plan of war against the success of which there was something little
short of mathematical demonstration. They refused to take any step which
might strike at the heart of affairs. They seemed unwilling to wound the
enemy in any vital part. They acted through the whole as if they really
wished the conservation of the Jacobin power, as what might be more
favorable than the lawful government to the attainment of the petty
objects they looked for. They always kept on the circumference; and the
wider and remoter the circle was, the more eagerly they chose it as
their sphere of action in this centrifugal war. The plan they pursued in
its nature demanded great length of time. In its execution, they who
went the nearest way to work were obliged to cover an incredible extent
of country. It left to the enemy every means of destroying this extended
line of weakness. Ill success in any part was sure to defeat the effect
of the whole. This is true of Austria. It is still more true of England.
On this false plan, even good fortune, by further weakening the victor,
put him but the further off from his object.
As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit of
aggrandizement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized
upon all the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory at
the expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the
expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its
turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of faith and
friendship.
The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has
been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through
the false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by the
errors of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues, when peace is made,
the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it
will be made upon the same false principle. What has been lost in the
field, in the field may be regained. An arrangement of peace in its
nature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel and
deliberation, and not of fortuitous events. If built upon a basis
fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those
unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of
the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin. It would
not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to
trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of
prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary
providence of God.
It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least
considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by
the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded. It would
answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war.
The whole has been but one error. It was but nominally a war of
alliance. As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to hold
an alliance together. There could be no tie of _honor_ in a society for
pillage. There could be no tie of a common _interest_, where the object
did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give
them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, form
such a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandon
a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other
member of the alliance. The partition of Poland offered an object of
spoil in which the parties _might_ agree. They were circumjacent, and
each might take a portion convenient to his own territory. They might
dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to
each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment.
Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitous
measure, and they most who were most concerned in it, for the moment
there was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongst
confederates in wrong. But the spoil of France did not afford the same
facilities for accommodation. What might satisfy the House of Austria in
a Flemish frontier afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of the
King of Prussia. What might be desired by Great Britain in the West
Indies must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest at
Vienna, and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interest
at Madrid. Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs on
Italy, could not be very much in earnest about the conservation of the
old patrimony of the House of Savoy; and Sardinia, who owed to an
Italian force all her means of shutting out France from Italy, of which
she has been supposed to hold the key, would not purchase the means of
strength upon one side by yielding it on the other: she would not
readily give the possession of Novara for the hope of Savoy. No
Continental power was willing to lose any of its Continental objects for
the increase of the naval power of Great Britain; and Great Britain
would not give up any of the objects she sought for, as the means of an
increase to her naval power, to further their aggrandizement.
The moment this war came to be considered as a war merely of profit, the
actual circumstances are such that it never could become really a war of
alliance. Nor can the peace be a peace of alliance, until things are put
upon their right bottom.
I don't find it denied, that, when a treaty is entered into for peace, a
demand will be made on the Regicides to surrender a great part of their
conquests on the Continent. 'Will they, in the present state of the war,
make that surrender without an equivalent? This Continental cession must
of course be made in favor of that party in the alliance that has
suffered losses. That party has nothing to furnish towards an
equivalent. What equivalent, for instance, has Holland to offer, who has
lost her all? What equivalent can come from the Emperor, every part of
whose territories contiguous to France is already within the pale of the
Regicide dominion? What equivalent has Sardinia to offer for Savoy, and
for Nice,--I may say, for her whole being? What has she taken from the
faction of France? She has lost very near her all, and she has gained
nothing. What equivalent has Spain to give? Alas! she has already paid
for her own ransom the fund of equivalent,--and a dreadful equivalent it
is, to England and to herself. But I put Spain out of the question: she
is a province of the Jacobin empire, and she must make peace or war
according to the orders she receives from the Directory of Assassins. In
effect and substance, her crown is a fief of Regicide.
Whence, then, can the compensation be demanded? Undoubtedly from that
power which alone has made some conquests. That power is England. Will
the Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England may
keep islands in the West Indies? They never can protract the war in good
earnest for that object; nor can they act in concert with us, in our
refusal to grant anything towards their redemption. In that case we are
thus situated: either we must give Europe, bound hand and foot, to
France, or we must quit the West Indies without any one object, great or
small, towards indemnity and security. I repeat it, without any
advantage whatever: because, supposing that our conquest could comprise
all that France ever possessed in the tropical America, it never can
amount in any fair estimation to a fair equivalent for Holland, for the
Austrian Netherlands, for the Lower Germany,--that is, for the whole
ancient kingdom or circle of Burgundy, now under the yoke of Regicide,
to say nothing of almost all Italy, under the same barbarous domination.
If we treat in the present situation of things, we have nothing in our
hands that can redeem Europe. Nor is the Emperor, as I have observed,
more rich in the fund of equivalents.
If we look to our stock in the Eastern world, our most valuable and
systematic acquisitions are made in that quarter. Is it from France they
are made? France has but one or two contemptible factories, subsisting
by the offal of the private fortunes of English individuals to support
them, in any part of India. I look on the taking of the Cape of Good
Hope as the securing of a post of great moment; it does honor to those
who planned and to those who executed that enterprise; but I speak of it
always as comparatively good,--as good as anything can be in a scheme
of war that repels us from a centre, and employs all our forces where
nothing can be finally decisive. But giving, as I freely give, every
possible credit to these Eastern conquests, I ask one question:--On whom
are they made? It is evident, that, if we can keep our Eastern
conquests, we keep them not at the expense of France, but at the expense
of Holland, our _ally_,--of Holland, the immediate cause of the war, the
nation whom we had undertaken to protect, and not of the Republic which
it was our business to destroy. If we return the African and the Asiatic
conquests, we put them into the hands of a nominal state (to that
Holland is reduced) unable to retain them, and which will virtually
leave them under the direction of France. If we withhold them, Holland
declines still more as a state. She loses so much carrying trade, and
that means of keeping up the small degree of naval power she holds: for
which policy alone, and not for any commercial gain, she maintains the
Cape, or any settlement beyond it. In that case, resentment, faction,
and even necessity, will throw her more and more into the power of the
new, mischievous Republic. But on the probable state of Holland I shall
say more, when in this correspondence I come to talk over with you the
state in which any sort of Jacobin peace will leave all Europe.
So far as to the East Indies.
As to the West Indies,--indeed, as to either, if we look for matter of
exchange in order to ransom Europe,--it is easy to show that we have
taken a terribly roundabout road. I cannot conceive, even if, for the
sake of holding conquests there, we should refuse to redeem Holland,
and the Austrian Netherlands, and the hither Germany, that Spain, merely
as she is Spain, (and forgetting that the Regicide ambassador governs at
Madrid,) will see with perfect satisfaction Great Britain sole mistress
of the isles. In truth, it appears to me, that, when we come to balance
our account, we shall find in the proposed peace only the pure, simple,
and unendowed charms of Jacobin amity. We shall have the satisfaction of
knowing that no blood or treasure has been spared by the Allies for
support of the Regicide system. We shall reflect at leisure on one great
truth: that it was ten times more easy totally to destroy the system
itself than, when established, it would be to reduce its power,--and
that this republic, most formidable abroad, was of all things the
weakest at home; that her frontier was terrible, her interior feeble;
that it was matter of choice to attack her where she is invincible, and
to spare her where she was ready to dissolve by her own internal
disorders. We shall reflect that our plan was good neither for offence
nor defence.
It would not be at all difficult to prove that an army of an hundred
thousand men, horse, foot, and artillery, might have been employed
against the enemy, on the very soil which he has usurped, at a far less
expense than has been squandered away upon tropical adventures. In these
adventures it was not an enemy we had to vanquish, but a cemetery to
conquer. In carrying on the war in the West Indies, the hostile sword is
merciful, the country in which we engage is the dreadful enemy. There
the European conqueror finds a cruel defeat in the very fruits of his
success. Every advantage is but a new demand on England for recruits to
the West Indian grave. In a West India war, the Regicides have for their
troops a race of fierce barbarians, to whom the poisoned air, in which
our youth inhale certain death, is salubrity and life. To them the
climate is the surest and most faithful of allies.
Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards the
Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his weak
and unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a man who
did not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of the
country, who to our hundred thousand would at one time have added eighty
thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthusiasm,
and by vengeance: motives which secured them to the cause in a very
different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with
millions. This ally, (or rather, this principal in the war,) by the
confession of the Regicide himself, was more formidable to him than all
his other foes united. Warring there, we should have led our arms to the
capital of Wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken)
of a sure retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, an
impenetrable barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formed
between the enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nation
who have declined to act against an enemy when it might have been done
in his own country, and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a long
victorious ally in that country, declined all effectual coöperation, and
suffered him to perish for want of support. On the plan of a war in
France, every advantage that our allies might obtain would be doubled
in its effect. Disasters on the one side might have a fair chance of
being compensated by victories on the other. Had we brought the main of
our force to bear upon that quarter, all the operations of the British
and Imperial crowns would have been combined. The war would have had
system, correspondence, and a certain direction. But as the war has been
pursued, the operations of the two crowns have not the smallest degree
of mutual bearing or relation.
Had acquisitions in the West Indies been our object, on success in
France, everything reasonable in those remote parts might be demanded
with decorum and justice and a sure effect. Well might we call for a
recompense in America for those services to which Europe owed its
safety. Having abandoned this obvious policy connected with principle,
we have seen the Regicide power taking the reverse course, and making
real conquests in the West Indies, to which all our dear-bought
advantages (if we could hold them) are mean and contemptible. The
noblest island within the tropics, worth all that we possess put
together, is by the vassal Spaniard delivered into her hands. The island
of Hispaniola (of which we have but one poor corner, by a slippery hold)
is perhaps equal to England in extent, and in fertility is far superior.
The part possessed by Spain of that great island, made for the seat and
centre of a tropical empire, was not improved, to be sure, as the French
division had been, before it was systematically destroyed by the
Cannibal Republic; but it is not only the far larger, but the far more
salubrious and more fertile part.
It was delivered into the hands of the barbarians, without, as I can
find, any public reclamation on our part, not only in contravention to
one of the fundamental treaties that compose the public law of Europe,
but in defiance of the fundamental colonial policy of Spain herself.
This part of the Treaty of Utrecht was made for great general ends,
unquestionably; but whilst it provided for those general ends, it was in
affirmance of that particular policy. It was not to injure, but to save
Spain, by making a settlement of her estate which prohibited her to
alienate to France. It is her policy not to see the balance of West
Indian power overturned by France or by Great Britain. Whilst the
monarchies subsisted, this unprincipled cession was what the influence
of the elder branch of the House of Bourbon never dared to attempt on
the younger: but cannibal terror has been more powerful than family
influence. The Bourbon monarchy of Spain, is united to the Republic of
France by what may be truly called the ties of blood.
By this measure the balance of power in the West Indies is totally
destroyed. It has followed the balance of power in Europe. It is not
alone what shall be left nominally to the Assassins that is theirs.
Theirs is the whole empire of Spain in America. That stroke finishes
all. I should be glad to see our suppliant negotiator in the act of
putting his feather to the ear of the Directory, to make it unclench the
fist, and, by his tickling, to charm that rich prize out of the iron
gripe of robbery and ambition! It does not require much sagacity to
discern that no power wholly baffled and defeated in Europe can flatter
itself with conquests in the West Indies. In that state of things it can
neither keep nor hold. No! It cannot even long make war, if the grand
bank and deposit of its force is at all in the West Indies. But here a
scene opens to my view too important to pass by, perhaps too critical to
touch. Is it possible that it should not present itself in all its
relations to a mind habituated to consider either war or peace on a
large scale or as one whole?
Unfortunately, other ideas have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, a
murderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on upon
ideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generous
wildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war in
a wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the enemy, a
war in the heart of his country, a war in concert with an internal ally,
and in combination with the external, is regarded as folly and romance.
My dear friend, I hold it impossible that these considerations should
have escaped the statesmen on both sides of the water, and on both sides
of the House of Commons. How a question of peace can be discussed
without having them in view I cannot imagine. If you or others see a way
out of these difficulties, I am happy. I see, indeed, a fund from whence
equivalents will be proposed. I see it, but I cannot just now touch it.
It is a question of high moment. It opens another Iliad of woes to
Europe.
Such is the time proposed for making _a common political peace_ to which
no one circumstance is propitious. As to the grand principle of the
peace, it is left, as if by common consent, wholly out of the question.
Viewing things in this light, I have frequently sunk into a degree of
despondency and dejection hardly to be described; yet out of the
profoundest depths of this despair, an impulse which I have in vain
endeavored to resist has urged me to raise one feeble cry against this
unfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make a
coalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of the
world. No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me
with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by this
junction of parties under the soothing name of peace. We are apt to
speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by which
dubious wars terminate in humiliating treaties. It is here the direct
contrary. I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at the
intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able with
deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity.
This fraternity is, indeed, so terrible in its nature, and in its
manifest consequences, that there is no way of quieting our
apprehensions about it, but by totally putting it out of sight, by
substituting for it, through a sort of periphrasis, something of an
ambiguous quality, and describing such a connection under the terms of
"_the usual relations of peace and amity_." By this means the proposed
fraternity is hustled in the crowd of those treaties which imply no
change in the public law of Europe, and which do not upon system affect
the interior condition of nations. It is confounded with those
conventions in which matters of dispute among sovereign powers are
compromised by the taking off a duty more or less, by the surrender of a
frontier town or a disputed district on the one side or the other, by
pactions in which the pretensions of families are settled, (as by a
conveyancer making family substitutions and successions,) without any
alteration in the laws, manners, religion, privileges, and customs of
the cities or territories which are the subject of such arrangements.
All this body of old conventions, composing the vast and voluminous
collection called the _Corps Diplomatique_, forms the code or statute
law, as the methodized reasonings of the great publicists and jurists
form the digest and jurisprudence, of the Christian world. In these
treasures are to be found the _usual_ relations of peace and amity in
civilized Europe; and there the relations of ancient France were to be
found amongst the rest.
The present system in France is not the ancient France. It is not the
ancient France with ordinary ambition and ordinary means. It is not a
new power of an old kind. It is a new power of a new species. When such
a questionable shape is to be admitted for the first time into the
brotherhood of Christendom, it is not a mere matter of idle curiosity to
consider how far it is in its nature alliable with the rest, or whether
"the relations of peace and amity" with this new state are likely to be
of the same nature with the _usual_ relations of the states of Europe.
The Revolution in France had the relation of France to other nations as
one of its principal objects. The changes made by that Revolution were
not the better to accommodate her to the old and usual relations, but to
produce new ones. The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but
to make her formidable,--not to make her a neighbor, but a
mistress,--not to make her more observant of laws, but to put her in a
condition to impose them. To make France truly formidable, it was
necessary that France should be new-modelled. They who have not
followed the train of the late proceedings have been led by deceitful
representations (which deceit made a part in the plan) to conceive that
this totally new model of a state, in which nothing escaped a change,
was made with a view to its internal relations only.
In the Revolution of France, two sorts of men were principally concerned
in giving a character and determination to its pursuits: the
philosophers and the politicians. They took different ways, but they met
in the same end.
The philosophers had one predominant object, which they pursued with a
fanatical fury,--that is, the utter extirpation of religion. To that
every question of empire was subordinate. They had rather domineer in a
parish of atheists than rule over a Christian world. Their temporal
ambition was wholly subservient to their proselytizing spirit, in which
they were not exceeded by Mahomet himself.