrity and life. To them theclimate is the surest and most faithful of allies. 

Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards theChannel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his weakand unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a man whodid not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of thecountry, who to our hundred thousand would at one time have added eightythousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthusiasm, and by vengeance: motives which secured them to the cause in a verydifferent manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized withmillions. This ally, (or rather, this principal in the war, ) by theconfession of the Regicide himself, was more formidable to him than allhis other foes united. Warring there, we should have led our arms to thecapital of Wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken)of a sure retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, animpenetrable barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formedbetween the enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nationwho have declined to act against an enemy when it might have been donein his own country, and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a longvictorious ally in that country, declined all effectual coöperation, andsuffered him to perish for want of support. On the plan of a war inFrance, every advantage that our allies might obtain would be doubledin its effect. Disasters on the one side might have a fair chance ofbeing compensated by victories on the other. Had we brought the main ofour force to bear upon that quarter, all the operations of the Britishand Imperial crowns would have been combined. The war would have hadsystem, correspondence, and a certain direction. But as the war has beenpursued, the operations of the two crowns have not the smallest degreeof mutual bearing or relation. 

Had acquisitions in the West Indies been our object, on success inFrance, everything reasonable in those remote parts might be demandedwith decorum and justice and a sure effect. Well might we call for arecompense in America for those services to which Europe owed itssafety. Having abandoned this obvious policy connected with principle, we have seen the Regicide power taking the reverse course, and makingreal conquests in the West Indies, to which all our dear-boughtadvantages (if we could hold them) are mean and contemptible. Thenoblest island within the tropics, worth all that we possess puttogether, is by the vassal Spaniard delivered into her hands. The islandof Hispaniola (of which we have but one poor corner, by a slippery hold)is perhaps equal to England in extent, and in fertility is far superior. The part possessed by Spain of that great island, made for the seat andcentre of a tropical empire, was not improved, to be sure, as the Frenchdivision had been, before it was systematically destroyed by theCannibal Republic; but it is not only the far larger, but the far moresalubrious and more fertile part. 

It was delivered into the hands of the barbarians, without, as I canfind, any public reclamation on our part, not only in contravention toone of the fundamental treaties that compose the public law of Europe, but in defiance of the fundamental colonial policy of Spain herself. This part of the Treaty of Utrecht was made for great general ends, unquestionably; but whilst it provided for those general ends, it was inaffirmance of that particular policy. It was not to injure, but to saveSpain, by making a settlement of her estate which prohibited her toalienate to France. It is her policy not to see the balance of WestIndian power overturned by France or by Great Britain. Whilst themonarchies subsisted, this unprincipled cession was what the influenceof the elder branch of the House of Bourbon never dared to attempt onthe younger: but cannibal terror has been more powerful than familyinfluence. The Bourbon monarchy of Spain, is united to the Republic ofFrance by what may be truly called the ties of blood. 

By this measure the balance of power in the West Indies is totallydestroyed. It has followed the balance of power in Europe. It is notalone what shall be left nominally to the Assassins that is theirs. Theirs is the whole empire of Spain in America. That stroke finishesall. I should be glad to see our suppliant negotiator in the act ofputting his feather to the ear of the Directory, to make it unclench thefist, and, by his tickling, to charm that rich prize out of the irongripe of robbery and ambition! It does not require much sagacity todiscern that no power wholly baffled and defeated in Europe can flatteritself with conquests in the West Indies. In that state of things it canneither keep nor hold. No! It cannot even long make war, if the grandbank and deposit of its force is at all in the West Indies. But here ascene opens to my view too important to pass by, perhaps too critical totouch. Is it possible that it should not present itself in all itsrelations to a mind habituated to consider either war or peace on alarge scale or as one whole?

Unfortunately, other ideas have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, amurderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on uponideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generouswildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war ina wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the enemy, awar in the heart of his country, a war in concert with an internal ally, and in combination with the external, is regarded as folly and romance. 

My dear friend, I hold it impossible that these considerations shouldhave escaped the statesmen on both sides of the water, and on both sidesof the House of Commons. How a question of peace can be discussedwithout having them in view I cannot imagine. If you or others see a wayout of these difficulties, I am happy. I see, indeed, a fund from whenceequivalents will be proposed. I see it, but I cannot just now touch it. It is a question of high moment. It opens another Iliad of woes toEurope. 

Such is the time proposed for making _a common political peace_ to whichno one circumstance is propitious. As to the grand principle of thepeace, it is left, as if by common consent, wholly out of the question. 

Viewing things in this light, I have frequently sunk into a degree ofdespondency and dejection hardly to be described; yet out of theprofoundest depths of this despair, an impulse which I have in vainendeavored to resist has urged me to raise one feeble cry against thisunfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make acoalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of theworld. No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike mewith half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by thisjunction of parties under the soothing name of peace. We are apt tospeak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by whichdubious wars terminate in humiliating treaties. It is here the directcontrary. I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at theintrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able withdeliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity. 

This fraternity is, indeed, so terrible in its nature, and in itsmanifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting ourapprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, bysubstituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of anambiguous quality, and describing such a connection under the terms of"_the usual relations of peace and amity_. " By this means the proposedfraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties which imply nochange in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system affectthe interior condition of nations. It is confounded with thoseconventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers arecompromised by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender of afrontier town or a disputed district on the one side or the other, bypactions in which the pretensions of families are settled, (as by aconveyancer making family substitutions and successions, ) without anyalteration in the laws, manners, religion, privileges, and customs ofthe cities or territories which are the subject of such arrangements. 

All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminouscollection called the _Corps Diplomatique_, forms the code or statutelaw, as the methodized reasonings of the great publicists and juristsform the digest and jurisprudence, of the Christian world. In thesetreasures are to be found the _usual_ relations of peace and amity incivilized Europe; and there the relations of ancient France were to befound amongst the rest. 

The present system in France is not the ancient France. It is not theancient France with ordinary ambition and ordinary means. It is not anew power of an old kind. It is a new power of a new species. When sucha questionable shape is to be admitted for the first time into thebrotherhood of Christendom, it is not a mere matter of idle curiosity toconsider how far it is in its nature alliable with the rest, or whether"the relations of peace and amity" with this new state are likely to beof the same nature with the _usual_ relations of the states of Europe. 

The Revolution in France had the relation of France to other nations asone of its principal objects. The changes made by that Revolution werenot the better to accommodate her to the old and usual relations, but toproduce new ones. The Revolution was made, not to make France free, butto make her formidable, --not to make her a neighbor, but amistress, --not to make her more observant of laws, but to put her in acondition to impose them. To make France truly formidable, it wasnecessary that France should be new-modelled. They who have notfollowed the train of the late proceedings have been led by deceitfulrepresentations (which deceit made a part in the plan) to conceive thatthis totally new model of a state, in which nothing escaped a change, was made with a view to its internal relations only. 

In the Revolution of France, two sorts of men were principally concernedin giving a character and determination to its pursuits: thephilosophers and the politicians. They took different ways, but they metin the same end. 

The philosophers had one predominant object, which they pursued with afanatical fury, --that is, the utter extirpation of religion. To thatevery question of empire was subordinate. They had rather domineer in aparish of atheists than rule over a Christian world. Their temporalambition was wholly subservient to their proselytizing spirit, in whichthey were not exceeded by Mahomet himself. 

They who have made but superficial studies in the natural history of thehuman mind have been taught to look on religious opinions as the onlycause of enthusiastic zeal and sectarian propagation. But there is nodoctrine whatever, on which men can warm, that is not capable of thevery same effect. The social nature of man impels him to propagate hisprinciples, as much as physical impulses urge him to propagate his kind. The passions give zeal and vehemence. The understanding bestows designand system. The whole man moves under the discipline of his opinions. Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm. When anythingconcerning it becomes an object of much meditation, it cannot beindifferent to the mind. They who do not love religion hate it. Therebels to God perfectly abhor the Author of their being. They hate Him"with all their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul, andwith all their strength. " He never presents Himself to their thoughts, but to menace and alarm them. They cannot strike the sun out of heaven, but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that obscures him fromtheir own eyes. Not being able to revenge themselves on God, they have adelight in vicariously defacing, degrading, torturing, and tearing inpieces His image in man. Let no one judge of them by what he hasconceived of them, when they were not incorporated, and had no lead. They were then only passengers in a common vehicle. They were thencarried along with the general motion of religion in the community, and, without being aware of it, partook of its influence. In that situation, at worst, their nature was left free to counterwork their principles. They despaired of giving any very general currency to their opinions:they considered them as a reserved privilege for the chosen few. Butwhen the possibility of dominion, lead, and propagation presentedthemselves, and that the ambition which before had so often made themhypocrites might rather gain than lose by a daring avowal of theirsentiments, then the nature of this infernal spirit, which has "evil forits good, " appeared in its full perfection. Nothing, indeed, but thepossession of some power can with any certainty discover what at thebottom is the true character of any man. Without reading the speeches ofVergniaud, Français of Nantes, Isnard, and some others of that sort, itwould not be easy to conceive the passion, rancor, and malice of theirtongues and hearts. They worked themselves up to a perfect frenzyagainst religion and all its professors. They tore the reputation of theclergy to pieces by their infuriated declamations and invectives, beforethey lacerated their bodies by their massacres. This fanatical atheismleft out, we omit the principal feature in the French Revolution, and aprincipal consideration with regard to the effects to be expected from apeace with it. 

The other sort of men were the politicians. To them, who had little ornot at all reflected on the subject, religion was in itself no object oflove or hatred. They disbelieved it, and that was all. Neutral withregard to that object, they took the side which in the present state ofthings might best answer their purposes. They soon found that they couldnot do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made themsensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with meansof conquest, first at home, and then abroad. The philosophers were theactive internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and principles: thesecond gave the practical direction. Sometimes the one predominated inthe composition, sometimes the other. The only difference between themwas in the necessity of concealing the general design for a time, and intheir dealing with foreign nations: the fanatics going straight forwardand openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zigzag. In the courseof events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloodycontentions between them; but at the bottom they thoroughly agreed inall the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all themeans of promoting these ends. 

Without question, to bring about the unexampled event of the FrenchRevolution, the concurrence of a very great number of views and passionswas necessary. In that stupendous work, no one principle by which thehuman mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and depraved wasleft unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and support it byundoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who acted in theRevolution _as statesmen_, had the exterior aggrandizement of France astheir ultimate end in the most minute part of the internal changes thatwere made. We, who of late years have been drawn from an attention toforeign affairs by the importance of our domestic discussions, cannoteasily form a conception of the general eagerness of the active andenergetic part of the French nation, itself the most active andenergetic of all nations, previous to its Revolution, upon that subject. I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the oldgovernment, were twenty to one of the same description then or now inEngland; and few of that description there were who did not emulouslyset forward the Revolution. The whole official system, particularly inthe diplomatic part, the regulars, the irregulars, down to the clerks inoffice, (a corps without all comparison more numerous than the sameamongst us, ) coöperated in it. All the intriguers in foreign politics, all the spies, all the intelligencers, actually or late in function, allthe candidates for that sort of employment, acted solely upon thatprinciple. 

On that system of aggrandizement there was but one mind: but two violentfactions arose about the means. The first wished France, diverted fromthe politics of the Continent, to attend solely to her marine, to feedit by an increase of commerce, and thereby to overpower England on herown element. They contended, that, if England were disabled, the powerson the Continent would fall into their proper subordination; that it wasEngland which deranged the whole Continental system of Europe. Theothers, who were by far the more numerous, though not the most outwardlyprevalent at court, considered this plan for France as contrary to hergenius, her situation, and her natural means. They agreed as to theultimate object, the reduction of the British power, and, if possible, its naval power; but they considered an ascendancy on the Continent as anecessary preliminary to that undertaking. They argued, that theproceedings of England herself had proved the soundness of this policy:that her greatest and ablest statesmen had not considered the support ofa Continental balance against France as a deviation from the principleof her naval power, but as one of the most effectual modes of carryingit into effect; that such had been her policy ever since the Revolution, during which period the naval strength of Great Britain had gone onincreasing in the direct ratio of her interference in the politics ofthe Continent. With much stronger reason ought the politics of France totake the same direction, --as well for pursuing objects which hersituation would dictate to her, though England had no existence, as forcounteracting the politics of that nation: to France Continentalpolitics are primary; they looked on them only of secondaryconsideration to England, and, however necessary, but as means necessaryto an end. 

What is truly astonishing, the partisans of those two opposite systemswere at once prevalent, and at once employed, and in the very sametransactions, the one ostensibly, the other secretly, during the latterpart of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth. Nor was there one court inwhich an ambassador resided on the part of the ministers, in whichanother, as a spy on him, did not also reside on the part of the king:they who pursued the scheme for keeping peace on the Continent, andparticularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly; the otherfaction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents werecontinually going from their function to the Bastile, and from theBastile to employment and favor again. An inextricable cabal was formed, some of persons of Rank, others of subordinates. But by this means thecorps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole formed abody of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people, despisingthe regular ministry, despising the courts at which they were employed, despising the court which employed them. 

The unfortunate Louis the Sixteenth[35] was not the first cause of theevil by which he suffered. He came to it, as to a sort of inheritance, by the false politics of his immediate predecessor. This system of darkand perplexed intrigue had come to its perfection before he came to thethrone; and even then the Revolution strongly operated in all itscauses. 

There was no point on which the discontented diplomatic politicians sobitterly arraigned their cabinet as for the decay of French influence inall others. From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain ofmonarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any regularplan of national aggrandizement. They observed that in that sort ofregimen too much depended on the personal character of the prince: thatthe vicissitudes produced by the succession of princes of a differentcharacter, and even the vicissitudes produced in the same man, by thedifferent views and inclinations belonging to youth, manhood, and age, disturbed and distracted the policy of a country made by Nature forextensive empire, or, what was still more to their taste, for that sortof general overruling influence which prepared empire or supplied theplace of it. They had continually in their hands the observations ofMachiavel on Livy. They had Montesquieu's _Grandeur et Décadence desRomains_ as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, thesystematic proceedings of a Roman Senate with the fluctuations of amonarchy. They observed the very small additions of territory which allthe power of Prance, actuated by all the ambition of France, hadacquired in two centuries. The Romans had frequently acquired more in asingle year. They severely and in every part of it criticized the reignof Louis the Fourteenth, whose irregular and desultory ambition hadmore provoked than endangered Europe. Indeed, they who will be at thepains of seriously considering the history of that period will see thatthose French politicians had some reason. They who will not take thetrouble of reviewing it through all its wars and all its negotiationswill consult the short, but judicious, criticism of the Marquis deMontalembert on that subject. It may be read separately from hisingenious system of fortification and military defence, on the practicalmerit of which I am unable to form a judgment. 

The diplomatic politicians of whom I speak, and who formed by far themajority in that class, made disadvantageous comparisons even betweentheir more legal and formalizing monarchy and the monarchies of otherstates, as a system of power and influence. They observed that Francenot only lost ground herself, but, through the languor and unsteadinessof her pursuits, and from her aiming through commerce at naval forcewhich she never could attain without losing more on one side than shecould gain on the other, three great powers, each of them (as militarystates) capable of balancing her, had grown up on the Continent. Russiaand Prussia had been created almost within memory; and Austria, thoughnot a new power, and even curtailed in territory, was, by the verycollision in which she lost that territory, greatly improved in hermilitary discipline and force. During the reign of Maria Theresa, theinterior economy of the country was made more to correspond with thesupport of great armies than formerly it had been. As to Prussia, amerely military power, they observed that one war had enriched her withas considerable a conquest as France had acquired in centuries. Russiahad broken the Turkish power, by which Austria might be, as formerly shehad been, balanced in favor of France. They felt it with pain, that thetwo Northern powers of Sweden and Denmark were in general under the swayof Russia, --or that, at best, France kept up a very doubtful conflict, with many fluctuations of fortune, and at an enormous expense, inSweden. In Holland the French party seemed, if not extinguished, atleast utterly obscured, and kept under by a Stadtholder, leaning forsupport sometimes on Great Britain, sometimes on Prussia, sometimes onboth, never on France. Even the spreading of the Bourbon family hadbecome merely a family accommodation, and had little effect oh thenational politics. This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain bydestroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power ofFrance in the accession of the forces of its great rival. In Italy thesame family accommodation, the same national insignificance, wereequally visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the Frenchmonarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature andfortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to givelife or vigor or consistency, but in a republic? Out the word came: andit never went back. 

Whether they reasoned right or wrong, or that there was some mixture ofright and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure that in this manner theyfelt and reasoned. The different effects of a great military andambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description wereconstantly in their mouths. The principle was ready to operate, whenopportunities should offer, which few of them, indeed, foresaw in theextent in which they were afterwards presented; but these opportunities, in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for. 

When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria andFrance was deplored as a national, calamity; because it united France infriendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope anyContinental aggrandizement. When the first partition of Poland was made, in which France had no share, and which had farther aggrandized everyone of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them ina perfect frenzy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at theshocking and uncolored violence and injustice of that partition, but atthe debility, improvidence, and want of activity in their government, innot preventing it as a means of aggrandizement to their rivals, or innot contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain theirshare of advantage from that robbery. 

In that or nearly in that state of things and of opinions came theAustrian match, which promised to draw the knot, as afterwards in effectit did, still more closely between the old rival houses. This addedexceedingly to their hatred and contempt of their monarchy. It was forthis reason that the late glorious queen, who on all accounts was formedto produce general love and admiration, and whose life was as mild andbeneficent as her death was beyond example great and heroic, became sovery soon and so very much the object of an implacable rancor, never tobe extinguished but in her blood. When I wrote my letter in answer to M. De Menonville, in the beginning of January, 1791, I had good reason forthinking that this description of revolutionists did not so early nor sosteadily point their murderous designs at the martyr king as at theroyal heroine. It was accident, and the momentary depression of thatpart of the faction, that gave to the husband the happy priority indeath. 

From this their restless desire of an overruling influence, they bent avery great part of their designs and efforts to revive the old Frenchparty, which was a democratic party, in Holland, and to make arevolution there. They were happy at the troubles which the singularimprudence of Joseph the Second had stirred up in the AustrianNetherlands. They rejoiced, when they saw him irritate his subjects, profess philosophy, send away the Dutch garrisons, and dismantle hisfortifications. As to Holland, they never forgave either the king or theministry for suffering that object, which they justly looked on asprincipal in their design of reducing the power of England, to escapeout of their hands. This was the true secret of the commercial treaty, made, on their part, against all the old rules and principles ofcommerce, with a view of diverting the English nation, by a pursuit ofimmediate profit, from an attention to the progress of France in itsdesigns upon that republic. The system of the economists, which led tothe general opening of commerce, facilitated that treaty, but did notproduce it. They were in despair, when they found, that, by the vigor ofMr. Pitt, supported in this point by Mr. Fox and the opposition, theobject to which they had sacrificed their manufactures was lost to theirambition. 

This eager desire of raising France from the condition into which shehad fallen, as they conceived, from her monarchical imbecility, had beenthe main spring of their precedent interference in that unhappy Americanquarrel, the bad effects of which to this nation have not as yet fullydisclosed themselves. These sentiments had been long lurking in theirbreasts, though their views were only discovered now and then in heatand as by escapes, but on this occasion they exploded suddenly. Theywere professed with ostentation, and propagated with zeal. Thesesentiments were not produced, as some think, by their American alliance. The American alliance was produced by their republican principles andrepublican policy. This new relation undoubtedly did much. Thediscourses and cabals that it produced, the intercourse that itestablished, and, above all, the example, which made it seem practicableto establish a republic in a great extent of country, finished the work, and gave to that part of the revolutionary faction a degree of strengthwhich required other energies than the late king possessed to resist oreven to restrain. It spread everywhere; but it was nowhere moreprevalent than in the heart of the court. The palace of Versailles, byits language, seemed a forum of democracy. To have pointed out to mostof those politicians, from their dispositions and movements, what hassince happened, the fall of their own monarchy, of their own laws, oftheir own religion, would have been to furnish a motive the more forpushing forward a system on which they considered all these things asincumbrances. Such in truth they were. And we have seen them succeed, not only in the destruction of their monarchy, but in all the objectsof ambition that they proposed from that destruction. 

When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when Icompare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be inconflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the verythings which make me tremble. The states of the Christian world havegrown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by agreat variety of accidents. They have been improved to what we see themwith greater or less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them hasbeen formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As theirconstitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any_peculiar_ end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other. The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, andhave become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries, the statehas been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state. Every state has pursued not only every sort of social advantage, but ithas cultivated the welfare of every individual. His wants, his wishes, even his tastes, have been consulted. This comprehensive schemevirtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the mostadverse to it. That liberty was found, under monarchies styled absolute, in a degree unknown to the ancient commonwealths. From hence the powersof all our modern states meet, in all their movements, with someobstruction. It is therefore no wonder, that when these states are to beconsidered as machines to operate for some one great end, that thisdissipated and balanced force is not easily concentred, or made to bearwith the whole force of the nation upon one point. 

The British state is, without question, that which pursues the greatestvariety of ends, and is the least disposed to sacrifice any one of themto another or to the whole. It aims at taking in the entire circle ofhuman desires, and securing for them their fair enjoyment. Ourlegislature has been ever closely connected, in its most efficient part, with individual feeling and individual interest. Personal liberty, themost lively of these feelings and the most important of these interests, which in other European countries has rather arisen from the system ofmanners and the habitudes of life than from the laws of the state, (inwhich it flourished more from neglect than attention, ) in England hasbeen a direct object of government. 

On this principle, England would be the weakest power in the wholesystem. Fortunately, however, the great riches of this kingdom, arisingfrom a variety of causes, and the disposition of the people, which is asgreat to spend as to accumulate, has easily afforded a disposablesurplus that gives a mighty momentum to the state. This difficulty, withthese advantages to overcome it, has called forth the talents of theEnglish financiers, who, by the surplus of industry poured out byprodigality, have outdone everything which has been accomplished inother nations. The present minister has outdone his predecessors, and, as a minister of revenue, is far above my power of praise. But stillthere are cases in which England feels more than several others (thoughthey all feel) the perplexity of an immense body of balanced advantagesand of individual demands, and of some irregularity in the whole mass. 

France differs essentially from all those governments which are formedwithout system, which exist by habit, and which are confused with themultitude and with the complexity of their pursuits. What now stands asgovernment in France is struck out at a heat. The design is wicked, immoral, impious, oppressive: but it is spirited and daring; it issystematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity and consistencyin perfection. In that country, entirely to cut off a branch ofcommerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to destroy the circulation ofmoney, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture, even toburn a city or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost thema moment's anxiety. To them the will, the wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individuals, is as nothing. Individuality is leftout of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Everythingis referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything istrusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in itsmaxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominionand conquest for its sole objects, --dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms. 

Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means, which arelessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, Francehas, since the accomplishment of the Revolution, a complete unity in itsdirection. It has destroyed every resource of the state which dependsupon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of conventiondisappear. The advantages of Nature in some measure remain; even these, I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what remains iscomplete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats will expire, and we laugh at the last price of them. But what signifies the fate ofthose tickets of despotism? The despotism will find despotic means ofsupply. They have found the short cut to the productions of Nature, while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged to wind through thelabyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon thefruit of the labor; they seize upon the laborer himself. Were France buthalf of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability ofits force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be toostrong for most of the states of Europe, constituted as they are, andproceeding as they proceed. Would it be wise to estimate what the worldof Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khân, upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in theremotest Tartary from whence first issued that scourge of the humanrace? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by whichMahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerfulempires of the world, beat one of them totally to the ground, broke topieces the other, and, in not much longer space of time than I havelived, overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended anempire from the Indus to the Pyrenees?

Material resources never have supplied, nor ever can supply, the want ofunity in design and constancy in pursuit. But unity in design andperseverance and boldness in pursuit have never wanted resources, andnever will. We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of astate in which the property has nothing to do with the governmentReflect, my dear Sir, reflect again and again, on a government in whichthe property is in complete subjection, and where nothing roles but themind of desperate men. The condition of a commonwealth not governed byits property was a combination of things which the learned and ingeniousspeculator, Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine to be possible. We have seen it; the world has feltit; and if the world will shut their eyes to this state of things, theywill feel it more. The rulers there have found their resources incrimes. The discovery is dreadful, the mine exhaustless. They haveeverything to gain, and they have nothing to lose. They have a boundlessinheritance in hope, and there is no medium for them betwixt the highestelevation and death with infamy. Never can they, who, from the miserableservitude of the desk, have been raised to empire, again submit to thebondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying music, or writing_plaidoyers_ by the sheet. It has made me often smile in bitterness, when I have heard talk of an indemnity to such men, provided theyreturned to their allegiance. 

From all this what is my inference? It is, that this new system ofrobbery in France cannot be rendered safe by any art; that it _must_ bedestroyed, or that it will destroy all Europe; that to destroy thatenemy, by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made tobear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which thatsystem exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerableparts. These are my inferences. In one word, with this republic nothingindependent can coexist. The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were morepardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which theallied courts may fall. They have the benefit of his dreadful example. 

The unhappy Louis the Sixteenth was a man of the best intentions thatprobably ever reigned. He was by no means deficient in talents. He had amost laudable desire to supply by general reading, and even by theacquisition of elemental knowledge, an education in all pointsoriginally defective; but nobody told him (and it was no wonder heshould not himself divine it) that the world of which he read and theworld in which he lived were no longer the same. Desirous of doingeverything for the best, fearful of cabal, distrusting his own judgment, he sought his ministers of all kinds upon public testimony. But ascourts are the field for caballers, the public is the theatre formountebanks and impostors. The cure for both those evils is in thediscernment of the prince. But an accurate and penetrating discernmentis what in a young prince could not be looked for. 

His conduct in its principle was not unwise; but, like most other of hiswell-meant designs, it failed in his hands. It failed partly from mereill fortune, to which speculators are rarely pleased to assign that verylarge share to which she is justly entitled in all human affairs. Thefailure, perhaps, in part, was owing to his suffering his system to bevitiated and disturbed by those intrigues which it is, humanly speaking, impossible wholly to prevent in courts, or indeed under any form ofgovernment. However, with these aberrations, he gave himself over to asuccession of the statesmen of public opinion. In other things hethought that he might be a king on the terms of his predecessors. He wasconscious of the purity of his heart and the general good tendency ofhis government. He flattered himself, as most men in his situation will, that he might consult his ease without danger to his safety. It is notat all wonderful that both he and his ministers, giving way abundantlyin other respects to innovation, should take up in policy with thetradition of their monarchy. Under his ancestors, the monarchy hadsubsisted, and even been strengthened, by the generation or support ofrepublics. First, the Swiss republics grew under the guardianship of theFrench monarchy. The Dutch republics were hatched and cherished underthe same incubation. Afterwards, a republican constitution was, underthe influence of France, established in the Empire, against thepretensions of its chief. Even whilst the monarchy of France, by aseries of wars and negotiations, and lastly by the Treaties ofWestphalia, had obtained the establishment of the Protestants in Germanyas a law of the Empire, the same monarchy under Louis the Thirteenth hadforce enough to destroy the republican system of the Protestants athome. 

Louis the Sixteenth was a diligent reader of history. But the very lampof prudence blinded him. The guide of human life led him astray. Asilent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, andprepared it. It became of more importance than ever what examples weregiven, and what measures wore adopted. Their causes no longer lurked inthe recesses of cabinets or in the private conspiracies of the factious. They were no longer to be controlled by the force and influence of thegrandees, who formerly had been able to stir up troubles by theirdiscontents and to quiet them by their corruption. The chain ofsubordination, even in cabal and sedition, was broken in its mostimportant links. It was no longer the great and the populace. Otherinterests were formed, other dependencies, other connections, othercommunications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond their formerproportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great insociety, these classes became the seat of all the active politics, andthe preponderating weight to decide on them. There were all the energiesby which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their success. There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and areimpatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them. Thesedescriptions had got between the great and the populace; and theinfluence on the lower classes was with them. The spirit of ambition hadtaken possession of this class as violently as ever it had done of anyother. They felt the importance of this situation. The correspondence ofthe moneyed and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse ofacademies, but above all, the press, of which they had in a mannerentire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere. Thepress, in reality, has made every government, in its spirit, almostdemocratic. Without the great, the first movements in this revolutioncould not, perhaps, have been given. But the spirit of ambition, now forthe first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to berestrained at will. There was no longer any means of arresting aprinciple in its course. When Louis the Sixteenth, under the influenceof the enemies to monarchy, meant to found but one republic, he set uptwo; when he meant to take away half the crown of his neighbor, he lostthe whole of his own. Louis the Sixteenth could not with impunitycountenance a new republic. Yet between his throne and that dangerouslodgment for an enemy, which he had erected, he had the whole Atlanticfor a ditch. He had for an outwork the English nation itself, friendlyto liberty, adverse to that mode of it. He was surrounded by a rampartof monarchies, most of them allied to him, and generally under hisinfluence. Yet even thus secured, a republic erected under his auspices, and dependent on his power, became fatal to his throne. The very moneywhich he had lent to support this republic, by a good faith which to himoperated as perfidy, was punctually paid to his enemies, and became aresource in the hands of his assassins. 

With this example before their eyes, do any ministers in England, do anyministers in Austria, really flatter themselves that they can erect, noton the remote shores of the Atlantic, but in their view, in theirvicinity, in absolute contact with one of them, not a commercial, but amartial republic, --a republic not of simple husbandmen or fishermen, butof intriguers, and of warriors, --a republic of a character the mostrestless, the most enterprising, the most impious, the most fierce andbloody, the most hypocritical and perfidious, the most bold and daring, that ever has been seen, or indeed that can be conceived to exist, without bringing on their own certain ruin?

Such is the republic to which we are going to give a place in civilizedfellowship, --the republic which, with joint consent, we are going toestablish in the centre of Europe, in a post that overlooks andcommands every other state, and which eminently confronts and menacesthis kingdom. 

You cannot fail to observe that I speak as if the allied powers wereactually consenting, and not compelled by events, to the establishmentof this faction in France. The words have not escaped me. You willhereafter naturally expect that I should make them good. But whether inadopting this measure we are madly active or weakly passive orpusillanimously panic-struck, the effects will be the same. You may callthis faction, which has eradicated the monarchy, expelled theproprietary, persecuted religion, and trampled upon law, [36]--you maycall this Prance, if you please; but of the ancient France nothingremains but its central geography, its iron frontier, its spirit ofambition, its audacity of enterprise, its perplexing intrigue. These, and these alone, remain: and they remain heightened in their principleand augmented in their means. All the former correctives, whether ofvirtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone. Nosingle new corrective is to be found in the whole body of the newinstitutions. How should such a thing be found there, when everythinghas been chosen with care and selection to forward all those ambitiousdesigns and dispositions, not to control them? The whole is a body ofways and means for the supply of dominion, without one heterogeneousparticle in it. 

Here I suffer you to breathe, and leave to your meditation what hasoccurred to me on the _genius and character_ of the French Revolution. From having this before us, we may be better able to determine on thefirst question I proposed, --that is, How far nations called foreign arelikely to be affected with the system established within that territory. I intended to proceed next on the question of her facilities, _from theinternal state of other nations, and particularly of this_, forobtaining her ends; but I ought to be aware that my notions arecontroverted. I mean, therefore, in my next letter, to take notice ofwhat in that way has been recommended to me as the most deserving ofnotice. In the examination of those pieces, I shall have occasion todiscuss some others of the topics to which I have called your attention. You know that the letters which I now send to the press, as well as apart of what is to follow, have been in their substance long sincewritten. A circumstance which your partiality alone could make ofimportance to you, but which to the public is of no importance at all, retarded their appearance. The late events which press upon us obligedme to make some additions, but no substantial change in the matter. 

This discussion, my friend, will be long. But the matter is serious; andif ever the fate of the world could be truly said to depend on aparticular measure, it is upon this peace. For the present, farewell. 

FOOTNOTES:

[34] See Declaration, Whitehall, Oct. 29, 1793. 

[35] It may be right to do justice to Louis the Sixteenth. He did whathe could to destroy the double diplomacy of France. He had all thesecret correspondence burnt, except one piece, which was called_Conjectures raisonnées sur la Situation actuelle de la France dans leSystème Politique de l'Europe_: a work executed by M. Favier, under thedirection of Count Broglie. A single copy of this was said to have beenfound in the cabinet of Louis the Sixteenth. It was published with somesubsequent state-papers of Vergennes, Turgot, and others, as "a newbenefit of the Revolution, " and the advertisement to the publicationends with the following words: "_Il sera facile de se convaincre_, QU'YCOMPRIS MÊME LA RÉVOLUTION, _en grande partie_, ON TROUVE DANS CES_MEMOIRES_ ET CES _CONJECTURES_ LE GERME DE TOUT CE QUI ARRIVEAUJOURD'HUI, _et qu'on ne peut, sans les avoir lus, être bien au faitdes intérêts, et même des vues actuelles des diverses puissances del'Europe_. " The book is entitled _Politique de tous les Cabinets del'Europe pendant la Règnes de Louis XV. Et de Louis XVI_. It isaltogether very curious, and worth reading. 

[36] See our Declaration. 

LETTER III. 

ON THE RUPTURE OF THE NEGOTIATION; THE TERMS OF PEACE PROPOSED; AND THERESOURCES OF THE COUNTRY FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF THE WAR. 

Dear Sir, --I thank you for the bundle of state-papers which I receivedyesterday. I have travelled through the negotiation, --and a sad, founderous road it is. There is a sort of standing jest against mycountrymen, --that one of them on his journey having found a piece ofpleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again. Thisproposal, with regard to the worthy traveller's final destination, wascertainly a blunder. It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction;for the way was pleasant. In the irksome journey of the Regicidenegotiations it is otherwise: our "paths are not paths of pleasantness, nor our ways the ways to peace. " All our mistakes, (if such they are, )like those of our Hibernian traveller, are mistakes of repetition; andthey will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest as hiswell-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see wepersevere. Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore anew one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have beenin motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance we resolve to measureback again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track. Backward and forward, --oscillation, space, --the travels of a postilion, miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage, --we have been, andwe are yet to be, jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stonesand the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill-kept, broken-up, treacherous French causeway!

The Declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid beforeParliament contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attemptsand all our failures, --a concise, but correct narrative of the painfulsteps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris, --a clearexposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of thatexperiment, --an honest confession of our departure from all the rulesand all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudencein the conduct of it, --and to crown the whole, a fair account of theatrocious manner in which the Regicide enemies had broken up what hadbeen so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, andwith all scorn, driving our suppliant ambassador out of the limits oftheir usurpation. 

Even after all that I have lately seen, I was a little surprised at thisexposure. A minute display of hopes formed without foundation and oflabors pursued without fruit is a thing not very flattering toself-estimation. But truth has its rights, and it will assert them. TheDeclaration, after doing all this with a mortifying candor, concludesthe whole recapitulation with an engagement still more extraordinarythan all the unusual matter it contains. It says that "His Majesty, whohad entered into the negotiation with _good faith_, who had suffered_no_ impediment to prevent his prosecuting it with _earnestness andsincerity_, has now _only to lament_ its abrupt termination, and torenew _in the face of all Europe the solemn declaration_, that, wheneverhis enemies shall be _disposed_ to enter on the work of generalpacification in a spirit of conciliation and equity, nothing shall bewanting on his part to contribute to the accomplishment of that greatobject. "

If the disgusting detail of the accumulated insults we have received, inwhat we have very properly called our "solicitation" to a gang of felonsand murderers, had been produced as a proof of the utter inefficacy ofthat mode of proceeding with that description of persons, I should havenothing at all to object to it. It might furnish matter conclusive inargument and instructive in policy; but, with all due submission to highauthority, and with all decent deference to superior lights, it does notseem quite clear to a discernment no better than mine that the premisesin that piece conduct irresistibly to the conclusion. A labored displayof the ill consequences which have attended an uniform course ofsubmission to every mode of contumelious insult, with which thedespotism of a proud, capricious, insulting, and implacable foe haschosen to buffet our patience, does not appear to my poor thoughts to beproperly brought forth as a preliminary to justify a resolution ofpersevering in the very same kind of conduct, towards the very same sortof person, and on the very same principles. We state our experience, andthen we come to the manly resolution of acting in contradiction to it. All that has passed at Paris, to the moment of our being shamefullyhissed off that stage, has been nothing but a more solemn representationon the theatre of the nation of what had been before in rehearsal atBasle. As it is not only confessed by us, but made a matter of charge onthe enemy, that he had given us no encouragement to believe there was achange in his disposition or in his policy at any time subsequent to theperiod of his rejecting our first overtures, there seems to have been noassignable motive for sending Lord Malmesbury to Paris, except to exposehis humbled country to the worst indignities, and the first of the kind, as the Declaration very truly observes, that have been known in theworld of negotiation. 

An honest neighbor of mine is not altogether unhappy in the applicationof an old common story to a present occasion. It may be said of myfriend, what Horace says of a neighbor of his, "_Garrit aniles ex refabellas_. " Conversing on this strange subject, he told me a currentstory of a simple English country squire, who was persuaded by certain_dilettanti_ of his acquaintance to see the world, and to become knowingin men and manners. Among other celebrated places, it was recommended tohim to visit Constantinople. He took their advice. After variousadventures, not to our purpose to dwell upon, he happily arrived at thatfamous city. As soon as he had a little reposed himself from hisfatigue, he took a walk into the streets; but he had not gone far, before "a malignant and a turbaned Turk" had his choler roused by thecareless and assured air with which this infidel strutted about in themetropolis of true believers. In this temper he lost no time in doing toour traveller the honors of the place. The Turk crossed over the way, and with perfect good-will gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seatof honor. To resent or to return the compliment in Turkey was quite outof the question. Our traveller, since he could not otherwise acknowledgethis kind of favor, received it with the best grace in the world: hemade one of his most ceremonious bows, and begged the kicking Mussulman"to accept his perfect assurances of high consideration. " Our countrymanwas too wise to imitate Othello in the use of the dagger. He thought itbetter, as better it was, to assuage his bruised dignity with half ayard square of balmy diplomatic diachylon. In the disasters of theirfriends, people are seldom wanting in a laudable patience. When theyare such as do not threaten to end fatally, they become even matter ofpleasantry. The English fellow-travellers of our sufferer, finding him alittle out of spirits, entreated him not to take so slight a business sovery seriously. They told him it was the custom of the country; thatevery country had its customs; that the Turkish manners were a littlerough, but that in the main the Turks were a good-natured people; thatwhat would have been a deadly affront anywhere else was only a littlefreedom there: in short, they told him to think no more of the matter, and to try his fortune in another promenade. But the squire, though alittle clownish, had some home-bred sense. "What! have I come, at allthis expense and trouble, all the way to Constantinople only to bekicked? Without going beyond my own stable, my groom, for half a crown, would have kicked me to my heart's content. I don't mean to stay inConstantinople eight-and-forty hours, nor ever to return to this rough, good-natured people, that have their own customs. "

In my opinion the squire was in the right. He was satisfied with hisfirst ramble and his first injuries. But reason of state and commonsense are two things. If it were not for this difference, it might notappear of absolute necessity, after having received a certain quantityof buffetings by advance, that we should send a peer of the realm to thescum of the earth to collect the debt to the last farthing, and toreceive, with infinite aggravation, the same scorns which had been paidto our supplication through a commoner: but it was proper, I suppose, that the whole of our country, in all its orders, should have a share ofthe indignity, and, as in reason, that the higher orders should touchthe larger proportion. 

This business was not ended because our dignity was wounded, or becauseour patience was worn out with contumely and scorn. We had not disgorgedone particle of the nauseous doses with which we were so liberallycrammed by the mountebanks of Paris in order to drug and diet us intoperfect tameness. No, --we waited till the morbid strength of our_boulimia_ for their physic had exhausted the well-stored dispensary oftheir empiricism. It is impossible to guess at the term to which ourforbearance would have extended. The Regicides were more fatigued withgiving blows than the callous cheek of British diplomacy was hurt inreceiving them. They had no way left for getting rid of this mendicantperseverance, but by sending for the beadle, and forcibly driving ourembassy "of shreds and patches, " with all its mumping cant, from theinhospitable door of Cannibal Castle, --

 "Where the gaunt mastiff, growling at the gate, Affrights the beggar whom he longs to eat, "

I think we might have found, before the rude hand of insolent office wason our shoulder, and the staff of usurped authority brandished over ourheads, that contempt of the suppliant is not the best forwarder of asuit, --that national disgrace is not the high-road to security, muchless to power and greatness. Patience, indeed, strongly indicates thelore of peace; but mere love does not always lead to enjoyment. It isthe power of winning that palm which insures our wearing it. Virtueshave their place; and out of their place they hardly deserve thename, --they pass into the neighboring vice. The patience of fortitudeand the endurance of pusillanimity are things very different, as intheir principle, so in their effects. 

In truth, this Declaration, containing a narrative of the firsttransaction of the kind (and I hope it will be the last) in theintercourse of nations, as a composition, is ably drawn. It does creditto our official style. The report of the speech of the minister in agreat assembly, which I have read, is a comment upon the Declaration. Without inquiry how far that report is exact, (inferior I believe it maybe to what it would represent, ) yet still it reads as a most eloquentand finished performance. Hardly one galling circumstance of theindignities offered by the Directory of Regicide to the supplicationsmade to that junto in his Majesty's name has been spared. Every one ofthe aggravations attendant on these acts of outrage is, with wonderfulperspicuity and order, brought forward in its place, and in the mannermost fitted to produce its effect. They are turned to every point ofview in which they can be seen to the best advantage. All the parts areso arranged as to point out their relation, and to furnish a true ideaof the spirit of the whole transaction. 

This speech may stand for a model. Never, for the triumphal decorationof any theatre, not for the decoration of those of Athens and Rome, oreven of this theatre of Paris, from the embroideries of Babylon or fromthe loom of the Gobelins, has there been sent any historic tissue sotruly drawn, so closely and so finely wrought, or in which the forms arebrought out in the rich purple of such glowing and blushing colors. Itputs me in mind of the piece of tapestry with which Virgil proposed toadorn the theatre he was to erect to Augustus upon the banks of theMincio, who now hides his head in his reeds, and leads his slow andmelancholy windings through banks wasted by the barbarians of Gaul. Hesupposes that the artifice is such, that the figures of the conquerednations in his tapestry are made to play their part, and are confoundedin the machine, --

 utque Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa Britanni;

or, as Dryden translates it, somewhat paraphrastically, but not less inthe spirit of the prophet than of the poet, --

 "Where the proud theatres disclose the scene, Which interwoven Britons seem to raise, And show the triumph which their shame displays. "

It is something wonderful, that the sagacity shown in the Declarationand the speech (and, so far as it goes, greater was never shown) shouldhave failed to discover to the writer and to the speaker the inseparablerelation between the parties to this transaction, and that nothing canbe said to display the imperious arrogance of a base enemy which doesnot describe with equal force and equal truth the contemptible figure ofan abject embassy to that imperious power. 

It is no less striking, that the same obvious reflection should notoccur to those gentlemen who conducted the opposition to government. Buttheir thoughts were turned another way. They seem to have been soentirely occupied with the defence of the French Directory, so veryeager in finding recriminatory; precedents to justify every act of itsintolerable insolence, so animated in their accusations of ministry fornot having at the very outset made concessions proportioned to thedignity of the great victorious power we had offended, that everythingconcerning the sacrifice in this business of national honor, and of themost fundamental principles in the policy of negotiation, seemed whollyto have escaped them. To this fatal hour, the contention in Parliamentappeared in another form, and was animated by another spirit. For threehundred years and more, we have had wars with what stood as governmentin France. In all that period, the language of ministers, whether ofboast or of apology, was, that they had left nothing undone for theassertion of the national honor, --the opposition, whether patrioticallyor factiously, contending that the ministers had been oblivious of thenational glory, and had made improper sacrifices of that public interestwhich they were bound not only to preserve, but by all fair methods toaugment. This total change of tone on both sides of your House formsitself no inconsiderable revolution; and I am afraid it prognosticatesothers of still greater importance. The ministers exhausted the storesof their eloquence in demonstrating that they had quitted the safe, beaten highway of treaty between independent powers, --that, to pacifythe enemy, they had made every sacrifice of the national dignity, --andthat they had offered to immolate at the same shrine the most valuableof the national acquisitions. The opposition insisted that the victimswere not fat nor fair enough to be offered on the altars of blasphemedRegicide; and it was inferred from thence, that the sacrificalministers, (who were a sort of intruders in the worship of the newdivinity, ) in their schismatical devotion, had discovered more ofhypocrisy than zeal. They charged them with a concealed resolution topersevere in what these gentlemen have (in perfect consistency, indeed, with themselves, but most irreconcilably with fact and reason) called anunjust and impolitic war. 

That day was, I fear, the fatal term of _local_ patriotism. On that day, I fear, there was an end of that narrow scheme of relations called ourcountry, with all its pride, its prejudices, and its partial affections. All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, butnot an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, andboundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France. It is nolonger an object of terror, the aggrandizement of a new power whichteaches as a professor that philanthropy in the chair, whilst itpropagates by arms and establishes by conquest the comprehensive systemof universal fraternity. In what light is all this viewed in a greatassembly? The party which takes the lead there has no longer anyapprehensions, except those that arise from not being admitted to theclosest and most confidential connections with the metropolis of thatfraternity. That reigning party no longer touches on its favoritesubject, the display of those horrors that must attend the existence ofa power with such dispositions and principles, seated in the heart ofEurope. It is satisfied to find some loose, ambiguous expressions inits former declarations, which may set it free from its professions andengagements. It always speaks of peace with the Regicides as a great andan undoubted blessing, and such a blessing as, if obtained, promises, asmuch as any human disposition of things can promise, security andpermanence. It holds out nothing at all definite towards this security. It only seeks, by a restoration to some of their former owners of somefragments of the general wreck of Europe, to find a plausible plea for apresent retreat from an embarrassing position. As to the future, thatparty is content to leave it covered in a night of the most palpableobscurity. It never once has entered into a particle of detail of whatour own situation, or that of other powers, must be, under the blessingsof the peace we seek. This defect, to my power, I mean to supply, --that, if any persons should still continue to think an attempt at foresight isany part of the duty of a statesman, I may contribute my trifle to thematerials of his speculation. 

As to the other party, the minority of to-day, possibly the majority ofto-morrow, small in number, but full of talents and every species ofenergy, which, upon the avowed ground of being more acceptable toFrance, is a candidate for the helm of this kingdom, it has neverchanged from the beginning. It has preserved a perennial consistency. This would be a never failing source of true glory, if springing fromjust and right; but it is truly dreadful, if it be an arm of Styx, whichsprings out of the profoundest depths of a poisoned soil. The Frenchmaxims were by these gentlemen at no time condemned. I speak of theirlanguage in the most moderate terms. There are many who think that theyhave gone much further, --that they have always magnified and extolledthe French maxims, --that; not in the least disgusted or discouraged bythe monstrous evils which have attended these maxims from the moment oftheir adoption both at home and abroad, they still continue to predictthat in due time they must produce the greatest good to the poor humanrace. They obstinately persist in stating those evils as matter ofaccident, as things wholly collateral to the system. 

It is observed, that this party has never spoken of an ally of GreatBritain with the smallest degree of respect or regard: on the contrary, it has generally mentioned them under opprobrious appellations, and insuch terms of contempt or execration as never had been heardbefore, --because no such would have formerly been permitted in ourpublic assemblies. The moment, however, that any of those allies quittedthis obnoxious connection, the party has instantly passed an act ofindemnity and oblivion in their favor. After this, no sort of censure ontheir conduct, no imputation on their character. From that moment theirpardon was sealed in a reverential and mysterious silence. With thegentlemen of this minority, there is no ally, from one end of Europe tothe other, with whom we ought not to be ashamed to act. The wholecollege of the states of Europe is no better than a gang of tyrants. With them all our connections were broken off at once. We ought to havecultivated France, and France alone, from the moment of her Revolution. On that happy change, all our dread of that nation as a power was tocease. She became in an instant dear to our affections and one with ourinterests. All other nations we ought to have commanded not to troubleher sacred throes, whilst in labor to bring into an happy birth herabundant litter of constitutions. We ought to have acted under herauspices, in extending her salutary influence upon every side. From thatmoment England and France were become natural allies, and all the otherstates natural enemies. The whole face of the world was changed. Whatwas it to us, if she acquired Holland and the Austrian Netherlands? Byher conquests she only enlarged the sphere of her beneficence, she onlyextended the blessings of liberty to so many more foolishly reluctantnations. What was it to England, if, by adding these, among the richestand most peopled countries of the world, to her territories, she therebyleft no possible link of communication between us and any other powerwith whom we could act against her? On this new system of optimism, itis so much the better: so much the further are we removed from thecontact with infectious despotism. No longer a thought of a barrier inthe Netherlands to Holland against France. All that is obsolete policy. It is fit that France should have both Holland and the AustrianNetherlands too, as a barrier to her against the attacks of despotism. She cannot multiply her securities too much; and as to our security, itis to be found in hers. Had we cherished her from the beginning, andfelt for her when attacked, she, poor, good soul, would never haveinvaded any foreign nation, never murdered her sovereign and his family, never proscribed, never exiled, never imprisoned, never been guilty ofextra-judicial massacre or of legal murder. All would have been a goldenage, full of peace, order, and liberty, --and philosophy, raying out fromEurope, would have warmed and enlightened the universe; but, unluckily, irritable philosophy, the most irritable of all things, was pat into apassion, and provoked into ambition abroad and tyranny at home. Theyfind all this very natural and very justifiable. They choose to forgetthat other nations, struggling for freedom, have been attacked by theirneighbors, or that their neighbors have otherwise interfered in theiraffairs. Often have neighbors interfered in favor of princes againsttheir rebellious subjects, and often in favor of subjects against theirprince. Such cases fill half the pages of history; yet never were theyused as an apology, much less as a justification, for atrocious crueltyin princes, or for general massacre and confiscation on the part ofrevolted subjects, --never as a politic cause for suffering any suchpowers to aggrandize themselves without limit and without measure. Athousand times have we seen it asserted in public prints and pamphlets, that, if the nobility and priesthood of France had stayed at home, theirproperty never would have been confiscated. One would think that none ofthe clergy had been robbed previous to their deportation, or that theirdeportation had, on their part, been a voluntary act. One would thinkthat the nobility and gentry, and merchants and bankers, who stayed athome, had enjoyed their property in security and repose. The assertorsof these positions well know that the lot of thousands who remained athome was far more terrible, that the most cruel imprisonment was only aharbinger of a cruel and ignominious death, and that in this mothercountry of freedom there were no less than _three hundred thousand_ atone time in prison. I go no further. I instance only theserepresentations of the party, as staring indications of partiality tothat sect to whose dominion they would have left this country nothing tooppose but her own naked force, and consequently subjected us, on everyreverse of fortune, to the imminent danger of falling under those veryevils, in that very system, which are attributed, not to its own nature, but to the perverseness of others. There is nothing in the world sodifficult as to put men in a state of judicial neutrality. A leaningthere must ever be, and it is of the first importance to any nation toobserve to what side that leaning inclines, --whether to our owncommunity, or to one with which it is in a state of hostility. 

Men are rarely without some sympathy in the sufferings of others; but inthe immense and diversified mass of human misery, which may be pitied, but cannot be relieved, in the gross, the mind must make a choice. Oursympathy is always more forcibly attracted towards the misfortunes ofcertain persons, and in certain descriptions: and this sympatheticattraction discovers, beyond a possibility of mistake, our mentalaffinities and elective affections. It is a much surer proof than thestrongest declaration of a real connection and of an overruling bias inthe mind. I am told that the active sympathies of this party have beenchiefly, if not wholly, attracted to the sufferings of the patriarchalrebels who were amongst the promulgators of the maxims of the FrenchRevolution, and who have suffered from their apt and forward scholarssome part of the evils which they had themselves so liberallydistributed to all the other parts of the community. Some of these men, flying from the knives which they had sharpened against their countryand its laws, rebelling against the very powers they had set overthemselves by their rebellion against their sovereign, given up by thosevery armies to whose faithful attachment they trusted for their safetyand support, after they had completely debauched all military fidelityin its source, --some of these men, I say, had fallen into the hands ofthe head of that family the most illustrious person of which they hadthree times cruelly imprisoned, and delivered in that state of captivityto those hands from which they were able to relieve neither her, northeir own nearest and most venerable kindred. One of these men, connected with this country by no circumstance of birth, --not related toany distinguished families here, --recommended by no service, --endearedto this nation by no act or even expression of kindness, --comprehendedin no league or common cause, --embraced by no laws of publichospitality, --this man was the only one to be found in Europe, in whosefavor the British nation, passing judgment without hearing on its almostonly ally, was to force (and that not by soothing interposition, butwith every reproach for inhumanity, cruelty, and breach of the laws ofwar) from prison. We were to release him from that prison out of which, in abuse of the lenity of government amidst its rigor, and in violationof at least an understood parole, he had attempted an escape, --an escapeexcusable, if you will, but naturally productive of strict and vigilantconfinement. The earnestness of gentlemen to free this person was themore extraordinary because there was full as little in him to raiseadmiration, from any eminent qualities he possessed, as there was toexcite an interest, from any that were amiable. A person not only of noreal civil or literary talents, but of no specious appearance ofeither, --and in his military profession not marked as a leader in anyone act of able or successful enterprise, unless his leading on (or hisfollowing) the allied army of Amazonian and male cannibal Parisians toVersailles, on the famous 6th of October, 1789, is to make his glory. Any otter exploit of his, as a general, I never heard of. But thetriumph of general fraternity was but the more signalized by the totalwant of particular claims in that case, --and by postponing all suchclaims in a case where they really existed, where they stood embossed, and in a manner forced themselves on the view of common, shortsightedbenevolence. Whilst, for its improvement, the humanity of thesegentlemen was thus on its travels, and had got as far off as Olmütz, they never thought of a place and a person much nearer to them, or ofmoving an instruction to Lord Malmesbury in favor of their own sufferingcountryman, Sir Sydney Smith. 

This officer, having attempted, with great gallantry, to cut out avessel from one of the enemy's harbors, was taken after an obstinateresistance, --such as obtained him the marked respect of those who werewitnesses of his valor, and knew the circumstances in which it wasdisplayed. Upon his arrival at Paris, he was instantly thrown intoprison, where the nature of his situation will best be understood byknowing that amongst its _mitigations_ was the permission to walkoccasionally in the court and to enjoy the privilege of shaving himself. On the old system of feelings and principles, his sufferings might havebeen entitled to consideration, and, even in a comparison with those ofCitizen La Fayette, to a priority in the order of compassion. If theministers had neglected to take any steps in his favor, a declaration ofthe sense of the House of Commons would have stimulated them to theirduty. If they had caused a representation to be made, such a proceedingwould have added force to it. If reprisal should be thought advisable, the address of the House would have given an additional sanction to ameasure which would have been, indeed, justifiable without any othersanction than its own reason. But no. Nothing at all like it. In fact, the merit of Sir Sydney Smith, and his claim on British compassion, wasof a kind altogether different from that which interested so deeply theauthors of the motion in favor of Citizen La Fayette. In my humbleopinion, Captain Sir Sydney Smith has another sort of merit with theBritish nation, and something of a higher claim on British humanity, than Citizen La Fayette. Faithful, zealous, and ardent in the service ofhis king and country, --full of spirit, --full of resources, --going out ofthe beaten road, but going right, because his uncommon enterprise wasnot conducted by a vulgar judgment, --in his profession Sir Sydney Smithmight be considered as a distinguished person, if any person could wellbe distinguished in a service in which scarce a commander can be namedwithout putting you in mind of some action of intrepidity, skill, andvigilance that has given them a fair title to contend with any men andin any age. But I will say nothing farther of the merits of Sir SydneySmith: the mortal animosity of the Regicide enemy supersedes all otherpanegyric. Their hatred is a judgment in his favor without appeal. Atpresent he is lodged in the tower of the Temple, the last prison ofLouis the Sixteenth, and the last but one of Marie Antoinette ofAustria, --the prison of Louis the Seventeenth, --the prison of Elizabethof Bourbon. There he lies, unpitied by the grand philanthropy, tomeditate upon the fate of those who are faithful to their king andcountry. Whilst this prisoner, secluded from intercourse, was indulgingin these cheering reflections, he might possibly have had the furtherconsolation of learning (by means of the insolent exultation of hisguards) that there was an English ambassador at Paris; he might have hadthe proud comfort of hearing that this ambassador had the honor ofpassing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of aRegicide pettifogger, and that in the evening he relaxed in theamusements of the opera, and in the spectacle of an audience totallynew, --an audience in which he had the pleasure of seeing about him not asingle face that he could formerly have known in Paris, but, in theplace of that company, one indeed more than equal to it in display ofgayety, splendor, and luxury, --a set of abandoned wretches, squanderingin insolent riot the spoils of their bleeding country: a subject ofprofound reflection both to the prisoner and to the ambassador. 

Whether all the matter upon which I have grounded my opinion of thislast party be fully authenticated or not must be left to those who havehad the opportunity of a nearer view of its conduct, and who have beenmore attentive in their perusal of the writings which have appeared inits favor. But for my part, I have never heard the gross facts on whichI ground my idea of their marked partiality to the reigning tyranny inFrance in any part denied. I am not surprised at all this. Opinions, asthey sometimes follow, so they frequently guide and direct theaffections; and men may become more attached to the country of theirprinciples than to the country of their birth. What I have stated hereis only to mark the spirit which seems to me, though in somewhatdifferent ways, to actuate our great party-leaders, and to trace thisfirst pattern of a negotiation to its true source. 

Such is the present state of our public councils. Well might I beashamed of what seems to be a censure of two great factions, with thetwo most eloquent men which this country ever saw at the head of them, if I had found that either of them could support their conduct by anyexample in the history of their country. I should very much prefer theirjudgment to my own, if I were not obliged, by an infinitelyoverbalancing weight of authority, to prefer the collected wisdom, ofages to the abilities of any two men living. --I return to theDeclaration, with which the history of the abortion of a treaty with theRegicides is closed. 

After such an elaborate display had been made of the injustice andinsolence of an enemy who seems to have been irritated by every one ofthe means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage ofintemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard inwhich we in vain attempted to plunge our sword should have been thrownaway with scorn. It would have been natural, that, rising in the fulnessof their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice, rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured outall the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so longrestrained. It might have been expected, that, emulous of the glory ofthe youthful hero[37] in alliance with him, touched by the example ofwhat one man well formed and well placed may do in the most desperatestate of affairs, convinced there is a courage of the cabinet full aspowerful and far less vulgar than that of the field, our minister wouldhave changed the whole line of that unprosperous prudence which hithertohad produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If he found hissituation full of danger, (and I do not deny that it is perilous in theextreme, ) he must feel that it is also full of glory, and that he isplaced on a stage than which no muse of fire that had ascended thehighest heaven of invention could imagine anything more awful andaugust. It was hoped that in this swelling scene in which he moved, withsome of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, and withso many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a part which, as heplays it, determines forever their destiny and his own, like Ulysses inthe unravelling point of the epic story, he would have thrown off hispatience and his rags together, and, stripped of unworthy disguises, hewould have stood forth in the form and in the attitude of an hero. Onthat day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars; that hewould bid to be brought forth from their hideous kennel (where hisscrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs ofwar whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance thatfeeds them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues, and death, upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all whose habit, order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and abhorrent. It wasexpected that he would at last have thought of active and effectual war;that he would no longer amuse the British lion in the chase of mice andrats; that he would no longer employ the whole naval power of GreatBritain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon the miserableremains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did not regard, and fromwhich none could profit. It was expected that he would have reassertedthe justice of his cause; that he would have reanimated whateverremained to him of his allies, and endeavored to recover those whomtheir fears had led astray; that he would have rekindled the martialardor of his citizens; that he would have held out to them the exampleof their ancestry, the assertor of Europe, and the scourge of Frenchambition; that he would have reminded them of a posterity, which, ifthis nefarious robbery, under the fraudulent name and false color of agovernment, should in full power be seated in the heart of Europe, mustforever be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism, and the mostignominious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause it was presumedthat he would (as in the beginning of the war he did) have opened allthe temples, and with prayer, with fasting, and with supplication, (better directed than to the grim Moloch of Regicide in France, ) havecalled upon us to raise that united cry which has: so often stormedheaven, and with a pious violence forced down blessings upon a repentantpeople. It was hoped, that, when he had invoked upon his endeavors thefavorable regard of the Protector of the human race, it would be seenthat his menaces to the enemy and his prayers to the Almighty were notfollowed, but accompanied, with correspondent action. It was hoped thathis shrilling trumpet should be heard, not to announce a show, but tosound a charge. 

Such a conclusion to such a declaration and such a speech would havebeen a thing of course, --so much a thing of course, that I will be boldto say, if in any ancient history, the Roman for instance, (supposingthat in Rome the matter of such a detail could have been furnished, ) aconsul had gone through such a long train of proceedings, and that therewas a chasm in the manuscripts by which we had lost the conclusion ofthe speech and the subsequent part of the narrative, all critics wouldagree that a Freinshemius would have been thought to have managed thesupplementary business of a continuator most unskillfully, and to havesupplied the hiatus most improbably, if he had not filled up the gapingspace in a manner somewhat similar (though better executed) to what Ihave imagined. But too often different is rational conjecture frommelancholy fact. This exordium, as contrary to all the rules of rhetoricas to those more essential rules of policy which our situation woulddictate, is intended as a prelude to a deadening and dishearteningproposition; as if all that a minister had to fear in a war of his ownconducting was, that the people should pursue it with too ardent a zeal. Such a tone as I guessed the minister would have taken, I am very sure, is the true, unsuborned, unsophisticated language of genuine, naturalfeeling, under the smart of patience exhausted and abused. Such aconduct as the facts stated in the Declaration gave room to expect isthat which true wisdom would have dictated under the impression of thosegenuine feelings. Never was there a jar or discord between genuinesentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one thingand Wisdom say another. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselvesturgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in hergrandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yetleft him at Belvedere) is as much in Nature as any figure from thepencil of Rembrandt or any clown in the rustic revels of Téniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that mindsmust exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passionunder the direction of a feeble reason feeds a low fever, which servesonly to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion doesnot always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, andactuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and whenthey both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroydisorder within and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was atime that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and forexertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence hasnow appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error, andevery great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directedabove the mark that we must aim at: everything below it is absolutelythrown away. 

Except with the addition of the unheard-of insult offered to ourambassador by his rude expulsion, we are never to forget that the pointon which the negotiation with De la Croix broke off was exactly thatwhich had stifled in its cradle the negotiation we had attempted withBarthélemy. Each of these transactions concluded with a manifesto uponour part; but the last of our manifestoes very materially differed fromthe first. The first Declaration stated, that "_nothing was left_ but toprosecute a war _equally just and necessary_. " In the second the justiceand necessity of the war is dropped: the sentence importing that nothingwas left but the prosecution of such a war disappears also. Instead ofthis resolution to prosecute the war, we sink into a whining lamentationon the abrupt termination of the treaty. We have nothing left but thelast resource of female weakness, of helpless infancy, of dotingdecrepitude, --wailing and lamentation. We cannot even utter a sentimentof vigor;--"his Majesty has only to lament. " A poor possession, to beleft to a great monarch! Mark the effect produced on our councils bycontinued insolence and inveterate hostility. We grow more malleableunder their blows. In reverential silence we smother the cause andorigin of the war. On that fundamental article of faith we leave everyone to abound in his own sense. In the minister's speech, glossing onthe Declaration, it is indeed mentioned, but very feebly. The lines areso faintly drawn as hardly to be traced. They only make a part of our_consolation_ in the circumstances which we so dolefully lament. We restour merits on the humility, the earnestness of solicitation, and theperfect good faith of those submissions which have been used to persuadeour Regicide enemies to grant us some sort of peace. Not a word is saidwhich might not have been full as well said, and much better too, if theBritish nation had appeared in the simple character of a penitentconvinced of his errors and offences, and offering, by penances, bypilgrimages, and by all the modes of expiation ever devised by anxious, restless guilt, to make all the atonement in his miserable power. 

The Declaration ends, as I have before quoted it, with a solemnvoluntary pledge, the most full and the most solemn that ever was given, of our resolution (if so it may be called) to enter again into the verysame course. It requires nothing more of the Regicides than to famishsome sort of excuse, some sort of colorable pretest, for our renewingthe supplications of innocence at the feet of guilt. It leaves themoment of negotiation, a most important moment, to the choice of theenemy. He is to regulate it according to the convenience of his affairs. He is to bring it forward at that time when it may best serve toestablish his authority at home and to extend his power abroad, Adangerous assurance for this nation to give, whether it is broken orwhether it is kept. As all treaty was broken off, and broken off in themanner we have seen, the field of future conduct ought to be reservedfree and unincumbered to our future discretion. As to the sort ofcondition prefixed to the pledge, namely, "that the enemy should bedisposed to enter into the work of general pacification with the spiritof reconciliation and equity, " this phraseology cannot possibly beconsidered otherwise than as so many words thrown in to fill thesentence and to round it to the ear. We prefixed the same plausibleconditions to any renewal of the negotiation, in our manifesto on therejection of our proposals at Basle. We did not consider thoseconditions as binding. We opened a much more serious negotiationwithout any sort of regard to them; and there is no new negotiationwhich we can possibly open upon fewer indications of conciliation andequity than were to be discovered when we entered into our last atParis. Any of the slightest pretences, any of the most loose, formal, equivocating expressions, would justify us, under the peroration of thispiece, in again sending the last or some other Lord Malmesbury to Paris. 

I hope I misunderstand this pledge, --or that we shall show no moreregard to it than we have done to all the faith that we have plighted tovigor and resolution in our former Declaration. If I am to understandthe conclusion of the Declaration to be what unfortunately it seems tome, we make an engagement with the enemy, without any correspondentengagement on his side. We seem to have cut ourselves off from anybenefit which an intermediate state of things might furnish to enable ustotally to overturn that power, so little connected with moderation andjustice. By holding out no hope, either to the justly discontented inFrance, or to any foreign power, and leaving the recommencement of alltreaty to this identical junto of assassins, we do in effect assure andguaranty to them the full possession of the rich fruits of theirconfiscations, of their murders of men, women, and children, and of allthe multiplied, endless, nameless iniquities by which they have obtainedtheir power. We guaranty to them the possession of a country, such andso situated as France, round, entire, immensely perhaps augmented. 

"Well, " some will say, "in this case we have only submitted to thenature of things. " The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdyadversary. This might be alleged as a plea for our attempt at a treaty. But what plea of that kind can be alleged, after the treaty was dead andgone, in favor of this posthumous Declaration? No necessity has drivenus to _that_ pledge. It is without a counterpart even in expectation. And what can be stated to obviate the evil which that solitaryengagement must produce on the understandings or the fears of men? Iask, what have the Regicides promised you in return, in case _you_should show what _they_ would call dispositions to conciliation andequity, whilst you are giving that pledge from the throne, and engagingParliament to counter-secure it? It is an awful consideration. It was onthe very day of the date of this wonderful pledge, [38] in which weassumed the Directorial government as lawful, and in which we engagedourselves to treat with them whenever they pleased, --it was on that veryday the Regicide fleet was weighing anchor from one of your harbors, where it had remained four days in perfect quiet. These harbors of theBritish dominions are the ports of France. They are of no use but toprotect an enemy from your best allies, the storms of heaven and his ownrashness. Had the West of Ireland been an unportuous coast, the Frenchnaval power would have been undone. The enemy uses the moment forhostility, without the least regard to your future dispositions ofequity and conciliation. They go out of what were once your harbors, andthey return to them at their pleasure. Eleven days they had the full useof Bantry Bay, and at length their fleet returns from their harbor ofBantry to their harbor of Brest. Whilst you are invoking the propitiousspirit of Regicide equity and conciliation, they answer you with anattack. They turn out the pacific bearer of your "how do you dos, " LordMalmesbury; and they return your visit, and their "thanks for yourobliging inquiries, " by their old practised assassin, Hoche. They cometo attack--what? A town, a fort, a naval station? They come to attackyour king, your Constitution, and the very being of that Parliamentwhich was holding out to them these pledges, together with theentireness of the empire, the laws, liberties, and properties of all thepeople. We know that they meditated the very same invasion, and for thevery same purposes, upon this kingdom, and, had the coast been asopportune, would have effected it. 

Whilst _you_ are in vain torturing your invention to assure them of_your_ sincerity and good faith, they have left no doubt concerning_their_ good faith and _their_ sincerity towards those to whom they haveengaged their honor. To their power they have been true to the onlypledge they have ever yet given to you, or to any of yours: I mean thesolemn engagement which they entered into with the deputation oftraitors who appeared at their bar, from England and from Ireland, in1792. They have been true and faithful to the engagement which they hadmade more largely, --that is, their engagement to give effectual aid toinsurrection and treason, wherever they might appear in the world. Wehave seen the British Declaration. This is the counter Declaration ofthe Directory. This is the reciprocal pledge which Regicide amity givesto the conciliatory pledges of kings. But, thank God, such pledgescannot exist single. They have no counterpart; and if they had, theenemy's conduct cancels such declarations, --and, I trust, along withthem, cancels everything of mischief and dishonor that they contain. 

There is one thing in this business which appears to be whollyunaccountable, or accountable on a supposition I dare not entertain fora moment. I cannot help asking, Why all this pains to clear the Britishnation of ambition, perfidy, and the insatiate thirst of war? At whatperiod of time was it that our country has deserved that load of infamyof which nothing but preternatural humiliation in language and conductcan serve to clear us? If we have deserved this kind of evil fame fromanything we have done in a state of prosperity, I am sure that it is notan abject conduct in adversity that can clear our reputation. Well is itknown that ambition can creep as well as soar. The pride of no person ina flourishing condition is more justly to be dreaded than that of himwho is mean and cringing under a doubtful and unprosperous fortune. Butit seems it was thought necessary to give some out-of-the-way proofs ofour sincerity, as well as of our freedom from ambition. Is, then, fraudand falsehood become the distinctive character of Englishmen? Wheneveryour enemy chooses to accuse you of perfidy and ill faith, will you putit into his power to throw you into the purgatory of self-humiliation?Is his charge equal to the finding of the grand jury of Europe, andsufficient to put you upon your trial? But on that trial I will defendthe English ministry. I am sorry that on some points I have, on theprinciples I have always opposed, so good a defence to make. They werenot the first to begin the war. They did not excite the generalconfederacy in Europe, which was so properly formed on the alarm givenby the Jacobinism of France. They did not begin with an hostileaggression on the Regicides, or any of their allies. These parricides oftheir own country, disciplining themselves for foreign by domesticviolence, were the first to attack a power that was our ally by nature, by habit, and by the sanction of multiplied treaties. Is it not truethat they were the first to declare war upon this kingdom? Is every wordin the declaration from Downing Street concerning their conduct, andconcerning ours and that of our allies, so obviously false that it isnecessary to give some new-invented proofs of our good faith in order toexpunge the memory of all this perfidy?

We know that over-laboring a point of this kind has the direct contraryeffect from what we wish. We know that there is a legal presumptionagainst men, _quando se nimis purgitant_; and if a charge of ambition isnot refuted by an affected humility, certainly the character of fraudand perfidy is still less to be washed away by indications of meanness. Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out ofthe necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degeneratespirits; and on the theatre of the world, it is not by assuming the maskof a Davus or a Geta that an actor will obtain credit for manlysimplicity and a liberal openness of proceeding. It is an erectcountenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power ofresisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith andhonor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind. Therefore all thesenegotiations, and all the declarations with which they were preceded andfollowed, can only serve to raise presumptions against that good faithand public integrity the fame of which to preserve inviolate is so muchthe interest and duty of every nation. 

The pledge is an engagement "to all Europe. " This is the moreextraordinary, because it is a pledge which no power in Europe, whom Ihave yet heard of, has thought proper to require at our hands. I am notin the secrets of office, and therefore I may be excused for proceedingupon probabilities and exterior indications. I have surveyed all Europefrom the east to the west, from the north to the south, in search ofthis call upon us to purge ourselves of "subtle _duplicity_ and a_Punic_ style" in our proceedings. I have not heard that his Excellencythe Ottoman ambassador has expressed his doubts of the British sincerityin our negotiation with the most unchristian republic lately set up atour door. What sympathy in that quarter may have introduced aremonstrance upon the want of faith in this nation I cannot positivelysay. If it exists, it is in Turkish or Arabic, and possibly is not yettranslated. But none of the nations which compose the old Christianworld have I yet heard as calling upon us for those judicial purgationsand ordeals, by fire and water, which we have chosen to go through;--forthe other great proof, by battle, we seem to decline. 

For whose use, entertainment, or instruction are all those overstrainedand overlabored proceedings in council, in negotiation, and in speechesin Parliament intended? What royal cabinet is to be enriched with thesehigh-finished pictures of the arrogance of the sworn enemies of kingsand the meek patience of a British administration? In what heart is itintended to kindle pity towards our multiplied mortifications anddisgraces? At best it is superfluous. What nation is unacquainted withthe haughty disposition of the common enemy of all nations? It has beenmore than seen, it has been felt, --not only by those who have been thevictims of their imperious rapacity, but, in a degree, by those verypowers who have consented to establish this robbery, that they might beable to copy it, and with impunity to make new usurpations of their own. 

The King of Prussia has hypothecated in trust to the Regicides his richand fertile territories on the Rhine, as a pledge of his zeal andaffection to the cause of liberty and equality. He has seen them robbedwith unbounded liberty and with the most levelling equality. The woodsare wasted, the country is ravaged, property is confiscated, and thepeople are put to bear a double yoke, in the exactions of a tyrannicalgovernment and in the contributions of an hostile irruption. Is it tosatisfy the Court of Berlin that the Court of London is to give the samesort of pledge of its sincerity and good faith to the French Directory?It is not that heart full of sensibility, it is not Lucchesini, theminister of his Prussian Majesty, the late ally of England, and thepresent ally of its enemy, who has demanded this pledge of oursincerity, as the price of the renewal of the long lease of his sincerefriendship to this kingdom. 

It is not to our enemy, the now faithful ally of Regicide, late thefaithful ally of Great Britain, the Catholic king, that we address ourdoleful lamentation: it is not to the _Prince of Peace_, whosedeclaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of generaltranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive-branch inhis beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark of clean birdsat Paris. 

Surely it is not to the Tetrarch of Sardinia, now the faithful ally of apower who has seized upon all his fortresses and confiscated the oldestdominions of his house, --it is not to this once powerful, oncerespected, and once cherished ally of Great Britain, that we mean toprove the sincerity of the peace which we offered to make at hisexpense. Or is it to him we are to prove the arrogance of the power who, under the name of friend, oppresses him, and the poor remains of hissubjects, with all the ferocity of the most cruel enemy?

It is not to Holland, under the name of an ally, laid under a permanentmilitary contribution, filled with their double garrison of barbarousJacobin troops and ten times more barbarous Jacobin clubs andassemblies, that we find ourselves obliged to give this pledge. 

Is it to Genoa that we make this kind promise, --a state which theRegicides were to defend in a favorable neutrality, but whose neutralityhas been, by the gentle influence of Jacobin authority, forced into thetrammels of an alliance, --whose alliance has been secured by theadmission of French garrisons, --and whose peace has been foreverratified by a forced declaration of war against ourselves?

It is not the Grand Duke of Tuscany who claims this declaration, --notthe Grand Duke, who for his early sincerity, for his love of peace, andfor his entire confidence in the amity of the assassins of his house, has been complimented in the British Parliament with the name of "_thewisest sovereign in Europe_": it is not this pacific Solomon, or hisphilosophic, cudgelled ministry, cudgelled by English and by French, whose wisdom and philosophy between them have placed Leghorn in thehands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the onlyprofitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not thissovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whosechair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculativethan Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon usso loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to therepublic always the same, always one and indivisible. 

It is not Venice, whose principal cities the enemy has appropriated tohimself, and scornfully desired the state to indemnify itself from theEmperor, that we wish to convince of the pride and the despotism of anenemy who loads us with his scoffs and buffets. 

It is not for his Holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of ourown weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. Thatprince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. Theartists of the French Revolution had given their very first essays andsketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a farmore cruel "murdering piece" than had over entered into the imaginationof painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing armsthe possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by allthe ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who during that period havereigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our latenegotiation ceded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, latelyamongst the most flourishing (perhaps the most flourishing for theirextent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove thesincerity of our resolution to make peace with the Republic ofBarbarism? That venerable potentate and pontiff is sunk deep into thevale of years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; hisdominions are more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years, defended as they were, not by force, but by reverence: yet, in all thesestraits, we see him display, amidst the recent ruins and the newdefacements of his plundered capital, along with the mild and decoratedpiety of the modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome. Does he, who, though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused toreceive pecuniary compensations for the protection he owed to his peopleof Avignon, Carpentras, and the Venaissin, --does he want proofs of ourgood disposition to deliver over that people, without any security forthem, or any compensation to their sovereign, to this cruel enemy? Doeshe want to be satisfied of the sincerity of our humiliation to France, who has seen his free, fertile, and happy city and state of Bologna, thecradle of regenerated law, the seat of sciences and of arts, sohideously metamorphosed, whilst he was crying to Great Britain for aid, and offering to purchase that aid at any price? Is it him, who sees thatchosen spot of plenty and delight converted into a Jacobin ferociousrepublic, dependent on the homicides of France, --is it him, who, fromthe miracles of his beneficent industry, has done a work which defiedthe power of the Roman emperors, though with an enthralled world tolabor for them, --is it him, who has drained and cultivated the PontineMarshes, that we are to satisfy of our cordial spirit of conciliationwith those who, in their equity, are restoring Holland again to theseas, whose maxims poison more than the exhalations of the most deadlyfens, and who turn all the fertilities of Nature and of Art into anhowling desert? Is it to him that we are to demonstrate the good faithof our submissions to the Cannibal Republic, --to him, who is commandedto deliver up into their hands Ancona and Civita Vecchia, seats ofcommerce raised by the wise and liberal labors and expenses of thepresent and late pontiffs, ports not more belonging to theEcclesiastical State than to the commerce of Great Britain, thuswresting from his hands the power of the keys of the centre of Italy, asbefore they had taken possession of the keys of the northern part fromthe hands of the unhappy King of Sardinia, the natural ally of England?Is it to him we are to prove our good faith in the peace which we aresoliciting to receive from the hands of his and our robbers, the enemiesof all arts, all sciences, all civilization, and all commerce?

Is it to the Cispadane or to the Transpadane republics, which have beenforced to bow under the galling yoke of French liberty, that we addressall these pledges of our sincerity and love of peace with theirunnatural parents?

Are we by this Declaration to satisfy the King of Naples, whom we haveleft to struggle as he can, after our abdication of Corsica, and theflight of the whole naval force of England out of the whole circuit ofthe Mediterranean, abandoning our allies, our commerce, and the honor ofa nation once the protectress of all other nations, because strengthenedby the independence and enriched by the commerce of them all? By theexpress provisions of a recent treaty, we had engaged with the King ofNaples to keep a naval force in the Mediterranean. But, good God! was atreaty at all necessary for this? The uniform policy of this kingdom asa state, and eminently so as a commercial state, has at all times led usto keep a powerful squadron and a commodious naval station in thatcentral sea, which borders upon and which connects a far greater numberand variety of states, European, Asiatic, and African, than any other. Without such a naval force, France must become despotic mistress of thatsea, and of all the countries whose shores it washes. Our commerce mustbecome vassal to her and dependent on her will. Since we are come nolonger to trust to our force in arms, but to our dexterity innegotiation, and begin to pay a desperate court to a proud and coyusurpation, and have finally sent an ambassador to the Bourbon Regicidesat Paris, the King of Naples, who saw that no reliance was to be placedon our engagements, or on any pledge of our adherence to our nearest anddearest interests, has been obliged to send his ambassador also to jointhe rest of the squalid tribe of the representatives of degraded kings. This monarch, surely, does not want any proof of the sincerity of ouramicable dispositions to that amicable republic, into whose arms he hasbeen given by our desertion of him. 

To look to the powers of the North. --It is not to the Danish ambassador, insolently treated in his own character and in ours, that we are to giveproofs of the Regicide arrogance, and of our disposition to submit toit. 

With regard to Sweden I cannot say much. The French influence isstruggling with her independence; and they who consider the manner inwhich the ambassador of that power was treated not long since at Paris, and the manner in which the father of the present King of Sweden(himself the victim of regicide principles and passions) would havelooked on the present assassins of France, will not be very prompt tobelieve that the young King of Sweden has made this kind of requisitionto the King of Great Britain, and has given this kind of auspice of hisnew government. 

I speak last of the most important of all. It certainly was not the lateEmpress of Russia at whose instance we have given this pledge. It is notthe new Emperor, the inheritor of so much glory, and placed in asituation of so much delicacy and difficulty for the preservation ofthat inheritance, who calls on England, the natural ally of hisdominions, to deprive herself of her power of action, and to bindherself to France. France at no time, and in none of its fashions, leastof all in its last, has been ever looked upon as the friend either ofRussia or of Great Britain. Everything good, I trust, is to be expectedfrom this prince, --whatever may be without authority given out of aninfluence over his mind possessed by that only potentate from whom hehas anything to apprehend or with whom he has much even to discuss. 

This sovereign knows, I have no doubt, and feels, on what sort of bottomis to be laid the foundation of a Russian throne. He knows what a rockof native granite is to form the pedestal of his statue who is toemulate Peter the Great. His renown will be in continuing with ease andsafety what his predecessor was obliged to achieve through mightystruggles. He is sensible that his business is not to innovate, out tosecure and to establish, --that reformations at this day are attempts atbest of ambiguous utility. He will revere his father with the piety ofa son, but in his government he will imitate the policy of his mother. His father, with many excellent qualities, had a short reign, --because, being a native Russian, he was unfortunately advised to act in thespirit of a foreigner. His mother reigned over Russia three-and-thirtyyears with the greatest glory, --because, with the disadvantage of beinga foreigner born, she made herself a Russian. A wise prince like thepresent will improve his country; but it will be cautiously andprogressively, upon its own native groundwork of religion, manners, habitudes, and alliances. If I prognosticate right, it is not theEmperor of Russia that ever will call for extravagant proofs of ourdesire to reconcile ourselves to the irreconcilable enemy of allthrones. 

I do not know why I should not include America among the Europeanpowers, --because she is of European origin, and has not yet, likeFrance, destroyed all traces of manners, laws, opinions, and usageswhich she drew from Europe. As long as that Europe shall have anypossessions either in the southern or the northern parts of thatAmerica, even separated as it is by the ocean, it must be considered asa part of the European system. It is not America, menaced with internalruin from the attempts to plant Jacobinism instead of liberty in thatcountry, --it is not America, whose independence is directly attacked bythe French, the enemies of the independence of all nations, that callsupon us to give security by disarming ourselves in a treacherous peace. By such a peace, we shall deliver the Americans, their liberty, andtheir order, without resource, to the mercy of their imperious allies, who will have peace or neutrality with no state which is not ready tojoin her in war against England. 

Having run round the whole circle of the European system, wherever itacts, I must affirm that all the foreign powers who are not leagued withFrance for the utter destruction of all balance through Europe andthroughout the world demand other assurances from this kingdom than aregiven in that Declaration. They require assurances, not of the sincerityof our good dispositions towards the usurpation in France, but of ouraffection towards the college of the ancient states of Europe, andpledges of our constancy, our fidelity, and of our fortitude inresisting to the last the power that menaces them all. The apprehensionfrom which they wish to be delivered cannot be from anything they dreadin the ambition of England. Our power must be their strength. They hopemore from us than they fear. I am sure the only ground of their hope, and of our hope, is in the greatness of mind hitherto shown by thepeople of this nation, and its adherence to the unalterable principlesof its ancient policy, whatever government may finally prevail inFrance. I have entered into this detail of the wishes and expectationsof the European powers, in order to point out more clearly not so muchwhat their disposition as (a consideration of far greater importance)what their situation demands, according as that situation is related tothe Regicide Republic and to this kingdom. 

Then, if it is not to satisfy the foreign powers we make this assurance, to what power at home is it that we pay all this humiliating court? Notto the old Whigs or to the ancient Tories of this kingdom, --if anymemory of such ancient divisions still exists amongst us. To which ofthe principles of these parties is this assurance agreeable? Is it tothe Whigs we are to recommend the aggrandizement of France, and thesubversion of the balance of power? Is it to the Tories we are torecommend our eagerness to cement ourselves with the enemies of royaltyand religion? But if these parties, which by their dissensions have sooften distracted the kingdom, which by their union have once saved it, and which by their collision and mutual resistance have preserved thevariety of this Constitution in its unity, be (as I believe they are)nearly extinct by the growth of new ones, which have their roots in thepresent circumstances of the times, I wish to know to which of these newdescriptions this Declaration is addressed. It can hardly be to thosepersons who, in the new distribution of parties, consider theconservation in England of the ancient order of things as necessary topreserve order everywhere else, and who regard the general conservationof order in other countries as reciprocally necessary to preserve thesame state of things in these islands. That party never can wish to seeGreat Britain pledge herself to give the lead and the ground ofadvantage and superiority to the France of to-day, in any treaty whichis to settle Europe. I insist upon it, that, so far from expecting suchan engagement, they are generally stupefied and confounded with it. Thatthe other party, which demands great changes here, and is so pleased tosee them everywhere else, which party I call Jacobin, that this factiondoes, from the bottom of its heart, approve the Declaration, and doeserect its crest upon the engagement, there can be little doubt. To themit may be addressed with propriety, for it answers their purposes inevery point. 

The party in opposition within the House of Lords and Commons it isirreverent, and half a breach of privilege, (far from my thoughts, ) toconsider as Jacobin. This party has always denied the existence of sucha faction, and has treated the machinations of those whom you and I callJacobins as so many forgeries and fictions of the minister and hisadherents, to find a pretext for destroying freedom and setting up anarbitrary power in this kingdom. However, whether this minority has aleaning towards the French system or only a charitable toleration ofthose who lean that way, it is certain that they have always attackedthe sincerity of the minister in the same modes, and on the very samegrounds, and nearly in the same terms, with the Directory. It musttherefore be at the tribunal of the minority (from the whole tenor ofthe speech) that the minister appeared to consider himself obliged topurge himself of duplicity. It was at their bar that he held up hishand; it was on their _sellette_ that he seemed to answerinterrogatories; it was on their principles that he defended his wholeconduct. They certainly take what the French call the _haut du pavé_. They have loudly called for the negotiation. It was accorded to them. They engaged their support of the war with vigor, in case peace was notgranted on honorable terms. Peace was not granted on any terms, honorable or shameful. Whether these judges, few in number, but powerfulin jurisdiction, are satisfied, --whether they to whom this new pledge ishypothecated have redeemed their own, --whether they have given oneparticle more of their support to ministry, or even, favored them withtheir good opinion or their candid construction, I leave it to those whorecollect that memorable debate to determine. 

The fact is, that neither this Declaration, nor the negotiation which isits subject, could serve any one good purpose, foreign or domestic; itcould conduce to no end, either with regard to allies or neutrals. Ittends neither to bring back the misled, nor to give courage to thefearful, nor to animate and confirm those who are hearty and zealous inthe cause. 

I hear it has been said (though I can scarcely believe it) by adistinguished person, in an assembly where, if there be less of thetorrent and tempest of eloquence, more guarded expression is to beexpected, that, indeed, there was no just ground of hope in thisbusiness from the beginning. 

It is plain that this noble person, however conversant in negotiation, having been employed in no less than four embassies, and in twohemispheres, and in one of those negotiations having fully experiencedwhat it was to proceed to treaty without previous encouragement, was notat all consulted in this experiment. For his Majesty's principalminister declared, on the very same day, in another House, "hisMajesty's deep and sincere regret at its unfortunate and abrupttermination, so different from the wishes and _hopes_ that wereentertained, "--and in other parts of the speech speaks of this abrupttermination as a great disappointment, and as a fall from sincereendeavors and sanguine expectation. Here are, indeed, sentimentsdiametrically opposite, as to the hopes with which the negotiation wascommenced and carried on; and what is curious is, the grounds of thehopes on the one side and the despair on the other are exactly the same. The logical conclusion from the common premises is, indeed, in favor ofthe noble lord; for they are agreed that the enemy was far from givingthe least degree of countenance to any such hopes, and that theyproceeded in spite of every discouragement which the enemy had thrown intheir way. But there is another material point in which they do not seemto differ: that is to say, the result of the desperate experiment of thenoble lord, and of the promising attempt of the great minister, insatisfying the people of England, and in causing discontent to thepeople of France, --or, as the minister expresses it, "in uniting Englandand in dividing France. "

For my own part, though I perfectly agreed with the noble lord that theattempt was desperate, so desperate, indeed, as to deserve _his_ name ofan experiment, yet no fair man can possibly doubt that the minister wasperfectly sincere in his proceeding, and that, from his ardent wishesfor peace with the Regicides, he was led to conceive hopes which werefounded rather in his vehement desires than in any rational ground ofpolitical speculation. Convinced as I am of this, it had been better, inmy humble opinion, that persons of great name and authority hadabstained from those topics which had been used to call the minister'ssincerity into doubt, and had not adopted the sentiments of theDirectory upon the subject of all our negotiations: for the noble lordexpressly says that the experiment was made for the satisfaction of thecountry. The Directory says exactly the same thing. Upon granting, inconsequence of our supplications, the passport to Lord Malmesbury, inorder to remove all sort of hope from its success, they charged all ourprevious steps, even to that moment of submissive demand to be admittedto their presence, on duplicity and perfidy, and assumed that the objectof all the steps we had taken was that "of justifying the continuance ofthe war in the eyes of the English nation, and of throwing all the odiumof it upon the French. " "The English nation" (said they) "supportsimpatiently the continuance of the war, and _a reply must be made to itscomplaints and its reproaches_; the Parliament is about to be opened, _and the mouths of the orators who will declaim against the war must beshut; the demands for new taxes must be justified; and to obtain theseresults, it is necessary to be able to advance that the Frenchgovernment refuses every reasonable proposition for peace_. " I am sorrythat the language of the friends to ministry and the enemies to mankindshould be so much in unison. 

As to the fact in which these parties are so well agreed, that theexperiment ought to have been made for the satisfaction of this country, (meaning the country of England, ) it were well to be wished that personsof eminence would cease to make themselves representatives of the peopleof England, without a letter of attorney, or any other act ofprocuration. In legal construction, the sense of the people of Englandis to be collected from the House of Commons; and though I do not denythe possibility of an abuse of this trust as well as any other, yet Ithink, without the most weighty reasons and in the most urgentexigencies, it is highly dangerous to suppose that the House speaksanything contrary to the sense of the people, or that the representativeis silent, when the sense of the constituent, strongly, decidedly, andupon long deliberation, speaks audibly upon any topic of moment. Ifthere is a doubt whether the House of Commons represents perfectly thewhole commons of Great Britain, (I think there is none, ) there can be noquestion but that the Lords and the Commons together represent the senseof the whole people to the crown and to the world. Thus it is, when wespeak legally and constitutionally. In a great measure it is equallytrue, when we speak prudentially. But I do not pretend to assert thatthere are no other principles to guide discretion than those which areor can be fixed by some law or some constitution: yet before the legallypresumed sense of the people should be superseded by a supposition ofone more real, (as in all cases where a legal presumption is to beascertained, ) some strong proofs ought to exist of a contrarydisposition in the people at large, and some decisive indications oftheir desire upon this subject. There can be no question, that, previously to a direct message from the crown, neither House ofParliament did indicate anything like a wish for such advances as wehave made or such negotiations as we have carried on. The Parliament hasassented to ministry; it is not ministry that has obeyed the impulse ofParliament. The people at large have their organs through which they canspeak to Parliament and to the crown by a respectful petition, andthough not with absolute authority, yet with weight, they can instructtheir representatives. The freeholders and other electors in thiskingdom have another and a surer mode of expressing their sentimentsconcerning the conduct which is held by members of Parliament. In themiddle of these transactions this last opportunity has been held out tothem. In all these points of view I positively assert that the peoplehave nowhere and in no way expressed their wish of throwing themselvesand their sovereign at the feet of a wicked and rancorous foe, tosupplicate mercy, which, from the nature of that foe, and from thecircumstances of affairs, we had no sort of ground to expect. It isundoubtedly the business of ministers very much to consult theinclinations of the people, but they ought to take great care that theydo not receive that inclination from the few persons who may happen toapproach them. The petty interests of such gentlemen, their lowconceptions of things, their fears arising from the danger to which thevery arduous and critical situation of public affairs may expose theirplaces, their apprehensions from the hazards to which the discontents ofa few popular men at elections may expose their seats inParliament, --all these causes trouble and confuse the representationswhich they make to ministers of the real temper of the nation. Ifministers, instead of following the great indications of theConstitution, proceed on such reports, they will take the whispers of acabal for the voice of the people, and the counsels of imprudenttimidity for the wisdom of a nation. 

I well remember, that, when the fortune of the war began (and it beganpretty early) to turn, as it is common and natural, we were dejected bythe losses that had been sustained, and with the doubtful issue of thecontests that were foreseen. But not a word was uttered that supposedpeace upon any proper terms was in our power, or therefore that itshould be in our desire. As usual, with or without reason, wecriticized the conduct of the war, and compared our fortunes with ourmeasures. The mass of the nation went no further. For I suppose that youalways understood me as speaking of that very preponderating part of thenation which had always been equally adverse to the French principlesand to the general progress of their Revolution throughoutEurope, --considering the final success of their arms and the triumph oftheir principles as one and the same thing. 

The first means that were used, by any one professing our principles, tochange the minds of this party upon that subject, appeared in a smallpamphlet circulated with considerable industry. It was commonly given tothe noble person himself who has passed judgment upon all hopes fromnegotiation, and justified our late abortive attempt only as anexperiment made to satisfy the country; and yet that pamphlet led theway in endeavoring to dissatisfy that very country with the continuanceof the war, and to raise in the people the most sanguine expectationsfrom some such course of negotiation as has been fatally pursued. Thisleads me to suppose (and I am glad to have reason for supposing) thatthere was no foundation for attributing the performance in question tothat author; but without mentioning his name in the title-page, itpassed for his, and does still pass uncontradicted. It was entitled, "Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the FourthWeek of October, 1795. "

This sanguine little king's-fisher, (not prescient of the storm, as byhis instinct he ought to be, ) appearing at that uncertain season beforethe rigs of old Michaelmas were yet well composed, and when theinclement storms of winter were approaching, began to flicker over theseas, and was busy in building its halcyon nest, as if the angry oceanhad been soothed by the genial breath of May. Very unfortunately, thisauspice was instantly followed by a speech from the throne in the veryspirit and principles of that pamphlet. 

I say nothing of the newspapers, which are undoubtedly in the interest, and which are supposed by some to be directly or indirectly under theinfluence of ministers, and which, with less authority than the pamphletI speak of, had indeed for some time before held a similar language, indirect contradiction to their more early tone: insomuch that I can speakit with a certain assurance, that very many, who wished toadministration as well as you and I do, thought, that, in giving theiropinion in favor of this peace, they followed the opinion ofministry;--they were conscious that they did not lead it. My inference, therefore, is this: that the negotiation, whatever its merits may be, inthe general principle and policy of undertaking it, is, what everypolitical measure in general ought to be, the sole work ofadministration; and that, if it was an experiment to satisfy anybody, itwas to satisfy those whom the ministers were in the daily habit ofcondemning, and by whom they were daily condemned, --I mean the _leaders_of the _opposition_ in _Parliament_. I am certain that the ministerswere then, and are now, invested with the fullest confidence of themajor part of the nation, to pursue such measures of peace or war as thenature of things shall suggest as most adapted to the public safety. Itis in this light, therefore, as a measure which ought to have beenavoided and ought not to be repeated, that I take the liberty ofdiscussing the merits of this system of Regicide negotiations. It is nota matter of light experiment, that leaves us where it found us. Peace orwar are the great hinges upon which the very being of nations turns. Negotiations are the means of making peace or preventing war, and aretherefore of more serious importance than almost any single event of warcan possibly be. 

At the very outset, I do not hesitate to affirm, that this country inparticular, and the public law in general, have suffered more by thisnegotiation of experiment than by all the battles together that we havelost from the commencement of this century to this time, when it touchesso nearly to its close. I therefore have the misfortune not to coincidein opinion with the great statesman who set on foot a negotiation, as hesaid, "in spite of the constant opposition he had met with from Prance. "He admits, "that the difficulty in this negotiation became mostseriously increased, indeed, by the situation in which we were placed, and the manner in which alone the enemy would _admit_ of a negotiation. "This situation so described, and so truly described, rendered oursolicitation not only degrading, but from the very outset evidentlyhopeless. 

I find it asserted, and even a merit taken for it, "that this countrysurmounted every difficulty of form and etiquette which the enemy hadthrown in our way. " An odd way of surmounting a difficulty, by coweringunder it! I find it asserted that an heroic resolution had been taken, and avowed in Parliament, previous to this negotiation, "that noconsideration of etiquette should stand in the way of it. "

Etiquette, if I understand rightly the term, which in any extent is ofmodern usage, had its original application to those ceremonial andformal observances practised at courts, which had been established bylong usage, in order to preserve the sovereign power from the rudeintrusion of licentious familiarity, as well as to preserve majestyitself from a disposition to consult its ease at the expense of itsdignity. The term came afterwards to have a greater latitude, and to beemployed to signify certain formal methods used in the transactionsbetween sovereign states. 

In the more limited, as well as in the larger sense of the term, withoutknowing what the etiquette is, it is impossible to determine whether itis a vain and captious punctilio, or a form necessary to preservedecorum in character and order in business. I readily admit that nothingtends to facilitate the issue of all public transactions more than amutual disposition in the parties treating to waive all ceremony. Butthe use of this temporary suspension of the recognized modes of respectconsists in its being mutual, and in the spirit of conciliation in whichall ceremony is laid aside. On the contrary, when one of the parties toa treaty intrenches himself up to the chin in these ceremonies, and willnot on his side abate a single punctilio, and that all the concessionsare upon one side only, the party so conceding does by this act placehimself in a relation of inferiority, and thereby fundamentally subvertsthat equality which is of the very essence of all treaty. 

After this formal act of degradation, it was but a matter of course thatgross insult should be offered to our ambassador, and that he shouldtamely submit to it. He found himself provoked to complain of theatrocious libels against his public character and his person whichappeared in a paper under the avowed patronage of that government. TheRegicide Directory, on this complaint, did not recognize the paper: andthat was all. They did not punish, they did not dismiss, they did noteven reprimand the writer. As to our ambassador, this total want ofreparation for the injury was passed by under the pretence of despisingit. 

In this but too serious business, it is not possible here to avoid asmile. Contempt is not a thing to be despised. It may be borne with acalm and equal mind, but no man by lifting his head high can pretendthat he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down upon him fromabove. All these sudden complaints of injury, and all these deliberatesubmissions to it, are the inevitable consequences of the situation inwhich we had placed ourselves: a situation wherein the insults were suchas Nature would not enable us to bear, and circumstances would notpermit us to resent. 

It was not long, however, after this contempt of contempt upon the partof our ambassador, (who by the way represented his sovereign, ) that anew object was furnished for displaying sentiments of the same kind, though the case was infinitely aggravated. Not the ambassador, but theking himself, was libelled and insulted, --libelled, not by a creature ofthe Directory, but by the Directory itself. At least, so Lord Malmesburyunderstood it, and so he answered it in his note of the 12th November, 1796, in which he says, --"With regard to the _offensive and injurious_insinuations which are contained in that paper, and which are onlycalculated to throw new obstacles in the way of the accommodation whichthe French government professes to desire, THE KING HAS DEEMED IT FARBENEATH HIS DIGNITY to permit an answer to be made to them on his part, in any manner whatsoever. "

I am of opinion, that, if his Majesty had kept aloof from that wash andoffscouring of everything that is low and barbarous in the world, itmight be well thought unworthy of his dignity to take notice of suchscurrilities: they must be considered as much the natural expression ofthat kind of animal as it is the expression of the feelings of a dog tobark. But when the king had been advised to recognize not only themonstrous composition as a sovereign power, but, in conduct, to admitsomething in it like a superiority, --when the bench of Regicide was madeat least coordinate with his throne, and raised upon a platform full aselevated, this treatment could not be passed by under the appearance ofdespising it. It would not, indeed, have been proper to keep up a war ofthe same kind; but an immediate, manly, and decided resentment ought tohave been the consequence. We ought not to have waited for thedisgraceful dismissal of our ambassador. There are cases in which we maypretend to sleep; but the wittol rule has some sense in it, _Non omnibusdormio_. We might, however, have seemed ignorant of the affront; butwhat was the fact? Did we dissemble or pass it by in silence? Whendignity is talked of, a language which I did not expect to hear in sucha transaction, I must say, what all the world must feel, that it was notfor the king's dignity to notice this insult and not to resent it. Thismode of proceeding is formed on new ideas of the correspondence betweensovereign powers. 

This was far from the only ill effect of the policy of degradation. Thestate of inferiority in which we were placed, in this vain attempt attreaty, drove us headlong from error into error, and led us to wanderfar away, not only from all the paths which have been beaten in the oldcourse of political communication between mankind, but out of the wayseven of the most common prudence. Against all rules, after we had metnothing but rebuffs in return to all our proposals, we made _twoconfidential communications_ to those in whom we had no confidence andwho reposed no confidence in us. What was worse, we were fully aware ofthe madness of the step we were taking. Ambassadors are not sent to ahostile power, persevering in sentiments of hostility, to make candid, confidential, and amicable communications. Hitherto the world hasconsidered it as the duty of an ambassador in such a situation to becautious, guarded, dexterous, and circumspect. It is true that mutualconfidence and common interest dispense with all rules, smooth therugged way, remove every obstacle, and make all things plain and level. When, in the last century, Temple and De Witt negotiated the famousTriple Alliance, their candor, their freedom, and the most_confidential_ disclosures were the result of true policy. Accordingly, in spite of all the dilatory forms of the complex government of theUnited Provinces, the treaty was concluded in three days. It did nottake a much longer time to bring the same state (that of Holland)through a still more complicated transaction, --that of the _GrandAlliance_. But in the present case, this unparalleled candor, thisunpardonable want of reserve, produced, what might have been expectedfrom it, the most serious evils. It instructed the enemy in the wholeplan of our demands and concessions. It made the most fatal discoveries. 

And first, it induced us to lay down the basis of a treaty which itselfhad nothing to rest upon. It seems, we thought we had gained a greatpoint in getting this basis admitted, --that is, a basis of mutualcompensation and exchange of conquests. If a disposition to peace, andwith any reasonable assurance, had been previously indicated, such aplan of arrangement might with propriety and safety be proposed; becausethese arrangements were not, in effect, to make the basis, but a part ofthe superstructure, of the fabric of pacification. The order of thingswould thus be reversed. The mutual disposition to peace would form thereasonable base, upon which the scheme of compensation upon one side orthe other might be constructed. This truly fundamental base being oncelaid, all differences arising from the spirit of huckstering and bartermight be easily adjusted. If the restoration of peace, with a view tothe establishment of a fair balance of power in Europe, had been madethe real basis of the treaty, the reciprocal value of the compensationscould not be estimated according to their proportion to each other, butaccording to their proportionate relation to that end: to that great endthe whole would be subservient. The effect of the treaty would be in amanner secured before the detail of particulars was begun, and for aplain reason, --because the hostile spirit on both sides had beenconjured down; but if, in the full fury and unappeased rancor of war, alittle traffic is attempted, it is easy to divine what must be theconsequence to those who endeavor to open that kind of petty commerce. 

To illustrate what I have said, I go back no further than to the twolast Treaties of Paris, and to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, whichpreceded the first of these two Treaties of Paris by about fourteen orfifteen years. I do not mean here to criticize any of them. My opinionsupon some particulars of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 are published in apamphlet[39] which your recollection will readily bring into your view. I recur to them only to show that their basis had not been, and nevercould have been, a mere dealing of truck and barter, but that theparties being willing, from common fatigue or common suffering, to putan end to a war the first object of which had either been obtained ordespaired of, the lesser objects were not thought worth the price offurther contest. The parties understanding one another, so much wasgiven away without considering from whose budget it came, not as thevalue of the objects, but as the value of peace to the parties mightrequire. 

At the last Treaty of Paris, the subjugation of America being despairedof on the part of Great Britain, and the independence of America beinglooked upon as secure on the part of France, the main cause of the warwas removed; and then the conquests which France had made upon us (forwe had made none of importance upon her) were surrendered withsufficient facility. Peace was restored as peace. In America the partiesstood as they were possessed. A limit was to be settled, but settled asa limit to secure that peace, and not at all on a system of equivalents, for which, as we then stood with the United States, there were little orno materials. 

At the preceding Treaty of Paris, I mean that of 1763, there wasnothing at all on which to fix a basis of compensation from reciprocalcession of conquests. They were all on one side. The question with uswas not what we were to receive, and on what consideration, but what wewere to keep for indemnity or to cede for peace. Accordingly, no placebeing left for barter, sacrifices were made on our side to peace; and wesurrendered to the French their most valuable possessions in the WestIndies without any equivalent. The rest of Europe fell soon after intoits ancient order; and the German war ended exactly where it had begun. 

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was built upon a similar basis. All theconquests in Europe had been made by France. She had subdued theAustrian Netherlands, and broken open the gates of Holland. We had takennothing in the West Indies; and Cape Breton was a trifling businessindeed. France gave up all for peace. The Allies had given up all thatwas ceded at Utrecht. Louis the Fourteenth made all, or nearly all, thecessions at Ryswick, and at Nimeguen. In all those treaties, and in allthe preceding, as well as in the others which intervened, the questionnever had been that of barter. The balance of power had been everassumed as the known common law of Europe at all times and by allpowers: the question had only been (as it must happen) on the more orless inclination of that balance. 

This general balance was regarded in four principal points of view: theGREAT MIDDLE BALANCE, which comprehended Great Britain, France, andSpain; the BALANCE OF THE NORTH; the BALANCE, external and internal, ofGERMANY; and the BALANCE OF ITALY. In all those systems of balance, England was the power to whose custody it was thought it might be mostsafely committed. 

France, as she happened to stand, secured the balance or endangered it. Without question, she had been long the security for the balance ofGermany, and, under her auspices, the system, if not formed, had been atleast perfected. She was so in some measure with regard to Italy, morethan occasionally. She had a clear interest in the balance of the North, and had endeavored to preserve it. But when we began to treat with thepresent France, or, more properly, to prostrate ourselves to her, and totry if we should be admitted to ransom our allies, upon a system ofmutual concession and compensation, we had not one of the usualfacilities. For, first, we had not the smallest indication of a desirefor peace on the part of the enemy, but rather the direct contrary. Mendo not make sacrifices to obtain what they do not desire: and as for thebalance of power, it was so far from being admitted by France, either onthe general system, or with regard to the particular systems that I havementioned, that, in the whole body of their authorized or encouragedreports and discussions upon the theory of the diplomatic system, theyconstantly rejected the very idea of the balance of power, and treatedit as the true cause of all the wars and calamities that had afflictedEurope; and their practice was correspondent to the dogmatic positionsthey had laid down. The Empire and the Papacy it was their great objectto destroy; and this, now openly avowed and steadfastly acted upon, might have been discerned with very little acuteness of sight, from thevery first dawnings of the Revolution, to be the main drift of theirpolicy: for they professed a resolution to destroy everything which canhold states together by the tie of opinion. 

Exploding, therefore, all sorts of balances, they avow their design toerect themselves into a new description of empire, which is not groundedon any balance, but forms a sort of impious hierarchy, of which Franceis to be the head and the guardian. The law of this their empire isanything rather than the public law of Europe, the ancient conventionsof its several states, or the ancient opinions which assign to themsuperiority or preëminence of any sort, or any other kind of connectionin virtue of ancient relations. They permit, and that is all, thetemporary existence of some of the old communities: but whilst they giveto these tolerated states this temporary respite, in order to securethem in a condition of real dependence on themselves, they invest themon every side by a body of republics, formed on the model, and dependentostensibly, as well as substantially, on the will of the mother republicto which they owe their origin. These are to be so many garrisons tocheck and control the states which are to be permitted to remain on theold model until they are ripe for a change. It is in this manner thatFrance, on her new system, means to form an universal empire, byproducing an universal revolution. By this means, forming a new code ofcommunities according to what she calls the natural rights of man and ofstates, she pretends to secure eternal peace to the world, guarantied byher generosity and justice, which are to grow with the extent of herpower. To talk of the balance of power to the governors of such acountry was a jargon which they could not understand even through aninterpreter. Before men can transact any affair, they must have acommon language to speak, and some common, recognized principles onwhich they can argue; otherwise all is cross purpose and confusion. Itwas, therefore, an essential preliminary to the whole proceeding, to fixwhether the balance of power, the liberties and laws of the Empire, andthe treaties of different belligerent powers in past times, when theyput an end to hostilities, were to be considered as the basis of thepresent negotiation. 

The whole of the enemy's plan was known when Lord Malmesbury was sentwith his scrap of equivalents to Paris. Yet, in this unfortunate attemptat negotiation, instead of fixing these points, and assuming the balanceof power and the peace of Europe as the basis to which all cessions onall sides were to be subservient, our solicitor for peace was directedto reverse that order. He was directed to make mutual concessions, on amere comparison of their marketable value, the base of treaty. Thebalance of power was to be thrown in as an inducement, and a sort ofmake-weight to supply the manifest deficiency, which must stare him andthe world in the face, between those objects which he was to require theenemy to surrender and those which he had to offer as a fair equivalent. 

To give any force to this inducement, and to make it answer even thesecondary purpose of equalizing equivalents having in themselves nonatural proportionate value, it supposed that the enemy, contrary to themost notorious fact, did admit this balance of power to be of somevalue, great or small; whereas it is plain, that, in the enemy'sestimate of things, the consideration of the balance of power, as wehave said before, was so far from going in diminution of the value ofwhat the Directory was desired to surrender, or of giving an additionalprice to our objects offered in exchange, that the hope of the utterdestruction of that balance became a new motive to the junto ofRegicides for preserving, as a means for realizing that hope, what wewished them to abandon. 

Thus stood the basis of the treaty, on laying the first stone of thefoundation. At the very best, upon our side, the question stood upon amere naked bargain and sale. Unthinking people here triumphed, when theythought they had obtained it; whereas, when obtained as a basis of atreaty, it was just the worst we could possibly have chosen. As to ouroffer to cede a most unprofitable, and, indeed, beggarly, chargeablecounting-house or two in the East Indies, we ought not to presume thatthey would consider this as anything else than a mockery. As to anythingof real value, we had nothing under heaven to offer, (for which we werenot ourselves in a very dubious struggle, ) except the island ofMartinico only. When this object was to be weighed against theDirectorial conquests, merely as an object of a value at market, theprinciple of barter became perfectly ridiculous: a single quarter in thesingle city of Amsterdam was worth ten Martinicos, and would have soldfor many more years' purchase in any market overt in Europe. How wasthis gross and glaring defect in the objects of exchange to be supplied?It was to be made up by argument. And what was that argument? Theextreme utility of possessions in the West Indies to the augmentation ofthe naval power of France. A very curious topic of argument to beproposed and insisted on by an ambassador of Great Britain! It isdirectly and plainly this:--"Come, we know that of all things you wish anaval power, and it is natural you should, who wish to destroy the verysources of the British greatness, to overpower our marine, to destroyour commerce, to eradicate our foreign influence, and to lay us open toan invasion, which at one stroke may complete our servitude and ruin andexpunge us from among the nations of the earth. Here I have it in mybudget, the infallible arcanum for that purpose. You are but novices inthe art of naval resources. Let you have the West Indies back, and yourmaritime preponderance is secured, for which you would do well to bemoderate in your demands upon the Austrian Netherlands. "

Under any circumstances, this is a most extraordinary topic of argument;but it is rendered by much the more unaccountable, when we are told, that, if the war has been diverted from the great object of establishingsociety and good order in Europe by destroying the usurpation in France, this diversion was made to increase the naval resources and power ofGreat Britain, and to lower, if not annihilate, those of the marine ofFrance. I leave all this to the very serious reflection of everyEnglishman. 

This basis was no sooner admitted than the rejection of a treaty uponthat sole foundation was a thing of course. The enemy did not think itworthy of a discussion, as in truth it was not; and immediately, asusual, they began, in the most opprobrious and most insolent manner, toquestion our sincerity and good faith: whereas, in truth, there was noone symptom wanting of openness and fair dealing. What could be morefair than to lay open to an enemy all that you wished to obtain, and theprice you meant to pay for it, and to desire him to imitate youringenuous proceeding, and in the same manner to open his honest heart toyou? Here was no want of fair dealing, but there was too evidently afault of another kind: there was much weakness, --there was an eager andimpotent desire of associating with this unsocial power, and ofattempting the connection by any means, however manifestly feeble andineffectual. The event was committed to chance, --that is, to such amanifestation of the desire of France for peace as would induce theDirectory to forget the advantages they had in the system of barter. Accordingly, the general desire for such a peace was triumphantlyreported from the moment that Lord Malmesbury had set his foot on shoreat Calais. 

It has been said that the Directory was compelled against its will toaccept the basis of barter (as if that had tended to accelerate the workof pacification!) by the voice of all France. Had this been the case, the Directors would have continued to listen to that voice to which itseems they were so obedient: they would have proceeded with thenegotiation upon that basis. But the fact is, that they instantly brokeup the negotiation, as soon as they had obliged our ambassador toviolate all the principles of treaty, and weakly, rashly, andunguardedly to expose, without any counter proposition, the whole of ourproject with regard to ourselves and our allies, and without holding outthe smallest hope that they would admit the smallest part of ourpretensions. 

When they had thus drawn from us all that they could draw out, theyexpelled Lord Malmesbury, and they appealed, for the propriety of theirconduct, to that very France which we thought proper to suppose haddriven them to this fine concession: and I do not find that in eitherdivision of the family of thieves, the younger branch, or the elder, orin any other body whatsoever, there was any indignation excited, or anytumult raised, or anything like the virulence of opposition which wasshown to the king's ministers here, on account of that transaction. 

Notwithstanding all this, it seems a hope is still entertained that theDirectory will have that tenderness for the carcass of their country, bywhose very distemper, and on whose festering wounds, like vermin, theyare fed, that these pious patriots will of themselves come into a moremoderate and reasonable way of thinking and acting. In the name ofwonder, what has inspired our ministry with this hope any more than withtheir former expectations?

Do these hopes only arise from continual disappointment? Do they growout of the usual grounds of despair? What is there to encourage them, inthe conduct or even in the declarations of the ruling powers in France, from the first formation of their mischievous republic to the hour inwhich I write? Is not the Directory composed of the same junto? Are theynot the identical men who, from the base and sordid vices which belongedto their original place and situation, aspired to the dignity ofcrimes, --and from the dirtiest, lowest, most fraudulent, and mostknavish of chicaners, ascended in the scale of robbery, sacrilege, andassassination in all its forms, till at last they had imbrued theirimpious hands in the blood of their sovereign? Is it from these men thatwe are to hope for this paternal tenderness to their country, and thissacred regard for the peace and happiness of all nations?

But it seems there is still another lurking hope, akin to that whichduped us so egregiously before, when our delightful basis was accepted:we still flatter ourselves that the public voice of France will compelthis Directory to more moderation. Whence does this hope arise? Whatpublic voice is there in France? There are, indeed, some writers, who, since this monster of a Directory has obtained a great, regular, military force to guard them, are indulged in a sufficient liberty ofwriting; and some of them write well, undoubtedly. But the world knowsthat in France there is no public, --that the country is composed but oftwo descriptions, audacious tyrants and trembling slaves. The contestsbetween the tyrants is the only vital principle that can be discerned inFrance. The only thing which there appears like spirit is amongst theirlate associates, and fastest friends of the Directory, --the more furiousand untamable part of the Jacobins. This discontented member of thefaction does almost balance the reigning divisions, and it threatensevery moment to predominate. For the present, however, the dread oftheir fury forms some sort of security to their fellows, who nowexercise a more regular and therefore a somewhat less ferocious tyranny. Most of the slaves choose a quiet, however reluctant, submission tothose who are somewhat satiated with blood, and who, like wolves, are alittle more tame from being a little less hungry, in preference to anirruption of the famished devourers who are prowling and howling aboutthe fold. 

This circumstance assures some degree of permanence to the power ofthose whom we know to be permanently our rancorous and implacableenemies. But to those very enemies who have sworn our destruction wehave ourselves given a further and far better security, by rendering thecause of the royalists desperate. Those brave and virtuous, butunfortunate adherents to the ancient Constitution of their country, after the miserable slaughters which have been made in that body, afterall their losses by emigration, are still numerous, but unable to exertthemselves against the force of the usurpation evidently countenancedand upheld by those very princes who had called them to arm for thesupport of the legal monarchy. Where, then, after chasing these fleetinghopes of ours from point to point of the political horizon, are they atlast really found? Not where, under Providence, the hopes of Englishmenused to be placed, in our own courage and in our own virtues, but in themoderation and virtue of the most atrocious monsters that have everdisgraced and plagued mankind. 

The only excuse to be made for all our mendicant diplomacy is the sameas in the case of all other mendicancy, namely, that it has been foundedon absolute necessity. This deserves consideration. Necessity, as it hasno law, so it has no shame. But moral necessity is not likemetaphysical, or even physical. In that category it is a word of loosesignification, and conveys different ideas to different minds. To thelow-minded, the slightest necessity becomes an invincible necessity. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall bedevoured in the streets. " But when the necessity pleaded is not in thenature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whiningtones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation:because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonorable existence, without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because theyaim at obtaining the dues of labor without industry, and by frauds woulddraw from the compassion of others what men ought to owe to their ownspirit and their own exertions. 

I am thoroughly satisfied, that, if we degrade ourselves, it is thedegradation which will subject us to the yoke of necessity, and not thatit is necessity which has brought on our degradation. In this samechaos, where light and darkness are struggling together, the opensubscription of last year, with all its circumstances, must have givenus no little glimmering of hope: not (as I have heard it was vainlydiscoursed) that the loan could prove a crutch to a lame negotiationabroad, and that the whiff and wind of it must at once have disposed theenemies of all tranquillity to a desire for peace. Judging on the faceof facts, if on them it had any effect at all, it had the directcontrary effect; for very soon after the loan became public at Paris, the negotiation ended, and our ambassador was ignominiously expelled. Myview of this was different: I liked the loan, not from the influencewhich it might have on the enemy, but on account of the temper which itindicated in our own people. This alone is a consideration of anyimportance; because all calculation formed upon a supposed relation ofthe habitudes of others to our own, under the present circumstances, isweak and fallacious. The adversary must be judged, not by what we are, or by what we wish him to be, but by what we must know he actually is:unless we choose to shut our eyes and our ears to the uniform tenor ofall his discourses, and to his uniform course in all his actions. We maybe deluded; but we cannot pretend that we have been disappointed. Theold rule of _Ne te quæsiveris extra_ is a precept as available in policyas it is in morals. Let us leave off speculating upon the dispositionand the wants of the enemy. Let us descend into our own bosoms; let usask ourselves what are our duties, and what are our means of dischargingthem. In what heart are you at home? How far may an English ministerconfide in the affections, in the confidence, in the force of an Englishpeople? What does he find us, when he puts us to the proof of whatEnglish interest and English honor demand? It is as furnishing an answerto these questions that I consider the circumstances of the loan. Theeffect on the enemy is not in what he may speculate on our resources, but in what he shall feel from our arms. 

The circumstances of the loan have proved beyond a doubt three capitalpoints, which, if they are properly used, may be advantageous to thefuture liberty and happiness of mankind. In the first place, the loandemonstrates, in regard to instrumental resources, the competency ofthis kingdom to the assertion of the common cause, and to themaintenance and superintendence of that which it is its duty and itsglory to hold and to watch over, --the balance of power throughout theChristian world. Secondly, it brings to light what, under the mostdiscouraging appearances, I always reckoned on: that, with its ancientphysical force, not only unimpaired, but augmented, its ancient spiritis still alive in the British nation. It proves that for theirapplication there is a spirit equal to the resources, for its energyabove them. It proves that there exists, though not always visible, aspirit which never fails to come forth, whenever it is rituallyinvoked, --a spirit which will give no equivocal response, but such aswill hearten the timidity and fix the irresolution of hesitatingprudence, --a spirit which will be ready to perform all the tasks thatshall be imposed upon it by public honor. Thirdly, the loan displays anabundant confidence in his Majesty's government, as administered by hispresent servants, in the prosecution of a war which the people consider, not as a war made on the suggestion of ministers, and to answer thepurposes of the ambition or pride of statesmen, but as a war of theirown, and in defence of that very property which they expend for itssupport, --a war for that order of things from which everything valuablethat they possess is derived, and in which order alone it can possiblybe maintained. 

I hear, in derogation of the value of the fact from which I drawinferences so favorable to the spirit of the people and to its justexpectation from ministers, that the eighteen million loan is to beconsidered in no other light than as taking advantage of a verylucrative bargain held out to the subscribers. I do not in truth believeit. All the circumstances which attended the subscription strongly spokea different language. Be it, however, as these detractors say. This withme derogates little, or rather nothing at all, from the political valueand importance of the fact. I should be very sorry, if the transactionwas not such a bargain; otherwise it would not have been a fair one. Acorrupt and improvident loan, like everything else corrupt or prodigal, cannot be too much condemned; but there is a short-sighted parsimonystill more fatal than an unforeseeing expense. The value of money mustbe judged, like everything else, from its rate at market. To force thatmarket, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous. For a smalltemporary benefit, the spring of all public credit might be relaxedforever. The moneyed men have a right to look to advantage in theinvestment of their property. To advance their money, they risk it; andthe risk is to be included in the price. If they were to incur a loss, that loss would amount to a tax on that peculiar species of property. Ineffect, it would be the most unjust and impolitic of allthings, --unequal taxation. It would throw upon one description ofpersons in the community that burden which ought by fair and equitabledistribution to rest upon the whole. None on account of their dignityshould be exempt; none (preserving due proportion) on account of thescantiness of their means. The moment a man is exempted from themaintenance of the community, he is in a sort separated from it, --heloses the place of a citizen. 

So it is in all _taxation_. But in a _bargain_, when terms of loss arelooked for by the borrower from the lender, compulsion, or whatvirtually is compulsion, introduces itself into the place of treaty. When compulsion may be at all used by a state in borrowing the occasionmust determine. But the compulsion ought to be known, and well defined, and well distinguished; for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy ofcompulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain. Theadvantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their natureutterly unsociable. It would be to introduce compulsion into that inwhich freedom and existence are the same: I mean credit. The moment thatshame or fear or force are directly or indirectly applied to a loan, credit perishes. 

There must be some impulse, besides public spirit, to put privateinterest into motion along with it. Moneyed men ought to be allowed toset a value on their money: if they did not, there could be no moneyedmen. This desire of accumulation is a principle without which the meansof their service to the state could not exist. The love of lucre, thoughsometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is thegrand cause of prosperity to all states. In this natural, thisreasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for thesatirist to expose the ridiculous, --it is for the moralist to censurethe vicious, --it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard andcruel, --it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he findsit, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections onits head. It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases, where he is to make use of the general energies of Nature, to take themas he finds them. 

After all, it is a great mistake to imagine, as too commonly, almostindeed generally, it is imagined, that the public borrower and theprivate lender are two adverse parties, with different and contendinginterests, and that what is given to the one is wholly taken from theother. Constituted as our system of finance and taxation is, theinterests of the contracting parties cannot well be separated, whateverthey may reciprocally intend. He who is the hard lender of to-dayto-morrow is the generous contributor to his own payment. For example, the last loan is raised on public taxes, which are designed to produceannually two millions sterling. At first view, this is an annuity of twomillions dead charge upon the public in favor of certain moneyed men;but inspect the thing more nearly, follow the stream in its meanders, and you will find that there is a good deal of fallacy in this state ofthings. 

I take it, that whoever considers any man's expenditure of his income, old or new, (I speak of certain classes in life, ) will find a full thirdof it to go in taxes, direct or indirect. If so, this new-created incomeof two millions will probably furnish 665, 000_l. _ (I avoid brokennumbers) towards the payment of its own interest, or to the sinking ofits own capital. So it is with the whole of the public debt. Suppose itany given sum, it is a fallacious estimate of the affairs of a nation toconsider it as a mere burden. To a degree it is so without question, butnot wholly so, nor anything like it. If the income from the interest bespent, the above proportion returns again into the public stock;insomuch that, taking the interest of the whole debt to be twelvemillion three hundred thousand pound, (it is something more, ) not lessthan a sum of four million one hundred thousand pound comes back againto the public through the channel of imposition. If the whole or anypart of that income be saved, so much new capital is generated, --theinfallible operation of which is to lower the value of money, andconsequently to conduce towards the improvement of public credit. 

I take the expenditure of the _capitalist_, not the value of thecapital, as my standard; because it is the standard upon which, amongstus, property, as an object of taxation, is rated. In this country, landand offices only excepted, we raise no faculty tax. We preserve thefaculty from the expense. Our taxes, for the far greater portion, flyover the heads of the lowest classes. They escape too, who, with betterability, voluntarily subject themselves to the harsh discipline of arigid necessity. With us, labor and frugality, the parents of riches, are spared, and wisely too. The moment men cease to augment the commonstock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or theirself-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to paycontribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, butbecause they are unproductive. If, in fact, the interest paid by thepublic had not thus revolved again into its own fund, if this secretionhad not again been absorbed into the mass of blood, it would have beenimpossible for the nation to have existed to this time under such adebt. But under the debt it does exist and flourish; and thisflourishing state of existence in no small degree is owing to thecontribution from the debt to the payment. Whatever, therefore, is takenfrom that capital by too close a bargain is but a delusive advantage: itis so much lost to the public in another way. This matter cannot, on theone side or the other, be metaphysically pursued to the extreme; but itis a consideration of which, in all discussions of this kind, we oughtnever wholly to lose sight. 

It is never, therefore, wise to quarrel with the interested views ofmen, whilst they are combined with the public interest and promote it:it is our business to tie the knot, if possible, closer. Resources thatare derived from extraordinary virtues, as such virtues are rare, sothey must be unproductive. It is a good thing for a moneyed man topledge his property on the welfare of his country: he shows that heplaces his treasure where his heart is; and revolving in this circle, weknow, that, "wherever a man's treasure is, there his heart will bealso. " For these reasons, and on these principles, I have been sorry tosee the attempts which have been made, with more good meaning thanforesight and consideration, towards raising the annual interest of thisloan by private contributions. Wherever a regular revenue isestablished, there voluntary contribution can answer no purpose but todisorder and disturb it in its course. To recur to such aids is, for somuch, to dissolve the community, and to return to a state of unconnectedNature. And even if such a supply should be productive in a degreecommensurate to its object, it must also be productive of much vexationand much oppression. Either the citizens by the proposed duties paytheir proportion according to some rate made by public authority, orthey do not. If the law be well made, and the contributions founded onjust proportions, everything superadded by something that is not asregular as law, and as uniform in its operation, will become more orless out of proportion. If, on the contrary, the law be not made uponproper calculation, it is a disgrace to the public; wisdom, which failsin skill to assess the citizen in just measure and according to hismeans. But the hand of authority is not always the most heavy hand. Itis obvious that men may be oppressed by many ways besides those whichtake their course from the supreme power of the state. Suppose thepayment to be wholly discretionary. Whatever has its origin in capriceis sure not to improve in its progress, nor to end in reason. It isimpossible for each private individual to have any measure conformableto the particular condition of each of his fellow-citizens, or to thegeneral exigencies of his country. 'Tis a random shot at best. 

When men proceed in this irregular mode, the first contributor is apt togrow peevish with his neighbors. He is but too well disposed to measuretheir means by his own envy, and not by the real state of theirfortunes, which he can rarely know, and which it may in them be an actof the grossest imprudence to reveal. Hence the odium and lassitude withwhich people will look upon a provision for the public which is boughtby discord at the expense of social quiet. Hence the bitterheart-burnings, and the war of tongues, which is so often the prelude toother wars. Nor is it every contribution, called voluntary, which isaccording to the free will of the giver. A false shame, or a falseglory, against his feelings and his judgment, may tax an individual tothe detriment of his family and in wrong of his creditors. A pretence ofpublic spirit may disable him from the performance of his privateduties; it may disable him even from paying the legitimate contributionswhich he is to furnish according to the prescript of law. But what isthe most dangerous of all is that malignant disposition to which thismode of contribution evidently tends, and which at length leaves thecomparatively indigent to judge of the wealth, and to prescribe to theopulent, or those whom they conceive to be such, the use they are tomake of their fortunes. From thence it is but one step to thesubversion of all property. 

Far, very far, am I from supposing that such things enter into thepurposes of those excellent persons whose zeal has led them to this kindof measure; but the measure itself will lead them beyond theirintention, and what is begun with the best designs bad men willperversely improve to the worst of their purposes. An ill-foundedplausibility in great affairs is a real evil. In France we have seen thewickedest and most foolish of men, the constitution-mongers of 1789, pursuing this very course, and ending in this very event. Theseprojectors of deception set on foot two modes of voluntary contributionto the state. The first they called patriotic gifts. These, for thegreater part, were not more ridiculous in the mode than contemptible inthe project. The other, which they called the patriotic contribution, was expected to amount to a fourth of the fortunes of individuals, butat their own will and on their own estimate; but this contributionthreatening to fall infinitely short of their hopes, they soon made itcompulsory, both in the rate and in the levy, beginning in fraud, andending, as all the frauds of power end, in plain violence. All thesedevices to produce an involuntary will were under the pretext ofrelieving the more indigent classes; but the principle of voluntarycontribution, however delusive, being once established, these lowerclasses first, and then all classes, were encouraged to throw off theregular, methodical payments to the state, as so many badges of slavery. Thus all regular revenue failing, these impostors, raising thesuperstructure on the same cheats with which they had laid thefoundation of their greatness, and not content with a portion of thepossessions of the rich, confiscated the whole, and, to prevent themfrom reclaiming their rights, murdered the proprietors. The whole of theprocess has passed before our eyes, and been conducted, indeed, with agreater degree of rapidity than could be expected. 

My opinion, then, is, that public contributions ought only to be raisedby the public will. By the judicious form of our Constitution, thepublic contribution is in its name and substance a grant. In its originit is truly voluntary: not voluntary according to the irregular, unsteady, capricious will of individuals, but according to the will andwisdom of the whole popular mass, in the only way in which will andwisdom can go together. This voluntary grant obtaining in its progressthe force of a law, a general necessity, which takes away all merit, andconsequently all jealousy from individuals, compresses, equalizes, andsatisfies the whole, suffering no man to judge of his neighbor or toarrogate anything to himself. If their will complies with theirobligation, the great end is answered in the happiest mode; if the willresists the burden, every one loses a great part of his own will as acommon lot. After all, perhaps, contributions raised by a charge onluxury, or that degree of convenience which approaches so near as to beconfounded with luxury, is the only mode of contribution which may bewith truth termed voluntary. 

I might rest here, and take the loan I speak of as leading to a solutionof that question which I proposed in my first letter: "Whether theinability of the country to prosecute the war did necessitate asubmission to the indignities and the calamities of a peace with theRegicide power?" But give me leave to pursue this point a littlefurther. 

I know that it has been a cry usual on this occasion, as it has beenupon occasions where such a cry could have less apparent justification, that great distress and misery have been the consequence of this war, bythe burdens brought and laid upon the people. But to know where theburden really lies, and where it presses, we must divide the people. Asto the common people, their stock is in their persons and in theirearnings. I deny that the stock of their persons is diminished in agreater proportion than the common sources of populousness abundantlyfill up: I mean constant employment; proportioned pay according to theproduce of the soil, and, where the soil fails, according to theoperation of the general capital; plentiful nourishment to vigorouslabor; comfortable provision to decrepit age, to orphan infancy, and toaccidental malady. I say nothing to the policy of the provision for thepoor, in all the variety of faces under which it presents itself. Thisis the matter of another inquiry. I only just speak of it as of a fact, taken with others, to support me in my denial that hitherto any one ofthe ordinary sources of the increase of mankind is dried up by this war. I affirm, what I can well prove, that the waste has been less than thesupply. To say that in war no man must be killed is to say that thereought to be no war. This they may say who wish to talk idly, and whowould display their humanity at the expense of their honesty or theirunderstanding. If more lives are lost in this war than necessityrequires, they are lost by misconduct or mistake: but if the hostilitybe just, the error is to be corrected, the war is not to be abandoned. 

That the stock of the common people, in numbers, is not lessened, anymore than the causes are impaired, is manifest, without being at thepains of an actual numeration. An improved and improving agriculture, which implies a great augmentation of labor, has not yet found itself ata stand, no, not for a single moment, for want of the necessary hands, either in the settled progress of husbandry or in the occasionalpressure of harvests. I have even reason to believe that there has beena much smaller importation, or the demand of it, from a neighboringkingdom, than in former times, when agriculture was more limited in itsextent and its means, and when the time was a season of profound peace. On the contrary, the prolific fertility of country life has poured itssuperfluity of population into the canals, and into other public works, which of late years have been undertaken to so amazing an extent, andwhich have not only not been discontinued, but, beyond all expectation, pushed on with redoubled vigor, in a war that calls for so many of ourmen and so much of our riches. An increasing capital calls for labor, and an increasing population answers to the call. Our manufactures, augmented both for the supply of foreign and domestic consumption, reproducing, with the means of life, the multitudes which they use andwaste, (and which many of them devour much more surely and much morelargely than the war, ) have always found the laborious hand ready forthe liberal pay. That the price of the soldier is highly raised is true. In part this rise may be owing to some measures not so well consideredin the beginning of this war; but the grand cause has been thereluctance of that class of people from whom the soldiery is taken toenter into a military life, --not that, but, once entered into, it hasits conveniences, and even its pleasures. I have seldom known a soldierwho, at the intercession of his friends, and at their no small charge, had been redeemed from that discipline, that in a short time was noteager to return to it again. But the true reason is the abundantoccupation and the augmented stipend found in towns and villages andfarms, which leaves a smaller number of persons to be disposed of. Theprice of men for new and untried ways of life must bear a proportion tothe profits of that mode of existence from whence they are to be bought. 

So far as to the stock of the common people, as it consists in theirpersons. As to the other part, which consists in their earnings, I haveto say, that the rates of wages are very greatly augmented almostthrough the kingdom. In the parish where I live it has been raised fromseven to nine shillings in the week, for the same laborer, performingthe same task, and no greater. Except something in the malt taxes andthe duties upon sugars, I do not know any one tax imposed for very manyyears past which affects the laborer in any degree whatsoever; while, onthe other hand, the tax upon houses not having more than seven windows(that is, upon cottages) was repealed the very year before thecommencement of the present war. On the whole, I am satisfied that thehumblest class, and that class which touches the most nearly on thelowest, out of which it is continually emerging, and to which it iscontinually falling, receives far more from public impositions than itpays. That class receives two million sterling annually from theclasses above it. It pays to no such amount towards any publiccontribution. 

I hope it is not necessary for me to take notice of that language, soill suited to the persons to whom it has been attributed, and sounbecoming the place in which it is said to have been uttered, concerning the present war as the cause of the high price of provisionsduring the greater part of the year 1796. I presume it is only to beascribed to the intolerable license with which the newspapers break notonly the rules of decorum in real life, but even the dramatic decorum, when they personate great men, and, like bad poets, make the heroes ofthe piece talk more like us Grub-Street scribblers than in a styleconsonant to persons of gravity and importance in the state. It was easyto demonstrate the cause, and the sole cause, of that rise in the grandarticle and first necessary of life. It would appear that it had no moreconnection with the war than the moderate price to which all sorts ofgrain were reduced, soon after the return of Lord Malmesbury, had withthe state of politics and the fate of his Lordship's treaty. I havequite as good reason (that is, no reason at all) to attribute thisabundance to the longer continuance of the war as the gentlemen whopersonate leading members of Parliament have had for giving the enhancedprice to that war, at a more early period of its duration. Oh, the follyof us poor creatures, who, in the midst of our distresses or ourescapes, are ready to claw or caress one another, upon matters that soseldom depend on our wisdom or our weakness, on our good or evil conducttowards each other!

An untimely shower or an unseasonable drought, a frost too longcontinued or too suddenly broken up with rain and tempest, the blight ofthe spring or the smut of the harvest will do more to cause the distressof the belly than all the contrivances of all statesmen can do torelieve it. Let government protect and encourage industry, secureproperty, repress violence, and discountenance fraud, it is all thatthey have to do. In other respects, the less they meddle in theseaffairs, the better; the rest is in the hands of our Master and theirs. We are in a constitution of things wherein "_modo sol nimius, modocorripit imber_. "--But I will push this matter no further. As I havesaid a good deal upon it at various times during my public service, andhave lately written something on it, which may yet see the light, Ishall content myself now with observing that the vigorous and laboriousclass of life has lately got, from the _bon-ton_ of the humanity of thisday, the name of the "_laboring poor_. " We have heard many plans for therelief of the "_laboring poor_. " This puling jargon is not as innocentas it is foolish. In meddling with great affairs, weakness is neverinnoxious. Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is usedto excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for thosewho cannot labor, --for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, forlanguishing and decrepit age; but when we affect to pity, as poor, thosewho must labor or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with thecondition of mankind. It is the common doom of man, that he must eat hisbread by the sweat of his brow, --that is, by the sweat of his body orthe sweat of his mind. If this toil was inflicted as a curse, it is, asmight be expected, from the curses of the Father of all blessings; it istempered with many alleviations, many comforts. Every attempt to flyfrom it, and to refuse the very terms of our existence, becomes muchmore truly a curse; and heavier pains and penalties fall upon those whowould elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great MasterWorkman of the world, who, in His dealings with His creatures, sympathizes with their weakness, and, speaking of a creation wrought bymere will out of nothing, speaks of six days of _labor_ and one of_rest_. I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind andvigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_; I cannot pity mykind as a kind, merely because they are men. This affected pity onlytends to dissatisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seekresources where no resources are to be found, in something else thantheir own industry and frugality and sobriety. Whatever may be theintention (which, because I do not know, I cannot dispute) of those whowould discontent mankind by this strange pity, they act towards us, inthe consequences, as if they were our worst enemies. 

In turning our view from the lower to the higher classes, it will not benecessary for me to show at any length that the stock of the latter, asit consists in their numbers, has not yet suffered any materialdiminution. I have not seen or heard it asserted; I have no reason tobelieve it: there is no want of officers, that I have ever understood, for the new ships which we commission, or the new regiments which weraise. In the nature of things, it is not with their persons that thehigher classes principally pay their contingent to the demands of war. There is another, and not less important part, which rests with almostexclusive weight upon them. They furnish the means

 "how War may, best upheld, Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold, In all her equipage. "

Not that they are exempt from contributing also by their personalservice in the fleets and armies of their country. They do contribute, and in their full and fair proportion, according to the relativeproportion of their numbers in the community. They contribute all themind that actuates the whole machine. The fortitude required of them isvery different from the unthinking alacrity of the common soldier orcommon sailor in the face of danger and death: it is not a passion, itis not an impulse, it is not a sentiment; it is a cool, steady, deliberate principle, always present, always equable, --having noconnection with anger, --tempering honor with prudence, --incited, invigorated, and sustained by a generous love of fame, --informed, moderated, and directed by an enlarged knowledge of its own great publicends, --flowing in one blended stream from the opposite sources of theheart and the head, --carrying in itself its own commission, and provingits title to every other command by the first and most difficultcommand, that of the bosom in which it resides: it is a fortitude whichunites with the courage of the field the more exalted and refinedcourage of the council, --which knows as well to retreat as toadvance, --which can conquer as well by delay as by the rapidity of amarch or the impetuosity of an attack, --which can be, with Fabius, theblack cloud that lowers on the tops of the mountains, or, with Scipio, the thunderbolt of war, --which, undismayed by false shame, can patientlyendure the severest trial that a gallant spirit can undergo, in thetaunts and provocations of the enemy, the suspicions, the cold respect, and "mouth honor" of those from whom it should meet a cheerfulobedience, --which, undisturbed by false humanity, can calmly assume thatmost awful moral responsibility of deciding when victory may be toodearly purchased by the loss of a single life, and when the safety andglory of their country may demand the certain sacrifice of thousands. Different stations of command may call for different modifications ofthis fortitude, but the character ought to be the same in all. Andnever, in the most "palmy state" of our martial renown, did it shinewith brighter lustre than in the present sanguinary and ferocioushostilities, wherever the British arms have been carried. But in thismost arduous and momentous conflict, which from its nature should haveroused us to new and unexampled efforts, I know not how it has been thatwe have never put forth half the strength which we have exerted inordinary wars. In the fatal battles which have drenched the Continentwith blood and shaken the system of Europe to pieces, we have never hadany considerable army, of a magnitude to be compared to the least ofthose by which in former times we so gloriously asserted our place asprotectors, not oppressors, at the head of the great commonwealth ofEurope. We have never manfully met the danger in front; and when theenemy, resigning to us our natural dominion of the ocean, and abandoningthe defence of his distant possessions to the infernal energy of thedestroying principles which he had planted there for the subversion ofthe neighboring colonies, drove forth, by one sweeping law ofunprecedented despotism, his armed multitudes on every side, tooverwhelm the countries and states which had for centuries stood thefirm barriers against the ambition of France, we drew back the arm ofour military force, which had never been more than half raised to opposehim. From that time we have been combating only with the other arm ofour naval power, --the right arm of England, I admit, --but which struckalmost unresisted, with blows that could never reach the heart of thehostile mischief. From that time, without a single effort to regainthose outworks which ever till now we so strenuously maintained, as thestrong frontier of our own dignity and safety no less than the libertiesof Europe, --with but one feeble attempt to succor those brave, faithful, and numerous allies, whom, for the first time since the days of ourEdwards and Henrys, we now have in the bosom of France itself, --we havebeen intrenching and fortifying and garrisoning ourselves at home, wehave been redoubling security on security to protect ourselves frominvasion, which has now first become to us a serious object of alarm andterror. Alas! the few of us who have protracted life in any measure nearto the extreme limits of our short period have been condemned to seestrange things, --new systems of policy, new principles, and not only newmen, but what might appear a new species of men. I believe that anyperson who was of age to take a part in public affairs forty years ago(if the intermediate space of time were expunged from his memory) wouldhardly credit his senses, when he should hear from the highest authoritythat an army of two hundred thousand men was kept up in this island, andthat in the neighboring island there were at least fourscore thousandmore. But when he had recovered from his surprise on being told of thisarmy, which has not its parallel, what must be his astonishment to betold again that this mighty force was kept up for the mere purpose of aninert and passive defence, and that in its far greater part it wasdisabled by its constitution and very essence from defending us againstan enemy by any one preventive stroke or any one operation of activehostility? What must his reflections be, on learning further, that afleet of five hundred men of war, the best appointed, and to the full asably commanded as this country ever had upon the sea, was for thegreater part employed in carrying on the same system of unenterprisingdefence? What must be the sentiments and feelings of one who remembersthe former energy of England, when he is given to understand that thesetwo islands, with their extensive and everywhere vulnerable coast, should be considered as a garrisoned sea-town? What would such a man, what would any man think, if the garrison of so strange a fortressshould be such, and so feebly commanded, as never to make a sally, --andthat, contrary to all which has hitherto been seen in war, an infinitelyinferior army, with the shattered relics of an almost annihilated navy, ill-found and ill-manned, may with safety besiege this superiorgarrison, and, without hazarding the life of a man, ruin the place, merely by the menaces and false appearances of an attack? Indeed, indeed, my dear friend, I look upon this matter of our defensive systemas much the most important of all considerations at this moment. It hasoppressed me with many anxious thoughts, which, more than any bodilydistemper, have sunk me to the condition in which you know that I am. Should it please Providence to restore to me even the late weak remainsof my strength, I propose to make this matter the subject of aparticular discussion. I only mean here to argue, that the mode ofconducting the war on our part, be it good or bad, has prevented eventhe common havoc of war in our population, and especially among thatclass whose duty and privilege of superiority it is to lead the wayamidst the perils and slaughter of the field of battle. 

The other causes which sometimes affect the numbers of the lowerclasses, but which I have shown not to have existed to any such degreeduring this war, --penury, cold, hunger, nakedness, --do not easily reachthe higher orders of society. I do not dread for them the slightesttaste of these calamities from the distress and pressure of the war. They have much more to dread in that way from the confiscations, therapines, the burnings, and the massacres that may follow in the train ofa peace which shall establish the devastating and depopulatingprinciples and example of the French Regicides in security and triumphand dominion. In the ordinary course of human affairs, any check topopulation among men in ease and opulence is less to be apprehended fromwhat they may suffer than from what they enjoy. Peace is more likely tobe injurious to them in that respect than war. The excesses of delicacy, repose, and satiety are as unfavorable as the extremes of hardship, toil, and want to the increase and multiplication of our kind. Indeed, the abuse of the bounties of Nature, much more surely than any partialprivation of them, tends to intercept that precious boon of a secondand dearer life in our progeny, which was bestowed in the first greatcommand to man from the All-Gracious Giver of all, --whose name beblessed, whether He gives or takes away! His hand, in every page of Hisbook, has written the lesson of moderation. Our physical well-being, ourmoral worth, our social happiness, our political tranquillity, alldepend on that control of all our appetites and passions which theancients designed by the cardinal virtue of _temperance_. 

The only real question to our present purpose, with regard to the higherclasses, is, How stands the account of their stock, as it consists inwealth of every description? Have the burdens of the war compelled themto curtail any part of their former expenditure?--which, I have beforeobserved, affords the only standard of estimating property as an objectof taxation. Do they enjoy all the same conveniences, the same comforts, the same elegancies, the same luxuries, in the same or in as manydifferent modes as they did before the war?

In the last eleven years there have been no less than three solemninquiries into the finances of the kingdom, by three differentcommittees of your House. The first was in the year 1786. On thatoccasion, I remember, the report of the committee was examined, andsifted and bolted to the bran, by a gentleman whose keen and powerfultalents I have ever admired. He thought there was not sufficientevidence to warrant the pleasing representation which the committee hadmade of our national prosperity. He did not believe that our publicrevenue could continue to be so productive as they had assumed. He evenwent the length of recording his own inferences of doubt in a set ofresolutions which now stand upon your journals. And perhaps theretrospect on which the report proceeded did not go far enough back toallow any sure and satisfactory average for a ground of solidcalculation. But what was the event? When the next committee sat, in1791, they found, that, on an average of the last four years, theirpredecessors had fallen short, in their estimate of the permanent taxes, by more than three hundred and forty thousand pounds a year. Surely, then, if I can show, that, in the produce of those same taxes, and moreparticularly of such as affect articles of luxurious use andconsumption, the four years of the war have equalled those four years ofpeace, flourishing as they were beyond the most sanguine speculations, Imay expect to hear no more of the distress occasioned by the war. 

The additional burdens which have been laid on some of those samearticles might reasonably claim some allowance to be made. Every newadvance of the price to the consumer is a new incentive to him toretrench the quantity of his consumption; and if, upon the whole, hepays the same, his property, computed by the standard of what hevoluntarily pays, must remain the same. But I am willing to forego thatfair advantage in the inquiry. I am willing that the receipts of thepermanent taxes which existed before January, 1793, should be comparedduring the war, and during the period of peace which I have mentioned. Iwill go further. Complete accounts of the year 1791 were separately laidbefore your House. I am ready to stand by a comparison of the produce offour years up to the beginning of the year 1792 with that of the war. Ofthe year immediately previous to hostilities I have not been able toobtain any perfect documents; but I have seen enough to satisfy me, that, although a comparison including that year might be less favorable, yet it would not essentially injure my argument. 

You will always bear in mind, my dear Sir, that I am not consideringwhether, if the common enemy of the quiet of Europe had not forced us totake up arms in our own defence, the spring-tide of our prosperity mightnot have flowed higher than the mark at which it now stands. Thatconsideration is connected with the question of the justice and thenecessity of the war. It is a question which I have long sincediscussed. I am now endeavoring to ascertain whether there exists, infact, any such necessity as we hear every day asserted, to furnish amiserable pretext for counselling us to surrender at discretion ourconquests, our honor, our dignity, our very independence, and, with it, all that is dear to man. It will be more than sufficient for thatpurpose, if I can make it appear that we have been stationary during thewar. What, then, will be said, if, in reality, it shall be proved thatthere is every indication of increased and increasing wealth, not onlypoured into the grand reservoir of the national capital, but diffusedthrough all the channels of all the higher classes, and giving life andactivity, as it passes, to the agriculture, the manufactures, thecommerce, and the navigation of the country?

The Finance Committee which has been appointed in this session hasalready made two reports. Every conclusion that I had before drawn, asyou know, from my own observation, I have the satisfaction of seeingthere confirmed by that great public authority. Large as was the sum bywhich the committee of 1791 found the estimate of 1786 to have beenexceeded in the actual produce of four years of peace, their ownestimate has been exceeded during the war by a sum more than one thirdlarger. The same taxes have yielded more than half a million beyondtheir calculation. They yielded this, notwithstanding the stoppage ofthe distilleries, against which, you may remember, I privatelyremonstrated. With an allowance for that defalcation, they have yieldedsixty thousand pounds annually above the actual average of the precedingfour years of peace. I believe this to have been without parallel in allformer wars. If regard be had to the great and unavoidable burdens ofthe present war, I am confident of the fact. 

But let us descend to particulars. The taxes which go by the generalname of Assessed Taxes comprehend the whole, or nearly the whole, domestic establishment of the rich. They include some things whichbelong to the middling, and even to all but the very lowest classes. They now consist of the duties on houses and windows, on male servants, horses, and carriages. They did also extend to cottages, to femaleservants, wagons, and carts used in husbandry, previous to the year1792, --when, with more enlightened policy, at the moment that thepossibility of war could not be out of the contemplation of anystatesman, the wisdom of Parliament confined them to their presentobjects. I shall give the gross assessment for five years, as I find itin the Appendix to the Second Report of your committee. 

1791 ending 5th April 1792 £1, 706, 3341792 1793 1, 585, 9911793 1794 1, 597, 6231794 1795 1, 608, 1961795 1796 1, 625, 874

Here will be seen a gradual increase during the whole progress of thewar; and if I am correctly informed, the rise in the last year, afterevery deduction that can be made, affords the most consoling andencouraging prospect. It is enormously out of all proportion. 

There are some other taxes which seem to have a reference to the samegeneral head. The present minister many years ago subjected bricks andtiles to a duty under the excise. It is of little consequence to ourpresent consideration, whether these materials have been employed inbuilding more commodious, more elegant, and more magnificenthabitations, or in enlarging, decorating, and remodelling those whichsufficed for our plainer ancestors. During the first two years of thewar, they paid so largely to the public revenue, that in 1794 a new dutywas laid upon them, which was equal to one half of the old, and whichhas produced upwards of 165, 000_l. _ in the last three years. Yet, notwithstanding the pressure of this additional weight, [40] there hasbeen an actual augmentation in the consumption. The only two otherarticles which come under this description are the stamp-duty on goldand silver plate, and the customs on glass plates. This latter is now, Ibelieve, the single instance of costly furniture to be found in thecatalogue of our imports. If it were wholly to vanish, I should notthink we were ruined. Both the duties have risen, during the war, veryconsiderably in proportion to the total of their produce. 

We have no tax among us on the most necessary articles of food. Thereceipts of our Custom-House, under the head of Groceries, afford us, however, some means of calculating our luxuries of the table. Thearticles of tea, coffee, and cocoa-nuts I would propose to omit, and totake them instead from the excise, as best showing what is consumed athome. Upon this principle, adding them all together, (with the exceptionof sugar, for a reason which I shall afterwards mention, ) I find thatthey have produced, in one mode of comparison, upwards of 272, 000_l. _, and in the other mode upwards of 165, 000_l. _, more during the war thanin peace. [41] An additional duty was also laid in 1795 on tea, anotheron coffee, and a third on raisins, --an article, together with currants, of much more extensive use than would readily be imagined. The balancein favor of our argument would have been much enhanced, if our coffeeand fruit ships from the Mediterranean had arrived, last year, at theirusual season. They do not appear in these accounts. This was oneconsequence arising (would to God that none more afflicting to Italy, toEurope, and the whole civilized world had arisen!) from our impoliticand precipitate desertion of that important maritime station. As tosugar, [42] I have excluded it from the groceries, because the account ofthe customs is not a perfect criterion of the consumption, much havingbeen reëxported to the North of Europe, which used to be supplied byFrance; and in the official papers which I have followed there are nomaterials to furnish grounds for computing this reëxportation. Theincrease on the face of our entries is immense during the four years ofwar, --little short of thirteen hundred thousand pounds. 

The increase of the duties on beer has been regularly progressive, ornearly so, to a very large amount. [43] It is a good deal above amillion, and is more than equal to one eighth of the whole produce. Under this general head some other liquors are included, --cider, perry, and mead, as well as vinegar and verjuice; but these are of verytrifling consideration. The excise duties on wine, having sunk a littleduring the first two years of the war, were rapidly recovering theirlevel again. In 1795 a heavy additional duty was imposed upon them, anda second in the following year; yet, being compared with four years ofpeace to 1790, they actually exhibit a small gain to the revenue. Andlow as the importation may seem in 1796, when contrasted with any yearsince the French treaty in 1787, it is still more than 3000 tuns abovethe average importation for three years previous to that period. I haveadded sweets, from which our factitious wines are made; and I would haveadded spirits, but that the total alteration of the duties in 1789, andthe recent interruption of our distilleries, rendered any comparisonimpracticable. 

The ancient staple of our island, in which we are clothed, is veryimperfectly to be traced on the books of the Custom-House: but I knowthat our woollen manufactures flourish. I recollect to have seen thatfact very fully established, last year, from the registers kept in theWest Riding of Yorkshire. This year, in the West of England, I receiveda similar account, on the authority of a respectable clothier in thatquarter, whose testimony can less be questioned, because, in hispolitical opinions, he is adverse, as I understand, to the continuanceof the war. The principal articles of female dress for some time pasthave been muslins and calicoes. [44] These elegant fabrics of our ownlooms in the East, which serve for the remittance of our own revenues, have lately been imitated at home, with improving success, by theingenious and enterprising manufacturers of Manchester, Paisley, andGlasgow. At the same time the importation from Bengal has kept pace withthe extension of our own dexterity and industry; while the sale of ourprinted goods, [45] of both kinds, has been with equal steadinessadvanced by the taste and execution of our designers and artists. Ourwoollens and cottons, it is true, are not all for the home market. Theydo not distinctly prove, what is my present point, our own wealth by ourown expense. I admit it: we export them in great and growing quantities:and they who croak themselves hoarse about the decay of our trade mayput as much of this account as they choose to the creditor side of moneyreceived from other countries in payment for British skill and labor. They may settle the items to their own liking, where all goes todemonstrate our riches. I shall be contented here with whatever theywill have the goodness to leave me, and pass to another entry, which isless ambiguous, --I mean that of silk. [46] The manufactory itself is aforced plant. We have been obliged to guard it from foreign competitionby very strict prohibitory laws. What we import is the raw and preparedmaterial, which is worked up in various ways, and worn in various shapesby both sexes. After what we have just seen, you will probably besurprised to learn that the quantity of silk imported during the war hasbeen much greater than it was previously in peace; and yet we must allremember, to our mortification, that several of our silk ships fell aprey to Citizen Admiral Richery. You will hardly expect me to go throughthe tape and thread, and all the other small wares of haberdashery andmillinery to be gleaned up among our imports. But I shall make oneobservation, and with great satisfaction, respecting them. Theygradually diminish, as our own manufactures of the same descriptionspread into their places; while the account of ornamental articles whichour country does not produce, and we cannot wish it to produce, continues, upon the whole, to rise, in spite of all the caprices offancy and fashion. Of this kind are the different furs[47] used formuffs, trimmings, and linings, which, as the chief of the kind, I shallparticularize. You will find them below. 

The diversions of the higher classes form another and the onlyremaining head of inquiry into their expenses: I mean those diversionswhich distinguish the country and the town life, --which are visible andtangible to the statesman, --which have some public measure and standard. And here, when, I look to the report of your committee, I, for the firsttime, perceive a failure. It is clearly so. Whichever way I reckon thefour years of peace, the old tax on the sports of the field hascertainly proved deficient since the war. The same money, however, ornearly the same, has been paid to government, --though the same number ofindividuals have not contributed to the payment. An additional tax waslaid in 1791, and during the war has produced upwards of 61, 000_l. _, which is about 4000_l. _ more than the decrease of the old tax, in onescheme of comparison, and about 4000_l. _ less, in the other scheme. Imight remark, that the amount of the new tax, in the several years ofthe war, by no means bears the proportion which it ought to the old. There seems to be some great irregularity or other in the receipt. But Ido not think it worth while to examine into the argument. I am willingto suppose that many, who, in the idleness of peace, made war uponpartridges, hares, and pheasants, may now carry more noble arms againstthe enemies of their country. Our political adversaries may do what theyplease with that concession. They are welcome to make the most of it. Iam sure of a very handsome set-off in the other branch of expense, --theamusements of a town life. 

There is much gayety and dissipation and profusion which must escape anddisappoint all the arithmetic of political economy. But the theatres area prominent feature. They are established through every part of thekingdom, at a cost unknown till our days. There is hardly a provincialcapital which does not possess, or which does not aspire to possess, atheatre-royal. Most of them engage for a short time, at a vast price, every actor or actress of name in the metropolis: a distinction which inthe reign of my old friend Garrick was confined to very few. Thedresses, the scenes, the decorations of every kind, I am told, are in anew style of splendor and magnificence: whether to the advantage of ourdramatic taste, upon the whole, I very much doubt. It is a show and aspectacle, not a play, that is exhibited. This is undoubtedly in thegenuine manner of the Augustan age, but in a manner which was censuredby one of the best poets and critics of that or any age:--

 Migravit ab aure voluptas Omnis ad incertos oculos, et gaudia vana: Quatuor aut plures aulæa premuntur in horas, Dum fugiunt equitum turmæ, peditumque catervæ;--

I must interrupt the passage, most fervently to deprecate and abominatethe sequel:--

 Mox trahitur manibus regum fortuna retortis. 

I hope that no French fraternization, which the relations of peace andamity with systematized regicide would assuredly sooner or later drawafter them, even if it should overturn our happy Constitution itself, could so change the hearts of Englishmen as to make them delight inrepresentations and processions which have no other merit than that ofdegrading and insulting the name of royalty. But good taste, manners, morals, religion, all fly, wherever the principles of Jacobinism enter;and we have no safety against them but in arms. 

The proprietors, whether in this they follow or lead what is called thetown, to furnish out these gaudy and pompous entertainments, mustcollect so much more from the public. It was but just before thebreaking out of hostilities, that they levied for themselves the verytax which, at the close of the American war, they represented to LordNorth as certain ruin to their affairs to demand for the state. Theexample has since been imitated by the managers of our Italian Opera. Once during the war, if not twice, (I would not willingly misstateanything, but I am not very accurate on these subjects, ) they haveraised the price of their subscription. Yet I have never heard that anylasting dissatisfaction has been manifested, or that their houses havebeen unusually and constantly thin. On the contrary, all the threetheatres have been repeatedly altered, and refitted, and enlarged, tomake them capacious of the crowds that nightly flock to them; and one ofthose huge and lofty piles, which lifts its broad shoulders in giganticpride, almost emulous of the temples of God, has been reared from thefoundation at a charge of more than fourscore thousand pounds, and yetremains a naked, rough, unsightly heap. 

I am afraid, my dear Sir, that I have tired you with these dull, thoughimportant details. But we are upon a subject which, like some of ahigher nature, refuses ornament, and is contented with conveyinginstruction. I know, too, the obstinacy of unbelief in those pervertedminds which have no delight but in contemplating the supposed distressand predicting the immediate ruin of their country. These birds of evilpresage at all times have grated our ears with their melancholy song;and, by some strange fatality or other, it has generally happened thatthey have poured forth their loudest and deepest lamentations at theperiods of our most abundant prosperity. Very early in my public life Ihad occasion to make myself a little acquainted with their naturalhistory. My first political tract in the collection which a friend hasmade of my publications is an answer to a very gloomy picture of thestate of the nation, which was thought to have been drawn by a statesmanof some eminence in his time. That was no more than the common spleen ofdisappointed ambition: in the present day I fear that too many areactuated by a more malignant and dangerous spirit. They hope, bydepressing our minds with a despair of our means and resources, to driveus, trembling and unresisting, into the toils of our enemies, with whom, from the beginning of the Revolution in France, they have ever moved instrict concert and coöperation. If, with the report of your FinanceCommittee in their hands, they can still affect to despond, and canstill succeed, as they do, in spreading the contagion of their pretendedfears among well-disposed, though weak men, there is no way ofcounteracting them, but by fixing them down to particulars. Nor must weforget that they are unwearied agitators, bold assertors, dexteroussophisters. Proof must be accumulated upon proof, to silence them. Withthis view, I shall now direct your attention to some other striking andunerring indications of our flourishing condition; and they will, ingeneral, be derived from other sources, but equally authentic: fromother reports and proceedings of both Houses of Parliament, all whichunite with wonderful force of consent in the same general result. Hitherto we have seen the superfluity of our capital discovering itselfonly in procuring superfluous accommodation and enjoyment, in ourhouses, in our furniture, in our establishments, in our eating anddrinking, our clothing, and our public diversions: we shall now see itmore beneficially employed in improving our territory itself: we shallsee part of our present opulence, with provident care, put out to usuryfor posterity. 

To what ultimate extent it may be wise or practicable to push inclosuresof common and waste lands may be a question of doubt, in some points ofview: but no person thinks them already carried to excess; and therelative magnitude of the sums laid out upon them gives us a standard ofestimating the comparative situation of the landed interest. Your House, this session, appointed a committee on waste lands, and they have made areport by their chairman, an honorable baronet, for whom the ministerthe other day (with very good intentions, I believe, but with littlereal profit to the public) thought fit to erect a board of agriculture. The account, as it stands there, appears sufficiently favorable. Thegreatest number of inclosing bills passed in any one year of the lastpeace does not equal the smallest annual number in the war, and those ofthe last year exceed by more than one half the highest year of peace. But what was my surprise, on looking into the late report of the SecretCommittee of the Lords, to find a list of these bills during the war, differing in every year, and[48] larger on the whole by nearly onethird! I have checked this account by the statute-book, and find it tobe correct. What new brilliancy, then, does it throw over the prospect, bright as it was before! The number during the last four years has morethan doubled that of the four years immediately preceding; it hassurpassed the five years of peace, beyond which the Lords' committeeshave not gone; it has even surpassed (I have verified the fact) thewhole ten years of peace. I cannot stop here. I cannot advance a singlestep in this inquiry without being obliged to cast my eyes back to theperiod when I first knew the country. These bills, which had begun inthe reign of Queen Anne, had passed every year in greater or lessnumbers from the year 1723; yet in all that space of time they had notreached the amount of any two years during the present war; and thoughsoon after that time they rapidly increased, still at the accession ofhis present Majesty they were far short of the number passed in the fouryears of hostilities. 

In my first letter I mentioned the state of our inland navigation, neglected as it had been from the reign of King William to the time ofmy observation. It was not till the present reign that the Duke ofBridgewater's canal first excited a spirit of speculation and adventurein this way. This spirit showed itself, but necessarily made no greatprogress, in the American war. When peace was restored, it began ofcourse to work with more sensible effect; yet in ten years from thatevent the bills passed on that subject were not so many as from the year1793 to the present session of Parliament. From what I can trace on thestatute-book, I am confident that all the capital expended in theseprojects during the peace bore no degree of proportion (I doubt, onvery grave consideration, whether all that was ever so expended wasequal) to the money which has been raised for the same purposes sincethe war. [49] I know that in the last four years of peace, when they roseregularly and rapidly, the sums specified in the acts were not near onethird of the subsequent amount. In the last session of Parliament, theGrand Junction Company, as it is called, having sunk half a million, (ofwhich I feel the good effects at my own door, ) applied to your House forpermission to subscribe half as much more among themselves. This GrandJunction is an inosculation of the Grand Trunk; and in the presentsession, the latter company has obtained the authority of Parliament tofloat two hundred acres of land, for the purpose of forming a reservoir, thirty feet deep, two hundred yards wide at the head, and two miles inlength: a lake which may almost vie with that which once fed the nowobliterated canal of Languedoc. 

The present war is, above all others of which we have heard or read, awar against landed property. That description of property is in itsnature the firm base of every stable government, --and has been soconsidered by all the wisest writers of the old philosophy, from thetime of the Stagyrite, who observes that the agricultural class of allothers is the least inclined to sedition. We find it to have been soregarded in the practical politics of antiquity, where they are broughtmore directly homo to our understandings and bosoms in the history ofBorne, and above all, in the writings of Cicero. The country tribes werealways thought more respectable than those of the city. And if in ourown history there is any one circumstance to which, under God, are to beattributed the steady resistance, the fortunate issue, and sobersettlement of all our struggles for liberty, it is, that, while thelanded interest, instead of forming a separate body, as in othercountries, has at all times been in close connection and union with theother great interests of the country, it has been spontaneously allowedto lead and direct and moderate all the rest. I cannot, therefore, butsee with singular gratification, that, during a war which has beeneminently made for the destruction of the lauded proprietors, as well asof priests and kings, as much has been done by public works for thepermanent benefit of their stake in this country as in all the rest ofthe current century, which now touches to its close. Perhaps after thisit may not be necessary to refer to private observation; but I amsatisfied that in general the rents of lands have been considerablyincreased: they are increased very considerably, indeed, if I may drawany conclusion from my own little property of that kind. I am notignorant, however, where our public burdens are most galling. But all ofthis class will consider who they are that are principally menaced, --howlittle the men of their description in other countries, where thisrevolutionary fury has but touched, have been found equal to their ownprotection, --how tardy and unprovided and full of anguish is theirflight, chained down as they are by every tie to the soil, --howhelpless they are, above all other men, in exile, in poverty, in need, in all the varieties of wretchedness; and then let them well weigh whatare the burdens to which they ought not to submit for their ownsalvation. 

Many of the authorities which I have already adduced, or to which I havereferred, may convey a competent notion of some of our principalmanufactures. Their general state will be clear from that of ourexternal and internal commerce, through which they circulate, and ofwhich they are at once the cause and effect. But the communication ofthe several parts of the kingdom with each other and with foreigncountries has always been regarded as one of the most certain tests toevince the prosperous or adverse state of our trade in all its branches. Recourse has usually been had to the revenue of the Post-Office withthis view. I shall include the product of the tax which was laid in thelast war, and which will make the evidence more conclusive, if it shallafford the same inference: I allude to the Post-Horse duty, which showsthe personal intercourse within the kingdom, as the Post-Office showsthe intercourse by letters both within and without. The first of thesestandards, then, exhibits an increase, according to my former schemes ofcomparison, from an eleventh to a twentieth part of the whole duty. [50]The Post-Office gives still less consolation to those who are miserablein proportion as the country feels no misery. From the commencement ofthe war to the month of April, 1796, the gross produce had increased bynearly one sixth of the whole sum which the state now derives from thatfund. I find that the year ending 5th of April, 1793, gave 627, 592_l. _, and the year ending at the same quarter in 1796, 750, 637_l. _, after afair deduction having been made for the alteration (which, you know, ongrounds of policy I never approved) in your privilege of franking. Ihave seen no formal document subsequent to that period, but I have beencredibly informed there is very good ground to believe that the revenueof the Post-Office[51] still continues to be regularly and largely uponthe rise. 

What is the true inference to be drawn from the annual number ofbankruptcies has been the occasion of much dispute. On one side it hasbeen confidently urged as a sure symptom of a decaying trade: on theother side it has been insisted that it is a circumstance attendant upona thriving trade; for that the greater is the whole quantity of trade, the greater of course must be the positive number of failures, while theaggregate success is still in the same proportion. In truth, theincrease of the number may arise from either of those causes. But allmust agree in one conclusion, --that, if the number diminishes, and atthe same time every other sort of evidence tends to show an augmentationof trade, there can be no better indication. We have already had veryample means of gathering that the year 1796 was a very favorable year oftrade, and in that year the number of bankruptcies was at least onefifth below the usual average. I take this from the declaration of theLord Chancellor in the House of Lords. [52] He professed to speak fromthe records of Chancery; and he added another very striking fact, --thaton the property actually paid into his court (a very small part, indeed, of the whole property of the kingdom) there had accrued in that year anet surplus of eight hundred thousand pounds, which was so much newcapital. 

But the real situation of our trade, during the whole of this war, deserves more minute investigation. I shall begin with that which, though the least in consequence, makes perhaps the most impression onour senses, because it meets our eyes in our daily walks: I mean ourretail trade. The exuberant display of wealth in our shops was the sightwhich most amazed a learned foreigner of distinction who lately residedamong us: his expression, I remember, was, that "_they seemed to bebursting with opulence into the streets_. " The documents which throwlight on this subject are not many, but they all meet in the same point:all concur in exhibiting an increase. The most material are the generallicenses[53] which the law requires to be taken out by all dealers inexcisable commodities. These seem to be subject to considerablefluctuations. They have not been so low in any year of the war as in theyears 1788 and 1789, nor ever so high in peace as in the first year ofthe war. I should next state the licenses to dealers in spirits andwine; but the change in them which took place in 1789 would give anunfair advantage to my argument. I shall therefore content myself withremarking, that from the date of that change the spirit licenses keptnearly the same level till the stoppage of the distilleries in 1795. Ifthey dropped a little, (and it was but little, ) the wine licenses, during the same time, more than countervailed that loss to the revenue;and it is remarkable with regard to the latter, that in the year 1796, which was the lowest in the excise duties on wine itself, as well as inthe quantity imported, more dealers in wine appear to have been licensedthan in any former year, excepting the first year of the war. This factmay raise some doubt whether the consumption has been lessened so muchas, I believe, is commonly imagined. The only other retail-traders whomI found so entered as to admit of being selected are tea-dealers andsellers of gold and silver plate, both of whom seem to have multipliedvery much in proportion to their aggregate number. [54] I have kept apartone set of licensed sellers, because I am aware that our antagonists maybe inclined to triumph a little, when I name auctioneers and auctions. They may be disposed to consider it as a sort of trade which thrives bythe distress of others. But if they will look at it a little moreattentively, they will find their gloomy comfort vanish. The publicincome from these licenses has risen with very great regularity througha series of years which all must admit to have been years of prosperity. It is remarkable, too, that in the year 1793, which was the great yearof bankruptcies, these duties on auctioneers and auctions[55] fell belowthe mark of 1791; and in 1796, which year had one fifth less than theaccustomed average of bankruptcies, they mounted at once beyond allformer examples. In concluding this general head, will you permit me, mydear Sir, to bring to your notice an humble, but industrious andlaborious set of chapmen, against whom the vengeance of your House hassometimes been levelled, with what policy I need not stay to inquire, asthey have escaped without much injury? The hawkers and peddlers, [56] Iam assured, are still doing well, though, from some new arrangementsrespecting them made in 1789, it would be difficult to trace theirproceedings in any satisfactory manner. 

When such is the vigor of our traffic in its minutest ramifications, wemay be persuaded that the root and the trunk are sound. When we see thelife-blood of the state circulate so freely through the capillaryvessels of the System, we scarcely need inquire if the heart performsits functions aright. But let us approach it; let us lay it bare, andwatch the systole and diastole, as it now receives and now pours forththe vital stream through all the members. The port of London has alwayssupplied the main evidence of the state of our commerce. I know, that, amidst all the difficulties and embarrassments of the year 1793, fromcauses unconnected with and prior to the war, the tonnage of ships inthe Thames actually rose. But I shall not go through a detail ofofficial papers on this point. There is evidence, which has appearedthis very session before your House, infinitely more forcible andimpressive to my apprehension than all the journals and ledgers of allthe Inspectors-General from the days of Davenant. It is such as cannotcarry with it any sort of fallacy. It comes, not from one set, but frommany opposite sets of witnesses, who all agree in nothing else:witnesses of the gravest and most unexceptionable character, and whoconfirm what they say, in the surest manner, by their conduct. Twodifferent bills have been brought in for improving the port of London. Ihave it from very good intelligence, that, when the project was firstsuggested from necessity, there were no less than eight different plans, supported by eight different bodies of subscribers. The cost of theleast was estimated at two hundred thousand pounds, and of the mostextensive at twelve hundred thousand. The two between which the contestnow lies substantially agree (as all the others must have done) in themotives and reasons of the preamble; but I shall confine myself to thatbill which is proposed on the part of the mayor, aldermen, and commoncouncil, because I regard them as the best authority, and their languagein itself is fuller and more precise. I certainly see them complain ofthe "great delays, accidents, damages, losses, and extraordinaryexpenses, which are almost continually sustained, to the hindrance anddiscouragement of commerce, and the great injury of the public revenue. "But what are the causes to which they attribute their complaints? Thefirst is, "THAT, FROM THE VERY GREAT AND PROGRESSIVE INCREASE OF THENUMBER AND SIZE OF SHIPS AND OTHER VESSELS TRADING TO THE PORT OFLONDON, the river Thames, in and near the said port, is in general somuch crowded with shipping, lighters, and other craft, that thenavigation of a considerable part of the river is thereby renderedtedious and dangerous; and there is great want of room in the said portfor the safe and convenient mooring of vessels, and constant access tothem. " The second is of the same nature. It is the want of regulationsand arrangements, never before found necessary, for expedition andfacility. The third is of another kind, but to the same effect: That thelegal quays are too confined, and there is not sufficient accommodationfor the landing and shipping of cargoes. And the fourth and last isstill different: they describe the avenues to the legal quays (which, little more than a century since, the great fire of London opened anddilated beyond the measure of our then circumstances) to be now"incommodious, and much too narrow for the great concourse of carts andother carriages usually passing and repassing therein. " Thus our tradehas grown too big for the ancient limits of Art and Nature. Our streets, our lanes, our shores, the river itself, which has so long been ourpride, are impeded and obstructed and choked up by our riches. They are, like our shops, "bursting with opulence. " To these misfortunes, to thesedistresses and grievances alone, we are told, it is to be imputed thatstill more of our capital has not been pushed into the channel of ourcommerce, to roll back in its reflux still more abundant capital, andfructify the national treasury in its course. Indeed, my dear Sir, whenI have before my eyes this consentient testimony of the corporation ofthe city of London, the West India merchants, and all the othermerchants who promoted the other plans, struggling and contending whichof them shall be permitted to lay out their money in consonance withtheir testimony, I cannot turn aside to examine what one or two violentpetitions, tumultuously voted by real or pretended liverymen of London, may have said of the utter destruction and annihilation of trade. 

This opens a subject on which every true lover of his country, and, atthis crisis, every friend to the liberties of Europe, and of socialorder in every country, must dwell and expatiate with delight. I mean towind up all my proofs of our astonishing and almost incredibleprosperity with the valuable information given to the Secret Committeeof the Lords by the Inspector-General. And here I am happy that I canadminister an antidote to all despondence from the same dispensary fromwhich the first dose of poison was supposed to have come. The report ofthat committee is generally believed to have derived much benefit fromthe labors of the same noble lord who was said, as the author of thepamphlet of 1795, to have led the way in teaching us to place all ourhope on that very experiment which he afterwards declared in his placeto have been from the beginning utterly without hope. We have now hisauthority to say, that, as far as our resources were concerned, theexperiment was equally without necessity. 

"It appears, " as the committee has very justly and satisfactorilyobserved, "by the accounts of the value of the imports and exports forthe last twenty years, produced by Mr. Irving, Inspector-General ofImports and Exports, that the demands for cash to be sent abroad"(which, by the way, including the loan to the Emperor, was nearly onethird less sent to the Continent of Europe than in the Seven Years' War). . . "was greatly compensated by a very large balance of commerce infavor of this kingdom, --greater than was ever known in any precedingperiod. The value of the exports of the last year amounted, according tothe valuation on which the accounts of the Inspector-General arefounded, to 30, 424, 184_l. _, which is more than double what it was in anyyear of the American war, and one third more than it was on an averageduring the last peace, previous to the year 1792; and though the valueof the imports to this country has during the same period greatlyincreased, the excess of the value of the exports above that of theimports, which constitutes the balance of trade, has augmented even in agreater proportion. " These observations might perhaps be branched outinto other points of view, but I shall leave them to your own active andingenious mind. There is another and still more important light inwhich, the Inspector-General's information may be seen, --and that is, asaffording a comparison of some circumstances in this war with thecommercial history of all our other wars in the present century. 

In all former hostilities, our exports gradually declined in value, andthen (with one single exception) ascended again, till they reached andpassed the level of the preceding peace. But this was a work of time, sometimes more, sometimes less slow. In Queen Anne's war, which began in1702, it was an interval of ten years before this was effected. Nineyears only were necessary, in the war of 1739, for the same operation. The Seven Years' War saw the period much shortened: hostilities began in1755; and in 1758, the fourth year of the war, the exports mounted abovethe peace-mark. There was, however, a distinguishing feature of thatwar, --that our tonnage, to the very last moment, was in a state of greatdepression, while our commerce was chiefly carried on by foreignvessels. The American war was darkened with singular and peculiaradversity. Our exports never came near to their peaceful elevation, andour tonnage continued, with very little fluctuation, to subside lowerand lower. [57] On the other hand, the present war, with regard to ourcommerce, has the white mark of as singular felicity. If, from internalcauses, as well as the consequence of hostilities, the tide ebbed in1793, it rushed back again with a bore in the following year, and fromthat time has continued to swell and run every successive year higherand higher into all our ports. The value of our exports last year abovethe year 1792 (the mere increase of our commerce during the war) isequal to the average value of all the exports during the wars of Williamand Anne. 

It has been already pointed out, that our imports have not kept pacewith our exports: of course, on the face of the account, the balance oftrade, both positively and comparatively considered, must have been muchmore than ever in our favor. In that early little tract of mine, towhich I have already more than once referred, I made many observationson the usual method of computing that balance, as well as the usualobjection to it, that the entries at the Custom-House were not alwaystrue. As you probably remember them, I shall not repeat them here. Onthe one hand, I am not surprised that the same trite objection isperpetually renewed by the detractors of our national affluence; and onthe other hand, I am gratified in perceiving that the balance of tradeseems to be now computed in a manner much clearer than it used to befrom those errors which I formerly noticed. The Inspector-Generalappears to have made his estimate with every possible guard and caution. His opinion is entitled to the greatest respect. It was in substance, (Ishall again use the words of the Report, as much better than my own, )"that the true balance of our trade amounted, on a medium of the fouryears preceding January, 1796, to upwards of 6, 500, 00_l. _ per annum, exclusive of the profits arising from our East and West India trade, which he estimates at upwards of 4, 000, 000_l. _ per annum, exclusive ofthe profits derived from our fisheries. " So that, including thefisheries, and making a moderate allowance for the exceedings, which Mr. Irving himself supposes, beyond his calculation, without reckoning whatthe public creditors themselves pay to themselves, and without takingone shilling from the stock of the landed interest, our colonies, ourOriental possessions, our skill and industry, our commerce andnavigation, at the commencement of this year, were pouring a new annualcapital into the kingdom, hardly half a million short of the wholeinterest of that tremendous debt from which we are taught to shrink indismay, as from an overwhelming and intolerable oppression. 

If, then, the real state of this nation is such as I have described, (and I am only apprehensive that you may think I have taken too muchpains to exclude all doubt on this question, )--if no class is lessenedin its numbers, or in its stock, or in its conveniences, or even itsluxuries, --if they build as many habitations, and as elegant and ascommodious as ever, and furnish them with every chargeable decorationand every prodigality of ingenious invention that can be thought of bythose who even incumber their necessities with superfluousaccommodation, --if they are as numerously attended, --if their equipagesare as splendid, --if they regale at table with as much or more varietyof plenty than ever, --if they are clad in as expensive and changeful adiversity, according to their tastes and modes, --if they are notdeterred from the pleasures of the field by the charges which governmenthas wisely turned from the culture to the sports of the field, --if thetheatres are as rich and as well filled, and greater and at a higherprice than ever, --and (what is more important than all) if it is plain, from the treasures which are spread over the soil or confided to thewinds and the seas, that there are as many who are indulgent to theirpropensities of parsimony as others to their voluptuous desires, andthat the pecuniary capital grows instead of diminishing, --on what groundare we authorized to say that a nation gambolling in an ocean ofsuperfluity is undone by want? With what face can we pretend that theywho have not denied any one gratification to any one appetite have aright to plead poverty in order to famish their virtues and to put theirduties on short allowance? that they are to take the law from animperious enemy, and can contribute no longer to the honor of theirking, to the support of the independence of their country, to thesalvation of that Europe which, if it falls, must crush them with itsgigantic ruins? How can they affect to sweat and stagger and groan undertheir burdens, to whom the mines of Newfoundland, richer than those ofMexico and Peru, are now thrown in as a make-weight in the scale oftheir exorbitant opulence? What excuse can they have to faint, andcreep, and cringe, and prostrate themselves at the footstool of ambitionand crime, who, during a short, though violent struggle, which they havenever supported with the energy of men, have amassed more to theirannual accumulation than all the well-husbanded capital that enabledtheir ancestors, by long and doubtful and obstinate conflicts, todefend and liberate and vindicate the civilized world? But I do notaccuse the people of England. As to the great majority of the nation, they have done whatever, in their several ranks and conditions anddescriptions, was required of them by their relative situations insociety: and from those the great mass of mankind cannot depart, withoutthe subversion of all public order. They look up to that governmentwhich they obey that they may be protected. They ask to be led anddirected by those rulers whom Providence and the laws of their countryhave set over them, and under their guidance to walk in the ways ofsafety and honor. They have again delegated the greatest trust whichthey have to bestow to those faithful representatives who made theirtrue voice heard against the disturbers and destroyers of Europe. Theysuffered, with unapproving acquiescence, solicitations, which they hadin no shape desired, to an unjust and usurping power, whom they hadnever provoked, and whose hostile menaces they did not dread. When theexigencies of the public service could only be met by their voluntaryzeal, they started forth with an ardor which outstripped the wishes ofthose who had injured them by doubting whether it might not be necessaryto have recourse to compulsion. They have in all things reposed anenduring, but not an unreflecting confidence. That confidence demands afull return, and fixes a responsibility on the ministers entire andundivided. The people stands acquitted, if the war is not carried on ina manner suited to its objects. If the public honor is tarnished, if thepublic safety suffers any detriment, the ministers, not the people, areto answer it, and they alone. Its armies, its navies, are given to themwithout stint or restriction. Its treasures are poured out at theirfeet. Its constancy is ready to second all their efforts. They are notto fear a responsibility for acts of manly adventure. The responsibilitywhich they are to dread is lest they should show themselves unequal tothe expectation of a brave people. The more doubtful may be theconstitutional and economical questions upon which they have received somarked a support, the more loudly they are called upon to support thisgreat war, for the success of which their country is willing tosupersede considerations of no slight importance. Where I speak ofresponsibility, I do not mean to exclude that species of it which thelegal powers of the country have a right finally to exact from those whoabuse a public trust: but high as this is, there is a responsibilitywhich attaches on them from which the whole legitimate power of thekingdom cannot absolve them; there is a responsibility to conscience andto glory, a responsibility to the existing world, and to that posteritywhich men of their eminence cannot avoid for glory or for shame, --aresponsibility to a tribunal at which not only ministers, but kings andparliaments, but even nations themselves, must one day answer. 

FOOTNOTES:

[37] The Archduke Charles of Austria. 

[38] Dec 27, 1790. 

[39] Observations on a Late State of the Nation. 

[40] This and the following tables on the same construction are compiledfrom the Reports of the Finance Committee in 1791 and 1797, with theaddition of the separate paper laid before the House of Commons, andordered to be printed, on the 7th of February, 1792. 

 BRICKS AND TILES. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 94, 521 | 1793 122, 9751788 96, 278 | 1794 106, 8111789 91, 773 | 1795 83, 8041790 104, 409 | 1796 94, 668 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £386, 981 | £408, 258 £21, 277. Increase to 17911791 £115, 382 4 Years to 1791 £407, 842 £416. 

 PLATE. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 22, 707 | 1793 25, 9201788 23, 295 | 1794 23, 6371789 22, 453 | 1795 25, 6071790 18, 433 | 1796 28, 513 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £86, 888 | £103, 677 £16, 789. Increase to 17911791 £31, 528 4 Years to 1791 £95, 704 £7, 973. 

 GLASS PLATES. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 ---- | 1793 5, 6551788 5, 496 | 1794 5, 4561789 4, 686 | 1795 5, 8391790 6, 008 | 1796 8, 871 ------- | ------- £16, 190 | £25, 821 Increase to 17911791 £7, 880 4 Years to 1791 £24, 070 £1, 751. 

[41]

 GROCERIES. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 167, 389 | 1793 124, 6551788 133, 191 | 1794 195, 8401789 142, 871 | 1795 208, 2421790 156, 311 | 1796 159, 826 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £599, 762 | £688, 563 £88, 081. Increase to 17911791 £236, 727 4 Years to 1791 £669, 100 £19, 463. 

 TEA. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 424, 144 | 1793 477, 6441788 426, 660 | 1794 467, 1321789 539, 575 | 1795 507, 5181790 417, 736 | 1796 526, 307 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £1, 808, 115 | £1, 978, 601 £170, 486. Increase to 17911791 £448, 709 4 Years to 1791 £1, 832, 680 £145, 921. 

The additional duty imposed in 1795 produced in that year 137, 656_l. _, and in 1796, 200, 107_l. _

 COFFEE AND COCOA-NUTS. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 17, 006 | 1793 36, 8461788 30, 217 | 1794 49, 1771789 34, 784 | 1795 27, 9131790 38, 647 | 1796 19, 711 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £120, 654 | £133, 647 £12, 993. Decrease to 17911791 £41, 194 4 Years to 1791 £144, 842 £11, 195. 

The additional duty of 1795 in that year gave 16, 775_l. _, and in 1796, 15, 319_l. _

[42]

 SUGAR. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 1, 065, 109 | 1793 1, 473, 1391788 1, 184, 458 | 1794 1, 392, 9651789 1, 905, 106 | 1795 1, 338, 2461790 1, 069, 108 | 1796 1, 474, 899 --------- | --------- Increase to 1790 £4, 413, 781 | £5, 679, 249 £1, 265, 468. Increase to 17911791 £1, 044, 781 4 Years to 1791 £4, 392, 725 £1, 286, 524. 

There was a new duty on sugar in 1791, which produced in 1794234, 292_l. _, in 1795, 206, 932_l. _, and in 1796, 245, 024_l. _ It is notclear from the report of the committee, whether the additional duty isincluded in the account given above. 

[43]

 BEER, &c. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 1, 761, 429 | 1793 2, 043, 9021788 1, 705, 199 | 1794 2, 082, 0531789 1, 742, 514 | 1795 1, 931, 1011790 1, 858, 043 | 1796 2, 294, 377 --------- | --------- Increase to 1790 £7, 067, 185 | £8, 351, 433 £1, 284, 248. Increase to 17911791 £1, 880, 478 4 Years to 1791 £7, 186, 234 £1, 165, 199. 

 WINE. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 219, 934 | 1793 222, 8871788 215, 578 | 1794 283, 6441789 252, 649 | 1795 317, 0721790 308, 624 | 1796 187, 818 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £996, 785 | £1, 011, 421 £14, 636. Decrease to 17911791 £336, 549 4 Years to 1791 £1, 113, 400 £101, 979. 

 QUANTITY IMPORTED. Years of Peace. Tuns. | Years of War. Tuns. 1787 22, 978 | 1793 22, 7881786 26, 442 | 1794 27, 8681789 27, 414 | 1795 32, 0331790 29, 182 | 1796 19, 079

The additional duty of 1795 produced that year 736, 871_l. _, and in 1796, 432, 689_l. _ A second additional duty, which produced 98, 165_l. _ was laidin 1796. 

 SWEETS. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 11, 167 | 1793 11, 0161788 7, 375 | 1794 10, 6121789 7, 202 | 1795 13, 3211790 4, 953 | 1796 15, 050 ------ | ------ Increase to 1790 £30, 697 | £49, 999 £19, 302. Increase to 17911791 £13, 282 4 Years to 1791 £32, 812 £17, 187. 

In 1795 an additional duty was laid on this article, which produced thatyear 5, 679_l. _, and in 1796, 9, 443_l. _; and in 1796 a second, tocommence on the 20th of June: its produce in that year was 2, 325_l. _

[44]

 MUSLINS AND CALICOES. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 129, 297 | 1793 173, 0501788 138, 660 | 1794 104, 9021789 126, 267 | 1795 103, 8571790 128, 865 | 1796 272, 544 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £522, 589 | £654, 353 £131, 764. 

This table begins with 1788. The net produce of the preceding year isnot in the report whence the table is taken. 

[45]

 PRINTED GOODS. Years of Peace. £ Years of War. £1787 142, 000 | 1793 191, 5661788 154, 486 | 1794 190, 5541789 153, 202 | 1795 197, 4161790 157, 156 | 1796 230, 530 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £616, 844 | £810, 066 £193, 222. Increase to 17911791 £191, 489 4 Years to 1791 £666, 333 £143, 733. 

These duties for 1787 are blended with several others. The proportion ofprinted goods to the other articles for four years was found to be onefourth. That proportion is here taken. 

[46]

 SILK. Years of Peace. £ Years of War. £1787 166, 912 | 1793 209, 9151788 123, 998 | 1794 221, 3061789 157, 730 | 1795 210, 7251790 212, 522 | 1796 221, 007 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £661, 162 | £862, 953 £201, 791. Increase to 17911791 £279, 128 4 Years to 1791 £773, 378 £89, 575. 

[47]

 FURS. Years of Peace. £ Years of War. £1787 3, 464 | 1793 2, 8291788 2, 958 | 1794 3, 3531789 1, 151 | 1795 3, 6661790 3, 328 | 1796 6, 138 ------ | ------ Increase to 1790 £10, 901 | £15, 986 £5, 085. Increase to 17911791 £5, 731 4 Years to 1791 £13, 168 £2, 815. 

The skins here selected from the Custom-House accounts are, _Black Bear, Ordinary Fox, Marten, Mink, Musquash, Otter, Raccoon_, and _Wolf_. 

[48] Report of the Lords' Committee of Secrecy, ordered to be printed28th April, 1797, Appendix 44. 

 INCLOSURE BILLS. Years of Peace | Years of War. 1789 33 | 1793 601790 25 | 1794 741791 40 | 1795 771792 40 | 1796 72 --- | --- 138 | 283

[49]

 NAVIGATION AND CANAL BILLS. Years of Peace. | Years of War. 1789 3 | 1793 281790 8 | 1794 181791 10 | 1795 111792 9 | 1796 12 -- | -- 80 | 69

Money raised £2, 377, 200 £ 7, 115, 100

[50]

 POST-HORSE DUTY. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1785 169, 410 | 1793 191, 4881788 204, 659 | 1794 202, 8841789 170, 554 | 1795 196, 6911790 181, 155 | 1796 204, 061 -------- | -------- Increase to 1790 £725, 778 | £795, 124 £69, 346. Increase to 17911791 £198, 634 4 Years to 1791 £755, 002 £40, 122. 

[51] The above account is taken from a paper which was ordered by theHouse of Commons to be printed 8th December, 1796. From the grossproduce of the year ending 5th April, 1796, there has been deducted inthat statement the sum of 36, 666_l. _, in consequence of the regulationon franking, which took place on the 5th May, 1795, and was computed at40, 000_l. _ per ann. To show an equal number of years, both of peace andwar, the accounts of two preceding years are given in the followingtable, from a report made since Mr. Burke's death by a committee of theHouse of Commons appointed to consider the claims of Mr. Palmer, thelate Comptroller-General; and for still greater satisfaction, the numberof letters, inwards and outwards, have been added, except for the year1790-1791. The letter-book for that year is not to be found. 

 POST-OFFICE. | Number of Letters. Gross Revenue |-------------------------------- £ | Inwards. | Outwards. April, 1790-1791 575, 079 | -------- | --------- 1791-1792 585, 432 | 6, 391, 149 | 5, 081, 344 1792-1793 627, 592 | 6, 584, 867 | 5, 041, 137 1793-1794 691, 268 | 7, 094, 777 | 6, 537, 234 1794-1795 705, 319 | 7, 071, 029 | 7, 473, 626 1795-1796 750, 637 | 7, 641, 077 | 8, 597, 167

From the last-mentioned report it appears that the accounts have notbeen completely and authentically made up for the years ending 5thApril, 1796 and 1797; but on the Receiver-General's books there is anincrease of the latter year over the former, equal to something morethan 5 per cent. 

[52] In a debate, 30th December, 1796, on the return of LordMalmesbury. --See Woodfall's Parliamentary Debates, Vol. XIII. P. 591. 

[53]

 GENERAL LICENSES. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 44, 030 | 1793 45, 5681788 40, 882 | 1794 42, 1291789 39, 917 | 1795 43, 3501790 41, 970 | 1796 41, 190 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £166, 799 | £170, 237 £3, 438. Increase to 17911791 £44, 240 4 Years to 1791 £167, 009 £3, 228. 

[54]

 DEALERS IN TEA. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 10, 934 | 1793 13, 9391788 11, 949 | 1794 14, 3151789 12, 501 | 1795 13, 9561790 13, 126 | 1796 14, 830 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £48, 510 | £57, 040 £8, 530. Increase to 17911791 £13, 921 4 Years to 1791 £51, 497 £5, 543. 

 SELLERS OF PLATE. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 6, 593 | 1793 8, 1781788 7, 953 | 1794 8, 2961789 7, 348 | 1795 8, 1281790 7, 988 | 1796 8, 835 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £29, 832 | £33, 437 £3, 555. Increase to 17911791 £8, 327 4 Years to 1791 £31, 616 £1, 821. 

[55]

 AUCTIONS AND AUCTIONEERS. Years of Peace. £ | Years of War. £1787 48, 964 | 1793 70, 0041788 53, 993 | 1794 82, 6591789 52, 024 | 1795 86, 8901790 53, 156 | 1796 109, 594 ------- | ------- Increase to 1790 £208, 137 | £349, 147 £141, 010. Increase to 17911791 £70, 973 4 Years to 1791 £230, 146 £119, 001. 

[56] Since Mr. Burke's death a Fourth Report of the Committee of Financehas made its appearance. An account is there given from the Stamp-Officeof the gross produce of duties on Hawkers and Peddlers for four years ofpeace and four of war. It is therefore added in the manner of the othertables. 

 HAWKERS AND PEDDLERS. Years of Peace. £ |Years of War. £1789 6, 132 | 1793 6, 0421790 6, 708 | 1794 6, 1041791 6, 482 | 1795 6, 7951792 6, 008 | 1796 7, 882 ------- | ------- £25, 330 | £26, 823

Increase in 4 Years of War £1, 493

[57] This account is extracted from different parts of Mr. Chalmers'sestimate. It is but just to mention, that in Mr. Chalmers's estimate thesums are uniformly lower than those of the same year in Mr Irving'saccount. 

END OF VOL. V.