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

EDMUND BURKE.

BEACONSFIELD, Oct. 30th, 1795.

Friday Evening.

LETTER IV.

TO THE EARL FITZWILLIAM

My dear Lord,—I am not sure that the best way of discussing any subject, except those that concern the abstracted sciences, is not somewhat in the way of dialogue. To this mode, however, there are two objections: the first, that it happens, as in the puppet-show, one man speaks for all the personages. An unnatural uniformity of tone is in a manner unavoidable. The other and more serious objection is, that, as the author (if not an absolute skeptic) must have some opinion of his own to enforce, he will be continually tempted to enervate the arguments he puts into the mouth of his adversary, or to place them in a point of view most commodious for their refutation. There is, however, a sort of dialogue not quite so liable to these objections, because it approaches more nearly to truth and Nature: it is called CONTROVERSY. Here the parties speak for themselves. If the writer who attacks another's notions does not deal fairly with his adversary, the diligent reader has it always in his power, by resorting to the work examined, to do justice to the original author and to himself. For this reason you will not blame me, if, in my discussion of the merits of a Regicide Peace, I do not choose to trust to my own statements, but to bring forward along with them the arguments of the advocates for that measure. If I choose puny adversaries, writers of no estimation or authority, then you will justly blame me. I might as well bring in at once a fictitious speaker, and thus fall into all the inconveniences of an imaginary dialogue. This I shall avoid; and I shall take no notice of any author who my friends in town do not tell me is in estimation with those whose opinions he supports.

A piece has been sent to me, called "Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795," with a French motto: "Que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour." The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to announce something uncommon. In the time I have lived to, I always seem to walk on enchanted ground. Everything is new, and, according to the fashionable phrase, revolutionary. In former days authors valued themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations. Accordingly, they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an eternal duration to their works. The quite contrary is our present fashion. Writers value themselves now on the instability of their opinions and the transitory life of their productions. On this kind of credit the modern institutors open their schools. They write for youth, and it is sufficient, if the instruction "lasts as long as a present love, or as the painted silks and cottons of the season."

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and duration. The title is "Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795." The time is critically chosen. A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another. A day or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy month in which it is said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and drown themselves. In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with symptoms of public suicide. However, there is one comfort to be taken even from the gloomy time of year. It is a rotting season. If what is brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long. Even buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather, if they are ill-contrived tenements, do not threaten long to incumber the earth. The author tells us (and I believe he is the very first author that ever told such a thing to his readers) "that the entire fabric of his speculations might be overset by unforeseen vicissitudes," and what is far more extraordinary, "that even the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages." Truly, in my poor judgment, this circumstance formed a very substantial motive for his not publishing those ill-considered considerations at all. He ought to have followed the good advice of his motto: "Que faire encore dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour." He ought to have waited till he had got a little more daylight on this subject. Night itself is hardly darker than the fogs of that time.

Finding the last week in October so particularly referred to, and not perceiving any particular event, relative to the war, which happened on any of the days in that week, I thought it possible that they were marked by some astrological superstition, to which the greatest politicians have been subject. I therefore had recourse to my Rider's Almanack. There I found, indeed, something that characterized the work, and that gave directions concerning the sudden political and natural variations, and for eschewing the maladies that are most prevalent in that aguish intermittent season, "the last week of October." On that week the sagacious astrologer, Rider, in his note on the third column of the calendar side, teaches us to expect "variable and cold weather"; but instead of encouraging us to trust ourselves to the haze and mist and doubtful lights of that changeable week, on the answerable part of the opposite page he gives us a salutary caution (indeed, it is very nearly in the words of the author's motto): "Avoid," says he, "being out late at night and in foggy weather, for a cold now caught may last the whole winter."[9 - Here I have fallen into an unintentional mistake. Rider's Almanack for 1794 lay before me; and, in troth, I then had no other. For variety, that sage astrologer has made some small changes on the weather side of 1795; but the caution is the same on the opposite page of instruction.] This ingenious author, who disdained the prudence of the Almanack, walked out in the very fog he complains of, and has led us to a very unseasonable airing at that time. Whilst this noble writer, by the vigor of an excellent constitution, formed for the violent changes he prognosticates, may shake off the importunate rheum and malignant influenza of this disagreeable week, a whole Parliament may go on spitting and snivelling, and wheezing and coughing, during a whole session. All this from listening to variable, hebdomadal politicians, who run away from their opinions without giving us a month's warning,—and for not listening to the wise and friendly admonitions of Dr. Cardanus Rider, who never apprehends he may change his opinions before his pen is out of his hand, but always enables us to lay in at least a year's stock of useful information.

At first I took comfort. I said to myself, that, if I should, as I fear I must, oppose the doctrines of the last week of October, it is probable that by this time they are no longer those of the eminent writer to whom they are attributed. He gives us hopes that long before this he may have embraced the direct contrary sentiments. If I am found in a conflict with those of the last week of October, I may be in full agreement with those of the last week in December, or the first week in January, 1796. But a second edition, and a French translation, (for the benefit, I must suppose, of the new Regicide Directory,) have let down a little of these flattering hopes. We and the Directory know that the author, whatever changes his works seemed made to indicate, like a weathercock grown rusty, remains just where he was in the last week of last October. It is true, that his protest against binding him to his opinions, and his reservation of a right to whatever opinions he pleases, remain in their full force. This variability is pleasant, and shows a fertility of fancy:—

Qualis in æthereo felix Vertumnus Olympo
Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet.

Yet, doing all justice to the sportive variability of these weekly, daily, or hourly speculators, shall I be pardoned, if I attempt a word on the part of us simple country folk? It is not good for us, however it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with variable politics. I consider different relations as prescribing a different conduct. I allow, that, in transactions with an enemy, a minister may, and often must, vary his demands with the day, possibly with the hour. With an enemy, a fixed plan, variable arrangements. This is the rule the nature of the transaction prescribes. But all this belongs to treaty. All these shiftings and changes are a sort of secret amongst the parties, till a definite settlement is brought about. Such is the spirit of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of things between enmity and friendship. In this change the subjects of the transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their cocoons. The gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state. This mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for our slow and coarse understandings. Our appetite demands a piece of resistance. We require some food that will stick to the ribs. We call for sentiments to which we can attach ourselves,—sentiments in which we can take an interest,—sentiments on which we can warm, on which we can ground some confidence in ourselves or in others. We do not want a largess of inconstancy. Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of poverty at home. There is a difference, too, between deliberation and doctrine: a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts to teach. His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region, but they cannot free us from the effects of the error into which we have been betrayed. His active Will-o'-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets, I come to the lesson itself. On the fullest consideration of it, I am utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is, in the detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or recommend. His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion. It is not only fugitive in its duration, but is slippery in the extreme whilst it lasts. Examining it part by part, it seems almost everywhere to contradict itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his opinions, has exercised this privilege in every section of his remarks. For this reason, amongst others, I follow the advice which the able writer gives in his last page, which is, "to consider the impression of what he has urged, taken from the whole, and not from detached paragraphs." That caution was not absolutely necessary. I should think it unfair to the author and to myself to have proceeded otherwise. This author's whole, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be again referred to the whole. Without this latter attention, several of the passages would certainly remain covered with an impenetrable and truly oracular obscurity.

The great, general, pervading purpose, of the whole pamphlet is to reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France. In this general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken. The other purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to show, first, that the time of the Remarks was the favorable time for making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy's side their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms as he is pleased to offer was rationally to be expected; the third purpose was, to make some sort of disclosure of the terms which, if the Regicides are pleased to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept: these form the basis of the negotiation which the author, whoever he is, proposes to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it,—that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks. That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of France. The word France is slipped in just as if the government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author, "will do this,"—"it is the interest of France,"—"the returning honor and generosity of France," &c., &c.—always merely France: just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe,—and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the concrete, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,—if we were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and tender-hearted Sieyès, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer, Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord,—nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. "Make your peace with France." That word France sounds quite as well as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France, and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis-d'or.

Having, therefore, slipped the persons with whom we are to treat out of view, we are next to be satisfied that the French Revolution, which this peace is to fix and consolidate, ought to give us no just cause of apprehension. Though the author labors this point, yet he confesses a fact (indeed, he could not conceal it) which renders all his labors utterly fruitless. He confesses that the Regicide means to dictate a pacification, and that this pacification, according to their decree passed but a very few days before his publication appeared, is to "unite to their empire, either in possession or dependence, new barriers, many frontier places of strength, a large sea-coast, and many sea-ports." He ought to have stated it, that they would annex to their territory a country about a third as large as France, and much more than half as rich, and in a situation the most important for command that it would be possible for her anywhere to possess.

To remove this terror, (even if the Regicides should carry their point,) and to give us perfect repose with regard to their empire, whatever they may acquire, or whomsoever they might destroy, he raises a doubt "whether France will not be ruined by retaining these conquests, and whether she will not wholly lose that preponderance which she has held in the scale of European powers, and will not eventually be destroyed by the effect of her present successes, or, at least, whether, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, she [France] will remain an object of as much jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch." Here, indeed, is a paragraph full of meaning! It gives matter for meditation almost in every word of it. The secret of the pacific politicians is out. This republic, at all hazards, is to be maintained. It is to be confined within some bounds, if we can; if not, with every possible acquisition of power, it is still to be cherished and supported. It is the return of the monarchy we are to dread, and therefore we ought to pray for the permanence of the Regicide authority. Esto perpetua is the devout ejaculation of our Frà Paolo for the Republic one and indivisible. It was the monarchy that rendered France dangerous: Regicide neutralizes all the acrimony of that power, and renders it safe and social. The October speculator is of opinion that monarchy is of so poisonous a quality that a moderate territorial power is far more dangerous to its neighbors under that abominable regimen than the greatest empire in the hands of a republic. This is Jacobinism sublimed and exalted into most pure and perfect essence. It is a doctrine, I admit, made to allure and captivate, if anything in the world can, the Jacobin Directory, to mollify the ferocity of Regicide, and to persuade those patriotic hangmen, after their reiterated oaths for our extirpation, to admit this well-humbled nation to the fraternal embrace. I do not wonder that this tub of October has been racked off into a French cask. It must make its fortune at Paris. That translation seems the language the most suited to these sentiments. Our author tells the French Jacobins, that the political interests of Great Britain are in perfect unison with the principles of their government,—that they may take and keep the keys of the civilized world, for they are safe in their unambitious and faithful custody. We say to them, "We may, indeed, wish you to be a little less murderous, wicked, and atheistical, for the sake of morals; we may think it were better you were less new-fangled in your speech, for the sake of grammar; but, as politicians, provided you keep clear of monarchy, all our fears, alarms, and jealousies are at an end: at least, they sink into nothing in comparison of our dread of your detestable royalty." A flatterer of Cardinal Mazarin said, when that minister had just settled the match between the young Louis the Fourteenth and a daughter of Spain, that this alliance had the effect of faith and had removed mountains,—that the Pyrenees were levelled by that marriage. You may now compliment Reubell in the same spirit on the miracles of regicide, and tell him that the guillotine of Louis the Sixteenth had consummated a marriage between Great Britain and France, which dried up the Channel, and restored the two countries to the unity which it is said they had before the unnatural rage of seas and earthquakes had broke off their happy junction. It will be a fine subject for the poets who are to prophesy the blessings of this peace.

I am now convinced that the Remarks of the last week of October cannot come from the author to whom they are given, they are such a direct contradiction to the style of manly indignation with which he spoke of those miscreants and murderers in his excellent memorial to the States of Holland,—to that very state which the author who presumes to personate him does not find it contrary to the political interests of England to leave in the hands of these very miscreants, against whom on the part of England he took so much pains to animate their republic. This cannot be; and if this argument wanted anything to give it new force, it is strengthened by an additional reason, that is irresistible. Knowing that noble person, as well as myself, to be under very great obligations to the crown, I am confident he would not so very directly contradict, even in the paroxysm of his zeal against monarchy, the declarations made in the name and with the fullest approbation of our sovereign, his master, and our common benefactor. In those declarations you will see that the king, instead of being sensible of greater alarm and jealousy from a neighboring crowned head than from, these regicides, attributes all the dangers of Europe to the latter. Let this writer hear the description given in the royal declaration of the scheme of power of these miscreants, as "a system destructive of all public order, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number, by arbitrary imprisonments, by massacres which cannot be remembered without horror, and at length by the execrable murder of a just and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who with an unshaken firmness has shared all the misfortunes of her royal consort, his protracted sufferings, hiscruel captivity, his ignominious death." After thus describing, with an eloquence and energy equalled only by its truth, the means by which this usurped power had been acquired and maintained, that government is characterized with equal force. His Majesty, far from thinking monarchy in France to be a greater object of jealousy than the Regicide usurpation, calls upon the French to reestablish "a monarchical government" for the purpose of shaking off "the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy,—of that anarchy which has broken all the most sacred bonds of society, dissolved all the relations of civil life, violated every right, confounded every duty,—which uses the name of liberty to exercise the most cruel tyranny, to annihilate all property, to seize on all possessions,—which founds its power on the pretended consent of the people, and itself carries fire and sword through extensive provinces, for having demanded their laws, their religion, and their lawful sovereign."

"That strain I heard was of a higher mood." That declaration of our sovereign was worthy of his throne. It is in a style which neither the pen of the writer of October nor such a poor crow-quill as mine can ever hope to equal. I am happy to enrich my letter with this fragment of nervous and manly eloquence, which, if it had not emanated from the awful authority of a throne, if it were not recorded amongst the most valuable monuments of history, and consecrated in the archives of states, would be worthy, as a private composition, to live forever in the memory of men.

In those admirable pieces does his Majesty discover this new opinion of his political security, in having the chair of the scorner, that is, the discipline of atheism, and the block of regicide, set up by his side, elevated on the same platform, and shouldering, with the vile image of their grim and bloody idol, the inviolable majesty of his throne? The sentiments of these declarations are the very reverse: they could not be other. Speaking of the spirit of that usurpation, the royal manifesto describes, with perfect truth, its internal tyranny to have been established as the very means of shaking the security of all other states,—as "disposing arbitrarily of the property and blood of the inhabitants of France, in order to disturb the tranquillity of other nations, and to render all Europe the theatre of the same crimes and of the same misfortunes." It was but a natural inference from this fact, that the royal manifesto does not at all rest the justification of this war on common principles: that it was "not only to defend his own rights, and those of his allies," but "that all the dearest interests of his people imposed upon him a duty still more important,—that of exerting his efforts for the preservation of civil society itself, as happily established among the nations of Europe." On that ground, the protection offered is to "those who, by declaring for a monarchical government, shall shake off the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy." It is for that purpose the declaration calls on them "to join the standard of an hereditary monarchy,"—declaring that the peace and safety of this kingdom and the other powers of Europe "materially depend on the reëstablishment of order in France." His Majesty does not hesitate to declare that "the reëstablishment of monarchy, in the person of Louis the Seventeenth, and the lawful heirs of the crown, appears to him [his Majesty] the best mode of accomplishing these just and salutary views."

This is what his Majesty does not hesitate to declare relative to the political safety and peace of his kingdom and of Europe, and with regard to France under her ancient hereditary monarchy in the course and order of legal succession. But in comes a gentleman, in the fag end of October, dripping with the fogs of that humid and uncertain season, and does not hesitate in diameter to contradict this wise and just royal declaration, and stoutly, on his part, to make a counter declaration,—that France, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, will not remain, under the despotism of Regicide, and with the better part of Europe in her hands, so much an object of jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch. When I hear the master and reason on one side, and the servant and his single and unsupported assertion on the other, my part is taken.

This is what the Octobrist says of the political interests of England, which it looks as if he completely disconnected with those of all other nations. But not quite so: he just allows it possible (with an "at least") that the other powers may not find it quite their interest that their territories should be conquered and their subjects tyrannized over by the Regicides. No fewer than ten sovereign princes had, some the whole, all a very considerable part of their dominions under the yoke of that dreadful faction. Amongst these was to be reckoned the first republic in the world, and the closest ally of this kingdom, which, under the insulting name of an independency, is under her iron yoke, and, as long as a faction averse to the old government is suffered there to domineer, cannot be otherwise. I say nothing of the Austrian Netherlands, countries of a vast extent, and amongst the most fertile and populous of Europe, and, with regard to us, most critically situated. The rest will readily occur to you.

But if there are yet existing any people, like me, old-fashioned enough to consider that we have an important part of our very existence beyond our limits, and who therefore stretch their thoughts beyond the pomoerium of England, for them, too, he has a comfort which will remove all their jealousies and alarms about the extent of the empire of Regicide. "These conquests eventually will be the cause of her destruction." So that they who hate the cause of usurpation, and dread the power of France under any form, are to wish her to be a conqueror, in order to accelerate her ruin. A little more conquest would be still better. Will he tell us what dose of dominion is to be the quantum sufficit for her destruction?—for she seems very voracious of the food of her distemper. To be sure, she is ready to perish with repletion; she has a boulimia, and hardly has bolted down one state than she calls for two or three more. There is a good deal of wit in all this; but it seems to me (with all respect to the author) to be carrying the joke a great deal too far. I cannot yet think that the armies of the Allies were of this way of thinking, and that, when they evacuated all these countries, it was a stratagem of war to decoy France into ruin,—or that, if in a treaty we should surrender them forever into the hands of the usurpation, (the lease the author supposes,) it is a master-stroke of policy to effect the destruction of a formidable rival, and to render her no longer an object of jealousy and alarm. This, I assure the author, will infinitely facilitate the treaty. The usurpers will catch at this bait, without minding the hook which this crafty angler for the Jacobin gudgeons of the new Directory has so dexterously placed under it.

Every symptom of the exacerbation of the public malady is, with him, (as with the Doctor in Molière,) a happy prognostic of recovery.—Flanders gone. Tant mieux.—Holland subdued. Charming!—Spain beaten, and all the hither Germany conquered. Bravo! Better and better still!—But they will retain all their conquests on a treaty. Best of all!—What a delightful thing it is to have a gay physician, who sees all things, as the French express it, couleur de rose! What an escape we have had, that we and our allies were not the conquerors! By these conquests, previous to her utter destruction, she is "wholly to lose that preponderance which she held in the scale of the European powers." Bless me! this new system of France, after changing all other laws, reverses the law of gravitation. By throwing in weight after weight, her scale rises, and will by-and-by kick the beam. Certainly there is one sense in which she loses her preponderance: that is, she is no longer preponderant against the countries she has conquered. They are part of herself. But I beg the author to keep his eyes fixed on the scales for a moment longer, and then to tell me, in downright earnest, whether he sees hitherto any signs of her losing preponderance by an augmentation of weight and power. Has she lost her preponderance over Spain by her influence in Spain? Are there any signs that the conquest of Savoy and Nice begins to lessen her preponderance over Switzerland and the Italian States,—or that the Canton of Berne, Genoa, and Tuscany, for example, have taken arms against her,—or that Sardinia is more adverse than ever to a treacherous pacification? Was it in the last week of October that the German States showed that Jacobin. France was losing her preponderance? Did the King of Prussia, when he delivered into her safe custody his territories on this side of the Rhine, manifest any tokens of his opinion of her loss of preponderance? Look on Sweden and on Denmark: is her preponderance less visible there?

It is true, that, in a course of ages, empires have fallen, and, in the opinion of some, not in mine, by their own weight. Sometimes they have been unquestionably embarrassed in their movements by the dissociated situation of their dominions. Such was the case of the empire of Charles the Fifth and of his successor. It might be so of others. But so compact a body of empire, so fitted in all the parts for mutual support, with a frontier by Nature and Art so impenetrable, with such facility of breaking out with irresistible force from every quarter, was never seen in such an extent of territory, from the beginning of time, as in that empire which the Jacobins possessed in October, 1795, and which Boissy d'Anglas, in his report, settled as the law for Europe, and the dominion assigned by Nature for the Republic of Regicide. But this empire is to be her ruin, and to take away all alarm and jealousy on the part of England, and to destroy her preponderance over the miserable remains of Europe.

These are choice speculations with which the author amuses himself, and tries to divert us, in the blackest hours of the dismay, defeat, and calamity of all civilized nations. They have but one fault,—that they are directly contrary to the common sense and common feeling of mankind. If I had but one hour to live, I would employ it in decrying this wretched system, and die with my pen in my hand to mark out the dreadful consequences of receiving an arrangement of empire dictated by the despotism of Regicide to my own country, and to the lawful sovereigns of the Christian world.

I trust I shall hardly be told, in palliation of this shameful system of politics, that the author expresses his sentiments only as doubts. In such things, it may be truly said, that "once to doubt is once to be resolved." It would be a strange reason for wasting the treasures and shedding the blood of our country, to prevent arrangements on the part of another power, of which we were doubtful whether they might not be even to our advantage, and render our neighbor less than before the object of our jealousy and alarm. In this doubt there is much decision. No nation would consent to carry on a war of skepticism. But the fact is, this expression of doubt is only a mode of putting an opinion, when it is not the drift of the author to overturn the doubt. Otherwise, the doubt is never stated as the author's own, nor left, as here it is, unanswered. Indeed, the mode of stating the most decided opinions in the form of questions is so little uncommon, particularly since the excellent queries of the excellent Berkeley, that it became for a good while a fashionable mode of composition.

Here, then, the author of the Fourth Week of October is ready for the worst, and would strike the bargain of peace on these conditions. I must leave it to you and to every considerate man to reflect upon the effect of this on any Continental alliances, present or future, and whether it would be possible (if this book was thought of the least authority) that its maxims with regard to our political interest must not naturally push them to be beforehand with us in the fraternity with Regicide, and thus not only strip us of any steady alliance at present, but leave us without any of that communion of interest which could produce alliances in future. Indeed, with these maxims, we should be well divided from the world.

Notwithstanding this new kind of barrier and security that is found against her ambition in her conquests, yet in the very same paragraph he admits, that, "for the present, at least, it is subversive of the balance of power." This, I confess, is not a direct contradiction, because the benefits which he promises himself from it, according to his hypothesis, are future and more remote.

So disposed is this author to peace, that, having laid a comfortable foundation for our security in the greatness of her empire, he has another in reserve, if that should fail, upon quite a contrary ground: that is, a speculation of her crumbling to pieces, and being thrown into a number of little separate republics. After paying the tribute of humanity to those who will be ruined by all these changes, on the whole he is of opinion that "the change might be compatible with general tranquillity, and with the establishment of a peaceful and prosperous commerce among nations." Whether France be great or small, firm and entire or dissipated and divided, all is well, provided we can have peace with her.

But without entering into speculations about her dismemberment, whilst she is adding great nations to her empire, is it, then, quite so certain that the dissipation of France into such a cluster of petty republics would be so very favorable to the true balance of power in Europe as this author imagines it would be, and to the commerce of nations? I greatly differ from him. I perhaps shall prove in a future letter, with the political map of Europe before my eye, that the general liberty and independence of the great Christian commonwealth could not exist with such a dismemberment, unless it were followed (as probably enough it would) by the dismemberment of every other considerable country in Europe: and what convulsions would arise in the constitution of every state in Europe it is not easy to conjecture in the mode, impossible not to foresee in the mass. Speculate on, good my Lord! provided you ground no part of your politics on such unsteady speculations. But as to any practice to ensue, are we not yet cured of the malady of speculating on the circumstances of things totally different from those in which we live and move? Five years has this monster continued whole and entire in all its members. Far from falling into a division within itself, it is augmented by tremendous additions. We cannot bear to look that frightful form in the face, as it is, and in its own actual shape. We dare not be wise; we have not the fortitude of rational fear; we will not provide for our future safety; but we endeavor to hush the cries of present timidity by guesses at what may be hereafter,—

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."

Is this our style of talk, when

"all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death"?

Talk not to me of what swarm of republics may come from this carcass! It is no carcass. Now, now, whilst we are talking, it is full of life and action. What say you to the Regicide empire of to-day? Tell me, my friend, do its terrors appall you into an abject submission, or rouse you to a vigorous defence? But do—I no longer prevent it—do go on,—look into futurity. Has this empire nothing to alarm you when all struggle against it is over, when mankind shall be silent before it, when all nations shall be disarmed, disheartened, and truly divided by a treacherous peace? Its malignity towards humankind will subsist with undiminished heat, whilst the means of giving it effect must proceed, and every means of resisting it must inevitably and rapidly decline.

Against alarm on their politic and military empire these are the writer's sedative remedies. But he leaves us sadly in the dark with regard to the moral consequences, which he states have threatened to demolish a system of civilization under which his country enjoys a prosperity unparalleled in the history of man. We had emerged from our first terrors, but here we sink into them again,—however, only to shake them off upon the credit of his being a man of very sanguine hopes.

Against the moral terrors of this successful empire of barbarism, though he has given us no consolation here, in another place he has formed other securities,—securities, indeed, which will make even the enormity of the crimes and atrocities of France a benefit to the world. We are to be cured by her diseases. We are to grow proud of our Constitution upon, the distempers of theirs. Governments throughout all Europe are to become much stronger by this event. This, too, comes in the favorite mode of doubt and perhaps. "To those," he says, "who meditate on the workings of the human mind, a doubt may perhaps arise, whether the effects which I have described," (namely, the change he supposes to be wrought on the public mind with regard to the French doctrines,) "though at present a salutary check to the dangerous spirit of innovation, may not prove favorable to abuses of power, by creating a timidity in the just cause of liberty." Here the current of our apprehensions takes a contrary course. Instead of trembling for the existence of our government from the spirit of licentiousness and anarchy, the author would make us believe we are to tremble for our liberties from the great accession of power which is to accrue to government.

I believe I have read in some author who criticized the productions of the famous Jurieu, that it is not very wise in people who dash away in prophecy, to fix the time of accomplishment at too short a period. Mr. Brothers may meditate upon this at his leisure. He was a melancholy prognosticator, and has had the fate of melancholy men. But they who prophesy pleasant things get great present applause; and in days of calamity people have something else to think of: they lose, in their feeling of their distress, all memory of those who flattered them in their prosperity. But merely for the credit of the prediction, nothing could have happened more unluckily for the noble lord's sanguine expectations of the amendment of the public mind, and the consequent greater security to government, from the examples in France, than what happened in the week after the publication of his hebdomadal system. I am not sure it was not in the very week one of the most violent and dangerous seditions broke out that we have seen in several years. This sedition, menacing to the public security, endangering the sacred person of the king, and violating in the most audacious manner the authority of Parliament, surrounded our sovereign with a murderous yell and war-whoop for that peace which the noble lord considers as a cure for all domestic disturbances and dissatisfactions.

So far as to this general cure for popular disorders. As for government, the two Houses of Parliament, instead of being guided by the speculations of the Fourth Week in October, and throwing up new barriers against the dangerous power of the crown, which the noble lord considered as no unplausible subject of apprehension, the two Houses of Parliament thought fit to pass two acts for the further strengthening of that very government against a most dangerous and wide-spread faction.

Unluckily, too, for this kind of sanguine speculation, on the very first day of the ever-famed "last week of October," a large, daring, and seditious meeting was publicly held, from which meeting this atrocious attempt against the sovereign publicly originated.

No wonder that the author should tell us that the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages. In one, and that the most material instance, his speculations not only might be, but were at that very time, entirely overset. Their war-cry for peace with France was the same with that of this gentle author, but in a different note. His is the gemitus columbæ, cooing and wooing fraternity; theirs the funereal screams of birds of night calling for their ill-omened paramours. But they are both songs of courtship. These Regicides considered a Regicide peace as a cure for all their evils; and so far as I can find, they showed nothing at all of the timidity which the noble lord apprehends in what they call the just cause of liberty.

However, it seems, that, notwithstanding these awkward appearances with regard to the strength of government, he has still his fears and doubts about our liberties. To a free people this would be a matter of alarm; but this physician of October has in his shop all sorts of salves for all sorts of sores. It is curious that they all come from the inexhaustible drug-shop of the Regicide dispensary. It costs him nothing to excite terror, because he lays it at his pleasure. He finds a security for this danger to liberty from the wonderful wisdom to be taught to kings, to nobility, and even, to the lowest of the people, by the late transactions.

I confess I was always blind enough to regard the French Revolution, in the act, and much more in the example, as one of the greatest calamities that had ever fallen upon mankind. I now find that in its effects it is to be the greatest of all blessings. If so, we owe amende honorable to the Jacobins. They, it seems, were right; and if they were right a little earlier than we are, it only shows that they exceeded us in sagacity. If they brought out their right ideas somewhat in a disorderly manner, it must be remembered that great zeal produces some irregularity; but when greatly in the right, it must be pardoned by those who are very regularly and temperately in the wrong. The master Jacobins had told me this a thousand times. I never believed the masters; nor do I now find myself disposed to give credit to the disciple. I will not much dispute with our author, which party has the best of this Revolution,—that which is from thence to learn wisdom, or that which from the same event has obtained power. The dispute on the preference of strength to wisdom may perhaps be decided as Horace has decided the controversy between Art and Nature. I do not like to leave all the power to my adversary, and to secure nothing to myself but the untimely wisdom that is taught by the consequences of folly. I do not like my share in the partition: because to his strength my adversary may possibly add a good deal of cunning, whereas my wisdom may totally fail in producing to me the same degree of strength. But to descend from the author's generalities a little nearer to meaning, the security given to liberty is this,—"that governments will have learned not to precipitate themselves into embarrassments by speculative wars. Sovereigns and princes will not forget that steadiness, moderation, and economy are the best supports of the eminence on which they stand." There seems to me a good deal of oblique reflection in this lesson. As to the lesson itself, it is at all times a good one. One would think, however, by this formal introduction of it as a recommendation of the arrangements proposed by the author, it had never been taught before, either by precept or by experience,—and that these maxims are discoveries reserved for a Regicide peace. But is it permitted to ask what security it affords to the liberty of the subject, that the prince is pacific or frugal? The very contrary has happened in our history. Our best securities for freedom have been obtained from princes who were either warlike, or prodigal, or both.

Although the amendment of princes in these points can have no effect in quieting our apprehensions for liberty on account of the strength to be acquired to government by a Regicide peace, I allow that the avoiding of speculative wars may possibly be an advantage, provided I well understand what the author means by a speculative war. I suppose he means a war grounded on speculative advantages, and not wars founded on a just speculation of danger. Does he mean to include this war, which we are now carrying on, amongst those speculative wars which this Jacobin peace is to teach sovereigns to avoid hereafter? If so, it is doing the party an important service. Does he mean that we are to avoid such wars as that of the Grand Alliance, made on a speculation of danger to the independence of Europe? I suspect he has a sort of retrospective view to the American war, as a speculative war, carried on by England upon one side and by Louis the Sixteenth on the other. As to our share of that war, let reverence to the dead and respect to the living prevent us from reading lessons of this kind at their expense. I don't know how far the author may find himself at liberty to wanton on that subject; but, for my part, I entered into a coalition which, when I had no longer a duty relative to that business, made me think myself bound in honor not to call it up without necessity. But if he puts England out of the question, and reflects only on Louis the Sixteenth, I have only to say, "Dearly has he answered it!" I will not defend him. But all those who pushed on the Revolution by which he was deposed were much more in fault than he was. They have murdered him, and have divided his kingdom as a spoil; but they who are the guilty are not they who furnish the example. They who reign through his fault are not among those sovereigns who are likely to be taught to avoid speculative wars by the murder of their master. I think the author will not be hardy enough to assert that they have shown less disposition to meddle in the concerns of that very America than he did, and in a way not less likely to kindle the flame of speculative war. Here is one sovereign not yet reclaimed by these healing examples. Will he point out the other sovereigns who are to be reformed by this peace? Their wars may not be speculative. But the world will not be much mended by turning wars from unprofitable and speculative to practical and lucrative, whether the liberty or the repose of mankind is regarded. If the author's new sovereign in France is not reformed by the example of his own Revolution, that Revolution has not added much to the security and repose of Poland, for instance, or taught the three great partitioning powers more moderation in their second than they had shown in their first division of that devoted country. The first division, which preceded these destructive examples, was moderation itself, in comparison of what has been, done since the period of the author's amendment.

This paragraph is written with something of a studied obscurity. If it means anything, it seems to hint as if sovereigns were to learn moderation, and an attention to the liberties of their people, from the fate of the sovereigns who have suffered in this war, and eminently of Louis the Sixteenth.

Will he say whether the King of Sardinia's horrible tyranny was the cause of the loss of Savoy and of Nice? What lesson of moderation does it teach the Pope? I desire to know whether his Holiness is to learn not to massacre his subjects, nor to waste and destroy such beautiful countries as that of Avignon, lest he should call to their assistance that great deliverer of nations, Jourdan Coupe-tête? What lesson does it give of moderation to the Emperor, whose predecessor never put one man to death after a general rebellion of the Low Countries, that the Regicides never spared man, woman, or child, whom they but suspected of dislike to their usurpations? What, then, are all these lessons about the softening the character of sovereigns by this Regicide peace? On reading this section, one would imagine that the poor tame sovereigns of Europe had been a sort of furious wild beasts, that stood in need of some uncommonly rough discipline to subdue the ferocity of their savage nature.

As to the example to be learnt from the murder of Louis the Sixteenth, if a lesson to kings is not derived from his fate, I do not know whence it can come. The author, however, ought not to have left us in the dark upon that subject, to break our shins over his hints and insinuations. Is it, then, true, that this unfortunate monarch drew his punishment upon himself by his want of moderation, and his oppressing the liberties of which he had found his people in possession? Is not the direct contrary the fact? And is not the example of this Revolution the very reverse of anything which can lead to that softening of character in princes which the author supposes as a security to the people, and has brought forward as a recommendation to fraternity with those who have administered that happy emollient in the murder of their king and the slavery and desolation of their country?

But the author does not confine the benefit of the Regicide lesson to kings alone. He has a diffusive bounty. Nobles, and men of property, will likewise be greatly reformed. They, too, will be led to a review of their social situation and duties,—"and will reflect, that their large allotment of worldly advantages is for the aid and benefit of the whole." Is it, then, from the fate of Juigné, Archbishop of Paris, or of the Cardinal de Rochefoucault, and of so many others, who gave their fortunes, and, I may say, their very beings, to the poor, that the rich are to learn, that their "fortunes are for the aid and benefit of the whole"? I say nothing of the liberal persons of great rank and property, lay and ecclesiastic, men and women, to whom we have had the honor and happiness of affording an asylum: I pass by these, lest I should never have done, or lest I should omit some as deserving as any I might mention. Why will the author, then, suppose that the nobles and men of property in France have been banished, confiscated, and murdered, on account of the savageness and ferocity of their character, and their being tainted with vices beyond those of the same order and description in other countries? No judge of a revolutionary tribunal, with his hands dipped in their blood and his maw gorged with their property, has yet dared to assert what this author has been pleased, by way of a moral lesson, to insinuate.