acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world,--when
it shall offer to Him no religious or moral worship,--when it shall
abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree,--when it shall
persecute, with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of
confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers,--when
it shall generally shut up or pull down churches,--when the few
buildings which remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose
of making a profane apotheosis of monsters whose vices and crimes have
no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of
general detestation and the severest animadversion of law. When, in the
place of that religion of social benevolence and of individual
self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious,
blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated,
perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own
corrupted and bloody republic,--when schools and seminaries are founded
at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with
the horrible maxims of this impiety,--when, wearied out with incessant
martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for
religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil,--I call this _Atheism
by Establishment_.
When to these establishments of Regicide, of Jacobinism, and of Atheism,
you add the _correspondent system of manners_, no doubt can be left on
the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the
human race. Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a
great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there,
and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify,
exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform,
insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give
their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality,
they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this
the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method,
and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most
licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at
the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing in
the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion of
a hat or a shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result of
design; all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could be
devised in favor of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that
has not been employed. The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love
of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its
propagation. All sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame
and vitiate the imagination and pervert the moral sense, have been
contrived. They have sometimes brought forth five or six hundred drunken
women calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their own
children, as being Royalists or Constitutionalists. Sometimes they have
got a body of wretches, calling themselves fathers, to demand the murder
of their sons, boasting that Rome had but one Brutus, but that they
could show five hundred. There were instances in which they inverted and
retaliated the impiety, and produced sons who called for the execution
of their parents. The foundation of their republic is laid in moral
paradoxes. Their patriotism is always prodigy. All those instances to be
found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit,
at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which
affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for
the instruction of their youth.
The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise
legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into
morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural
affections. They, on the contrary, have omitted no pains to eradicate
every benevolent and noble propensity in the mind of men. In their
culture it is a rule always to graft virtues on vices. They think
everything unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicates
violence on the private. All their new institutions (and with them
everything is new) strike at the root of our social nature. Other
legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and
consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavored by every
art to make it sacred. The Christian religion, by confining it to the
pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these two
things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and
civilization of the world than by any other part in this whole scheme of
Divine wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in the
synagogue of Antichrist,--I mean in that forge and manufactory of all
evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789.
Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate and
degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy
and honorable. By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronounced
that marriage was no better than a common civil contract. It was one of
their ordinary tricks, to put their sentiments into the mouths of
certain personated characters, which they theatrically exhibited at the
bar of what ought to be a serious assembly. One of these was brought out
in the figure of a prostitute, whom they called by the affected name of
"a mother without being a wife." This creature they made to call for a
repeal of the incapacities which in civilized states are put upon
bastards. The prostitutes of the Assembly gave to this their puppet the
sanction of their greater impudence. In consequence of the principles
laid down, and the manners authorized, bastards were not long after put
on the footing of the issue of lawful unions. Proceeding in the spirit
of the first authors of their Constitution, succeeding Assemblies went
the full length of the principle, and gave a license to divorce at the
mere pleasure of either party, and at a month's notice. With them the
matrimonial connection is brought into so degraded a state of
concubinage, that I believe none of the wretches in London who keep
warehouses of infamy would give out one of their victims to private
custody on so short and insolent a tenure. There was, indeed, a kind of
profligate equity in giving to women the same licentious power. The
reason they assigned was as infamous as the act: declaring that women
had been too long under the tyranny of parents and of husbands. It is
not necessary to observe upon the horrible consequences of taking one
half of the species wholly out of the guardianship and protection of the
other.
The practice of divorce, though in some countries permitted, has been
discouraged in all. In the East, polygamy and divorce are in discredit;
and the manners correct the laws. In Rome, whilst Rome was in its
integrity, the few causes allowed for divorce amounted in effect to a
prohibition. They were only three. The arbitrary was totally excluded;
and accordingly some hundreds of years passed without a single example
of that kind. When manners were corrupted, the laws were relaxed; as the
latter always follow the former, when they are not able to regulate them
or to vanquish them. Of this circumstance the legislators of vice and
crime were pleased to take notice, as an inducement to adopt their
regulation: holding out an hope that the permission would as rarely be
made use of. They knew the contrary to be true; and they had taken good
care that the laws should be well seconded by the manners. Their law of
divorce, like all their laws, had not for its object the relief of
domestic uneasiness, but the total corruption of all morals, the total
disconnection of social life.
It is a matter of curiosity to observe the operation of this
encouragement to disorder. I have before me the Paris paper
correspondent to the usual register of births, marriages, and deaths.
Divorce, happily, is no regular head of registry amongst civilized
nations. With the Jacobins it is remarkable that divorce is not only a
regular head, but it has the post of honor. It occupies the first place
in the list. In the three first months of the year 1793 the number of
divorces in that city amounted to 562; the marriages were 1785: so that
the proportion of divorces to marriages was not much less than one to
three: a thing unexampled, I believe, among mankind. I caused an inquiry
to be made at Doctors' Commons concerning the number of divorces, and
found that all the divorces (which, except by special act of Parliament,
are separations, and not proper divorces) did not amount in all those
courts, and in an hundred years, to much more than one fifth of those
that passed in the single city of Paris in three months. I followed up
the inquiry relative to that city through several of the subsequent
months, until I was tired, and found the proportions still the same.
Since then I have heard that they have declared for a revisal of these
laws: but I know of nothing done. It appears as if the contract that
renovates the world was under no law at all. From this we may take our
estimate of the havoc that has been made through all the relations of
life. With the Jacobins of France, vague intercourse is without
reproach; marriage is reduced to the vilest concubinage; children are
encouraged to cut the throats of their parents; mothers are taught that
tenderness is no part of their character, and, to demonstrate their
attachment to their party, that they ought to make no scruple to rake
with their bloody hands in the bowels of those who came from their own.
To all this let us join the practice of _cannibalism_, with which, in
the proper terms, and with the greatest truth, their several factions
accuse each other. By cannibalism I mean their devouring, as a nutriment
of their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered,
their drinking the blood of their victims, and forcing the victims
themselves to drink the blood of their kindred slaughtered before their
faces. By cannibalism I mean also to signify all their nameless,
unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter.
As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permit
them to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights of
sepulture which indicate hope, and which mere Nature has taught to
mankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions and to cover the
infirmity of mortal condition. They disgrace men in the entry into life,
they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and they
deprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonored and
depraved existence. Endeavoring to persuade the people that they are no
better than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends to make
them beasts of prey, furious and savage. For this purpose the active
part of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel. To
this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtues
which accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up together
in the rankness of uncultivated Nature. But nothing is left to Nature in
their systems.
The same discipline which hardens their hearts relaxes their morals.
Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolutionary tribunals, and
silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion,
there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small,
most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded
every night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness,
amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of
despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter,
went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it from
good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the
gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was
hired out for a show of dancing dogs. I think, without concert, we have
made the very same remark, on reading some of their pieces, which, being
written for other purposes, let us into a view of their social life. It
struck us that the habits of Paris had no resemblance to the finished
virtues, or to the polished vice, and elegant, though not blameless
luxury, of the capital of a great empire. Their society was more like
that of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier,--of a lewd tavern for
the revels and debauches of banditti, assassins, bravoes, smugglers,
and their more desperate paramours, mixed with bombastic players, the
refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, puffing out ill-sorted
verses about virtue, mixed with the licentious and blasphemous songs
proper to the brutal and hardened course of life belonging to that sort
of wretches. This system of manners in itself is at war with all orderly
and moral society, and is in its neighborhood unsafe. If great bodies of
that kind were anywhere established in a bordering territory, we should
have a right to demand of their governments the suppression of such a
nuisance. What are we to do, if the government and the whole community
is of the same description? Yet that government has thought proper to
invite ours to lay by its unjust hatred, and to listen to the voice of
humanity as taught by their example.
The operation of dangerous and delusive first principles obliges us to
have recourse to the true ones. In the intercourse between nations, we
are apt to rely too much on the instrumental part. We lay too much
weight upon the formality of treaties and compacts. We do not act much
more wisely, when we trust to the interests of men as guaranties of
their engagements. The interests frequently tear to pieces the
engagements, and the passions trample upon both. Entirely to trust to
either is to disregard our own safety, or not to know mankind. Men are
not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate
by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. It is with nations as
with individuals. Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nation and
nation as correspondence in laws, customs, manners, and habits of life.
They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They are
obligations written in the heart. They approximate men to men without
their knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions. The secret,
unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them
together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to
equivocate, scuffle, and fight about the terms of their written
obligations.
As to war, if it be the means of wrong and violence, it is the sole
means of justice amongst nations. Nothing can banish it from the world.
They who say otherwise, intending to impose upon us, do not impose upon
themselves. But it is one of the greatest objects of human wisdom to
mitigate those evils which we are unable to remove. The conformity and
analogy of which I speak, incapable, like everything else, of preserving
perfect trust and tranquillity among men, has a strong tendency to
facilitate accommodation, and to produce a generous oblivion of the
rancor of their quarrels. With this similitude, peace is more of peace,
and war is less of war. I will go further. There have been periods of
time in which communities apparently in peace with each other have been
more perfectly separated than in later times many nations in Europe have
been in the course of long and bloody wars. The cause must be sought in
the similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws, and manners. At
bottom, these are all the same. The writers on public law have often
called this _aggregate_ of nations a commonwealth. They had reason. It
is virtually one great state, having the same basis of general law, with
some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments. The
nations of Europe have had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in
the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the
subordinate doctrines. The whole of the polity and economy of every
country in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawn
from the old Germanic or Gothic Custumary,--from the feudal
institutions, which must be considered as an emanation from that
Custumary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and
discipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with
or without a monarch, (which are called States,) in every European
country; the strong traces of which, where monarchy predominated, were
never wholly extinguished or merged in despotism. In the few places
where monarchy was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still
left. Those countries still continued countries of States,--that is, of
classes, orders, and distinctions, such as had before subsisted, or
nearly so. Indeed, the force and form of the institution called States
continued in greater perfection in those republican communities than
under monarchies. From all those sources arose a system of manners and
of education which was nearly similar in all this quarter of the
globe,--and which softened, blended, and harmonized the colors of the
whole. There was little difference in the form of the universities for
the education of their youth, whether with regard to faculties, to
sciences, or to the more liberal and elegant kinds of erudition. From
this resemblance in the modes of intercourse, and in the whole form and
fashion of life, no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in
any part of it. There was nothing more than a pleasing variety to
recreate and instruct the mind, to enrich the imagination, and to
meliorate the heart. When a man travelled or resided, for health,
pleasure, business, or necessity, from his own country, he never felt
himself quite abroad.
The whole body of this new scheme of manners, in support of the new
scheme of polities, I consider as a strong and decisive proof of
determined ambition and systematic hostility. I defy the most refining
ingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of the
Jacobin Republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious,
legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing
herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed
resolution of keeping no terms with that world. It has not been, as has
been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only
broke with their old government. They made a schism with the whole
universe, and that schism extended to almost everything, great and
small. For one, I wish, since it is gone thus far, that the breach had
been so complete as to make all intercourse impracticable: but, partly
by accident, partly by design, partly from the resistance of the matter,
enough is left to preserve intercourse, whilst amity is destroyed or
corrupted in its principle.
This violent breach of the community of Europe we must conclude to have
been made (even if they had not expressly declared it over and over
again) either to force mankind into an adoption of their system or to
live in perpetual enmity with a community the most potent we have ever
known. Can any person imagine, that, in offering to mankind this
desperate alternative, there is no indication of a hostile mind, because
men in possession of the ruling authority are supposed to have a right
to act without coercion in their own territories? As to the right of
men to act anywhere according to their pleasure, without any moral tie,
no such right exists. Men are never in a state of _total_ independence
of each other. It is not the condition of our nature: nor is it
conceivable how any man can pursue a considerable course of action
without its having some effect upon others, or, of course, without
producing some degree of responsibility for his conduct. The
_situations_ in which men relatively stand produce the rules and
principles of that responsibility, and afford directions to prudence in
exacting it.
Distance of place does not extinguish the duties or the rights of men;
but it often renders their exercise impracticable. The same circumstance
of distance renders the noxious effects of an evil system in any
community less pernicious. But there are situations where this
difficulty does not occur, and in which, therefore, those duties are
obligatory and these rights are to be asserted. It has ever been the
method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which
they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in
civil community. Civil laws are not all of them merely positive. Those
which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable
provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.
Almost the whole prætorian law is such. There is a _law of neighborhood_
which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground. When a
neighbor sees a _new erection_, in the nature of a nuisance, set up at
his door, he has a right to represent it to the judge, who, on his part,
has a right to order the work to be stayed, or, if established, to be
removed. On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made
many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain
the right of _ownership_ by the right of _vicinage_. No _innovation_ is
permitted that may redound, even secondarily, to the prejudice of a
neighbor. The whole doctrine of that important head of prætorian law,
"_De novi operis nunciatione_," is founded on the principle, that no
_new_ use should be made of a man's private liberty of operating upon
his private property, from whence a detriment may be justly apprehended
by his neighbor. This law of denunciation is prospective. It is to
anticipate what is called _damnum infectum_ or _damnum nondum factum_,
that is, a damage justly apprehended, but not actually done. Even before
it is clearly known whether the innovation be damageable or not, the
judge is competent to issue a prohibition to innovate until the point
can be determined. This prompt interference is grounded on principles
favorable to both parties. It is preventive of mischief difficult to be
repaired, and of ill blood difficult to be softened. The rule of law,
therefore, which comes before the evil is amongst the very best parts of
equity, and justifies the promptness of the remedy; because, as it is
well observed, "_Res damni infecti celeritatem desiderat, et periculosa
est dilatio_." This right of denunciation does not hold, when things
continue, however inconveniently to the neighborhood, according to the
_ancient_ mode. For there is a sort of presumption against novelty,
drawn out of a deep consideration of human nature and human affairs; and
the maxim of jurisprudence is well laid down, "_Vetustas pro lege semper
habetur_."
Such is the law of civil vicinity. Now where there is no constituted
judge, as between independent states there is not, the vicinage itself
is the natural judge. It is, preventively, the assertor of its own
rights, or, remedially, their avenger. Neighbors are presumed to take
cognizance of each other's acts. "_Vicini vicinorum facta præsumuntur
seire_." This principle, which, like the rest, is as true of nations as
of individual men, has bestowed on the grand vicinage of Europe a duty
to know and a right to prevent any capital innovation which may amount
to the erection of a dangerous nuisance.[32] Of the importance of that
innovation, and the mischief of that nuisance, they are, to be sure,
bound to judge not litigiously: but it is in their competence to judge.
They have uniformly acted on this right. What in civil society is a
ground of action in politic society is a ground of war. But the exercise
of that competent jurisdiction is a matter of moral prudence. As suits
in civil society, so war in the political, must ever be a matter of
great deliberation. It is not this or that particular proceeding, picked
out here and there, as a subject of quarrel, that will do. There must be
an aggregate of mischief. There must be marks of deliberation; there
must be traces of design; there must be indications of malice; there
must be tokens of ambition. There must be force in the body where they
exist; there must be energy in the mind. When all these circumstances
combine, or the important parts of them, the duty of the vicinity calls
for the exercise of its competence: and the rules of prudence do not
restrain, but demand it.