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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultuHorrida contremuere sub altis ætheris auris,In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendumOmnibus 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.