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THE WORKS
OF
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
EDMUND BURKE
IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME THE FOURTH
[Illustration: Burke Coat of Arms.]
LONDON
JOHN C. NIMMO
14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.
MDCCCLXXXVII
CONTENTS OF VOL IV.
LETTER TO A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, IN ANSWER TO SOME
OBJECTIONS TO HIS BOOK ON FRENCH AFFAIRS 1
APPEAL FROM THE NEW TO THE OLD WHIGS 57
LETTER TO A PEER OF IRELAND ON THE PENAL LAWS AGAINST IRISH
CATHOLICS 217
LETTER TO SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE, ON THE SUBJECT OF THE ROMAN
CATHOLICS OF IRELAND 241
HINTS FOR A MEMORIAL TO BE DELIVERED TO MONSIEUR DE M.M. 307
THOUGHTS ON FRENCH AFFAIRS 313
HEADS FOR CONSIDERATION ON THE PRESENT STATE OF AFFAIRS 379
REMARKS ON THE POLICY OF THE ALLIES WITH RESPECT TO FRANCE: WITH
AN APPENDIX 403
A
LETTER
TO
A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY,
IN
ANSWER TO SOME OBJECTIONS TO HIS BOOK ON FRENCH AFFAIRS.
1791.
Sir,--I had the honor to receive your letter of the 17th of November
last, in which, with some exceptions, you are pleased to consider
favorably the letter I have written on the affairs of France. I shall
ever accept any mark of approbation attended with instruction with more
pleasure than general and unqualified praises. The latter can serve only
to flatter our vanity; the former, whilst it encourages us to proceed,
may help to improve us in our progress.
Some of the errors you point out to me in my printed letter are really
such. One only I find to be material. It is corrected in the edition
which I take the liberty of sending to you. As to the cavils which may
be made on some part of my remarks with regard to the _gradations_ in
your new Constitution, you observe justly that they do not affect the
substance of my objections. Whether there be a round more or less in the
ladder of representation by which your workmen ascend from their
parochial tyranny to their federal anarchy, when the whole scale is
false, appears to me of little or no importance.
I published my thoughts on that Constitution, that my countrymen might
be enabled to estimate the wisdom of the plans which were held out to
their imitation. I conceived that the true character of those plans
would be best collected from the committee appointed to prepare them. I
thought that the scheme of their building would be better comprehended
in the design of the architects than in the execution of the masons. It
was not worth my reader's while to occupy himself with the alterations
by which bungling practice corrects absurd theory. Such an investigation
would be endless: because every day's past experience of
impracticability has driven, and every day's future experience will
drive, those men to new devices as exceptionable as the old, and which
are no otherwise worthy of observation than as they give a daily proof
of the delusion of their promises and the falsehood of their
professions. Had I followed all these changes, my letter would have been
only a gazette of their wanderings, a journal of their march from error
to error, through a dry, dreary desert, unguided by the lights of
Heaven, or by the contrivance which wisdom has invented to supply their
place.
I am unalterably persuaded that the attempt to oppress, degrade,
impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen and landed
property of a whole nation cannot be justified under any form it may
assume. I am satisfied beyond a doubt, that the project of turning a
great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of
governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless
and absurd, in any mode or with any qualifications. I can never be
convinced that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in
church-wardens and constables and other such officers, guided by the
prudence of litigious attorneys and Jew brokers, and set in action by
shameless women of the lowest condition, by keepers of hotels, taverns,
and brothels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop-boys, hair-dressers,
fiddlers, and dancers on the stage, (who, in such a commonwealth as
yours, will in future overbear, as already they have overborne, the
sober incapacity of dull, uninstructed men, of useful, but laborious
occupations,) can never be put into any shape that must not be both
disgraceful and destructive. The whole of this project, even if it were
what it pretends to be, and was not in reality the dominion, through
that disgraceful medium, of half a dozen, or perhaps fewer, intriguing
politicians, is so mean, so low-minded, so stupid a contrivance, in
point of wisdom, as well as so perfectly detestable for its wickedness,
that I must always consider the correctives which might make it in any
degree practicable to be so many new objections to it.
In that wretched state of things, some are afraid that the authors of
your miseries may be led to precipitate their further designs by the
hints they may receive from the very arguments used to expose the
absurdity of their system, to mark the incongruity of its parts, and its
inconsistency with their own principles,--and that your masters may be
led to render their schemes more consistent by rendering them more
mischievous. Excuse the liberty which your indulgence authorizes me to
take, when I observe to you that such apprehensions as these would
prevent all exertion of our faculties in this great cause of mankind.
A rash recourse to _force_ is not to be justified in a state of real
weakness. Such attempts bring on disgrace, and in their failure
discountenance and discourage more rational endeavors. But _reason_ is
to be hazarded, though it may be perverted by craft and sophistry; for
reason can suffer no loss nor shame, nor can it impede any useful plan
of future policy. In the unavoidable uncertainty as to the effect,
which attends on every measure of human prudence, nothing seems a surer
antidote to the poison of fraud than its detection. It is true, the
fraud may be swallowed after this discovery, and perhaps even swallowed
the more greedily for being a detected fraud. Men sometimes make a point
of honor not to be disabused; and they had rather fall into an hundred
errors than confess one. But, after all, when neither our principles nor
our dispositions, nor, perhaps, our talents, enable us to encounter
delusion with delusion, we must use our best reason to those that ought
to be reasonable creatures, and to take our chance for the event. We
cannot act on these anomalies in the minds of men. I do not conceive
that the persons who have contrived these things can be made much the
better or the worse for anything which can be said to them. _They_ are
reason-proof. Here and there, some men, who were at first carried away
by wild, good intentions, may be led, when their first fervors are
abated, to join in a sober survey of the schemes into which they had
been deluded. To those only (and I am sorry to say they are not likely
to make a large description) we apply with any hope. I may speak it upon
an assurance almost approaching to absolute knowledge, that nothing has
been done that has not been contrived from the beginning, even before
the States had assembled. _Nulla nova mihi res inopinave surgit._ They
are the same men and the same designs that they were from the first,
though varied in their appearance. It was the very same animal that at
first crawled about in the shape of a caterpillar that you now see rise
into the air and expand his wings to the sun.
Proceeding, therefore, as we are obliged to proceed,--that is, upon an
hypothesis that we address rational men,--can false political principles
be more effectually exposed than by demonstrating that they lead to
consequences directly inconsistent with and subversive of the
arrangements grounded upon them? If this kind of demonstration is not
permitted, the process of reasoning called _deductio ad absurdum_, which
even the severity of geometry does not reject, could not be employed at
all in legislative discussions. One of our strongest weapons against
folly acting with authority would be lost.
You know, Sir, that even the virtuous efforts of your patriots to
prevent the ruin of your country have had this very turn given to them.
It has been said here, and in France too, that the reigning usurpers
would not have carried their tyranny to such destructive lengths, if
they had not been stimulated and provoked to it by the acrimony of your
opposition. There is a dilemma to which every opposition to successful
iniquity must, in the nature of things, be liable. If you lie still, you
are considered as an accomplice in the measures in which you silently
acquiesce. If you resist, you are accused of provoking irritable power
to new excesses. The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at
least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to
vulgar judgments,--success.
The indulgence of a sort of undefined hope, an obscure confidence, that
some lurking remains of virtue, some degree of shame, might exist in the
breasts of the oppressors of France, has been among the causes which
have helped to bring on the common ruin of king and people. There is no
safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men,
and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
I well remember, at every epocha of this wonderful history, in every
scene of this tragic business, that, when your sophistic usurpers were
laying down mischievous principles, and even applying them in direct
resolutions, it was the fashion to say that they never intended to
execute those declarations in their rigor. This made men careless in
their opposition, and remiss in early precaution. By holding out this
fallacious hope, the impostors deluded sometimes one description of men,
and sometimes another, so that no means of resistance were provided
against them, when they came to execute in cruelty what they had planned
in fraud.
There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed
on. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without
which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would
be by the perfidy of others. But when men whom we _know_ to be wicked
impose upon us, we are something worse than dupes. When we know them,
their fair pretences become new motives for distrust. There is one case,
indeed, in which it would be madness not to give the fullest credit to
the most deceitful of men,--that is, when they make declarations of
hostility against us.
I find that some persons entertain other hopes, which I confess appear
more specious than those by which at first so many were deluded and
disarmed. They flatter themselves that the extreme misery brought upon
the people by their folly will at last open the eyes of the multitude,
if not of their leaders. Much the contrary, I fear. As to the leaders in
this system of imposture,--you know that cheats and deceivers never can
repent. The fraudulent have no resource but in fraud. They have no other
goods in their magazine. They have no virtue or wisdom in their minds,
to which, in a disappointment concerning the profitable effects of fraud
and cunning, they can retreat. The wearing out of an old serves only to
put them upon the invention of a new delusion. Unluckily, too, the
credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves. They
never give people possession; but they always keep them in hope. Your
state doctors do not so much as pretend that any good whatsoever has
hitherto been derived from their operations, or that the public has
prospered in any one instance under their management. The nation is
sick, very sick, by their medicines. But the charlatan tells them that
what is past cannot be helped;--they have taken the draught, and they
must wait its operation with patience;--that the first effects, indeed,
are unpleasant, but that the very sickness is a proof that the dose is
of no sluggish operation;--that sickness is inevitable in all
constitutional revolutions;--that the body must pass through pain to
ease;--that the prescriber is not an empiric who proceeds by vulgar
experience, but one who grounds his practice[1] on the sure rules of
art, which cannot possibly fail. You have read, Sir, the last manifesto,
or mountebank's bill, of the National Assembly. You see their
presumption in their promises is not lessened by all their failures in
the performance. Compare this last address of the Assembly and the
present state of your affairs with the early engagements of that body,
engagements which, not content with declaring, they solemnly deposed
upon oath,--swearing lustily, that, if they were supported, they would
make their country glorious and happy; and then judge whether those who
can write such things, or those who can bear to read them, are of
_themselves_ to be brought to any reasonable course of thought or
action.
As to the people at large, when once these miserable sheep have broken
the fold, and have got themselves loose, not from the restraint, but
from the protection, of all the principles of natural authority and
legitimate subordination, they become the natural prey of impostors.
When they have once tasted of the flattery of knaves, they can no longer
endure reason, which appears to them only in the form of censure and
reproach. Great distress has never hitherto taught, and whilst the world
lasts it never will teach, wise lessons to any part of mankind. Men are
as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of
prosperity. Desperate situations produce desperate councils and
desperate measures. The people of France, almost generally, have been
taught to look for other resources than those which can be derived from
order, frugality, and industry. They are generally armed; and they are
made to expect much from the use of arms. _Nihil non arrogant armis._
Besides this, the retrograde order of society has something flattering
to the dispositions of mankind. The life of adventurers, gamesters,
gypsies, beggars, and robbers is not unpleasant. It requires restraint
to keep men from falling into that habit. The shifting tides of fear
and hope, the flight and pursuit, the peril and escape, the alternate
famine and feast of the savage and the thief, after a time; render all
course of slow, steady, progressive, unvaried occupation, and the
prospect only of a limited mediocrity at the end of long labor, to the
last degree tame, languid, and insipid. Those who have been once
intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it,
even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may
be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look
to anything but power for their relief. When did distress ever oblige a
prince to abdicate his authority? And what effect will it have upon
those who are made to believe themselves a people of princes?
The more active and stirring part of the lower orders having got
government and the distribution of plunder into their hands, they will
use its resources in each municipality to form a body of adherents.
These rulers and their adherents will be strong enough to overpower the
discontents of those who have not been able to assert their share of the
spoil. The unfortunate adventurers in the cheating lottery of plunder
will probably be the least sagacious or the most inactive and irresolute
of the gang. If, on disappointment, they should dare to stir, they will
soon be suppressed as rebels and mutineers by their brother rebels.
Scantily fed for a while with the offal of plunder, they will drop off
by degrees; they will be driven out of sight and out of thought; and
they will be left to perish obscurely, like rats, in holes and corners.
From the forced repentance of invalid mutineers and disbanded thieves
you can hope for no resource. Government itself, which ought to
constrain the more bold and dexterous of these robbers, is their
accomplice. Its arms, its treasures, its all are in their hands.
Judicature, which above all things should awe them, is their creature
and their instrument. Nothing seems to me to render your internal
situation more desperate than this one circumstance of the state of your
judicature. Many days are not passed since we have seen a set of men
brought forth by your rulers for a most critical function. Your rulers
brought forth a set of men, steaming from the sweat and drudgery, and
all black with the smoke and soot, of the forge of confiscation and
robbery,--_ardentis massæ fuligine lippos_,--a set of men brought forth
from the trade of hammering arms of proof, offensive and defensive, in
aid of the enterprises, and for the subsequent protection, of
housebreakers, murderers, traitors, and malefactors,--men, who had their
minds seasoned with theories perfectly conformable to their practice,
and who had always laughed at possession and prescription, and defied
all the fundamental maxims of jurisprudence. To the horror and
stupefaction of all the honest part of this nation, and indeed of all
nations who are spectators, we have seen, on the credit of those very
practices and principles, and to carry them further into effect, these
very men placed on the sacred seat of justice in the capital city of
your late kingdom. We see that in future you are to be destroyed with
more form and regularity. This is not peace: it is only the introduction
of a sort of discipline in their hostility. Their tyranny is complete in
their justice; and their _lanterne_ is not half so dreadful as their
court.
One would think, that, out of common decency, they would have given you
men who had not been in the habit of trampling upon law and justice in
the Assembly, neutral men, or men apparently neutral, for judges, who
are to dispose of your lives and fortunes.
Cromwell, when he attempted to legalize his power, and to settle his
conquered country in a state of order, did not look for dispensers of
justice in the instruments of his usurpation. Quite the contrary. He
sought out, with great solicitude and selection, and even from the party
most opposite to his designs, men of weight and decorum of
character,--men unstained with the violence of the times, and with hands
not fouled with confiscation and sacrilege: for he chose an Hale for his
chief justice, though he absolutely refused to take his civic oaths, or
to make any acknowledgment whatsoever of the legality of his government.
Cromwell told this great lawyer, that, since he did not approve his
title, all he required of him was to administer, in a manner agreeable
to his pure sentiments and unspotted character, that justice without
which human society cannot subsist,--that it was not his particular
government, but civil order itself, which, as a judge, he wished him to
support. Cromwell knew how to separate the institutions expedient to his
usurpation from the administration of the public justice of his country.
For Cromwell was a man in whom ambition had not wholly suppressed, but
only suspended, the sentiments of religion, and the love (as far as it
could consist with his designs) of fair and honorable reputation.
Accordingly, we are indebted to this act of his for the preservation of
our laws, which some senseless assertors of the rights of men were then
on the point of entirely erasing, as relics of feudality and barbarism.
Besides, he gave, in the appointment of that man, to that age, and to
all posterity, the most brilliant example of sincere and fervent piety,
exact justice, and profound jurisprudence.[2] But these are not the
things in which your philosophic usurpers choose to follow Cromwell.
One would think, that, after an honest and necessary revolution, (if
they had a mind that theirs should pass for such,) your masters would
have imitated the virtuous policy of those who have been at the head of
revolutions of that glorious character. Burnet tells us, that nothing
tended to reconcile the English nation to the government of King William
so much as the care he took to fill the vacant bishoprics with men who
had attracted the public esteem by their learning, eloquence, and piety,
and above all, by their known moderation in the state. With you, in your
purifying revolution, whom have you chosen to regulate the Church? M.
Mirabeau is a fine speaker, and a fine writer, and a fine--a very fine
man; but, really, nothing gave more surprise to everybody here than to
find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The rest is of
course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to France, in which they
tell the people, with an insulting irony, that they have brought the
Church to its primitive condition. In one respect their declaration is
undoubtedly true: for they have brought it to a state of poverty and
persecution. What can be hoped for after this? Have not men, (if they
deserve the name,) under this new hope and head of the Church, been made
bishops for no other merit than having acted as instruments of atheists?
for no other merit than having thrown the children's bread to dogs? and,
in order to gorge the whole gang of usurers, peddlers, and itinerant
Jew discounters at the corners of streets, starved the poor of their
Christian flocks, and their own brother pastors? Have not such men been
made bishops to administer in temples in which (if the patriotic
donations have not already stripped them of their vessels) the
church-wardens ought to take security for the altar plate, and not so
much as to trust the chalice in their sacrilegious hands, so long as
Jews have assignats on ecclesiastic plunder, to exchange for the silver
stolen from churches?
I am told that the very sons of such Jew jobbers have been made bishops:
persons not to be suspected of any sort of _Christian_ superstition, fit
colleagues to the holy prelate of Autun, and bred at the feet of that
Gamaliel. We know who it was that drove the money-changers out of the
temple. We see, too, who it is that brings them in again. We have in
London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation, whom we will keep;
but we have of the same tribe others of a very different
description,--housebreakers, and receivers of stolen goods, and forgers
of paper currency, more than we can conveniently hang. These we can
spare to France, to fill the new episcopal thrones: men well versed in
swearing; and who will scruple no oath which the fertile genius of any
of your reformers can devise.
In matters so ridiculous it is hard to be grave. On a view of their
consequences, it is almost inhuman to treat them lightly. To what a
state of savage, stupid, servile insensibility must your people be
reduced, who can endure such proceedings in their Church, their state,
and their judicature, even for a moment! But the deluded people of
France are like other madmen, who, to a miracle, bear hunger, and
thirst, and cold, and confinement, and the chains and lash of their
keeper, whilst all the while they support themselves by the imagination
that they are generals of armies, prophets, kings, and emperors. As to a
change of mind in those men, who consider infamy as honor, degradation
as preferment, bondage to low tyrants as liberty, and the practical
scorn and contumely of their upstart masters as marks of respect and
homage, I look upon it as absolutely impracticable. These madmen, to be
cured, must first, like other madmen, be subdued. The sound part of the
community, which I believe to be large, but by no means the largest
part, has been taken by surprise, and is disjointed, terrified, and
disarmed. That sound part of the community must first be put into a
better condition, before it can do anything in the way of deliberation
or persuasion. This must be an act of power, as well as of wisdom: of
power in the hands of firm, determined patriots, who can distinguish the
misled from traitors, who will regulate the state (if such should be
their fortune) with a discriminating, manly, and provident mercy; men
who are purged of the surfeit and indigestion of systems, if ever they
have been admitted into the habit of their minds; men who will lay the
foundation of a real reform in effacing every vestige of that philosophy
which pretends to have made discoveries in the _Terra Australia_ of
morality; men who will fix the state upon these bases of morals and
politics, which are our old and immemorial, and, I hope, will be our
eternal possession.
This power, to such men, must come from _without_. It may be given to
you in pity: for surely no nation ever called so pathetically on the
compassion of all its neighbors. It may be given by those neighbors on
motives of safety to themselves. Never shall I think any country in
Europe to be secure, whilst there is established in the very centre of
it a state (if so it may be called) founded on principles of anarchy,
and which is in reality a college of armed fanatics, for the propagation
of the principles of assassination, robbery, rebellion, fraud, faction,
oppression, and impiety. Mahomet, hid, as for a time he was, in the
bottom of the sands of Arabia, had his spirit and character been
discovered, would have been an object of precaution to provident minds.
What if he had erected his fanatic standard for the destruction of the
Christian religion _in luce Asiæ_, in the midst of the then noonday
splendor of the then civilized world? The princes of Europe, in the
beginning of this century, did well not to suffer the monarchy of France
to swallow up the others. They ought not now, in my opinion, to suffer
all the monarchies and commonwealths to be swallowed up in the gulf of
this polluted anarchy. They may be tolerably safe at present, because
the comparative power of France for the present is little. But times and
occasions make dangers. Intestine troubles may arise in other countries.
There is a power always on the watch, qualified and disposed to profit
of every conjuncture, to establish its own principles and modes of
mischief, wherever it can hope for success. What mercy would these
usurpers have on other sovereigns, and on other nations, when they treat
their own king with such unparalleled indignities, and so cruelly
oppress their own countrymen?
The king of Prussia, in concurrence with us, nobly interfered to save
Holland from confusion. The same power, joined with the rescued Holland
and with Great Britain, has put the Emperor in the possession of the
Netherlands, and secured, under that prince, from all arbitrary
innovation, the ancient, hereditary Constitution of those provinces. The
chamber of Wetzlar has restored the Bishop of Liege, unjustly
dispossessed by the rebellion of his subjects. The king of Prussia was
bound by no treaty nor alliance of blood, nor had any particular reasons
for thinking the Emperor's government would be more mischievous or more
oppressive to human nature than that of the Turk; yet, on mere motives
of policy, that prince has interposed, with the threat of all his force,
to snatch even the Turk from the pounces of the Imperial eagle. If this
is done in favor of a barbarous nation, with a barbarous neglect of
police, fatal to the human race,--in favor of a nation by principle in
eternal enmity with the Christian name, a nation which will not so much
as give the salutation of peace (_Salam_) to any of us, nor make any
pact with any Christian nation beyond a truce,--if this be done in favor
of the Turk, shall it be thought either impolitic or unjust or
uncharitable to employ the same power to rescue from captivity a
virtuous monarch, (by the courtesy of Europe considered as Most
Christian,) who, after an intermission of one hundred and seventy-five
years, had called together the States of his kingdom to reform abuses,
to establish a free government, and to strengthen his throne,--a monarch
who, at the very outset, without force, even without solicitation, had
given to his people such a Magna Charta of privileges as never was given
by any king to any subjects? Is it to be tamely borne by kings who love
their subjects, or by subjects who love their kings, that this monarch,
in the midst of these gracious acts, was insolently and cruelly torn
from his palace by a gang of traitors and assassins, and kept in close
prison to this very hour, whilst his royal name and sacred character
were used for the total ruin of those whom the laws had appointed him to
protect?
The only offence of this unhappy monarch towards his people was his
attempt, under a monarchy, to give them a free Constitution. For this,
by an example hitherto unheard of in the world, he has been deposed. It
might well disgrace sovereigns to take part with a deposed tyrant. It
would suppose in them a vicious sympathy. But not to make a common cause
with a just prince, dethroned by traitors and rebels, who proscribe,
plunder, confiscate, and in every way cruelly oppress their
fellow-citizens, in my opinion is to forget what is due to the honor and
to the rights of all virtuous and legal government.
I think the king of France to be as much an object both of policy and
compassion as the Grand Seignior or his states. I do not conceive that
the total annihilation of France (if that could be effected) is a
desirable thing to Europe, or even to this its rival nation. Provident
patriots did not think it good for Rome that even Carthage should be
quite destroyed; and he was a wise Greek, wise for the general Grecian
interests, as well as a brave Lacedæmonian enemy and generous conqueror,
who did not wish, by the destruction of Athens, to pluck out the other
eye of Greece.
However, Sir, what I have here said of the interference of foreign
princes is only the opinion of a private individual, who is neither the
representative of any state nor the organ of any party, but who thinks
himself bound to express his own sentiments with freedom and energy in a
crisis of such importance to the whole human race.
I am not apprehensive, that, in speaking freely on the subject of the
king and queen of France, I shall accelerate (as you fear) the execution
of traitorous designs against them. You are of opinion, Sir, that the
usurpers may, and that they will, gladly lay hold of any pretext to
throw off the very name of a king: assuredly, I do not wish ill to your
king; but better for him not to live (he does not reign) than to live
the passive instrument of tyranny and usurpation.
I certainly meant to show, to the best of my power, that the existence
of such an executive officer in such a system of republic as theirs is
absurd in the highest degree. But in demonstrating this, to _them_, at
least, I can have made no discovery. They only held out the royal name
to catch those Frenchmen to whom the name of king is still venerable.
They calculate the duration of that sentiment; and when they find it
nearly expiring, they will not trouble themselves with excuses for
extinguishing the name, as they have the thing. They used it as a sort
of navel-string to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels of
royalty itself. Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence,
it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the
womb it came from. Tyrants seldom want pretexts. Fraud is the ready
minister of injustice; and whilst the currency of false pretence and
sophistic reasoning was expedient to their designs, they were under no
necessity of drawing upon me to furnish them with that coin. But
pretexts and sophisms have had their day, and have done their work. The
usurpation no longer seeks plausibility: it trusts to power.
Nothing that I can say, or that you can say, will hasten them, by a
single hour, in the execution of a design which they have long since
entertained. In spite of their solemn declarations, their soothing
addresses, and the multiplied oaths which they have taken and forced
others to take, they will assassinate the king when his name will no
longer be necessary to their designs,--but not a moment sooner. They
will probably first assassinate the queen, whenever the renewed menace
of such an assassination loses its effect upon the anxious mind of an
affectionate husband. At present, the advantage which they derive from
the daily threats against her life is her only security for preserving
it. They keep their sovereign alive for the purpose of exhibiting him,
like some wild beast at a fair,--as if they had a Bajazet in a cage.
They choose to make monarchy contemptible by exposing it to derision in
the person of the most benevolent of their kings.
In my opinion their insolence appears more odious even than their
crimes. The horrors of the fifth and sixth of October were less
detestable than the festival of the fourteenth of July. There are
situations (God forbid I should think that of the 5th and 6th of October
one of them!) in which the best men may be confounded with the worst,
and in the darkness and confusion, in the press and medley of such
extremities, it may not be so easy to discriminate the one from the
other. Tho necessities created even by ill designs have their excuse.
They may be forgotten by others, when the guilty themselves do not
choose to cherish their recollection, and, by ruminating their
offences, nourish themselves, through the example of their past, to the
perpetration of future crimes. It is in the relaxation of security, it
is in the expansion of prosperity, it is in the hour of dilatation of
the heart, and of its softening into festivity and pleasure, that the
real character of men is discerned. If there is any good in them, it
appears then or never. Even wolves and tigers, when gorged with their
prey, are safe and gentle. It is at such times that noble minds give all
the reins to their good nature. They indulge their genius even to
intemperance, in kindness to the afflicted, in generosity to the
conquered,--forbearing insults, forgiving injuries, overpaying benefits.
Full of dignity themselves, they respect dignity in all, but they feel
it sacred in the unhappy. But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of
unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell
with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious
splendor, and shine out in the full lustre of their native villany and
baseness. It is in that season that no man of sense or honor can be
mistaken for one of them. It was in such a season, for them of political
ease and security, though their people were but just emerged from actual
famine, and were ready to be plunged into a gulf of penury and beggary,
that your philosophic lords chose, with an ostentatious pomp and luxury,
to feast an incredible number of idle and thoughtless people, collected
with art and pains from all quarters of the world. They constructed a
vast amphitheatre in which they raised a species of pillory.[3] On this
pillory they set their lawful king and queen, with an insulting figure
over their heads. There they exposed these objects of pity and respect
to all good minds to the derision of an unthinking and unprincipled
multitude, degenerated even from the versatile tenderness which marks
the irregular and capricious feelings of the populace. That their cruel
insult might have nothing wanting to complete it, they chose the
anniversary of that day in which they exposed the life of their prince
to the most imminent dangers and the vilest indignities, just following
the instant when the assassins, whom they had hired without owning,
first openly took up arms against their king, corrupted his guards,
surprised his castle, butchered some of the poor invalids of his
garrison, murdered his governor, and, like wild beasts, tore to pieces
the chief magistrate of his capital city, on account of his fidelity to
his service.
Till the justice of the world is awakened, such as these will go on,
without admonition, and without provocation, to every extremity. Those
who have made the exhibition of the fourteenth of July are capable of
every evil. They do not commit crimes for their designs; but they form
designs that they may commit crimes. It is not their necessity, but
their nature, that impels them. They are modern philosophers, which when
you say of them, you express everything that is ignoble, savage, and
hard-hearted.
Besides the sure tokens which are given by the spirit of their
particular arrangements, there are some characteristic lineaments in the
general policy of your tumultuous despotism, which, in my opinion,
indicate, beyond a doubt, that no revolution whatsoever _in their
disposition_ is to be expected: I mean their scheme of educating the
rising generation, the principles which they intend to instil and the
sympathies which they wish to form in the mind at the season in which it
is the most susceptible. Instead of forming their young minds to that
docility, to that modesty, which are the grace and charm of youth, to an
admiration of famous examples, and to an averseness to anything which
approaches to pride, petulance, and self-conceit, (distempers to which
that time of life is of itself sufficiently liable,) they artificially
foment these evil dispositions, and even form them into springs of
action. Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books
recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the
character of the age. Uncertain indeed is the efficacy, limited indeed
is the extent, of a virtuous institution. But if education takes in
_vice_ as any part of its system, there is no doubt but that it will
operate with abundant energy, and to an extent indefinite. The
magistrate, who in favor of freedom thinks himself obliged to suffer all
sorts of publications, is under a stricter duty than any other well to
consider what sort of writers he shall authorize, and shall recommend by
the strongest of all sanctions, that is, by public honors and rewards.
He ought to be cautious how he recommends authors of mixed or ambiguous
morality. He ought to be fearful of putting into the hands of youth
writers indulgent to the peculiarities of their own complexion, lest
they should teach the humors of the professor, rather than the
principles of the science. He ought, above all, to be cautious in
recommending any writer who has carried marks of a deranged
understanding: for where there is no sound reason, there can be no real
virtue; and madness is ever vicious and malignant.
The Assembly proceeds on maxims the very reverse of these. The Assembly
recommends to its youth a study of the bold experimenters in morality.
Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders,
which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all
resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their
manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all
the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the
debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his
life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard figure of
perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to
Frenchmen, the foundries of Paris are now running for statues, with the
kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches. If an author had
written like a great genius on geometry, though his practical and
speculative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear that in
voting the statue they honored only the geometrician. But Rousseau is a
moralist or he is nothing. It is impossible, therefore, putting the
circumstances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author
with whom they have begun to recommend a course of studies.
Their great problem is, to find a substitute for all the principles
which hitherto have been employed to regulate the human will and action.
They find dispositions in the mind of such force and quality as may fit
men, far better than the old morality, for the purposes of such a state
as theirs, and may go much further in supporting their power and
destroying their enemies. They have therefore chosen a selfish,
flattering, seductive, ostentatious vice, in the place of plain duty.
True humility, the basis of the Christian system, is the low, but deep
and firm foundation of all real virtue. But this, as very painful in the
practice, and little imposing in the appearance, they have totally
discarded. Their object is to merge all natural and all social sentiment
in inordinate vanity. In a small degree, and conversant in little
things, vanity is of little moment. When full-grown, it is the worst of
vices, and the occasional mimic of them all. It makes the whole man
false. It leaves nothing sincere or trustworthy about him. His best
qualities are poisoned and perverted by it, and operate exactly as the
worst. When your lords had many writers as immoral as the object of
their statue (such as Voltaire and others) they chose Rousseau, because
in him that peculiar vice which they wished to erect into ruling virtue
was by far the most conspicuous.
We have had the great professor and founder of _the philosophy of
vanity_ in England. As I had good opportunities of knowing his
proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he
entertained no principle, either to influence his heart or to guide his
understanding, but _vanity_. With this vice he was possessed to a degree
little short of madness. It is from the same deranged, eccentric vanity,
that this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to
publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of
glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which
we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not
observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is
omnivorous,--that it has no choice in its food,--that it is fond to
talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and
draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness and candor.
It was this abuse and perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy,
which has driven Rousseau to record a life not so much as checkered or
spotted here and there with virtues, or even distinguished by a single
good action. It is such a life he chooses to offer to the attention of
mankind. It is such a life that, with a wild defiance, he flings in the
face of his Creator, whom he acknowledges only to brave. Your Assembly,
knowing how much more powerful example is found than precept, has chosen
this man (by his own account without a single virtue) for a model. To
him they erect their first statue. From him they commence their series
of honors and distinctions.
It is that new-invented virtue which your masters canonize that led
their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful
rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence, whilst his heart
was incapable of harboring one spark of common parental affection.
Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every
individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character
of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this
their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as
the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors
the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse
for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by
the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away,
as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours,
and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves,
licks, and forms her young: but bears are not philosophers. Vanity,
however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural
feelings. Thousands admire the sentimental-writer; the affectionate
father is hardly known in his parish.
Under this philosophic instructor in _the ethics of vanity_, they have
attempted in France a regeneration of the moral constitution of man.
Statesmen like your present rulers exist by everything which is
spurious, fictitious, and false,--by everything which takes the man from
his house, and sets him on a stage,--which makes him up an artificial
creature, with painted, theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare
of candle-light, and formed to be contemplated at a due distance. Vanity
is too apt to prevail in all of us, and in all countries. To the
improvement of Frenchmen, it seems not absolutely necessary that it
should be taught upon system. But it is plain that the present rebellion
was its legitimate offspring, and it is piously fed by that rebellion
with a daily dole.
If the system of institution recommended by the Assembly is false and
theatric, it is because their system of government is of the same
character. To that, and to that alone, it is strictly conformable. To
understand either, we must connect the morals with the politics of the
legislators. Your practical philosophers, systematic in everything, have
wisely began at the source. As the relation between parents and children
is the first among the elements of vulgar, natural morality,[4] they
erect statues to a wild, ferocious, low-minded, hard-hearted father, of
fine general feelings,--a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred.
Your masters reject the duties of this vulgar relation, as contrary to
liberty, as not founded in the social compact, and not binding according
to the rights of men; because the relation is not, of course, the result
of _free election_,--never so on the side of the children, not always on
the part of the parents.
The next relation which they regenerate by their statues to Rousseau is
that which is next in sanctity to that of a father. They differ from
those old-fashioned thinkers who considered pedagogues as sober and
venerable characters, and allied to the parental. The moralists of the
dark times _præceptorem sancti voluere parentis esse loco_. In this age
of light they teach the people that preceptors ought to be in the place
of gallants. They systematically corrupt a very corruptible race, (for
some time a growing nuisance amongst you,)--a set of pert, petulant
literators, to whom, instead of their proper, but severe, unostentatious
duties, they assign the brilliant part of men of wit and pleasure, of
gay, young, military sparks, and danglers at toilets. They call on the
rising generation in France to take a sympathy in the adventures and
fortunes, and they endeavor to engage their sensibility on the side, of
pedagogues who betray the most awful family trusts and vitiate their
female pupils. They teach the people that the debauchers of virgins,
almost in the arms of their parents, may be safe inmates in their house,
and even fit guardians of the honor of those husbands who succeed
legally to the office which the young literators had preoccupied
without asking leave of law or conscience.