(_I have found the selection of a suitable sample of Burke to be my
most difficult task in this volume. All his writings, as I have
pointed out in the general introduction, are, after a sort, pamphlets;
and this of itself was an embarrassment. It was partly complicated and
partly lessened by the fact that the form of his speeches naturally
excluded them. Many of his other works--notably the _Thoughts on the
Present Discontents_, the immortal _Reflections on the French
Revolution_, and the _Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old_--were much
too long for a scheme in which I have made it a rule to give in each
case entire works or divisions of works. I at last reduced the
suitable candidates to three--the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_,
that _To a Noble Lord_, and the present number of the _Letters on a
Regicide Peace_. The first went as being to some extent identical in
subject with the examples of another writer, Sydney Smith, which I had
already resolved on giving; the second as being too much in the nature
of a personal apologia. With the third, which I looked on at first
with least favour, I have become increasingly well satisfied. It has
not the gorgeous rhetoric of _The Letter to a Noble Lord_, the
_Reflections_, and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast
between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even
seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly
or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it
does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned,
admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great
knowledge and mastery of foreign politics--the point in which English
statesmen have always been weakest. I may add that it seems to me a
triumphant refutation of the charge--constantly brought against Burke
not merely by extreme democrats, but by the usual advocate of the
_juste milieu_,--that in his later years, and especially in these very
Letters, he became a mere raving Gallophobe, with no sense of
proportion or circumstance. For my part, I have read scores, probably
hundreds, of books--English, French, and German--on the French
Revolution; I have never read one that made Burke obsolete. Let it
only be added that the author, who was born in 1730, was very near the
end of his career--he died next year--when he wrote these letters,
and that the peace proposals which he deprecated, and which he did not
a little to avert, were dictated on the one side by the sobering down
of the first Revolutionary fervour under the Directory; on the other
by the persistent ill-success of the Allies, and the conflicts of
interest and principle which had arisen among them._)
My dear Sir--I closed my first letter with serious matter, and I hope
it has employed your thoughts. The system of peace must have a
reference to the system of the war. On that ground, I must therefore
again recall your mind to our original opinions, which time and events
have not taught me to vary.
My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter
France, not as a state, but as a faction. The vast territorial extent
of that country, its immense population, its riches of production, its
riches of commerce and convention--the whole aggregate mass of what,
in ordinary cases, constitutes the force of a state, to me were but
objects of secondary consideration. They might be balanced; and they
have been often more than balanced. Great as these things are, they
are not what make the faction formidable. It is the faction that makes
them truly dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses
the body of France; that informs it as a soul; that stamps upon its
ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which
strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions, and the
same general views, in other men and in other communities. It is that
spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating
activity. Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that
France to shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner
that we behold. A sure destruction impends over those infatuated
princes, who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power,
proceed as if they were engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to
their former contests; or that they can make peace in the spirit of
their former arrangements of pacification. Here the beaten path is the
very reverse of the safe road.
As to me, I was always steadily of opinion, that this disorder was not
in its nature intermittent. I conceived that the contest, once begun,
could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but
that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never
thought we could make peace with the system; because it was not for
the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with
the system itself, that we were at war. As I understood the matter, we
were at war not with its conduct, but with its existence; convinced
that its existence and its hostility were the same.
The faction is not local or territorial. It is a general evil. Where
it least appears in action, it is still full of life. In its sleep it
recruits its strength, and prepares its exertion. Its spirit lies deep
in the corruption of our common nature. The social order which
restrains it, feeds it. It exists in every country in Europe; and
among all orders of men in every country, who look up to France as to
a common head. The centre is there. The circumference is the world of
Europe wherever the race of Europe may be settled. Everywhere else the
faction is militant; in France it is triumphant. In France it is the
bank of deposit, and the bank of circulation, of all the pernicious
principles that are forming in every state. It will be folly scarcely
deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of
restraining it in any other country whilst it is predominant there.
War, instead of being the cause of its force, has suspended its
operation. It has given a reprieve, at least, to the Christian world.
The true nature of a Jacobin war, in the beginning, was, by most of
the Christian powers, felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precise
manner declared. In the joint manifesto, published by the emperor and
the king of Prussia, on the 4th of August, 1792, it is expressed in
the clearest terms, and on principles which could not fail, if they
had adhered to them, of classing those monarchs with the first
benefactors of mankind. This manifesto was published, as they
themselves express it, 'to lay open to the present generation, as well
as to posterity, their motives, their intentions, and the
_disinterestedness_ of their personal views; taking up arms for the
purpose of preserving social and political order amongst all civilised
nations, and to secure to _each_ state its religion, happiness,
independence, territories, and real constitution.'--'On this ground,
they hoped that all empires and all states would be unanimous; and
becoming the firm guardians of the happiness of mankind, that they
could not fail to unite their efforts to rescue a numerous nation from
its own fury, to preserve Europe from the return of barbarism, and the
universe from the subversion and anarchy with which it was
threatened.' The whole of that noble performance ought to be read at
the first meeting of any congress which may assemble for the purpose
of pacification. In that piece 'these powers expressly renounce all
views of personal aggrandisement,' and confine themselves to objects
worthy of so generous, so heroic, and so perfectly wise and politic an
enterprise. It was to the principles of this confederation, and to no
other, that we wished our sovereign and our country to accede, as a
part of the commonwealth of Europe. To these principles with some
trifling exceptions and limitations they did fully accede. And all our
friends who took office acceded to the ministry (whether wisely or
not), as I always understood the matter, on the faith and on the
principles of that declaration.
As long as these powers flattered themselves that the menace of force
would produce the effect of force, they acted on those declarations:
but when their menaces failed of success, their efforts took a new
direction. It did not appear to them that virtue and heroism ought to
be purchased by millions of rix-dollars. It is a dreadful truth, but
it is a truth that cannot be concealed; in ability, in dexterity, in
the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors. They
saw the thing right from the very beginning. Whatever were the first
motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and
for its objects, it was a _civil war_; and as such they pursued it. It
is a war between the partisans of the ancient, civil, moral, and
political order of Europe, against a sect of fanatical and ambitious
atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a
foreign empire over other nations; it is a sect aiming at universal
empire, and beginning with the conquest of France. The leaders of that
sect secured the _centre of Europe_; and that secured, they knew, that
whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their _cause_ was
victorious. Whether its territory had a little more or a little less
peeled from its surface, or whether an island or two was detached from
its commerce, to them was of little moment. The conquest of France
was a glorious acquisition. That once well laid as a basis of empire,
opportunities never could be wanting to regain or to replace what had
been lost, and dreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of their
adversaries.
They saw it was a _civil war_. It was their business to persuade their
adversaries that it ought to be a _foreign_ war. The Jacobins
everywhere set up a cry against the new crusade; and they intrigued
with effect in the cabinet, in the field, and in every private society
in Europe. Their task was not difficult. The condition of princes, and
sometimes of first ministers too, is to be pitied. The creatures of
the desk, and the creatures of favour, had no relish for the
principles of the manifestoes. They promised no governments, no
regiments, no revenues from whence emoluments might arise by
perquisite or by grant. In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians are
the lowest of our species. There is no trade so vile and mechanical as
government in their hands. Virtue is not their habit. They are out of
themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and
glory. A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of
states passes with them for romance; and the principles that recommend
it, for the wanderings of a disordered imagination. The calculators
compute them out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons shame them
out of everything grand and elevated. Littleness in object and in
means, to them appears soundness and sobriety. They think there is
nothing worth pursuit but that which they can handle; which they can
measure with a two-foot rule; which they can tell upon ten fingers.
Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles
at all, they played the game of that faction. There was a beaten road
before them. The powers of Europe were armed; France had always
appeared dangerous; the war was easily diverted from France as a
faction, to France as a state. The princes were easily taught to slide
back into their old, habitual course of politics. They were easily led
to consider the flames that were consuming France, not as a warning to
protect their own buildings (which were without any party wall, and
linked by a contignation into the edifice of France,) but as a happy
occasion for pillaging the goods, and for carrying off the materials,
of their neighbour's house. Their provident fears were changed into
avaricious hopes. They carried on their new designs without seeming to
abandon the principles of their old policy. They pretended to seek, or
they flattered themselves that they sought, in the accession of new
fortresses, and new territories, a _defensive_ security. But the
security wanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly
dangerous in its fortresses nor in its territories, as in its spirit
and its principles. The aimed, or pretended to aim, at _defending_
themselves against a danger from which there can be no security in any
_defensive_ plan. If armies and fortresses were a defence against
Jacobinism, Louis the Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful
monarch over a happy people.
This error obliged them, even in their offensive operations, to adopt
a 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 favourable 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
aggrandisement, 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 _honour_, 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 the 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 aggrandisement.
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 do not 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 favour 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 dominions? 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
honour 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 a 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
subsidised 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 co-operation, 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
recompence 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 unclinch
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
endeavoured 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 terminated 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 connexion 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 alterations 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 methodised reasonings of the great publicists and jurists
from the digest and jurisprudence of the Christian world. In these
treasures are to be found the _usual_ relations of peace and amity in
civilised 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 neighbour, 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 proselytising spirit, in which they were not
exceeded by Mahomet himself.
They, who have made but superficial studies in the natural history of
the human mind, have been taught to look on religious opinions as the
only cause of enthusiastic zeal and sectarian propagation. But there
is no doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, that is not capable of
the very same effect. The social nature of man impels him to propagate
his principles, as much as physical impulses urge him to propagate his
kind. The passions give zeal and vehemence. The understanding bestows
design and system. The whole man moves under the discipline of his
opinions. Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.
When anything concerning it becomes an object of much meditation, it
cannot be indifferent to the mind. They who do not love religion,
hate it. The rebels to God perfectly abhor the author of their being.
They hate Him 'with all their heart, with all their mind, with all
their soul, and with all their strength.' He never presents Himself to
their thoughts but to menace and alarm them. They cannot strike the
sun out of heaven, but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that
obscures Him from their own eyes. Not being able to revenge themselves
on God, they have a delight in vicariously defacing, degrading,
torturing, and tearing in pieces, His image in man. Let no one judge
of them by what he has conceived of them, when they were not
incorporated, and had no lead. They were then only passengers in a
common vehicle. They were then carried along with the general motion
of religion in the community, and, without being aware of it, partook
of its influence. In that situation, at worst, their nature was left
free to counterwork their principles. They despaired of giving any
very general currency to their opinions. They considered them as a
reserved privilege for the chosen few. But when the possibility of
dominion, lead, and propagation, presented itself, and that the
ambition, which before had so often made them hypocrites, might rather
gain than lose by a daring avowal of their sentiments, then the nature
of this infernal spirit, which has 'evil for its good,' appeared in
its full perfection. Nothing indeed but the possession of some power
can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true
character of any man. Without reading the speeches of Vergniaux,
Françias of Nantz, Isnard, and some others of that sort, it would not
be easy to conceive the passion, rancour, and malice of their tongues
and hearts. They worked themselves up to a perfect phrensy against
religion and all its professors. They tore the reputation of the
clergy to pieces by their infuriated declamations and invectives,
before they lacerated their bodies by their massacres. This fanatical
atheism left out, we omit the principal feature in the French
Revolution, and a principal consideration with regard to the effects
to be expected from a peace with it.
The other sort of men were the politicians. To them, who had little or
not at all reflected on the subject, religion was in itself no object
of love or hatred. They disbelieved it, and that was all. Neutral with
regard to that object, they took the side which in the present state
of things might best answer their purposes. They soon found that they
could not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made
them sensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with
means of conquest first at home, and then abroad. The philosophers
were the active internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and
principles: the second gave the practical direction. Sometimes the
one predominated in the composition, sometimes the other. The only
difference between them was in the necessity of concealing the general
design for a time, and in their dealing with foreign nations; the
fanatics going straight forward and openly, the politicians by the
surer mode of zigzag. In the course of events this, among other
causes, produced fierce and bloody contentions between them. But at
the bottom they thoroughly agreed in all the objects of ambition and
irreligion, and substantially in all the means of promoting these
ends. Without question, to bring about the unexampled event of the
French Revolution, the concurrence of a very great number of views and
passions was necessary. In that stupendous work, no one principle, by
which the human mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and
depraved, was left unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and
support it by undoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who
acted in the Revolution as _statesmen_, had the exterior
aggrandisement of France as their ultimate end in the most minute part
of the internal changes that were made. We, who of late years have
been drawn from an attention to foreign affairs by the importance of
our domestic discussions, cannot easily form a conception of the
general eagerness of the active and energetic part of the French
nation, itself the most active and energetic of all nations, previous
to its Revolution, upon that subject. I am convinced that the foreign
speculators in France, under the old government, were twenty to one of
the same description then or now in England; and few of that
description there were, who did not emulously set forward the
Revolution. The whole official system, particularly in the diplomatic
part, the regulars, the irregulars, down to the clerks in office, (a
corps, without comparison, more numerous than the same amongst us,)
co-operated in it. All the intriguers in foreign politics, all the
spies, all the intelligencers, actually or late in function, all the
candidates for that sort of employment, acted solely upon that
principle.
On that system of aggrandisement there was but one mind: but two
violent factions arose about the means. The first wished France,
diverted from the politics of the continent, to attend solely to her
marine, to feed it by an increase of commerce, and thereby to
overpower England on her own element. They contended, that if England
were disabled, the powers on the continent would fall into their
proper subordination; that it was England which deranged the whole
continental system of Europe. The others, who were by far the more
numerous, though not the most outwardly prevalent at court, considered
this plan for France as contrary to her genius, her situation, and her
natural means. They agree as to the ultimate object, the reduction of
the British power, and, if possible, its naval power; but they
considered an ascendency on the continent as a necessary preliminary
to that undertaking. They argued, that the proceedings of England
herself had proved the soundness of this policy. That her greatest and
ablest statesmen had not considered the support of a continental
balance against France as a deviation from the principle of her naval
power, but as one of the most effectual modes of carrying it into
effect. That such had been her policy ever since the Revolution,
during which period the naval strength of Great Britain had gone on
increasing in the direct ratio of her interference in the politics of
the continent. With much stronger reason ought the politics of France
to take the same direction; as well for pursuing objects which her
situation would dictate to her, though England had no existence, as
for counteracting the politics of that nation; to France continental
politics are primary; they looked on them only of secondary
consideration to England, and, however necessary, but as means
necessary to an end.
What is truly astonishing, the partisans of those two opposite systems
were at once prevalent, and at once employed, and in the very same
transactions--the one ostensibly, the other secretly, during the
latter part of the reign of Louis XV. Nor was there one court in which
an ambassador resided on the part of the ministers, in which another,
as a spy on him, did not also reside on the part of the king. They who
pursued the scheme for keeping peace on the continent, and
particularly with Austria, acting officially and publicly, the other
faction counteracting and opposing them. These private agents were
continually going from their function to the Bastile, and from the
Bastile to employment, and favour again. An inextricable cabal was
formed, some of persons of rank, others of subordinates. But by this
means the corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole
formed a body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people,
despising the regular ministry, despising the courts at which they
were employed, despising the court which employed them.
The unfortunate Louis the Sixteenth was not the first cause of the
evil by which he suffered. He came to it, as to a sort of inheritance,
by the false politics of his immediate predecessor. This system of
dark and perplexed intrigue had come to its perfection before he came
to the throne: and even then the Revolution strongly operated in all
its causes.
There was no point on which the discontented diplomatic politicians so
bitterly arraigned their cabinet, as for the decay of French influence
in all others. From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain
of monarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any
regular plan of national aggrandisement. They observed, that in that
sort of regimen too much depended on the personal character of the
prince; that the vicissitudes produced by the succession of princes of
a different character, and even the vicissitudes produced in the same
man, by the different views and inclinations belonging to youth,
manhood, and age, disturbed and distracted the policy of a country
made by nature for extensive empire, or, what was still more to their
taste, for that sort of general over-ruling influence which prepared
empire or supplied the place of it. They had continually in their
hands the observations of _Machiavel_ on _Livy_. They had
_Montesquieu's Grandeur et Décadence des Romains_ as a manual; and
they compared, with mortification, the systematic proceedings of a
Roman senate with the fluctuations of a monarchy. They observed the
very small additions of territory which all the power of France,
actuated by all the ambition of France, had acquired in two centuries.
The Romans had frequently acquired more in a single year. They
severely and in every part of it criticised the reign of Louis XIV.,
whose irregular and desultory ambition had more provoked than
endangered Europe. Indeed, they who will be at the pains of seriously
considering the history of that period will see that those French
politicians had some reason. They who will not take the trouble of
reviewing it through all its wars and all its negotiations, will
consult the short but judicious criticism of the Marquis de
Montalembert on that subject. It may be read separately from his
ingenious system of fortification and military defence, on the
practical merit of which I am unable to form a judgment.
The diplomatic politicians of whom I speak, and who formed by far the
majority in that class, made disadvantageous comparisons even between
their more legal and formalising monarchy, and the monarchies of other
states, as a system of power and influence. They observed that France
not only lost ground herself, but, through the languor and
unsteadiness of her pursuits, and from her aiming through commerce at
naval force which she never could attain without losing more on one
side than she could gain on the other, that three great powers, each
of them (as military states) capable of balancing her, had grown up on
the continent. Russia and Prussia had been created almost within
memory; and Austria, though not a new power, and even curtailed in
territory, was, by the very collision in which she lost that
territory, greatly improved in her military discipline and force.
During the reign of Maria Theresa the interior economy of the country
was made more to correspond with the support of great armies than
formerly it had been. As to Prussia, a merely military power, they
observed that one war had enriched her with as considerable a conquest
as France had acquired in centuries. Russia had broken the Turkish
power by which Austria might be, as formerly she had been, balanced in
favour of France. They felt it with pain, that the two northern powers
of Sweden and Denmark were in general under the sway of Russia; or
that, at best, France kept up a very doubtful conflict, with many
fluctuations of fortune, and at an enormous expense, in Sweden. In
Holland, the French party seemed, if not extinguished, at least
utterly obscured, and kept under by a stadtholder, leaning for support
sometimes on Great Britain, sometimes on Prussia, sometimes on both,
never on France. Even the spreading of the Bourbon family had become
merely a family accommodation; and had little effect on the national
politics. This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain by destroying
all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of France in
the accession of the forces of its great rival. In Italy, the same
family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were equally
visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to
which all the means which wit could devise, or nature and fortune
could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give life,
or vigour, or consistency,--but in a Republic? Out the word came; and
it never went back.
Whether they reasoned, right or wrong, or that there was some mixture
of right and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure, that in this manner
they felt and reasoned. The different effects of a great military and
ambitious republic, and of a monarchy of the same description, were
constantly in their mouths. The principle was ready to operate when
opportunities should offer, which few of them indeed foresaw in the
extent in which they were afterwards presented; but these
opportunities, in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for.
When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria and
France was deplored as a national calamity; because it united France
in friendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope any
continental aggrandisement. When the first partition of Poland was
made, in which France had no share, and which had further aggrandised
every one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found
them in a perfect phrensy of rage and indignation: not that they were
hurt at the shocking and uncoloured violence and injustice of that
partition, but at the debility, improvidence, and want of activity, in
their government, in not preventing it as a means of aggrandisement to
their rivals, or in not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or
other, to obtain their share of advantage from that robbery.
In that or nearly in that state of things and of opinions, came the
Austrian match; which promised to draw the knot, as afterwards in
effect it did, still more closely between the old rival houses. This
added exceedingly to their hatred and contempt of their monarchy. It
was for this reason that the late glorious queen, who on all accounts
was formed to produce general love and admiration, and whose life was
as mild and beneficent as her death was beyond example great and
heroic, became so very soon and so very much the object of an
implacable rancour, never to be extinguished but in her blood. When I
wrote my letter in answer to M. de Menonville, in the beginning of
January, 1791, I had good reason for thinking that this description of
revolutionists did not so early nor so steadily point their murderous
designs at the martyr king as at the royal heroine. It was accident,
and the momentary depression of that part of the faction, that gave to
the husband the happy priority in death.
From this their restless desire of an over-ruling influence, they bent
a very great part of their designs and efforts to revive the old
French party, which was a democratic party in Holland, and to make a
revolution there. They were happy at the troubles which the singular
imprudence of Joseph the Second had stirred up in the Austrian
Netherlands. They rejoiced when they saw him irritate his subjects,
profess philosophy, send away the Dutch garrisons, and dismantle his
fortifications. As to Holland, they never forgave either the king or
the ministry, for suffering that object, which they justly looked on
as principal in their design of reducing the power of England, to
escape out of their hands. This was the true secret of the commercial
treaty, made, on their part, against all the old rules and principles
of commerce, with a view of diverting the English nation, by a pursuit
of immediate profit, from an attention to the progress of France in
its designs upon that republic. The system of the economists, which
led to the general opening of commerce, facilitated that treaty, but
did not produce it. They were in despair when they found that by the
vigour of Mr. Pitt, supported in this point by Mr. Fox and the
opposition, the object to which they had sacrificed their manufactures
was lost to their ambition.
This eager desire of raising France from the condition into which she
had fallen, as they conceived, from her monarchical imbecility, had
been the main-spring of their precedent interference in that unhappy
American quarrel, the bad effects of which to this nation have not, as
yet, fully disclosed themselves. These sentiments had been long
lurking in their breasts, though their views were only discovered now
and then, in heat and as by escapes; but on this occasion they
exploded suddenly. They were professed with ostentation and propagated
with zeal. These sentiments were not produced, as some think, by
their American alliance. The American alliance was produced by their
republican principles and republican policy. This new relation
undoubtedly did much. The discourses and cabals that it produced, the
intercourse that it established, and, above all, the example, which
made it seem practicable to establish a republic in a great extent of
country, finished the work, and gave to that part of the revolutionary
faction a degree of strength which required other energies than the
late king possessed, to resist, or even to restrain. It spread
everywhere; but it was nowhere more prevalent than in the heart of the
court. The palace of Versailles, by its language, seemed a forum of
democracy. To have pointed out to most of those politicians, from
their dispositions and movements, what has since happened, the fall of
their own monarchy, of their own laws, of their own religion, would
have been to furnish a motive the more for pushing forward a system on
which they considered all these things as encumbrances. Such in truth
they were. And we have seen them succeed not only in the destruction
of their monarchy, but in all the objects of ambition that they
proposed from that destruction. When I contemplate the scheme on which
France is formed, and when I compare it with these systems, with which
it is, and ever must be, in conflict, those things which seem as
defects in her polity are the very things which make me tremble. The
states of the Christian world have grown up to their present
magnitude in a great length of time, and by a great variety of
accidents. They have been improved to what we see them with greater or
less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has been formed
upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As their
constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any
_peculiar_ end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.
The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety,
and have become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries the
state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the
state. Every state has pursued not only every sort of social
advantage, but it has cultivated the welfare of every individual. His
wants, his wishes, even his tastes, have been consulted. This
comprehensive scheme virtually produced a degree of personal liberty
in forms the most adverse to it. That liberty was found, under
monarchies styled absolute, in a degree unknown to the ancient
commonwealths. From hence the powers of all our modern states meet, in
all their movements, with some obstruction. It is therefore no wonder,
that, when these states are to be considered as machines to operate
for some one great end, this dissipated and balanced force is not
easily concentred, or made to bear with the whole force of the nation
upon one point.
The British state is, without question, that which pursues the
greatest variety of ends, and is the least disposed to sacrifice any
one of them to another, or to the whole. It aims at taking in the
entire circle of human desires, and securing for them their fair
enjoyment. Our legislature has been ever closely connected, in its
most efficient part, with individual feeling, and individual interest.
Personal liberty, the most lively of these feelings and the most
important of these interests, which in other European countries has
rather arisen from the system of manners and the habitudes of life
than from the laws of the state, (in which it flourished more from
neglect than attention,) in England has been a direct object of
government.
On this principle England would be the weakest power in the whole
system. Fortunately, however, the great riches of this kingdom,
arising from a variety of causes, and the disposition of the people,
which is as great to spend as to accumulate, has easily afforded a
disposable surplus that gives a mighty momentum to the state. This
difficulty, with these advantages to overcome it, has called forth the
talents of the English financiers, who, by the surplus of industry
poured out by prodigality, have outdone everything which has been
accomplished in other nations. The present minister has outdone his
predecessors; and, as a minister of revenue, is far above my power of
praise. But still there are cases in which England feels more than
several others (though they all feel) the perplexity of an immense
body of balanced advantages, and of individual demands, and of some
irregularity in the whole mass.
France differs essentially from all those governments, which are
formed without system, which exist by habit, and which are confused
with the multitude, and with the complexity of their pursuits. What
now stands as government in France is struck out at a heat. The design
is wicked, immoral, impious, oppressive; but it is spirited and
daring; it is systematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity
and consistency in perfection. In that country entirely to cut off a
branch of commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to destroy the
circulation of money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of
agriculture, even to burn a city, or to lay waste a province of their
own, does not cost them a moment's anxiety. To them the will, the
wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individuals, is as
nothing. Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The
state is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of
force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is
military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all
its movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its sole
objects; dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.
Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means which are
lessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, France
has, since the accomplishment of the Revolution, a complete unity in
its direction. It has destroyed every resource of the state which
depends upon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of
convention disappear. The advantages of nature in some measure remain:
even these, I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what
remains is complete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats
will expire, and we laugh at the last price of them. But what
signifies the fate of those tickets of despotism? The despotism will
find despotic means of supply. They have found the short cut to the
productions of nature, while others, in pursuit of them, are obliged
to wind through the labyrinth of a very intricate state of society.
They seize upon the fruit of the labour; they seize upon the labourer
himself. Were France but half of what it is in population, in
compactness, in applicability of its force, situated as it is, and
being what it is, it would be too strong for most of the states of
Europe, constituted as they are, and proceeding as they proceed. Would
it be wise to estimate what the world of Europe, as well as the world
of Asia, had to dread from Genghiz Khân, upon a contemplation of the
resources of the cold and barren spot in the remotest Tartary, from
whence first issued that scourge of the human race? Ought we to judge
from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper
circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which Mahomet and his
tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful empires of the
world; beat one of them totally to the ground, broke to pieces the
other, and, in not much longer space of time than I have lived,
overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an
empire from the Indus to the Pyrenees?
Material resources never have supplied, nor ever can supply, the want
of 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 rules
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 return 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 co-exist The errors of Louis XVI.
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 XVI. 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 XIII. had force enough to
destroy the republican system of the Protestants at home.
Louis XVI. 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 were 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 connexions, 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 monied 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 it 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 XVI., 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 neighbour, he lost the whole of his own. Louis
XVI. 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 out-work
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
civilised 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,--you may call
this France 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.