The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)

It is no less striking, that the same obvious reflection should not occur to those gentlemen who conducted the opposition to government. But their thoughts were turned another way. They seem to have been so entirely occupied with the defence of the French Directory, so very eager in finding recriminatory; precedents to justify every act of its intolerable insolence, so animated in their accusations of ministry for not having at the very outset made concessions proportioned to the dignity of the great victorious power we had offended, that everything concerning the sacrifice in this business of national honor, and of the most fundamental principles in the policy of negotiation, seemed wholly to have escaped them. To this fatal hour, the contention in Parliament appeared in another form, and was animated by another spirit. For three hundred years and more, we have had wars with what stood as government in France. In all that period, the language of ministers, whether of boast or of apology, was, that they had left nothing undone for the assertion of the national honor,—the opposition, whether patriotically or factiously, contending that the ministers had been oblivious of the national glory, and had made improper sacrifices of that public interest which they were bound not only to preserve, but by all fair methods to augment. This total change of tone on both sides of your House forms itself no inconsiderable revolution; and I am afraid it prognosticates others of still greater importance. The ministers exhausted the stores of their eloquence in demonstrating that they had quitted the safe, beaten highway of treaty between independent powers,—that, to pacify the enemy, they had made every sacrifice of the national dignity,—and that they had offered to immolate at the same shrine the most valuable of the national acquisitions. The opposition insisted that the victims were not fat nor fair enough to be offered on the altars of blasphemed Regicide; and it was inferred from thence, that the sacrifical ministers, (who were a sort of intruders in the worship of the new divinity,) in their schismatical devotion, had discovered more of hypocrisy than zeal. They charged them with a concealed resolution to persevere in what these gentlemen have (in perfect consistency, indeed, with themselves, but most irreconcilably with fact and reason) called an unjust and impolitic war.

That day was, I fear, the fatal term of local patriotism. On that day, I fear, there was an end of that narrow scheme of relations called our country, with all its pride, its prejudices, and its partial affections. All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France. It is no longer an object of terror, the aggrandizement of a new power which teaches as a professor that philanthropy in the chair, whilst it propagates by arms and establishes by conquest the comprehensive system of universal fraternity. In what light is all this viewed in a great assembly? The party which takes the lead there has no longer any apprehensions, except those that arise from not being admitted to the closest and most confidential connections with the metropolis of that fraternity. That reigning party no longer touches on its favorite subject, the display of those horrors that must attend the existence of a power with such dispositions and principles, seated in the heart of Europe. It is satisfied to find some loose, ambiguous expressions in its former declarations, which may set it free from its professions and engagements. It always speaks of peace with the Regicides as a great and an undoubted blessing, and such a blessing as, if obtained, promises, as much as any human disposition of things can promise, security and permanence. It holds out nothing at all definite towards this security. It only seeks, by a restoration to some of their former owners of some fragments of the general wreck of Europe, to find a plausible plea for a present retreat from an embarrassing position. As to the future, that party is content to leave it covered in a night of the most palpable obscurity. It never once has entered into a particle of detail of what our own situation, or that of other powers, must be, under the blessings of the peace we seek. This defect, to my power, I mean to supply,—that, if any persons should still continue to think an attempt at foresight is any part of the duty of a statesman, I may contribute my trifle to the materials of his speculation.

As to the other party, the minority of to-day, possibly the majority of to-morrow, small in number, but full of talents and every species of energy, which, upon the avowed ground of being more acceptable to France, is a candidate for the helm of this kingdom, it has never changed from the beginning. It has preserved a perennial consistency. This would be a never failing source of true glory, if springing from just and right; but it is truly dreadful, if it be an arm of Styx, which springs out of the profoundest depths of a poisoned soil. The French maxims were by these gentlemen at no time condemned. I speak of their language in the most moderate terms. There are many who think that they have gone much further,—that they have always magnified and extolled the French maxims,—that; not in the least disgusted or discouraged by the monstrous evils which have attended these maxims from the moment of their adoption both at home and abroad, they still continue to predict that in due time they must produce the greatest good to the poor human race. They obstinately persist in stating those evils as matter of accident, as things wholly collateral to the system.

It is observed, that this party has never spoken of an ally of Great Britain with the smallest degree of respect or regard: on the contrary, it has generally mentioned them under opprobrious appellations, and in such terms of contempt or execration as never had been heard before,—because no such would have formerly been permitted in our public assemblies. The moment, however, that any of those allies quitted this obnoxious connection, the party has instantly passed an act of indemnity and oblivion in their favor. After this, no sort of censure on their conduct, no imputation on their character. From that moment their pardon was sealed in a reverential and mysterious silence. With the gentlemen of this minority, there is no ally, from one end of Europe to the other, with whom we ought not to be ashamed to act. The whole college of the states of Europe is no better than a gang of tyrants. With them all our connections were broken off at once. We ought to have cultivated France, and France alone, from the moment of her Revolution. On that happy change, all our dread of that nation as a power was to cease. She became in an instant dear to our affections and one with our interests. All other nations we ought to have commanded not to trouble her sacred throes, whilst in labor to bring into an happy birth her abundant litter of constitutions. We ought to have acted under her auspices, in extending her salutary influence upon every side. From that moment England and France were become natural allies, and all the other states natural enemies. The whole face of the world was changed. What was it to us, if she acquired Holland and the Austrian Netherlands? By her conquests she only enlarged the sphere of her beneficence, she only extended the blessings of liberty to so many more foolishly reluctant nations. What was it to England, if, by adding these, among the richest and most peopled countries of the world, to her territories, she thereby left no possible link of communication between us and any other power with whom we could act against her? On this new system of optimism, it is so much the better: so much the further are we removed from the contact with infectious despotism. No longer a thought of a barrier in the Netherlands to Holland against France. All that is obsolete policy. It is fit that France should have both Holland and the Austrian Netherlands too, as a barrier to her against the attacks of despotism. She cannot multiply her securities too much; and as to our security, it is to be found in hers. Had we cherished her from the beginning, and felt for her when attacked, she, poor, good soul, would never have invaded any foreign nation, never murdered her sovereign and his family, never proscribed, never exiled, never imprisoned, never been guilty of extra-judicial massacre or of legal murder. All would have been a golden age, full of peace, order, and liberty,—and philosophy, raying out from Europe, would have warmed and enlightened the universe; but, unluckily, irritable philosophy, the most irritable of all things, was pat into a passion, and provoked into ambition abroad and tyranny at home. They find all this very natural and very justifiable. They choose to forget that other nations, struggling for freedom, have been attacked by their neighbors, or that their neighbors have otherwise interfered in their affairs. Often have neighbors interfered in favor of princes against their rebellious subjects, and often in favor of subjects against their prince. Such cases fill half the pages of history; yet never were they used as an apology, much less as a justification, for atrocious cruelty in princes, or for general massacre and confiscation on the part of revolted subjects,—never as a politic cause for suffering any such powers to aggrandize themselves without limit and without measure. A thousand times have we seen it asserted in public prints and pamphlets, that, if the nobility and priesthood of France had stayed at home, their property never would have been confiscated. One would think that none of the clergy had been robbed previous to their deportation, or that their deportation had, on their part, been a voluntary act. One would think that the nobility and gentry, and merchants and bankers, who stayed at home, had enjoyed their property in security and repose. The assertors of these positions well know that the lot of thousands who remained at home was far more terrible, that the most cruel imprisonment was only a harbinger of a cruel and ignominious death, and that in this mother country of freedom there were no less than three hundred thousand at one time in prison. I go no further. I instance only these representations of the party, as staring indications of partiality to that sect to whose dominion they would have left this country nothing to oppose but her own naked force, and consequently subjected us, on every reverse of fortune, to the imminent danger of falling under those very evils, in that very system, which are attributed, not to its own nature, but to the perverseness of others. There is nothing in the world so difficult as to put men in a state of judicial neutrality. A leaning there must ever be, and it is of the first importance to any nation to observe to what side that leaning inclines,—whether to our own community, or to one with which it is in a state of hostility.

Men are rarely without some sympathy in the sufferings of others; but in the immense and diversified mass of human misery, which may be pitied, but cannot be relieved, in the gross, the mind must make a choice. Our sympathy is always more forcibly attracted towards the misfortunes of certain persons, and in certain descriptions: and this sympathetic attraction discovers, beyond a possibility of mistake, our mental affinities and elective affections. It is a much surer proof than the strongest declaration of a real connection and of an overruling bias in the mind. I am told that the active sympathies of this party have been chiefly, if not wholly, attracted to the sufferings of the patriarchal rebels who were amongst the promulgators of the maxims of the French Revolution, and who have suffered from their apt and forward scholars some part of the evils which they had themselves so liberally distributed to all the other parts of the community. Some of these men, flying from the knives which they had sharpened against their country and its laws, rebelling against the very powers they had set over themselves by their rebellion against their sovereign, given up by those very armies to whose faithful attachment they trusted for their safety and support, after they had completely debauched all military fidelity in its source,—some of these men, I say, had fallen into the hands of the head of that family the most illustrious person of which they had three times cruelly imprisoned, and delivered in that state of captivity to those hands from which they were able to relieve neither her, nor their own nearest and most venerable kindred. One of these men, connected with this country by no circumstance of birth,—not related to any distinguished families here,—recommended by no service,—endeared to this nation by no act or even expression of kindness,—comprehended in no league or common cause,—embraced by no laws of public hospitality,—this man was the only one to be found in Europe, in whose favor the British nation, passing judgment without hearing on its almost only ally, was to force (and that not by soothing interposition, but with every reproach for inhumanity, cruelty, and breach of the laws of war) from prison. We were to release him from that prison out of which, in abuse of the lenity of government amidst its rigor, and in violation of at least an understood parole, he had attempted an escape,—an escape excusable, if you will, but naturally productive of strict and vigilant confinement. The earnestness of gentlemen to free this person was the more extraordinary because there was full as little in him to raise admiration, from any eminent qualities he possessed, as there was to excite an interest, from any that were amiable. A person not only of no real civil or literary talents, but of no specious appearance of either,—and in his military profession not marked as a leader in any one act of able or successful enterprise, unless his leading on (or his following) the allied army of Amazonian and male cannibal Parisians to Versailles, on the famous 6th of October, 1789, is to make his glory. Any otter exploit of his, as a general, I never heard of. But the triumph of general fraternity was but the more signalized by the total want of particular claims in that case,—and by postponing all such claims in a case where they really existed, where they stood embossed, and in a manner forced themselves on the view of common, shortsighted benevolence. Whilst, for its improvement, the humanity of these gentlemen was thus on its travels, and had got as far off as Olmütz, they never thought of a place and a person much nearer to them, or of moving an instruction to Lord Malmesbury in favor of their own suffering countryman, Sir Sydney Smith.

This officer, having attempted, with great gallantry, to cut out a vessel from one of the enemy's harbors, was taken after an obstinate resistance,—such as obtained him the marked respect of those who were witnesses of his valor, and knew the circumstances in which it was displayed. Upon his arrival at Paris, he was instantly thrown into prison, where the nature of his situation will best be understood by knowing that amongst its mitigations was the permission to walk occasionally in the court and to enjoy the privilege of shaving himself. On the old system of feelings and principles, his sufferings might have been entitled to consideration, and, even in a comparison with those of Citizen La Fayette, to a priority in the order of compassion. If the ministers had neglected to take any steps in his favor, a declaration of the sense of the House of Commons would have stimulated them to their duty. If they had caused a representation to be made, such a proceeding would have added force to it. If reprisal should be thought advisable, the address of the House would have given an additional sanction to a measure which would have been, indeed, justifiable without any other sanction than its own reason. But no. Nothing at all like it. In fact, the merit of Sir Sydney Smith, and his claim on British compassion, was of a kind altogether different from that which interested so deeply the authors of the motion in favor of Citizen La Fayette. In my humble opinion, Captain Sir Sydney Smith has another sort of merit with the British nation, and something of a higher claim on British humanity, than Citizen La Fayette. Faithful, zealous, and ardent in the service of his king and country,—full of spirit,—full of resources,—going out of the beaten road, but going right, because his uncommon enterprise was not conducted by a vulgar judgment,—in his profession Sir Sydney Smith might be considered as a distinguished person, if any person could well be distinguished in a service in which scarce a commander can be named without putting you in mind of some action of intrepidity, skill, and vigilance that has given them a fair title to contend with any men and in any age. But I will say nothing farther of the merits of Sir Sydney Smith: the mortal animosity of the Regicide enemy supersedes all other panegyric. Their hatred is a judgment in his favor without appeal. At present he is lodged in the tower of the Temple, the last prison of Louis the Sixteenth, and the last but one of Marie Antoinette of Austria,—the prison of Louis the Seventeenth,—the prison of Elizabeth of Bourbon. There he lies, unpitied by the grand philanthropy, to meditate upon the fate of those who are faithful to their king and country. Whilst this prisoner, secluded from intercourse, was indulging in these cheering reflections, he might possibly have had the further consolation of learning (by means of the insolent exultation of his guards) that there was an English ambassador at Paris; he might have had the proud comfort of hearing that this ambassador had the honor of passing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of a Regicide pettifogger, and that in the evening he relaxed in the amusements of the opera, and in the spectacle of an audience totally new,—an audience in which he had the pleasure of seeing about him not a single face that he could formerly have known in Paris, but, in the place of that company, one indeed more than equal to it in display of gayety, splendor, and luxury,—a set of abandoned wretches, squandering in insolent riot the spoils of their bleeding country: a subject of profound reflection both to the prisoner and to the ambassador.

Whether all the matter upon which I have grounded my opinion of this last party be fully authenticated or not must be left to those who have had the opportunity of a nearer view of its conduct, and who have been more attentive in their perusal of the writings which have appeared in its favor. But for my part, I have never heard the gross facts on which I ground my idea of their marked partiality to the reigning tyranny in France in any part denied. I am not surprised at all this. Opinions, as they sometimes follow, so they frequently guide and direct the affections; and men may become more attached to the country of their principles than to the country of their birth. What I have stated here is only to mark the spirit which seems to me, though in somewhat different ways, to actuate our great party-leaders, and to trace this first pattern of a negotiation to its true source.

Such is the present state of our public councils. Well might I be ashamed of what seems to be a censure of two great factions, with the two most eloquent men which this country ever saw at the head of them, if I had found that either of them could support their conduct by any example in the history of their country. I should very much prefer their judgment to my own, if I were not obliged, by an infinitely overbalancing weight of authority, to prefer the collected wisdom, of ages to the abilities of any two men living.—I return to the Declaration, with which the history of the abortion of a treaty with the Regicides is closed.

After such an elaborate display had been made of the injustice and insolence of an enemy who seems to have been irritated by every one of the means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage of intemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard in which we in vain attempted to plunge our sword should have been thrown away with scorn. It would have been natural, that, rising in the fulness of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice, rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured out all the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so long restrained. It might have been expected, that, emulous of the glory of the youthful hero37 in alliance with him, touched by the example of what one man well formed and well placed may do in the most desperate state of affairs, convinced there is a courage of the cabinet full as powerful and far less vulgar than that of the field, our minister would have changed the whole line of that unprosperous prudence which hitherto had produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If he found his situation full of danger, (and I do not deny that it is perilous in the extreme,) he must feel that it is also full of glory, and that he is placed on a stage than which no muse of fire that had ascended the highest heaven of invention could imagine anything more awful and august. It was hoped that in this swelling scene in which he moved, with some of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, and with so many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a part which, as he plays it, determines forever their destiny and his own, like Ulysses in the unravelling point of the epic story, he would have thrown off his patience and his rags together, and, stripped of unworthy disguises, he would have stood forth in the form and in the attitude of an hero. On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars; that he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous kennel (where his scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of war whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues, and death, upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all whose habit, order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and abhorrent. It was expected that he would at last have thought of active and effectual war; that he would no longer amuse the British lion in the chase of mice and rats; that he would no longer employ the whole naval power of Great Britain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon the miserable remains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did not regard, and from which none could profit. It was expected that he would have reasserted the justice of his cause; that he would have reanimated whatever remained to him of his allies, and endeavored to recover those whom their fears had led astray; that he would have rekindled the martial ardor of his citizens; that he would have held out to them the example of their ancestry, the assertor of Europe, and the scourge of French ambition; that he would have reminded them of a posterity, which, if this nefarious robbery, under the fraudulent name and false color of a government, should in full power be seated in the heart of Europe, must forever be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism, and the most ignominious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause it was presumed that he would (as in the beginning of the war he did) have opened all the temples, and with prayer, with fasting, and with supplication, (better directed than to the grim Moloch of Regicide in France,) have called upon us to raise that united cry which has: so often stormed heaven, and with a pious violence forced down blessings upon a repentant people. It was hoped, that, when he had invoked upon his endeavors the favorable regard of the Protector of the human race, it would be seen that his menaces to the enemy and his prayers to the Almighty were not followed, but accompanied, with correspondent action. It was hoped that his shrilling trumpet should be heard, not to announce a show, but to sound a charge.

Such a conclusion to such a declaration and such a speech would have been a thing of course,—so much a thing of course, that I will be bold to say, if in any ancient history, the Roman for instance, (supposing that in Rome the matter of such a detail could have been furnished,) a consul had gone through such a long train of proceedings, and that there was a chasm in the manuscripts by which we had lost the conclusion of the speech and the subsequent part of the narrative, all critics would agree that a Freinshemius would have been thought to have managed the supplementary business of a continuator most unskillfully, and to have supplied the hiatus most improbably, if he had not filled up the gaping space in a manner somewhat similar (though better executed) to what I have imagined. But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact. This exordium, as contrary to all the rules of rhetoric as to those more essential rules of policy which our situation would dictate, is intended as a prelude to a deadening and disheartening proposition; as if all that a minister had to fear in a war of his own conducting was, that the people should pursue it with too ardent a zeal. Such a tone as I guessed the minister would have taken, I am very sure, is the true, unsuborned, unsophisticated language of genuine, natural feeling, under the smart of patience exhausted and abused. Such a conduct as the facts stated in the Declaration gave room to expect is that which true wisdom would have dictated under the impression of those genuine feelings. Never was there a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvedere) is as much in Nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt or any clown in the rustic revels of Téniers. Indeed, it is when a great nation is in great difficulties that minds must exalt themselves to the occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion under the direction of a feeble reason feeds a low fever, which serves only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy disorder within and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error, and every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed above the mark that we must aim at: everything below it is absolutely thrown away.