The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)

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.

Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
Horrida contremuere sub altis ætheris auris,
In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum
Omnibus humanis esset terrâque marique.—

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 - Hic auratis volitans argenteus anserPorticibus GALLOS in limine adesse canebat.] 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.

As to foreign powers, so long as they were conjoined with Great Britain in this contest, so long they were treated as the most abandoned tyrants, and, indeed, the basest of the human race. The moment any of them quits the cause of this government, and of all governments, he is rehabilitated, his honor is restored, all attainders are purged. The friends of Jacobins are no longer despots; the betrayers of the common cause are no longer traitors.

That you may not doubt that they look on this war as a civil war, and the Jacobins of France as of their party, and that they look upon us, though locally their countrymen, in reality as enemies, they have never failed to run a parallel between our late civil war and this war with the Jacobins of France. They justify their partiality to those Jacobins by the partiality which was shown by several here to the Colonies, and they sanction their cry for peace with the Regicides of France by some of our propositions for peace with the English in America.

This I do not mention as entering into the controversy how far they are right or wrong in this parallel, but to show that they do make it, and that they do consider themselves as of a party with the Jacobins of France. You cannot forget their constant correspondence with the Jacobins, whilst it was in their power to carry it on. When the communication is again opened, the interrupted correspondence will commence. We cannot be blind to the advantage which such a party affords to Regicide France in all her views,—and, on the other hand, what an advantage Regicide France holds out to the views of the republican party in England. Slightly as they have considered their subject, I think this can hardly have escaped the writers of political ephemerides for any month or year. They have told us much of the amendment of the Regicides of France, and of their returning honor and generosity. Have they told anything of the reformation and of the returning loyalty of the Jacobins of England? Have they told us of their gradual softening towards royalty? Have they told us what measures they are taking for "putting the crown in commission," and what approximations of any kind they are making towards the old Constitution of their country? Nothing of this. The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive. They dare not touch the subject. But it is not annihilated by their silence, nor by our indifference. It is but too plain that our Constitution cannot exist with such a communication. Our humanity, our manners, our morals, our religion, cannot stand with such a communication. The Constitution is made by those things, and for those things: without them it cannot exist; and without them it is no matter whether it exists or not.

It was an ingenious Parliamentary Christmas play, by which, in both Houses, you anticipated the holidays; it was a relaxation from your graver employment; it was a pleasant discussion you had, which part of the family of the Constitution was the elder branch,—whether one part did not exist prior to the others, and whether it might exist and flourish, if "the others were cast into the fire."[12 - See debates in Parliament upon motions made in both Houses for prosecuting Mr. Reeves for a libel upon the Constitution, Dec., 1795.] In order to make this Saturnalian amusement general in the family, you sent it down stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment. The unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the butt of all this sport may suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants' hall. But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed, in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created or uncreated, and were ready to massacre the holders of the unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach into the capital of the Christian world. I may possibly suffer much more than Mr. Reeves (I shall certainly give much more general offence) for breaking in upon this constitutional amusement concerning the created or uncreated nature of the two Houses of Parliament, and by calling their attention to a problem which may entertain them less, but which concerns them a great deal more,—that is, whether, with this Gallic Jacobin fraternity, which they are desired by some writers to court, all the parts of the government, about whose combustible or incombustible qualities they are contending, may "not be cast into the fire" together. He is a strange visionary (but he is nothing worse) who fancies that any one part of our Constitution, whatever right of primogeniture it may claim, or whatever astrologers may divine from its horoscope, can possibly survive the others. As they have lived, so they will die, together. I must do justice to the impartiality of the Jacobins. I have not observed amongst them the least predilection for any of those parts. If there has been any difference in their malice, I think they have shown a worse disposition to the House of Commons than to the crown. As to the House of Lords, they do not speculate at all about it, and for reasons that are too obvious to detail.

The question will be concerning the effect of this French fraternity on the whole mass. Have we anything to apprehend from Jacobin communication, or have we not? If we have not, is it by our experience before the war that we are to presume that after the war no dangerous communion can exist between those who are well affected to the new Constitution of France and ill affected to the old Constitution here?

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this communication. I do not except from this observation those who are willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity. Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief. Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a remedy could be at all adopted? We expel suspected foreigners from hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pass over into France to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs. In France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them. But the worst aliens are the ambassador and his train. These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A French ambassador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we have never experienced. The mischief is by far more visible than the remedy. But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall bring it on. In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication. Everything done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Everything, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual dilemma. But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken. The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce us to temporize with all the evils of it. By degrees our minds will be made to our circumstances. The novelty of such things, which produces half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off. Our ruin will be disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a degenerate people to barter away the most precious jewel of their souls. Our Constitution is not made for this kind of warfare. It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence. It is formed, in a great measure, upon the principle of jealousy of the crown,—and as things stood, when it took that turn, with very great reason. I go farther: it must keep alive some part of that fire of jealousy eternally and chastely burning, or it cannot be the British Constitution. At various periods we have had tyranny in this country, more than enough. We have had rebellions with more or less justification. Some of our kings have made adulterous connections abroad, and trucked away for foreign gold the interests and glory of their crown. But, before this time, our liberty has never been corrupted. I mean to say, that it has never been debauched from its domestic relations. To this time it has been English liberty, and English liberty only. Our love of liberty and our love of our country were not distinct things. Liberty is now, it seems, put upon a larger and more liberal bottom. We are men,—and as men, undoubtedly, nothing human is foreign to us. We cannot be too liberal in our general wishes for the happiness of our kind. But in all questions on the mode of procuring it for any particular community, we ought to be fearful of admitting those who have no interest in it, or who have, perhaps, an interest against it, into the consultation. Above all, we cannot be too cautious in our communication with those who seek their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion, and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those restraints which are imposed by the virtues upon the passions.

When we invite danger from a confidence in defensive measures, we ought, first of all, to be sure that it is a species of danger against which any defensive measures that can be adopted will be sufficient. Next, we ought to know that the spirit of our laws, or that our own dispositions, which are stronger than laws, are susceptible of all those defensive measures which the occasion may require. A third consideration is, whether these measures will not bring more odium than strength to government; and the last, whether the authority that makes them, in a general corruption of manners and principles, can insure their execution. Let no one argue, from the state of things, as he sees them at present, concerning what will be the means and capacities of government, when the time arrives which shall call for remedies commensurate to enormous evils.

It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men. These are what no constitution can give: they are the gifts of God; and He alone knows whether we shall possess such gifts at the time we stand in need of them. Constitutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural: it is all that in this case they can do. But our Constitution has more impediments than helps. Its excellencies, when they come to be put to this sort of proof, may be found among its defects.

Nothing looks more awful and imposing than an ancient fortification. Its lofty, embattled walls, its bold, projecting, rounded towers, that pierce the sky, strike the imagination and promise inexpugnable strength. But they are the very things that make its weakness. You may as well think of opposing one of these old fortresses to the mass of artillery brought by a French irruption into the field as to think of resisting by your old laws and your old forms the new destruction which the corps of Jacobin engineers of to-day prepare for all such forms and all such laws. Besides the debility and false principle of their construction to resist the present modes of attack, the fortress itself is in ruinous repair, and there is a practicable breach in every part of it.

Such is the work. But miserable works have been defended by the constancy of the garrison. Weather-beaten ships have been brought safe to port by the spirit and alertness of the crew. But it is here that we shall eminently fail. The day that, by their consent, the seat of Regicide has its place among the thrones of Europe, there is no longer a motive for zeal in their favor; it will at best be cold, unimpassioned, dejected, melancholy duty. The glory will seem all on the other side. The friends of the crown will appear, not as champions, but as victims; discountenanced, mortified, lowered, defeated, they will fall into listlessness and indifference. They will leave things to take their course, enjoy the present hour, and submit to the common fate.

Is it only an oppressive nightmare with which we have been loaded? Is it, then, all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the world? Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian who would not suffer his benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped for execution, to say one parting word to his deluded people,—of Santerre, who commanded the drums and trumpets to strike up to stifle his voice, and dragged him backward to the machine of murder! This nefarious villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in a republic of robbers and murderers he ought. What hinders this monster from being sent as ambassador to convey to his Majesty the first compliments of his brethren, the Regicide Directory? They have none that can represent them more properly. I anticipate the day of his arrival. He will make his public entry into London on one of the pale horses of his brewery. As he knows that we are pleased with the Paris taste for the orders of knighthood,[13 - "In the costume assumed by the members of the legislative body we almost behold the revival of the extinguished insignia of knighthood," &c., &c.—See A View of the Relative State of Great Britain and France at the Commencement of the Year 1796.] he will fling a bloody sash across his shoulders, with the order of the holy guillotine surmounting the crown appendant to the riband. Thus adorned, he will proceed from Whitechapel to the further end of Pall Mall, all the music of London playing the Marseillaise Hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of the Légion de l'Échafaud. It were only to be wished that no ill-fated loyalist, for the imprudence of his zeal, may stand in the pillory at Charing Cross, under the statue of King Charles the First, at the time of this grand procession, lest some of the rotten eggs which the Constitutional Society shall let fly at his indiscreet head may hit the virtuous murderer of his king. They might soil the state dress which the ministers of so many crowned heads have admired, and in which Sir Clement Cotterel is to introduce him at St. James's.

If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home, Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage. He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of the Departments. Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall at the next Sheriff's feast. He may open the ball with my Lady Mayoress. But this will be after he has retired from the public table, and gone into the private room for the enjoyment of more social and unreserved conversation with the ministers of state and the judges of the bench. There these ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain the worthy aldermen with an instructing and pleasing narrative of the manner in which he made the rich citizens of Bordeaux squeak, and gently led them by the public credit of the guillotine to disgorge their anti-revolutionary pelf.

All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendor of the Hôtel de la République. There another scene of gaudy grandeur will be opened. When his Citizen Excellency keeps the festival, which every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a grand ball of course will be given on the occasion. Then what a hurly-burly! what a crowding! what a glare of a thousand flambeaux in the square! what a clamor of footmen contending at the door! what a rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys, choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle who should be first to pay her court to the Citoyenne, the spouse of the twenty-first husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the rank of honorable matrons before the four days' duration of marriage is expired!—Morals, as they were, decorum, the great outguard of the sex, and the proud sentiment of honor, which makes virtue more respectable, where it is, and conceals human frailty, where virtue may not be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve.

We had before an ambassador from the most Christian King. We shall have then one, perhaps two, as lately, from the most Anti-Christian Republic. His chapel will be great and splendid, formed on the model of the Temple of Reason at Paris; while the famous ode of the infamous Chénier will be sung, and a prostitute of the street adored as a goddess. We shall then have a French ambassador without a suspicion of Popery. One good it will have: it will go some way in quieting the minds of that synod of zealous Protestant lay elders who govern Ireland on the pacific principles of polemic theology, and who now, from dread of the Pope, cannot take a cool bottle of claret, or enjoy an innocent Parliamentary job, with any tolerable quiet.

So far as to the French communication here:—what will be the effect of our communication there? We know that our new brethren, whilst they everywhere shut up the churches, increased in Paris, at one time at least fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in that place, that has not been increased,—brothels, gaming-houses, everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to their utmost perfection, and cover them with every species of imposing magnificence. They have all along avowed them as a part of their policy; and whilst they corrupt young minds through pleasure, they form them to crimes. Every idea of corporal gratification is carried to the highest excess, and wooed with all the elegance that belongs to the senses. All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. Any one, who attends to all their own descriptions, narratives, and dissertations, will find in that whole place more of the air of a body of assassins, banditti, housebreakers, and outlawed smugglers, joined to that of a gang of strolling players expelled from and exploded orderly theatres, with their prostitutes in a brothel, at their debauches and bacchanals, than anything of the refined and perfected virtues, or the polished, mitigated vices of a great capital.

Is it for this benefit we open "the usual relations of peace and amity"? Is it for this our youth of both sexes are to form themselves by travel? Is it for this that with expense and pains we form their lisping infant accents to the language of France? I shall be told that this abominable medley is made rather to revolt young and ingenuous minds. So it is in the description. So perhaps it may in reality to a chosen few. So it may be, when the magistrate, the law, and the church frown on such manners, and the wretches to whom they belong,—when they are chased from the eye of day, and the society of civil life, into night-cellars and caves and woods. But when these men themselves are the magistrates,—when all the consequence, weight, and authority of a great nation adopt them,—when we see them conjoined with victory, glory, power, and dominion, and homage paid to them by every government,—it is not possible that the downhill should not be slid into, recommended by everything which has opposed it. Let it be remembered that no young man can go to any part of Europe without taking this place of pestilential contagion in his way; and whilst the less active part of the community will be debauched by this travel, whilst children are poisoned at these schools, our trade will put the finishing hand to our ruin. No factory will be settled in France, that will not become a club of complete French Jacobins. The minds of young men of that description will receive a taint in their religion, their morals, and their politics, which they will in a short time communicate to the whole kingdom.

Whilst everything prepares the body to debauch and the mind to crime, a regular church of avowed atheism, established by law, with a direct and sanguinary persecution of Christianity, is formed to prevent all amendment and remorse. Conscience is formally deposed from its dominion over the mind. What fills the measure of horror is, that schools of atheism are set up at the public charge in every part of the country. That some English parents will be wicked enough to send their children to such schools there is no doubt. Better this island should be sunk to the bottom of the sea than that (so far as human infirmity admits) it should not be a country of religion and morals!

With all these causes of corruption, we may well judge what the general fashion of mind will be through both sexes and all conditions. Such spectacles and such examples will overbear all the laws that ever blackened the cumbrous volumes of our statutes. When royalty shall have disavowed itself,—when it shall have relaxed all the principles of its own support,—when it has rendered the system of Regicide fashionable, and received it as triumphant, in the very persons who have consolidated that system by the perpetration, of every crime, who have not only massacred the prince, but the very laws and magistrates which were the support of royalty, and slaughtered with an indiscriminate proscription, without regard to either sex or age, every person that was suspected of an inclination to king, law, or magistracy,—I say, will any one dare to be loyal? Will any one presume, against both authority and opinion, to hold up this unfashionable, antiquated, exploded Constitution?

The Jacobin faction in England must grow in strength and audacity; it will be supported by other intrigues and supplied by other resources than yet we have seen in action. Confounded at its growth, the government may fly to Parliament for its support. But who will answer for the temper of a House of Commons elected under these circumstances? Who will answer for the courage of a House of Commons to arm the crown with the extraordinary powers that it may demand? But the ministers will not venture to ask half of what they know they want. They will lose half of that half in the contest; and when they have obtained their nothing, they will be driven by the cries of faction either to demolish the feeble works they have thrown up in a hurry, or, in effect, to abandon them. As to the House of Lords, it is not worth mentioning. The peers ought naturally to be the pillars of the crown; but when their titles are rendered contemptible, and their property invidious, and a part of their weakness, and not of their strength, they will be found so many degraded and trembling individuals, who will seek by evasion to put off the evil day of their ruin. Both Houses will be in perpetual oscillation between abortive attempts at energy and still more unsuccessful attempts at compromise. You will be impatient of your disease, and abhorrent of your remedy. A spirit of subterfuge and a tone of apology will enter into all your proceedings, whether of law or legislation. Your judges, who now sustain so masculine an authority, will appear more on their trial than the culprits they have before them. The awful frown of criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction. Judges will think to insinuate and soothe the accused into conviction and condemnation, and to wheedle to the gallows the most artful of all delinquents. But they will not be so wheedled. They will not submit even to the appearance of persons on their trial. Their claim to this exemption will be admitted. The place in which some of the greatest names which ever distinguished the history of this country have stood will appear beneath their dignity. The criminal will climb from the dock to the side-bar, and take his place and his tea with the counsel. From the bar of the counsel, by a natural progress, he will ascend to the bench, which long before had been virtually abandoned. They who escape from justice will not suffer a question upon reputation. They will take the crown of the causeway; they will be revered as martyrs; they will triumph as conquerors. Nobody will dare to censure that popular part of the tribunal whose only restraint on misjudgment is the censure of the public. They who find fault with the decision will be represented as enemies to the institution. Juries that convict for the crown will be loaded with obloquy. The juries who acquit will be held up as models of justice. If Parliament orders a prosecution, and fails, (as fail it will,) it will be treated to its face as guilty of a conspiracy maliciously to prosecute. Its care in discovering a conspiracy against the state will be treated as a forged plot to destroy the liberty of the subject: every such discovery, instead of strengthening government, will weaken its reputation.

In this state things will be suffered to proceed, lest measures of vigor should precipitate a crisis. The timid will act thus from character, the wise from necessity. Our laws had done all that the old condition of things dictated to render our judges erect and independent; but they will naturally fail on the side upon which they had taken no precautions. The judicial magistrates will find themselves safe as against the crown, whose will is not their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame or abuse as they think fit. They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands. They will speculate on consequences, when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges. It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the criminal of to-day turned into the magistrate of to-morrow.

The press–

The army–

When thus the helm of justice is abandoned, an universal abandonment of all other posts will succeed. Government will be for a while the sport of contending factions, who, whilst they fight with one another, will all strike at her. She will be buffeted and beat forward and backward by the conflict of those billows, until at length, tumbling from the Gallic coast, the victorious tenth wave shall ride, like the bore, over all the rest, and poop the shattered, weather-beaten, leaky, water-logged vessel, and sink her to the bottom of the abyss.

Among other miserable remedies that have been found in the materia medica, of the old college, a change of ministry will be proposed, and probably will take place. They who go out can never long with zeal and good-will support government in the hands of those they hate. In a situation of fatal dependence on popularity, and without one aid from the little remaining power of the crown, it is not to be expected that they will take on them that odium which more or less attaches upon every exertion of strong power. The ministers of popularity will lose all their credit at a stroke, if they pursue any of those means necessary to give life, vigor, and consistence to government. They will be considered as venal wretches, apostates, recreant to all their own principles, acts, and declarations. They cannot preserve their credit, but by betraying that authority of which they are the guardians.

To be sure, no prognosticating symptoms of these things have as yet appeared,—nothing even resembling their beginnings. May they never appear! May these prognostications of the author be justly laughed at and speedily forgotten! If nothing as yet to cause them has discovered itself, let us consider, in the author's excuse, that we have not yet seen a Jacobin legation in England. The natural, declared, sworn ally of sedition has not yet fixed its head-quarters in London.

There never was a political contest, upon better or worse grounds, that by the heat of party-spirit may not ripen into civil confusion. If ever a party adverse to the crown should be in a condition here publicly to declare itself, and to divide, however unequally, the natural force of the kingdom, they are sure of an aid of fifty thousand men, at ten days' warning, from the opposite coast of France. But against this infusion of a foreign force the crown has its guaranties, old and new. But I should be glad to hear something said of the assistance which loyal subjects in France have received from other powers in support of that lawful government which secured their lawful property. I should be glad to know, if they are so disposed to a neighborly, provident, and sympathetic attention to their public engagements, by what means they are to come at us. Is it from the powerful states of Holland we are to reclaim our guaranty? Is it from the King of Prussia, and his steady good affections, and his powerful navy, that we are to look for the guaranty of our security? Is it from the Netherlands, which the French may cover with the swarms of their citizen-soldiers in twenty-four hours, that we are to look for this assistance? This is to suppose, too, that all these powers have no views offensive or necessities defensive of their own. They will cut out work for one another, and France will cut out work for them all.

That the Christian religion cannot exist in this country with such a fraternity will not, I think, be disputed with me. On that religion, according to our mode, all our laws and institutions stand, as upon their base. That scheme is supposed in every transaction of life; and if that were done away, everything else, as in France, must be changed along with it. Thus, religion perishing, and with it this Constitution, it is a matter of endless meditation what order of things would follow it. But what disorder would fill the space between the present and that which is to come, in the gross, is no matter of doubtful conjecture. It is a great evil, that of a civil war. But, in that state of things, a civil war, which would give to good men and a good cause some means of struggle, is a blessing of comparison that England will not enjoy. The moment the struggle begins, it ends. They talk of Mr. Hume's euthanasia of the British Constitution gently expiring, without a groan, in the paternal arms of a mere monarchy. In a monarchy!—fine trifling indeed!—there is no such euthanasia for the British Constitution.

The manuscript copy of this Letter ends here

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