It is not difficult to discern what sort of humanity our government is
to learn from these syren singers. Our government also, I admit with
some reason, as a step towards the proposed fraternity, is required
to abjure the unjust hatred which it bears to this body, of honour and
virtue. I thank God I am neither a minister nor a leader of opposition.
I protest I cannot do what they desire. I could not do it if I were
under the guillotine; or as they ingeniously and pleasantly express
it, "looking out of the little national window." Even at that opening
I could receive none of their light. I am fortified against all such
affections by the declaration of the government, which I must yet
consider as lawful, made on the 29th of October, 1793, and still ringing
in my ears.
("In their place has succeeded a system destructive of all public order,
maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number;
by arbitrary imprisonment; by massacres which cannot be remembered
without horror; and at length by the execrable murder of a just and
beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who, with an
unshaken firmness, has shared all the misfortunes of her royal consort,
his protracted sufferings, his cruel captivity, and ignominious death."
They (the allies) have had to encounter acts of aggression without
pretext, open violation of all treaties, unprovoked declarations of war;
in a word, whatever corruption, intrigue, or violence, could effect
for the purpose, openly avowed, of subverting all the institutions of
society, and of extending over all the nations of Europe that confusion,
which has produced the misery of France."--"This state of things cannot
exist in France without involving all the surrounding powers in one
common danger, without giving them the right, without imposing it upon
them as a duty, to stop the progress of an evil, which exists only by
the successive violation of all law and all property, and which attacks
the fundamental principles by which mankind is united in the bonds of
civil society."--"The king would impose none other than equitable
and moderate conditions, not such as the expense, the risks, and the
sacrifices of the war might justify; but such as his majesty thinks
himself under the indispensable necessity of requiring, with a view to
these considerations, and still more to that of his own security and
of the future tranquillity of Europe. His majesty desires nothing more
sincerely than thus to terminate a war, which he in vain endeavoured to
avoid, and all the calamities of which, as now experienced by France,
are to be attributed only to the ambition, the perfidy, and the violence
of those, whose crimes have involved their own country in misery, and
disgraced all civilized nations."--"The king promises, on his part,
the suspension of hostilities, friendship, and (as far as the course of
events will allow, of which the will of man cannot dispose) security
and protection to all those who, by declaring for a monarchical form
of government, shall shake off the yoke of sanguinary anarchy; of that
anarchy which has broken all the most sacred bonds of society, dissolved
all the relations of civil life, violated every right, confounded every
duty; which uses the name of liberty to exercise the most cruel tyranny,
to annihilate all property, to seize on all possessions: which founds
its power on the pretended consent of the people, and itself carries
fire and sword through extensive provinces for having demanded their
laws, their religion, and their LAWFUL SOVEREIGN."
Declaration sent by his majesty's command to the commanders of his
majesty's fleets and armies employed against France, and to his
majesty's ministers employed at foreign courts.)
This declaration was transmitted not only to our commanders by sea and
land, but to our ministers in every court of Europe. It is the most
eloquent and highly-finished in the style, the most judicious in the
choice of topics, the most orderly in the arrangement, and the most rich
in the colouring, without employing the smallest degree of exaggeration,
of any state paper that has ever yet appeared. An ancient writer,
Plutarch, I think it is, quotes some verses on the eloquence of
Pericles, who is called "the only orator that left stings in the
minds of his hearers." Like his, the eloquence of the declaration, not
contradicting, but enforcing sentiments of the truest humanity, has left
stings that have penetrated more than skin-deep into my mind; and
never can they be extracted by all the surgery of murder, never can the
throbbings they have created be assuaged by all the emolient cataplasms
of robbery and confiscation. I CANNOT love the republic.