the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for
such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world,
I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of the
evil. No man who has attended to the particulars of what has been done
in France, and combined them with the principles there asserted, can
possibly doubt it. When I compare with this great cause of nations the
trifling points of honor, the still more contemptible points of
interest, the light ceremonies, the undefinable punctilios, the disputes
about precedency, the lowering or the hoisting of a sail, the dealing in
a hundred or two of wildcat-skins on the other side of the globe, which
have often kindled up the flames of war between nations, I stand
astonished at those persons who do not feel a resentment, not more
natural than politic, at the atrocious insults that this monstrous
compound offers to the dignity of every nation, and who are not alarmed
with what it threatens to their safety.
I have therefore been decidedly of opinion, with our declaration at
Whitehall in the beginning of this war, that the vicinage of Europe had
not only a right, but an indispensable duty and an exigent interest, to
denunciate this new work, before it had produced the danger we have so
sorely felt, and which we shall long feel. The example of what is done
by France is too important not to have a vast and extensive influence;
and that example, backed with its power, must bear with great force on
those who are near it, especially on those who shall recognize the
pretended republic on the principle upon which it now stands. It is not
an old structure, which you have found as it is, and are not to dispute
of the original end and design with which it had been so fashioned. It
is a recent wrong, and can plead no prescription. It violates the rights
upon which not only the community of France, but those on which all
communities are founded. The principles on which they proceed are
_general_ principles, and are as true in England as in any other
country. They who (though with the purest intentions) recognize the
authority of these regicides and robbers upon principle justify their
acts, and establish them as precedents. It is a question not between
France and England; it is a question between property and force. The
property claims; and its claim has been allowed. The property of the
nation is the nation. They who massacre, plunder, and expel the body of
the proprietary are murderers and robbers. The state, in its essence,
must be moral and just: and it may be so, though a tyrant or usurper
should be accidentally at the head of it. This is a thing to be
lamented: but this notwithstanding, the body of the commonwealth may
remain in all its integrity and be perfectly sound in its composition.
The present case is different. It is not a revolution in government. It
is not the victory of party over party. It is a destruction and
decomposition of the whole society; which never can be made of right by
any faction, however powerful, nor without terrible consequences to all
about it, both in the act and in the example. This pretended republic is
founded in crimes, and exists by wrong and robbery; and wrong and
robbery, far from a title to anything, is war with mankind. To be at
peace with robbery is to be an accomplice with it.
Mere locality does not constitute a body politic. Had Cade and his gang
got possession of London, they would not have been the lord mayor,
aldermen, and common council. The body politic of France existed in the
majesty of its throne, in the dignity of its nobility, in the honor of
its gentry, in the sanctity of its clergy, in the reverence of its
magistracy, in the weight and consideration due to its landed property
in the several bailliages, in the respect due to its movable substance
represented by the corporations of the kingdom. All these particular
_molecules_ united form the great mass of what is truly the body politic
in all countries. They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice;
because they can only exist by justice. Nation is a moral essence, not a
geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator. France,
though out of her territorial possession, exists; because the sole
possible claimant, I mean the proprietary, and the government to which
the proprietary adheres, exists and claims. God forbid, that if you were
expelled from your house by ruffians and assassins, that I should call
the material walls, doors, and windows of ---- the ancient and honorable
family of ----! Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to
turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all
the esteem and respect I owe to you? The Regicides in France are not
France. France is out of her bounds, but the kingdom is the same.
To illustrate my opinions on this subject, let us suppose a case, which,
after what has happened, we cannot think absolutely impossible, though
the augury is to be abominated, and the event deprecated with our most
ardent prayers. Let us suppose, then, that our gracious sovereign was
sacrilegiously murdered; his exemplary queen, at the head of the
matronage of this land, murdered in the same manner; that those
princesses whose beauty and modest elegance are the ornaments of the
country, and who are the leaders and patterns of the ingenuous youth of
their sex, were put to a cruel and ignominious death, with hundreds of
others, mothers and daughters, ladies of the first distinction; that the
Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, princes the hope and pride of the
nation, with all their brethren, were forced to fly from the knives of
assassins; that the whole body of our excellent clergy were either
massacred or robbed of all and transported; the Christian religion, in
all its denominations, forbidden and persecuted; the law totally,
fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed; the judges put to death
by revolutionary tribunals; the peers and commons robbed to the last
acre of their estates, massacred, if they stayed, or obliged to seek
life in flight, in exile, and in beggary; that the whole landed property
should share the very same fate; that every military and naval officer
of honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the same
description of confiscation and exile; that the principal merchants and
bankers should be drawn out, as from an hen-coop, for slaughter; that
the citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the hand
and the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should have
been collected in the public squares and massacred by thousands with
cannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to a
situation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons. In such
a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?
Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired,
honored, loved, and cherished? Would not the exiles of England alone be
my government and my fellow-citizens? Would not their places of refuge
be my temporary country? Would not all my duties and all my affections
be there, and there only? Should I consider myself as a traitor to my
country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of
every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them
on their enemies? Could I in any way show myself more a patriot? What
should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering
brethren,--who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,--and
could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?
What ought I to think and feel, if, being geographers instead of kings,
they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers
polluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement, as the honorable
member of Europe called England? In that condition, what should we think
of Sweden, Denmark, or Holland, or whatever power afforded us a churlish
and treacherous hospitality, if they should invite us to join the
standard of our king, our laws, and our religion,--if they should give
us a direct promise of protection,--if, after all this, taking advantage
of our deplorable situation, which left us no choice, they were to treat
us as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries,--if they were to send us
far from the aid of our king and our suffering country, to squander us
away in the most pestilential climates for a venal enlargement of their
own territories, for the purpose of trucking them, when obtained, with
those very robbers and murderers they had called upon us to oppose with
our blood? What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service we
were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes,
but as outcasts of the human race? Whilst we were fighting those battles
of their interest and as their soldiers, how should we feel, if we were
to be excluded from all their cartels? How must we feel, if the pride
and flower of the English nobility and gentry, who might escape the
pestilential clime and the devouring sword, should, if taken prisoners,
be delivered over as rebel subjects, to be condemned as rebels, as
traitors, as the vilest of all criminals, by tribunals formed of Maroon
negro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters, who were
made free and organized into judges for their robberies and murders?
What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous
protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders? Should we not obtest
Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth? Oppression makes
wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which
is better than the sobriety of fools. Their cry is the voice of sacred
misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy of
prophecy and inspiration. In that bitterness of soul, in that
indignation of suffering virtue, in that exaltation of despair, would
not persecuted English loyalty cry out with an awful warning voice, and
denounce the destruction that waits on monarchs who consider fidelity
to them as the most degrading of all vices, who suffer it to be punished
as the most abominable of all crimes, and who have no respect but for
rebels, traitors, regicides, and furious negro slaves, whose crimes have
broke their chains? Would not this warm language of high indignation
have more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of true
attachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers who would hush monarchs
to sleep in the arms of death? Let them be well convinced, that, if ever
this example should prevail in its whole extent, it will have its full
operation. Whilst kings stand firm on their base, though under that base
there is a sure-wrought mine, there will not be wanting to their levees
a single person of those who are attached to their fortune, and not to
their persons or cause; but hereafter none will support a tottering
throne. Some will fly for fear of being crushed under the ruin; some
will join in making it. They will seek, in the destruction of royalty,
fame and power and wealth and the homage of kings, with Reubell, with
Carnot, with Révellière, and with the Merlins and the Talliens, rather
than suffer exile and beggary with the Condés, or the Broglies, the
Castries, the D'Avarays, the Sérents, the Cazalès, and the long line of
loyal, suffering, patriot nobility, or to be butchered with the oracles
and the victims of the laws, the D'Ormessons, the D'Esprémesnils, and
the Malesherbes. This example we shall give, if, instead of adhering to
our fellows in a cause which is an honor to us all, we abandon the
lawful government and lawful corporate body of France, to hunt for a
shameful and ruinous fraternity with this odious usurpation that
disgraces civilized society and the human race.
And is, then, example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school
of mankind, and they will learn at no other. This war is a war against
that example. It is not a war for Louis the Eighteenth, or even for the
property, virtue, fidelity of France. It is a war for George the Third,
for Francis the Second, and for all the dignity, property, honor,
virtue, and religion of England, of Germany, and of all nations.
I know that all I have said of the systematic unsociability of this
new-invented species of republic, and the impossibility of preserving
peace, is answered by asserting that the scheme of manners, morals, and
even of maxims and principles of state, is of no weight in a question of
peace or war between communities. This doctrine is supported by example.
The case of Algiers is cited, with an hint, as if it were the stronger
case. I should take no notice of this sort of inducement, if I had found
it only where first it was. I do not want respect for those from whom I
first heard it; but, having no controversy at present with them, I only
think it not amiss to rest on it a little, as I find it adopted, with
much more of the same kind, by several of those on whom such reasoning
had formerly made no apparent impression. If it had no force to prevent
us from submitting to this necessary war, it furnishes no better ground
for our making an unnecessary and ruinous peace.
This analogical argument drawn from the case of Algiers would lead us a
good way. The fact is, we ourselves with a little cover, others more
directly, pay a _tribute_ to the Republic of Algiers. Is it meant to
reconcile us to the payment of a _tribute_ to the French Republic? That
this, with other things more ruinous, will be demanded, hereafter, I
little doubt; but for the present this will not be avowed,--though our
minds are to be gradually prepared for it. In truth, the arguments from
this case are worth little, even to those who approve the buying an
Algerine forbearance of piracy. There are many things which men do not
approve, that they must do to avoid a greater evil. To argue from thence
that they are to act in the same manner in all cases is turning
necessity into a law. Upon what is matter of prudence, the argument
concludes the contrary way. Because we have done one humiliating act, we
ought with infinite caution to admit more acts of the same nature, lest
humiliation should become our habitual state. Matters of prudence are
under the dominion of circumstances, and not of logical analogies. It is
absurd to take it otherwise.
I, for one, do more than doubt the policy of this kind of convention
with Algiers. On those who think as I do the argument _ad hominem_ can
make no sort of impression. I know something of the constitution and
composition of this very extraordinary republic. It has a constitution,
I admit, similar to the present tumultuous military tyranny of France,
by which an handful of obscure ruffians domineer over a fertile country
and a brave people. For the composition, too, I admit the Algerine
community resembles that of France,--being formed out of the very scum,
scandal, disgrace, and pest of the Turkish Asia. The Grand Seignior, to
disburden the country, suffers the Dey to recruit in his dominions the
corps of janizaries, or asaphs, which form the Directory and Council of
Elders of the African Republic one and indivisible. But notwithstanding
this resemblance, which I allow, I never shall so far injure the
Janizarian Republic of Algiers as to put it in comparison, for every
sort of crime, turpitude, and oppression, with the Jacobin Republic of
Paris. There is no question with me to which of the two I should choose
to be a neighbor or a subject. But. situated as I am, I am in no danger
of becoming to Algiers either the one or the other. It is not so in my
relation to the atheistical fanatics of France. I _am_ their neighbor; I
_may_ become their subject. Have the gentlemen who borrowed this happy
parallel no idea of the different conduct to be held with regard to the
very same evil at an immense distance and when it is at your door? when
its power is enormous, as when it is comparatively as feeble as its
distance is remote? when there is a barrier of language and usages,
which prevents corruption through certain old correspondences and
habitudes, from the contagion of the horrible novelties that are
introduced into everything else? I can contemplate without dread a royal
or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with an
easy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the Tower.
But if, by _Habeas Corpus_, or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby
of the House of Commons whilst your door was open, any of you would be
more stout than wise who would not gladly make your escape out of the
back windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in my
bedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind
Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and
the lions and tigers that are in our antechambers and our lobbies.
Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our
neighbor; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be, is an
old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be
apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will
tell you what I think of that point. In the mean time, the case quoted
from the Algerine Reports will not apply as authority. We shall put it
out of court; and so far as that goes, let the counsel for the Jacobin
peace take nothing by their motion.
When we voted, as you and I did, with many more whom you and I respect
and love, to resist this enemy, we were providing for dangers that were
direct, home, pressing, and not remote, contingent, uncertain, and
formed upon loose analogies. We judged of the danger with which we were
menaced by Jacobin France from the whole tenor of her conduct, not from
one or two doubtful or detached acts or expressions. I not only
concurred in the idea of combining with Europe in this war, but to the
best of my power even stimulated ministers to that conjunction of
interests and of efforts. I joined them with all my soul, on the
principles contained in that manly and masterly state-paper which I have
two or three times referred to,[33] and may still more frequently
hereafter. The diplomatic collection never was more enriched than with
this piece. The historic facts justify every stroke of the master. "Thus
painters write their names at Co."
Various persons may concur in the same measure on various grounds. They
may be various, without being contrary to or exclusive of each other. I
thought the insolent, unprovoked aggression of the Regicide upon our
ally of Holland a good ground of war. I think his manifest attempt to
overturn the balance of Europe a good ground of war. As a good ground
of war I consider his declaration of war on his Majesty and his kingdom.
But though I have taken all these to my aid, I consider them as nothing
more than as a sort of evidence to indicate the treasonable mind within.
Long before their acts of aggression and their declaration of war, the
faction in France had assumed a form, had adopted a body of principles
and maxims, and had regularly and systematically acted on them, by which
she virtually had put herself in a posture which was in itself a
declaration of war against mankind.
It is said by the Directory, in their several manifestoes, that we of
the people are tumultuous for peace, and that ministers pretend
negotiation to amuse us. This they have learned from the language of
many amongst ourselves, whose conversations have been one main cause of
whatever extent the opinion for peace with Regicide may be. But I, who
think the ministers unfortunately to be but too serious in their
proceedings, find myself obliged to say a little more on this subject of
the popular opinion.
Before our opinions are quoted against ourselves, it is proper, that,
from our serious deliberation, they may be worth quoting. It is without
reason we praise the wisdom of our Constitution in putting under the
discretion of the crown the awful trust of war and peace, if the
ministers of the crown virtually return it again into our hands. The
trust was placed there as a sacred deposit, to secure us against popular
rashness in plunging into wars, and against the effects of popular
dismay, disgust, or lassitude, in getting out of them as imprudently as
we might first engage in them. To have no other measure in judging of
those great objects than our momentary opinions and desires is to throw
us back upon that very democracy which, in this part, our Constitution
was formed to avoid.
It is no excuse at all for a minister who at our desire takes a measure
contrary to our safety, that it is our own act. He who does not stay the
hand of suicide is guilty of murder. On our part, I say, that to be
instructed is not to be degraded or enslaved. Information is an
advantage to us; and we have a right to demand it. He that is bound to
act in the dark cannot be said to act freely. When it appears evident to
our governors that our desires and our interests are at variance, they
ought not to gratify the former at the expense of the latter. Statesmen
are placed on an eminence, that they may have a larger horizon than we
can possibly command. They have a whole before them, which we can
contemplate only in the parts, and often without the necessary
relations. Ministers are not only our natural rulers, but our natural
guides. Reason, clearly and manfully delivered, has in itself a mighty
force; but reason in the mouth of legal authority is, I may fairly say,
irresistible.
I admit that reason of state will not, in many circumstances, permit the
disclosure of the true ground of a public proceeding. In that case
silence is manly, and it is wise. It is fair to call for trust, when the
principle of reason itself suspends its public use. I take the
distinction to be this: the ground of a particular measure making a part
of a plan it is rarely proper to divulge; all the broader grounds of
policy, on which the general plan is to be adopted, ought as rarely to
be concealed. They who have not the whole cause before them, call them
politicians, call them people, call them what you will, are no judges.
The difficulties of the case, as well as its fair side, ought to be
presented. This ought to be done; and it is all that can be done. When
we have our true situation distinctly presented to us, if then we
resolve, with a blind and headlong violence, to resist the admonitions
of our friends, and to cast ourselves into the hands of our potent and
irreconcilable foes, then, and not till then, the ministers stand
acquitted before God and man for whatever may come.
Lamenting, as I do, that the matter has not had so full and free a
discussion as it requires, I mean to omit none of the points which seem
to me necessary for consideration, previous to an arrangement which is
forever to decide the form and the fate of Europe. In the course,
therefore, of what I shall have the honor to address to you, I propose
the following questions to your serious thoughts.--1. Whether the
present system, which stands for a government, in France, be such as in
peace and war affects the neighboring states in a manner different from
the internal government that formerly prevailed in that country?--2.
Whether that system, supposing its views hostile to other nations,
possesses any means of being hurtful to them peculiar to itself?--3.
Whether there has been lately such a change in France as to alter the
nature of its system, or its effect upon other powers?--4. Whether any
public declarations or engagements exist, on the part of the allied
powers, which stand in the way of a treaty of peace which supposes the
right and confirms the power of the Regicide faction in France?--5. What
the state of the other powers of Europe will be with respect to each
other and their colonies, on the conclusion of a Regicide peace?--6.
Whether we are driven to the absolute necessity of making that kind of
peace?
These heads of inquiry will enable us to make the application of the
several matters of fact and topics of argument, that occur in this vast
discussion, to certain fixed principles. I do not mean to confine myself
to the order in which they stand. I shall discuss them in such a manner
as shall appear to me the best adapted for showing their mutual bearings
and relations. Here, then, I close the public matter of my letter; but
before I have done, let me say one word in apology for myself.