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 connection 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 form
the digest and jurisprudence of the Christian world. In these treasures
are to be found the USUAL relations of peace and amity in civilized
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.