rather, perhaps, respites the troubles than secures the peace of the
Electorate. The offer of the succession to the crown of Poland is truly
critical, whether he accepts or whether he declines it. If the States
will consent to his acceptance, it will add to the difficulties, already
great, of his situation between the king of Prussia and the
Emperor.--But these thoughts lead me too far, when I mean to speak only
of the interior condition of these princes. It has always, however, some
necessary connection with their foreign politics.
[Sidenote: Holland.]
With regard to Holland, and the ruling party there, I do not think it at
all tainted, or likely to be so, except by fear,--or that it is likely
to be misled, unless indirectly and circuitously. But the predominant
party in Holland is not Holland. The suppressed faction, though
suppressed, exists. Under the ashes, the embers of the late commotions
are still warm. The anti-Orange party has from the day of its origin
been French, though alienated in some degree for some time, through the
pride and folly of Louis the Fourteenth. It will ever hanker after a
French connection; and now that the internal government in France has
been assimilated in so considerable a degree to that which the
immoderate republicans began so very lately to introduce into Holland,
their connection, as still more natural, will be more desired. I do not
well understand the present exterior politics of the Stadtholder, nor
the treaty into which the newspapers say he has entered for the States
with the Emperor. But the Emperor's own politics with regard to the
Netherlands seem to me to be exactly calculated to answer the purpose of
the French Revolutionists. He endeavors to crush the aristocratic party,
and to nourish one in avowed connection with the most furious
democratists in France.
These Provinces in which the French game is so well played they consider
as part of the old French Empire: certainly they were amongst the oldest
parts of it. These they think very well situated, as their party is well
disposed to a reunion. As to the greater nations, they do not aim at
making a direct conquest of them, but, by disturbing them through a
propagation of their principles, they hope to weaken, as they will
weaken them, and to keep them in perpetual alarm and agitation, and thus
render all their efforts against them utterly impracticable, whilst they
extend the dominion of their sovereign anarchy on all sides.
[Sidenote: England.]
As to England, there may be some apprehension from vicinity, from
constant communication, and from the very name of liberty, which, as it
ought to be very dear to us, in its worst abuses carries something
seductive. It is the abuse of the first and best of the objects which we
cherish. I know that many, who sufficiently dislike the system of
France, have yet no apprehensions of its prevalence here. I say nothing
to the ground of this security in the attachment of the people to their
Constitution, and their satisfaction in the discreet portion of liberty
which it measures out to them. Upon this I have said all I have to say,
in the Appeal I have published. That security is something, and not
inconsiderable; but if a storm arises, I should not much rely upon it.
[Sidenote: Objection to the stability of the French system.]
There are other views of things which may be used to give us a perfect
(though in my opinion a delusive) assurance of our own security. The
first of these is from the weakness and rickety nature of the new system
in the place of its first formation. It is thought that the monster of a
commonwealth cannot possibly live,--that at any rate the ill contrivance
of their fabric will make it fall in pieces of itself,--that the
Assembly must be bankrupt,--and that this bankruptcy will totally
destroy that system from the contagion of which apprehensions are
entertained.
For my part I have long thought that one great cause of the stability of
this wretched scheme of things in France was an opinion that it could
not stand, and therefore that all external measures to destroy it were
wholly useless.
[Sidenote: Bankruptcy.]
As to the bankruptcy, that event has happened long ago, as much as it is
ever likely to happen. As soon as a nation compels a creditor to take
paper currency in discharge of his debt, there is a bankruptcy. The
compulsory paper has in some degree answered,--not because there was a
surplus from Church lands, but because faith has not been kept with the
clergy. As to the holders of the old funds, to them the payments will be
dilatory, but they will be made; and whatever may be the discount on
paper, whilst paper is taken, paper will be issued.
[Sidenote: Resources.]
As to the rest, they have shot out three branches of revenue to supply
all those which they have destroyed: that is, _the Universal Register of
all Transactions_, the heavy and universal _Stamp Duty_, and the new
_Territorial Impost_, levied chiefly on the reduced estates of the
gentlemen. These branches of the revenue, especially as they take
assignats in payment, answer their purpose in a considerable degree, and
keep up the credit of their paper: for, as they receive it in their
treasury, it is in reality funded upon all their taxes and future
resources of all kinds, as well as upon the Church estates. As this
paper is become in a manner the only visible maintenance of the whole
people, the dread of a bankruptcy is more apparently connected with the
delay of a counter-revolution than with the duration of this republic;
because the interest of the new republic manifestly leans upon it, and,
in my opinion, the counter-revolution cannot exist along with it. The
above three projects ruined some ministers under the old government,
merely for having conceived them. They are the salvation of the present
rulers.
As the Assembly has laid a most unsparing and cruel hand on all men who
have lived by the bounty, the justice, or the abuses of the old
government, they have lessened many expenses. The royal establishment,
though excessively and ridiculously great for _their_ scheme of things,
is reduced at least one half; the estates of the king's brothers, which
under the ancient government had been in truth royal revenues, go to the
general stock of the confiscation; and as to the crown lands, though
under the monarchy they never yielded two hundred and fifty thousand a
year, by many they are thought at least worth three times as much.
As to the ecclesiastical charge, whether as a compensation for losses,
or a provision for religion, of which they made at first a great parade,
and entered into a solemn engagement in favor of it, it was estimated at
a much larger sum than they could expect from the Church property,
movable or immovable: they are completely bankrupt as to that article.
It is just what they wish; and it is not productive of any serious
inconvenience. The non-payment produces discontent and occasional
sedition; but is only by fits and spasms, and amongst the country
people, who are of no consequence. These seditions furnish new pretexts
for non-payment to the Church establishment, and help the Assembly
wholly to get rid of the clergy, and indeed of any form of religion,
which is not only their real, but avowed object.
[Sidenote: Want of money how supplied.]
They are embarrassed, indeed, in the highest degree, but not wholly
resourceless. They are without the species of money. Circulation of
money is a great convenience, but a substitute for it may be found.
Whilst the great objects of production and consumption, corn, cattle,
wine, and the like, exist in a country, the means of giving them
circulation, with more or less convenience, cannot be _wholly_ wanting.
The great confiscation of the Church and of the crown lands, and of the
appanages of the princes, for the purchase of all which their paper is
always received at par, gives means of continually destroying and
continually creating; and this perpetual destruction and renovation
feeds the speculative market, and prevents, and will prevent, till that
fund of confiscation begins to fail, a _total_ depreciation.
[Sidenote: Moneyed interest not necessary to them.]
But all consideration of public credit in France is of little avail at
present. The action, indeed, of the moneyed interest was of absolute
necessity at the beginning of this Revolution; but the French republic
can stand without any assistance from that description of men, which, as
things are now circumstanced, rather stands in need of assistance itself
from the power which alone substantially exists in France: I mean the
several districts and municipal republics, and the several clubs which
direct all their affairs and appoint all their magistrates. This is the
power now paramount to everything, even to the Assembly itself called
National and that to which tribunals, priesthood, laws, finances, and
both descriptions of military power are wholly subservient, so far as
the military power of either description yields obedience to any name of
authority.
The world of contingency and political combination is much larger than
we are apt to imagine. We never can say what may or may not happen,
without a view to all the actual circumstances. Experience, upon other
data than those, is of all things the most delusive. Prudence in new
cases can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. A constant vigilance and
attention to the train of things as they successively emerge, and to act
on what they direct, are the only sure courses. The physician that let
blood, and by blood-letting cured one kind of plague, in the next added
to its ravages. That power goes with property is not universally true,
and the idea that the operation of it is certain and invariable may
mislead us very fatally.
[Sidenote: Power separated from property.]
Whoever will take an accurate view of the state of those republics, and
of the composition of the present Assembly deputed by them, (in which
Assembly there are not quite fifty persons possessed of an income
amounting to 100_l._ sterling yearly,) must discern clearly, _that the
political and civil power of France is wholly separated from its
property of every description_, and of course that neither the landed
nor the moneyed interest possesses the smallest weight or consideration
in the direction of any public concern. The whole kingdom is directed by
_the refuse of its chicane_, with the aid of the bustling, presumptuous
young clerks of counting-houses and shops, and some intermixture of
young gentlemen of the same character in the several towns. The rich
peasants are bribed with Church lands; and the poorer of that
description are, and can be, counted for nothing. They may rise in
ferocious, ill-directed tumults,--but they can only disgrace themselves
and signalize the triumph of their adversaries.
[Sidenote: Effects of the rota.]
The _truly_ active citizens, that is, the above descriptions, are all
concerned in intrigue respecting the various objects in their local or
their general government. The rota, which the French have established
for their National Assembly, holds out the highest objects of ambition
to such vast multitudes as in an unexampled measure to widen the bottom
of a new species of interest merely political, and wholly unconnected
with birth or property. This scheme of a rota, though it enfeebles the
state, considered as one solid body, and indeed wholly disables it from
acting as such, gives a great, an equal, and a diffusive strength to the
democratic scheme. Seven hundred and fifty people, every two years
raised to the supreme power, has already produced at least fifteen
hundred bold, acting politicians: a great number for even so great a
country as France. These men never will quietly settle in ordinary
occupations, nor submit to any scheme which must reduce them to an
entirely private condition, or to the exercise of a steady, peaceful,
but obscure and unimportant industry. Whilst they sit in the Assembly,
they are denied offices of trust and profit,--but their short duration
makes this no restraint: during their probation and apprenticeship they
are all salaried with an income to the greatest part of them immense;
and after they have passed the novitiate, those who take any sort of
lead are placed in very lucrative offices, according to their influence
and credit, or appoint those who divide their profits with them.
This supply of recruits to the corps of the highest civil ambition goes
on with a regular progression. In very few years it must amount to many
thousands. These, however, will be as nothing in comparison to the
multitude of municipal officers, and officers of district and
department, of all sorts, who have tasted of power and profit, and who
hunger for the periodical return of the meal. To these needy agitators,
the glory of the state, the general wealth and prosperity of the nation,
and the rise or fall of public credit are as dreams; nor have arguments
deduced from these topics any sort of weight with them. The indifference
with which the Assembly regards the state of their colonies, the only
valuable part of the French commerce, is a full proof how little they
are likely to be affected by anything but the selfish game of their own
ambition, now universally diffused.
[Sidenote: Impracticability of resistance.]
It is true, amidst all these turbulent means of security to their
system, very great discontents everywhere prevail. But they only produce
misery to those who nurse them at home, or exile, beggary, and in the
end confiscation, to those who are so impatient as to remove from them.
Each municipal republic has a _Committee_, or something in the nature of
a _Committee of Research_. In these petty republics the tyranny is so
near its object that it becomes instantly acquainted with every act of
every man. It stifles conspiracy in its very first movements. Their
power is absolute and uncontrollable. No stand can be made against it.
These republics are besides so disconnected, that very little
intelligence of what happens in them is to be obtained beyond their own
bounds, except by the means of their clubs, who keep up a constant
correspondence, and who give what color they please to such facts as
they choose to communicate out of the track of their correspondence.
They all have some sort of communication, just as much or as little as
they please, with the centre. By this confinement of all communication
to the ruling faction, any combination, grounded on the abuses and
discontents in one, scarcely can reach the other. There is not one man,
in any one place, to head them. The old government had so much
abstracted the nobility from the cultivation of provincial interest,
that no man in France exists, whose power, credit, or consequence
extends to two districts, or who is capable of uniting them in any
design, even if any man could assemble ten men together without being
sure of a speedy lodging in a prison. One must not judge of the state of
France by what has been observed elsewhere. It does not in the least
resemble any other country. Analogical reasoning from history or from
recent experience in other places is wholly delusive.
In my opinion, there never was seen so strong a government internally as
that of the French municipalities. If ever any rebellion can arise
against the present system, it must begin, where the Revolution which
gave birth to it did, at the capital. Paris is the only place in which
there is the least freedom of intercourse. But even there, so many
servants as any man has, so many spies and irreconcilable domestic
enemies.
[Sidenote: Gentlemen are fugitives.]
But that place being the chief seat of the power and intelligence of the
ruling faction, and the place of occasional resort for their fiercest
spirits, even there a revolution is not likely to have anything to feed
it. The leaders of the aristocratic party have been drawn out of the
kingdom by order of the princes, on the hopes held out by the Emperor
and the king of Prussia at Pilnitz; and as to the democratic factions in
Paris, amongst them there are no leaders possessed of an influence for
any other purpose but that of maintaining the present state of things.
The moment they are seen to warp, they are reduced to nothing. They have
no attached army,--no party that is at all personal.
It is not to be imagined, because a political system is, under certain
aspects, very unwise in its contrivance, and very mischievous in its
effects, that it therefore can have no long duration. Its very defects
may tend to its stability, because they are agreeable to its nature. The
very faults in the Constitution of Poland made it last; the _veto_ which
destroyed all its energy preserved its life. What can be conceived so
monstrous as the republic of Algiers, and that no less strange republic
of the Mamelukes in Egypt? They are of the worst form imaginable, and
exercised in the worst manner, yet they have existed as a nuisance on
the earth for several hundred years.
[Sidenote: Conclusions.]
From all these considerations, and many more that crowd upon me, three
conclusions have long since arisen in my mind.
First, that no counter revolution is to be expected in France from
internal causes solely.
Secondly, that, the longer the present system exists, the greater will
be its strength, the greater its power to destroy discontents at home,
and to resist all foreign attempts in favor of these discontents.
Thirdly, that, as long as it exists in France, it will be the interest
of the managers there, and it is in the very essence of their plan, to
disturb and distract all other governments, and their endless succession
of restless politicians will continually stimulate them to new attempts.
[Sidenote: Proceedings of princes; defensive plans.]
Princes are generally sensible that this is their common cause; and two
of them have made a public declaration of their opinion to this effect.
Against this common danger, some of them, such as the king of Spain, the
king of Sardinia, and the republic of Bern, are very diligent in using
defensive measures.
If they were to guard against an invasion from France, the merits of
this plan of a merely defensive resistance might be supported by
plausible topics; but as the attack does not operate against these
countries externally, but by an internal corruption, (a sort of dry
rot,) they who pursue this merely defensive plan against a danger which
the plan itself supposes to be serious cannot possibly escape it. For
it is in the nature of all defensive measures to be sharp and vigorous
under the impressions of the first alarm, and to relax by degrees, until
at length the danger, by not operating instantly, comes to appear as a
false alarm,--so much so, that the next menacing appearance will look
less formidable, and will be less provided against. But to those who are
on the offensive it is not necessary to be always alert. Possibly it is
more their interest not to be so. For their unforeseen attacks
contribute to their success.
[Sidenote: The French party how composed.]
In the mean time a system of French conspiracy is gaining ground in
every country. This system, happening to be founded on principles the
most delusive indeed, but the most flattering to the natural
propensities of the unthinking multitude, and to the speculations of all
those who think, without thinking very profoundly, must daily extend its
influence. A predominant inclination towards it appears in all those who
have no religion, when otherwise their disposition leads them to be
advocates even for despotism. Hence Hume, though I cannot say that he
does not throw out some expressions of disapprobation on the proceedings
of the levellers in the reign of Richard the Second, yet affirms that
the doctrines of John Ball were "conformable to the ideas of primitive
equality _which are engraven in the hearts of all men_."
Boldness formerly was not the character of atheists as such. They were
even of a character nearly the reverse; they were formerly like the old
Epicureans, rather an unenterprising race. But of late they are grown
active, designing, turbulent, and seditious. They are sworn enemies to
kings, nobility, and priesthood. We have seen all the Academicians at
Paris, with Condorcet, the friend and correspondent of Priestley, at
their head, the most furious of the extravagant republicans.
[Sidenote: Condorcet.]
The late Assembly, after the last captivity of the king, had actually
chosen this Condorcet, by a majority on the ballot, for preceptor to the
Dauphin, who was to be taken out of the hands and direction of his
parents, and to be delivered over to this fanatic atheist and furious
democratic republican. His untractability to these leaders, and his
figure in the club of Jacobins, which at that time they wished to bring
under, alone prevented that part of the arrangement, and others in the
same style, from being carried into execution. Whilst he was candidate
for this office, he produced his title to it by promulgating the
following ideas of the title of his royal pupil to the crown. In a paper
written by him, and published with his name, against the reëstablishment
even of the appearance of monarchy under any qualifications, he says:--
[Sidenote: Doctrine of the French.]
"Jusqu'à ce moment, ils [l'Assemblée Nationale] n'ont rien préjugé
encore. En se réservant de nommer un gouverneur au Dauphin, ils n'ont
pas prononcé _que cet enfant dût régner_, mais seulement qu'il _était
possible_ que la Constitution l'y destinât; ils ont voulu que
l'éducation effaçât tout ce que _les prestiges du trône_ ont pu lui
inspirer de préjugés sur les droits prétendus de sa naissance; qu'elle
lui fît connaître de bonne heure et _l'égalité naturelle des hommes et
la souveraineté du peuple_; qu'elle lui apprît à ne pas oublier que
c'est _du peuple_ qu'il tiendra le titre de Roi, et que _le peuple n'a
pas même le droit de renoncer à celui de l'en dépouiller_.
"Ils ont voulu que cette éducation le rendît également digne, par ses
lumières et ses vertus, de recevoir _avec résignation_ le fardeau
dangereux d'une couronne, ou de la _déposer avec joie_ entre les mains
de ses frères; qu'il sentît que le devoir et la gloire du roi d'un
peuple libre sont de hâter le moment de n'être plus qu'un citoyen
ordinaire.
"Ils ont voulu que _l'inutilité d'un roi_, la nécessité de chercher les
moyens de remplacer _un pouvoir fondé sur des illusions_, fût une des
premières vérités offertes à sa raison; _l'obligation d'y concourir
lui-même, un des premiers devoirs de sa morale; et le désir de n'être
plus affranchi du joug de la loi par une injurieuse inviolabilité, le
premier sentiment de son cÅur_. Ils n'ignorent pas que dans ce moment
il s'agit bien moins de former un roi que de lui apprendre _Ã savoir Ã
vouloir ne plus l'être_."[32]
Such are the sentiments of the man who has occasionally filled the chair
of the National Assembly, who is their perpetual secretary, their only
standing officer, and the most important by far. He leads them to peace
or war. He is the great theme of the republican faction in England.
These ideas of M. Condorcet are the principles of those to whom kings
are to intrust their successors and the interests of their succession.
This man would be ready to plunge the poniard in the heart of his pupil,
or to whet the axe for his neck. Of all men, the most dangerous is a
warm, hot-headed, zealous atheist. This sort of man aims at dominion,
and his means are the words he always has in his mouth,--"_L'égalité
naturelle des hommes, et la souveraineté du peuple_."