Volume VI Part 5 (1/2)

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 a.s.surances, 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.surance? Did they not give it; when they fabricated their first Const.i.tution? 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 a.s.sembly, 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 rest.i.tution; 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 a.s.sured, that, if, by being engaged, as you a.s.suredly would be, in the defence of your religion, your king, your order, your laws, and liberties, that estate should be put under confiscation, the property would be secured, but in the same manner, at your expense.

But, after all, for what purpose are we told of this reformation in their principles, and what is the policy of all this softening in ours, which is to be produced by their example? It is not to soften us to suffering innocence and virtue, but to mollify us to the crimes and to the society of robbers and ruffians. But I trust that our countrymen will not be softened to that kind of crimes and criminals; for, if we should, our hearts will be hardened to everything which has a claim on our benevolence. A kind Providence has placed in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

There is another piece of policy, not more laudable than this, in reading these moral lectures, which lessens our hatred to criminals and our pity to sufferers by insinuating that it has been owing to their fault or folly that the latter have become the prey of the former. By flattering us that we are not subject to the same vices and follies, it induces a confidence that we shall not suffer the same evils by a contact with the infamous gang of robbers who have thus robbed and butchered our neighbors before our faces. We must not be flattered to our ruin. Our vices are the same as theirs, neither more nor less. If any faults we had, which wanted this French example to call us to a ”_softening_ of character, and a review of our social relations and duties,” there is yet no sign that we have commenced our reformation. We seem, by the best accounts I have from the world, to go on just as formerly, ”some to undo, and some to be undone.” There is no change at all: and if we are not bettered by the sufferings of war, this peace, which, for reasons to himself best known, the author fixes as the period of our reformation, must have something very extraordinary in it; because hitherto ease, opulence, and their concomitant pleasure have never greatly disposed mankind to that serious reflection and review which the author supposes to be the result of the approaching peace with vice and crime. I believe he forms a right estimate of the nature of this peace, and that it will want many of those circ.u.mstances which formerly characterizes that state of things.

If I am right in my ideas of this new republic, the different states of peace and war will make no difference in her pursuits. It is not an enemy of accident that we have to deal with. Enmity to us, and to all civilized nations, is wrought into the very stamina of its Const.i.tution.

It was made to pursue the purposes of that fundamental enmity. The design will go on regularly in every position and in every relation.

Their hostility is to break us to their dominion; their amity is to debauch us to their principles. In the former, we are to contend with their force; in the latter, with their intrigues. But we stand in a very different posture of defence in the two situations. In war, so long as government is supported, we fight with the whole united force of the kingdom. When under the name of peace the war of intrigue begins, we do not contend against our enemies with the whole force of the kingdom.

No,--we shall have to fight, (if it should be a fight at all, and not an ignominious surrender of everything which has made our country venerable in our eyes and dear to our hearts,) we shall have to light with but a portion of our strength against the whole of theirs. Gentlemen who not long since thought with us, but who now recommend a Jacobin peace, were at that time sufficiently aware of the existence of a dangerous Jacobin faction within this kingdom. Awhile ago they seemed to be tremblingly alive to the number of those who composed it, to their dark subtlety, to their fierce audacity, to their admiration of everything that pa.s.ses in France, to their eager desire of a close communication with the mother faction there. At this moment, when the question is upon the opening of that communication, not a word of our English Jacobins. That faction is put out of sight and out of thought. ”It vanished at the crowing of the c.o.c.k.” Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light begun to utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor Tory geese to alarm the garrison of the Capitol was forgot.[11] There was enough of indemnity before. Now a complete act of oblivion is pa.s.sed about the Jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would make a princ.i.p.al object in all fair deliberation upon the merits of a project of amity with the Jacobins of France. But however others may choose to forget the faction, the faction does not choose to forget itself, nor, however gentlemen may choose to flatter themselves, it does not forget them.

Never, in any civil contest, has a part been taken with more of the warmth, or carried on with more of the arts of a party. The Jacobins are worse than lost to their country. Their hearts are abroad. Their sympathy with the Regicides of France is complete. Just as in a civil contest, they exult in all their victories, they are dejected and mortified in all their defeats. Nothing that the Regicides can do (and they have labored hard for the purpose) can alienate them from their cause. You and I, my dear Lord, have often observed on the spirit of their conduct. When the Jacobins of France, by their studied, deliberated, catalogued files of murders with the poniard, the sabre, and the tribunal, have shocked whatever remained of human sensibility in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then it was they distinguished the resources of party policy. They did not venture directly to confront the public sentiment; for a very short time they seemed to partake of it. They began with a reluctant and sorrowful confession; they deplored the stains which tarnished the l.u.s.tre of a good cause. After keeping a decent time of retirement, in a few days crept out an apology for the excesses of men cruelly irritated by the attacks of unjust power. Grown bolder, as the first feeling of mankind decayed and the color of these horrors began to fade upon the imagination, they proceeded from apology to defence. They urged, but still deplored, the absolute necessity of such a proceeding.

Then they made a bolder stride, and marched from defence to recrimination. They attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate the memory of those whose bodies their friends had ma.s.sacred, and to consider their murder as a less formal act of justice. They endeavored even to debauch our pity, and to suborn it in favor of cruelty. They wept over the lot of those who were driven by the crimes of aristocrats to republican vengeance.

Every pause of their cruelty they considered as a return of their natural sentiments of benignity and justice. Then they had recourse to history, and found out all the recorded cruelties that deform the annals of the world, in order that the ma.s.sacres of the Regicides might pa.s.s for a common event, and even that the most merciful of princes, who suffered by their hands, should bear the iniquity of all the tyrants who have at any time infested the earth. In order to reconcile us the better to this republican tyranny, they confounded the bloodshed of war with the murders of peace; and they computed how much greater prodigality of blood was exhibited in battles and in the storm of cities than in the frugal, well-ordered ma.s.sacres of the revolutionary tribunals of France.

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

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

This I do not mention as entering into the controversy how far they are right or wrong in this parallel, but to show that they do make it, and that they do consider themselves as of a party with the Jacobins of France. You cannot forget their constant correspondence with the Jacobins, whilst it was in their power to carry it on. When the communication is again opened, the interrupted correspondence will commence. We cannot be blind to the advantage which such a party affords to Regicide France in all her views,--and, on the other hand, what an advantage Regicide France holds out to the views of the republican party in England. Slightly as they have considered their subject, I think this can hardly have escaped the writers of political ephemerides for any month or year. They have told us much of the amendment of the Regicides of France, and of their returning honor and generosity. Have they told anything of the reformation and of the returning loyalty of the Jacobins of England? Have they told us of _their_ gradual softening towards royalty? Have they told us what measures _they_ are taking for ”putting the crown in commission,” and what approximations of any kind _they_ are making towards the old Const.i.tution of their country? Nothing of this.

The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive. They dare not touch the subject. But it is not annihilated by their silence, nor by our indifference. It is but too plain that our Const.i.tution cannot exist with such a communication. Our humanity, our manners, our morals, our religion, cannot stand with such a communication. The Const.i.tution is made by those things, and for those things: without them it cannot exist; and without them it is no matter whether it exists or not.

It was an ingenious Parliamentary Christmas play, by which, in both Houses, you antic.i.p.ated the holidays; it was a relaxation from your graver employment; it was a pleasant discussion you had, which part of the family of the Const.i.tution was the elder branch,--whether one part did not exist prior to the others, and whether it might exist and flourish, if ”the others were cast into the fire.”[12] In order to make this Saturnalian amus.e.m.e.nt general in the family, you sent it down stairs, that judges and juries might partake of the entertainment. The unfortunate antiquary and augur who is the b.u.t.t of all this sport may suffer in the roistering horse-play and practical jokes of the servants'

hall. But whatever may become of him, the discussion itself, and the timing it, put me in mind of what I have read, (where I do not recollect,) that the subtle nation of the Greeks were busily employed, in the Church of Santa Sophia, in a dispute of mixed natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, whether the light on Mount Tabor was created or uncreated, and were ready to ma.s.sacre the holders of the unfas.h.i.+onable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach into the capital of the Christian world. I may possibly suffer much more than Mr. Reeves (I shall certainly give much more general offence) for breaking in upon this const.i.tutional amus.e.m.e.nt concerning the created or uncreated nature of the two Houses of Parliament, and by calling their attention to a problem which may entertain them less, but which concerns them a great deal more,--that is, whether, with this Gallic Jacobin fraternity, which they are desired by some writers to court, all the parts of the government, about whose combustible or incombustible qualities they are contending, may ”not be cast into the fire” together. He is a strange visionary (but he is nothing worse) who fancies that any one part of our Const.i.tution, whatever right of primogeniture it may claim, or whatever astrologers may divine from its horoscope, can possibly survive the others. As they have lived, so they will die, together. I must do justice to the impartiality of the Jacobins. I have not observed amongst _them_ the least predilection for any of those parts. If there has been any difference in their malice, I think they have shown a worse disposition to the House of Commons than to the crown. As to the House of Lords, they do not speculate at all about it, and for reasons that are too obvious to detail.

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

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this communication. I do not except from this observation those who are willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity.

Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief.

Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a remedy could be at all adopted? We expel suspected foreigners from hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pa.s.s over into France to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs. In France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them. But the worst aliens are the amba.s.sador and his train. These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A French amba.s.sador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we have never experienced. The mischief is by far more visible than the remedy. But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall bring it on. In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication. Everything done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Everything, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual dilemma. But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken.

The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce us to temporize with all the evils of it. By degrees our minds will be made to our circ.u.mstances. The novelty of such things, which produces half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off. Our ruin will be disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a degenerate people to barter away the most precious jewel of their souls.

Our Const.i.tution is not made for this kind of warfare. It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence. It is formed, in a great measure, upon the principle of jealousy of the crown,--and as things stood, when it took that turn, with very great reason. I go farther: it must keep alive some part of that fire of jealousy eternally and chastely burning, or it cannot be the British Const.i.tution. At various periods we have had tyranny in this country, more than enough. We have had rebellions with more or less justification. Some of our kings have made adulterous connections abroad, and trucked away for foreign gold the interests and glory of their crown. But, before this time, our liberty has never been corrupted. I mean to say, that it has never been debauched from its domestic relations. To this time it has been English liberty, and English liberty only. Our love of liberty and our love of our country were not distinct things. Liberty is now, it seems, put upon a larger and more liberal bottom. We are men,--and as men, undoubtedly, nothing human is foreign to us. We cannot be too liberal in our general wishes for the happiness of our kind. But in all questions on the mode of procuring it for any particular community, we ought to be fearful of admitting those who have no interest in it, or who have, perhaps, an interest against it, into the consultation. Above all, we cannot be too cautious in our communication with those who seek their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion, and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those restraints which are imposed by the virtues upon the pa.s.sions.

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 const.i.tution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fort.i.tude of men. These are what no const.i.tution can give: they are the gifts of G.o.d; and He alone knows whether we shall possess such gifts at the time we stand in need of them. Const.i.tutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural: it is all that in this case they can do. But our Const.i.tution 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 ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ps 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, unimpa.s.sioned, 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 amba.s.sador to convey to his Majesty the first compliments of his brethren, the Regicide Directory?

They have none that can represent them more properly. I antic.i.p.ate 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Ma.r.s.eillaise Hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of the _Legion de l'echafaud_. 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 Const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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.