Page images
PDF
EPUB

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 circumstances, which formerly characterized 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 constitution. 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 every thing which has made our country venerable in our eyes and dear to our hearts) we shall have to fight 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. A while ago, they seemed to be tremblingly alive to the number of those who composed it, to their dark subtilty, to their fierce audacity, to their admiration of every thing that passes 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 cock." Scarcely had the Gallic harbinger of peace and light began to utter his lively notes, than all the cackling of us poor tory geese to alarm the garrison of the capitol was forgot.* There was enough of indemni

Hic auratis volitans argenteus anger
Porticibus, GALLOS in limine adesse.canebat.

ty before. Now a complete act of oblivion is passed about the jacobins of England, though one would naturally imagine it would make a principal 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 laboured 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 poignard, the sabre and the tribunal, have shocked whatever remained of human sensibility in our breasts, 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 lustre 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 colour 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 assassinate the memory of those whose bodies their friends had massacred; and to consider their murder as a less formal act of justice. They endeavoured even to debauch our pity, and to suborn it in favour 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 massacres of the regicides might pass 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 massacres 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 honour 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 honour and generosity. Have they told any thing 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 constitution of their country? Nothing of this. The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive. They dare not touch

VOL. V.

"

[9]

the subject: but it is not annihilated by their silence, nor by our indifference. It is but too plain, that our constitution cannot exist with such a communication. Our humanity, our manners, our morals, our religion, cannot stand with such a communication: the constitution 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 anticipated the holidays;-it was a relaxation from your graver employment;-it was a pleasant discussion you had, which part of the family of the constitution 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?"* In order to make this saturnalian amusement 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 butt of all this sport, may suffer in the roystering 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 massacre the holders of the unfashionable opinion, at the very moment when the ferocious enemy of all philosophy and religion, Mahomet the Second, entered through a breach, into the capitol 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 constitutional amusement 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 constitution, 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

* See debates in parliament upon motions, made in both houses, for prosecuting Mr. Reeves for a libel upon the constitution, Dec. 1795.

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.

[ocr errors]

The question will be concerning the effect of this French fraternity on the whole mass. Have we any thing 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 constitution of France, and ill affected to the old constitution 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 pass 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 ambassador and his train. These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A French ambassador, 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. Every thing done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Every thing, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual dilemma; but it is easy to see,

« PreviousContinue »