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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)

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Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)

Author: Edmund Burke


        
Release date: April 24, 2005 [eBook #15701]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EDMUND BURKE, VOL. 05 (OF 12) ***




Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team from images generously made
available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France
(BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr







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 THE
LAST 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 IN
THE HOUSE OF LORDS BY THE **** OF *******, IN THE DEBATE CONCERNING
LORD FITZWILLIAM, 1795                                               107

THOUGHTS AND DETAILS ON SCARCITY                                     131

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, 1796                                             171

THREE LETTERS TO A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT ON THE PROPOSALS FOR
PEACE 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 your
Grace was, for the greater part, written during the last session. A few
days after the prorogation some few observations were added. I was,
however, resolved to let it lie by me for a considerable time, that, on
viewing the matter at a proper distance, and when the sharpness of
recent impressions had been worn off, I might be better able to form a
just estimate of the value of my first opinions.

I have just now read it over very coolly and deliberately. My latest
judgment 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 some
few and short intervals, has filled me with a good deal of serious
inquietude. I considered a general war against Jacobins and Jacobinism
as the only possible chance of saving Europe (and England as included in
Europe) from a truly frightful revolution. For this I have been
censured, as receiving through weakness, or spreading through fraud and
artifice, a false alarm. Whatever others may think of the matter, that
alarm, 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 of
confidence. At _home_, I see no abatement whatsoever in the zeal of the
partisans of Jacobinism towards their cause, nor any cessation in their
efforts to do mischief. What is doing by Lord Lauderdale on the first
scene of Lord George Gordon's actions, and in his spirit, is not
calculated to remove my apprehensions. They pursue their first object
with as much eagerness as ever, but with more dexterity. Under the
plausible name of peace, by which they delude or are deluded, they would
deliver us unarmed and defenceless to the confederation of Jacobins,
whose centre is indeed in France, but whose rays proceed in every
direction throughout the world. I understand that Mr. Coke, of Norfolk,
has been lately very busy in spreading a disaffection to this war (which
we carry on for our being) in the country in which his property gives
him so great an influence. It is truly alarming to see so large a part
of the aristocratic interest engaged in the cause of the new species of
democracy, which is openly attacking or secretly undermining the system
of property by which mankind has hitherto been governed. But we are not
to delude ourselves. No man can be connected with a party which
professes publicly to admire or may be justly suspected of secretly
abetting 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 that
form, as being the most respectful; but I do not stand in need of any
apology for my principles, my sentiments, or my conduct. I wish the
paper I lay before your Grace to be considered as my most deliberate,
solemn, and even testamentary protest against the proceedings and
doctrines which have hitherto produced so much mischief in the world,
and which will infallibly produce more, and possibly greater. It is my
protest against the delusion by which some have been taught to look upon
this Jacobin contest at home as an ordinary party squabble about place
or patronage, and to regard this Jacobin war abroad as a common war
about trade or territorial boundaries, or about a political balance of
power among rival or jealous states. Above all, it is my protest against
that mistake or perversion of sentiment by which they who agree with us
in our principles may on collateral considerations be regarded as
enemies, and those who, in this perilous crisis of all human affairs,
differ from us fundamentally and practically, as our best friends. Thus
persons of great importance may be made to turn the whole of their
influence to the destruction of their principles.

I now make it my humble request to your Grace, that you will not give
any sort of answer to the paper I send, or to this letter, except barely
to let me know that you have received them. I even wish that at present
you may not read the paper which I transmit: lock it up in the drawer of
your library-table; and when a day of compulsory reflection comes, then
be pleased to turn to it. Then remember that your Grace had a true
friend, who had, comparatively with men of your description, a very
small interest in opposing the modern system of morality and policy, but
who, under every discouragement, was faithful to public duty and to
private friendship. I shall then probably be dead. I am sure I do not
wish to live to see such things. But whilst I do live, I shall pursue
the same course, although my merits should be taken for unpardonable
faults, 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 most
sincere 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 is
natural I should be desirous to stand well (I hope I do stand tolerably
well) with that public which, with whatever fortune, I have endeavored
faithfully and zealously to serve.

I am also not a little anxious for some place in the estimation of the
two persons to whom I address this paper. I have always acted with them,
and with those whom they represent. To my knowledge, I have not
deviated, no, not in the minutest point, from their opinions and
principles. Of late, without any alteration in their sentiments or in
mine, a difference of a very unusual nature, and which, under the
circumstances, 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 I
travelled with him very cheerfully, as long as he appeared to me to
pursue the same direction with those in whose company I set out. In the
latter stage of our progress a new scheme of liberty and equality was
produced in the world, which either dazzled his imagination, or was
suited to some new walks of ambition which were then opened to his view.
The whole frame and fashion of his politics appear to have suffered
about that time a very material alteration. It is about three years
since, in consequence of that extraordinary change, that, after a
pretty long preceding period of distance, coolness, and want of
confidence, if not total alienation on his part, a complete public
separation has been made between that gentleman and me. Until lately the
breach between us appeared reparable. I trusted that time and
reflection, and a decisive experience of the mischiefs which have flowed
from the proceedings and the system of France, on which our difference
had arisen, as well as the known sentiments of the best and wisest of
our common friends upon that subject, would have brought him to a safer
way of thinking. Several of his friends saw no security for keeping
things in a proper train after this excursion of his, but in the reunion
of the party on its old grounds, under the Duke of Portland. Mr. Fox, if
he pleased, might have been comprehended in that system, with the rank
and consideration to which his great talents entitle him, and indeed
must secure to him in any party arrangement that _could_ be made. The
Duke of Portland knows how much I wished for, and how earnestly I
labored that reunion, and upon terms that might every way be honorable
and advantageous to Mr. Fox. His conduct in the last session has
extinguished these hopes forever.

Mr. Fox has lately published in print a defence of his conduct. On
taking into consideration that defence, a society of gentlemen, called
the Whig Club, thought proper to come to the following
resolution:--"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 Lord
Fitzwilliam, have given their concurrence.

The calumnies supposed in that resolution can be nothing else than the
objections taken to Mr. Fox's conduct in this session of Parliament; for
to them, and to them alone, the resolution refers. I am one of those who
have publicly and strongly urged those objections. I hope I shall be
thought 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 of
the friends to the Duke of Portland, have made to Mr. Fox's conduct, are
not _calumnies_, but founded on truth,--that they are not _few_, but
many,--and that they are not _light and trivial_, but, in a very high
degree, serious and important.

That I may avoid the imputation of throwing out, even privately, any
loose, random imputations against the public conduct of a gentleman for
whom I once entertained a very warm affection, and whose abilities I
regard with the greatest admiration, I will put down, distinctly and
articulately, some of the matters of objection which I feel to his late
doctrines and proceedings, trusting that I shall be able to demonstrate
to the friends whose good opinion I would still cultivate, that not
levity, nor caprice, nor less defensible motives, but that very grave
reasons, influence my judgment. I think that the spirit of his late
proceedings is wholly alien to our national policy, and to the peace, to
the prosperity, and to the legal liberties of this nation, _according to
our ancient domestic and appropriated mode of holding them_.

Viewing things in that light, my confidence in him is not increased, but
totally destroyed, by those proceedings. I cannot conceive it a matter
of honor or duty (but the direct contrary) in any member of Parliament
to continue systematic opposition for the purpose of putting government
under difficulties, until Mr. Fox (with all his present ideas) shall
have the principal direction of affairs placed in his hands, and until
the present body of administration (with their ideas and measures) is of
course overturned and dissolved.

To come to particulars.

1. The laws and Constitution of the kingdom intrust the sole and
exclusive right of treating with foreign potentates to the king. This is
an undisputed part of the legal prerogative of the crown. However,
notwithstanding this, Mr. Fox, without the knowledge or participation of
any one person in the House of Commons, with whom he was bound by every
party principle, in matters of delicacy and importance, confidentially
to communicate, thought proper to send Mr. Adair, as his representative,
and with his cipher, to St. Petersburg, there to frustrate the objects
for which the minister from the crown was authorized to treat. He
succeeded in this his design, and did actually frustrate the king's
minister in some of the objects of his negotiation.

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

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

On the other hand, the advantage taken of the discontent which at that
time prevailed in Parliament and in the nation, to give to an individual
an influence directly against the government of his country, in a
foreign court, has made a highway into England for the intrigues of
foreign courts in our affairs. This is a sore evil,--an evil from which,
before this time, England was more free than any other nation. Nothing
can preserve us from that evil--which connects cabinet factions abroad
with popular factions here--but the keeping sacred the crown as the only
channel of communication with every other nation.

This proceeding of Mr. Fox has given a strong countenance and an
encouraging example to the doctrines and practices of the Revolution and
Constitutional Societies, and of other mischievous societies of that
description, who, without any legal authority, and even without any
corporate capacity, are in the habit of proposing, and, to the best of
their power, of forming, leagues and alliances with France.

This proceeding, which ought to be reprobated on all the general
principles of government, is in a more narrow view of things not less
reprehensible. It tends to the prejudice of the whole of the Duke of
Portland's late party, by discrediting the principles upon which they
supported Mr. Fox in the Russian business, as if they of that party also
had proceeded in their Parliamentary opposition on the same mischievous
principles which actuated Mr. Fox in sending Mr. Adair on his embassy.

2. Very soon after his sending this embassy to Russia, that is, in the
spring of 1792, a covenanting club or association was formed in London,
calling itself by the ambitious and invidious title of "_The Friends of
the People_." It was composed of many of Mr. Fox's own most intimate
personal and party friends, joined to a very considerable part of the
members of those mischievous associations called the Revolution Society
and the Constitutional Society. Mr. Fox must have been well apprised of
the progress of that society in every one of its steps, if not of the
very origin of it. I certainly was informed of both, who had no
connection with the design, directly or indirectly. His influence over
the persons who composed the leading part in that association was, and
is, unbounded. I hear that he expressed some disapprobation of this club
in one case, (that of Mr. St. John,) where his consent was formally
asked; yet he never attempted seriously to put a stop to the
association, or to disavow it, or to control, check, or modify it in any
way whatsoever. If he had pleased, without difficulty, he might have
suppressed it in its beginning. However, he did not only not suppress it
in its beginning, but encouraged it in every part of its progress, at
that particular time when Jacobin clubs (under the very same or similar
titles) were making such dreadful havoc in a country not thirty miles
from the coast of England, and when every motive of moral prudence
called for the discouragement of societies formed for the increase of
popular pretensions to power and direction.

3. When the proceedings of this society of the Friends of the People, as
well as others acting in the same spirit, had caused a very serious
alarm in the mind of the Duke of Portland, and of many good patriots,
he publicly, in the House of Commons, treated their apprehensions and
conduct with the greatest asperity and ridicule. He condemned and
vilified, in the most insulting and outrageous terms, the proclamation
issued by government on that occasion,--though he well knew that it had
passed through the Duke of Portland's hands, that it had received his
fullest approbation, and that it was the result of an actual interview
between that noble Duke and Mr. Pitt. During the discussion of its
merits in the House of Commons, Mr. Fox countenanced and justified the
chief promoters of that association; and he received, in return, a
public assurance from them of an inviolable adherence to him singly and
personally. On account of this proceeding, a very great number (I
presume to say not the least grave and wise part) of the Duke of
Portland's friends in Parliament, and many out of Parliament who are of
the same description, have become separated from that time to this from
Mr. 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 pay
any respect to him or his opinions.

4. At the beginning of this session, when the sober part of the nation
was a second time generally and justly alarmed at the progress of the
French arms on the Continent, and at the spreading of their horrid
principles and cabals in England, Mr. Fox did not (as had been usual in
cases of far less moment) call together any meeting of the Duke of
Portland's friends in the House of Commons, for the purpose of taking
their opinion on the conduct to be pursued in Parliament at that
critical juncture. He concerted his measures (if with any persons at
all) with the friends of Lord Lansdowne, and those calling themselves
Friends of the People, and others not in the smallest degree attached to
the Duke of Portland; by which conduct he wilfully gave up (in my
opinion) all pretensions to be considered as of that party, and much
more to be considered as the leader and mouth of it in the House of
Commons. This could not give much encouragement to those who had been
separated from Mr. Fox, on account of his conduct on the first
proclamation, to rejoin that party.

5. Not having consulted any of the Duke of Portland's party in the House
of Commons,--and not having consulted them, because he had reason to
know that the course he had resolved to pursue would be highly
disagreeable to them,--he represented the alarm, which was a second time
given and taken, in still more invidious colors than those in which he
painted the alarms of the former year. He described those alarms in this
manner, although the cause of them was then grown far less equivocal and
far more urgent. He even went so far as to treat the supposition of the
growth of a Jacobin spirit in England as a libel on the nation. As to
the danger from _abroad_, on the first day of the session he said little
or nothing upon the subject. He contented himself with defending the
ruling factions in France, and with accusing the public councils of this
kingdom of every sort of evil design on the liberties of the
people,--declaring distinctly, strongly, and precisely, that the whole
danger of the nation was from the growth of the power of the crown. The
policy of this declaration was obvious. It was in subservience to the
general plan of disabling us from taking any steps against France. To
counteract the alarm given by the progress of Jacobin arms and
principles, he endeavored to excite an opposite alarm concerning the
growth of the power of the crown. If that alarm should prevail, he knew
that the nation never would be brought by arms to oppose the growth of
the Jacobin empire: because it is obvious that war does, in its very
nature, necessitate the Commons considerably to strengthen the hands of
government; 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 attributed
all the evils which the public had suffered to the proclamation of the
preceding summer; though he spoke in presence of the Duke of Portland's
own son, the Marquis of Tichfield, who had seconded the address on that
proclamation, and in presence of the Duke of Portland's brother, Lord
Edward Bentinck, and several others of his best friends and nearest
relations.

7. On that day, that is, on the 13th of December, 1792, he proposed an
amendment to the address, which stands on the journals of the House, and
which is, perhaps, the most extraordinary record which ever did stand
upon them. To introduce this amendment, he not only struck out the part
of the proposed address which alluded to insurrections, upon the ground
of the objections which he took to the legality of calling together
Parliament, (objections which I must ever think litigious and
sophistical,) but he likewise struck out _that part which related to the
cabals and conspiracies of the French faction in England_, although
their practices and correspondences were of public notoriety. Mr. Cooper
and Mr. Watt had been deputed from Manchester to the Jacobins. These
ambassadors were received by them as British representatives. Other
deputations of English had been received at the bar of the National
Assembly. They had gone the length of giving supplies to the Jacobin
armies; and they, in return, had received promises of military
assistance to forward their designs in England. A regular correspondence
for fraternizing the two nations had also been carried on by societies
in London with a great number of the Jacobin societies in France. This
correspondence had also for its object the pretended improvement of the
British Constitution. What is the most remarkable, and by much the more
mischievous part of his proceedings that day, Mr. Fox likewise struck
out everything in the address which _related to the tokens of ambition
given by France, her aggressions upon our allies, and the sudden and
dangerous growth of her power upon every side_; and instead of all those
weighty, and, at that time, necessary matters, by which the House of
Commons was (in a crisis such as perhaps Europe never stood) to give
assurances to our allies, strength to our government, and a check to the
common enemy of Europe, he substituted nothing but a criminal charge on
the 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 project
for the amendment to the address, he would forever have ruined this
nation, along with the rest of Europe. At home all the Jacobin
societies, formed for the utter destruction of our Constitution, would
have lifted up their heads, which had been beaten down by the two
proclamations. Those societies would have been infinitely strengthened
and multiplied in every quarter; their dangerous foreign communications
would have been left broad and open; the crown would not have been
authorized to take any measure whatever for our immediate defence by sea
or land. The closest, the most natural, the nearest, and at the same
time, from many internal as well as external circumstances, the weakest
of our allies, Holland, would have been given up, bound hand and foot,
to France, just on the point of invading that republic. A general
consternation would have seized upon all Europe; and all alliance with
every other power, except France, would have been forever rendered
impracticable to us. I think it impossible for any man, who regards the
dignity and safety of his country, or indeed the common safety of
mankind, ever to forget Mr. Fox's proceedings in that tremendous crisis
of all human affairs.

9. Mr. Fox very soon had reason to be apprised of the general dislike of
the Duke of Portland's friends to this conduct. Some of those who had
even voted with him, the day after their vote, expressed their
abhorrence of his amendment, their sense of its inevitable tendency, and
their total alienation from the principles and maxims upon which it was
made; 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 same
principles, 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 it
with so much heat and perseverance as to sit into Sunday: a thing not
known in Parliament for many years.

11. In all these motions and debates he wholly departed from all the
political principles relative to France (considered merely as a state,
and independent of its Jacobin form of government) which had hitherto
been held fundamental in this country, and which he had himself held
more strongly than any man in Parliament. He at that time studiously
separated himself from those to whose sentiments he used to profess no
small regard, although those sentiments were publicly declared. I had
then no concern in the party, having been, for some time, with all
outrage, excluded from it; but, on general principles, I must say that a
person who assumes to be leader of a party composed of freemen and of
gentlemen ought to pay some degree of deference to their feelings, and
even to their prejudices. He ought to have some degree of management for
their credit and influence in their country. He showed so very little of
this delicacy, that he compared the alarm raised in the minds of the
Duke of Portland's party, (which was his own,) an alarm in which they
sympathized with the greater part of the nation, to the panic produced
by the pretended Popish plot in the reign of Charles the
Second,--describing it to be, as that was, a contrivance of knaves, and
believed only by well-meaning dupes and madmen.

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

13. Mr. Fox's whole conduct, on this occasion, was without example. The
very morning after these violent declamations in the House of Commons
against the association, (that is, on Tuesday, the 18th,) he went
himself to a meeting of St. George's parish, and there signed an
association of the nature and tendency of those he had the night before
so vehemently condemned; and several of his particular and most intimate
friends, inhabitants of that parish, attended and signed along with him.

14. Immediately after this extraordinary step, and in order perfectly to
defeat the ends of that association against Jacobin publications,
(which, contrary to his opinions, he had promoted and signed,) a
mischievous society was formed under his auspices, called _The Friends
of the Liberty of the Press_. Their title groundlessly insinuated that
the freedom of the press had lately suffered, or was now threatened
with, some violation. This society was only, in reality, another
modification of the society calling itself _The Friends of the People_,
which in the preceding summer had caused so much uneasiness in the Duke
of Portland's mind, and in the minds of several of his friends. This new
society was composed of many, if not most, of the members of the club of
the Friends of the People, with the addition of a vast multitude of
others (such as Mr. Horne Tooke) of the worst and most seditious
dispositions that could be found in the whole kingdom. In the first
meeting of this club Mr. Erskine took the lead, and directly (without
any disavowal ever since on Mr. Fox's part) _made use of his name and
authority in favor of its formation and purposes_. In the same meeting
Mr. Erskine had thanks for his defence of Paine, which amounted to a
complete avowal of that Jacobin incendiary; else it is impossible to
know how Mr. Erskine should have deserved such marked applauses for
acting merely as a lawyer for his fee, in the ordinary course of his
profession.

15. Indeed, Mr. Fox appeared the general patron of all such persons and
proceedings. When Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and other persons, for
practices of the most dangerous kind, in Paris and in London, were
removed from the King's Guards, Mr. Fox took occasion in the House of
Commons heavily to censure that act, as unjust and oppressive, and
tending to make officers bad citizens. There were few, however, who did
not call for some such measures on the part of government, as of
absolute necessity for the king's personal safety, as well as that of
the public; and nothing but the mistaken lenity, with which such
practices were rather discountenanced than punished, could possibly
deserve reprehension in what was done with regard to those gentlemen.

16. Mr. Fox regularly and systematically, and with a diligence long
unusual to him, did everything he could to countenance the same
principle of fraternity and connection with the Jacobins abroad, and the
National Convention of France, for which these officers had been removed
from the Guards. For when a bill (feeble and lax, indeed, and far short
of the vigor required by the conjuncture) was brought in for removing
out of the kingdom the emissaries of France, Mr. Fox opposed it with all
his might. He pursued a vehement and detailed opposition to it through
all its stages, describing it as a measure contrary to the existing
treaties between Great Britain and France, as a violation of the law of
nations, 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 wise
in its principle, and was precedented in the best times, and absolutely
necessary at that juncture: I mean the Traitorous Correspondence Bill.
By these means the enemy, rendered infinitely dangerous by the links of
real faction and pretended commerce, would have been (had Mr. Fox
succeeded) enabled to carry on the war against us by our own resources.
For this purpose that enemy would have had his agents and traitors in
the midst of us.

18. When at length war was actually declared by the usurpers in France
against this kingdom, and declared whilst they were pretending a
negotiation through Dumouriez with Lord Auckland, Mr. Fox still
continued, through the whole of the proceedings, to discredit the
national honor and justice, and to throw the entire blame of the war on
Parliament, and on his own country, as acting with violence,
haughtiness, and want of equity. He frequently asserted, both at the
time and ever since, that the war, though declared by France, was
provoked by us, and that it was wholly unnecessary and fundamentally
unjust.

19. He has lost no opportunity of railing, in the most virulent manner
and in the most unmeasured language, at every foreign power with whom we
could now, or at any time, contract any useful or effectual alliance
against France,--declaring that he hoped no alliance with those powers
was made, or was in a train of being made.[1] He always expressed
himself with the utmost horror concerning such alliances. So did all
his phalanx. Mr. Sheridan in particular, after one of his invectives
against those powers, sitting by him, said, with manifest marks of his
approbation, that, if we must go to war, he had rather go to war alone
than with such allies.

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

The object of the last of this extraordinary string of resolutions moved
by Mr. Fox was to advise the crown not to enter into such an engagement
with any foreign power so as to hinder us from making a _separate_ peace
with France, or which might tend to enable any of those powers to
introduce a government in that country other than such as those persons
whom 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 the
independency of Europe, to the support of this strange mixture of
anarchy and tyranny which prevails in France, and which Mr. Fox and his
party were pleased to call a government. The immediate consequence of
these measures was (by an example the ill effects of which on the whole
world are not to be calculated) to secure the robbers of the innocent
nobility, gentry, and ecclesiastics of France in the enjoyment of the
spoil they have made of the estates, houses, and goods of their
fellow-citizens.

21. Not satisfied with moving these resolutions, tending to confirm this
horrible tyranny and robbery, and with actually dividing the House on
the first of the long string which they composed, in a few days
afterwards he encouraged and supported Mr. Grey in producing the very
same string in a new form, and in moving, under the shape of an address
of Parliament to the crown, another virulent libel on all its own
proceedings in this session, in which not only all the ground of the
resolutions was again travelled over, but much new inflammatory matter
was introduced. In particular, a charge was made, that Great Britain had
not interposed to prevent the last partition of Poland. On this head
the party dwelt very largely and very vehemently. Mr. Fox's intention,
in the choice of this extraordinary topic, was evident enough. He well
knows two things: first, that no wise or honest man can approve of that
partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief
from it to all countries at some future time; secondly, he knows quite
as well, that, let our opinions on that partition be what they will,
England, by itself, is not in a situation to afford to Poland any
assistance whatsoever. The purpose of the introduction of Polish
politics into this discussion was not for the sake of Poland; it was to
throw an odium upon those who are obliged to decline the cause of
justice from their impossibility of supporting a cause which they
approve: 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 some
of the authors of that injustice against our common enemy, France. But
the great and leading purpose of this introduction of Poland into the
debates on the French war was to divert the public attention from what
was in our power, that is, from a steady coöperation against France, to
a quarrel with the allies for the sake of a Polish war, which, for any
useful purpose to Poland, he knew it was out of our power to make. If
England can touch Poland ever so remotely, it must be through the medium
of alliances. But by attacking all the combined powers together for
their supposed unjust aggression upon France, he bound them by a now
common interest not separately to join England for the rescue of Poland.
The proposition could only mean to do what all the writers of his party
in the Morning Chronicle have aimed at persuading the public to, through
the whole of the last autumn and winter, and to this hour: that is, to
an alliance with the Jacobins of France, for the pretended purpose of
succoring Poland. This curious project would leave to Great Britain no
other ally in all Europe except its old enemy, France.

22. Mr. Fox, after the first day's discussion on the question for the
address, was at length driven to admit (to admit rather than to urge,
and that very faintly) that France had discovered ambitious views, which
none of his partisans, that I recollect, (Mr. Sheridan excepted,) did,
however, either urge or admit. What is remarkable enough, all the points
admitted against the Jacobins were brought to bear in their favor as
much as those in which they were defended. For when Mr. Fox admitted
that the conduct of the Jacobins did discover ambition, he always ended
his admission of their ambitious views by an apology for them, insisting
that the universally hostile disposition shown to them rendered their
ambition a sort of defensive policy. Thus, on whatever roads he
travelled, they all terminated in recommending a recognition of their
pretended republic, and in the plan of sending an ambassador to it. This
was the burden of all his song:--"Everything which we could reasonably
hope from war would be obtained from treaty." It is to be observed,
however, that, in all these debates, Mr. Fox never once stated to the
House upon what ground it was he conceived that all the objects of the
French system of united fanaticism and ambition would instantly be given
up, whenever England should think fit to propose a treaty. On proposing
so strange a recognition and so humiliating an embassy as he moved, he
was bound to produce his authority, if any authority he had. He ought to
have done this the rather, because Le Brun, in his first propositions,
and in his answers to Lord Grenville, defended, _on principle, not on
temporary convenience_, everything which was objected to France, and
showed not the smallest disposition to give up any one of the points in
discussion. Mr. Fox must also have known that the Convention had passed
to the order of the day, on a proposition to give some sort of
explanation or modification to the hostile decree of the 19th of
November for exciting insurrections in all countries,--a decree known to
be peculiarly pointed at Great Britain. The whole proceeding of the
French administration was the most remote that could be imagined from
furnishing any indication of a pacific disposition: for at the very time
in which it was pretended that the Jacobins entertained those boasted
pacific intentions, at the very time in which Mr. Fox was urging a
treaty with them, not content with refusing a modification of the decree
for insurrections, they published their ever-memorable decree of the
15th of December, 1792, for disorganizing every country in Europe into
which they should on any occasion set their foot; and on the 25th and
the 30th of the same month, they solemnly, and, on the last of these
days, practically, confirmed that decree.

23. But Mr. Fox had himself taken good care, in the negotiation he
proposed, that France should not be obliged to make any very great
concessions to her presumed moderation: for he had laid down one
general, comprehensive rule, with him (as he said) constant and
inviolable. This rule, in fact, would not only have left to the faction
in France all the property and power they had usurped at home, but most,
if not all, of the conquests which by their atrocious perfidy and
violence they had made abroad. The principle laid down by Mr. Fox is
this,--"_That every state, in the conclusion of a war, has a right to
avail itself of its conquests towards an indemnification_." This
principle (true or false) is totally contrary to the policy which this
country has pursued with France at various periods, particularly at the
Treaty of Ryswick, in the last century, and at the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, in this. Whatever the merits of his rule may be in the
eyes of neutral judges, it is a rule which no statesman before him ever
laid 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 parties
had been exchanged) Mr. Fox's English ambassador, by some odd mistake,
would find himself charged with the concerns of France. If we were to
leave France as she stood at the time when Mr. Fox proposed to treat
with her, that formidable power must have been infinitely strengthened,
and almost every other power in Europe as much weakened, by the
extraordinary basis which he laid for a treaty. For Avignon must go from
the Pope; Savoy (at least) from the King of Sardinia, if not Nice.
Liege, Mentz, Salm, Deux-Ponts, and Basle must be separated from
Germany. On this side of the Rhine, Liege (at least) must be lost to the
Empire, and added to France. Mr. Fox's general principle fully covered
all this. How much of these territories came within his rule he never
attempted to define. He kept a profound silence as to Germany. As to
the Netherlands he was something more explicit. He said (if I recollect
right) that France on that side might expect something towards
strengthening her frontier. As to the remaining parts of the
Netherlands, which he supposed France might consent to surrender, he
went so far as to declare that England ought not to permit the Emperor
to be repossessed of the remainder of the ten Provinces, but that _the
people_ should choose such a form of independent government as they
liked. This proposition of Mr. Fox was just the arrangement which the
usurpation in France had all along proposed to make. As the
circumstances were at that time, and have been ever since, his
proposition fully indicated what government the Flemings _must_ have in
the stated extent of what was left to them. A government so set up in
the Netherlands, whether compulsory, or by the choice of the
_sans-culottes_, (who he well knew were to be the real electors, and the
sole electors,) in whatever name it was to exist, must evidently depend
for 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, an
incorporation with France as a body of new Departments, just as Savoy
and Liege and the rest of their pretended independent popular
sovereignties have been united to their republic. Such an arrangement
must have destroyed Austria; it must have left Holland always at the
mercy of France; it must totally and forever cut off all political
communication between England and the Continent. Such must have been the
situation of Europe, according to Mr. Fox's system of politics, however
laudable his personal motives may have been in proposing so complete a
change in the whole system of Great Britain with regard to all the
Continental powers.

24. After it had been generally supposed that all public business was
over for the session, and that Mr. Fox had exhausted all the modes of
pressing this French scheme, he thought proper to take a step beyond
every expectation, and which demonstrated his wonderful eagerness and
perseverance in his cause, as well as the nature and true character of
the cause itself. This step was taken by Mr. Fox immediately after his
giving his assent to the grant of supply voted to him by Mr. Serjeant
Adair and a committee of gentlemen who assumed to themselves to act in
the name of the public. In the instrument of his acceptance of this
grant, Mr. Fox took occasion to assure them that he would always
persevere _in the same conduct_ which had procured to him so honorable a
mark of the public approbation. He was as good as his word.

25. It was not long before an opportunity was found, or made, for
proving the sincerity of his professions, and demonstrating his
gratitude to those who had given public and unequivocal marks of their
approbation of his late conduct. One of the most virulent of the Jacobin
faction, Mr. Gurney, a banker at Norwich, had all along distinguished
himself by his French politics. By the means of this gentleman, and of
his associates of the same description, one of the most insidious and
dangerous handbills that ever was seen had been circulated at Norwich
against the war, drawn up in an hypocritical tone of compassion for the
poor. This address to the populace of Norwich was to play in concert
with an address to Mr. Fox; it was signed by Mr. Gurney and the higher
part of the French fraternity in that town. In this paper Mr. Fox is
applauded for his conduct throughout the session, and requested, before
the prorogation, to make a motion for an immediate peace with France.

26. Mr. Fox did not revoke to this suit: he readily and thankfully
undertook the task assigned to him. Not content, however, with merely
falling in with their wishes, he proposed a task on his part to the
gentlemen of Norwich, which was, _that they should move the people
without doors to petition against the war_. He said, that, without such
assistance, little good could be expected from anything he might attempt
within the walls of the House of Commons. In the mean time, to animate
his Norwich friends in their endeavors to besiege Parliament, he
snatched the first opportunity to give notice of a motion which he very
soon after made, namely, to address the crown to make peace with France.
The address was so worded as to coöperate with the handbill in bringing
forward matter calculated to inflame the manufacturers throughout the
kingdom.

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

28. Mr. Fox could not be ignorant of the mistaken basis upon which his
motion was grounded. He was not ignorant, that, though the attempt of
Dumouriez on Holland, (so very near succeeding,) and the navigation of
the Scheldt, (a part of the same piece,) were among the _immediate_
causes, they were by no means the only causes, alleged for Parliament's
taking that offence at the proceedings of France, for which the Jacobins
were so prompt in declaring war upon this kingdom. Other full as weighty
causes had been alleged: they were,--1. The general overbearing and
desperate ambition of that faction; 2. Their actual attacks on every
nation in Europe; 3. Their usurpation of territories in the Empire with
the governments of which they had no pretence of quarrel; 4. Their
perpetual and irrevocable consolidation with their own dominions of
every territory of the Netherlands, of Germany, and of Italy, of which
they got a temporary possession; 5. The mischiefs attending the
prevalence of their system, which would make the success of their
ambitious designs a new and peculiar species of calamity in the world;
6. Their formal, public decrees, particularly those of the 19th of
November and 15th and 25th of December; 7. Their notorious attempts to
undermine the Constitution of this country; 8. Their public reception of
deputations of traitors for that direct purpose; 9. Their murder of
their sovereign, declared by most of the members of the Convention, who
spoke with their vote, (without a disavowal from any,) to be perpetrated
as an example to _all_ kings and a precedent for _all_ subjects to
follow. All these, and not the Scheldt alone, or the invasion of
Holland, were urged by the minister, and by Mr. Windham, by myself, and
by others who spoke in those debates, as causes for bringing France to a
sense of her wrong in the war which she declared against us. Mr. Fox
well knew that not one man argued for the necessity of a vigorous
resistance to France, who did not state the war as being for the very
existence of the social order here, and in every part of Europe,--who
did not state his opinion that this war was not at all a foreign war of
empire, 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 war
which, according to Mr. Fox and Mr. Gurney, we were to abandon before
the enemy had felt in the slightest degree the impression of our arms.

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

30. But we are not to be imposed on by forms of language. We must act on
the substance of things. To abandon Austria in this manner was to
abandon Holland itself. For suppose France, encouraged and strengthened
as she must have been by our treacherous desertion,--suppose France, I
say, to succeed against Austria, (as she had succeeded the very year
before,) England would, after its disarmament, have nothing in the world
but the inviolable faith of Jacobinism and the steady politics of
anarchy to depend upon, against France's renewing the very same attempts
upon Holland, and renewing them (considering what Holland was and is)
with much better prospects of success. Mr. Fox must have been well
aware, that, if we were to break with the greater Continental powers,
and particularly to come to a rupture with them, in the violent and
intemperate mode in which he would have made the breach, the defence of
Holland against a foreign enemy and a strong domestic faction must
hereafter 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 sole
object 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 completely
obtained) as to leave us nothing else to do than to cultivate a
peaceful, quiet correspondence with those quiet, peaceable, and moderate
people, the Jacobins of France.

31. To induce us to this, Mr. Fox labored hard to make it appear that
the powers with whom we acted were full as ambitious and as perfidious
as 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 active
ambition and ill faith against Austria. But supposing the combined
powers had been all thus faithless, and been all alike so, there was one
circumstance which made an essential difference between them and
France. I need not, therefore, be at the trouble of contesting this
point,--which, however, in this latitude, and as at all affecting Great
Britain and Holland, I deny utterly. Be it so. But the great monarchies
have it in their power to keep their faith, _if they please_, because
they are governments of established and recognized authority at home and
abroad. France had, in reality, no government. The very factions who
exercised power had no stability. The French Convention had no powers of
peace or war. Supposing the Convention to be free, (most assuredly it
was not,) they had shown no disposition to abandon their projects.
Though long driven out of Liege, it was not many days before Mr. Fox's
motion that they still continued to claim it as a country which their
principles of fraternity bound them to protect,--that is, to subdue and
to regulate at their pleasure. That party which Mr. Fox inclined most to
favor and trust, and from which he must have received his assurances,
(if any he did receive,) that is, the _Brissotins_, were then either
prisoners or fugitives. The party which prevailed over them (that of
Danton and Marat) was itself in a tottering condition, and was disowned
by a very great part of France. To say nothing of the royal party, who
were powerful and growing, and who had full as good a right to claim to
be the legitimate government as any of the Parisian factions with whom
he proposed to treat,--or rather, (as it seemed to me,) to surrender at
discretion.

32. But when Mr. Fox began to come from his general hopes of the
moderation of the Jacobins to particulars, he put the case that they
might not perhaps be willing to surrender Savoy. He certainly was not
willing to contest that point with them, but plainly and explicitly (as
I understood him) proposed to let them keep it,--though he knew (or he
was much worse informed than he would be thought) that England had at
the 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 of
this treaty, Mr. Fox proposed a direct and most scandalous breach of our
faith, formally and recently given. But to surrender Savoy was to
surrender a great deal more than so many square acres of land or so much
revenue. In its consequences, the surrender of Savoy was to make a
surrender to France of Switzerland and Italy, of both which countries
Savoy 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, are
by Mr. Fox called to be the judges in this matter.

A sure way, indeed, to encourage France not to make a surrender of this
key of Italy and Switzerland, or of Mentz, the key of Germany, or of any
other object whatsoever which she holds, is to let her see _that the
people of England raise a clamor against the war before terms are so
much as proposed on any side_. From that moment the Jacobins would be
masters of the terms. They would know that Parliament, at all hazards,
would force the king to a separate peace. The crown could not, in that
case, have any use of its judgment. Parliament could not possess more
judgment 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. In
effect, his two speeches were, through the whole, nothing more than an
amplification of the Norwich handbill. He rested the greatest part of
his 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 then
difficulties of the trade and manufacture could have no sort of
connection with our share in it. The war had hardly begun. We had
suffered neither by spoil, nor by defeat, nor by disgrace of any kind.
Public credit was so little impaired, that, instead of being supported
by any extraordinary aids from individuals, it advanced a credit to
individuals to the amount of five millions for the support of trade and
manufactures under their temporary difficulties, a thing before never
heard of,--a thing of which I do not commend the policy, but only state
it, to show that Mr. Fox's ideas of the effects of war were without any
trace of foundation.

33. It is impossible not to connect the arguments and proceedings of a
party with that of its leader,--especially when not disavowed or
controlled by him. Mr. Fox's partisans declaim against all the powers of
Europe, except the Jacobins, just as he does; but not having the same
reasons for management and caution which he has, they speak out. He
satisfies himself merely with making his invectives, and leaves others
to draw the conclusion. But they produce their Polish interposition for
the express purpose of leading to a French alliance. They urge their
French peace in order to make a junction with the Jacobins to oppose the
powers, whom, in their language, they call despots, and their leagues, a
combination of despots. Indeed, no man can look on the present posture
of Europe with the least degree of discernment, who will not be
thoroughly convinced that England must be the fast friend or the
determined 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 involved
us instantly in the most extensive and most ruinous wars, at the same
time that it would have made a broad highway (across which no human
wisdom could put an effectual barrier) for a mutual intercourse with the
fraternizing Jacobins on both sides, the consequences of which those
will 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 the
spirit of the principal arguments on which Mr. Fox thought proper to
rest this his grand and concluding motion, particularly such as were
drawn from the internal state of our affairs. Under a specious
appearance, (not uncommonly put on by men of unscrupulous ambition,)
that of tenderness and compassion to the poor, he did his best to appeal
to the judgments of the meanest and most ignorant of the people on the
merits of the war. He had before done something of the same dangerous
kind in his printed letter. The ground of a political war is of all
things that which the poor laborer and manufacturer are the least
capable of conceiving. This sort of people know in general that they
must suffer by war. It is a matter to which they are sufficiently
competent, because it is a matter of feeling. The _causes_ of a war are
not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote
considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances which
_they_ are utterly incapable of comprehending: and, indeed, it is not
every 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 no
attempt were made to inflame the passions) than to submit a matter on
discussion to a tribunal incapable of judging of more than _one side_ of
the question. It is at least as unjustifiable to inflame the passions of
such judges against _that side_ in favor of which they cannot so much as
comprehend the arguments. Before the prevalence of the French system,
(which, as far as it has gone, has extinguished the salutary prejudice
called our country,) nobody was more sensible of this important truth
than Mr. Fox; and nothing was more proper and pertinent, or was more
felt at the time, than his reprimand to Mr. Wilberforce for an
inconsiderate expression which tended to call in the judgment of the
poor to estimate the policy of war upon the standard of the taxes they
may 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 under
ambitious men for the pillage and destruction of the more eminent orders
and classes of the community. The thing, therefore, that a man not
fanatically attached to that dreadful project would most studiously
avoid is, to act a part with the French _Propagandists_, in attributing
(as they constantly do) all wars, and all the consequences of wars, to
the pride of those orders, and to their contempt of the weak and
indigent part of the society. The ruling Jacobins insist upon it, that
even the wars which they carry on with so much obstinacy against all
nations are made to prevent the poor from any longer being the
instruments and victims of kings, nobles, and the aristocracy of
burghers and rich men. They pretend that the destruction of kings,
nobles, and the aristocracy of burghers and rich men is the only means
of establishing an universal and perpetual peace. This is the great
drift of all their writings, from the time of the meeting of the states
of France, in 1789, to the publication of the last Morning Chronicle.
They insist that even the war which with so much boldness they have
declared against all nations is to prevent the poor from becoming the
instruments and victims of these persons and descriptions. It is but too
easy, if you once teach poor laborers and mechanics to defy their
prejudices, and, as this has been done with an industry scarcely
credible, to substitute the principles of fraternity in the room of that
salutary prejudice called our country,--it is, I say, but too easy to
persuade 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 conquest
are not terrors for _them_; it is easy to persuade them, that, for their
part, _they_ have nothing to lose,--and that their condition is not
likely to be altered for the worse, whatever party may happen to prevail
in the war. Under any circumstances this doctrine is highly dangerous,
as it tends to make separate parties of the higher and lower orders, and
to put their interests on a different bottom. But if the enemy you have
to deal with should appear, as France now appears, under the very name
and title of the deliverer of the poor and the chastiser of the rich,
the former class would readily become not an indifferent spectator of
the war, but would be ready to enlist in the faction of the
enemy,--which they would consider, though under a foreign name, to be
more connected with them than an adverse description in the same land.
All the props of society would be drawn from us by these doctrines, and
the very foundations of the public defence would give way in an instant.

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

37. This last motion of Mr. Fox bound up the whole of his politics
during the session. This motion had many circumstances, particularly in
the Norwich correspondence, by which the mischief of all the others was
aggravated beyond measure. Yet this last motion, far the worst of Mr.
Fox's proceedings, was the best supported of any of them, except his
amendment to the address. The Duke of Portland had directly engaged to
support the war;--here was a motion as directly made to force the crown
to put an end to it before a blow had been struck. The efforts of the
faction have so prevailed that some of his Grace's nearest friends have
actually voted for that motion; some, after showing themselves, went
away; others did not appear at all. So it must be, where a man is for
any time supported from personal considerations, without reference to
his public conduct. Through the whole of this business, the spirit of
fraternity appears to me to have been the governing principle. It might
be shameful for any man, above the vulgar, to show so blind a partiality
even to his own country as Mr. Fox appears, on all occasions, this
session, to have shown to France. Had Mr. Fox been a minister, and
proceeded on the principles laid down by him, I believe there is little
doubt he would have been considered as the most criminal statesman that
ever lived in this country. I do not know why a statesman out of place
is not to be judged in the same manner, unless we can excuse him by
pleading in his favor a total indifference to principle, and that he
would act and think in quite a different way, if he were in office. This
I will not suppose. One may think better of him, and that, in case of
his power, he might change his mind. But supposing, that, from better or
from worse motives, he might change his mind on his acquisition of the
favor of the crown, I seriously fear, that, if the king should to-morrow
put power into his hands, and that his good genius would inspire him
with maxims very different from those he has promulgated, he would not
be able to get the better of the ill temper and the ill doctrines he has
been the means of exciting and propagating throughout the kingdom. From
the very beginning of their inhuman and unprovoked rebellion and
tyrannic usurpation, he has covered the predominant faction in France,
and their adherents here, with the most exaggerated panegyrics; neither
has he missed a single opportunity of abusing and vilifying those who,
in uniform concurrence with the Duke of Portland's and Lord
Fitzwilliam's opinion, have maintained the true grounds of the
Revolution Settlement in 1688. He lamented all the defeats of the
French; he rejoiced in all their victories,--even when these victories
threatened to overwhelm the continent of Europe, and, by facilitating
their means of penetrating into Holland, to bring this most dreadful of
all evils with irresistible force to the very doors, if not into the
very heart, of our country. To this hour he always speaks of every
thought of overturning the French Jacobinism by force, on the part of
any power whatsoever, as an attempt unjust and cruel, and which he
reprobates with horror. If any of the French Jacobin leaders are spoken
of with hatred or scorn, he falls upon those who take that liberty with
all the zeal and warmth with which men of honor defend their particular
and bosom friends, when attacked. He always represents their cause as a
cause of liberty, and all who oppose it as partisans of despotism. He
obstinately continues to consider the great and growing vices, crimes,
and disorders of that country as only evils of passage, which are to
produce a permanently happy state of order and freedom. He represents
these disorders exactly in the same way and with the same limitations
which are used by one of the two great Jacobin factions: I mean that of
Pétion and Brissot. Like them, he studiously confines his horror and
reprobation only to the massacres of the 2d of September, and passes by
those of the 10th of August, as well as the imprisonment and deposition
of the king, which were the consequences of that day, as indeed were the
massacres themselves to which he confines his censure, though they were
not actually perpetrated till early in September. Like that faction, he
condemns, not the deposition, or the proposed exile or perpetual
imprisonment, but only the murder of the king. Mr. Sheridan, on every
occasion, palliates all their massacres committed in every part of
France, as the effects of a natural indignation at the exorbitances of
despotism, 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 patriotic
prince, and his suffering, faithful subjects, with all the crimes of the
new anarchical tyranny under which the one has been murdered and the
others are oppressed. Those continual either praises or palliating
apologies of everything done in France, and those invectives as
uniformly vomited out upon all those who venture to express their
disapprobation of such proceedings, coming from a man of Mr. Fox's fame
and authority, and one who is considered as the person to whom a great
party of the wealthiest men of the kingdom look up, have been the cause
why the principle of French fraternity formerly gained the ground which
at one time it had obtained in this country. It will infallibly recover
itself again, and in ten times a greater degree, if the kind of peace,
in the manner which he preaches, ever shall be established with the
reigning faction in France.

38. So far as to the French practices with regard to France and the
other powers of Europe. As to their principles and doctrines with
regard to the constitution of states, Mr. Fox studiously, on all
occasions, and indeed when no occasion calls for it, (as on the debate
of the petition for reform,) brings forward and asserts their
fundamental and fatal principle, pregnant with every mischief and every
crime, namely, that "in every country the people is the legitimate
sovereign": exactly conformable to the declaration of the French clubs
and legislators:--"La souveraineté est _une, indivisible, inalienable,
et imprescriptible_; elle appartient à la nation; aucune _section_ du
peuple ni aucun _individu_ ne peut s'en attribuer l'exercise." This
confounds, in a manner equally mischievous and stupid, the origin of a
government from the people with its continuance in their hands. I
believe that no such doctrine has ever been heard of in any public act
of any government whatsoever, until it was adopted (I think from the
writings of Rousseau) by the French Assemblies, who have made it the
basis of their Constitution at home, and of the matter of their
apostolate in every country. These and other wild declarations of
abstract principle, Mr. Fox says, are in themselves perfectly right and
true; though in some cases he allows the French draw absurd consequences
from them. But I conceive he is mistaken. The consequences are most
logically, though most mischievously, drawn from the premises and
principles by that wicked and ungracious faction. The fault is in the
foundation.

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

40. Not the least alarming of the proceedings of Mr. Fox and his friends
in this session, especially taken in concurrence with their whole
proceedings with regard to France and its principles, is their eagerness
at this season, under pretence of Parliamentary reforms, (a project
which had been for some time rather dormant,) to discredit and disgrace
the House of Commons. For this purpose these gentlemen had found a way
to insult the House by several atrocious libels in the form of
petitions. In particular they brought up a libel, or rather a complete
digest of libellous matter, from the club called the Friends of the
People. It is, indeed, at once the most audacious and the most insidious
of all the performances of that kind which have yet appeared. It is said
to be the penmanship of Mr. Tierney, to bring whom into Parliament the
Duke 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 its
precedent, it is observable that this is the first petition (if I
remember right) _coming from a club or association, signed by
individuals, denoting neither local residence nor corporate capacity_.
This mode of petition, not being strictly illegal or informal, though in
its spirit in the highest degree mischievous, may and will lead to other
things of that nature, tending to bring these clubs and associations to
the French model, and to make them in the end answer French purposes: I
mean, that, without legal names, these clubs will be led to assume
political capacities; that they may debate the forms of Constitution;
and that from their meetings they may insolently dictate their will to
the regular authorities of the kingdom, in the manner in which the
Jacobin clubs issue their mandates to the National Assembly or the
National Convention. The audacious remonstrance, I observe, is signed
by all of that association (the Friends of the People) _who are not in
Parliament_, and it was supported most strenuously by all the
associators _who are members_, with Mr. Fox at their head. He and they
contended for referring this libel to a committee. Upon the question of
that reference they grounded all their debate for a change in the
constitution of Parliament. The pretended petition is, in fact, a
regular charge or impeachment of the House of Commons, digested into a
number of articles. This plan of reform is not a criminal impeachment,
but a matter of prudence, to be submitted to the public wisdom, which
must be as well apprised of the facts as petitioners can be. But those
accusers of the House of Commons have proceeded upon the principles of a
criminal process, and have had the effrontery to offer proof on each
article.

42. This charge the party of Mr. Fox maintained article by article,
beginning with the first,--namely, the interference of peers at
elections, and their nominating in effect several of the members of the
House of Commons. In the printed list of grievances which they made out
on the occasion, and in support of their charge, is found the borough
for which, under Lord Fitzwilliam's influence, I now sit. By this
remonstrance, and its object, they hope to defeat the operation of
property in elections, and in reality to dissolve the connection and
communication of interests which makes the Houses of Parliament a mutual
support to each other. Mr. Fox and the Friends of the People are not so
ignorant as not to know that peers do not interfere in elections as
peers, but as men of property; they well know that the House of Lords
is by itself the feeblest part of the Constitution; they know that the
House of Lords is supported only by its connections with the crown and
with the House of Commons, and that without this double connection the
Lords could not exist a single year. They know that all these parts of
our Constitution, whilst they are balanced as opposing interests, are
also connected as friends; otherwise nothing but confusion could be the
result of such a complex Constitution. It is natural, therefore, that
they who wish the common destruction of the whole and of all its parts
should contend for their total separation. But as the House of Commons
is 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 that
link (as it is natural enough) that their incessant attacks are
directed. That artificial representation of the people being once
discredited 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 lean
to a representation of the people by the head,--that is, to _individual
representation_. None of them, that I recollect, except Mr. Fox,
directly rejected it. It is remarkable, however, that he only rejected
it by simply declaring an opinion. He let all the argument go against
his opinion. All the proceedings and arguments of his reforming friends
lead to individual representation, and to nothing else. It deserves to
be attentively observed, _that this individual representation is the
only plan of their reform which has been explicitly proposed_. In the
mean time, the conduct of Mr. Fox appears to be far more inexplicable,
on any good ground, than theirs, who propose the individual
representation; for he neither proposes anything, nor even suggests that
he has anything to propose, in lieu of the present mode of constituting
the House of Commons; on the contrary, he declares against all the plans
which have yet been suggested, either from himself or others: yet, thus
unprovided with any plan whatsoever, he pressed forward this unknown
reform with all possible warmth; and for that purpose, in a speech of
several hours, he urged the referring to a committee the libellous
impeachment of the House of Commons by the association of the Friends of
the People. But for Mr. Fox to discredit Parliament _as it stands_, to
countenance leagues, covenants, and associations for its further
discredit, to render it perfectly odious and contemptible, and at the
same time to propose nothing at all in place of what he disgraces, is
worse, if possible, than to contend for personal individual
representation, and is little less than demanding, in plain terms, to
bring on plain anarchy.

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

45. It is also not to be forgotten, that Mr. Fox, and all who hold with
him, on this, as on all other occasions of pretended reform, most
bitterly reproach Mr. Pitt with treachery, in declining to support the
scandalous charges and indefinite projects of this infamous libel from
the Friends of the People. By the animosity with which they persecute
all 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 their
design, they shall by a false shame keep him fast in it forever. Many
they have so hampered.

46. I know it is usual, when the peril and alarm of the hour appears to
be 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 anxiety
with regard to the dangers which in my opinion are still to be
apprehended both at home and abroad. This business has cast deep roots.
Whether it is necessarily connected in theory with Jacobinism is not
worth a dispute. The two things are connected in fact. The partisans of
the one are the partisans of the other. I know it is common with those
who are favorable to the gentlemen of Mr. Fox's party and to their
leader, though not at all devoted to all their reforming projects or
their Gallican politics, to argue, in palliation of their conduct, that
it is not in their power to do all the harm which their actions
evidently tend to. It is said, that, as the people will not support
them, they may safely be indulged in those eccentric fancies of reform,
and those theories which lead to nothing. This apology is not very much
to the honor of those politicians whose interests are to be adhered to
in defiance of their conduct. I cannot flatter myself that these
incessant attacks on the constitution of Parliament are safe. It is not
in my power to despise the unceasing efforts of a confederacy of about
fifty persons of eminence: men, for the far greater part, of very ample
fortunes either in possession or in expectancy; men of decided
characters and vehement passions; men of very great talents of all
kinds, of much boldness, and of the greatest possible spirit of
artifice, intrigue, adventure, and enterprise, all operating with
unwearied activity and perseverance. These gentlemen are much stronger,
too, without doors than some calculate. They have the more active part
of the Dissenters with them, and the whole clan of speculators of all
denominations,--a large and growing species. They have that floating
multitude which goes with events, and which suffers the loss or gain of
a battle to decide its opinions of right and wrong. As long as by every
art this party keeps alive a spirit of disaffection against the very
Constitution of the kingdom, and attributes, as lately it has been in
the habit of doing, all the public misfortunes to that Constitution, it
is absolutely _impossible_ but that some moment must arrive in which
they will be enabled to produce a pretended reform and a real
revolution. If ever the body of this _compound Constitution_ of ours is
subverted, either in favor of unlimited monarchy or of wild democracy,
that ruin will _most certainly_ be the result of this very sort of
machinations against the House of Commons. It is not from a confidence
in the views or intentions of any statesman that I think he is to be
indulged in these perilous amusements.

47. Before it is made the great object of any man's political life to
raise another to power, it is right to consider what are the real
dispositions of the person to be so elevated. We are not to form our
judgment on those dispositions from the rules and principles of a court
of justice, but from those of private discretion,--not looking for what
would serve to criminate another, but what is sufficient to direct
ourselves. By a comparison of a series of the discourses and actions of
certain men for a reasonable length of time, it is impossible not to
obtain sufficient indication of the general tendency of their views and
principles. There is no other rational mode of proceeding. It is true,
that in some one or two perhaps not well-weighed expressions, or some
one or two unconnected and doubtful affairs, we may and ought to judge
of 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 regular
course of systematic action, or of constant and repeated discourse. It
is against every principle of common sense, and of justice to one's self
and to the public, to judge of a series of speeches and actions from the
man, and not of the man from the whole tenor of his language and
conduct. I have stated the above matters, not as inferring a criminal
charge of evil intention. If I had meant to do so, perhaps they are
stated with tolerable exactness. But I have no such view. The intentions
of these gentlemen may be very pure. I do not dispute it. But I think
they are in some great error. If these things are done by Mr. Fox and
his friends with good intentions, they are not done less dangerously;
for it shows these good intentions are not under the direction of safe
maxims and principles.

48. Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, and the gentlemen who call themselves the
Phalanx, have not been so very indulgent to others. They have thought
proper to ascribe to those members of the House of Commons, who, in
exact agreement with the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, abhor
and oppose the French system, the basest and most unworthy motives for
their conduct;--as if none could oppose that atheistic, immoral, and
impolitic project set up in France, so disgraceful and destructive, as I
conceive, to human nature itself, but with some sinister intentions.
They treat those members on all occasions with a sort of lordly
insolence, though they are persons that (whatever homage they may pay to
the eloquence of the gentlemen who choose to look down upon them with
scorn) are not their inferiors in any particular which calls for and
obtains just consideration from the public: not their inferiors in
knowledge of public law, or of the Constitution of the kingdom; not
their inferiors in their acquaintance with its foreign and domestic
interests; not their inferiors in experience or practice of business;
not their inferiors in moral character; not their inferiors in the
proofs they have given of zeal and industry in the service of their
country. Without denying to these gentlemen the respect and
consideration which it is allowed justly belongs to them, we see no
reason why they should not as well be obliged to defer something to our
opinions as that we should be bound blindly and servilely to follow
those of Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, Mr. Courtenay, Mr. Lambton,
Mr. Whitbread, Mr. Taylor, and others. We are members of Parliament and
their equals. We never consider ourselves as their followers. These
gentlemen (some of them hardly born when some of us came into
Parliament) have thought proper to treat us as deserters,--as if we had
been listed into their phalanx like soldiers, and had sworn to live and
die in their French principles. This insolent claim of superiority on
their 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 the
Society for Constitutional Information, and (I believe) the Friends of
the People, as well as some clubs in Scotland, have, indeed, declared,
"that their confidence in and attachment to Mr. Fox has lately been
confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies" (as they are
called) "against him." It is true, Mr. Fox and his friends have those
testimonies in their favor, against certain old friends of the Duke of
Portland. Yet, on a full, serious, and, I think, dispassionate
consideration of the whole of what Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan and their
friends have acted, said, and written, in this session, instead of doing
anything which might tend to procure power, or any share of it
whatsoever, to them or to their phalanx, (as they call it,) or to
increase their credit, influence, or popularity in the nation, I think
it one of my most serious and important public duties, in whatsoever
station I may be placed for the short time I have to live, effectually
to employ my best endeavors, by every prudent and every lawful means, to
traverse all their designs. I have only to lament that my abilities are
not greater, and that my probability of life is not better, for the
more effectual pursuit of that object. But I trust that neither the
principles nor exertions will die with me. I am the rather confirmed in
this my resolution, and in this my wish of transmitting it, because
every ray of hope concerning a possible control or mitigation of the
enormous mischiefs which the principles of these gentlemen, and which
their connections, full as dangerous as their principles, might receive
from the influence of the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, on
becoming their colleagues in office, is now entirely banished from the
mind 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 have
not, through this session, been able to prevail on them to forbear, or
to 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 declared
opinions, and the uniform line of conduct conformable to those opinions,
pursued by Mr. Fox, must become a matter of serious alarm, if he should
obtain a power either at court or in Parliament or in the nation at
large, and for this plain reason: he must be the most active and
efficient 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 delivered
and avowed principles and maxims of policy, as to need a watch and check
on them in the exercise of the highest power, ought, in my opinion, to
make every man, who is not of the same principles and guided by the
same maxims, a little cautious how he makes himself one of the
traverses of a ladder to help such a man, or such a set of men, to climb
up to the highest authority. A minister of this country is to be
controlled 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 a
scene of anarchy. Besides, Mr. Fox is a man of an aspiring and
commanding mind, made rather to control than to be controlled, and he
never will be nor can be in any administration in which he will be
guided by any of those whom I have been accustomed to confide in. It is
absurd to think that he would or could. If his own opinions do not
control him, nothing can. When we consider of an adherence to a man
which leads to his power, we must not only see what the man is, but how
he stands related. It is not to be forgotten that Mr. Fox acts in close
and inseparable connection with another gentleman of exactly the same
description as himself, and who, perhaps, of the two, is the leader. The
rest of the body are not a great deal more tractable; and over them, if
Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan have authority, most assuredly the Duke of
Portland has not the smallest degree of influence.

51. One must take care that a blind partiality to some persons, and as
blind an hatred to others, may not enter into our minds under a color of
inflexible public principle. We hear, as a reason for clinging to Mr.
Fox at present, that nine years ago Mr. Pitt got into power by
mischievous intrigues with the court, with the Dissenters, and with
other factious people out of Parliament, to the discredit and weakening
of the power of the House of Commons. His conduct nine years ago I still
hold to be very culpable. There are, however, many things very culpable
that I do not know how to punish. My opinion on such matters I must
submit to the good of the state, as I have done on other occasions,--and
particularly with regard to the authors and managers of the American
war, with whom I have acted, both in office and in opposition, with
great confidence and cordiality, though I thought many of their acts
criminal and impeachable. Whilst the misconduct of Mr. Pitt and his
associates was yet recent, it was not possible to get Mr. Fox of himself
to take a single step, or even to countenance others in taking any step,
upon the ground of that misconduct and false policy; though, if the
matters had been then taken up and pursued, such a step could not have
appeared 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's
friends were actually, and with no small earnestness, looking out to a
coalition with that gentleman. For years I never heard this circumstance
of Mr. Pitt's misconduct on that occasion mentioned by Mr. Fox, either
in public or in private, as a ground for opposition to that minister.
All opposition, from that period to this very session, has proceeded
upon the separate measures as they separately arose, without any
vindictive 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 this
day I see no remedy for what was done in 1784. I had no great hopes
even at the time. I was therefore very eager to record a remonstrance on
the journals of the House of Commons, as a caution against such a
popular delusion in times to come; and this I then feared, and now am
certain, is all that could be done. I know of no way of animadverting on
the 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. As
little, or rather less, am I able to coerce the people at large, who
behaved very unwisely and intemperately on that occasion. Mr. Pitt was
then accused, by me as well as others, of attempting to be minister
without enjoying the confidence of the House of Commons, though he did
enjoy the confidence of the crown. That House of Commons, whose
confidence he did not enjoy, unfortunately did not itself enjoy the
confidence (though we well deserved it) either of the crown or of the
public. For want of that confidence, the then House of Commons did not
survive the contest. Since that period Mr. Pitt has enjoyed the
confidence of the crown, and of the Lords, and _of the House of
Commons_, through two successive Parliaments; and I suspect that he has
ever 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. Before
whom, then, is Mr. Pitt to be impeached, and by whom? The more I
consider the matter, the more firmly I am convinced that the idea of
proscribing Mr. Pitt _indirectly_, when you cannot _directly punish_
him, is as chimerical a project, and as unjustifiable, as it would be to
have proscribed Lord North. For supposing that by indirect ways of
opposition, by opposition upon measures which do not relate to the
business of 1784, but which on other grounds might prove unpopular, you
were to drive him from his seat, this would be no example whatever of
punishment for the matters we charge as offences in 1784. On a cool and
dispassionate view of the affairs of this time and country, it appears
obvious 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 the
idea of his power a matter of serious alarm to many people who were very
little pleased with the proceedings of Mr. Pitt in the beginning of his
administration. They like neither the conduct of Mr. Pitt in 1784, nor
that of Mr. Fox in 1793; but they estimate which of the evils is most
pressing at the time, and what is likely to be the consequence of a
change. If Mr. Fox be wedded, they must be sensible that his opinions
and principles on the now existing state of things at home and abroad
must be taken as his portion. In his train must also be taken the whole
body of gentlemen who are pledged to him and to each other, and to their
common politics and principles. I believe no king of Great Britain ever
will adopt, for his confidential servants, that body of gentlemen,
holding that body of principles. Even if the present king or his
successor should think fit to take that step, I apprehend a general
discontent of those who wish that this nation and that Europe should
continue in their present state would ensue,--a discontent which,
combined with the principles and progress of the new men in power, would
shake this kingdom to its foundations. I do not believe any one
political conjecture can be more certain than this.

53. Without at all defending or palliating Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784, I
must observe, that the crisis of 1793, with regard to everything at home
and abroad, is full as important as that of 1784 ever was, and, if for
no other reason, by being present, is much more important. It is not to
nine 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 is
at _this_ very time, and in _this_ very session, that, if they had not
been strenuously resisted, they would not only have discredited the
House of Commons, (as Mr. Pitt did in 1784, when he persuaded the king
to reject their advice, and to appeal from them to the people,) but, in
my opinion, would have been the means of wholly subverting the House of
Commons and the House of Peers, and the whole Constitution actual and
virtual, together with the safety and independence of this nation, and
the peace and settlement of every state in the now Christian world. It
is 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 the
most dreadful and the most shameful evil which ever afflicted mankind, a
thing which goes beyond the power of all calculation in its
mischief,--and that, if it is suffered to exist in France, we must in
England, and speedily too, fall into that calamity.

54. I figure to myself the purpose of these gentlemen accomplished, and
this ministry destroyed. I see that the persons who in that case must
rule can be no other than Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, the Marquis
of Lansdowne, Lord Thurlow, Lord Lauderdale, and the Duke of Norfolk,
with the other chiefs of the Friends of the People, the Parliamentary
reformers, and the admirers of the French Revolution. The principal of
these are all formally pledged to their projects. If the Duke of
Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam should be admitted into that system, (as
they might and probably would be,) it is quite certain they could not
have the smallest weight in it,--less, indeed, than what they now
possess, if less were possible: because they would be less wanted than
they now are; and because all those who wished to join them, and to act
under them, have been rejected by the Duke of Portland and Lord
Fitzwilliam themselves; and Mr. Fox, finding them thus by themselves
disarmed, has built quite a new fabric, upon quite a new foundation.
There is no trifling on this subject. We see very distinctly before us
the ministry that would be formed and the plan that would be pursued. If
we like the plan, we must wish the power of those who are to carry it
into execution; but to pursue the political exaltation of those whose
political measures we disapprove and whose principles we dissent from is
a species of modern politics not easily comprehensible, and which must
end 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, at
present, the former is in the interest of his country, and of the order
of 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 sure
it is sufficient to make men as virtuous, as happy, and as knowing as
anything which Mr. Fox, and his friends abroad or at, home, would
substitute in its place; and I should be sorry that any set of
politicians should obtain power in England whose principles or schemes
should lead them to countenance persons or factions whose object is to
introduce some new devised order of things into England, or to support
that order where it is already introduced, in France,--a place in which
if it can be fixed, in my mind, it must have a certain and decided
influence in and upon this kingdom.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is an exception, that in one of his last speeches (but not
before) 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 and
various histories. As might be expected, the royalists and the
republicans have differed a good deal in their accounts of the
principles of that Revolution, of the springs which have set it in
motion, 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 undoubtedly
object to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of a
royalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmly
attached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and not
of friends to despotism, the royal party is composed,)--that their very
affection to this generous and manly cause, and their abhorrence of a
Revolution not less fatal to liberty than to government, may possibly
lead them in some particulars to a more harsh representation of the
proceedings of their adversaries than would be allowed by the cold
neutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of error arises from a
source highly laudable; but the exactness of truth may suffer even from
the feelings of virtue. History will do justice to the intentions of
worthy men, but it will be on its guard against their infirmities; it
will examine with great strictness of scrutiny whatever appears from a
writer in favor of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapes
him, and makes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight.

In this important controversy, the translator of the following work
brings forward to the English tribunal of opinion the testimony of a
witness beyond all exception. His competence is undoubted. He knows
everything which concerns this Revolution to the bottom. He is a chief
actor in all the scenes which he presents. No man can object to him as a
royalist: the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a more
determined enemy. In a word, it is BRISSOT. It is Brissot, the
republican, the Jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give an
account of Jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy.

It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius of
Jacobinism and its effects is not confined to the period in which that
faction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those very
important particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of the
preceding period before the great schism, and whilst the Jacobins acted
as one body; insomuch that the far greater part of the proceedings of
the ruling powers since the commencement of the Revolution in France, so
strikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot,
were the acts of Brissot himself and his associates. All the members of
the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain
could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid
transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the
greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the
common liberty and safety.

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

The rights of men and the new principles of liberty and equality were
very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
tranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respect
in the title and in the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a prince
succeeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of a
succession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, found
nothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity and dutiful
allegiance to Messrs. Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Anacharsis Clootz,
and Thomas Paine.

In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern the
people, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult,
but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials and
by such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplish
the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the
principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. Ill as the disguise
became them, they began to assume the mask of an austere and rigid
virtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in some
of them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult and
confusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order,
discipline, quiet, and obedience to authority; they even showed some
sort of disposition to protect such property as had not been
confiscated. They who on every occasion had discovered a sort of furious
thirst of blood and a greedy appetite for slaughter, who avowed and
gloried in the murders and massacres of the 14th of July, of the 5th and
6th of October, and of the 10th of August, now began to be squeamish and
fastidious with regard to those of the 2nd of September.

In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the 10th
of August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained not
the smallest credit for humanity. They endeavored to establish a
distinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of
murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own purposes, without
endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they prepared
for their enemies.

Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction. His morals
had furnished little matter of exception against him. Old, domestic, and
uxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was therefore
set up as the _Cato_ of the republican party, which did not abound in
such characters.

This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, in
which he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal present
made by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministers
under the new Constitution. Amongst his colleagues were Clavière and
Servan. All the three have since that time either lost their heads by
the axe of their associates in rebellion, or, to evade their own
revolutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands.

These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethrone
him. Nobody who considers the circumstances which preceded the
deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequent
conduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such a
conspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himself
obliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him to
choose such regicide ministers constrained him to replace them by
Dumouriez the Jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of a
better 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. This
paper Roland a few days after delivered to the National Assembly,[2] who
instantly published and dispersed it over all France; and in order to
give it the stronger operation, they declared that he and his brother
ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of the
writings which have inflamed the Jacobin spirit to a savage fury ever
worked up a fiercer ferment through the whole mass of the republicans
in every part of France.

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

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

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

On this proscription of the clergy a principal part of the ostensible
quarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the time
of the authorized publication of this libel, some of the manoeuvres long
and uniformly pursued for the king's deposition became more and more
evident and declared.

The 10th of August came on, and in the manner in which Roland had
predicted: it was followed by the same consequences. The king was
deposed, after cruel massacres in the courts and the apartments of his
palace and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason to
his old master, Roland was by his new masters named Minister of the Home
Department.

The massacres of the 2nd of September were begotten by the massacres of
the 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. The
ordinary jails were all filled with prepared victims; and when they
overflowed, churches were turned into jails. At this time the relentless
Roland had the care of the general police;--he had for his colleague the
bloody Danton, who was Minister of Justice; the insidious Pétion was
Mayor of Paris; the treacherous Manuel was Procurator of the Common
Hall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authors
of this massacre. Lest the national guard should, by their very name, be
reminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow-citizens,
the Common Council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think of
resisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers nor
their arms were at all formidable,) obliged those guards to draw the
charges from their muskets, and took away their bayonets. One of their
journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading
statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he
formerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to the
paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the
galleys; but, by the benignity of the late king, this felon (to be one
day advanced to the rank of a regicide) had been pardoned and released
at the intercession of the ambassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitude
was such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately been
rewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, in
mockery of all criminal law, to be Minister of Justice: he became from
his elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has since
received the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death.

It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed
at this crisis. The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland
appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting
magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first
day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after
the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate,
verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according
to the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity,
courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody
proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that
day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a full
knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been
formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which he more than
insinuates was the work of his late unhappy master,--who was universally
known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty
subjects to an excess.

"Without the day of the 10th," says he, "it is evident that we should
have been lost. The court, prepared for a long time, waited for the
hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris the
standard of death, and to reign there by terror. The sense of the
people, (_le sentiment_,) always just and ready when their opinion is
not corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, and
rendered it fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant
which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th of
July, 1789, to the present time:--"It is in the nature of things,"
continues he, "and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring
with it _some_ excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars
_long_ after the tempest; but _everything has bounds_, which ought _at
length_ to be observed."

In this memorable epistle, he considers such _excesses_ as fatalities
arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be
punished. He allows a space of time for the duration of these
agitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his
measure, he thinks it may be _long_. But he would have things to cease
_at length_. But when? and where?--When they may approach his own
person.

"_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 imagination
and 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 the
sections, convoked by the ministers, with the view of conciliating all
minds, and of mutual explanation, I perceived _that distrust which
suspects, interrogates, and fetters operations_."

In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) this
virtuous Minister of the Home Department, and all the magistracy of
Paris, spent the first day of the massacre, the atrocity of which has
spread horror and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that the
putting a stop to the massacre had any part in the object of their
meeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was a
minister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of his
fellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferent
about its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says "that
their hidden enemies may make use of this _agitation_" (the tender
appellation which he gives to horrid massacre) "to hurt _their best
friends and their most able defenders. Already the example begins_: let
it restrain and arrest a _just_ rage. Indignation carried to its height
commences proscriptions which fall only on the _guilty_, but in which
error and particular passions may shortly involve the _honest man_."

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

His observations on the massacre of the preceding day are such as cannot
be passed over. "Yesterday," said he, "was a day upon the events of
which it is perhaps necessary to leave a _veil_. I know that the people
with their vengeance _mingled a sort of justice_: they did not take for
victims _all_ who presented themselves to their fury; they directed it
to _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 be
sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to _villains and
traitors_ to misrepresent this _effervescence_, and that it must be
checked; I know that we owe to all France the declaration, that the
_executive power_ could not foresee or prevent this excess; I know that
it is due to the constituted authorities to place a limit to it, or
consider themselves as abolished."

In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veil
over it,--which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and to
extinguish all compassion for the sufferers. He apologizes for it; in
fact, he justifies it. He who (as the reader has just seen in what is
quoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at "vague
denunciations," when made against himself, and from which he then feared
nothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed to
consider the charge of a conspiracy to massacre the Parisians, brought
against his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or rather
upon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrous
proceedings against him. He is not ashamed to call the murder of the
unhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation
whatsoever, a "_vengeance_ mingled with a _sort of justice_"; he
observes that they "had been a long time spared by the sword of the
law," and calls by anticipation all those who should represent this
"_effervescence_" in other colors _villains and traitors_: he did not
than foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under the
necessity of assuming the pretended character of this new sort of
"_villany and treason_", in the hope of obliterating the memory of their
former real _villanies and treasons_; he did not foresee that in the
course of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and his
faction, 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 of
the assassins, their policy, and even what they "believed." How could
this be, if he had no connection with them? He praises the murderers for
not having taken as yet _all_ the lives of those who had, as he calls
it, "_presented themselves_ as victims to their fury." He paints the
miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in
the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as _presenting themselves_
as victims to their fury,--as if death was their choice, or (allowing
the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by
some accident _presented_ to the fury of their assassins: whereas he
knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent
victims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure to
find 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 circumstance
on the very day of the commencement of the massacres, when, in all
probability, he had begun this letter,--for he presented it to the
Assembly on the very next.

Whilst, however, he defends these acts, he is conscious that they will
appear in another light to the world. He therefore acquits the executive
power, that is, he acquits himself, (but only by his own assertion,) of
those acts of "_vengeance mixed with a sort of justice_," as an
"_excess_ which he could neither foresee nor prevent." He could not, he
says, foresee these acts, when he tells us the people of Paris had
sagacity so well to foresee the designs of the court on the 10th of
August,--to foresee them so well as to mark the precise epoch on which
they were to be executed, and to contrive to anticipate them on the very
day: he could not foresee these events, though he declares in this very
letter that victory _must_ bring with it some _excess_,--that "the sea
roars _long_ after the tempest." So far as to his foresight. As to his
disposition to prevent, if he had foreseen, the massacres of that
day,--this will be judged by his care in putting a stop to the massacre
then going on. This was no matter of foresight: he was in the very midst
of it. He does not so much as pretend that he had used any force to put
a stop to it. But if he had used any, the sanction given under his hand
to a sort of justice in the murderers was enough to disarm the
protecting force.

That approbation of what they had already done had its natural effect on
the executive assassins, then in the paroxysm of their fury, as well as
on their employers, then in the midst of the execution of their
deliberate, cold-blooded system of murder. He did not at all differ from
either of them in the principle of those executions, but only in the
time of their duration,--and that only as it affected himself. This,
though to him a great consideration, was none to his confederates, who
were at the same time his rivals. They were encouraged to accomplish the
work they had in hand. They did accomplish it; and whilst this grave
moral epistle from a grave minister, recommending a cessation of their
work of "vengeance mingled with a sort of justice," was before a grave
assembly, the authors of the massacres proceeded without interruption in
their business for four days together,--that is, until the seventh of
that month, and until all the victims of the first proscription in Paris
and at Versailles and several other places were immolated at the shrine
of the grim Moloch of liberty and equality. All the priests, all the
loyalists, 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 remark
how the nerve and vigor of his style, which had spoken so potently to
his sovereign, is relaxed when he addresses himself to the
_sans-culottes,_--how that strength and dexterity of arm, with which he
parries and beats down the sceptre, is enfeebled and lost when he comes
to fence with the poniard. When he speaks to the populace, he can no
longer be direct. The whole compass of the language is tried to find
synonymes and circumlocutions for massacre and murder. Things are never
called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes _agitation_,
sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_, sometimes too continued
an exercise of a _revolutionary power_.

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

Under the cover of these artifices, Roland, Brissot, and their party
hoped to gain the bankers, merchants, substantial tradesmen, hoarders of
assignats, and purchasers of the confiscated lands of the clergy and
gentry to join with their party, as holding out some sort of security to
the effects which they possessed, whether these effects were the
acquisitions of fair commerce, or the gains of jobbing in the
misfortunes of their country and the plunder of their fellow-citizens.
In this design the party of Roland and Brissot succeeded in a great
degree. They obtained a majority in the National Convention. Composed,
however, as that assembly is, their majority was far from steady. But
whilst they appeared to gain the Convention, and many of the outlying
departments, they lost the city of Paris entirely and irrecoverably: it
was fallen into the hands of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton. Their
instruments were the _sans-culottes_, or rabble, who domineered in that
capital, and were wholly at the devotion of those incendiaries, and
received their daily pay. The people of property were of no consequence,
and trembled before Marat and his janizaries. As that great man had not
obtained the helm of the state, it was not yet come to his turn to act
the part of Brissot and his friends in the assertion of subordination
and regular government. But Robespierre has survived both these rival
chiefs, and is now the great patron of Jacobin order.

To balance the exorbitant power of Paris, (which threatened to leave
nothing to the National Convention but a character as insignificant as
that which the first Assembly had assigned to the unhappy Louis the
Sixteenth,) the faction of Brissot, whose leaders were Roland, Pétion,
Vergniaud, Isnard, Condorcet, &c., &c., &c., applied themselves to gain
the great commercial towns, Lyons, Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and
Bordeaux. The republicans of the Brissotin description, to whom the
concealed royalists, still very numerous, joined themselves, obtained a
temporary superiority in all these places. In Bordeaux, on account of
the activity and eloquence of some of its representatives, this
superiority was the most distinguished. This last city is seated on the
Garonne, or Gironde; and being the centre of a department named from
that river, the appellation of Girondists was given to the whole party.
These, and some other towns, declared strongly against the principles of
anarchy, and against the despotism of Paris. Numerous addresses were
sent to the Convention, promising to maintain its authority, which the
addressers were pleased to consider as legal and constitutional, though
chosen, not to compose an executive government, but to form a plan for a
Constitution. In the Convention measures were taken to obtain an armed
force 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 by
their 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 some
threats of such a departure were from time to time thrown out, was too
powerful for the party of the Gironde. Some of the proposed guards, but
neither with regularity nor in force, did indeed arrive: they were
debauched as fast as they came, or were sent to the frontiers. The game
played by the revolutionists in 1789, with respect to the French guards
of the unhappy king, was now played against the departmental guards,
called together for the protection of the revolutionists. Every part of
their own policy comes round, and strikes at their own power and their
own lives.

The Parisians, on their part, were not slow in taking the alarm. They
had just reason to apprehend, that, if they permitted the smallest
delay, they should see themselves besieged by an army collected from all
parts of France. Violent threats were thrown out against that city in
the Assembly. Its total destruction was menaced. A very remarkable
expression was used in these debates,--"that in future times it might be
inquired on what part of the Seine Paris had stood." The faction which
ruled in Paris, too bold to be intimidated and too vigilant to be
surprised, instantly armed themselves. In their turn, they accused the
Girondists of a treasonable design to break _the republic one and
indivisible_ (whose unity they contended could only be preserved by the
supremacy of Paris) into a number of _confederate_ commonwealths. The
Girondin faction on this account received also the name of
_Federalists_.

Things on both sides hastened fast to extremities. Paris, the mother of
equality, was herself to be equalized. Matters were come to this
alternative: either that city must be reduced to a mere member of the
federative republic, or the Convention, chosen, as they said, by all
France, was to be brought regularly and systematically under the
dominion of the Common Hall, and even of any one of the sections of
Paris.

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

As a preliminary to this attempt on the Jacobins and the commons of
Paris, which it was hoped would be supported by all the remaining
property of France, it became absolutely necessary to prepare a
manifesto, laying before the public the whole policy, genius, character,
and conduct of the partisans of club government. To make this exposition
as fully and clearly as it ought to be made, it was of the same
unavoidable necessity to go through a series of transactions, in which
all those concerned in this Revolution were, at the several periods of
their activity, deeply involved. In consequence of this design, and
under these difficulties, Brissot prepared the following declaration of
his party, which he executed with no small ability; and in this manner
the whole mystery of the French Revolution was laid open in all its
parts.

It is almost needless to mention to the reader the fate of the design to
which this pamphlet was to be subservient. The Jacobins of Paris were
more prompt than their adversaries. They were the readiest to resort to
what La Fayette calls the _most sacred of all duties, that of
insurrection_. Another era of holy insurrection commenced the 31st of
last May. As the first fruits of that insurrection grafted on
insurrection, and of that rebellion improving upon rebellion, the
sacred, irresponsible character of the members of the Convention was
laughed to scorn. They had themselves shown in their proceedings against
the late king how little the most fixed principles are to be relied
upon, in their revolutionary Constitution. The members of the Girondin
party in the Convention were seized upon, or obliged to save themselves
by flight. The unhappy author of this piece, with twenty of his
associates, suffered together on the scaffold, after a trial the
iniquity of which puts all description to defiance.

The English reader will draw from this work of Brissot, and from the
result of the last struggles of this party, some useful lessons. He will
be enabled to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to
guide and enlighten us, and who, for reasons best known to themselves,
have chosen to paint the French Revolution and its consequences in
brilliant and flattering colors. They will know how to appreciate the
liberty of France, which has been so much magnified in England. They
will do justice to the wisdom and goodness of their sovereign and his
Parliament, who have put them into a state of defence, in the war
audaciously 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 of
our enemies, our gratitude will become an active principle. It will
produce a strong and zealous coöperation with the efforts of our
government in favor of a Constitution under which we enjoy advantages
the full value of which the querulous weakness of human nature requires
sometimes 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 our
affairs was not for our molestation, but for our security. We shall be
sensible that this alarm was not ill-timed,--and that it ought to have
been given, as it was given, before the enemy had time fully to mature
and accomplish their plans for reducing us to the condition of France,
as that condition is faithfully and without exaggeration described in
the following work. We now have our arms in our hands; we have the means
of opposing the sense, the courage, and the resources of England to the
deepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined, and the most
extensive design that ever was carried on, since the beginning of the
world, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and all
real freedom.

The reader is requested to attend to the part of this pamphlet which
relates to the conduct of the Jacobins with regard to the Austrian
Netherlands, which they call Belgia or Belgium. It is from page
seventy-two to page eighty-four of this translation. Here their views
and designs upon all their neighbors are fully displayed. Here the whole
mystery of their ferocious politics is laid open with the utmost
clearness. Here the manner in which they would treat every nation into
which they could introduce their doctrines and influence is distinctly
marked. We see that no nation was out of danger, and we see what the
danger was with which every nation was threatened. The writer of this
pamphlet throws the blame of several of the most violent of the
proceedings on the other party. He and his friends, at the time alluded
to, had a majority in the National Assembly. He admits that neither he
nor they _ever publicly_ opposed these measures; but he attributes their
silence to a fear of rendering themselves suspected. It is most certain,
that, whether from fear or from approbation, they never discovered any
dislike of those proceedings till Dumouriez was driven from the
Netherlands. But whatever their motive was, it is plain that the most
violent is, and since the Revolution has always been, the predominant
party.

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

It is true that in this present work, which the author professedly
designed for an appeal to foreign nations and posterity, he has dressed
up the philosophy of his own faction in as decent a garb as he could to
make her appearance in public; but through every disguise her hideous
figure may be distinctly seen. If, however, the reader still wishes to
see her in all her naked deformity, I would further refer him to a
private letter of Brissot, written towards the end of the last year, and
quoted in a late very able pamphlet of Mallet Du Pan. "We must" (says
our philosopher) "_set fire to the four corners of Europe_"; in that
alone is our safety. "_Dumouriez cannot suit us_. I always distrusted
him. Miranda is the general for us: he understands the _revolutionary
power_; he has _courage, lights_," &c.[5] Here everything is fairly
avowed in plain language. The triumph of philosophy is the universal
conflagration of Europe; the only real dissatisfaction with Dumouriez is
a suspicion of his moderation; and the secret motive of that preference
which in this very pamphlet the author gives to Miranda, though without
assigning his reasons, is declared to be the superior fitness of that
foreign adventurer for the purposes of subversion and destruction. On
the other hand, if there can be any man in this country so hardy as to
undertake the defence or the apology of the present monstrous usurpers
of France, and if it should be said in their favor, that it is not just
to credit the charges of their enemy Brissot against them, who have
actually tried and condemned him on the very same charges among others,
we are luckily supplied with the best possible evidence in support of
this part of his book against them: it comes from among themselves.
Camille Desmoulins published the History of the Brissotins in answer to
this very address of Brissot. It was the counter-manifesto of the last
holy revolution of the 31st of May; and the flagitious orthodoxy of his
writings at that period has been admitted in the late scrutiny of him by
the Jacobin Club, when they saved him from that guillotine "which he
grazed." 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; _to
disorganize Europe; perhaps to purge it of its tyrants by the eruption
of 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 no
neutrality. 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 a
powerful impression on the feelings. Such is the nature of Jacobinism,
such is the nature of man, that this system must be regarded either with
enthusiastic admiration, or with the highest degree of detestation,
resentment, and horror.

Another great lesson may be taught by this book, and by the fortune of
the author and his party: I mean a lesson drawn from the consequences of
engaging in daring innovations from an hope that we may be able to limit
their mischievous operation at our pleasure, and by our policy to secure
ourselves against the effect of the evil examples we hold out to the
world. This lesson is taught through almost all the important pages of
history; but never has it been taught so clearly and so awfully as at
this hour. The revolutionists who have just suffered an ignominious
death, under the sentence of the revolutionary tribunal, (a tribunal
composed of those with whom they had triumphed in the total destruction
of the ancient government,) were by no means ordinary men, or without
very considerable talents and resources. But with all their talents and
resources, and the apparent momentary extent of their power, we see the
fate of their projects, their power, and their persons. We see before
our eyes the absurdity of thinking to establish order upon principles of
confusion, or with the materials and instruments of rebellion to build
up a solid and stable government.

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

The translator has only to say for himself, that he has found some
difficulty in this version. His original author, through haste, perhaps,
or through the perturbation of a mind filled with a great and arduous
enterprise, is often obscure. There are some passages, too, in which his
language requires to be first translated into French,--at least into
such French as the Academy would in former times have tolerated. He
writes with great force and vivacity; but the language, like everything
else in his country, has undergone a revolution. The translator thought
it best to be as literal as possible, conceiving such a translation
would perhaps be the most fit to convey the author's peculiar mode of
thinking. In this way the translator has no credit for style, but he
makes it up in fidelity. Indeed, the facts and observations are so much
more important than the style, that no apology is wanted for producing
them in any intelligible manner.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[3] Letter to the National Assembly, signed, _The Minister of the
Interior_, 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 Camille
Desmoulins, 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 completely
disorganized the supply of our armies; which by that disorganization
reduced 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 from
forcing the Prussians and Austrians to repass the Rhine, and afterwards
from putting themselves in a condition to invade Holland sooner than
they did.

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

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

Mark the date of the presentation of the system of this equality of
fact, entire equality. It had been projected and decreed even at the
very opening of the Dutch campaign. If any project could encourage the
want of discipline in the soldiers, any scheme could disgust and banish
good officers, and throw all things into confusion at the moment when
order alone could give victory, it is this project, in truth, so
stubbornly defended by the anarchists, and transplanted into their
ordinary tactic.

How could they expect that there should exist any discipline, any
subordination, when even in the camp they permit motions, censures, and
denunciations of officers and of generals? Does not such a disorder
destroy all the respect that is due to superiors, and all the mutual
confidence without which success cannot be hoped for? For the spirit of
distrust makes the soldier suspicious, and intimidates the general. The
first discerns treason in every danger; the second, always placed
between the necessity of conquest and the image of the scaffold, dares
not raise himself to bold conception, and those heights of courage which
electrify an army and insure victory. Turenne, in our time, would have
carried his head to the scaffold; for he was sometimes beat: but the
reason why he more frequently conquered was, that his discipline was
severe; it was, that his soldiers, confiding in his talents, never
muttered discontent instead of fighting. Without reciprocal confidence
between 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 of
subordination, which has been recommended in some clubs and defended
even in the Convention, that we owe the pillages, the murders, the
enormities of all kinds, which it was difficult for the officers to put
a stop to, from the general spirit of insubordination,--excesses which
have rendered the French name odious to the Belgians? Again, is it not
to this system of anarchy, and of robbery, that we are indebted for the
_revolutionary power_, which has so justly aggravated the hatred of the
Belgians against France?

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

But how can the people be led to that point? By the example of good
government established among us; by the example of order; by the care of
spreading nothing but moral ideas among them: to respect their
properties and their rights; to respect their prejudices, even when we
combat them: by disinterestedness in defending the people; by a zeal to
extend the spirit of liberty amongst them.

This system was at first followed.[7] Excellent pamphlets from the pen
of Condorcet prepared the people for liberty; the 10th of August, the
republican decrees, the battle of Valmy, the retreat of the Prussians,
the victory of Jemappes, all spoke in favor of France: all was rapidly
destroyed by _the revolutionary power_. Without doubt, good intentions
made the majority of the Assembly adopt it; they would plant the tree of
liberty in a foreign soil, under the shade of a people already free. To
the eyes of the people of Belgium it seemed but the mask of a new
foreign tyranny. This opinion was erroneous; I will suppose it so for a
moment; but still this opinion of Belgium deserved to be considered. In
general, we have always considered our own opinions and our own
intentions rather than the people whose cause we defend. We have given
those people a will: that is to say, we have more than ever alienated
them from liberty.

How could the Belgic people believe themselves free, since we exercise
for them, and over them, the rights of sovereignty,--when, without
consulting them, we suppress, all in a mass, their ancient usages, their
abuses, their prejudices, those classes of society which without doubt
are contrary to the spirit of liberty, but the utility of whose
destruction was not as yet proved to them? How could they believe
themselves free and sovereign, when we made them take such an oath as we
thought fit, as a test to give them the right of voting? How could they
believe themselves free, when openly despising their religious worship,
which religious worship that superstitious people valued beyond their
liberty, beyond even their life; when we proscribed their priests; when
we banished them from their assemblies, where they were in the practice
of seeing them govern; when we seized their revenues, their domains, and
riches, to the profit of the nation; when we carried to the very censer
those hands which they regarded as profane? Doubtless these operations
were founded on principles; but those principles ought to have had the
consent 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, trampling
under our feet all human superstitions, (after, however, a four years'
war with them,) we attempt all at once to raise to the same eminence
men, strangers even to the first elementary principles of liberty, and
plunged for fifteen hundred years in ignorance and superstition; we
wished 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, and
before that character was altered.[8]

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

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

Joseph the Second also borrowed the language of philosophy, when he
wished to suppress the monks in Belgium, and to seize upon their
revenues. There was seen on him a mask only of philosophy, covering the
hideous 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 but
proconsuls working the mine of Belgium for the profit of the French
nation, seeking to conquer it for the sovereign of Paris,--either to
aggrandize his empire, or to share the burdens of the debts, and furnish
a rich prize to the robbers who domineered in France.

Do you believe the Belgians have ever been the dupes of those
well-rounded periods which they vended in the pulpit in order to
familiarize them to the idea of an union with France? Do you believe
they were ever imposed upon by those votes and resolutions, made by what
is called acclamation, for their union, of which corruption paid one
part,[9] and fear forced the remainder? Who, at this time of day, is
unacquainted with the springs and wires of their miserable puppet-show?
_Who does not know the farces of primary assemblies, composed of a
president, of a secretary, and of some assistants, whose day's work was
paid for?_ No: it is not by means which belong only to thieves and
despots that the foundations of liberty can be laid in an enslaved
country. It is not by those means, that a new-born republic, a people
who know not yet the elements of republican governments, can be united
to us. Even slaves do not suffer themselves to be seduced by such
artifices; and if they have not the strength to resist, they have at
least 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 their
minds by _good writings_; we must send to them _missionaries_, and not
despotic commissioners.[10] We ought to give them time to see,--to
perceive by themselves the advantages of liberty, the unhappy effects of
superstition, the fatal spirit of priesthood. And whilst we waited for
this moral revolution, we should have accepted the offers which they
incessantly repeated to join to the French army an army of fifty
thousand men, to entertain them at their own expense, and to advance to
France the specie of which she stood in need.

But have we ever seen those fifty thousand soldiers who were to join our
army as soon as the standard of liberty should be displayed in Belgium?
Have we ever seen those treasures which they were to count into our
hands? Can we either accuse the sterility of their country, or the
penury of their treasure, or the coldness of their love for liberty? No!
despotism and anarchy, these are the benefits which we have transplanted
into their soil. We have acted, we have spoken, like masters; and from
that time we have found the Flemings nothing but jugglers, who made the
grimace of liberty for money, or slaves, who in their hearts cursed
their new tyrants. Our commissioners address them in this sort: "You
have nobles and priests among you: drive them out without delay, or we
will neither be your brethren nor your patrons." They answered: "Give us
but 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 the
spot; or we will treat you as enemies, we will abandon you to the
resentment of the Austrians."

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

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

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

Did not this language energetically enough signify that they looked
upon 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 the
Committee of Finance. That committee wanted to make anarchy the means of
an union. They only busied themselves in making the Belgic Provinces
subservient to their finances.

Cambon said loftily before the Belgians themselves: The Belgian war
costs us hundreds of millions. Their ordinary revenues, and even some
extraordinary taxes, will not answer to our reimbursements; and yet we
have occasion for them. The mortgage of our assignats draws near its
end. What must be done? Sell the Church property of Brabant. There is a
mortgage of two thousand millions (eighty millions sterling). How shall
we get possession of them? By an immediate union. Instantly they decreed
this 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, they
secretly order the Minister of Foreign Affairs to dispose of four or
five hundred thousand livres (20,000_l._ sterling) _to make the
vagabonds of Brussels drunk, and to buy proselytes to the union in all
the States_. But even these means, it was said, will obtain but a weak
minority in our favor. What does that signify? _Revolutions_, said they,
_are made only by minorities. It is the minority which has made the
Revolution of France; it is a minority which, has made the people
triumph_.

The Belgic Provinces were not sufficient to satisfy the voracious
cravings of this financial system. Cambon wanted to unite everything,
that he might sell everything. Thus he forced the union of Savoy. In
the war with Holland, he saw nothing but gold to seize on, and
assignats to sell at par.[11] "Do not let us dissemble," said he one day
to the Committee of General Defence, in presence even of the patriot
deputies of Holland, "you have no ecclesiastical goods to offer us for
our 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 bankers
Abema and Van Staphorst understood it.

Do you think that that word has not been worth an army to the
Stadtholder? 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 the
preparatory decree which gave France an execution on their goods,--do
you believe that those patriots would not have liked better to have
remained under the government of the Stadtholder, who took from them no
more than a fixed portion of their property, than to pass under that of
a revolutionary power, which would make a complete revolution in their
bureaus and strong-boxes, and reduce them to wretchedness and rags?[13]
Robbery and anarchy, instead of encouraging, will always stifle
revolutions.

"But why," they object to me, "have not you and your friends chosen to
expose these measures in the rostrum of the National Convention? Why
have 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 not
stain the soul of a courageous man, at least arrests his thoughts in
their passage to his lips. The suspicions of a good citizen freeze those
men whom the calumny of the wicked could not stop in their progress.

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

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

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

What ought a wise man to do in the midst of these circumstances? He is
silent. He waits the moment when the passions give way; he waits till
reason 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 the
diplomatic, flattering the ignorant multitude, lending his name and
popularity to the anarchists, seconded by their vociferations, denounced
incessantly, as counter-revolutionists, those intelligent persons who
were desirous at least of having things discussed. To oppose the acts of
union appeared to Cambon an overt act of treason. The wish so much as to
reflect and to deliberate was in his eyes a great crime. He calumniated
our intentions. The voice of every deputy, especially my voice, would
infallibly have been stifled. There were spies on the very monosyllables
that escaped our lips.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

The people of the Netherlands, by their Constitution, are as much
entitled to be called free as any nation upon earth. The Austrian
government (until some wild attempts the Emperor Joseph made on the
French principle, but which have been since abandoned by the court of
Vienna) has been remarkably mild. No people were more at their ease than
the Flemish subjects, particularly the lower classes. It is curious to
hear this great oculist talk of couching the _cataract_ by which the
Netherlands were _blinded_, and hindered from seeing in its proper
colors the beautiful vision of the French republic, which he has himself
painted with so masterly an hand. That people must needs be dull, blind,
and brutalized by fifteen hundred years of superstition, (the time
elapsed since the introduction of Christianity amongst them,) who could
prefer their former state to the _present state of France_! The reader
will remark, that the only difference between Brissot and his
adversaries is in the _mode_ of bringing other nations into the pale of
the French republic. _They_ would abolish the order and classes of
society, and all religion, at a stroke: Brissot would have just the same
thing done, but with more address and management.--TRANSLATOR.

[9] See the correspondence of Dumouriez, especially the letter of the
12th of March.

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

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

[12] _Portefeuille_ is the word in the original. It signifies all
movable property which may be represented in bonds, notes, bills,
stocks, or any sort of public or private securities. I do not know of a
single word in English that answers it: I have therefore substituted
that 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 OF
LORDS 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 the
entertainment of the House of Lords, has been lately played by his Grace
the **** of *******, a great deal at my expense, and a little at his
own. I confess I should have liked the composition rather better, if it
had been quite new. But every man has his taste, and his Grace is an
admirer 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 as
to disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and
overload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians may
at last be stunned with "three times three." I am sure I have been very
grateful for the flattering remembrance made of me in the toasts of the
Revolution Society, and of other clubs formed on the same laudable plan.
After giving the brimming honors to Citizen Thomas Paine and to Citizen
Dr. Priestley, the gentlemen of these clubs seldom failed to bring me
forth in my turn, and to drink, "Mr. Burke, and thanks to him for the
discussion he has provoked."

I found myself elevated with this honor; for, even by the collision of
resistance, to be the means of striking out sparkles of truth, if not
merit, 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 and
exuberant fountains of politics and of rhetoric, (as I hear he did, in
three or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens,) I
was rather let down a little. Though still somewhat proud of myself, I
was 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 do
more credit to his diligence as a special pleader than to his invention
as an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources,
both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated
the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in
the 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 his
imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn
special arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, I
must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at
the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when
the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with
still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some
amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace
gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff
which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up
of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork
and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when
that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of
the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed
again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the
high 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 age
to the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and
his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to put
these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of
letters; 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 the
boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before
us. 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, that
Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who
only moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in his own
native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for
himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to
libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me
or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not be
guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against
religion and human society upon his Grace's excellent speech in the
House of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neither
encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty,
safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the
decrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the
guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could
find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old
Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England.
The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects
of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free
agent. 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 dull
slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to
provoke a jockey of Norfolk,[14] who was inspired with the resolute
ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might
render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted
merit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of
the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I
say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace
I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted
solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.

His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins with giving me a great
deal of praise for talents which I do not possess. He does this to
entitle himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness, to
exaggerate my abuse of the parts which his bounty, and not that of
Nature, has bestowed upon me. In this, too, he has condescended to copy
Mr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priests
of the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and their
fillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to their
knocking me on the head with their consecrated axes. I have injured, say
they, the Constitution; and I have abandoned the Whig party and the Whig
principles that I professed. I do not mean, my dear Sir, to defend
myself against his Grace. I have not much interest in what the world
shall think or say of me; as little has the world an interest in what I
shall think or say of any one in it; and I wish that his Grace had
suffered an unhappy man to enjoy, in his retreat, the melancholy
privileges of obscurity and sorrow. At any rate, I have spoken and I
have written on the subject. If I have written or spoken so poorly as to
be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lasting
impression. "I must let the tree lie as it falls." Perhaps I must take
some shame to myself. I confess that I have acted on my own principles
of 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 the
party to which he alludes, and which has long taken its leave of me, I
believe the principles of the book which he condemns are very
conformable to the opinions of many of the most considerable and most
grave in that description of politicians. A few, indeed, who, I admit,
are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk his
Grace's language. I am too feeble to contend with them. They have the
field to themselves. There are others, very young and very ingenious
persons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, I
believe, is pleased to consider as that party. Some of them were not
born into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered into
that connection. I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad
phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbins
and doctors in the cabala of political science. I admit that "wisdom is
as 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 be
excused, if I caught something of the general indocility. It might not
be surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two, and, in an age of
relaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions. If
that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and
without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and
very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to
their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern liberty
is a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It
belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary
representation 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 than
they came of age I do not mean to include his Grace. With all those
native titles to empire over our minds which distinguish the others, he
has a large share of experience. He certainly ought to understand the
British Constitution better than I do. He has studied it in the
fundamental part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in
twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his
speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend
with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With
thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles
been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst
he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has
he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and great
sums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence,
and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the
ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right of
election itself.

Amidst these his labors, his Grace will be pleased to forgive me, if my
zeal, less enlightened, to be sure, than his by midnight lamps and
studies, has presumed to talk too favorably of this Constitution, and
even to say something sounding like approbation of that body which has
the honor to reckon his Grace at the head of it, Those who dislike this
partiality, or, if his Grace pleases, this flattery of mine, have a
comfort at hand. I may be refuted and brought to shame by the most
convincing of all refutations, a practical refutation. Every individual
peer for himself may show that I was ridiculously wrong; the whole body
of those noble persons may refute me for the whole corps. If they
please, they are more powerful advocates against themselves than a
thousand scribblers like me can be in their favor. If I were even
possessed of those powers which his Grace, in order to heighten my
offence, is pleased to attribute to me, there would be little
difference. The eloquence of Mr. Erskine might save Mr. ***** from the
gallows, but no eloquence could save Mr. Jackson from the effects of his
own potion.

In that unfortunate book of mine, which is put in the _Index
Expurgatorius_ of the modern Whigs, I might have spoken too favorably
not only of those who wear coronets, but of those who wear crowns.
Kings, however, have not only long arms, but strong ones too. A great
Northern potentate, for instance, is able in one moment, and with one
bold stroke of his diplomatic pen, to efface all the volumes which I
could write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists of
Germany ever carried to the fair of Leipsic, as an apology for monarchs
and monarchy. Whilst I, or any other poor, puny, private sophist, was
defending the Declaration of Pilnitz, his Majesty might refute me by the
Treaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republic because it had
a king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act by
founding another republic that has cut off the head of its king. I
defended that great potentate for associating in a grand alliance for
the preservation of the old governments of Europe; but he puts me to
silence by delivering up all those governments (his own virtually
included) to the new system of France. If he is accused before the
Parisian tribunal (constituted for the trial of kings) for having
polluted the soil of liberty by the tracks of his disciplined slaves, he
clears himself by surrendering the finest parts of Germany (with a
handsome cut of his own territories) to the offended majesty of the
regicides 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 _amende
honorable_ to the _sans-culotterie_ of the Republic one and indivisible?
In that humiliating attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplicate
pardon for his menacing proclamations, and, as an expiation to those
whom he failed to terrify with his threats, he may abandon those whom he
had seduced by his promises. He may sacrifice the royalists of France,
whom he had called to his standard, as a salutary example to those who
shall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any other
who undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects.

How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to the
invectives which the regicides have made against all kings, and
particularly against himself? How can I help it, if this royal
propagandist will preach the doctrine of the Rights of Men? Is it my
fault, if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in all
his academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers in
his dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals? Can
it be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers and all
his hussars in these high mysteries? Am I responsible, if he will make
_Le Droit de l'Homme_, or _La Souverainté du Peuple_ the favorite parole
of his military orders? Now that his troops are to act with the brave
legions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity. He
will teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to act like them, and to
emulate the glories of the _régiment de l'échafaud_. He will employ the
illustrious Citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instruct
the dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who,
like Louis the Sixteenth, (whose cause and person he once took into his
protection,) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it,
to consider themselves as hereditary kings. Can I arrest this great
potentate in his career of glory? Am I blamable in recommending virtue
and religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because the
protector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, to
ingratiate himself with the Republic of Philosophy, shall abolish all
the three? It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of the
Reformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinistic
sabbath, and establishing the _décadi_ of atheism in all his states. He
may even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple of
Reason. In these things, at least, he is truly despotic. He has now
shaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him with
horror. It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall not, however,
travel so far to see) the ingenious devices and the elegant
transparencies which, on the restoration of peace and the commencement
of Prussian liberty, are to decorate Potsdam and Charlottenburg
_festeggianti_. What shades of his armed ancestors of the House of
Brandenburg will the committee of _Illuminés_ raise up in the
opera-house of Berlin, to dance a grand ballet in the rejoicings for
this auspicious event? Is it a grand master of the Teutonic order, or is
it the great Elector? Is it the first king of Prussia, or the last? or
is the whole long line (long, I mean, _a parte ante_) to appear like
Banquo's royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?

How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displays
of royal magnificence? How can I prevent the successor of Frederick the
Great from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind of
glory? Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessions
in the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume the
character of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery on
philosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbs
in the sackcloth and the _hair-shirt_, and exercise on his broad
shoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the
_Sans-Culottes_? It is not in me to hinder kings from making new orders
of religious and martial knighthood. I am not Hercules enough to uphold
those orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shifting
from their weary shoulders. What can be done against the magnanimous
resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of
their own character and situation?

What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignities
and all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. If they have a
mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and
their advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It is
very true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human
wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the
powerful,--for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws,
and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived for
extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of
that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not be
inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into
which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of
their _conclusums_ should taste of the prejudices of country or of
faction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruption
should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose
that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum,
listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the
public 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 monstrous
and even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of human
depravity, or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possibly
match it,--if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeeling
cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent
people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of
the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,--does any one
think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying
insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on
all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from
their purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to its
disgrace in themselves? As the wisdom of men mates such institutions,
the folly of men destroys them. Whatever we may pretend, there is always
more 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 declined
from its perpendicular, if the cement is loose and incoherent, if the
stones are scaling with every change of the weather, and the whole
toppling on our heads, what matter is it whether we are crushed by a
Corinthian or a Doric ruin? The fine form of a vessel is a matter of use
and of delight. It is pleasant to see her decorated with cost and art.
But what signifies even the mathematical truth of her form,--what
signify all the art and cost with which she can be carved, and painted,
and gilded, and covered with decorations from stem to stern,--what
signify all her rigging and sails, her flags, her pendants, and her
streamers,--what signify even her cannon, her stores, and her
provisions, 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 what
very few except myself would think worth any trouble at all. In a speech
in the House of Lords, I have been attacked for the defence of a scheme
of government in which that body inheres, and in which alone it can
exist. Peers of Great Britain may become as penitent as the sovereign of
Prussia. They may repent of what they have done in assertion of the
honor of their king, and in favor of their own safety. But never the
gloom that lowers over the fortune of the cause, nor anything which the
great may do towards hastening their own fall, can make me repent of
what I have done by pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favor of
the order of things into which I was born and in which I fondly hoped to
die.

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 moral
eye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolution in France. I knew,
indeed, that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own
danger. In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in the
other it produced bold spirits and dark designs. A false philosophy
passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were
infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge,
which in the two last centuries either did not exist at all, or existed
solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused,
weakened, and perverted. General wealth loosened morals, relaxed
vigilance, and increased presumption. Men of talent began to compare, in
the partition of the common stock of public prosperity, the proportions
of the dividends with the merits of the claimants. As usual, they found
their portion not equal to their estimate (or perhaps to the public
estimate) of their own worth. When it was once discovered by the
Revolution in France that a struggle between establishment and rapacity
could be maintained, though but for one year and in one place, I was
sure that a practicable breach was made in the whole order of things,
and in every country. Religion, that held the materials of the fabric
together, was first systematically loosened. All other opinions, under
the name of prejudices, must fall along with it; and property, left
undefended by principles, became a repository of spoils to tempt
cupidity, and not a magazine to furnish arms for defence. I knew, that,
attacked on all sides by the infernal energies of talents set in action
by vice and disorder, authority could not stand upon authority alone. It
wanted some other support than the poise of its own gravity. Situations
formerly supported persons. It now became necessary that personal
qualities should support situations. Formerly, where authority was
found, wisdom and virtue were presumed. But now the veil was torn, and,
to keep off sacrilegious intrusion, it was necessary that in the
sanctuary of government something should be disclosed not only
venerable, but dreadful. Government was at once to show itself full of
virtue and full of force. It was to invite partisans, by making it
appear to the world that a generous cause was to be asserted, one fit
for a generous people to engage in. From passive submission was it to
expect resolute defence? No! It must have warm advocates and passionate
defenders, which an heavy, discontented acquiescence never could
produce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated body
of authority to say, or to act as if it said, "I will put my trust, not
in my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, in
indolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicious
humors, because you cannot punish me without the hazard of ruining
yourselves."

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,--a blind
and 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 that
provident fear might prevent fruitless penitence. I trusted that danger
might produce at least circumspection. I flattered myself, in a moment
like this, that nothing would be added to make authority
top-heavy,--that the very moment of an earthquake would not be the time
chosen for adding a story to our houses. I hoped to see the surest of
all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform,--the ceasing to do ill. In
the mean time I wished to the people the wisdom of knowing how to
tolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render much more
than tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which everything was to
be found that could enable them to live to Nature, and, if so they
pleased, to live to virtue and to honor.

I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished well
than they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far from
repenting, 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 the
general, vital principle, that, whilst it was in its vigor, produced the
state of things transmitted to us from our fathers, but which, through
the joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish
in our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the
commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete
and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own
conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. These
analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes
illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of themselves. They are but
too often used, under the color of a specious philosophy, to find
apologies for the despair of laziness and pusillanimity, and to excuse
the want of all manly efforts, when the exigencies of our country call
for them the more loudly.

How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin by
the seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? I
am 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 when
the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is,) I say, one such
man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own
fortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him
some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in
existence, would appear and troop about him.

If I saw this auspicious beginning, baffled and frustrated as I am, yet
on the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate at
home, stripped of my boast, my hope, my consolation, my helper, my
counsellor, and my guide, (you know in part what I have lost, and would
to God I could clear myself of all neglect and fault in that loss,) yet
thus, even thus, I would rake up the fire under all the ashes that
oppress it. I am no longer patient of the public eye; nor am I of force
to 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 have
infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the
brands of the Furies. The cure might come from the same source with the
distemper. 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 and
his brethren arise to assert the honor of the ancient law and to defend
the temple of their forefathers with as ardent a spirit as can inspire
any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of
ancient 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 acts
out of the ordinary course they can alone be reëstablished. Republican
spirit can only be combated by a spirit of the same nature,--of the same
nature, but informed with another principle, and pointing to another
end. I would persuade a resistance both to the corruption and to the
reformation that prevails. It will not be the weaker, but much the
stronger, for combating both together. A victory over real corruptions
would enable us to baffle the spurious and pretended reformations. I
would not wish to excite, or even to tolerate, that kind of evil spirit
which 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 the
correction of human vice, and the recalling of human error from the
devious ways into which it has been betrayed. I would wish to call the
impulses of individuals at once to the aid and to the control of
authority. By this, which I call the true republican spirit, paradoxical
as it may appear, monarchies alone can be rescued from the imbecility of
courts and the madness of the crowd. This republican spirit would not
suffer men in high place to bring ruin on their country and on
themselves. It would reform, not by destroying, but by saving, the
great, the rich, and the powerful. Such a republican spirit we perhaps
fondly conceive to have animated the distinguished heroes and patriots
of old, who knew no mode of policy but religion and virtue. These they
would have paramount to all constitutions; they would not suffer
monarchs, or senates, or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignity
or authority or freedom, to shake off those moral riders which reason
has appointed to govern every sort of rude power. These, in appearance
loading them by their weight, do by that pressure augment their
essential force. The momentum is increased by the extraneous weight. It
is true in moral as it is in mechanical science. It is true, not only in
the draught, but in the race. These riders of the great, in effect, hold
the reins which guide them in their course, and wear the spur that
stimulates them to the goals of honor and of safety. The great must
submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long
submit 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 good
share of diligence, a very great share of ability, and much public
virtue to those who direct our affairs. But they are incumbered, not
aided, by their very instruments, and by all the apparatus of the state.
I think that our ministry (though there are things against them which
neither you nor

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