Читать книгу The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) - Edmund Burke - Страница 3

My dear Lord,—I am not sure that the best way of discussing any subject, except those that concern the abstracted sciences, is not somewhat in the way of dialogue. To this mode, however, there are two objections: the first, that it happens, as in the puppet-show, one man speaks for all the personages. An unnatural uniformity of tone is in a manner unavoidable. The other and more serious objection is, that, as the author (if not an absolute skeptic) must have some opinion of his own to enforce, he will be continually tempted to enervate the arguments he puts into the mouth of his adversary, or to place them in a point of view most commodious for their refutation. There is, however, a sort of dialogue not quite so liable to these objections, because it approaches more nearly to truth and Nature: it is called CONTROVERSY. Here the parties speak for themselves. If the writer who attacks another's notions does not deal fairly with his adversary, the diligent reader has it always in his power, by resorting to the work examined, to do justice to the original author and to himself. For this reason you will not blame me, if, in my discussion of the merits of a Regicide Peace, I do not choose to trust to my own statements, but to bring forward along with them the arguments of the advocates for that measure. If I choose puny adversaries, writers of no estimation or authority, then you will justly blame me. I might as well bring in at once a fictitious speaker, and thus fall into all the inconveniences of an imaginary dialogue. This I shall avoid; and I shall take no notice of any author who my friends in town do not tell me is in estimation with those whose opinions he supports.

A piece has been sent to me, called "Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795," with a French motto: "Que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour." The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to announce something uncommon. In the time I have lived to, I always seem to walk on enchanted ground. Everything is new, and, according to the fashionable phrase, revolutionary. In former days authors valued themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations. Accordingly, they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an eternal duration to their works. The quite contrary is our present fashion. Writers value themselves now on the instability of their opinions and the transitory life of their productions. On this kind of credit the modern institutors open their schools. They write for youth, and it is sufficient, if the instruction "lasts as long as a present love, or as the painted silks and cottons of the season."

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and duration. The title is "Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795." The time is critically chosen. A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another. A day or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy month in which it is said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and drown themselves. In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with symptoms of public suicide. However, there is one comfort to be taken even from the gloomy time of year. It is a rotting season. If what is brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long. Even buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather, if they are ill-contrived tenements, do not threaten long to incumber the earth. The author tells us (and I believe he is the very first author that ever told such a thing to his readers) "that the entire fabric of his speculations might be overset by unforeseen vicissitudes," and what is far more extraordinary, "that even the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages." Truly, in my poor judgment, this circumstance formed a very substantial motive for his not publishing those ill-considered considerations at all. He ought to have followed the good advice of his motto: "Que faire encore dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour." He ought to have waited till he had got a little more daylight on this subject. Night itself is hardly darker than the fogs of that time.

Finding the last week in October so particularly referred to, and not perceiving any particular event, relative to the war, which happened on any of the days in that week, I thought it possible that they were marked by some astrological superstition, to which the greatest politicians have been subject. I therefore had recourse to my Rider's Almanack. There I found, indeed, something that characterized the work, and that gave directions concerning the sudden political and natural variations, and for eschewing the maladies that are most prevalent in that aguish intermittent season, "the last week of October." On that week the sagacious astrologer, Rider, in his note on the third column of the calendar side, teaches us to expect "variable and cold weather"; but instead of encouraging us to trust ourselves to the haze and mist and doubtful lights of that changeable week, on the answerable part of the opposite page he gives us a salutary caution (indeed, it is very nearly in the words of the author's motto): "Avoid," says he, "being out late at night and in foggy weather, for a cold now caught may last the whole winter."9 This ingenious author, who disdained the prudence of the Almanack, walked out in the very fog he complains of, and has led us to a very unseasonable airing at that time. Whilst this noble writer, by the vigor of an excellent constitution, formed for the violent changes he prognosticates, may shake off the importunate rheum and malignant influenza of this disagreeable week, a whole Parliament may go on spitting and snivelling, and wheezing and coughing, during a whole session. All this from listening to variable, hebdomadal politicians, who run away from their opinions without giving us a month's warning,—and for not listening to the wise and friendly admonitions of Dr. Cardanus Rider, who never apprehends he may change his opinions before his pen is out of his hand, but always enables us to lay in at least a year's stock of useful information.

At first I took comfort. I said to myself, that, if I should, as I fear I must, oppose the doctrines of the last week of October, it is probable that by this time they are no longer those of the eminent writer to whom they are attributed. He gives us hopes that long before this he may have embraced the direct contrary sentiments. If I am found in a conflict with those of the last week of October, I may be in full agreement with those of the last week in December, or the first week in January, 1796. But a second edition, and a French translation, (for the benefit, I must suppose, of the new Regicide Directory,) have let down a little of these flattering hopes. We and the Directory know that the author, whatever changes his works seemed made to indicate, like a weathercock grown rusty, remains just where he was in the last week of last October. It is true, that his protest against binding him to his opinions, and his reservation of a right to whatever opinions he pleases, remain in their full force. This variability is pleasant, and shows a fertility of fancy:—

Yet, doing all justice to the sportive variability of these weekly, daily, or hourly speculators, shall I be pardoned, if I attempt a word on the part of us simple country folk? It is not good for us, however it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with variable politics. I consider different relations as prescribing a different conduct. I allow, that, in transactions with an enemy, a minister may, and often must, vary his demands with the day, possibly with the hour. With an enemy, a fixed plan, variable arrangements. This is the rule the nature of the transaction prescribes. But all this belongs to treaty. All these shiftings and changes are a sort of secret amongst the parties, till a definite settlement is brought about. Such is the spirit of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of things between enmity and friendship. In this change the subjects of the transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their cocoons. The gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state. This mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for our slow and coarse understandings. Our appetite demands a piece of resistance. We require some food that will stick to the ribs. We call for sentiments to which we can attach ourselves,—sentiments in which we can take an interest,—sentiments on which we can warm, on which we can ground some confidence in ourselves or in others. We do not want a largess of inconstancy. Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of poverty at home. There is a difference, too, between deliberation and doctrine: a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts to teach. His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region, but they cannot free us from the effects of the error into which we have been betrayed. His active Will-o'-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets, I come to the lesson itself. On the fullest consideration of it, I am utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is, in the detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or recommend. His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion. It is not only fugitive in its duration, but is slippery in the extreme whilst it lasts. Examining it part by part, it seems almost everywhere to contradict itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his opinions, has exercised this privilege in every section of his remarks. For this reason, amongst others, I follow the advice which the able writer gives in his last page, which is, "to consider the impression of what he has urged, taken from the whole, and not from detached paragraphs." That caution was not absolutely necessary. I should think it unfair to the author and to myself to have proceeded otherwise. This author's whole, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be again referred to the whole. Without this latter attention, several of the passages would certainly remain covered with an impenetrable and truly oracular obscurity.

The great, general, pervading purpose, of the whole pamphlet is to reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France. In this general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken. The other purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to show, first, that the time of the Remarks was the favorable time for making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy's side their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms as he is pleased to offer was rationally to be expected; the third purpose was, to make some sort of disclosure of the terms which, if the Regicides are pleased to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept: these form the basis of the negotiation which the author, whoever he is, proposes to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it,—that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks. That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of France. The word France is slipped in just as if the government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author, "will do this,"—"it is the interest of France,"—"the returning honor and generosity of France," &c., &c.—always merely France: just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe,—and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the concrete, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,—if we were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and tender-hearted Sieyès, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer, Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord,—nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. "Make your peace with France." That word France sounds quite as well as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France, and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis-d'or.

Having, therefore, slipped the persons with whom we are to treat out of view, we are next to be satisfied that the French Revolution, which this peace is to fix and consolidate, ought to give us no just cause of apprehension. Though the author labors this point, yet he confesses a fact (indeed, he could not conceal it) which renders all his labors utterly fruitless. He confesses that the Regicide means to dictate a pacification, and that this pacification, according to their decree passed but a very few days before his publication appeared, is to "unite to their empire, either in possession or dependence, new barriers, many frontier places of strength, a large sea-coast, and many sea-ports." He ought to have stated it, that they would annex to their territory a country about a third as large as France, and much more than half as rich, and in a situation the most important for command that it would be possible for her anywhere to possess.

To remove this terror, (even if the Regicides should carry their point,) and to give us perfect repose with regard to their empire, whatever they may acquire, or whomsoever they might destroy, he raises a doubt "whether France will not be ruined by retaining these conquests, and whether she will not wholly lose that preponderance which she has held in the scale of European powers, and will not eventually be destroyed by the effect of her present successes, or, at least, whether, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, she [France] will remain an object of as much jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch." Here, indeed, is a paragraph full of meaning! It gives matter for meditation almost in every word of it. The secret of the pacific politicians is out. This republic, at all hazards, is to be maintained. It is to be confined within some bounds, if we can; if not, with every possible acquisition of power, it is still to be cherished and supported. It is the return of the monarchy we are to dread, and therefore we ought to pray for the permanence of the Regicide authority. Esto perpetua is the devout ejaculation of our Frà Paolo for the Republic one and indivisible. It was the monarchy that rendered France dangerous: Regicide neutralizes all the acrimony of that power, and renders it safe and social. The October speculator is of opinion that monarchy is of so poisonous a quality that a moderate territorial power is far more dangerous to its neighbors under that abominable regimen than the greatest empire in the hands of a republic. This is Jacobinism sublimed and exalted into most pure and perfect essence. It is a doctrine, I admit, made to allure and captivate, if anything in the world can, the Jacobin Directory, to mollify the ferocity of Regicide, and to persuade those patriotic hangmen, after their reiterated oaths for our extirpation, to admit this well-humbled nation to the fraternal embrace. I do not wonder that this tub of October has been racked off into a French cask. It must make its fortune at Paris. That translation seems the language the most suited to these sentiments. Our author tells the French Jacobins, that the political interests of Great Britain are in perfect unison with the principles of their government,—that they may take and keep the keys of the civilized world, for they are safe in their unambitious and faithful custody. We say to them, "We may, indeed, wish you to be a little less murderous, wicked, and atheistical, for the sake of morals; we may think it were better you were less new-fangled in your speech, for the sake of grammar; but, as politicians, provided you keep clear of monarchy, all our fears, alarms, and jealousies are at an end: at least, they sink into nothing in comparison of our dread of your detestable royalty." A flatterer of Cardinal Mazarin said, when that minister had just settled the match between the young Louis the Fourteenth and a daughter of Spain, that this alliance had the effect of faith and had removed mountains,—that the Pyrenees were levelled by that marriage. You may now compliment Reubell in the same spirit on the miracles of regicide, and tell him that the guillotine of Louis the Sixteenth had consummated a marriage between Great Britain and France, which dried up the Channel, and restored the two countries to the unity which it is said they had before the unnatural rage of seas and earthquakes had broke off their happy junction. It will be a fine subject for the poets who are to prophesy the blessings of this peace.

I am now convinced that the Remarks of the last week of October cannot come from the author to whom they are given, they are such a direct contradiction to the style of manly indignation with which he spoke of those miscreants and murderers in his excellent memorial to the States of Holland,—to that very state which the author who presumes to personate him does not find it contrary to the political interests of England to leave in the hands of these very miscreants, against whom on the part of England he took so much pains to animate their republic. This cannot be; and if this argument wanted anything to give it new force, it is strengthened by an additional reason, that is irresistible. Knowing that noble person, as well as myself, to be under very great obligations to the crown, I am confident he would not so very directly contradict, even in the paroxysm of his zeal against monarchy, the declarations made in the name and with the fullest approbation of our sovereign, his master, and our common benefactor. In those declarations you will see that the king, instead of being sensible of greater alarm and jealousy from a neighboring crowned head than from, these regicides, attributes all the dangers of Europe to the latter. Let this writer hear the description given in the royal declaration of the scheme of power of these miscreants, as "a system destructive of all public order, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number, by arbitrary imprisonments, 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, his ignominious death." After thus describing, with an eloquence and energy equalled only by its truth, the means by which this usurped power had been acquired and maintained, that government is characterized with equal force. His Majesty, far from thinking monarchy in France to be a greater object of jealousy than the Regicide usurpation, calls upon the French to reestablish "a monarchical government" for the purpose of shaking off "the yoke of a 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."

"That strain I heard was of a higher mood." That declaration of our sovereign was worthy of his throne. It is in a style which neither the pen of the writer of October nor such a poor crow-quill as mine can ever hope to equal. I am happy to enrich my letter with this fragment of nervous and manly eloquence, which, if it had not emanated from the awful authority of a throne, if it were not recorded amongst the most valuable monuments of history, and consecrated in the archives of states, would be worthy, as a private composition, to live forever in the memory of men.

In those admirable pieces does his Majesty discover this new opinion of his political security, in having the chair of the scorner, that is, the discipline of atheism, and the block of regicide, set up by his side, elevated on the same platform, and shouldering, with the vile image of their grim and bloody idol, the inviolable majesty of his throne? The sentiments of these declarations are the very reverse: they could not be other. Speaking of the spirit of that usurpation, the royal manifesto describes, with perfect truth, its internal tyranny to have been established as the very means of shaking the security of all other states,—as "disposing arbitrarily of the property and blood of the inhabitants of France, in order to disturb the tranquillity of other nations, and to render all Europe the theatre of the same crimes and of the same misfortunes." It was but a natural inference from this fact, that the royal manifesto does not at all rest the justification of this war on common principles: that it was "not only to defend his own rights, and those of his allies," but "that all the dearest interests of his people imposed upon him a duty still more important,—that of exerting his efforts for the preservation of civil society itself, as happily established among the nations of Europe." On that ground, the protection offered is to "those who, by declaring for a monarchical government, shall shake off the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy." It is for that purpose the declaration calls on them "to join the standard of an hereditary monarchy,"—declaring that the peace and safety of this kingdom and the other powers of Europe "materially depend on the reëstablishment of order in France." His Majesty does not hesitate to declare that "the reëstablishment of monarchy, in the person of Louis the Seventeenth, and the lawful heirs of the crown, appears to him [his Majesty] the best mode of accomplishing these just and salutary views."

This is what his Majesty does not hesitate to declare relative to the political safety and peace of his kingdom and of Europe, and with regard to France under her ancient hereditary monarchy in the course and order of legal succession. But in comes a gentleman, in the fag end of October, dripping with the fogs of that humid and uncertain season, and does not hesitate in diameter to contradict this wise and just royal declaration, and stoutly, on his part, to make a counter declaration,—that France, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, will not remain, under the despotism of Regicide, and with the better part of Europe in her hands, so much an object of jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch. When I hear the master and reason on one side, and the servant and his single and unsupported assertion on the other, my part is taken.

This is what the Octobrist says of the political interests of England, which it looks as if he completely disconnected with those of all other nations. But not quite so: he just allows it possible (with an "at least") that the other powers may not find it quite their interest that their territories should be conquered and their subjects tyrannized over by the Regicides. No fewer than ten sovereign princes had, some the whole, all a very considerable part of their dominions under the yoke of that dreadful faction. Amongst these was to be reckoned the first republic in the world, and the closest ally of this kingdom, which, under the insulting name of an independency, is under her iron yoke, and, as long as a faction averse to the old government is suffered there to domineer, cannot be otherwise. I say nothing of the Austrian Netherlands, countries of a vast extent, and amongst the most fertile and populous of Europe, and, with regard to us, most critically situated. The rest will readily occur to you.

But if there are yet existing any people, like me, old-fashioned enough to consider that we have an important part of our very existence beyond our limits, and who therefore stretch their thoughts beyond the pomoerium of England, for them, too, he has a comfort which will remove all their jealousies and alarms about the extent of the empire of Regicide. "These conquests eventually will be the cause of her destruction." So that they who hate the cause of usurpation, and dread the power of France under any form, are to wish her to be a conqueror, in order to accelerate her ruin. A little more conquest would be still better. Will he tell us what dose of dominion is to be the quantum sufficit for her destruction?—for she seems very voracious of the food of her distemper. To be sure, she is ready to perish with repletion; she has a boulimia, and hardly has bolted down one state than she calls for two or three more. There is a good deal of wit in all this; but it seems to me (with all respect to the author) to be carrying the joke a great deal too far. I cannot yet think that the armies of the Allies were of this way of thinking, and that, when they evacuated all these countries, it was a stratagem of war to decoy France into ruin,—or that, if in a treaty we should surrender them forever into the hands of the usurpation, (the lease the author supposes,) it is a master-stroke of policy to effect the destruction of a formidable rival, and to render her no longer an object of jealousy and alarm. This, I assure the author, will infinitely facilitate the treaty. The usurpers will catch at this bait, without minding the hook which this crafty angler for the Jacobin gudgeons of the new Directory has so dexterously placed under it.

Every symptom of the exacerbation of the public malady is, with him, (as with the Doctor in Molière,) a happy prognostic of recovery.—Flanders gone. Tant mieux.—Holland subdued. Charming!—Spain beaten, and all the hither Germany conquered. Bravo! Better and better still!—But they will retain all their conquests on a treaty. Best of all!—What a delightful thing it is to have a gay physician, who sees all things, as the French express it, couleur de rose! What an escape we have had, that we and our allies were not the conquerors! By these conquests, previous to her utter destruction, she is "wholly to lose that preponderance which she held in the scale of the European powers." Bless me! this new system of France, after changing all other laws, reverses the law of gravitation. By throwing in weight after weight, her scale rises, and will by-and-by kick the beam. Certainly there is one sense in which she loses her preponderance: that is, she is no longer preponderant against the countries she has conquered. They are part of herself. But I beg the author to keep his eyes fixed on the scales for a moment longer, and then to tell me, in downright earnest, whether he sees hitherto any signs of her losing preponderance by an augmentation of weight and power. Has she lost her preponderance over Spain by her influence in Spain? Are there any signs that the conquest of Savoy and Nice begins to lessen her preponderance over Switzerland and the Italian States,—or that the Canton of Berne, Genoa, and Tuscany, for example, have taken arms against her,—or that Sardinia is more adverse than ever to a treacherous pacification? Was it in the last week of October that the German States showed that Jacobin. France was losing her preponderance? Did the King of Prussia, when he delivered into her safe custody his territories on this side of the Rhine, manifest any tokens of his opinion of her loss of preponderance? Look on Sweden and on Denmark: is her preponderance less visible there?

It is true, that, in a course of ages, empires have fallen, and, in the opinion of some, not in mine, by their own weight. Sometimes they have been unquestionably embarrassed in their movements by the dissociated situation of their dominions. Such was the case of the empire of Charles the Fifth and of his successor. It might be so of others. But so compact a body of empire, so fitted in all the parts for mutual support, with a frontier by Nature and Art so impenetrable, with such facility of breaking out with irresistible force from every quarter, was never seen in such an extent of territory, from the beginning of time, as in that empire which the Jacobins possessed in October, 1795, and which Boissy d'Anglas, in his report, settled as the law for Europe, and the dominion assigned by Nature for the Republic of Regicide. But this empire is to be her ruin, and to take away all alarm and jealousy on the part of England, and to destroy her preponderance over the miserable remains of Europe.

These are choice speculations with which the author amuses himself, and tries to divert us, in the blackest hours of the dismay, defeat, and calamity of all civilized nations. They have but one fault,—that they are directly contrary to the common sense and common feeling of mankind. If I had but one hour to live, I would employ it in decrying this wretched system, and die with my pen in my hand to mark out the dreadful consequences of receiving an arrangement of empire dictated by the despotism of Regicide to my own country, and to the lawful sovereigns of the Christian world.

I trust I shall hardly be told, in palliation of this shameful system of politics, that the author expresses his sentiments only as doubts. In such things, it may be truly said, that "once to doubt is once to be resolved." It would be a strange reason for wasting the treasures and shedding the blood of our country, to prevent arrangements on the part of another power, of which we were doubtful whether they might not be even to our advantage, and render our neighbor less than before the object of our jealousy and alarm. In this doubt there is much decision. No nation would consent to carry on a war of skepticism. But the fact is, this expression of doubt is only a mode of putting an opinion, when it is not the drift of the author to overturn the doubt. Otherwise, the doubt is never stated as the author's own, nor left, as here it is, unanswered. Indeed, the mode of stating the most decided opinions in the form of questions is so little uncommon, particularly since the excellent queries of the excellent Berkeley, that it became for a good while a fashionable mode of composition.

Here, then, the author of the Fourth Week of October is ready for the worst, and would strike the bargain of peace on these conditions. I must leave it to you and to every considerate man to reflect upon the effect of this on any Continental alliances, present or future, and whether it would be possible (if this book was thought of the least authority) that its maxims with regard to our political interest must not naturally push them to be beforehand with us in the fraternity with Regicide, and thus not only strip us of any steady alliance at present, but leave us without any of that communion of interest which could produce alliances in future. Indeed, with these maxims, we should be well divided from the world.

Notwithstanding this new kind of barrier and security that is found against her ambition in her conquests, yet in the very same paragraph he admits, that, "for the present, at least, it is subversive of the balance of power." This, I confess, is not a direct contradiction, because the benefits which he promises himself from it, according to his hypothesis, are future and more remote.

So disposed is this author to peace, that, having laid a comfortable foundation for our security in the greatness of her empire, he has another in reserve, if that should fail, upon quite a contrary ground: that is, a speculation of her crumbling to pieces, and being thrown into a number of little separate republics. After paying the tribute of humanity to those who will be ruined by all these changes, on the whole he is of opinion that "the change might be compatible with general tranquillity, and with the establishment of a peaceful and prosperous commerce among nations." Whether France be great or small, firm and entire or dissipated and divided, all is well, provided we can have peace with her.

But without entering into speculations about her dismemberment, whilst she is adding great nations to her empire, is it, then, quite so certain that the dissipation of France into such a cluster of petty republics would be so very favorable to the true balance of power in Europe as this author imagines it would be, and to the commerce of nations? I greatly differ from him. I perhaps shall prove in a future letter, with the political map of Europe before my eye, that the general liberty and independence of the great Christian commonwealth could not exist with such a dismemberment, unless it were followed (as probably enough it would) by the dismemberment of every other considerable country in Europe: and what convulsions would arise in the constitution of every state in Europe it is not easy to conjecture in the mode, impossible not to foresee in the mass. Speculate on, good my Lord! provided you ground no part of your politics on such unsteady speculations. But as to any practice to ensue, are we not yet cured of the malady of speculating on the circumstances of things totally different from those in which we live and move? Five years has this monster continued whole and entire in all its members. Far from falling into a division within itself, it is augmented by tremendous additions. We cannot bear to look that frightful form in the face, as it is, and in its own actual shape. We dare not be wise; we have not the fortitude of rational fear; we will not provide for our future safety; but we endeavor to hush the cries of present timidity by guesses at what may be hereafter,—

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."

Is this our style of talk, when

"all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death"?

Talk not to me of what swarm of republics may come from this carcass! It is no carcass. Now, now, whilst we are talking, it is full of life and action. What say you to the Regicide empire of to-day? Tell me, my friend, do its terrors appall you into an abject submission, or rouse you to a vigorous defence? But do—I no longer prevent it—do go on,—look into futurity. Has this empire nothing to alarm you when all struggle against it is over, when mankind shall be silent before it, when all nations shall be disarmed, disheartened, and truly divided by a treacherous peace? Its malignity towards humankind will subsist with undiminished heat, whilst the means of giving it effect must proceed, and every means of resisting it must inevitably and rapidly decline.

Against alarm on their politic and military empire these are the writer's sedative remedies. But he leaves us sadly in the dark with regard to the moral consequences, which he states have threatened to demolish a system of civilization under which his country enjoys a prosperity unparalleled in the history of man. We had emerged from our first terrors, but here we sink into them again,—however, only to shake them off upon the credit of his being a man of very sanguine hopes.

Against the moral terrors of this successful empire of barbarism, though he has given us no consolation here, in another place he has formed other securities,—securities, indeed, which will make even the enormity of the crimes and atrocities of France a benefit to the world. We are to be cured by her diseases. We are to grow proud of our Constitution upon, the distempers of theirs. Governments throughout all Europe are to become much stronger by this event. This, too, comes in the favorite mode of doubt and perhaps. "To those," he says, "who meditate on the workings of the human mind, a doubt may perhaps arise, whether the effects which I have described," (namely, the change he supposes to be wrought on the public mind with regard to the French doctrines,) "though at present a salutary check to the dangerous spirit of innovation, may not prove favorable to abuses of power, by creating a timidity in the just cause of liberty." Here the current of our apprehensions takes a contrary course. Instead of trembling for the existence of our government from the spirit of licentiousness and anarchy, the author would make us believe we are to tremble for our liberties from the great accession of power which is to accrue to government.

I believe I have read in some author who criticized the productions of the famous Jurieu, that it is not very wise in people who dash away in prophecy, to fix the time of accomplishment at too short a period. Mr. Brothers may meditate upon this at his leisure. He was a melancholy prognosticator, and has had the fate of melancholy men. But they who prophesy pleasant things get great present applause; and in days of calamity people have something else to think of: they lose, in their feeling of their distress, all memory of those who flattered them in their prosperity. But merely for the credit of the prediction, nothing could have happened more unluckily for the noble lord's sanguine expectations of the amendment of the public mind, and the consequent greater security to government, from the examples in France, than what happened in the week after the publication of his hebdomadal system. I am not sure it was not in the very week one of the most violent and dangerous seditions broke out that we have seen in several years. This sedition, menacing to the public security, endangering the sacred person of the king, and violating in the most audacious manner the authority of Parliament, surrounded our sovereign with a murderous yell and war-whoop for that peace which the noble lord considers as a cure for all domestic disturbances and dissatisfactions.

So far as to this general cure for popular disorders. As for government, the two Houses of Parliament, instead of being guided by the speculations of the Fourth Week in October, and throwing up new barriers against the dangerous power of the crown, which the noble lord considered as no unplausible subject of apprehension, the two Houses of Parliament thought fit to pass two acts for the further strengthening of that very government against a most dangerous and wide-spread faction.

Unluckily, too, for this kind of sanguine speculation, on the very first day of the ever-famed "last week of October," a large, daring, and seditious meeting was publicly held, from which meeting this atrocious attempt against the sovereign publicly originated.

No wonder that the author should tell us that the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages. In one, and that the most material instance, his speculations not only might be, but were at that very time, entirely overset. Their war-cry for peace with France was the same with that of this gentle author, but in a different note. His is the gemitus columbæ, cooing and wooing fraternity; theirs the funereal screams of birds of night calling for their ill-omened paramours. But they are both songs of courtship. These Regicides considered a Regicide peace as a cure for all their evils; and so far as I can find, they showed nothing at all of the timidity which the noble lord apprehends in what they call the just cause of liberty.

However, it seems, that, notwithstanding these awkward appearances with regard to the strength of government, he has still his fears and doubts about our liberties. To a free people this would be a matter of alarm; but this physician of October has in his shop all sorts of salves for all sorts of sores. It is curious that they all come from the inexhaustible drug-shop of the Regicide dispensary. It costs him nothing to excite terror, because he lays it at his pleasure. He finds a security for this danger to liberty from the wonderful wisdom to be taught to kings, to nobility, and even, to the lowest of the people, by the late transactions.

I confess I was always blind enough to regard the French Revolution, in the act, and much more in the example, as one of the greatest calamities that had ever fallen upon mankind. I now find that in its effects it is to be the greatest of all blessings. If so, we owe amende honorable to the Jacobins. They, it seems, were right; and if they were right a little earlier than we are, it only shows that they exceeded us in sagacity. If they brought out their right ideas somewhat in a disorderly manner, it must be remembered that great zeal produces some irregularity; but when greatly in the right, it must be pardoned by those who are very regularly and temperately in the wrong. The master Jacobins had told me this a thousand times. I never believed the masters; nor do I now find myself disposed to give credit to the disciple. I will not much dispute with our author, which party has the best of this Revolution,—that which is from thence to learn wisdom, or that which from the same event has obtained power. The dispute on the preference of strength to wisdom may perhaps be decided as Horace has decided the controversy between Art and Nature. I do not like to leave all the power to my adversary, and to secure nothing to myself but the untimely wisdom that is taught by the consequences of folly. I do not like my share in the partition: because to his strength my adversary may possibly add a good deal of cunning, whereas my wisdom may totally fail in producing to me the same degree of strength. But to descend from the author's generalities a little nearer to meaning, the security given to liberty is this,—"that governments will have learned not to precipitate themselves into embarrassments by speculative wars. Sovereigns and princes will not forget that steadiness, moderation, and economy are the best supports of the eminence on which they stand." There seems to me a good deal of oblique reflection in this lesson. As to the lesson itself, it is at all times a good one. One would think, however, by this formal introduction of it as a recommendation of the arrangements proposed by the author, it had never been taught before, either by precept or by experience,—and that these maxims are discoveries reserved for a Regicide peace. But is it permitted to ask what security it affords to the liberty of the subject, that the prince is pacific or frugal? The very contrary has happened in our history. Our best securities for freedom have been obtained from princes who were either warlike, or prodigal, or both.

Although the amendment of princes in these points can have no effect in quieting our apprehensions for liberty on account of the strength to be acquired to government by a Regicide peace, I allow that the avoiding of speculative wars may possibly be an advantage, provided I well understand what the author means by a speculative war. I suppose he means a war grounded on speculative advantages, and not wars founded on a just speculation of danger. Does he mean to include this war, which we are now carrying on, amongst those speculative wars which this Jacobin peace is to teach sovereigns to avoid hereafter? If so, it is doing the party an important service. Does he mean that we are to avoid such wars as that of the Grand Alliance, made on a speculation of danger to the independence of Europe? I suspect he has a sort of retrospective view to the American war, as a speculative war, carried on by England upon one side and by Louis the Sixteenth on the other. As to our share of that war, let reverence to the dead and respect to the living prevent us from reading lessons of this kind at their expense. I don't know how far the author may find himself at liberty to wanton on that subject; but, for my part, I entered into a coalition which, when I had no longer a duty relative to that business, made me think myself bound in honor not to call it up without necessity. But if he puts England out of the question, and reflects only on Louis the Sixteenth, I have only to say, "Dearly has he answered it!" I will not defend him. But all those who pushed on the Revolution by which he was deposed were much more in fault than he was. They have murdered him, and have divided his kingdom as a spoil; but they who are the guilty are not they who furnish the example. They who reign through his fault are not among those sovereigns who are likely to be taught to avoid speculative wars by the murder of their master. I think the author will not be hardy enough to assert that they have shown less disposition to meddle in the concerns of that very America than he did, and in a way not less likely to kindle the flame of speculative war. Here is one sovereign not yet reclaimed by these healing examples. Will he point out the other sovereigns who are to be reformed by this peace? Their wars may not be speculative. But the world will not be much mended by turning wars from unprofitable and speculative to practical and lucrative, whether the liberty or the repose of mankind is regarded. If the author's new sovereign in France is not reformed by the example of his own Revolution, that Revolution has not added much to the security and repose of Poland, for instance, or taught the three great partitioning powers more moderation in their second than they had shown in their first division of that devoted country. The first division, which preceded these destructive examples, was moderation itself, in comparison of what has been, done since the period of the author's amendment.

This paragraph is written with something of a studied obscurity. If it means anything, it seems to hint as if sovereigns were to learn moderation, and an attention to the liberties of their people, from the fate of the sovereigns who have suffered in this war, and eminently of Louis the Sixteenth.

Will he say whether the King of Sardinia's horrible tyranny was the cause of the loss of Savoy and of Nice? What lesson of moderation does it teach the Pope? I desire to know whether his Holiness is to learn not to massacre his subjects, nor to waste and destroy such beautiful countries as that of Avignon, lest he should call to their assistance that great deliverer of nations, Jourdan Coupe-tête? What lesson does it give of moderation to the Emperor, whose predecessor never put one man to death after a general rebellion of the Low Countries, that the Regicides never spared man, woman, or child, whom they but suspected of dislike to their usurpations? What, then, are all these lessons about the softening the character of sovereigns by this Regicide peace? On reading this section, one would imagine that the poor tame sovereigns of Europe had been a sort of furious wild beasts, that stood in need of some uncommonly rough discipline to subdue the ferocity of their savage nature.

As to the example to be learnt from the murder of Louis the Sixteenth, if a lesson to kings is not derived from his fate, I do not know whence it can come. The author, however, ought not to have left us in the dark upon that subject, to break our shins over his hints and insinuations. Is it, then, true, that this unfortunate monarch drew his punishment upon himself by his want of moderation, and his oppressing the liberties of which he had found his people in possession? Is not the direct contrary the fact? And is not the example of this Revolution the very reverse of anything which can lead to that softening of character in princes which the author supposes as a security to the people, and has brought forward as a recommendation to fraternity with those who have administered that happy emollient in the murder of their king and the slavery and desolation of their country?

But the author does not confine the benefit of the Regicide lesson to kings alone. He has a diffusive bounty. Nobles, and men of property, will likewise be greatly reformed. They, too, will be led to a review of their social situation and duties,—"and will reflect, that their large allotment of worldly advantages is for the aid and benefit of the whole." Is it, then, from the fate of Juigné, Archbishop of Paris, or of the Cardinal de Rochefoucault, and of so many others, who gave their fortunes, and, I may say, their very beings, to the poor, that the rich are to learn, that their "fortunes are for the aid and benefit of the whole"? I say nothing of the liberal persons of great rank and property, lay and ecclesiastic, men and women, to whom we have had the honor and happiness of affording an asylum: I pass by these, lest I should never have done, or lest I should omit some as deserving as any I might mention. Why will the author, then, suppose that the nobles and men of property in France have been banished, confiscated, and murdered, on account of the savageness and ferocity of their character, and their being tainted with vices beyond those of the same order and description in other countries? No judge of a revolutionary tribunal, with his hands dipped in their blood and his maw gorged with their property, has yet dared to assert what this author has been pleased, by way of a moral lesson, to insinuate.

Their nobility, and their men of property, in a mass, had the very same virtues, and the very same vices, and in the very same proportions, with the same description of men in this and in other nations. I must do justice to suffering honor, generosity, and integrity. I do not know that any time or any country has furnished more splendid examples of every virtue, domestic and public. I do not enter into the councils of Providence; but, humanly speaking, many of these nobles and men of property, from whose disastrous fate we are, it seems, to learn a general softening of character, and a revision of our social situations and duties, appear to me full as little deserving of that fate as the author, whoever he is, can be. Many of them, I am sure, were such as I should be proud indeed to be able to compare myself with, in knowledge, in integrity, and in every other virtue. My feeble nature might shrink, though theirs did not, from the proof; but my reason and my ambition tell me that it would be a good bargain to purchase their merits with their fate.

For which of his vices did that great magistrate, D'Espréménil, lose his fortune and his head? What were the abominations of Malesherbes, that other excellent magistrate, whose sixty years of uniform virtue was acknowledged, in the very act of his murder, by the judicial butchers who condemned him? On account of what misdemeanors was he robbed of his property, and slaughtered with two generations of his offspring,—and the remains of the third race, with a refinement of cruelty, and lest they should appear to reclaim the property forfeited by the virtues of their ancestor, confounded in an hospital with the thousands of those unhappy foundling infants who are abandoned, without relation and without name, by the wretchedness or by the profligacy of their parents?

Is the fate of the Queen of France to produce this softening of character? Was she a person so very ferocious and cruel, as, by the example of her death, to frighten us into common humanity? Is there no way to teach the Emperor a softening of character, and a review of his social situation and duty, but his consent, by an infamous accord with Regicide, to drive a second coach with the Austrian arms through the streets of Paris, along which, after a series of preparatory horrors exceeding the atrocities of the bloody execution itself, the glory of the Imperial race had been carried to an ignominious death? Is this a lesson of moderation to a descendant of Maria Theresa, drawn from the fate of the daughter of that incomparable woman and sovereign? If he learns this lesson from such an object, and from such teachers, the man may remain, but the king is deposed. If he does not carry quite another memory of that transaction in the inmost recesses of his heart, he is unworthy to reign, he is unworthy to live. In the chronicle of disgrace he will have but this short tale told of him: "He was the first emperor of his house that embraced a regicide; he was the last that wore the imperial purple." Far am I from thinking so ill of this august sovereign, who is at the head of the monarchies of Europe, and who is the trustee of their dignities and his own.

What ferocity of character drew on the fate of Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis the Sixteenth? For which of the vices of that pattern of benevolence, of piety, and of all the virtues, did they put her to death? For which of her vices did they put to death the mildest of all human creatures, the Duchess of Biron? What were the crimes of those crowds of matrons and virgins of condition, whom they mas sacred, with their juries of blood, in prisons and on scaffolds? What were the enormities of the infant king, whom they caused, by lingering tortures, to perish in their dungeon, and whom if at last they dispatched by poison, it was in that detestable crime the only act of mercy they have ever shown?

What softening of character is to be had, what review of their social situations and duties is to be taught by these examples to kings, to nobles, to men of property, to women, and to infants? The royal family perished because it was royal. The nobles perished because they were noble. The men, women, and children, who had property, because they had property to be robbed of. The priests were punished, after they had been robbed of their all, not for their vices, but for their virtues and their piety, which made them an honor to their sacred profession, and to that nature of which we ought to be proud, since they belong to it. My Lord, nothing can be learned from such examples, except the danger of being kings, queens, nobles, priests, and children, to be butchered on account of their inheritance. These are things at which not vice, not crime, not folly, but wisdom, goodness, learning, justice, probity, beneficence, stand aghast. By these examples our reason and our moral sense are not enlightened, but confounded; and there is no refuge for astonished and affrighted virtue, but being annihilated in humility and submission, sinking into a silent adoration of the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, and flying with trembling wings from this world of daring crimes, and feeble, pusillanimous, half-bred, bastard justice, to the asylum of another order of things, in an unknown form, but in a better life.

Whatever the politician or preacher of September or of October may think of the matter, it is a most comfortless, disheartening, desolating example. Dreadful is the example of ruined innocence and virtue, and the completest triumph of the completest villany that ever vexed and disgraced mankind! The example is ruinous in every point of view, religious, moral, civil, political. It establishes that dreadful maxim of Machiavel, that in great affairs men are not to be wicked by halves. This maxim is not made for a middle sort of beings, who, because they cannot be angels, ought to thwart their ambition, and not endeavor to become infernal spirits. It is too well exemplified in the present time, where the faults and errors of humanity, checked by the imperfect, timorous virtues, have been overpowered by those who have stopped at no crime. It is a dreadful part of the example, that infernal malevolence has had pious apologists, who read their lectures on frailties in favor of crimes,—who abandon the weak, and court the friendship of the wicked. To root out these maxims, and the examples that support them, is a wise object of years of war. This is that war. This is that moral war. It was said by old Trivulzio, that the Battle of Marignano was the Battle of the Giants,—that all the rest of the many he had seen were those of the Cranes and Pygmies. This is true of the objects, at least, of the contest: for the greater part of those which we have hitherto contended for, in comparison, were the toys of children.

The October politician is so full of charity and good-nature, that he supposes that these very robbers and murderers themselves are in a course of melioration: on what ground I cannot conceive, except on the long practice of every crime, and by its complete success. He is an Origenist, and believes in the conversion of the Devil. All that runs in the place of blood in his veins is nothing but the milk of human kindness. He is as soft as a curd,—though, as a politician, he might be supposed to be made of sterner stuff. He supposes (to use his own expression) "that the salutary truths which he inculcates are making their way into their bosoms." Their bosom is a rock of granite, on which Falsehood has long since built her stronghold. Poor Truth has had a hard work of it, with her little pickaxe. Nothing but gunpowder will do.

As a proof, however, of the progress of this sap of Truth, he gives us a confession they had made not long before he wrote. "'Their fraternity' (as was lately stated by themselves in a solemn report) 'has been the brotherhood of Cain and Abel,' and 'they have organized nothing but bankruptcy and famine.'" A very honest confession, truly,—and much in the spirit of their oracle, Rousseau. Yet, what is still more marvellous than the confession, this is the very fraternity to which our author gives us such an obliging invitation to accede. There is, indeed, a vacancy in the fraternal corps: a brother and a partner is wanted. If we please, we may fill up the place of the butchered Abel; and whilst we wait the destiny of the departed brother, we may enjoy the advantages of the partnership, by entering without delay into a shop of ready-made bankruptcy and famine. These are the douceurs by which we are invited to Regicide fraternity and friendship. But still our author considers the confession as a proof that "truth is making its way into their bosoms." No! It is not making its way into their bosoms. It has forced its way into their mouths! The evil spirit by which they are possessed, though essentially a liar, is forced by the tortures of conscience to confess the truth,—to confess enough for their condemnation, but not for their amendment. Shakspeare very aptly expresses this kind of confession, devoid of repentance, from the mouth of an usurper, a murderer, and a regicide:—

Whence is their amendment? Why, the author writes, that, on their murderous insurrectionary system, their own lives are not sure for an hour; nor has their power a greater stability. True. They are convinced of it; and accordingly the wretches have done all they can to preserve their lives, and to secure their power; but not one step have they taken to amend the one or to make a more just use of the other. Their wicked policy has obliged them to make a pause in the only massacres in which their treachery and cruelty had operated as a kind of savage justice,—that is, the massacre of the accomplices of their crimes: they have ceased to shed the inhuman blood of their fellow-murderers; but when they take any of those persons who contend for their lawful government, their property, and their religion, notwithstanding the truth which this author says is making its way into their bosoms, it has not taught them the least tincture of mercy. This we plainly see by their massacre at Quiberon, where they put to death, with every species of contumely, and without any exception, every prisoner of war who did not escape out of their hands. To have had property, to have been robbed of it, and to endeavor to regain it,—these are crimes irremissible, to which every man who regards his property or his life, in every country, ought well to look in all connection with those with whom to have had property was an offence, to endeavor to keep it a second offence, to attempt to regain it a crime that puts the offender out of all the laws of peace or war. You cannot see one of those wretches without an alarm for your life as well as your goods. They are like the worst of the French and Italian banditti, who, whenever they robbed, were sure to murder.

Are they not the very same ruffians, thieves, assassins, and regicides that they were from the beginning? Have they diversified the scene by the least variety, or produced the face of a single new villany? Tædet harum quotidianarum formarum. Oh! but I shall be answered, "It is now quite another thing;—they are all changed. You have not seen them in their state dresses;—this makes an amazing difference. The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed a Constitution;—the costume of the sans-culotte Constitution of 1793 was absolutely insufferable. The Committee for Foreign Affairs were such slovens, and stunk so abominably, that no muscadin ambassador of the smallest degree of delicacy of nerves could come within ten yards of them; but now they are so powdered, and perfumed, and ribanded, and sashed, and plumed, that, though they are grown infinitely more insolent in their fine clothes even than they were in their rags, (and that was enough,) as they now appear, there is something in it more grand and noble, something more suitable to an awful Roman Senate receiving the homage of dependent tetrarchs. Like that Senate, (their perpetual model for conduct towards other nations,) they permit their vassals (during their good pleasure) to assume the name of kings, in order to bestow more dignity on the suite and retinue of the sovereign Republic by the nominal rank of their slaves: Ut habeant instrumenta servitutis et reges." All this is very fine, undoubtedly; and ambassadors whose hands are almost out for want of employment may long to have their part in this august ceremony of the Republic one and indivisible. But, with great deference to the new diplomatic taste, we old people must retain some square-toed predilection, for the fashions of our youth.

I am afraid you will find me, my Lord, again falling into my usual vanity, in valuing myself on the eminent men whose society I once enjoyed. I remember, in a conversation I once had with my ever dear friend Garrick, who was the first of actors, because he was the most acute observer of Nature I ever knew, I asked him how it happened, that, whenever a senate appeared on the stage, the audience seemed always disposed to laughter. He said, the reason was plain: the audience was well acquainted with the faces of most of the senators. They knew that they were no other than candle-snuffers, revolutionary scene-shifters, second and third mob, prompters, clerks, executioners, who stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,—in short, the very scum and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits naturally excited ideas of contempt and ridicule.

So it was at Paris on the inaugural day of the Constitution for the present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this investiture of the Directory;—for so they call the managers of their burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were quite awe-struck with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of this majestic senate; whilst the sans-culotte gallery instantly recognized their old insurrectionary acquaintance, burst out into a horse-laugh at their absurd finery, and held them in infinitely greater contempt than whilst they prowled about the streets in the pantaloons of the last year's Constitution, when their legislators appeared honestly, with their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their side-pocket-holes, like a bold, brave banditti, as they are. The Parisians (and I am much of their mind) think that a thief with a crape on his visage is much worse than a barefaced knave, and that such robbers richly deserve all the penalties of all the black acts. In this their thin disguise, their comrades of the late abdicated sovereign canaille hooted and hissed them, and from that day have no other name for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English, impossible to make it very civil English: it belongs, indeed, to the language of the halles: but, without being instructed in that dialect, it was the opinion of the polite Lord Chesterfield that no man could be a complete master of French. Their Parisian brethren called them gueux plumés, which, though not elegant, is expressive and characteristic: feathered scoundrels, I think, comes the nearest to it in that kind of English. But we are now to understand that these gueux, for no other reason, that I can divine, except their red and white clothes, form at last a state with which we may cultivate amity, and have a prospect of the blessings of a secure and permanent peace. In effect, then, it was not with the men, or their principles, or their polities, that we quarrelled: our sole dislike was to the cut of their clothes.

But to pass over their dresses,—good God! in what habits did the representatives of the crowned heads of Europe appear, when they came to swell the pomp of their humiliation, and attended in solemn function this inauguration of Regicide? That would be the curiosity. Under what robes did they cover the disgrace and degradation of the whole college of kings? What warehouses of masks and dominoes furnished a cover to the nakedness of their shame? The shop ought to be known; it willsoon have a good trade. Were the dresses of the ministers of those lately called potentates, who attended on that occasion, taken from the wardrobe of that property-man at the opera, from whence my old acquaintance, Anacharsis Clootz, some years ago equipped a body of ambassadors, whom he conducted, as from all the nations of the world, to the bar of what was called the Constituent Assembly? Among those mock ministers, one of the most conspicuous figures was the representative of the British nation, who unluckily was wanting at the late ceremony. In the face of all the real ambassadors of the sovereigns of Europe was this ludicrous representation of their several subjects, under the name of oppressed sovereigns,10 exhibited to the Assembly. That Assembly received an harangue, in the name of those sovereigns, against their kings, delivered by this Clootz, actually a subject of Prussia, under the name of Ambassador of the Human Race. At that time there was only a feeble reclamation from one of the ambassadors of these tyrants and oppressors. A most gracious answer was given to the ministers of the oppressed sovereigns; and they went so far on that occasion as to assign them, in that assumed character, a box at one of their festivals.

I was willing to indulge myself in an hope that this second appearance of ambassadors was only an insolent mummery of the same kind; but, alas! Anacharsis himself, all fanatic as he was, could not have imagined that his opera procession should have been the prototype of the real appearance of the representatives of all the sovereigns of Europe themselves, to make the same prostration that was made by those who dared to represent their people in a complaint against them. But in this the French Republic has followed, as they always affect to do, and have hitherto done with success, the example of the ancient Romans, who shook all governments by listening to the complaints of their subjects, and soon after brought the kings themselves to answer at their bar. At this last ceremony the ambassadors had not Clootz for their Cotterel. Pity that Clootz had not had a reprieve from the guillotine till he had completed his work! But that engine fell before the curtain had fallen upon all the dignity of the earth.

On this their gaudy day the new Regicide Directory sent for that diplomatic rabble, as bad as themselves in principle, but infinitely worse in degradation. They called them out by a sort of roll of their nations, one after another, much in the manner in which they called wretches out of their prison to the guillotine. When these ambassadors of infamy appeared before them, the chief Director, in the name of the rest, treated each of them with a short, affected, pedantic, insolent, theatric laconium,—a sort of epigram of contempt. When they had thus insulted them in a style and language which never before was heard, and which no sovereign would for a moment endure from another, supposing any of them frantic enough to use it, to finish their outrage, they drummed and trumpeted the wretches out of their hall of audience.

Among the objects of this insolent buffoonery was a person supposed to represent the King of Prussia. To this worthy representative they did not so much as condescend to mention his master; they did not seem to know that he had one; they addressed themselves solely to Prussia in the abstract, notwithstanding the infinite obligation they owed to their early protector for their first recognition and alliance, and for the part of his territory he gave into their hands for the first-fruits of his homage. None but dead monarchs are so much as mentioned by them, and those only to insult the living by an invidious comparison. They told the Prussians they ought to learn, after the example of Frederick the Great, a love for France. What a pity it is, that he, who loved France so well as to chastise it, was not now alive, by an unsparing use of the rod (which, indeed, he would have spared little) to give them another instance of his paternal affection! But the Directory were mistaken. These are not days in which monarchs value themselves upon the title of great: they are grown philosophic: they are satisfied to be good.

Your Lordship will pardon me for this no very long reflection on the short, but excellent speech of the plumed Director to the ambassador of Cappadocia. The Imperial ambassador was not in waiting, but they found for Austria a good Judean representation. With great judgment, his Highness, the Grand Duke, had sent the most atheistic coxcomb to be found in Florence, to represent at the bar of impiety the House of Apostolic Majesty, and the descendants of the pious, though high-minded, Maria Theresa. He was sent to humble the whole race of Austria before those grim assassins, reeking with the blood of the daughter of Maria Theresa, whom they sent half dead, in a dung-cart, to a cruel execution; and this true-born son of apostasy and infidelity, this renegado from the faith and from all honor and all humanity, drove an Austrian coach over the stones which were yet wet with her blood,—with that blood which dropped every step through her tumbrel, all the way she was drawn from the horrid prison, in which they had finished all the cruelty and horrors not executed in the face of the sun. The Hungarian subjects of Maria Theresa, when they drew their swords to defend her rights against France, called her, with correctness of truth, though not with the same correctness, perhaps, of grammar, a king: "Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresa." SHE lived and died a king; and others will have subjects ready to make the same vow, when, in either sex, they show themselves real kings.

When the Directory came to this miserable fop, they bestowed a compliment on his matriculation into their philosophy; but as to his master, they made to him, as was reasonable, a reprimand, not without a pardon, and an oblique hint at the whole family. What indignities have been offered through this wretch to his master, and how well borne, it is not necessary that I should dwell on at present. I hope that those who yet wear royal, imperial, and ducal crowns will learn to feel as men and as kings: if not, I predict to them, they will not long exist as kings or as men.

Great Britain was not there. Almost in despair, I hope she will never, in any rags and coversluts of infamy, be seen at such an exhibition. The hour of her final degradation is not yet come; she did not herself appear in the Regicide presence, to be the sport and mockery of those bloody buffoons, who, in the merriment of their pride, were insulting with every species of contumely the fallen dignity of the rest of Europe. But Britain, though not personally appearing to bear her part in this monstrous tragi-comedy, was very far from being forgotten. The new-robed regicides found a representative for her. And who was this representative? Without a previous knowledge, any one would have given a thousand guesses before he could arrive at a tolerable divination of their rancorous insolence. They chose to address what they had to say concerning this nation to the ambassador of America. They did not apply to this ambassador for a mediation: that, indeed, would have indicated a want of every kind of decency; but it would have indicated nothing more. But in this their American apostrophe, your Lordship will observe, they did not so much as pretend to hold out to us directly, or through any mediator, though in the most humiliating manner, any idea whatsoever of peace, or the smallest desire of reconciliation. To the States of America themselves they paid no compliment. They paid their compliment to Washington solely: and on what ground? This most respectable commander and magistrate might deserve commendation on very many of those qualities which they who most disapprove some part of his proceedings, not more justly than freely, attribute to him; but they found nothing to commend in him "but the hatred he bore to Great Britain." I verily believe, that, in the whole history of our European wars, there never was such a compliment paid from the sovereign of one state to a great chief of another. Not one ambassador from any one of those powers who pretend to live in amity with this kingdom took the least notice of that unheard-of declaration; nor will Great Britain, till she is known with certainty to be true to her own dignity, find any one disposed to feel for the indignities that are offered to her. To say the truth, those miserable creatures were all silent under the insults that were offered to themselves. They pocketed their epigrams, as ambassadors formerly took the gold boxes and miniature pictures set in diamonds presented them by sovereigns at whose courts they had resided. It is to be presumed that by the next post they faithfully and promptly transmitted to their masters the honors they had received. I can easily conceive the epigram which will be presented to Lord Auckland, or to the Duke of Bedford, as hereafter, according to circumstances, they may happen to represent this kingdom. Few can have so little imagination as not readily to conceive the nature of the boxes of epigrammatic lozenges that will be presented to them.

But hæ nugæ seria ducunt in mala. The conduct of the Regicide faction is perfectly systematic in every particular, and it appears absurd only as it is strange and uncouth, not as it has an application to the ends and objects of their policy. When by insult after insult they have rendered the character of sovereigns vile in the eyes of their subjects, they know there is but one step more to their utter destruction. All authority, in a great degree, exists in opinion: royal authority most of all. The supreme majesty of a monarch cannot be allied with contempt. Men would reason, not unplausibly, that it would be better to get rid of the monarchy at once than to suffer that which was instituted, and well instituted, to support the glory of the nation, to become the instrument of its degradation and disgrace.

A good many reflections will arise in your Lordship's mind upon the time and circumstances of that most insulting and atrocious declaration of hostility against this kingdom. The declaration was made subsequent to the noble lord's encomium on the new Regicide Constitution,—after the pamphlet had made something more than advances towards a reconciliation with that ungracious race, and had directly disowned all those who adhered to the original declaration in favor of monarchy. It was even subsequent to the unfortunate declaration in the speech from the throne (which this pamphlet but too truly announced) of the readiness of our government to enter into connections of friendship with that faction. Here was the answer from the throne of Regicide to the speech from the throne of Great Britain. They go out of their way to compliment General Washington on the supposed rancor of his heart towards this country. It is very remarkable, that they make this compliment of malice to the chief of the United States, who had first signed a treaty of peace, amity, and commerce with this kingdom. This radical hatred, according to their way of thinking, the most recent, solemn compacts of friendship cannot or ought not to remove. In this malice to England, as in the one great comprehensive virtue, all other merits of this illustrious person are entirely merged. For my part, I do not believe the fact to be so as they represent it. Certainly it is not for Mr. Washington's honor as a gentleman, a Christian, or a President of the United States, after the treaty he has signed, to entertain such sentiments. I have a moral assurance that the representation of the Regicide Directory is absolutely false and groundless. If it be, it is a stronger mark of their audacity and insolence, and still a stronger proof of the support they mean to give to the mischievous faction they are known to nourish there, to the ruin of those States, and to the end that no British affections should ever arise in that important part of the world, which would naturally lead to a cordial, hearty British alliance, upon the bottom of mutual interest and ancient affection. It shows in what part it is, and with what a weapon, they mean a deadly blow at the heart of Great Britain. One really would have expected, from this new Constitution of theirs, which had been announced as a great reform, and which was to be, more than any of their former experimental schemes, alliable with other nations, that they would, in their very first public act, and their declaration to the collected representation of Europe and America, have affected some degree of moderation, or, at least, have observed a guarded silence with regard to their temper and their views. No such thing: they were in haste to declare the principles which are spun into the primitive staple of their frame. They were afraid that a moment's doubt should exist about them. In their very infancy they were in haste to put their hand on their infernal altar, and to swear the same immortal hatred to England which was sworn in the succession of all the short-lived constitutions that preceded it. With them everything else perishes almost as soon as it is formed; this hatred alone is immortal. This is their impure Vestal fire that never is extinguished: and never will it be extinguished, whilst the system of Regicide exists in France. What! are we not to believe them? Men are too apt to be deceitful enough in their professions of friendship, and this makes a wise man walk with some caution through life. Such professions, in some cases, may be even a ground of further distrust. But when a man declares himself your unalterable enemy! No man ever declared to another a rancor towards him which he did not feel. Falsos in amore odia, non fingere, said an author who points his observations so as to make them remembered.

Observe, my Lord, that, from their invasion of Flanders and Holland to this hour, they have never made the smallest signification of a desire of peace with this kingdom, with Austria, or, indeed, with any other power that I know of. As superiors, they expect others to begin. We have complied, as you may see. The hostile insolence with which they gave such a rebuff to our first overture, in the speech from the throne, did not hinder us from making, from the same throne, a second advance. The two Houses a second time coincided in the same sentiments, with a degree of apparent unanimity, (for there was no dissentient voice but yours,) with which, when they reflect on it, they will be as much ashamed as I am. To this our new humiliating overture (such, at whatever hazard, I must call it) what did the Regicide Directory answer? Not one public word of a readiness to treat. No,—they feel their proud situation too well. They never declared whether they would grant peace to you or not. They only signified to you their pleasure as to the terms on which alone they would in any case admit you to it. You showed your general disposition to peace, and, to forward it, you left everything open to negotiations. As to any terms you can possibly obtain, they shut out all negotiation at the very commencement. They declared that they never would make a peace by which anything that ever belonged to France should be ceded. We would not treat with the monarchy, weakened as it must obviously be in any circumstance of restoration, without a reservation of something for indemnity and security,—and that, too, in words of the largest comprehension. You treat with the Regicides without any reservation at all. On their part, they assure you formally and publicly, that they will give you nothing in the name of indemnity or security, or for any other purpose.

It is impossible not to pause here for a moment, and to consider the manner in which such declarations would have been taken by your ancestors from a monarch distinguished for his arrogance,—an arrogance which, even more than his ambition, incensed and combined all Europe against him. Whatever his inward intentions may have been, did Louis the Fourteenth ever make a declaration that the true bounds of France were the ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Rhine? In any overtures for peace, did he ever declare that he would make no sacrifices to promote it? His declarations were always directly to the contrary; and at the Peace of Ryswick his actions were to the contrary. At the close of the war, almost in every instance victorious, all Europe was astonished, even those who received them were astonished, at his concessions. Let those who have a mind to see how little, in comparison, the most powerful and ambitious of all monarchs is to be dreaded consult the very judicious critical observations on the politics of that reign, inserted in the military treatise of the Marquis de Montalembert. Let those who wish to know what is to be dreaded from an ambitious republic consult no author, no military critic, no historical critic. Let them open their own eyes, which degeneracy and pusillanimity have shut from the light that pains them, and let them not vainly seek their security in a voluntary ignorance of their danger.

To dispose us towards this peace,—an attempt in which our author has, I do not know whether to call it the good or ill fortune to agree with whatever is most seditious, factious, and treasonable in this country,—we are told by many dealers in speculation, but not so distinctly by the author himself, (too great distinctness of affirmation not being his fault,)—but we are told, that the French have lately obtained a very pretty sort of Constitution, and that it resembles the British Constitution as if they had been twinned together in the womb,—mire sagaces fallere hospites discrimen obscurum. It may be so: but I confess I am not yet made to it: nor is the noble author. He finds the "elements" excellent, but the disposition very inartificial indeed. Contrary to what we might expect at Paris, the meat is good, the cookery abominable. I agree with him fully in the last; and if I were forced to allow the first, I should still think, with our old coarse by-word, that the same power which furnished all their former restaurateurs sent also their present cooks. I have a great opinion of Thomas Paine, and of all his productions: I remember his having been one of the committee for forming one of their annual Constitutions, I mean the admirable Constitution of 1793, after having been a chamber council to the no less admirable Constitution of 1791. This pious patriot has his eyes still directed to his dear native country, notwithstanding her in gratitude to so kind a benefactor. This outlaw of England, and lawgiver to France, is now, in secret probably, trying his hand again, and inviting us to him by making his Constitution such as may give his disciples in England some plausible pretext for going into the house that he has opened. We have discovered, it seems, that all which the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has labored to bring to perfection for six or seven centuries is nearly, or altogether, matched in six or seven days, at the leisure hours and sober intervals of Citizen Thomas Paine.

Indeed, in this good old house, where everything at least is well aired, I shall be content to put up my fatigued horses, and here take a bed for the long night that begins to darken upon me. Had I, however, the honor (I must now call it so) of being a member of any of the constitutional clubs, I should think I had carried my point most completely. It is clear, by the applauses bestowed on what the author calls this new Constitution, a mixed oligarchy, that the difference between the clubbists and the old adherents to the monarchy of this country is hardly worth a scuffle. Let it depart in peace, and light lie the earth on the British Constitution! By this easy manner of treating the most difficult of all subjects, the constitution for a great kingdom, and by letting loose an opinion that they may be made by any adventurers in speculation in a small given time, and for any country, all the ties, which, whether of reason or prejudice, attach mankind to their old, habitual, domestic governments, are not a little loosened; all communion, which the similarity of the basis has produced between all the governments that compose what we call the Christian world and the republic of Europe, would be dissolved. By these hazarded speculations France is more approximated to us in constitution than in situation; and in proportion as we recede from the ancient system of Europe, we approach to that connection which alone can remain to us, a close alliance with the new-discovered moral and political world in France.

These theories would be of little importance, if we did not only know, but sorely feel, that there is a strong Jacobin faction in this country, which has long employed itself in speculating upon constitutions, and to whom the circumstance of their government being home-bred and prescriptive seems no sort of recommendation. What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable slavery. This speculative faction had long been at work. The French Revolution did not cause it: it only discovered it, increased it, and gave fresh vigor to its operations. I have reason to be persuaded that it was in this country, and from English writers and English caballers, that France herself was instituted in this revolutionary fury. The communion of these two factions upon any pretended basis of similarity is a matter of very serious consideration. They are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution: the moral basis they consider as nothing. Very different is my opinion: I consider the moral basis as everything,—the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not the makers of them, to be of little importance. What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same? As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,—and that was enough; but this new pretended republic has given us more to apprehend from what they call their virtues than we had to dread from the vices of other men. Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature. It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we have anything to hope.

I hear another inducement to fraternity with the present rulers. They have murdered one Robespierre. This Robespierre, they tell us, was a cruel tyrant, and now that he is put out of the way, all will go well in France. Astræa will again return to that earth from which she has been an emigrant, and all nations will resort to her golden scales. It is very extraordinary, that, the very instant the mode of Paris is known here, it becomes all the fashion in London. This is their jargon. It is the old bon-ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates. I care little about the memory of this same Robespierre. I am sure he was an execrable villain. I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less than I should at the execution of the present Directory, or any of its members. But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny? The present virtuous constitution-mongers. He was a tyrant; they were his satellites and his hangmen. Their sole merit is in the murder of their colleague. They have expiated their other murders by a new murder. It has always been the case among this banditti. They have always had the knife at each other's throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man. These people thought, that, in the commerce of murder, he was like to have the better of the bargain, if any time was lost; they therefore took one of their short revolutionary methods, and massacred him in a manner so perfidious and cruel as would shock all humanity, if the stroke was not struck by the present rulers on one of their own associates. But this last act of infidelity and murder is to expiate all the rest, and to qualify them for the amity of an humane and virtuous sovereign and civilized people. I have heard that a Tartar believes, when he has killed a man, that all his estimable qualities pass with his clothes and arms to the murderer; but I have never heard that it was the opinion of any savage Scythian, that, if he kills a brother villain, he is, ipso facto, absolved of all his own offences. The Tartarian doctrine is the most tenable opinion. The murderers of Robespierre, besides what they are entitled to by being engaged in the same tontine of infamy, are his representatives, have inherited all his murderous qualities, in addition to their own private stock. But it seems we are always to be of a party with the last and victorious assassins. I confess I am of a different mind, and am rather inclined, of the two, to think and speak less hardly of a dead ruffian than to associate with the living. I could better bear the stench of the gibbeted murderer than the society of the bloody felons who yet annoy the world. Whilst they wait the recompense due to their ancient crimes, they merit new punishment by the new offences they commit. There is a period to the offences of Robespierre. They survive in his assassins. "Better a living dog," says the old proverb, "than a dead lion." Not so here. Murderers and hogs never look well till they are hanged. From villany no good can arise, but in the example of its fate. So I leave them their dead Robespierre, either to gibbet his memory, or to deify him in their Pantheon with their Marat and their Mirabeau.

It is asserted that this government promises stability. God of his mercy forbid! If it should, nothing upon earth besides itself can be stable. We declare this stability to be the ground of our making peace with them. Assuming it, therefore, that the men and the system are what I have described, and that they have a determined hostility against this country,—an hostility not only of policy, but of predilection,—then I think that every rational being would go along with me in considering its permanence as the greatest of all possible evils. If, therefore, we are to look for peace with such a thing in any of its monstrous shapes, which I deprecate, it must be in that state of disorder, confusion, discord, anarchy, and insurrection, such as might oblige the momentary rulers to forbear their attempts on neighboring states, or to render these attempts less operative, if they should kindle new wars. When was it heard before, that the internal repose of a determined and wicked enemy, and the strength of his government, became the wish of his neighbor, and a security, against either his malice or his ambition? The direct contrary has always been inferred from that state of things: accordingly, it has ever been the policy of those who would preserve themselves against the enterprises of such a malignant and mischievous power to cut out so much work for him in his own states as might keep his dangerous activity employed at home.

It is said, in vindication of this system, which demands the stability of the Regicide power as a ground for peace with them, that, when they have obtained, as now it is said (though not by this noble author) they have, a permanent government, they will be able to preserve amity with this kingdom, and with others who have the misfortune to be in their neighborhood. Granted. They will be able to do so, without question; but are they willing to do so? Produce the act; produce the declaration. Have they made any single step towards it? Have they ever once proposed to treat?

The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,—that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their government had not strength enough to master. This I utterly deny. I insist upon it as a fact, that, in the daring commencement of all their hostilities, and their astonishing perseverance in them, so as never once, in any fortune, high or low, to propose a treaty of peace to any power in Europe, they have never been actuated by the people: on the contrary, the people, I will not say have been moved, but impelled by them, and have generally acted under a compulsion, of which most of us are as yet, thank God, unable to form an adequate idea. The war against Austria was formally declared by the unhappy Louis the Sixteenth; but who has ever considered Louis the Sixteenth, since the Revolution, to have been the government? The second Regicide Assembly, then the only government, was the author of that war; and neither the nominal king nor the nominal people had anything to do with it, further than in a reluctant obedience. It is to delude ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a state of anarchy: it is something far worse. Anarchy it is, undoubtedly, if compared with government pursuing the peace, order, morals, and prosperity of the people; but regarding only the power that has really guided from the day of the Revolution to this time, it has been of all governments the most absolute, despotic, and effective that has hitherto appeared on earth. Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies. We do not call a republic with annual magistrates an anarchy: theirs is that kind of republic; but the succession is not effected by the expiration of the term of the magistrate's service, but by his murder. Every new magistracy, succeeding by homicide, is auspicated by accusing its predecessors in the office of tyranny, and it continues by the exercise of what they charged upon others.

This strong hand is the law, and the sole law, in their state. I defy any person to show any other law,—or if any such should be found on paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance, regarded or practised. In all their successions, not one magistrate, or one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult; everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one revolutionary cabal, operating within itself upon itself. That cabal is all in all. France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of, where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest and most recondite parts of their household concerns. The helots of Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery. Much would these servile wretches call for our pity under that unheard-of yoke, if for their perfidious and unnatural rebellion, and for their murder of the mildest of all monarchs, they did not richly deserve a punishment not greater than their crime.

On the whole, therefore, I take it to be a great mistake to think that the want of power in the government furnished a natural cause of war; whereas the greatness of its power, joined to its use of that power, the nature of its system, and the persons who acted in it, did naturally call for a strong military resistance to oppose them, and rendered it not only just, but necessary. But at present I say no more on the genius and character of the power set up in France. I may probably trouble you with it more at large hereafter: this subject calls for a very full exposure: at present it is enough for me, if I point it out as a matter well worthy of consideration, whether the true ground of hostility was not rightly conceived very early in this war, and whether anything has happened to change that system, except our ill success in a war which in no principal instance had its true destination as the object of its operations. That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted; but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted, dispirited, and must submit. This would be intelligible. The world would be inclined to pardon the abject conduct of an undone nation. But let us not conceal from ourselves our real situation, whilst, by every species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of it to the enemy.

The writer of the Remarks in the Last Week of October appears to think that the present government in France contains many of the elements which, when properly arranged, are known to form the best practical governments,—and that the system, whatever may become its particular form, is no longer likely to be an obstacle to negotiation. If its form now be no obstacle to such negotiation, I do not know why it was ever so. Suppose that this government promised greater permanency than any of the former, (a point on which I can form no judgment,) still a link is wanting to couple the permanence of the government with the permanence of the peace. On this not one word is said: nor can there be, in my opinion. This deficiency is made up by strengthening the first ringlet of the chain, that ought to be, but that is not, stretched to connect the two propositions. All seems to be done, if we can make out that the last French edition of Regicide is like to prove stable.

As a prognostic of this stability, it is said to be accepted by the people. Here again I join issue with the fraternizers, and positively deny the fact. Some submission or other has been obtained, by some means or other, to every government that hitherto has been set up. And the same submission would, by the same means, be obtained for any other project that the wit or folly of man could possibly devise. The Constitution of 1790 was universally received. The Constitution which followed it, under the name of a Convention, was universally submitted to. The Constitution of 1793 was universally accepted. Unluckily, this year's Constitution, which was formed, and its genethliacon sung by the noble author while it was yet in embryo, or was but just come bloody from the womb, is the only one which in its very formation has been generally resisted by a very great and powerful party in many parts of the kingdom, and particularly in the capital. It never had a popular choice even in show: those who arbitrarily erected the new building out of the old materials of their own Convention were obliged to send for an army to support their work: like brave gladiators, they fought it out in the streets of Paris, and even massacred each other in their house of assembly, in the most edifying manner, and for the entertainment and instruction of their Excellencies the foreign ambassadors, who had a box in this constitutional amphitheatre of a free people.

At length, after a terrible struggle, the troops prevailed over the citizens. The citizen soldiers, the ever-famed national guards, who had deposed and murdered their sovereign, were disarmed by the inferior trumpeters of that rebellion. Twenty thousand regular troops garrison Paris. Thus a complete military government is formed. It has the strength, and it may count on the stability, of that kind of power. This power is to last as long as the Parisians think proper. Every other ground of stability, but from military force and terror, is clean out of the question. To secure them further, they have a strong corps of irregulars, ready-armed. Thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution, as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people. The whole of their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force: a forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced requisition of soldiers, a forced loan of money.

They differ nothing from all the preceding usurpations, but that to the same odium a good deal more of contempt is added. In this situation, notwithstanding all their military force, strengthened with the undisciplined power of the Terrorists, and the nearly general disarming of Paris, there would almost certainly have been before this an insurrection against them, but for one cause. The people of France languish for peace. They all despaired of obtaining it from the coalesced powers, whilst they had a gang of professed regicides at their head; and several of the least desperate republicans would have joined with better men to shake them wholly off, and to produce something more ostensible, if they had not been reiteratedly told that their sole hope of peace was the very contrary to what they naturally imagined: that they must leave off their cabals and insurrections, which could serve no purpose but to bring in that royalty which was wholly rejected by the coalesced kings; that, to satisfy them, they must tranquilly, if they could not cordially, submit themselves to the tyranny and the tyrants they despised and abhorred. Peace was held out by the allied monarchies to the people of France, as a bounty for supporting the Republic of Regicides. In fact, a coalition, begun for the avowed purpose of destroying that den of robbers, now exists only for their support. If evil happens to the princes of Europe from the success and stability of this infernal business, it is their own absolute crime.

We are to understand, however, (for sometimes so the author hints,) that something stable in the Constitution of Regicide was required for our amity with it; but the noble Remarker is no more solicitous about this point than he is for the permanence of the whole body of his October speculations. "If," says he, speaking of the Regicide, "they can obtain a practicable constitution, even for a limited period of time, they will be in a condition to reestablish the accustomed relations of peace and amity." Pray let us leave this bush-fighting. What is meant by a limited period of time? Does it mean the direct contrary to the terms, an unlimited period? If it is a limited period, what limitation does he fix as a ground for his opinion? Otherwise, his limitation is unlimited. If he only requires a constitution that will last while the treaty goes on, ten days' existence will satisfy his demands. He knows that France never did want a practicable constitution, nor a government, which endured for a limited period of time. Her constitutions were but too practicable; and short as was their duration, it was but too long. They endured time enough for treaties which benefited themselves and have done infinite mischief to our cause. But, granting him his strange thesis, that hitherto the mere form or the mere term of their constitutions, and not their indisposition, but their instability, has been the cause of their not preserving the relations of amity,—how could a constitution which might not last half an hour after the noble lord's signature of the treaty, in the company in which he must sign it, insure its observance? If you trouble yourself at all with their constitutions, you are certainly more concerned with them after the treaty than before it, as the observance of conventions is of infinitely more consequence than the making them. Can anything be more palpably absurd and senseless than to object to a treaty of peace for want of durability in constitutions which had an actual duration, and to trust a constitution that at the time of the writing had not so much as a practical existence? There is no way of accounting for such discourse in the mouths of men of sense, but by supposing that they secretly entertain a hope that the very act of having made a peace with the Regicides will give a stability to the Regicide system. This will not clear the discourse from the absurdity, but it will account for the conduct, which such reasoning so ill defends. What a roundabout way is this to peace,—to make war for the destruction of regicides, and then to give them peace in order to insure a stability that will enable them to observe it! I say nothing of the honor displayed in such a system. It is plain it militates with itself almost in all the parts of it. In one part, it supposes stability in their Constitution, as a ground of a stable peace; in another part, we are to hope for peace in a different way,—that is, by splitting this brilliant orb into little stars, and this would make the face of heaven so fine! No, there is no system upon which the peace which in humility we are to supplicate can possibly stand.

I believe, before this time, that the more form of a constitution, in any country, never was fixed as the sole ground of objecting to a treaty with it. With other circumstances it may be of great moment. What is incumbent on the assertors of the Fourth Week of October system to prove is not whether their then expected Constitution was likely to be stable or transitory, but whether it promised to this country and its allies, and to the peace and settlement of all Europe, more good-will or more good faith than any of the experiments which have gone before it. On these points I would willingly join issue.

Observe first the manner in which the Remarker describes (very truly, as I conceive) the people of France under that auspicious government, and then observe the conduct of that government to other nations. "The people without any established constitution; distracted by popular convulsions; in a state of inevitable bankruptcy; without any commerce; with their principal ports blockaded; and without a fleet that could venture to face one of our detached squadrons." Admitting, as fully as he has stated it, this condition of France, I would fain know how he reconciles this condition with his ideas of any kind of a practicable constitution, or duration for a limited period, which are his sine qua non of peace. But passing by contradictions, as no fair objections to reasoning, this state of things would naturally, at other times, and in other governments, have produced a disposition to peace, almost on any terms. But, in that state of their country, did the Regicide government solicit peace or amity with other nations, or even lay any specious grounds for it, in propositions of affected moderation, or in the most loose and general conciliatory language? The direct contrary. It was but a very few days before the noble writer had commenced his Remarks, as if it were to refute him by anticipation, that his France thought fit to lay out a new territorial map of dominion, and to declare to us and to all Europe what territories she was willing to allot to her own empire, and what she is content (during her good pleasure) to leave to others.

This their law of empire was promulgated without any requisition on that subject, and proclaimed in a style and upon principles which never had been heard of in the annals of arrogance and ambition. She prescribed the limits to her empire, not upon principles of treaty, convention, possession, usage, habitude, the distinction of tribes, nations, or languages, but by physical aptitudes. Having fixed herself as the arbiter of physical dominion, she construed the limits of Nature by her convenience. That was Nature which most extended and best secured the empire of France.

I need say no more on the insult offered not only to all equity and justice, but to the common sense of mankind, in deciding legal property by physical principles, and establishing the convenience of a party as a rule of public law. The noble advocate for peace has, indeed, perfectly well exploded this daring and outrageous system of pride and tyranny. I am most happy in commending him, when he writes like himself. But hear still further and in the same good strain the great patron and advocate of amity with this accommodating, mild, and unassuming power, when he reports to you the law they give, and its immediate effects:—"They amount," says he, "to the sacrifice of powers that have been the most nearly connected with us,—the direct or indirect annexation to France of all the ports of the Continent from Dunkirk to Hamburg,—an immense accession of territory,—and, in one word, THE ABANDONMENT OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF EUROPE!" This is the LAW (the author and I use no different terms) which this new government, almost as soon as it could cry in the cradle, and as one of the very first acts by which it auspicated its entrance into function, the pledge it gives of the firmness of its policy,—such is the law that this proud power prescribes to abject nations. What is the comment upon this law by the great jurist who recommends us to the tribunal which issued the decree? "An obedience to it would be" (says he) "dishonorable to us, and exhibit us to the present age and to posterity as submitting to the law prescribed to us by our enemy."

Here I recognize the voice of a British plenipotentiary: I begin to feel proud of my country. But, alas! the short date of human elevation! The accents of dignity died upon his tongue. This author will not assure us of his sentiments for the whole of a pamphlet; but, in the sole energetic part of it, he does not continue the same through an whole sentence, if it happens to be of any sweep or compass. In the very womb of this last sentence, pregnant, as it should seem, with a Hercules, there is formed a little bantling of the mortal race, a degenerate, puny parenthesis, that totally frustrates our most sanguine views and expectations, and disgraces the whole gestation. Here is this destructive parenthesis: "Unless some adequate compensation be secured to us." To us! The Christian world may shift for itself, Europe may groan in slavery, we may be dishonored by receiving law from an enemy,—but all is well, provided the compensation to us be adequate. To what are we reserved? An adequate compensation "for the sacrifice of powers the most nearly connected with us";—an adequate compensation "for the direct or indirect annexation to France of all the ports of the Continent from Dunkirk to Hamburg";—an adequate compensation "for the abandonment of the independence of Europe"! Would that, when all our manly sentiments are thus changed, our manly language were changed along with them, and that the English tongue were not employed to utter what our ancestors never dreamed could enter into an English heart!

But let us consider this matter of adequate compensation. Who is to furnish it? From what funds is it to be drawn? Is it by another treaty of commerce? I have no objections to treaties of commerce upon principles of commerce. Traffic for traffic,—all is fair. But commerce in exchange for empire, for safety, for glory! We set out in our dealing with a miserable cheat upon ourselves. I know it may be said, that we may prevail on this proud, philosophical, military Republic, which looks down with contempt on trade, to declare it unfit for the sovereign of nations to be eundem negotiatorem et dominum: that, in virtue of this maxim of her state, the English in France may be permitted, as the Jews are in Poland and in Turkey, to execute all the little inglorious occupations,—to be the sellers of new and the buyers of old clothes, to be their brokers and factors, and to be employed in casting up their debits and credits, whilst the master Republic cultivates the arts of empire, prescribes the forms of peace to nations, and dictates laws to a subjected world. But are we quite sure, that, when we have surrendered half Europe to them in hope of this compensation, the Republic will confer upon us those privileges of dishonor? Are we quite certain that she will permit us to farm the guillotine,—to contract for the provision of her twenty thousand Bastiles,—to furnish transports for the myriads of her exiles to Guiana,—to become commissioners for her naval stores,—or to engage for the clothing of those armies which are to subdue the poor relics of Christian Europe? No! She is bespoke by the Jew subjects of her own Amsterdam for all these services.

But if these, or matters similar, are not the compensations the Remarker demands, and that on consideration he finds them neither adequate nor certain, who else is to be the chapman, and to furnish the purchase-money, at this market, of all the grand principles of empire, of law, of civilization, of morals, and of religion, where British faith and honor are to be sold by inch of candle? Who is to be the dedecorum pretiosus emptor? Is it the navis Hispanæ magister? Is it to be furnished by the Prince of Peace? Unquestionably. Spain as yet possesses mines of gold and silver, and may give us in pesos duros an adequate compensation for our honor and our virtue. When these things are at all to be sold, they are the vilest commodities at market.

It is full as singular as any of the other singularities in this work, that the Remarker, talking so much as he does of cessions and compensations, passes by Spain in his general settlement, as if there were no such country on the globe,—as if there were no Spain in Europe, no Spain in America. But this great matter of political deliberation cannot be put out of our thoughts by his silence. She has furnished compensations,—not to you, but to France. The Regicide Republic and the still nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain are united,—and are united upon a principle of jealousy, if not of bitter enmity, to Great Britain. The noble writer has here another matter for meditation. It is not from Dunkirk to Hamburg that the ports are in the hands of France: they are in the hands of France from Hamburg to Gibraltar. How long the new dominion will last I cannot tell; but France the Republic has conquered Spain, and the ruling party in that court acts by her orders and exists by her power.

The noble writer, in his views into futurity, has forgotten to look back to the past. If he chooses it, he may recollect, that, on the prospect of the death of Philip the Fourth, and still more on the event, all Europe was moved to its foundations. In the treaties of partition that first were entered into, and in the war that afterwards blazed out to prevent those crowns from being actually or virtually united in the House of Bourbon, the predominance of France in Spain, and above all, in the Spanish Indies, was the great object of all these movements in the cabinet and in the field. The Grand Alliance was formed upon that apprehension. On that apprehension the mighty war was continued during such a number of years as the degenerate and pusillanimous impatience of our dwindled race can hardly bear to have reckoned: a war equal, within a few years, in duration, and not, perhaps, inferior in bloodshed, to any of those great contests for empire which in history make the most awful matter of recorded memory.

When this war was ended, (I cannot stay now to examine how,) the object of the war was the object of the treaty. When it was found impracticable, or less desirable than before, wholly to exclude a branch of the Bourbon race from that immense succession, the point of Utrecht was to prevent the mischiefs to arise from the influence of the greater upon the lesser branch. His Lordship is a great member of the diplomatic body; he has, of course, all the fundamental treaties which make the public statute law of Europe by heart: and, indeed, no active member of Parliament ought to be ignorant of their general tenor and leading provisions. In the treaty which closed that war, and of which it is a fundamental part, because relating to the whole policy of the compact, it was agreed that Spain should not give anything from her territory in the West Indies to France. This article, apparently onerous to Spain, was in truth highly beneficial. But, oh, the blindness of the greatest statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which lie hid in the dark prolific womb of futurity! The great trunk of Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the construction of a French Regicide Republic. Here we have formed a new, unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,—a double-natured monster, republic above and monarchy below. There is no centaur of fiction, no poetic satyr of the woods, nothing short of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt, dog in head and man in body, that can give an idea of it. None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical rejects.

In this metamorphosis, the first thing done by Spain, in the honey-moon of her new servitude, was, with all the hardihood of pusillanimity, utterly to defy the most solemn treaties with Great Britain and the guaranty of Europe. She has yielded the largest and fairest part of one of the largest and fairest islands in the West Indies, perhaps on the globe, to the usurped powers of France. She completes the title of those powers to the whole of that important central island of Hispaniola. She has solemnly surrendered to the regicides and butchers of the Bourbon family what that court never ventured, perhaps never wished, to bestow on the patriarchal stock of her own august house.

The noble negotiator takes no notice of this portentous junction and this audacious surrender. The effect is no less than the total subversion of the balance of power in the West Indies, and indeed everywhere else. This arrangement, considered in itself, but much more as it indicates a complete union of France with Spain, is truly alarming. Does he feel nothing of the change this makes in that part of his description of the state of France where he supposes her not able to face one of our detached squadrons? Does he feel nothing for the condition of Portugal under this new coalition? Is it for this state of things he recommends our junction in that common alliance as a remedy? It is surely already monstrous enough. We see every standing principle of policy, every old governing opinion of nations, completely gone, and with it the foundation of all their establishments. Can Spain keep herself internally where she is, with this connection? Does he dream that Spain, unchristian, or even uncatholic, can exist as a monarchy? This author indulges himself in speculations of the division of the French Republic. I only say, that with much greater reason he might speculate on the republicanism and the subdivision of Spain.

It is not peace with France which secures that feeble government; it is that peace which, if it shall continue, decisively ruins Spain. Such a peace is not the peace which the remnant of Christianity celebrates at this holy season. In it there is no glory to God on high, and not the least tincture of good-will to man. What things we have lived to see! The King of Spain in a group of Moors, Jews, and Renegadoes; and the clergy taxed to pay for his conversion! The Catholic King in the strict embraces of the most Unchristian Republic! I hope we shall never see his Apostolic Majesty, his Faithful Majesty, and the King, Defender of the Faith, added to that unhallowed and impious fraternity.

The noble author has glimpses of the consequences of peace, as well as I. He feels for the colonies of Great Britain, one of the principal resources of our commerce and our naval power, if piratical France shall be established, as he knows she must be, in the West Indies, if we sue for peace on such terms as they may condescend to grant us. He feels that their very colonial system for the interior is not compatible with the existence of our colonies. I tell him, and doubt not I shall be able to demonstrate, that, being what she is, if she possesses a rock there, we cannot be safe. Has this author had in his view the transactions between the Regicide Republic and the yet nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain?

I bring this matter under your Lordship's consideration, that you may have a more complete view than this author chooses to give of the true France you have to deal with, as to its nature, and to its force and its disposition. Mark it, my Lord, France, in giving her law to Spain, stipulated for none of her indemnities in Europe, no enlargement whatever of her frontier. Whilst we are looking for indemnities from France, betraying our own safety in a sacrifice of the independence of Europe, France secures hers by the most important acquisition of territory ever made in the West Indies since their first settlement. She appears (it is only in appearance) to give up the frontier of Spain; and she is compensated, not in appearance, but in reality, by a territory that makes a dreadful frontier to the colonies of Great Britain.

It is sufficiently alarming that she is to have the possession of this great island. But all the Spanish colonies, virtually, are hers. Is there so puny a whipster in the petty form of the school of politics who can be at a loss for the fate of the British colonies, when he combines the French and Spanish consolidation with the known critical and dubious dispositions of the United States of America, as they are at present, but which, when a peace is made, when the basis of a Regicide ascendency in Spain is laid, will no longer be so good as dubious and critical? But I go a great deal further; and on much consideration of the condition and circumstances of the West Indies, and of the genius of this new republic, as it has operated and is likely to operate on them, I say, that, if a single rock in the West Indies is in the hands of this transatlantic Morocco, we have not an hour's safety there.

The Remarker, though he slips aside from the main consideration, seems aware that this arrangement, standing as it does, in the West Indies, leaves us at the mercy of the new coalition, or rather at the mercy of the sole guiding part of it. He does not, indeed, adopt a supposition such as I make, who am confident that anything which can give them a single good port and opportune piratical station there would lead to our ruin: the author proceeds upon an idea that the Regicides may be an existing and considerable territorial power in the West Indies, and, of course, her piratical system more dangerous and as real. However, for that desperate case he has an easy remedy; but, surely, in his whole shop there is nothing so extraordinary. It is, that we three, France, Spain, and England, (there are no other of any moment,) should adopt some "analogy in the interior systems of government in the several islands which we may respectively retain after the closing of the war." This plainly can be done only by a convention between the parties; and I believe it would be the first war ever made to terminate in an analogy of the interior government of any country, or any parts of such countries. Such a partnership in domestic government is, I think, carrying fraternity as far as it will go.

It will be an affront to your sagacity to pursue this matter into all its details: suffice it to say, that, if this convention for analogous domestic government is made, it immediately gives a right for the residence of a consul (in all likelihood some negro or man of color) in every one of your islands; a Regicide ambassador in London will be at all your meetings of West India merchants and planters, and, in effect, in all our colonial councils. Not one order of Council can hereafter be made, or any one act of Parliament relative to the West India colonies even be agitated, which will not always afford reasons for protests and perpetual interference; the Regicide Republic will become an integral part of the colonial legislature, and, so far as the colonies are concerned, of the British too. But it will be still worse: as all our domestic affairs are interlaced more or less intimately with our external, this intermeddling must everywhere insinuate itself into all other interior transactions, and produce a copartnership in our domestic concerns of every description.

Such are the plain, inevitable consequences of this arrangement of a system, of analogous interior government. On the other hand, without it, the author assures us, and in this I heartily agree with him, "that the correspondence and communications between the neighboring colonies will be great, that the disagreements will be incessant, and that causes even of national quarrels will arise from day to day." Most true. But, for the reasons I have given, the case, if possible, will be worse by the proposed remedy, by the triple fraternal interior analogy,—an analogy itself most fruitful, and more foodful than the old Ephesian statue with the three tier of breasts. Your Lordship must also observe how infinitely this business must be complicated by our interference in the slow-paced Saturnian movements of Spain and the rapid parabolic flights of France. But such is the disease,—such is the cure,—such is, and must be, the effect of Regicide vicinity.

But what astonishes me is, that the negotiator, who has certainly an exercised understanding, did not see that every person habituated to such meditations must necessarily pursue the train of thought further than he has carried it, and must ask himself whether what he states so truly of the necessity of our arranging an analogous interior government, in consequence of the vicinity of our possessions, in the West Indies, does not as extensively apply, and much more forcibly, to the circumstance of our much nearer vicinity with the parent and author of this mischief. I defy even his acuteness and ingenuity to show me any one point in which the cases differ, except that it is plainly more necessary in Europe than in America. Indeed, the further we trace the details of the proposed peace, the more your Lordship will be satisfied that I have not been guilty of any abuse of terms, when I use indiscriminately (as I always do, in speaking of arrangements with Regicide) the words peace and fraternity. An analogy between our interior governments must be the consequence. The noble negotiator sees it as well as I do. I deprecate this Jacobin interior analogy. But hereafter, perhaps, I may say a good deal more upon this part of the subject.

The noble lord insists on very little more than on the excellence of their Constitution, the hope of their dwindling into little republics, and this close copartnership in government. I hear of others, indeed, that offer by other arguments to reconcile us to this peace and fraternity. The Regicides, they say, have renounced the creed of the Rights of Man, and declared equality a chimera. This is still more strange than all the rest. They have apostatized from their apostasy. They are renegadoes from that impious faith for which they subverted the ancient government, murdered their king, and imprisoned, butchered, confiscated, and banished their fellow-subjects, and to which they forced every man to swear at the peril of his life. And now, to reconcile themselves to the world, they declare this creed, bought by so much blood, to be an imposture and a chimera. I have no doubt that they always thought it to be so, when they were destroying everything at home and abroad for its establishment. It is no strange thing, to those who look into the nature of corrupted man, to find a violent persecutor a perfect unbeliever of his own creed. But this is the very first time that any man or set of men were hardy enough to attempt to lay the ground of confidence in them by an acknowledgment of their own falsehood, fraud, hypocrisy, treachery, heterodox doctrine, persecution, and cruelty. Everything we hear from them is new, and, to use a phrase of their own, revolutionary; everything supposes a total revolution in all the principles of reason, prudence, and moral feeling. If possible, this their recantation of the chief parts in the canon of the Rights of Man is more infamous and causes greater horror than their originally promulgating and forcing down the throats of mankind that symbol of all evil. It is raking too much into the dirt and ordure of human nature to say more of it.

I hear it said, too, that they have lately declared in favor of property. This is exactly of the same sort with the former. What need had they to make this declaration, if they did not know that by their doctrines and practices they had totally subverted all property? What government of Europe, either in its origin or its continuance, has thought it necessary to declare itself in favor of property? The more recent ones were formed for its protection against former violations; the old consider the inviolability of property and their own existence as one and the same thing, and that a proclamation for its safety would be sounding an alarm on its danger. But the Regicide banditti knew that this was not the first time they have been obliged to give such assurances, and had as often falsified them. They knew, that, after butchering hundreds of men, women, and children, for no other cause than to lay hold on their property, such a declaration might have a chance of encouraging other nations to run the risk of establishing a commercial house amongst them. It is notorious, that these very Jacobins, upon an alarm of the shopkeeper of Paris, made this declaration in favor of property. These brave fellows received the apprehensions expressed on that head with indignation, and said that property could be in no danger, because all the world knew it was under the protection of the sans-culottes. At what period did they not give this assurance? Did they not give it; when they fabricated their first Constitution? Did they not then solemnly declare it one of the rights of a citizen (a right, of course, only declared, and not then fabricated) to depart from his country, and choose another domicilium, without detriment to his property? Did they not declare that no property should be confiscated from the children for the crime of the parent? Can they now declare more fully their respect for property than they did at that time? And yet was there ever known such horrid violences and confiscations as instantly followed under the very persons now in power, many of them leading members of that Assembly, and all of them violators of that engagement which was the very basis of their republic,—confiscations in which hundreds of men, women, and children, not guilty of one act of duty in resisting their usurpation, were involved? This keeping of their old is, then, to give us a confidence in their new engagements. But examine the matter, and you will see that the prevaricating sons of violence give no relief at all, where at all it can be wanted. They renew their old fraudulent declaration against confiscations, and then they expressly exclude all adherents to their ancient lawful government from any benefit of it: that is to say, they promise that they will secure all their brother plunderers in their share of the common plunder. The fear of being robbed by every new succession of robbers, who do not keep even the faith of that kind of society, absolutely required that they should give security to the dividends of spoil, else they could not exist a moment. But it was necessary, in giving security to robbers, that honest men should be deprived of all hope of restitution; and thus their interests were made utterly and eternally incompatible. So that it appears that this boasted security of property is nothing more than a seal put upon its destruction; this ceasing of confiscation is to secure the confiscators against the innocent proprietors. That very thing which is held out to you as your cure is that which makes your malady, and renders it, if once it happens, utterly incurable. You, my Lord, who possess a considerable, though not an invidious estate, may be well assured, that, if, by being engaged, as you assuredly would be, in the defence of your religion, your king, your order, your laws, and liberties, that estate should be put under confiscation, the property would be secured, but in the same manner, at your expense.

But, after all, for what purpose are we told of this reformation in their principles, and what is the policy of all this softening in ours, which is to be produced by their example? It is not to soften us to suffering innocence and virtue, but to mollify us to the crimes and to the society of robbers and ruffians. But I trust that our countrymen will not be softened to that kind of crimes and criminals; for, if we should, our hearts will be hardened to everything which has a claim on our benevolence. A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

There is another piece of policy, not more laudable than this, in reading these moral lectures, which lessens our hatred to criminals and our pity to sufferers by insinuating that it has been owing to their fault or folly that the latter have become the prey of the former. By flattering us that we are not subject to the same vices and follies, it induces a confidence that we shall not suffer the same evils by a contact with the infamous gang of robbers who have thus robbed and butchered our neighbors before our faces. We must not be flattered to our ruin. Our vices are the same as theirs, neither more nor less. If any faults we had, which wanted this French example to call us to a "softening of character, and a review of our social relations and duties," there is yet no sign that we have commenced our reformation. We seem, by the best accounts I have from the world, to go on just as formerly, "some to undo, and some to be undone." There is no change at all: and if we are not bettered by the sufferings of war, this peace, which, for reasons to himself best known, the author fixes as the period of our reformation, must have something very extraordinary in it; because hitherto ease, opulence, and their concomitant pleasure have never greatly disposed mankind to that serious reflection and review which the author supposes to be the result of the approaching peace with vice and crime. I believe he forms a right estimate of the nature of this peace, and that it will want many of those circumstances which formerly characterizes that state of things.

If I am right in my ideas of this new republic, the different states of peace and war will make no difference in her pursuits. It is not an enemy of accident that we have to deal with. Enmity to us, and to all civilized nations, is wrought into the very stamina of its Constitution. It was made to pursue the purposes of that fundamental enmity. The design will go on regularly in every position and in every relation. Their hostility is to break us to their dominion; their amity is to debauch us to their principles. In the former, we are to contend with their force; in the latter, with their intrigues. But we stand in a very different posture of defence in the two situations. In war, so long as government is supported, we fight with the whole united force of the kingdom. When under the name of peace the war of intrigue begins, we do not contend against our enemies with the whole force of the kingdom. No,—we shall have to fight, (if it should be a fight at all, and not an ignominious surrender of everything which has made our country venerable in our eyes and dear to our hearts,) we shall have to light with but a portion of our strength against the whole of theirs. Gentlemen who not long since thought with us, but who now recommend a Jacobin peace, were at that time sufficiently aware of the existence of a dangerous Jacobin faction within this kingdom. Awhile ago they seemed to be tremblingly alive to the number of those who composed it, to their dark subtlety, to their fierce audacity, to their admiration of everything that passes in France, to their eager desire of a close communication with the mother faction there. At this moment, when the question is upon the opening of that communication, not a word of our English Jacobins. That faction is put out of sight and out of thought. "It vanished at the crowing of the cock." Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light begun to utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor Tory geese to alarm the garrison of the Capitol was forgot.11 There was enough of indemnity before. Now a complete act of oblivion is passed about the Jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would make a principal object in all fair deliberation upon the merits of a project of amity with the Jacobins of France. But however others may choose to forget the faction, the faction does not choose to forget itself, nor, however gentlemen may choose to flatter themselves, it does not forget them.

Never, in any civil contest, has a part been taken with more of the warmth, or carried on with more of the arts of a party. The Jacobins are worse than lost to their country. Their hearts are abroad. Their sympathy with the Regicides of France is complete. Just as in a civil contest, they exult in all their victories, they are dejected and mortified in all their defeats. Nothing that the Regicides can do (and they have labored hard for the purpose) can alienate them from their cause. You and I, my dear Lord, have often observed on the spirit of their conduct. When the Jacobins of France, by their studied, deliberated, catalogued files of murders with the poniard, the sabre, and the tribunal, have shocked whatever remained of human sensibility in our breasts, then it was they distinguished the resources of party policy. They did not venture directly to confront the public sentiment; for a very short time they seemed to partake of it. They began with a reluctant and sorrowful confession; they deplored the stains which tarnished the lustre of a good cause. After keeping a decent time of retirement, in a few days crept out an apology for the excesses of men cruelly irritated by the attacks of unjust power. Grown bolder, as the first feeling of mankind decayed and the color of these horrors began to fade upon the imagination, they proceeded from apology to defence. They urged, but still deplored, the absolute necessity of such a proceeding. Then they made a bolder stride, and marched from defence to recrimination. They attempted to assassinate the memory of those whose bodies their friends had massacred, and to consider their murder as a less formal act of justice. They endeavored even to debauch our pity, and to suborn it in favor of cruelty. They wept over the lot of those who were driven by the crimes of aristocrats to republican vengeance. Every pause of their cruelty they considered as a return of their natural sentiments of benignity and justice. Then they had recourse to history, and found out all the recorded cruelties that deform the annals of the world, in order that the massacres of the Regicides might pass for a common event, and even that the most merciful of princes, who suffered by their hands, should bear the iniquity of all the tyrants who have at any time infested the earth. In order to reconcile us the better to this republican tyranny, they confounded the bloodshed of war with the murders of peace; and they computed how much greater prodigality of blood was exhibited in battles and in the storm of cities than in the frugal, well-ordered massacres of the revolutionary tribunals of France.