Brown,
upon some reverses which happened in the beginning
of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the
people of England had been totally changed, and that
a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character.
upon some reverses which happened in the beginning
of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the
people of England had been totally changed, and that
a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character.
Edmund Burke
?
?
?
ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION.
223
trace of honor and virtue ill it, things had taken a
different turn from what they did, I should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less good-will
and more pride, though with far other feelings, than
I partook of the general flow of national joy that
attended the justice that was done to his virtue.
Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age,
which loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in retrospect
alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds,
the consolation of friendship, in those only whom
we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord
Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it so
much as on the first day when I was attacked in
the House of Lords.
Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen
in its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension
to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have
told him that the favor of that gracious prince who
had honored his virtues with the government of the
navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under
his rudest trials. He would have told him, that, to
whomever else these reproaches might be becoming,
they were not decorous in his near kindred. He
would have told him, that, when men in that rank
lose decorum, they lose everything.
On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the
public loss of him in this awful crisis! --I speak
from much knowledge of the person: he never woul(l
lhave listened to any compromise *vith the rabble rot
? ? ? ? 224 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
of this sans-culotterie of France. His goodness of
heart, his reason, his taste, his public duty, his
principles, his prejudices, would have repelled him
forever from all connection with that horrid medley
of madness, vice, impiety, and crime.
Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent,
and one of birth. Their interest and their glory are
the same; and his mind was capacious of both. His
family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was
of the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can
boast, among a people renowned above all others
for love of their native land. Though it was never
shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel
was something high. It was a wild stock of pride,
on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the
milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he
was not disinclined to augment it with new honors.
He valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind, - conceiving that a
man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing,
but everything in what went before and what was to
come after him. Without much speculation, but by
the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the
dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by any
possibility long subsist without a body of some kind
or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain that
connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with
Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made, without some such order of
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 225
things as might, through a series of time, afford a
rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing
else can protect it against the levity of courts and the
greater levity of the multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary
reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded
absurdity, fit only for those detestable " fools aspiring
to be knaves" who began to forge in 1789 the false
money of the French Constitution; that it is one fatal
objection to all new fancied and new fabricated republics, (among a people who, once possessing such an.
advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it,)
that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that
cannot be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken
from it or aggregated to it; but the thing itself is matter of inveterate opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.
I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine
the future out of what we collect from the past, no
person living would look with more scorn and horror
on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate attainder passed on all
their posterity, by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de Noailles, and the false P6rigords, and the long et cetera
of the perfidious sans-culottes of the court, who, like
demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and
inverted ambition, abdicated their dignities, disowned
their families, betrayed the most sacred of all trusts,
and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and
VOL. V. 15
? ? ? ? 226 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
all the cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their country. For
the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves he
would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who
by their means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would
leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind,
for any such sensation. We are not made at once
to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.
Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear
to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave
nobility of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured
out, had, more than all the canals, meres, and inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race, - in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to whose sceptred pride they
had opposed an elevation of soul that surmounted and
overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness
of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?
Could he with patience bear that the children of
that nobility who would have deluged their country
and given it to the sea rather than submit to Louis
the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory,
when his arms were conducted by the Turennes, by
the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers, when his councils
were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when
his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the
D'Aguesseaus, - that these should be given up to the
cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas,
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 227
and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides,
robbers, and revolutionary judges, that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have
poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest and
at once the most destructive of the classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have
laid waste the fairest part of the world?
Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the
virtuous patricians, that happy union of the noble
and the burgher, who with signal prudence and integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protection?
Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should
totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy founded on the spurious
rights of man?
He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well
versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not
have heard with patience that the country of Grotius,
the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new
code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the
presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen
rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue
and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry
of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.
Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau,
who was himself given to England along with the
blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with
Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which con
? ? ? ? 228 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
solidated and married the liberties and the interests
of the two nations forever, - could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to France?
Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind
of contumely, from the country which that family of
deliverers had so often rescued from slavery, and
obliged to live in exile in another country, which
owes its liberty to his house?
Would Keppel have heard with patience that the
conduct to be held on such occasions was to become
short by the knees to the faction of the homicides, to
entreat them quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of
war should drive them from their first wicked and
unprovoked invasion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the security of that which under a foreign name is the most precious part of England?
What would he have said, if it was even proposed
that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a
barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance'to protect her against any species of rule that might be
erected or even be restored in France) should be
formed into a republic under her influence and dependent upon her power?
But above all, what would he have said, if he had
heard it made a matter of accusation against me, by
his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high
distinction to myself, (as from pride I might, but from
justice I dare not,) he would have snatched his share
of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a
dying convulsion to his end.
It would be a most arrogant presumption in me
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 229
to assume to myself the glory of what belongs to his
Majesty, and to his ministers, and to his Parliament,
and to the far greater majority of his faithful people:
but had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were
determined to be guided by my advice, and to follow
it implicitly, then I should have been the sole author
of a war. But it should have been a war on my ideas
and my principles. However, let his Grace think as
he may of my demerits with regard to the war with
Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone.
He never shall, with the smallest color of reason,
accuse me of being the author of a peace with Regicide. - But that is high matter, and ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment as what
may belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford.
I have the honor to be, &c.
EDMUND BURKE.
? ? ? ? THREE LETTERS
ADDRESSED TO
A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT, ON THE
PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE.
1796-7.
? ? ? ? LETTER I.
()N THE OVERTURES OF PEACE.
M Y DEAR SIR,- Our last conversation, though
not in the tone of absolute despondency, was
far from cheerful. We could not easily account for
some unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The disastrous events which
have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken,
funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to
have no end, -- these were not the principal causes
of our dejection. We feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to oppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud
and great, and great because they were proud, a
change in the national spirit is the most terrible of
all revolutions.
I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the
intricate plot which saddens and perplexes the awful
drama of Providence now acting on the moral theatre
of the world. Whether for thought or for action,
I am at the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of its orbit the nation
with which we are carried along moves at this
instant'it is not easy to conjecture. It may, per
? ? ? ? 234 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
haps, be far advanced in its aphelion, -but when
to return?
Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the
conjectural world, our business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the worse, by the
wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon men and human affairs, it is of no small
moment to distinguish things of accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered. It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation from our course. I am not
quite of the mind of those speculators who seem
assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of
things, all states have the same periods of infancy,
manhood, and decrepitude that are found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sort
rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn
than supply analogies from whence to reason. The
objects which are attempted to be forced into an
analogy are not found in the same classes of existence. Individuals are physical beings, subject to
laws universal and invariable. The immediate cause
acting in these laws may be obscure: the general
results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths are not physical, but moral essences.
They are artificial combinations, and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the
human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the
laws which necessarily influence the stability of that
kind of work made by that kind of agent. There is
not in the physical order (with which they do not
appear to hold any assignable connection) a distinct
cause by which any of those fabrics must necessarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, in my opinion, does
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 235
the moral world produce anything more determinate
on that subject than what may serve as an amusement (liberal, indeed, and ingenious, but still only
an amusement) for speculative men. I doubt whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if
ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure
theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect
the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the
operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure, and much more
difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend
to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a
community.
It is often impossible, in these political inquiries,
to find any proportion between the apparent force
of any moral causes we may assign and their known
operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up
that operation to mere chance, or, more piously,
(perhaps more rationally,) to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.
We have seen states of considerable duration, which
for ages have remained nearly as they have begun,
and could hardly be said to ebb or flow. Some
appear to have spent their vigor at their commencement. Some have blazed out in their glory a little
before their extinction. The meridian of some has
been the most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them
seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace
and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They
have begun a new course and opened a new reckon
ing, and even in the depths of their calamity and on
? ? ? ? 236 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
the very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this
has happened without any apparent previous change
in the general circumstances which had brought on
their distress. The death of a man at a critical
juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have
brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation.
A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an
inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of
Nature.
Such, and often influenced by such causes, has
commonly been the fate of monarchies of long duration. They have their ebbs and their flows. This
has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of
France. There have been times in which no power
has ever been brought so low. Few have ever flourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that power had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not only powerful,
but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the
monarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from
being preceded by any exterior symptoms of decline.
The interior were not visible to every eye; and a
thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what the most clear-sighted were not able to
discern nor the most provident to divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was a
kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the
crown, which usually adds to government strength
and authority at home. The crown seemed then to
have obtained some of the most splendid objects of
state ambition. None of the Continental powers of
Europe were the enemies of France. They were all
either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 237
with her; and in those who kept the most aloof
there was little appearance of jealousy, - of animosity there was no appearance at all. The British nation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to all appearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting off a very large and by
far the most growing part of her empire. In that its
acme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high
and palmy state of. the monarchy of France, it fell to
the ground without a struggle. It fell without any
of those vices in the monarch wlich have sometimes
been the causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which
existed, without any visible effect on the state, in the
highest degree in many other princes, and, far from
destroying their power, had only left some slight
stains on their character. The financial difficulties
were only pretexts and instruments of those who
accomplished the ruin of that monarchy; they were
not the causes of it.
Deprived of the old government, deprived in a
manner of all government, France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared
more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers,
than to be the scourge and terror of them all: but
out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France
has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a
far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have
overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising
all common maxims and all common means, that
hideous phantom overpowered those who could not
believe it was possible she could at all exist, except
? ? ? ? 238 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
on the principles which habit rather than Nature had
persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary modes of
action. But the constitution of any political being,
as well as that of any physical being, ought to be
known, before one can venture to say what is fit for
its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the
new Republic. That bankruptcy,-the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned for the fall
of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened
her traffic with the world.
The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved,
and famished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course, from the wildest anarchy to
the sternest despotism, has actually conquered the
finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to them, except
that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a display of their imbecility and meanness.
Even in their greatest military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem not to hope,
they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of
what subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition
is only to be admitted to a more favored class in the
order of servitude under that domineering power.
This seems the temper of the day. At first the
French force was too much despised. Now it is too
much dreaded. As inconsiderate courage has given
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 239
way to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that,
through the medium of deliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude. Who knows
whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and
the revival of high sentiment, spurning away the, delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory,
may not yet drive us to that generous despair which
has often subdued distempers in the state for which
no remedy could be found in the wisest councils?
Other great states having been without any regular, certain course of elevation or decline, we may
hope that the British fortune may fluctuate also; because the public mind, which greatly influences that
fortune, may have its changes. We are therefore
never authorized to abandon our country to its fate,
or to act or advise as if it had no resource. There
is no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means
threaten to fail, that no others can spring up. Whilst
our heart is whole, it will find means, or make them.
The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy to the state. Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume that it will cease instantly to beat. The public must never be regarded as incurable. I remember, in the beginning of what has
lately been called the Seven Years' War, that an eloquent writer and ingenious speculator, Dr.
Brown,
upon some reverses which happened in the beginning
of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the
people of England had been totally changed, and that
a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that
work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the
light people of this country, (who were and are light,
? ? ? ? 240 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
but who were not and are not effeminate,) that we
had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices.
Pythagoras could hot be more pleased with his lead-.
ing discovery. But whilst, in that splenetic mood,
we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation,
of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which
every man lost his particular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper,whilst, as in the Alps, goitre kept goitre in countenance, - whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct confession of our inferiority to France, and
whilst many, very many, were ready to act upon a
sense of that inferiority,- a few months effected a
total change in our variable minds. We emerged
from the gulf of that speculative despondency, and
were buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigor. Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius
soar with a prouder preeminence over France, than
at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been
at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the good people of this kingdom.
For one, (if they be properly treated,) I despair
neither of the public fortune nor of the public mind.
There is much to be done, undoubtedly, and much to
be retrieved. We must walk in new ways, or we can
never encounter our enemy in his devious march.
We are not at an end of our struggle, nor near it.
Let us not deceive ourselves: we are at the begin
ning of great troubles. I readily acknowledge thal
the state of public affairs is infinitely more unprom
ising than at the period I have just now alluded to;
and the position of all the powers of Europe, in relation to us, and in relation to each other, is more in
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 241
tricate and critical beyond all comparison. Difficult
indeed is our situation. In all situations of difficulty, men will be influenced in the part they take, not only by the reason of the case, but by the peculiar
turn of their own character. The same ways to
safety do not present themselves to all men, nor to
the same men in different tempers. There is a cou
rageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile pru
dence, the result, not of caution, but of fear. Under
misfortunes, it often happens that the nerves of the
understanding are so relaxed, the pressing peril of
the hour so completely confounds all the faculties,
that no future danger can be properly provided for,,
can be justly estimated, can be so much as fully seen.
The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished. An:
abject distrust of ourselves, an extravagant admira --
tion of the enemy, present us with no hope but in a,
compromise with his pride by a submission to his will.
This short plan of policy is the only counsel which
will obtain a hearing. We plunge into a dark gulf
with all the rash precipitation of fear. The nature of
courage is, without a question, to be conversant with
danger: but in the palpable night of their terrors,
men under consternation suppose, not that it is the
danger which by a sure instinct calls out the courage
to resist it, but that it is the courage which produces
the danger. They therefore seek for a refuge from
their fears in the fears themselves, and consider a
temporizing meanness as the only source of safety.
The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely
be exact, never universal. I do not deny, that, in
small, truckling states, a timely compromise with
power has often been the means, and the only means,
of drawling out their puny existence; but a great
VOL. V. 16
? ? ? ? 242 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
state is too much envied, too much dreaded, to find
safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are
things not to be begged; they must be commanded:
and they who supplicate for mercy from others can
never hope for justice through themselves. What
justice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy,
depends upon his character; and that they ought well
to know before they implicitly confide.
Much controversy there has been in Parliament,
and not a little amongst us out of doors, about the
instrumental means of this nation towards the maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights.
On the most elaborate and correct detail of facts, the
result seems to be, that at no time has the wealth and
power of Great Britain been so considerable as it is at
this very perilous moment. We haye a vast interest
to preserve, and we possess great means of preserving it: but it is to be remembered that the artificer
may be incumbered by his tools, and that resources
may be among impediments. If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor,
then wealth is in its place and has its use; but if this
order is changed, and honor is to be sacrificed to the
conservation of riches, riches, which have neither eyes
nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot
long survive the being of their vivifying powers, their
legitimate masters, and their potent protectors. If
we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free:
if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. We
are bought by the enemy with the treasure from our
own coffers. Too great a sense of the value of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, as well as the certain ruin of interests of a su
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 243
perior order. Often has a man lost his all because he
would not submit to hazard all in defending it. A
display of our wealth before robbers is not the way
to restrain their boldness or to lessen their rapacity.
This display is made, I know, to persuade the people
of England that thereby we shall awe the enemy, and
improve the terms of our capitulation: it is made,
not that we should fight with more animation, but
that we should supplicate with better hopes. We are
mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who
never regarded our contest as a measuring and
weighing of purses. He is the Gaul that puts his
sword into the scale. He is more tempted with our
wealth as booty than terrified with it as power. But
let us be rich or poor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false or this is true, that,
where the essential public force (of which money is
but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict
between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects
must have an infinite advantage over that which is
resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance
beyond a certain point. Humanly speaking, that
people which bounds its efforts only with its being
must give the law to that nation which will not push
its opposition beyond its convenience.
If we look to nothing but our domestic condition,
the state of the nation is full even to plethora; but
if we imagine that this country can long maintain
its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane. I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves the discussion which perhaps
? ? ? ? 244 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannot arrange
with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without
abandoning the interest of mankind. If we look only
to our own petty peculium in the war, we have had
some advantages, - advantages ambiguous in their
nature, and dearly bought. We have not in the
slightest degree impaired the strength of the common
enemy in any one of those points in which his particular force consists, - at the same time that new enemies to ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of the wrecks and fragments of
the general confederacy. So far as to the selfish part.
As composing a part of the community of Europe,
and interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a
state of things more doubtful and perplexing. When
Louis the Fourteenth had made himself master of one
of the largest and most important provinces of Spain,
- when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and
was thundering at the gates of Turin,- when he had
mastered almost all Germany on this side the Rhine,
-when he was on the point of ruining the august
fabric of the Empire, -- when, with the Elector of
Bavaria in his alliance, hardly anything interposed
between him and Vienna, -- when the Turk hung
with a mighty force over the Empire on the other
side,- I do not know that in the beginning of 1704
(that is, in the third year of the renovated war with
Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so
truly alarming. To England it certainly was not.
Holland (and Holland is a matter to England of
value inestimable) was then powerful, was then independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then
full of energy and spirit. But the great resource of
Europe was in England: not in a sort of England
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 245
detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can
be no better, whilst all the sources of that power, and
of every sort of power, are precarious,) but in that
sort of England who considered herself as embodied
with Europe, but in that sort of England who,
sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of
mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom,
that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least
effect or duration can exist against France, of which
England is not only a part, but the head, so neither
can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body of Christendom.
Our account of the war, as a war of communion, to
the very point in which we began to throw out lures,
oglings, and glances for peace, was a war of disaster,
and of little else. The independent advantages obtained by us at the beginning of the war, and which
were made at the expense of that common cause, if
they deceive us about our largest and our surest
interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest
losses.
The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest,
(and perhaps amongst the foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error: that
it was in our power to make peace with this monster
of a state, whenever we chose to forget the crimes
that made it great and the designs that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing to resist was the sure way to be secure. This " pale cast of thought" sicklied over all their enterprises, and
turned all their politics awry. They could not, or
rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal
? ? ? ? 246 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that kind of
being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms
that do not imply an inability hereafter to resist its
designs. This great, prolific error (I mean that peace
was always in our power) has been the cause that
rendered the Allies indifferent about the direction of
the war, and persuaded them that they might always
risk a choice and even a change in its -objects. They
seldom improved any advantage, -- hoping that the
enemy, affected by it, would make a proffer of peace.
Hence it was that all their early victories have been
followed almost immediately with the usual effects of
a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtained by the
Regicides have been followed by the consequences
that were natural. The discomfitures which the
Republic of Assassins has suffered have uniformly
called forth new exertions, which not only repaired
old losses, but prepared new conquests. The losses
of the Allies, on the contrary, (no provision having
been made on the speculation of such an event,) have
been followed by desertion, by dismay, by disunion,
by a dereliction of their policy, by a flight from their
principles, by an admiration of the enemy, by mutual accusations, by a distrust in every member of the Alliance of its fellow, of its cause, its power, and
its courage.
Great difficulties in consequence of our erroneous
policy, as I have said, press upon every side of us.
Far from desiring to conceal or even to palliate the
evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as
my foundation, that never greater existed. In a moment when sudden panic is apprehended, it may be
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 247
wise for a while to conceal some great public disaster, or to reveal it by degrees, until the minds of the
people have time to be re-collected, that their understanding may have leisure to rally, and that more
steady councils may prevent their doing something
desperate under the first impressions of rage or terror. But with regard to a general state of things,
growing out of events and causes already known in
the gross, there is no piety in the fraud that covers
its true nature; because nothing but erroneous resolutions can be the result of false representations.
Those measures, which in common distress might be
available, in greater are no better than playing with
the evil. That the effort may bear a proportion to
the exigence, it is fit it should be known, --known
in its quality, in its extent, and in all the circumstances which attend it. Great reverses of fortune there
have been, and great embarrassments in council: a
principled regicide enemy possessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for the rest;
within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority,
whilst a cry is raised against it, as if it were the most
ferocious of all despotism. A worse phenomenon:
our government disowned by the most efficient member of its tribunals, -- ill-supported by any of their
constituent parts,- and the highest tribunal of all
(from causes not for our present purpose to examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply the want of every other
court. Public prosecutions are become little better
than schools for treason, - of no use but to improve
the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion,
or to show with what complete impunity men may
? ? ? ? 248 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety
assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything
is secure, except what the laws have made sacred;
everything is tameness and languor that is not fury
and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre
prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the
physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the
disease. * The doctor of the Constitution, pretending
to underrate what he is not able to contend with,
shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and
questions the salutary, but critical, terrors of the
cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even
from his defeat, and covers impotence under the mask
of lenity. He praises the moderation of the laws, as
in his hands he sees them baffled and despised. Is
all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and legible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter. Dead and
putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent
to infect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and
of equity and justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,)
ought to be severe, and awful too, - or the words of
menace, whether written on the parchment roll of
England or cut into the brazen tablet of Rome, will
excite nothing but contempt. How comes it that in
all the state prosecutions of magnitude, from the
Revolution to within these two or three years, the
crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts? Whence this alarming change?
By a connection easily felt, and not impossible to be
traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have
* " Mussabat tacito medicina timore. "
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 249
their correspondence and consent. They who bow
to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue
the conspirator at home. It is impossible not to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life. The promise of the
year is blasted and shrivelled and burned up before
them. Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest
of our law is no more than stubble. It is in the
nature of these eruptive diseases in the state to sink
in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady
remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest
degree mitigated in its malignity, though it waits
the favorable moment of a freer communication with
the source of regicide to exert and to increase its
force.
Is it that the people are changed, that the common
wealth cannot be protected by its laws? I hardly
think it. On the contrary, I conceive that these
things happen because men are not changed, but remain always what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be, when abandoned
to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or
control: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation
in prosperity; to despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present
inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow
and to bow to fortune; to admire successful, though
wicked enterprise, and to imitate what we admire; to
? ? ? ? 250 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
contemn the government which announces danger
from sacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in
their infancy and their struggle, but which finds
nothing that can alarm in their adult state, and in
the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a mass we cannot be left to ourselves. We
must have leaders. If none will undertake to lead us
right, we shall find guides who will contrive to conduct us to shame and ruin.
We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not
with an ordinary community, which is hostile or
friendly as passion or as interest may veer about,
not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at
war with a system which by its essence is inimical to
all other governments, and which makes peace or war
as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country. To us it
is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel. It has one
foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.
Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally
prevail. Nothing can so completely ruin any of the
old governments, ours in particular, as the acknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiority in this new power. This acknowledgment
we make, if, in a bad or doubtful situation of our affairs, we solicit peace, or if we yield to the modes of new humiliation in which alone she is content to give
us an hearing. By that means the terms cannot be
of our choosing, - no, not in any part.
It is laid in the unalterable constitution of things,
-- None can aspire to act greatly but those who are
? ? ? ? LETTER 251
of force greatly to suffer. They who make their arrangements in the first run of misadventure, and in a
temper of mind the common fruit of disappointment
and dismay, put a seal on their calamities. To their
power they take a security against any favors which
they might hope from the usual inconstancy of fortune. I am therefore, my dear friend, invariably of
your opinion, (though full of respect for those who
think differently,) that neither the time chosen for
it, nor the manner of soliciting a negotiation, were
properly considered,- even though 1 had allowed (I
hardly shall allow) that with the horde of Regicides
we could by any selection of time or use of means
obtain anything at all deserving the name of peace.
In one point we are lucky. The Regicide has received our advances with scorn. We have an enemy
to whose virtues we can owe nothing, but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices.
We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution. The haughtiness by which the proud repel
us has this of good in it, - that, in making us keep
our distance, they must keep their distance too. In
the present case, the pride of the Regicide may be
our safety. He has given time for our reason to operate, and for British dignity to recover from its surprise. From first to last he has rejected all our advances. Far as we have gone, he has still left a way open to our retreat.
There is always an augury to be taken of what a
peace is likely to be from the preliminary steps that
are made to bring it about. We may gather something from the time in which the first overtures are
made, from the quarter whence they come, from the
manner in which they are received. These discover
? ? ? ? 252 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
the temper of the parties. If your enemy offers peace
in the moment of success, it indicates that he is satisfied with something.
trace of honor and virtue ill it, things had taken a
different turn from what they did, I should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less good-will
and more pride, though with far other feelings, than
I partook of the general flow of national joy that
attended the justice that was done to his virtue.
Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age,
which loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in retrospect
alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds,
the consolation of friendship, in those only whom
we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord
Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it so
much as on the first day when I was attacked in
the House of Lords.
Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen
in its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension
to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have
told him that the favor of that gracious prince who
had honored his virtues with the government of the
navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under
his rudest trials. He would have told him, that, to
whomever else these reproaches might be becoming,
they were not decorous in his near kindred. He
would have told him, that, when men in that rank
lose decorum, they lose everything.
On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the
public loss of him in this awful crisis! --I speak
from much knowledge of the person: he never woul(l
lhave listened to any compromise *vith the rabble rot
? ? ? ? 224 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
of this sans-culotterie of France. His goodness of
heart, his reason, his taste, his public duty, his
principles, his prejudices, would have repelled him
forever from all connection with that horrid medley
of madness, vice, impiety, and crime.
Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent,
and one of birth. Their interest and their glory are
the same; and his mind was capacious of both. His
family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was
of the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can
boast, among a people renowned above all others
for love of their native land. Though it was never
shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel
was something high. It was a wild stock of pride,
on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the
milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he
was not disinclined to augment it with new honors.
He valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind, - conceiving that a
man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing,
but everything in what went before and what was to
come after him. Without much speculation, but by
the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the
dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by any
possibility long subsist without a body of some kind
or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain that
connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with
Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made, without some such order of
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 225
things as might, through a series of time, afford a
rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing
else can protect it against the levity of courts and the
greater levity of the multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary
reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded
absurdity, fit only for those detestable " fools aspiring
to be knaves" who began to forge in 1789 the false
money of the French Constitution; that it is one fatal
objection to all new fancied and new fabricated republics, (among a people who, once possessing such an.
advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it,)
that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that
cannot be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken
from it or aggregated to it; but the thing itself is matter of inveterate opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.
I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine
the future out of what we collect from the past, no
person living would look with more scorn and horror
on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate attainder passed on all
their posterity, by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de Noailles, and the false P6rigords, and the long et cetera
of the perfidious sans-culottes of the court, who, like
demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and
inverted ambition, abdicated their dignities, disowned
their families, betrayed the most sacred of all trusts,
and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and
VOL. V. 15
? ? ? ? 226 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
all the cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their country. For
the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves he
would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who
by their means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would
leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind,
for any such sensation. We are not made at once
to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.
Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear
to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave
nobility of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured
out, had, more than all the canals, meres, and inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race, - in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to whose sceptred pride they
had opposed an elevation of soul that surmounted and
overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness
of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?
Could he with patience bear that the children of
that nobility who would have deluged their country
and given it to the sea rather than submit to Louis
the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory,
when his arms were conducted by the Turennes, by
the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers, when his councils
were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when
his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the
D'Aguesseaus, - that these should be given up to the
cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas,
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 227
and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides,
robbers, and revolutionary judges, that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have
poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest and
at once the most destructive of the classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have
laid waste the fairest part of the world?
Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the
virtuous patricians, that happy union of the noble
and the burgher, who with signal prudence and integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protection?
Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should
totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy founded on the spurious
rights of man?
He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well
versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not
have heard with patience that the country of Grotius,
the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new
code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the
presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen
rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue
and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry
of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.
Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau,
who was himself given to England along with the
blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with
Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which con
? ? ? ? 228 LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
solidated and married the liberties and the interests
of the two nations forever, - could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to France?
Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind
of contumely, from the country which that family of
deliverers had so often rescued from slavery, and
obliged to live in exile in another country, which
owes its liberty to his house?
Would Keppel have heard with patience that the
conduct to be held on such occasions was to become
short by the knees to the faction of the homicides, to
entreat them quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of
war should drive them from their first wicked and
unprovoked invasion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the security of that which under a foreign name is the most precious part of England?
What would he have said, if it was even proposed
that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a
barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance'to protect her against any species of rule that might be
erected or even be restored in France) should be
formed into a republic under her influence and dependent upon her power?
But above all, what would he have said, if he had
heard it made a matter of accusation against me, by
his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high
distinction to myself, (as from pride I might, but from
justice I dare not,) he would have snatched his share
of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a
dying convulsion to his end.
It would be a most arrogant presumption in me
? ? ? ? ON THE ATTACKS UPON HIS PENSION. 229
to assume to myself the glory of what belongs to his
Majesty, and to his ministers, and to his Parliament,
and to the far greater majority of his faithful people:
but had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were
determined to be guided by my advice, and to follow
it implicitly, then I should have been the sole author
of a war. But it should have been a war on my ideas
and my principles. However, let his Grace think as
he may of my demerits with regard to the war with
Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone.
He never shall, with the smallest color of reason,
accuse me of being the author of a peace with Regicide. - But that is high matter, and ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment as what
may belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford.
I have the honor to be, &c.
EDMUND BURKE.
? ? ? ? THREE LETTERS
ADDRESSED TO
A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT, ON THE
PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE.
1796-7.
? ? ? ? LETTER I.
()N THE OVERTURES OF PEACE.
M Y DEAR SIR,- Our last conversation, though
not in the tone of absolute despondency, was
far from cheerful. We could not easily account for
some unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The disastrous events which
have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken,
funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to
have no end, -- these were not the principal causes
of our dejection. We feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to oppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud
and great, and great because they were proud, a
change in the national spirit is the most terrible of
all revolutions.
I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the
intricate plot which saddens and perplexes the awful
drama of Providence now acting on the moral theatre
of the world. Whether for thought or for action,
I am at the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of its orbit the nation
with which we are carried along moves at this
instant'it is not easy to conjecture. It may, per
? ? ? ? 234 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
haps, be far advanced in its aphelion, -but when
to return?
Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the
conjectural world, our business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the worse, by the
wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon men and human affairs, it is of no small
moment to distinguish things of accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered. It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation from our course. I am not
quite of the mind of those speculators who seem
assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of
things, all states have the same periods of infancy,
manhood, and decrepitude that are found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sort
rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn
than supply analogies from whence to reason. The
objects which are attempted to be forced into an
analogy are not found in the same classes of existence. Individuals are physical beings, subject to
laws universal and invariable. The immediate cause
acting in these laws may be obscure: the general
results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths are not physical, but moral essences.
They are artificial combinations, and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the
human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the
laws which necessarily influence the stability of that
kind of work made by that kind of agent. There is
not in the physical order (with which they do not
appear to hold any assignable connection) a distinct
cause by which any of those fabrics must necessarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, in my opinion, does
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 235
the moral world produce anything more determinate
on that subject than what may serve as an amusement (liberal, indeed, and ingenious, but still only
an amusement) for speculative men. I doubt whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if
ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure
theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect
the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the
operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure, and much more
difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend
to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a
community.
It is often impossible, in these political inquiries,
to find any proportion between the apparent force
of any moral causes we may assign and their known
operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up
that operation to mere chance, or, more piously,
(perhaps more rationally,) to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.
We have seen states of considerable duration, which
for ages have remained nearly as they have begun,
and could hardly be said to ebb or flow. Some
appear to have spent their vigor at their commencement. Some have blazed out in their glory a little
before their extinction. The meridian of some has
been the most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them
seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace
and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They
have begun a new course and opened a new reckon
ing, and even in the depths of their calamity and on
? ? ? ? 236 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
the very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this
has happened without any apparent previous change
in the general circumstances which had brought on
their distress. The death of a man at a critical
juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have
brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation.
A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an
inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of
Nature.
Such, and often influenced by such causes, has
commonly been the fate of monarchies of long duration. They have their ebbs and their flows. This
has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of
France. There have been times in which no power
has ever been brought so low. Few have ever flourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that power had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not only powerful,
but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the
monarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from
being preceded by any exterior symptoms of decline.
The interior were not visible to every eye; and a
thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what the most clear-sighted were not able to
discern nor the most provident to divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was a
kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the
crown, which usually adds to government strength
and authority at home. The crown seemed then to
have obtained some of the most splendid objects of
state ambition. None of the Continental powers of
Europe were the enemies of France. They were all
either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 237
with her; and in those who kept the most aloof
there was little appearance of jealousy, - of animosity there was no appearance at all. The British nation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to all appearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting off a very large and by
far the most growing part of her empire. In that its
acme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high
and palmy state of. the monarchy of France, it fell to
the ground without a struggle. It fell without any
of those vices in the monarch wlich have sometimes
been the causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which
existed, without any visible effect on the state, in the
highest degree in many other princes, and, far from
destroying their power, had only left some slight
stains on their character. The financial difficulties
were only pretexts and instruments of those who
accomplished the ruin of that monarchy; they were
not the causes of it.
Deprived of the old government, deprived in a
manner of all government, France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared
more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers,
than to be the scourge and terror of them all: but
out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France
has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a
far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have
overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising
all common maxims and all common means, that
hideous phantom overpowered those who could not
believe it was possible she could at all exist, except
? ? ? ? 238 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
on the principles which habit rather than Nature had
persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary modes of
action. But the constitution of any political being,
as well as that of any physical being, ought to be
known, before one can venture to say what is fit for
its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the
new Republic. That bankruptcy,-the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned for the fall
of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened
her traffic with the world.
The Republic of Regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved,
and famished people, passing, with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course, from the wildest anarchy to
the sternest despotism, has actually conquered the
finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to them, except
that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a display of their imbecility and meanness.
Even in their greatest military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem not to hope,
they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of
what subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition
is only to be admitted to a more favored class in the
order of servitude under that domineering power.
This seems the temper of the day. At first the
French force was too much despised. Now it is too
much dreaded. As inconsiderate courage has given
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 239
way to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that,
through the medium of deliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude. Who knows
whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and
the revival of high sentiment, spurning away the, delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory,
may not yet drive us to that generous despair which
has often subdued distempers in the state for which
no remedy could be found in the wisest councils?
Other great states having been without any regular, certain course of elevation or decline, we may
hope that the British fortune may fluctuate also; because the public mind, which greatly influences that
fortune, may have its changes. We are therefore
never authorized to abandon our country to its fate,
or to act or advise as if it had no resource. There
is no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means
threaten to fail, that no others can spring up. Whilst
our heart is whole, it will find means, or make them.
The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy to the state. Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume that it will cease instantly to beat. The public must never be regarded as incurable. I remember, in the beginning of what has
lately been called the Seven Years' War, that an eloquent writer and ingenious speculator, Dr.
Brown,
upon some reverses which happened in the beginning
of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the
people of England had been totally changed, and that
a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that
work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the
light people of this country, (who were and are light,
? ? ? ? 240 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
but who were not and are not effeminate,) that we
had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices.
Pythagoras could hot be more pleased with his lead-.
ing discovery. But whilst, in that splenetic mood,
we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation,
of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which
every man lost his particular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper,whilst, as in the Alps, goitre kept goitre in countenance, - whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct confession of our inferiority to France, and
whilst many, very many, were ready to act upon a
sense of that inferiority,- a few months effected a
total change in our variable minds. We emerged
from the gulf of that speculative despondency, and
were buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigor. Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius
soar with a prouder preeminence over France, than
at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been
at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the good people of this kingdom.
For one, (if they be properly treated,) I despair
neither of the public fortune nor of the public mind.
There is much to be done, undoubtedly, and much to
be retrieved. We must walk in new ways, or we can
never encounter our enemy in his devious march.
We are not at an end of our struggle, nor near it.
Let us not deceive ourselves: we are at the begin
ning of great troubles. I readily acknowledge thal
the state of public affairs is infinitely more unprom
ising than at the period I have just now alluded to;
and the position of all the powers of Europe, in relation to us, and in relation to each other, is more in
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 241
tricate and critical beyond all comparison. Difficult
indeed is our situation. In all situations of difficulty, men will be influenced in the part they take, not only by the reason of the case, but by the peculiar
turn of their own character. The same ways to
safety do not present themselves to all men, nor to
the same men in different tempers. There is a cou
rageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile pru
dence, the result, not of caution, but of fear. Under
misfortunes, it often happens that the nerves of the
understanding are so relaxed, the pressing peril of
the hour so completely confounds all the faculties,
that no future danger can be properly provided for,,
can be justly estimated, can be so much as fully seen.
The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished. An:
abject distrust of ourselves, an extravagant admira --
tion of the enemy, present us with no hope but in a,
compromise with his pride by a submission to his will.
This short plan of policy is the only counsel which
will obtain a hearing. We plunge into a dark gulf
with all the rash precipitation of fear. The nature of
courage is, without a question, to be conversant with
danger: but in the palpable night of their terrors,
men under consternation suppose, not that it is the
danger which by a sure instinct calls out the courage
to resist it, but that it is the courage which produces
the danger. They therefore seek for a refuge from
their fears in the fears themselves, and consider a
temporizing meanness as the only source of safety.
The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely
be exact, never universal. I do not deny, that, in
small, truckling states, a timely compromise with
power has often been the means, and the only means,
of drawling out their puny existence; but a great
VOL. V. 16
? ? ? ? 242 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
state is too much envied, too much dreaded, to find
safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are
things not to be begged; they must be commanded:
and they who supplicate for mercy from others can
never hope for justice through themselves. What
justice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy,
depends upon his character; and that they ought well
to know before they implicitly confide.
Much controversy there has been in Parliament,
and not a little amongst us out of doors, about the
instrumental means of this nation towards the maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights.
On the most elaborate and correct detail of facts, the
result seems to be, that at no time has the wealth and
power of Great Britain been so considerable as it is at
this very perilous moment. We haye a vast interest
to preserve, and we possess great means of preserving it: but it is to be remembered that the artificer
may be incumbered by his tools, and that resources
may be among impediments. If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor,
then wealth is in its place and has its use; but if this
order is changed, and honor is to be sacrificed to the
conservation of riches, riches, which have neither eyes
nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot
long survive the being of their vivifying powers, their
legitimate masters, and their potent protectors. If
we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free:
if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. We
are bought by the enemy with the treasure from our
own coffers. Too great a sense of the value of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, as well as the certain ruin of interests of a su
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 243
perior order. Often has a man lost his all because he
would not submit to hazard all in defending it. A
display of our wealth before robbers is not the way
to restrain their boldness or to lessen their rapacity.
This display is made, I know, to persuade the people
of England that thereby we shall awe the enemy, and
improve the terms of our capitulation: it is made,
not that we should fight with more animation, but
that we should supplicate with better hopes. We are
mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who
never regarded our contest as a measuring and
weighing of purses. He is the Gaul that puts his
sword into the scale. He is more tempted with our
wealth as booty than terrified with it as power. But
let us be rich or poor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false or this is true, that,
where the essential public force (of which money is
but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict
between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects
must have an infinite advantage over that which is
resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance
beyond a certain point. Humanly speaking, that
people which bounds its efforts only with its being
must give the law to that nation which will not push
its opposition beyond its convenience.
If we look to nothing but our domestic condition,
the state of the nation is full even to plethora; but
if we imagine that this country can long maintain
its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane. I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves the discussion which perhaps
? ? ? ? 244 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannot arrange
with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without
abandoning the interest of mankind. If we look only
to our own petty peculium in the war, we have had
some advantages, - advantages ambiguous in their
nature, and dearly bought. We have not in the
slightest degree impaired the strength of the common
enemy in any one of those points in which his particular force consists, - at the same time that new enemies to ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of the wrecks and fragments of
the general confederacy. So far as to the selfish part.
As composing a part of the community of Europe,
and interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a
state of things more doubtful and perplexing. When
Louis the Fourteenth had made himself master of one
of the largest and most important provinces of Spain,
- when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and
was thundering at the gates of Turin,- when he had
mastered almost all Germany on this side the Rhine,
-when he was on the point of ruining the august
fabric of the Empire, -- when, with the Elector of
Bavaria in his alliance, hardly anything interposed
between him and Vienna, -- when the Turk hung
with a mighty force over the Empire on the other
side,- I do not know that in the beginning of 1704
(that is, in the third year of the renovated war with
Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so
truly alarming. To England it certainly was not.
Holland (and Holland is a matter to England of
value inestimable) was then powerful, was then independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then
full of energy and spirit. But the great resource of
Europe was in England: not in a sort of England
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 245
detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can
be no better, whilst all the sources of that power, and
of every sort of power, are precarious,) but in that
sort of England who considered herself as embodied
with Europe, but in that sort of England who,
sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of
mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom,
that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least
effect or duration can exist against France, of which
England is not only a part, but the head, so neither
can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body of Christendom.
Our account of the war, as a war of communion, to
the very point in which we began to throw out lures,
oglings, and glances for peace, was a war of disaster,
and of little else. The independent advantages obtained by us at the beginning of the war, and which
were made at the expense of that common cause, if
they deceive us about our largest and our surest
interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest
losses.
The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest,
(and perhaps amongst the foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error: that
it was in our power to make peace with this monster
of a state, whenever we chose to forget the crimes
that made it great and the designs that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing to resist was the sure way to be secure. This " pale cast of thought" sicklied over all their enterprises, and
turned all their politics awry. They could not, or
rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal
? ? ? ? 246 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that kind of
being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms
that do not imply an inability hereafter to resist its
designs. This great, prolific error (I mean that peace
was always in our power) has been the cause that
rendered the Allies indifferent about the direction of
the war, and persuaded them that they might always
risk a choice and even a change in its -objects. They
seldom improved any advantage, -- hoping that the
enemy, affected by it, would make a proffer of peace.
Hence it was that all their early victories have been
followed almost immediately with the usual effects of
a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtained by the
Regicides have been followed by the consequences
that were natural. The discomfitures which the
Republic of Assassins has suffered have uniformly
called forth new exertions, which not only repaired
old losses, but prepared new conquests. The losses
of the Allies, on the contrary, (no provision having
been made on the speculation of such an event,) have
been followed by desertion, by dismay, by disunion,
by a dereliction of their policy, by a flight from their
principles, by an admiration of the enemy, by mutual accusations, by a distrust in every member of the Alliance of its fellow, of its cause, its power, and
its courage.
Great difficulties in consequence of our erroneous
policy, as I have said, press upon every side of us.
Far from desiring to conceal or even to palliate the
evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as
my foundation, that never greater existed. In a moment when sudden panic is apprehended, it may be
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 247
wise for a while to conceal some great public disaster, or to reveal it by degrees, until the minds of the
people have time to be re-collected, that their understanding may have leisure to rally, and that more
steady councils may prevent their doing something
desperate under the first impressions of rage or terror. But with regard to a general state of things,
growing out of events and causes already known in
the gross, there is no piety in the fraud that covers
its true nature; because nothing but erroneous resolutions can be the result of false representations.
Those measures, which in common distress might be
available, in greater are no better than playing with
the evil. That the effort may bear a proportion to
the exigence, it is fit it should be known, --known
in its quality, in its extent, and in all the circumstances which attend it. Great reverses of fortune there
have been, and great embarrassments in council: a
principled regicide enemy possessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for the rest;
within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority,
whilst a cry is raised against it, as if it were the most
ferocious of all despotism. A worse phenomenon:
our government disowned by the most efficient member of its tribunals, -- ill-supported by any of their
constituent parts,- and the highest tribunal of all
(from causes not for our present purpose to examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply the want of every other
court. Public prosecutions are become little better
than schools for treason, - of no use but to improve
the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion,
or to show with what complete impunity men may
? ? ? ? 248 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety
assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything
is secure, except what the laws have made sacred;
everything is tameness and languor that is not fury
and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre
prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the
physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the
disease. * The doctor of the Constitution, pretending
to underrate what he is not able to contend with,
shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and
questions the salutary, but critical, terrors of the
cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even
from his defeat, and covers impotence under the mask
of lenity. He praises the moderation of the laws, as
in his hands he sees them baffled and despised. Is
all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and legible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter. Dead and
putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent
to infect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and
of equity and justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,)
ought to be severe, and awful too, - or the words of
menace, whether written on the parchment roll of
England or cut into the brazen tablet of Rome, will
excite nothing but contempt. How comes it that in
all the state prosecutions of magnitude, from the
Revolution to within these two or three years, the
crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts? Whence this alarming change?
By a connection easily felt, and not impossible to be
traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have
* " Mussabat tacito medicina timore. "
? ? ? ? LETTER I. 249
their correspondence and consent. They who bow
to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue
the conspirator at home. It is impossible not to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life. The promise of the
year is blasted and shrivelled and burned up before
them. Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest
of our law is no more than stubble. It is in the
nature of these eruptive diseases in the state to sink
in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady
remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest
degree mitigated in its malignity, though it waits
the favorable moment of a freer communication with
the source of regicide to exert and to increase its
force.
Is it that the people are changed, that the common
wealth cannot be protected by its laws? I hardly
think it. On the contrary, I conceive that these
things happen because men are not changed, but remain always what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be, when abandoned
to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or
control: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation
in prosperity; to despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present
inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow
and to bow to fortune; to admire successful, though
wicked enterprise, and to imitate what we admire; to
? ? ? ? 250 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
contemn the government which announces danger
from sacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in
their infancy and their struggle, but which finds
nothing that can alarm in their adult state, and in
the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a mass we cannot be left to ourselves. We
must have leaders. If none will undertake to lead us
right, we shall find guides who will contrive to conduct us to shame and ruin.
We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not
with an ordinary community, which is hostile or
friendly as passion or as interest may veer about,
not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at
war with a system which by its essence is inimical to
all other governments, and which makes peace or war
as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country. To us it
is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel. It has one
foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.
Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally
prevail. Nothing can so completely ruin any of the
old governments, ours in particular, as the acknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiority in this new power. This acknowledgment
we make, if, in a bad or doubtful situation of our affairs, we solicit peace, or if we yield to the modes of new humiliation in which alone she is content to give
us an hearing. By that means the terms cannot be
of our choosing, - no, not in any part.
It is laid in the unalterable constitution of things,
-- None can aspire to act greatly but those who are
? ? ? ? LETTER 251
of force greatly to suffer. They who make their arrangements in the first run of misadventure, and in a
temper of mind the common fruit of disappointment
and dismay, put a seal on their calamities. To their
power they take a security against any favors which
they might hope from the usual inconstancy of fortune. I am therefore, my dear friend, invariably of
your opinion, (though full of respect for those who
think differently,) that neither the time chosen for
it, nor the manner of soliciting a negotiation, were
properly considered,- even though 1 had allowed (I
hardly shall allow) that with the horde of Regicides
we could by any selection of time or use of means
obtain anything at all deserving the name of peace.
In one point we are lucky. The Regicide has received our advances with scorn. We have an enemy
to whose virtues we can owe nothing, but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices.
We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution. The haughtiness by which the proud repel
us has this of good in it, - that, in making us keep
our distance, they must keep their distance too. In
the present case, the pride of the Regicide may be
our safety. He has given time for our reason to operate, and for British dignity to recover from its surprise. From first to last he has rejected all our advances. Far as we have gone, he has still left a way open to our retreat.
There is always an augury to be taken of what a
peace is likely to be from the preliminary steps that
are made to bring it about. We may gather something from the time in which the first overtures are
made, from the quarter whence they come, from the
manner in which they are received. These discover
? ? ? ? 252 LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE.
the temper of the parties. If your enemy offers peace
in the moment of success, it indicates that he is satisfied with something.
