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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The press–

The army–

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

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

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

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

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

The manuscript copy of this Letter ends here

A

LETTER

TO

THE EMPRESS OF RUSSIA.

NOVEMBER 1, 1791

Madam,—The Comte de Woronzow, your Imperial Majesty's minister, and Mr. Fawkener, have informed me of the very gracious manner in which your Imperial Majesty, and, after your example, the Archduke and Archduchess, have condescended to accept my humble endeavors in the service of that cause which connects the rights and duties of sovereigns with the true interest and happiness of their people.

If, confiding in titles derived from your own goodness, I venture to address directly to your Imperial Majesty the expressions of my gratitude for so distinguished an honor, I hope it will not be thought a presumptuous intrusion. I hope, too, that the willing homage I pay to the high and ruling virtues which distinguish your Imperial Majesty, and which form the felicity of so large a part of the world, will not be looked upon as the language of adulation to power and greatness. In my humble situation, I can behold majesty in its splendor without being dazzled, and I am capable of respecting it in its fall.

It is, Madam, from my strong sense of what is due to dignity in undeserved misfortune, that I am led to felicitate your Imperial Majesty on the use you have lately made of your power. The princes and nobility of France, who from honor and duty, from blood and from principle, are attached to that unhappy crown, have experienced your favor and countenance; and there is no doubt that they will finally enjoy the full benefit of your protection. The generosity of your Imperial Majesty has induced you to take an interest in their cause; and your sagacity has made you perceive that in the case of the sovereign of France the cause of all sovereigns is tried,—that in the case of its church, the cause of all churches,—and that in the case of its nobility is tried the cause of all the respectable orders of all society, and even of society itself.

Your Imperial Majesty has sent your minister to reside where the crown of France, in this disastrous eclipse of royalty, can alone truly and freely be represented, that is, in its royal blood,—where alone the nation can be represented, that is, in its natural and inherent dignity. A throne cannot be represented by a prison. The honor of a nation cannot be represented by an assembly which disgraces and degrades it: at Coblentz only the king and the nation of France are to be found.

Your Imperial Majesty, who reigns and lives for glory, has nobly and wisely disdained to associate your crown with a faction which has for its object the subversion of all thrones.

You have not recognized this universal public enemy as a part of the system of Europe. You have refused to sully the lustre of your empire by any communion with a body of fanatical usurpers and tyrants, drawn out of the dregs of society, and exalted to their evil eminence by the enormity of their crimes,—an assemblage of tyrants, wholly destitute of any distinguished qualification in a single person amongst them, that can command reverence from our reason, or seduce it from our prejudices. These enemies of sovereigns, if at all acknowledged, must be acknowledged on account of that enmity alone: they have nothing else to recommend them.