accept the basis of barter (as if that had tended to accelerate the work
of pacification!) by the voice of all France. Had this been the case,
the Directors would have continued to listen to that voice to which it
seems they were so obedient: they would have proceeded with the
negotiation upon that basis. But the fact is, that they instantly broke
up the negotiation, as soon as they had obliged our ambassador to
violate all the principles of treaty, and weakly, rashly, and
unguardedly to expose, without any counter proposition, the whole of our
project with regard to ourselves and our allies, and without holding out
the smallest hope that they would admit the smallest part of our
pretensions.
When they had thus drawn from us all that they could draw out, they
expelled Lord Malmesbury, and they appealed, for the propriety of their
conduct, to that very France which we thought proper to suppose had
driven them to this fine concession: and I do not find that in either
division of the family of thieves, the younger branch, or the elder, or
in any other body whatsoever, there was any indignation excited, or any
tumult raised, or anything like the virulence of opposition which was
shown to the king's ministers here, on account of that transaction.
Notwithstanding all this, it seems a hope is still entertained that the
Directory will have that tenderness for the carcass of their country, by
whose very distemper, and on whose festering wounds, like vermin, they
are fed, that these pious patriots will of themselves come into a more
moderate and reasonable way of thinking and acting. In the name of
wonder, what has inspired our ministry with this hope any more than with
their former expectations?
Do these hopes only arise from continual disappointment? Do they grow
out of the usual grounds of despair? What is there to encourage them, in
the conduct or even in the declarations of the ruling powers in France,
from the first formation of their mischievous republic to the hour in
which I write? Is not the Directory composed of the same junto? Are they
not the identical men who, from the base and sordid vices which belonged
to their original place and situation, aspired to the dignity of
crimes,--and from the dirtiest, lowest, most fraudulent, and most
knavish of chicaners, ascended in the scale of robbery, sacrilege, and
assassination in all its forms, till at last they had imbrued their
impious hands in the blood of their sovereign? Is it from these men that
we are to hope for this paternal tenderness to their country, and this
sacred regard for the peace and happiness of all nations?
But it seems there is still another lurking hope, akin to that which
duped us so egregiously before, when our delightful basis was accepted:
we still flatter ourselves that the public voice of France will compel
this Directory to more moderation. Whence does this hope arise? What
public voice is there in France? There are, indeed, some writers, who,
since this monster of a Directory has obtained a great, regular,
military force to guard them, are indulged in a sufficient liberty of
writing; and some of them write well, undoubtedly. But the world knows
that in France there is no public,--that the country is composed but of
two descriptions, audacious tyrants and trembling slaves. The contests
between the tyrants is the only vital principle that can be discerned in
France. The only thing which there appears like spirit is amongst their
late associates, and fastest friends of the Directory,--the more furious
and untamable part of the Jacobins. This discontented member of the
faction does almost balance the reigning divisions, and it threatens
every moment to predominate. For the present, however, the dread of
their fury forms some sort of security to their fellows, who now
exercise a more regular and therefore a somewhat less ferocious tyranny.
Most of the slaves choose a quiet, however reluctant, submission to
those who are somewhat satiated with blood, and who, like wolves, are a
little more tame from being a little less hungry, in preference to an
irruption of the famished devourers who are prowling and howling about
the fold.
This circumstance assures some degree of permanence to the power of
those whom we know to be permanently our rancorous and implacable
enemies. But to those very enemies who have sworn our destruction we
have ourselves given a further and far better security, by rendering the
cause of the royalists desperate. Those brave and virtuous, but
unfortunate adherents to the ancient Constitution of their country,
after the miserable slaughters which have been made in that body, after
all their losses by emigration, are still numerous, but unable to exert
themselves against the force of the usurpation evidently countenanced
and upheld by those very princes who had called them to arm for the
support of the legal monarchy. Where, then, after chasing these fleeting
hopes of ours from point to point of the political horizon, are they at
last really found? Not where, under Providence, the hopes of Englishmen
used to be placed, in our own courage and in our own virtues, but in the
moderation and virtue of the most atrocious monsters that have ever
disgraced and plagued mankind.
The only excuse to be made for all our mendicant diplomacy is the same
as in the case of all other mendicancy, namely, that it has been founded
on absolute necessity. This deserves consideration. Necessity, as it has
no law, so it has no shame. But moral necessity is not like
metaphysical, or even physical. In that category it is a word of loose
signification, and conveys different ideas to different minds. To the
low-minded, the slightest necessity becomes an invincible necessity.
"The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be
devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the
nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining
tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation:
because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonorable existence,
without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they
aim at obtaining the dues of labor without industry, and by frauds would
draw from the compassion of others what men ought to owe to their own
spirit and their own exertions.
I am thoroughly satisfied, that, if we degrade ourselves, it is the
degradation which will subject us to the yoke of necessity, and not that
it is necessity which has brought on our degradation. In this same
chaos, where light and darkness are struggling together, the open
subscription of last year, with all its circumstances, must have given
us no little glimmering of hope: not (as I have heard it was vainly
discoursed) that the loan could prove a crutch to a lame negotiation
abroad, and that the whiff and wind of it must at once have disposed the
enemies of all tranquillity to a desire for peace. Judging on the face
of facts, if on them it had any effect at all, it had the direct
contrary effect; for very soon after the loan became public at Paris,
the negotiation ended, and our ambassador was ignominiously expelled. My
view of this was different: I liked the loan, not from the influence
which it might have on the enemy, but on account of the temper which it
indicated in our own people. This alone is a consideration of any
importance; because all calculation formed upon a supposed relation of
the habitudes of others to our own, under the present circumstances, is
weak and fallacious. The adversary must be judged, not by what we are,
or by what we wish him to be, but by what we must know he actually is:
unless we choose to shut our eyes and our ears to the uniform tenor of
all his discourses, and to his uniform course in all his actions. We may
be deluded; but we cannot pretend that we have been disappointed. The
old rule of _Ne te quæsiveris extra_ is a precept as available in policy
as it is in morals. Let us leave off speculating upon the disposition
and the wants of the enemy. Let us descend into our own bosoms; let us
ask ourselves what are our duties, and what are our means of discharging
them. In what heart are you at home? How far may an English minister
confide in the affections, in the confidence, in the force of an English
people? What does he find us, when he puts us to the proof of what
English interest and English honor demand? It is as furnishing an answer
to these questions that I consider the circumstances of the loan. The
effect on the enemy is not in what he may speculate on our resources,
but in what he shall feel from our arms.
The circumstances of the loan have proved beyond a doubt three capital
points, which, if they are properly used, may be advantageous to the
future liberty and happiness of mankind. In the first place, the loan
demonstrates, in regard to instrumental resources, the competency of
this kingdom to the assertion of the common cause, and to the
maintenance and superintendence of that which it is its duty and its
glory to hold and to watch over,--the balance of power throughout the
Christian world. Secondly, it brings to light what, under the most
discouraging appearances, I always reckoned on: that, with its ancient
physical force, not only unimpaired, but augmented, its ancient spirit
is still alive in the British nation. It proves that for their
application there is a spirit equal to the resources, for its energy
above them. It proves that there exists, though not always visible, a
spirit which never fails to come forth, whenever it is ritually
invoked,--a spirit which will give no equivocal response, but such as
will hearten the timidity and fix the irresolution of hesitating
prudence,--a spirit which will be ready to perform all the tasks that
shall be imposed upon it by public honor. Thirdly, the loan displays an
abundant confidence in his Majesty's government, as administered by his
present servants, in the prosecution of a war which the people consider,
not as a war made on the suggestion of ministers, and to answer the
purposes of the ambition or pride of statesmen, but as a war of their
own, and in defence of that very property which they expend for its
support,--a war for that order of things from which everything valuable
that they possess is derived, and in which order alone it can possibly
be maintained.
I hear, in derogation of the value of the fact from which I draw
inferences so favorable to the spirit of the people and to its just
expectation from ministers, that the eighteen million loan is to be
considered in no other light than as taking advantage of a very
lucrative bargain held out to the subscribers. I do not in truth believe
it. All the circumstances which attended the subscription strongly spoke
a different language. Be it, however, as these detractors say. This with
me derogates little, or rather nothing at all, from the political value
and importance of the fact. I should be very sorry, if the transaction
was not such a bargain; otherwise it would not have been a fair one. A
corrupt and improvident loan, like everything else corrupt or prodigal,
cannot be too much condemned; but there is a short-sighted parsimony
still more fatal than an unforeseeing expense. The value of money must
be judged, like everything else, from its rate at market. To force that
market, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous. For a small
temporary benefit, the spring of all public credit might be relaxed
forever. The moneyed men have a right to look to advantage in the
investment of their property. To advance their money, they risk it; and
the risk is to be included in the price. If they were to incur a loss,
that loss would amount to a tax on that peculiar species of property. In
effect, it would be the most unjust and impolitic of all
things,--unequal taxation. It would throw upon one description of
persons in the community that burden which ought by fair and equitable
distribution to rest upon the whole. None on account of their dignity
should be exempt; none (preserving due proportion) on account of the
scantiness of their means. The moment a man is exempted from the
maintenance of the community, he is in a sort separated from it,--he
loses the place of a citizen.
So it is in all _taxation_. But in a _bargain_, when terms of loss are
looked for by the borrower from the lender, compulsion, or what
virtually is compulsion, introduces itself into the place of treaty.
When compulsion may be at all used by a state in borrowing the occasion
must determine. But the compulsion ought to be known, and well defined,
and well distinguished; for otherwise treaty only weakens the energy of
compulsion, while compulsion destroys the freedom of a bargain. The
advantage of both is lost by the confusion of things in their nature
utterly unsociable. It would be to introduce compulsion into that in
which freedom and existence are the same: I mean credit. The moment that
shame or fear or force are directly or indirectly applied to a loan,
credit perishes.
There must be some impulse, besides public spirit, to put private
interest into motion along with it. Moneyed men ought to be allowed to
set a value on their money: if they did not, there could be no moneyed
men. This desire of accumulation is a principle without which the means
of their service to the state could not exist. The love of lucre, though
sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the
grand cause of prosperity to all states. In this natural, this
reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the
satirist to expose the ridiculous,--it is for the moralist to censure
the vicious,--it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and
cruel,--it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion,
and the oppression; but it is for the statesman to employ it as he finds
it, with all its concomitant excellencies, with all its imperfections on
its head. It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases,
where he is to make use of the general energies of Nature, to take them
as he finds them.
After all, it is a great mistake to imagine, as too commonly, almost
indeed generally, it is imagined, that the public borrower and the
private lender are two adverse parties, with different and contending
interests, and that what is given to the one is wholly taken from the
other. Constituted as our system of finance and taxation is, the
interests of the contracting parties cannot well be separated, whatever
they may reciprocally intend. He who is the hard lender of to-day
to-morrow is the generous contributor to his own payment. For example,
the last loan is raised on public taxes, which are designed to produce
annually two millions sterling. At first view, this is an annuity of two
millions dead charge upon the public in favor of certain moneyed men;
but inspect the thing more nearly, follow the stream in its meanders,
and you will find that there is a good deal of fallacy in this state of
things.
I take it, that whoever considers any man's expenditure of his income,
old or new, (I speak of certain classes in life,) will find a full third
of it to go in taxes, direct or indirect. If so, this new-created income
of two millions will probably furnish 665,000_l._ (I avoid broken
numbers) towards the payment of its own interest, or to the sinking of
its own capital. So it is with the whole of the public debt. Suppose it
any given sum, it is a fallacious estimate of the affairs of a nation to
consider it as a mere burden. To a degree it is so without question, but
not wholly so, nor anything like it. If the income from the interest be
spent, the above proportion returns again into the public stock;
insomuch that, taking the interest of the whole debt to be twelve
million three hundred thousand pound, (it is something more,) not less
than a sum of four million one hundred thousand pound comes back again
to the public through the channel of imposition. If the whole or any
part of that income be saved, so much new capital is generated,--the
infallible operation of which is to lower the value of money, and
consequently to conduce towards the improvement of public credit.
I take the expenditure of the _capitalist_, not the value of the
capital, as my standard; because it is the standard upon which, amongst
us, property, as an object of taxation, is rated. In this country, land
and offices only excepted, we raise no faculty tax. We preserve the
faculty from the expense. Our taxes, for the far greater portion, fly
over the heads of the lowest classes. They escape too, who, with better
ability, voluntarily subject themselves to the harsh discipline of a
rigid necessity. With us, labor and frugality, the parents of riches,
are spared, and wisely too. The moment men cease to augment the common
stock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or their
self-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to pay
contribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, but
because they are unproductive. If, in fact, the interest paid by the
public had not thus revolved again into its own fund, if this secretion
had not again been absorbed into the mass of blood, it would have been
impossible for the nation to have existed to this time under such a
debt. But under the debt it does exist and flourish; and this
flourishing state of existence in no small degree is owing to the
contribution from the debt to the payment. Whatever, therefore, is taken
from that capital by too close a bargain is but a delusive advantage: it
is so much lost to the public in another way. This matter cannot, on the
one side or the other, be metaphysically pursued to the extreme; but it
is a consideration of which, in all discussions of this kind, we ought
never wholly to lose sight.
It is never, therefore, wise to quarrel with the interested views of
men, whilst they are combined with the public interest and promote it:
it is our business to tie the knot, if possible, closer. Resources that
are derived from extraordinary virtues, as such virtues are rare, so
they must be unproductive. It is a good thing for a moneyed man to
pledge his property on the welfare of his country: he shows that he
places his treasure where his heart is; and revolving in this circle, we
know, that, "wherever a man's treasure is, there his heart will be
also." For these reasons, and on these principles, I have been sorry to
see the attempts which have been made, with more good meaning than
foresight and consideration, towards raising the annual interest of this
loan by private contributions. Wherever a regular revenue is
established, there voluntary contribution can answer no purpose but to
disorder and disturb it in its course. To recur to such aids is, for so
much, to dissolve the community, and to return to a state of unconnected
Nature. And even if such a supply should be productive in a degree
commensurate to its object, it must also be productive of much vexation
and much oppression. Either the citizens by the proposed duties pay
their proportion according to some rate made by public authority, or
they do not. If the law be well made, and the contributions founded on
just proportions, everything superadded by something that is not as
regular as law, and as uniform in its operation, will become more or
less out of proportion. If, on the contrary, the law be not made upon
proper calculation, it is a disgrace to the public; wisdom, which fails
in skill to assess the citizen in just measure and according to his
means. But the hand of authority is not always the most heavy hand. It
is obvious that men may be oppressed by many ways besides those which
take their course from the supreme power of the state. Suppose the
payment to be wholly discretionary. Whatever has its origin in caprice
is sure not to improve in its progress, nor to end in reason. It is
impossible for each private individual to have any measure conformable
to the particular condition of each of his fellow-citizens, or to the
general exigencies of his country. 'Tis a random shot at best.
When men proceed in this irregular mode, the first contributor is apt to
grow peevish with his neighbors. He is but too well disposed to measure
their means by his own envy, and not by the real state of their
fortunes, which he can rarely know, and which it may in them be an act
of the grossest imprudence to reveal. Hence the odium and lassitude with
which people will look upon a provision for the public which is bought
by discord at the expense of social quiet. Hence the bitter
heart-burnings, and the war of tongues, which is so often the prelude to
other wars. Nor is it every contribution, called voluntary, which is
according to the free will of the giver. A false shame, or a false
glory, against his feelings and his judgment, may tax an individual to
the detriment of his family and in wrong of his creditors. A pretence of
public spirit may disable him from the performance of his private
duties; it may disable him even from paying the legitimate contributions
which he is to furnish according to the prescript of law. But what is
the most dangerous of all is that malignant disposition to which this
mode of contribution evidently tends, and which at length leaves the
comparatively indigent to judge of the wealth, and to prescribe to the
opulent, or those whom they conceive to be such, the use they are to
make of their fortunes. From thence it is but one step to the
subversion of all property.
Far, very far, am I from supposing that such things enter into the
purposes of those excellent persons whose zeal has led them to this kind
of measure; but the measure itself will lead them beyond their
intention, and what is begun with the best designs bad men will
perversely improve to the worst of their purposes. An ill-founded
plausibility in great affairs is a real evil. In France we have seen the
wickedest and most foolish of men, the constitution-mongers of 1789,
pursuing this very course, and ending in this very event. These
projectors of deception set on foot two modes of voluntary contribution
to the state. The first they called patriotic gifts. These, for the
greater part, were not more ridiculous in the mode than contemptible in
the project. The other, which they called the patriotic contribution,
was expected to amount to a fourth of the fortunes of individuals, but
at their own will and on their own estimate; but this contribution
threatening to fall infinitely short of their hopes, they soon made it
compulsory, both in the rate and in the levy, beginning in fraud, and
ending, as all the frauds of power end, in plain violence. All these
devices to produce an involuntary will were under the pretext of
relieving the more indigent classes; but the principle of voluntary
contribution, however delusive, being once established, these lower
classes first, and then all classes, were encouraged to throw off the
regular, methodical payments to the state, as so many badges of slavery.
Thus all regular revenue failing, these impostors, raising the
superstructure on the same cheats with which they had laid the
foundation of their greatness, and not content with a portion of the
possessions of the rich, confiscated the whole, and, to prevent them
from reclaiming their rights, murdered the proprietors. The whole of the
process has passed before our eyes, and been conducted, indeed, with a
greater degree of rapidity than could be expected.