It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares.
That figure has lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands for
new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the Republic that find
him a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after the
geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his
Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They
consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present
state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all
establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of _ruins_ is far
the fittest for making other _ruins_, and so _ad infinitum_. They have
calculated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to be found
in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and his
trustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist, Inigo
Jones, in Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffeehouses, all alike,
are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common
rubbish,--and, well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true,
democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre. Their Academy _del
Cimento_, (_per antiphrasin_,) with Morveau and Hassenfratz at its head,
have computed that the brave _sans-culottes_ may make war on all the
aristocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth out of the rubbish of the Duke
of Bedford's buildings.[21]
While the Morveaux and Priestleys are proceeding with these experiments
upon the Duke of Bedford's houses, the Sieyès, and the rest of the
analytical legislators and constitution-venders, are quite as busy in
their trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's vassals
into primary assemblies, national guards, first, second, and third
requisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the travelling
guillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legislative hangmen,
supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, and
assessors of the maximum.
The din of all this smithery may some time or other possibly wake this
noble Duke, and push him to an endeavor to save some little matter from
their experimental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the crown,
he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has received them from the
pillage of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a
little, because they are enemies to all corporations and to all
religion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his
Grace, or his learned council, that all such property belongs to the
_nation_,--and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to live
the natural term of a _citizen_, (that is, according to Condorcet's
calculation, six months on an average,) not to pass for an usurper upon
the national property. This is what the _serjeants_-at-law of the rights
of man will say to the puny _apprentices_ of the common law of England.
Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may as well think the
garden of the Tuileries was well protected with the cords of ribbon
insultingly stretched by the National Assembly to keep the sovereign
_canaille_ from intruding on the retirement of the poor King of the
French as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the
Revolution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no triflers;
brave _sans-culottes_ are no formalists. They will no more regard a
Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Woburn will
not be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they
will make no difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns
and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rush
whether his coat is long or short,--whether the color be purple, or blue
and buff. They will not trouble _their_ heads with what part of _his_
head his hair is out from; and they will look with equal respect on a
tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre,
or some oilier of their legislative butchers: How he cuts up; how he
tallows in the caul or on the kidneys.
Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the _sans-culotte_
carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles are pricking their
dotted lines upon his hide, and, like the print of the poor ox that we
see in the shop-windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking
no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and
briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and
stewing, that, all the while they are measuring _him_, his Grace is
measuring _me_,--is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with
the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning
on those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor innocent!
"Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."
No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer with
resignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed,
they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the other
day, that, on putting in order some things which had been brought here,
on my taking leave of London forever, I looked over a number of fine
portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my
better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst those was the
picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the
subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest
youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years
without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to
the day of our final separation.
I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his
age, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my
heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was after
his trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and
anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,--what
part my son, in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the
pious passion with which he attached himself to all my
connections,--with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in
courting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt,
just as I should have felt such friendship on such an occasion. I
partook, indeed, of this honor with several of the first and best and
ablest in the kingdom, but I was behindhand with none of them; and I am
sure, that, if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total
annihilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things had taken
a different turn from what they did. I should have attended him to the
quarter-deck with no less good-will and more pride, though with far
other feelings, than I partook of the general flow of national joy that
attended the justice that was done to his virtue.
Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuse
itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in
retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life,
we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship, in
those only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at
all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when I
was attacked in the House of Lords.
Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and,
with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford,
he would have told him that the favor of that gracious prince who had
honored his virtues with the government of the navy of Great Britain,
and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not
undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and
his faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would
have told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might be
becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have told
him, that, when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose everything.
On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the public loss of him in
this awful crisis!--I speak from much knowledge of the person: he never
would have listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this
_sans-culotterie_ of France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his
taste, his public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have
repelled him forever from all connection with that horrid medley of
madness, vice, impiety, and crime.
Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent, and one of birth. Their
interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of
both. His family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was of the
oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people
renowned above all others for love of their native land. Though it was
never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something
high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts
had grafted the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he was
not disinclined to augment it with new honors. He valued the old
nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an
incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for
selfishness and a narrow mind,--conceiving that a man born in an
elevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what went
before and what was to come after him. Without much speculation, but by
the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain,
unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great
commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body of
some kind or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified by
privilege. This nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a
nation, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no
one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could
be well made, without some such order of things as might, through a
series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence,
consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can
protect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of the
multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of
hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity,
fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves" who began to
forge in 1789 the false money of the French Constitution; that it is one
fatal objection to all _new_ fancied and _new fabricated_ republics,
(among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly
and insolently rejected it,) that the _prejudice_ of an old nobility is
a thing that _cannot_ be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected,
it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but
_the thing itself_ is matter of _inveterate_ opinion, and therefore
_cannot_ be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this
nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state,
but by them, and for them.
I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine the future out of what
we collect from the past, no person living would look with more scorn
and horror on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and
on the desperate attainder passed on all their posterity, by the
Orléans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de
Noailles, and the false Périgords, and the long _et cetera_ of the
perfidious _sans-culottes_ of the court, who, like demoniacs possessed
with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, abdicated their
dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of all
trusts, and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and all the
cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and
desolation on their country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides
themselves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of men,
of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in
prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave
no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. We
are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.
Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold his
kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of Holland, whose blood,
prodigally poured out, had, more than all the canals, meres, and
inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold
them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human
race,--in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity
or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to
whose sceptred pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that
surmounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of
Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?
Could he with patience bear that the children of that nobility who would
have deluged their country and given it to the sea rather than submit to
Louis the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory, when his arms
were conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers,
when his councils were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when
his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the D'Aguesseaus,--that
these should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the
Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas,
and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons,
and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges,
that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have poured
out innumerable swarms of the lowest and at once the most destructive of
the classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laid
waste the fairest part of the world?
Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous patricians, that
happy union of the noble and the burgher, who with signal prudence and
integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the
cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to
themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their
protection? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totally
destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy
founded on the spurious rights of man?
He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests
of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country of
Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest
repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant
flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with
his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and
turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his
insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.
Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau, who was himself given to
England along with the blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions,
with Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which consolidated and
married the liberties and the interests of the two nations
forever,--could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in
servitude to France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange
expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of contumely,
from the country which that family of deliverers had so often rescued
from slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, which
owes its liberty to his house?
Would Keppel have heard with patience that the conduct to be held on
such occasions was to become short by the knees to the faction of the
homicides, to entreat them quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of war
should drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, that
no security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, no
alliance entered into for the security of that which under a foreign
name is the most precious part of England? What would he have said, if
it was even proposed that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a
barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance to protect her against
any species of rule that might be erected or even be restored in France)
should be formed into a republic under her influence and dependent upon
her power?
But above all, what would he have said, if he had heard it made a matter
of accusation against me, by his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was
the author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction to
myself, (as from pride I might, but from justice I dare not,) he would
have snatched his share of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp
of a dying convulsion to his end.
It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to assume to myself the
glory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to his ministers, and to his
Parliament, and to the far greater majority of his faithful people: but
had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined to be guided
by my advice, and to follow it implicitly, then I should have been the
sole author of a war. But it should have been a war on my ideas and my
principles. However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits with
regard to the war with Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that
alone. He never shall, with the smallest color of reason, accuse me of
being the author of a peace with Regicide.--But that is high matter, and
ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment as what may
belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford.
I have the honor to be, &c.
EDMUND BURKE.
FOOTNOTES:
[15]
Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec sævior ulla
Pestis et ira Deûm Stygiis sese extulit undis.
Virginei volucrum vultus, fœdissima ventris
Proluvies, uncæque manus, et pallida semper
Ora fame.
Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that _he_ is Virgil) had
not verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived
her. Had he lived to our time, he would have been more overpowered with
the reality than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the
horror of the times before him. Had he lived to see the revolutionists
and constitutionalists of France, he would have had more horrid and
disgusting features of his harpies to describe, and more frequent
failures in the attempt to describe them.
[16] London, J. Dodsley, 1792, 3 vols. 4to.--Vol. II. pp. 324-336, in
the present edition.
[17] See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of
Buckingham. Temp. Hen. VIII.
[18] At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, etc.
[19] Sir George Savile's act, called The _Nullum Tempus_ Act.
[20] "Templum in modum arcis."--TACITUS, of the temple of Jerusalem.
[21] There is nothing on which the leaders of the Republic one and
indivisible value themselves more than on the chemical operations by
which; through science, they convert the pride of aristocracy to an
instrument of its own destruction,--on the operations by which they
reduce the magnificent ancient country-seats of the nobility, decorated
with the _feudal_ titles of Duke, Marquis, or Earl, into magazines of
what they call _revolutionary_ gunpowder. They tell us, that hitherto
things "had not yet been properly and in a _revolutionary_ manner
explored,"--"The strong _chateaus_, those _feudal_ fortresses, that
_were ordered to be demolished_ attracted next the attention of your
committee. _Nature_ there had _secretly_ regained her _rights_, and had
produced saltpetre, for the _purpose_, as it should seem, _of
facilitating the execution of your decree by preparing the means of
destruction_. From these _ruins_, which _still frown_ on the liberties
of the Republic, we have extracted the means of producing good; and
those piles which have hitherto glutted the _pride of despots_, and
covered the plots of La Vendée, will soon furnish wherewithal to tame
the traitors and to overwhelm the disaffected,"--"The _rebellious
cities_, also, have afforded a large quantity of saltpetre. _Commune
Affranchie_" (that is, the noble city of Lyons, reduced in many parts to
an heap of ruins) "and Toulon will pay a _second_ tribute to our
artillery."--_Report, 1st February_, 1794.
THREE LETTERS
ADDRESSED TO
A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT,
ON THE
PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE.
1796-7.
LETTER I.
ON THE OVERTURES OF PEACE.
My Dear Sir,--Our last conversation, though not in the tone of absolute
despondency, was far from cheerful. We could not easily account for some
unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the
state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have
expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English
character. The disastrous events which have followed one upon another in
a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to
have no end,--these were not the principal causes of our dejection. We
feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to
oppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud and great,
and great because they were proud, a change in the national spirit is
the most terrible of all revolutions.
I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot which
saddens and perplexes the awful drama of Providence now acting on the
moral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am at
the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of
its orbit the nation with which we are carried along moves at this
instant it is not easy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advanced
in its aphelion,--but when to return?
Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, our
business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the
worse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon
men and human affairs, it is of no small moment to distinguish things of
accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered.
It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation
from our course. I am not quite of the mind of those speculators who
seem assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of things, all
states have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude that
are found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sort
rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn than supply
analogies from whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to be
forced into an analogy are not found in the same classes of existence.
Individuals are physical beings, subject to laws universal and
invariable. The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure: the
general results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths
are not physical, but moral essences. They are artificial combinations,
and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of
the human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws which
necessarily influence the stability of that kind of work made by that
kind of agent. There is not in the physical order (with which they do
not appear to hold any assignable connection) a distinct cause by which
any of those fabrics must necessarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, in
my opinion, does the moral world produce anything more determinate on
that subject than what may serve as an amusement (liberal, indeed, and
ingenious, but still only an amusement) for speculative men. I doubt
whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be
so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which
necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the
operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much
more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes
that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community.