unity in design and constancy in pursuit. But unity in design and
perseverance and boldness in pursuit have never wanted resources, and
never will. We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of a
state in which the property has nothing to do with the government
Reflect, my dear Sir, reflect again and again, on a government in which
the property is in complete subjection, and where nothing roles but the
mind of desperate men. The condition of a commonwealth not governed by
its property was a combination of things which the learned and ingenious
speculator, Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms,
never could imagine to be possible. We have seen it; the world has felt
it; and if the world will shut their eyes to this state of things, they
will feel it more. The rulers there have found their resources in
crimes. The discovery is dreadful, the mine exhaustless. They have
everything to gain, and they have nothing to lose. They have a boundless
inheritance in hope, and there is no medium for them betwixt the highest
elevation and death with infamy. Never can they, who, from the miserable
servitude of the desk, have been raised to empire, again submit to the
bondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying music, or writing
_plaidoyers_ by the sheet. It has made me often smile in bitterness,
when I have heard talk of an indemnity to such men, provided they
returned to their allegiance.
From all this what is my inference? It is, that this new system of
robbery in France cannot be rendered safe by any art; that it _must_ be
destroyed, or that it will destroy all Europe; that to destroy that
enemy, by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to
bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that
system exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerable
parts. These are my inferences. In one word, with this republic nothing
independent can coexist. The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were more
pardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which the
allied courts may fall. They have the benefit of his dreadful example.
The unhappy Louis the Sixteenth was a man of the best intentions that
probably ever reigned. He was by no means deficient in talents. He had a
most laudable desire to supply by general reading, and even by the
acquisition of elemental knowledge, an education in all points
originally defective; but nobody told him (and it was no wonder he
should not himself divine it) that the world of which he read and the
world in which he lived were no longer the same. Desirous of doing
everything for the best, fearful of cabal, distrusting his own judgment,
he sought his ministers of all kinds upon public testimony. But as
courts are the field for caballers, the public is the theatre for
mountebanks and impostors. The cure for both those evils is in the
discernment of the prince. But an accurate and penetrating discernment
is what in a young prince could not be looked for.
His conduct in its principle was not unwise; but, like most other of his
well-meant designs, it failed in his hands. It failed partly from mere
ill fortune, to which speculators are rarely pleased to assign that very
large share to which she is justly entitled in all human affairs. The
failure, perhaps, in part, was owing to his suffering his system to be
vitiated and disturbed by those intrigues which it is, humanly speaking,
impossible wholly to prevent in courts, or indeed under any form of
government. However, with these aberrations, he gave himself over to a
succession of the statesmen of public opinion. In other things he
thought that he might be a king on the terms of his predecessors. He was
conscious of the purity of his heart and the general good tendency of
his government. He flattered himself, as most men in his situation will,
that he might consult his ease without danger to his safety. It is not
at all wonderful that both he and his ministers, giving way abundantly
in other respects to innovation, should take up in policy with the
tradition of their monarchy. Under his ancestors, the monarchy had
subsisted, and even been strengthened, by the generation or support of
republics. First, the Swiss republics grew under the guardianship of the
French monarchy. The Dutch republics were hatched and cherished under
the same incubation. Afterwards, a republican constitution was, under
the influence of France, established in the Empire, against the
pretensions of its chief. Even whilst the monarchy of France, by a
series of wars and negotiations, and lastly by the Treaties of
Westphalia, had obtained the establishment of the Protestants in Germany
as a law of the Empire, the same monarchy under Louis the Thirteenth had
force enough to destroy the republican system of the Protestants at
home.
Louis the Sixteenth was a diligent reader of history. But the very lamp
of prudence blinded him. The guide of human life led him astray. A
silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and
prepared it. It became of more importance than ever what examples were
given, and what measures wore adopted. Their causes no longer lurked in
the recesses of cabinets or in the private conspiracies of the factious.
They were no longer to be controlled by the force and influence of the
grandees, who formerly had been able to stir up troubles by their
discontents and to quiet them by their corruption. The chain of
subordination, even in cabal and sedition, was broken in its most
important links. It was no longer the great and the populace. Other
interests were formed, other dependencies, other connections, other
communications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond their former
proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in
society, these classes became the seat of all the active politics, and
the preponderating weight to decide on them. There were all the energies
by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their success.
There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and are
impatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them. These
descriptions had got between the great and the populace; and the
influence on the lower classes was with them. The spirit of ambition had
taken possession of this class as violently as ever it had done of any
other. They felt the importance of this situation. The correspondence of
the moneyed and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of
academies, but above all, the press, of which they had in a manner
entire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere. The
press, in reality, has made every government, in its spirit, almost
democratic. Without the great, the first movements in this revolution
could not, perhaps, have been given. But the spirit of ambition, now for
the first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to be
restrained at will. There was no longer any means of arresting a
principle in its course. When Louis the Sixteenth, under the influence
of the enemies to monarchy, meant to found but one republic, he set up
two; when he meant to take away half the crown of his neighbor, he lost
the whole of his own. Louis the Sixteenth could not with impunity
countenance a new republic. Yet between his throne and that dangerous
lodgment for an enemy, which he had erected, he had the whole Atlantic
for a ditch. He had for an outwork the English nation itself, friendly
to liberty, adverse to that mode of it. He was surrounded by a rampart
of monarchies, most of them allied to him, and generally under his
influence. Yet even thus secured, a republic erected under his auspices,
and dependent on his power, became fatal to his throne. The very money
which he had lent to support this republic, by a good faith which to him
operated as perfidy, was punctually paid to his enemies, and became a
resource in the hands of his assassins.
With this example before their eyes, do any ministers in England, do any
ministers in Austria, really flatter themselves that they can erect, not
on the remote shores of the Atlantic, but in their view, in their
vicinity, in absolute contact with one of them, not a commercial, but a
martial republic,--a republic not of simple husbandmen or fishermen, but
of intriguers, and of warriors,--a republic of a character the most
restless, the most enterprising, the most impious, the most fierce and
bloody, the most hypocritical and perfidious, the most bold and daring,
that ever has been seen, or indeed that can be conceived to exist,
without bringing on their own certain ruin?
Such is the republic to which we are going to give a place in civilized
fellowship,--the republic which, with joint consent, we are going to
establish in the centre of Europe, in a post that overlooks and
commands every other state, and which eminently confronts and menaces
this kingdom.
You cannot fail to observe that I speak as if the allied powers were
actually consenting, and not compelled by events, to the establishment
of this faction in France. The words have not escaped me. You will
hereafter naturally expect that I should make them good. But whether in
adopting this measure we are madly active or weakly passive or
pusillanimously panic-struck, the effects will be the same. You may call
this faction, which has eradicated the monarchy, expelled the
proprietary, persecuted religion, and trampled upon law,[36]--you may
call this Prance, if you please; but of the ancient France nothing
remains but its central geography, its iron frontier, its spirit of
ambition, its audacity of enterprise, its perplexing intrigue. These,
and these alone, remain: and they remain heightened in their principle
and augmented in their means. All the former correctives, whether of
virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone. No
single new corrective is to be found in the whole body of the new
institutions. How should such a thing be found there, when everything
has been chosen with care and selection to forward all those ambitious
designs and dispositions, not to control them? The whole is a body of
ways and means for the supply of dominion, without one heterogeneous
particle in it.
Here I suffer you to breathe, and leave to your meditation what has
occurred to me on the _genius and character_ of the French Revolution.
From having this before us, we may be better able to determine on the
first question I proposed,--that is, How far nations called foreign are
likely to be affected with the system established within that territory.
I intended to proceed next on the question of her facilities, _from the
internal state of other nations, and particularly of this_, for
obtaining her ends; but I ought to be aware that my notions are
controverted. I mean, therefore, in my next letter, to take notice of
what in that way has been recommended to me as the most deserving of
notice. In the examination of those pieces, I shall have occasion to
discuss some others of the topics to which I have called your attention.
You know that the letters which I now send to the press, as well as a
part of what is to follow, have been in their substance long since
written. A circumstance which your partiality alone could make of
importance to you, but which to the public is of no importance at all,
retarded their appearance. The late events which press upon us obliged
me to make some additions, but no substantial change in the matter.
This discussion, my friend, will be long. But the matter is serious; and
if ever the fate of the world could be truly said to depend on a
particular measure, it is upon this peace. For the present, farewell.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] See Declaration, Whitehall, Oct. 29, 1793.
[35] It may be right to do justice to Louis the Sixteenth. He did what
he could to destroy the double diplomacy of France. He had all the
secret correspondence burnt, except one piece, which was called
_Conjectures raisonnées sur la Situation actuelle de la France dans le
Système Politique de l'Europe_: a work executed by M. Favier, under the
direction of Count Broglie. A single copy of this was said to have been
found in the cabinet of Louis the Sixteenth. It was published with some
subsequent state-papers of Vergennes, Turgot, and others, as "a new
benefit of the Revolution," and the advertisement to the publication
ends with the following words: "_Il sera facile de se convaincre_, QU'Y
COMPRIS MÊME LA RÉVOLUTION, _en grande partie_, ON TROUVE DANS CES
_MEMOIRES_ ET CES _CONJECTURES_ LE GERME DE TOUT CE QUI ARRIVE
AUJOURD'HUI, _et qu'on ne peut, sans les avoir lus, être bien au fait
des intérêts, et même des vues actuelles des diverses puissances de
l'Europe_." The book is entitled _Politique de tous les Cabinets de
l'Europe pendant la Règnes de Louis XV. et de Louis XVI_. It is
altogether very curious, and worth reading.
[36] See our Declaration.
LETTER III.
ON THE RUPTURE OF THE NEGOTIATION; THE TERMS OF PEACE PROPOSED; AND THE
RESOURCES OF THE COUNTRY FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF THE WAR.
Dear Sir,--I thank you for the bundle of state-papers which I received
yesterday. I have travelled through the negotiation,--and a sad,
founderous road it is. There is a sort of standing jest against my
countrymen,--that one of them on his journey having found a piece of
pleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again. This
proposal, with regard to the worthy traveller's final destination, was
certainly a blunder. It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction;
for the way was pleasant. In the irksome journey of the Regicide
negotiations it is otherwise: our "paths are not paths of pleasantness,
nor our ways the ways to peace." All our mistakes, (if such they are,)
like those of our Hibernian traveller, are mistakes of repetition; and
they will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest as his
well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see we
persevere. Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore a
new one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have been
in motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance we resolve to measure
back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track.
Backward and forward,--oscillation, space,--the travels of a postilion,
miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage,--we have been, and
we are yet to be, jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stones
and the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill-kept, broken-up,
treacherous French causeway!
The Declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid before
Parliament contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attempts
and all our failures,--a concise, but correct narrative of the painful
steps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris,--a clear
exposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of that
experiment,--an honest confession of our departure from all the rules
and all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudence
in the conduct of it,--and to crown the whole, a fair account of the
atrocious manner in which the Regicide enemies had broken up what had
been so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, and
with all scorn, driving our suppliant ambassador out of the limits of
their usurpation.
Even after all that I have lately seen, I was a little surprised at this
exposure. A minute display of hopes formed without foundation and of
labors pursued without fruit is a thing not very flattering to
self-estimation. But truth has its rights, and it will assert them. The
Declaration, after doing all this with a mortifying candor, concludes
the whole recapitulation with an engagement still more extraordinary
than all the unusual matter it contains. It says that "His Majesty, who
had entered into the negotiation with _good faith_, who had suffered
_no_ impediment to prevent his prosecuting it with _earnestness and
sincerity_, has now _only to lament_ its abrupt termination, and to
renew _in the face of all Europe the solemn declaration_, that, whenever
his enemies shall be _disposed_ to enter on the work of general
pacification in a spirit of conciliation and equity, nothing shall be
wanting on his part to contribute to the accomplishment of that great
object."
If the disgusting detail of the accumulated insults we have received, in
what we have very properly called our "solicitation" to a gang of felons
and murderers, had been produced as a proof of the utter inefficacy of
that mode of proceeding with that description of persons, I should have
nothing at all to object to it. It might furnish matter conclusive in
argument and instructive in policy; but, with all due submission to high
authority, and with all decent deference to superior lights, it does not
seem quite clear to a discernment no better than mine that the premises
in that piece conduct irresistibly to the conclusion. A labored display
of the ill consequences which have attended an uniform course of
submission to every mode of contumelious insult, with which the
despotism of a proud, capricious, insulting, and implacable foe has
chosen to buffet our patience, does not appear to my poor thoughts to be
properly brought forth as a preliminary to justify a resolution of
persevering in the very same kind of conduct, towards the very same sort
of person, and on the very same principles. We state our experience, and
then we come to the manly resolution of acting in contradiction to it.
All that has passed at Paris, to the moment of our being shamefully
hissed off that stage, has been nothing but a more solemn representation
on the theatre of the nation of what had been before in rehearsal at
Basle. As it is not only confessed by us, but made a matter of charge on
the enemy, that he had given us no encouragement to believe there was a
change in his disposition or in his policy at any time subsequent to the
period of his rejecting our first overtures, there seems to have been no
assignable motive for sending Lord Malmesbury to Paris, except to expose
his humbled country to the worst indignities, and the first of the kind,
as the Declaration very truly observes, that have been known in the
world of negotiation.
An honest neighbor of mine is not altogether unhappy in the application
of an old common story to a present occasion. It may be said of my
friend, what Horace says of a neighbor of his, "_Garrit aniles ex re
fabellas_." Conversing on this strange subject, he told me a current
story of a simple English country squire, who was persuaded by certain
_dilettanti_ of his acquaintance to see the world, and to become knowing
in men and manners. Among other celebrated places, it was recommended to
him to visit Constantinople. He took their advice. After various
adventures, not to our purpose to dwell upon, he happily arrived at that
famous city. As soon as he had a little reposed himself from his
fatigue, he took a walk into the streets; but he had not gone far,
before "a malignant and a turbaned Turk" had his choler roused by the
careless and assured air with which this infidel strutted about in the
metropolis of true believers. In this temper he lost no time in doing to
our traveller the honors of the place. The Turk crossed over the way,
and with perfect good-will gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seat
of honor. To resent or to return the compliment in Turkey was quite out
of the question. Our traveller, since he could not otherwise acknowledge
this kind of favor, received it with the best grace in the world: he
made one of his most ceremonious bows, and begged the kicking Mussulman
"to accept his perfect assurances of high consideration." Our countryman
was too wise to imitate Othello in the use of the dagger. He thought it
better, as better it was, to assuage his bruised dignity with half a
yard square of balmy diplomatic diachylon. In the disasters of their
friends, people are seldom wanting in a laudable patience. When they
are such as do not threaten to end fatally, they become even matter of
pleasantry. The English fellow-travellers of our sufferer, finding him a
little out of spirits, entreated him not to take so slight a business so
very seriously. They told him it was the custom of the country; that
every country had its customs; that the Turkish manners were a little
rough, but that in the main the Turks were a good-natured people; that
what would have been a deadly affront anywhere else was only a little
freedom there: in short, they told him to think no more of the matter,
and to try his fortune in another promenade. But the squire, though a
little clownish, had some home-bred sense. "What! have I come, at all
this expense and trouble, all the way to Constantinople only to be
kicked? Without going beyond my own stable, my groom, for half a crown,
would have kicked me to my heart's content. I don't mean to stay in
Constantinople eight-and-forty hours, nor ever to return to this rough,
good-natured people, that have their own customs."
In my opinion the squire was in the right. He was satisfied with his
first ramble and his first injuries. But reason of state and common
sense are two things. If it were not for this difference, it might not
appear of absolute necessity, after having received a certain quantity
of buffetings by advance, that we should send a peer of the realm to the
scum of the earth to collect the debt to the last farthing, and to
receive, with infinite aggravation, the same scorns which had been paid
to our supplication through a commoner: but it was proper, I suppose,
that the whole of our country, in all its orders, should have a share of
the indignity, and, as in reason, that the higher orders should touch
the larger proportion.
This business was not ended because our dignity was wounded, or because
our patience was worn out with contumely and scorn. We had not disgorged
one particle of the nauseous doses with which we were so liberally
crammed by the mountebanks of Paris in order to drug and diet us into
perfect tameness. No,--we waited till the morbid strength of our
_boulimia_ for their physic had exhausted the well-stored dispensary of
their empiricism. It is impossible to guess at the term to which our
forbearance would have extended. The Regicides were more fatigued with
giving blows than the callous cheek of British diplomacy was hurt in
receiving them. They had no way left for getting rid of this mendicant
perseverance, but by sending for the beadle, and forcibly driving our
embassy "of shreds and patches," with all its mumping cant, from the
inhospitable door of Cannibal Castle,--
"Where the gaunt mastiff, growling at the gate,
Affrights the beggar whom he longs to eat,"
I think we might have found, before the rude hand of insolent office was
on our shoulder, and the staff of usurped authority brandished over our
heads, that contempt of the suppliant is not the best forwarder of a
suit,--that national disgrace is not the high-road to security, much
less to power and greatness. Patience, indeed, strongly indicates the
lore of peace; but mere love does not always lead to enjoyment. It is
the power of winning that palm which insures our wearing it. Virtues
have their place; and out of their place they hardly deserve the
name,--they pass into the neighboring vice. The patience of fortitude
and the endurance of pusillanimity are things very different, as in
their principle, so in their effects.
In truth, this Declaration, containing a narrative of the first
transaction of the kind (and I hope it will be the last) in the
intercourse of nations, as a composition, is ably drawn. It does credit
to our official style. The report of the speech of the minister in a
great assembly, which I have read, is a comment upon the Declaration.
Without inquiry how far that report is exact, (inferior I believe it may
be to what it would represent,) yet still it reads as a most eloquent
and finished performance. Hardly one galling circumstance of the
indignities offered by the Directory of Regicide to the supplications
made to that junto in his Majesty's name has been spared. Every one of
the aggravations attendant on these acts of outrage is, with wonderful
perspicuity and order, brought forward in its place, and in the manner
most fitted to produce its effect. They are turned to every point of
view in which they can be seen to the best advantage. All the parts are
so arranged as to point out their relation, and to furnish a true idea
of the spirit of the whole transaction.