That the house must perceive, from his coming forward to mark an
expression or two of his best friend, how anxious he was to keep the
distemper of France from the least countenance in England, where he was
sure some wicked persons had shown a strong disposition to recommend an
imitation of the French spirit of reform. He was so strongly opposed to
any the least tendency towards the MEANS of introducing a democracy like
theirs, as well as to the END itself, that much as it would afflict him,
if such a thing could be attempted, and that any friend of his could
concur in such measures (he was far, very far, from believing they
could), he would abandon his best friends, and join with his worst
enemies to oppose either the means or the end; and to resist all violent
exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of
true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states,
but perfectly unfit to amend them.
That he was no enemy to reformation. Almost every business in which
he was much concerned, from the first day he sat in that house to that
hour, was a business of reformation; and when he had not been employed
in correcting, he had been employed in resisting, abuses. Some traces
of this spirit in him now stand on their statute-book. In his opinion,
anything which unnecessarily tore to pieces the contexture of the state,
not only prevented all real reformation, but introduced evils which
would call, but perhaps call in vain, for new reformation.
That he thought the French nation very unwise. What they valued
themselves on, was a disgrace to them. They had gloried (and some people
in England had thought fit to take share in that glory) in making a
revolution; as if revolutions were good things in themselves. All
the horrors, and all the crimes of the anarchy which led to their
revolution, which attend its progress, and which may virtually attend it
in its establishment, pass for nothing with the lovers of revolutions.
The French have made their way, through the destruction of their
country, to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession
of a good one. They were in possession of it the day the states met in
separate orders. Their business, had they been either virtuous or wise,
or had they been left to their own judgment, was to secure the stability
and independence of the states, according to those orders, under the
monarch on the throne. It was then their duty to redress grievances.
Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their
state, to which they were called by their monarch, and sent by their
country, they were made to take a very different course. They first
destroyed all the balances and counterpoises which serve to fix the
state, and to give it a steady direction, and which furnish sure
correctives to any violent spirit which may prevail in any of the
orders. These balances existed in their oldest constitution; and in
the constitution of this country; and in the constitution of all the
countries in Europe. These they rashly destroyed, and then they melted
down the whole into one incongruous, ill-connected mass.
When they had done this, they instantly, and with the most atrocious
perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root
of all property, and consequently of all national prosperity, by the
principles they established, and the example they set, in confiscating
all the possessions of the church. They made and recorded a sort of
INSTITUTE and DIGEST of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a
pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys
at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and
pedantic in them, as by their name and authority they systematically
destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the
minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state,
and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has
ever been known to suffer; and which may in the end produce such a war,
and perhaps many such.
With them the question was not between despotism and liberty. The
sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country was not made
on the altar of freedom. Freedom, and a better security for freedom than
that they have taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all.
They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that
through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged
themselves headlong into those calamities to prevent themselves from
settling into that constitution, or into anything resembling it.