insolence of an enemy who seems to have been irritated by every one of
the means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage of
intemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard in
which we in vain attempted to plunge our sword should have been thrown
away with scorn. It would have been natural, that, rising in the fulness
of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice,
rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured out
all the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so long
restrained. It might have been expected, that, emulous of the glory of
the youthful hero[37] in alliance with him, touched by the example of
what one man well formed and well placed may do in the most desperate
state of affairs, convinced there is a courage of the cabinet full as
powerful and far less vulgar than that of the field, our minister would
have changed the whole line of that unprosperous prudence which hitherto
had produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If he found his
situation full of danger, (and I do not deny that it is perilous in the
extreme,) he must feel that it is also full of glory, and that he is
placed on a stage than which no muse of fire that had ascended the
highest heaven of invention could imagine anything more awful and
august. It was hoped that in this swelling scene in which he moved, with
some of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, and with
so many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a part which, as he
plays it, determines forever their destiny and his own, like Ulysses in
the unravelling point of the epic story, he would have thrown off his
patience and his rags together, and, stripped of unworthy disguises, he
would have stood forth in the form and in the attitude of an hero. On
that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars; that he
would bid to be brought forth from their hideous kennel (where his
scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of
war whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that
feeds them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues,
and death, upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all whose habit,
order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and abhorrent. It was
expected that he would at last have thought of active and effectual war;
that he would no longer amuse the British lion in the chase of mice and
rats; that he would no longer employ the whole naval power of Great
Britain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon the miserable
remains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did not regard, and from
which none could profit. It was expected that he would have reasserted
the justice of his cause; that he would have reanimated whatever
remained to him of his allies, and endeavored to recover those whom
their fears had led astray; that he would have rekindled the martial
ardor of his citizens; that he would have held out to them the example
of their ancestry, the assertor of Europe, and the scourge of French
ambition; that he would have reminded them of a posterity, which, if
this nefarious robbery, under the fraudulent name and false color of a
government, should in full power be seated in the heart of Europe, must
forever be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism, and the most
ignominious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause it was presumed
that he would (as in the beginning of the war he did) have opened all
the temples, and with prayer, with fasting, and with supplication,
(better directed than to the grim Moloch of Regicide in France,) have
called upon us to raise that united cry which has: so often stormed
heaven, and with a pious violence forced down blessings upon a repentant
people. It was hoped, that, when he had invoked upon his endeavors the
favorable regard of the Protector of the human race, it would be seen
that his menaces to the enemy and his prayers to the Almighty were not
followed, but accompanied, with correspondent action. It was hoped that
his shrilling trumpet should be heard, not to announce a show, but to
sound a charge.
Such a conclusion to such a declaration and such a speech would have
been a thing of course,--so much a thing of course, that I will be bold
to say, if in any ancient history, the Roman for instance, (supposing
that in Rome the matter of such a detail could have been furnished,) a
consul had gone through such a long train of proceedings, and that there
was a chasm in the manuscripts by which we had lost the conclusion of
the speech and the subsequent part of the narrative, all critics would
agree that a Freinshemius would have been thought to have managed the
supplementary business of a continuator most unskillfully, and to have
supplied the hiatus most improbably, if he had not filled up the gaping
space in a manner somewhat similar (though better executed) to what I
have imagined. But too often different is rational conjecture from
melancholy fact. This exordium, as contrary to all the rules of rhetoric
as to those more essential rules of policy which our situation would
dictate, is intended as a prelude to a deadening and disheartening
proposition; as if all that a minister had to fear in a war of his own
conducting was, that the people should pursue it with too ardent a zeal.
Such a tone as I guessed the minister would have taken, I am very sure,
is the true, unsuborned, unsophisticated language of genuine, natural
feeling, under the smart of patience exhausted and abused. Such a
conduct as the facts stated in the Declaration gave room to expect is
that which true wisdom would have dictated under the impression of those
genuine feelings. Never was there a jar or discord between genuine
sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing
and Wisdom say another. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves
turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her
grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet
left him at Belvedere) is as much in Nature as any figure from the
pencil of Rembrandt or any clown in the rustic revels of Téniers.
Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds
must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion
under the direction of a feeble reason feeds a low fever, which serves
only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does
not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and
actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when
they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy
disorder within and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a
time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for
exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has
now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error, and
every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed
above the mark that we must aim at: everything below it is absolutely
thrown away.
Except with the addition of the unheard-of insult offered to our
ambassador by his rude expulsion, we are never to forget that the point
on which the negotiation with De la Croix broke off was exactly that
which had stifled in its cradle the negotiation we had attempted with
Barthélemy. Each of these transactions concluded with a manifesto upon
our part; but the last of our manifestoes very materially differed from
the first. The first Declaration stated, that "_nothing was left_ but to
prosecute a war _equally just and necessary_." In the second the justice
and necessity of the war is dropped: the sentence importing that nothing
was left but the prosecution of such a war disappears also. Instead of
this resolution to prosecute the war, we sink into a whining lamentation
on the abrupt termination of the treaty. We have nothing left but the
last resource of female weakness, of helpless infancy, of doting
decrepitude,--wailing and lamentation. We cannot even utter a sentiment
of vigor;--"his Majesty has only to lament." A poor possession, to be
left to a great monarch! Mark the effect produced on our councils by
continued insolence and inveterate hostility. We grow more malleable
under their blows. In reverential silence we smother the cause and
origin of the war. On that fundamental article of faith we leave every
one to abound in his own sense. In the minister's speech, glossing on
the Declaration, it is indeed mentioned, but very feebly. The lines are
so faintly drawn as hardly to be traced. They only make a part of our
_consolation_ in the circumstances which we so dolefully lament. We rest
our merits on the humility, the earnestness of solicitation, and the
perfect good faith of those submissions which have been used to persuade
our Regicide enemies to grant us some sort of peace. Not a word is said
which might not have been full as well said, and much better too, if the
British nation had appeared in the simple character of a penitent
convinced of his errors and offences, and offering, by penances, by
pilgrimages, and by all the modes of expiation ever devised by anxious,
restless guilt, to make all the atonement in his miserable power.
The Declaration ends, as I have before quoted it, with a solemn
voluntary pledge, the most full and the most solemn that ever was given,
of our resolution (if so it may be called) to enter again into the very
same course. It requires nothing more of the Regicides than to famish
some sort of excuse, some sort of colorable pretest, for our renewing
the supplications of innocence at the feet of guilt. It leaves the
moment of negotiation, a most important moment, to the choice of the
enemy. He is to regulate it according to the convenience of his affairs.
He is to bring it forward at that time when it may best serve to
establish his authority at home and to extend his power abroad, A
dangerous assurance for this nation to give, whether it is broken or
whether it is kept. As all treaty was broken off, and broken off in the
manner we have seen, the field of future conduct ought to be reserved
free and unincumbered to our future discretion. As to the sort of
condition prefixed to the pledge, namely, "that the enemy should be
disposed to enter into the work of general pacification with the spirit
of reconciliation and equity," this phraseology cannot possibly be
considered otherwise than as so many words thrown in to fill the
sentence and to round it to the ear. We prefixed the same plausible
conditions to any renewal of the negotiation, in our manifesto on the
rejection of our proposals at Basle. We did not consider those
conditions as binding. We opened a much more serious negotiation
without any sort of regard to them; and there is no new negotiation
which we can possibly open upon fewer indications of conciliation and
equity than were to be discovered when we entered into our last at
Paris. Any of the slightest pretences, any of the most loose, formal,
equivocating expressions, would justify us, under the peroration of this
piece, in again sending the last or some other Lord Malmesbury to Paris.
I hope I misunderstand this pledge,--or that we shall show no more
regard to it than we have done to all the faith that we have plighted to
vigor and resolution in our former Declaration. If I am to understand
the conclusion of the Declaration to be what unfortunately it seems to
me, we make an engagement with the enemy, without any correspondent
engagement on his side. We seem to have cut ourselves off from any
benefit which an intermediate state of things might furnish to enable us
totally to overturn that power, so little connected with moderation and
justice. By holding out no hope, either to the justly discontented in
France, or to any foreign power, and leaving the recommencement of all
treaty to this identical junto of assassins, we do in effect assure and
guaranty to them the full possession of the rich fruits of their
confiscations, of their murders of men, women, and children, and of all
the multiplied, endless, nameless iniquities by which they have obtained
their power. We guaranty to them the possession of a country, such and
so situated as France, round, entire, immensely perhaps augmented.
"Well," some will say, "in this case we have only submitted to the
nature of things." The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy
adversary. This might be alleged as a plea for our attempt at a treaty.
But what plea of that kind can be alleged, after the treaty was dead and
gone, in favor of this posthumous Declaration? No necessity has driven
us to _that_ pledge. It is without a counterpart even in expectation.
And what can be stated to obviate the evil which that solitary
engagement must produce on the understandings or the fears of men? I
ask, what have the Regicides promised you in return, in case _you_
should show what _they_ would call dispositions to conciliation and
equity, whilst you are giving that pledge from the throne, and engaging
Parliament to counter-secure it? It is an awful consideration. It was on
the very day of the date of this wonderful pledge,[38] in which we
assumed the Directorial government as lawful, and in which we engaged
ourselves to treat with them whenever they pleased,--it was on that very
day the Regicide fleet was weighing anchor from one of your harbors,
where it had remained four days in perfect quiet. These harbors of the
British dominions are the ports of France. They are of no use but to
protect an enemy from your best allies, the storms of heaven and his own
rashness. Had the West of Ireland been an unportuous coast, the French
naval power would have been undone. The enemy uses the moment for
hostility, without the least regard to your future dispositions of
equity and conciliation. They go out of what were once your harbors, and
they return to them at their pleasure. Eleven days they had the full use
of Bantry Bay, and at length their fleet returns from their harbor of
Bantry to their harbor of Brest. Whilst you are invoking the propitious
spirit of Regicide equity and conciliation, they answer you with an
attack. They turn out the pacific bearer of your "how do you dos," Lord
Malmesbury; and they return your visit, and their "thanks for your
obliging inquiries," by their old practised assassin, Hoche. They come
to attack--what? A town, a fort, a naval station? They come to attack
your king, your Constitution, and the very being of that Parliament
which was holding out to them these pledges, together with the
entireness of the empire, the laws, liberties, and properties of all the
people. We know that they meditated the very same invasion, and for the
very same purposes, upon this kingdom, and, had the coast been as
opportune, would have effected it.
Whilst _you_ are in vain torturing your invention to assure them of
_your_ sincerity and good faith, they have left no doubt concerning
_their_ good faith and _their_ sincerity towards those to whom they have
engaged their honor. To their power they have been true to the only
pledge they have ever yet given to you, or to any of yours: I mean the
solemn engagement which they entered into with the deputation of
traitors who appeared at their bar, from England and from Ireland, in
1792. They have been true and faithful to the engagement which they had
made more largely,--that is, their engagement to give effectual aid to
insurrection and treason, wherever they might appear in the world. We
have seen the British Declaration. This is the counter Declaration of
the Directory. This is the reciprocal pledge which Regicide amity gives
to the conciliatory pledges of kings. But, thank God, such pledges
cannot exist single. They have no counterpart; and if they had, the
enemy's conduct cancels such declarations,--and, I trust, along with
them, cancels everything of mischief and dishonor that they contain.
There is one thing in this business which appears to be wholly
unaccountable, or accountable on a supposition I dare not entertain for
a moment. I cannot help asking, Why all this pains to clear the British
nation of ambition, perfidy, and the insatiate thirst of war? At what
period of time was it that our country has deserved that load of infamy
of which nothing but preternatural humiliation in language and conduct
can serve to clear us? If we have deserved this kind of evil fame from
anything we have done in a state of prosperity, I am sure that it is not
an abject conduct in adversity that can clear our reputation. Well is it
known that ambition can creep as well as soar. The pride of no person in
a flourishing condition is more justly to be dreaded than that of him
who is mean and cringing under a doubtful and unprosperous fortune. But
it seems it was thought necessary to give some out-of-the-way proofs of
our sincerity, as well as of our freedom from ambition. Is, then, fraud
and falsehood become the distinctive character of Englishmen? Whenever
your enemy chooses to accuse you of perfidy and ill faith, will you put
it into his power to throw you into the purgatory of self-humiliation?
Is his charge equal to the finding of the grand jury of Europe, and
sufficient to put you upon your trial? But on that trial I will defend
the English ministry. I am sorry that on some points I have, on the
principles I have always opposed, so good a defence to make. They were
not the first to begin the war. They did not excite the general
confederacy in Europe, which was so properly formed on the alarm given
by the Jacobinism of France. They did not begin with an hostile
aggression on the Regicides, or any of their allies. These parricides of
their own country, disciplining themselves for foreign by domestic
violence, were the first to attack a power that was our ally by nature,
by habit, and by the sanction of multiplied treaties. Is it not true
that they were the first to declare war upon this kingdom? Is every word
in the declaration from Downing Street concerning their conduct, and
concerning ours and that of our allies, so obviously false that it is
necessary to give some new-invented proofs of our good faith in order to
expunge the memory of all this perfidy?
We know that over-laboring a point of this kind has the direct contrary
effect from what we wish. We know that there is a legal presumption
against men, _quando se nimis purgitant_; and if a charge of ambition is
not refuted by an affected humility, certainly the character of fraud
and perfidy is still less to be washed away by indications of meanness.
Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of
the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate
spirits; and on the theatre of the world, it is not by assuming the mask
of a Davus or a Geta that an actor will obtain credit for manly
simplicity and a liberal openness of proceeding. It is an erect
countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of
resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and
honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind. Therefore all these
negotiations, and all the declarations with which they were preceded and
followed, can only serve to raise presumptions against that good faith
and public integrity the fame of which to preserve inviolate is so much
the interest and duty of every nation.
The pledge is an engagement "to all Europe." This is the more
extraordinary, because it is a pledge which no power in Europe, whom I
have yet heard of, has thought proper to require at our hands. I am not
in the secrets of office, and therefore I may be excused for proceeding
upon probabilities and exterior indications. I have surveyed all Europe
from the east to the west, from the north to the south, in search of
this call upon us to purge ourselves of "subtle _duplicity_ and a
_Punic_ style" in our proceedings. I have not heard that his Excellency
the Ottoman ambassador has expressed his doubts of the British sincerity
in our negotiation with the most unchristian republic lately set up at
our door. What sympathy in that quarter may have introduced a
remonstrance upon the want of faith in this nation I cannot positively
say. If it exists, it is in Turkish or Arabic, and possibly is not yet
translated. But none of the nations which compose the old Christian
world have I yet heard as calling upon us for those judicial purgations
and ordeals, by fire and water, which we have chosen to go through;--for
the other great proof, by battle, we seem to decline.
For whose use, entertainment, or instruction are all those overstrained
and overlabored proceedings in council, in negotiation, and in speeches
in Parliament intended? What royal cabinet is to be enriched with these
high-finished pictures of the arrogance of the sworn enemies of kings
and the meek patience of a British administration? In what heart is it
intended to kindle pity towards our multiplied mortifications and
disgraces? At best it is superfluous. What nation is unacquainted with
the haughty disposition of the common enemy of all nations? It has been
more than seen, it has been felt,--not only by those who have been the
victims of their imperious rapacity, but, in a degree, by those very
powers who have consented to establish this robbery, that they might be
able to copy it, and with impunity to make new usurpations of their own.
The King of Prussia has hypothecated in trust to the Regicides his rich
and fertile territories on the Rhine, as a pledge of his zeal and
affection to the cause of liberty and equality. He has seen them robbed
with unbounded liberty and with the most levelling equality. The woods
are wasted, the country is ravaged, property is confiscated, and the
people are put to bear a double yoke, in the exactions of a tyrannical
government and in the contributions of an hostile irruption. Is it to
satisfy the Court of Berlin that the Court of London is to give the same
sort of pledge of its sincerity and good faith to the French Directory?
It is not that heart full of sensibility, it is not Lucchesini, the
minister of his Prussian Majesty, the late ally of England, and the
present ally of its enemy, who has demanded this pledge of our
sincerity, as the price of the renewal of the long lease of his sincere
friendship to this kingdom.
It is not to our enemy, the now faithful ally of Regicide, late the
faithful ally of Great Britain, the Catholic king, that we address our
doleful lamentation: it is not to the _Prince of Peace_, whose
declaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of general
tranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive-branch in
his beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark of clean birds
at Paris.
Surely it is not to the Tetrarch of Sardinia, now the faithful ally of a
power who has seized upon all his fortresses and confiscated the oldest
dominions of his house,--it is not to this once powerful, once
respected, and once cherished ally of Great Britain, that we mean to
prove the sincerity of the peace which we offered to make at his
expense. Or is it to him we are to prove the arrogance of the power who,
under the name of friend, oppresses him, and the poor remains of his
subjects, with all the ferocity of the most cruel enemy?
It is not to Holland, under the name of an ally, laid under a permanent
military contribution, filled with their double garrison of barbarous
Jacobin troops and ten times more barbarous Jacobin clubs and
assemblies, that we find ourselves obliged to give this pledge.
Is it to Genoa that we make this kind promise,--a state which the
Regicides were to defend in a favorable neutrality, but whose neutrality
has been, by the gentle influence of Jacobin authority, forced into the
trammels of an alliance,--whose alliance has been secured by the
admission of French garrisons,--and whose peace has been forever
ratified by a forced declaration of war against ourselves?
It is not the Grand Duke of Tuscany who claims this declaration,--not
the Grand Duke, who for his early sincerity, for his love of peace, and
for his entire confidence in the amity of the assassins of his house,
has been complimented in the British Parliament with the name of "_the
wisest sovereign in Europe_": it is not this pacific Solomon, or his
philosophic, cudgelled ministry, cudgelled by English and by French,
whose wisdom and philosophy between them have placed Leghorn in the
hands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the only
profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this
sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose
chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative
than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us
so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the
republic always the same, always one and indivisible.
It is not Venice, whose principal cities the enemy has appropriated to
himself, and scornfully desired the state to indemnify itself from the
Emperor, that we wish to convince of the pride and the despotism of an
enemy who loads us with his scoffs and buffets.