Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE

COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME THREE

All rights reserved

Milton’s house N^o. 19, York Street, Westminster, occupied by Hazlitt 1812–1819.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT

EDITED BY A. R. WALLER

AND ARNOLD GLOVER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. E. HENLEY

❦

Free Thoughts on Public Affairs

Political Essays

Advertisement, etc., from The Eloquence of the British Senate

❦

1902

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty

CONTENTS

FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS
IN A LETTER ADDRESSED TO
A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This pamphlet of 46 8vo pages was published by the author himself in 1806. The title-page was ‘Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, or Advice to a Patriot; in a Letter addressed to a Member of the Old Opposition. London, Printed by Taylor & Co., Shoe Lane, and sold by J. Budd, Crown & Mitre, Pall Mall, 1806.’ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt reprinted the pamphlet from the author’s own copy in 1885 (Bohn’s Library, The Spirit of the Age, etc.), and that reprint forms the text of the present edition. The pamphlet is exceedingly rare. Mr. Alexander Ireland knew of only one copy, that which belonged to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt. This he caused to be transcribed; but it has not been possible to collate the present text with either the original or Mr. Ireland’s transcription.

ADVICE TO A PATRIOT;
IN A LETTER ADDRESSED
TO A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION

Sir, If the opposition of character between the individuals of different nations is that which attaches every one the most strongly to his own country; if the love of liberty instilled from our very cradle is any security for the hatred of oppression; if a spirit of independence, and a constitutional stubbornness of temper are not forward to crouch under the yoke of unjust ambition; if to look up with heartfelt admiration to the great names, whether heroes or sages, which England has produced, and to be unwilling that the country which gave birth to Shakespear and Milton should ever be enslaved by a mean and servile foe; if to love its glory—that virtue, that integrity, that genius, which have distinguished it from all others, and in which its true greatness consists,—is to love one’s country, there are few persons who have a better right than myself (on the score of sincerity) to offer that kind of advice which is the subject of the following letter, however weak or defective it may be found.

To love one’s country is to wish well to it; to prefer its interests to our own; to oppose every measure inconsistent with its welfare; and to be ready to sacrifice ease, health, and life itself in its defence. But there is a false kind of patriotism, loud and noisy, and ever ready to usurp that name from others, as an honourable covering either for selfish designs or blind zeal, to which I shall make no pretensions. It has been called patriotism, to flatter those in power at the expense of the people; to sail with the stream; to make a popular prejudice the stalking-horse of ambition, to mislead first and then betray; to enrich yourself out of the public treasure; to strengthen your influence by pursuing such measures as give to the richest members of the community an opportunity of becoming richer, and to laugh at the waste of blood and the general misery which they occasion; to defend every act of a party, and to treat all those as enemies of their country who do not think the pride of a minister and the avarice of a few of his creatures of more consequence than the safety and happiness of a free, brave, industrious, and honest people; to strike at the liberty of other countries, and through them at your own; to change the maxims of a state, to degrade its spirit, to insult its feelings, and tear from it its well-earned and proudest distinctions; to soothe the follies of the multitude, to lull them in their sleep, to goad them on in their madness, and, under the terror of imaginary evils, to cheat them of their best privileges; to blow the blast of war for a livelihood in journals and pamphlets, and by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of defiance, animosity, suspicion, distrust, and the most galling contempt, to make it impossible that we should ever remain at peace or in safety, while insults and general obloquy have a tendency to provoke those passions in others which they are intended to excite.

Being then of opinion, that to flatter is not always the duty of a friend; that it is no part of the love of one’s country to be blind to her errors, or to wish her to persist in them; I may take the liberty of stating freely such observations as have occurred to an unprejudiced but not indifferent spectator on the present state of things: and there is at least this advantage in reflections which are not the echo of the popular cry, that something may be found in them, however unsupported or frivolous in general, which may be turned to good account by persons of sounder judgment and more extensive means of information. It has been said that ‘there is wisdom in a multitude of counsellors;’ but if they only raise a clamour by repeating all of them the same thing, I do not see how this advantage can be obtained.

What I would chiefly remark upon is,—How far the principles and views acted upon by the late administrations are such as to afford us the safest and most honourable ground for prosecuting a war which is said to be carried on for the existence of the empire.

Had I to engage with an enemy in a struggle of this kind, the ground which I should choose to occupy would be such a one as that he must feel himself to be the aggressor. In a conflict which is to decide the fate of a people, I think the greatest care should be taken to remove all doubtful or frivolous causes of debate, to suffer no sinister motives to divert their minds from the great object in which they are engaged or lessen their steady confidence in the justice of their cause. It is hardly to be expected that the mass of a people should defend the patrimony of independence which they inherit from their ancestors with the reverence, intrepidity, and dauntless zeal required of them, when they see a minister ready to gamble it away for the first idle object that excites his cupidity, or opens a door to the spirit of intrigue. Examining the conduct of those who were the advisers and authors of the late renewal of hostilities according to these maxims, which seem to me well founded, it is not easy to imagine any thing more remote from true dignity, magnanimity, or wisdom, than the manner in which we chose to enter upon a war on which we were to stake our all. We chose to rest a dispute, which was to involve every thing near and dear to us, on a diplomatic ambiguity; on a technical question, as to the manner how and to whom we were to give up a barren rock which was of no use to us, and to which we had resigned all pretensions. It was clear that we had refused to fulfil our share of a treaty which had been formally ratified; but the reasons which we gave for doing this were by no means equally clear and satisfactory. They sounded more like the excuses of those seeking a pretence for the continuance of an unsuccessful contest, than the remonstrances of persons sincerely anxious for peace, and opposed by real difficulties. I remember at the time when the design of retaining Malta was first made known, every one’s remark was,—Had we not agreed to give it up? And as to the official reasons for this change of measures, which were afterwards detailed to the public with such pomp and circumstance, viz., that it was to have been given up to the Order that formerly possessed it only on the supposition of that Order’s remaining entire, though no such condition had been expressed, and under the guarantee of another power whose consent had neither been asked or obtained, I believe that no one who was not either indifferent to peace or desirous of war ever thought them of sufficient consequence to justify us in exposing ourselves to unnecessary reproach and odium, and plunging into a sea of unknown troubles. It is certain that by the generality of people they could neither be felt nor understood. On this tottering foundation did Mr. Addington think proper to take his stand. Doubt, perplexity, evasion, a general indifference as to the immediate object of the dispute, and a direct accusation of breach of faith on the part of the enemy were the auspices under which we were to begin a war, which ought (from the tremendous consequences attached to it) to have had no motives but what came home to the bosoms and businesses of men; to every manly, generous, and honest feeling; that might not have been uttered boldly without fear of contradiction in the face of an enemy; that must not have beat in every heart, have strung every arm, and animated every tongue. If the situation of the country was believed to be at all precarious; if there was even a chance that the contest might really lead to the dreadful alternative held out to us, the want either of cautious prudence or of manly wisdom in ministers was at that time inexcusable. It is no part of wisdom to hang the fate of kingdoms in the balance with straws. It is no part of courage to fight, to show that you are not afraid of fighting. Calm steady courage does not distrust itself; nor is it afraid that by giving up a trifling or doubtful point, it may afterwards be bullied into dangerous compliances. Firmness and moderation seem to me not only not incompatible with each other, but that the one is a necessary consequence of the other. On the other hand, meanness and pride are nearly allied together. In common life we should think that a readiness to seize the first occasion of quarrel shewed a man to be either a bully or a coward; it would seem as if he was afraid that by deferring his resentment he should either want courage or opportunity for shewing it another time. Yet the great excuse for our going into the war was,—that by yielding any thing to the demands of the enemy, we should soon lose all power of resistance, and crouch in abject submission at his feet. This was not a proud confidence in ourselves, but a mean dread of our own pusillanimity and want of firmness. It was to suppose that we had no security for our firmness, but in the heat of our passions and the infliction of mutual injuries. But it may be said, that whatever was the cause of the war, the consequences were the same. The critical situation in which we stood, and the threats of the enemy made it necessary for us to repel force by force, to call forth every energy of which we were possessed, and to stand forth as one man in defence of the country. But whatever this might prove as to the conduct of the people, it forms no justification of the conduct of ministers. It was not the danger of invasion which produced the taking up arms, but the determination to take up arms which produced the fear of invasion. The threatened invasion was not the cause of the war, but the consequence of it. This reasoning, as applied to the commencement of the war is preposterous. It is the same absurdity as to give yourself an infectious disease in order that you may call in the physician, instead of calling in the physician because you are attacked by the disease. It is ridiculous, I say, to argue that the war was necessary to repel the horrors and ravages of invasion; when, if the war had not taken place, no such evils would have been possible. It was true, that so long as we determined to carry on the war, it was necessary to guard ourselves against the consequences of war; but to suppose (which seemed to be generally the case with the good people of England in the height of their panic) that to doubt for a moment of the necessity of the war was the same thing as wishing that the French might come here and put every one to the sword (when one chief object of peace would be to prevent all such wild alarms), implies such an intricate confusion of ideas as I am not able to unravel. At least I can account for it only in one way; by supposing that this reluctance to distinguish between the necessity of our going to war, and the necessity of self-defence, brought upon us by it, arose from a deep consciousness in the human mind of the importance of the motives by which we have been actuated to the success of our undertakings, and a belief that he who lessens your confidence in the grounds of your proceeding, thereby unnerves your resolution, and lessens your safety. I know that immediate danger, however incurred, produces the same necessity for self-defence; but it does not produce the same temper of mind and motives for going through it. It may also produce the same mechanical courage at the moment; but perseverance, superiority to fear or disaster, self-confidence, a cheerful determined submission to the greatest hardships and sufferings from a sense that they were unavoidable, ‘the unconquerable will, and courage never to submit or yield, and what else is not to be overcome;’ all these are not in the gift of fear, or folly, or ignorance, or hatred. It is therefore of the highest consequence to ascertain the true grounds and motives of a war, such as the present, and to know the spirit and sentiments by which it was brought about, and to what part of our character, whether to its strong or its weak side, whether to our vices or our virtues, those motives were addressed which called forth our ardour and readiness to engage in it. It is not from loud boasting, from what we think or say of ourselves, but from what we really are; not from a pretended, but real love of justice, of independence, of honour, and of our country’s welfare, that we can expect the fruits of victory. If we find in those who lead, no higher principle of action than a wish to serve their own interests, or gratify their own passions, and in those who are led, only that zeal which arises from the drunken uproar of an ale-house, the low credulity of ignorance, or the idle vanity of wearing a red coat and shouldering a firelock—I will not say that the situation of the country is desperate indeed, but I think it is not such as to afford the most solid grounds of confidence in our security against a spirit of unbounded ambition; the insolence of almost unexampled success, resentment for supposed injuries, and the most consummate military skill. ‘The still small voice is wanting.’... It is not in the order of nature that an administration acting upon such principles as I have here described should feel, or be capable of inspiring into others, either true patriotism, a sincere and manly spirit of independence, or any particle of that high-souled energy, which is necessary to contend with inordinate ambition, armed with strength and cunning. That administration is no more: I trust that its spirit has not survived it!

It seems almost impertinent at present to turn back to the diplomatic pedantry and legal quibbling by which the retention of Malta was so gravely justified at the time. After the repeated declarations that have been made in parliament, and after having witnessed those tragical events, to which, it seems, it was the necessary prelude, there can be little doubt as to the real motives of that measure. From these motives then we are to form our opinion of the conduct of ministers. If it was a wise and necessary measure to plunge Europe again into the calamities of war, to bathe it once more in that ‘fountain of blood,’ then and then only was our refusing to fulfil our engagements a wise and necessary determination; for the now avowed reason of our going to war was, that we might not remain at peace! Here then was a war voluntarily undertaken for its own sake, peace studiously shunned, and all the evils consequent upon such a step incurred, for the sake of making one more desperate effort to reduce the power of France and humble it with the dust. We therefore entered upon this wild Quixotic scheme at our own peril, and the responsibility of the war devolved upon us. We ought therefore to have had strong grounds, either from a confidence in the result or from the justice of the principle, for making such an attempt. But we have seen what has been the result with respect to the other powers of Europe, it remains to be seen how it will terminate with respect to ourselves. As to the justice and generosity of the design, I may perhaps speak of that hereafter.

I will not pretend to censure the general practice of obtaining a war under false pretences, I leave it to the politicians to settle the rules of honour among themselves: but I cannot help thinking that in a war which is to try the spirit of a people, they ought not to be tricked, or bullied, or unnecessarily forced into it. With respect to the suspension of the war in consequence of the treaty of Amiens, it certainly had this good effect (on the supposition that it was absolutely necessary to go on with the contest), that it gave those who had been enemies of the old war, and had been afterwards disgusted by the conduct of the French, but did not like to relinquish their opinion while the original cause of dispute remained—it gave all persons of this class (of which there were great numbers) an opportunity to quit the ranks of discontent without exposing themselves to the charge of inconsistency. As it was a new war, they thought they had a fair right to have a new opinion about it; and they exercised their freedom of election as eagerly in approving the conduct of ministers in entering upon the present war, as they had done in condemning their continuance of the former one. For myself, I confess I have always looked upon the present war as a continuance of the last, carried on upon the same principles and for the same purposes, only without any hopes of success, and therefore infinitely more wanton and foolish. For as, in the commencement of the last war, it was our intention to conquer France, in this we can only hope to defend ourselves. Of the necessity of this defence there can be but one opinion. But to confound this with the necessity of the war itself, or to argue as if the discontinuance of the war would increase the dangers arising from it, is an improvement in political logic, a luminous arrangement of ideas, that must have crept in with the benefits of the Union.

The first plea that was made use of to give a colouring of interest to the renewal of hostilities, before the discovery of that profound train of policy, the explosion of which has left Europe a heap of ruins, was, that after the incautious surrender of Malta, it had been found to be of much greater importance to Great Britain than had been imagined at the time; and that it could not be suffered to fall into the hands of the French, or even become subject to their influence, without endangering one of the chief sources of the wealth and prosperity of this country. It seems Malta was the enchanted island, into which Buonaparte was to convey himself by stealth, and thence passing easily into Egypt was, at another vast stride, to come down souse upon our possessions in India. With these resting-places, and the help of the thousand-league boots which our imagination had lent him, the political magician was to take but a hop, step and a jump, from one hemisphere into the other. Or, in the language of the day, Malta was the key to Egypt, and Egypt was the key to our Eastern conquests. Both the points assumed in this statement were directly denied, and their fallacy exposed at the time by one to whose authority or reasonings on the subject I can add nothing; but I may be permitted to make one general remark with respect to this part of the subject, that if the mere possibility of the loss of an object of national aggrandisement is to be considered as a sufficient ground of war, there never could be such a thing as peace among mankind. If one party is to be kept in a state of perpetual alarm from a distant apprehension of losing the superiority they possess in wealth, or luxury, or power, and the other to be perpetually goaded on by the hope of speculative plunder; if one party is determined to forgo nothing, and the other to grasp at everything; if future causes of contention are to be anticipated, and we are to fight now to defend an object that may never come into dispute hereafter; if we are not to wait till we see and feel our danger, but to create it out of every fantastic occasion; if our selfishness must be of that refined calculating comprehensive kind as to overlook no possibility of danger or advantage however remote or uncertain, and at the same time so inflexibly disinterested as to think no sacrifices too great in pursuit of its favourite object—it is easy to see that the world would soon be dispeopled. It is well for mankind that our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own antidote within them. The only excuse for our narrow, selfish passions is their short-sightedness: were it not for this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would never leave them a moment’s interval of rest or quiet. It is well that the headlong passions which make us rush on our own destruction and that of others are only excited by gross, palpable objects; and are therefore transient and limited in their operation. It is well that those motives which owe nothing to reason in their birth should not afterwards receive either nourishment or support from it. If in their present desultory state they produce so many mischiefs, what would be the case if they were to be organized into systems, and under the direction of pure abstract reason? Any object that provoked a momentary resentment or excited our jealousy might plunge us into a war that could only be expiated by seas of blood. But in a war of mere interest or passion, it is surely allowable to sit down and count the cost, and to strive to moderate our pride and resentment instead of inflaming them. Virtue, truth, and patriotism require nothing of us but an inviolable resolution and integrity in the defence of those rights which are the common privilege of humanity; the rest is a calculation of prudence, not a stern command of duty that admits neither of compromise or delay. To defend at the point of the sword, and at the risk of every thing valuable, our title to the possessions that are neither necessary nor durable in their own nature, that are never worth a hundred years’ purchase, that may crumble to pieces of their own accord, or slip out of our hands in various ways before the end of the contest, and which afterwards will be no more secure ‘against infection and the hand of war,’ against the insidious or desperate designs of the enemy, against the breath of accident or unforeseen decay than they were before—is madness and folly. It is to defeat the intended favours of Fortune, by paying for them before-hand a price much greater than they can ever be worth. It is to squander away the whole estate of our present happiness and comfort in purchasing security for that, for which no security ever was or can be given—the continued smiles of fortune. We cannot without a presumption that will involve its own punishment think of placing beyond the reach of chance or fate that which by its own nature and the fluctuation of human affairs is liable to change.

But this must be the case with all distant and maritime possessions: indeed all naval superiority is attended with this necessary disadvantage; that, though actual power, it is not self-dependent, or the source of its own permanence. We cannot secure the possession of the sea in the same manner by taking ships as we can the possession of the land by taking fortresses and countries. The longer a successful continental warfare is carried on, the more able is the conqueror to carry it on: every new conquest that he makes furnishes him with the means of making more, and secures to him what he has already gained by striking at the heart of power, by disarming resistance, and by very liberally rewarding the expence and trouble of keeping it—Whereas the advantages that are gained at sea are, like that element itself, infinitely treacherous and uncertain. We may take their ships; but this will not hinder them from building others. We cannot build forts or erect passes on the seas, or dig them into trenches to keep out the enemy. We cannot enter their country and cut down their forests; we cannot enter their ports and destroy their magazines;—all their means and sources of power remain untouched. We cannot prevent their exertions, though we may constantly render them abortive. Thus, while at an enormous expence we maintain our actual superiority, we make no advances to our object—which is security; but are rather further from it. If we ever make peace, which I suppose will happen sooner or later, we shall find that we have not in any one respect lessened the means or palsied the energies of our rivals; and while we remain at war we are teaching them two very dangerous things, resolution and skill. I conceive no power can be long superior to the attacks of another, unless where it has the means of crushing its resistance in embryo. Naval dominion is in this respect what a government would be that should give to insurgents a free communication with each other, full liberty of forming plans and of organizing themselves into regular bodies of troops, and the privilege of never being attacked till they themselves gave the signal for the onset. Military conquests are therefore in their nature to a certain degree secure; because in maintaining them we have to contend with those whom we have bound hand and foot, from whom we have taken all effectual power of resistance; while in maintaining our naval superiority, we strengthen our adversary by struggling with him, since he has the full use of every limb and muscle, has every inducement as well as opportunity to exert himself to the utmost, and is in no danger of receiving any material hurt; at least this must be the consequence where our natural strength and advantages are at all equal. I know nothing but some such reasoning as this on the inefficiency of naval advantages, as a means of reducing the enemy to terms of submission, that could form the least excuse for the late ministers in their desperate attempt to turn the course of the war from a channel in which it was sure to be successful, into one in which it was sure to be disastrous; to throw the game knowingly and wilfully into the enemy’s hands, and ruin us in our allies. They seemed to anticipate with fatal apprehension the most splendid success that ever adorned the annals of the British navy, and to be determined by an inverted ambition to match it with a pattern, in their own style, of equal horror, discomfiture, and dismay. They seemed to conspire maliciously with fortune, in depriving Englishmen of the pure, unalloyed triumph of that day.—For the present, the errors of the cabinet have entirely defeated whatever advantages we might have derived from our naval success; and the effect of our mistaken policy has been, that while we remain undisputed masters of the seas, and are grasping at the commerce of the world, we see the ports of Europe about to be shut against us. War on the continent is therefore hopeless; war at sea useless, or worse than useless: for methinks there is neither policy nor wisdom nor humanity ‘in resolving to set no limits to your hostility but with your existence,’ when you have to contend with a great and formidable foe; when you only know that he is safe from your attacks; when you can only distress him, when you gain no advantage yourself in the mean time, and cannot possibly gain any that can be put in competition with such an alternative; when we consider that such a resolution (however heroically it may be formed) cannot be always persisted in (for the desire of peace is natural, and war revolting to the human mind); that the longer it is adhered to, the more mischievous it will become, and the more dangerous in its consequences afterwards, and will render the diminution of that maritime preponderance, which we have held with such a convulsive grasp, more and more an object both of policy and revenge to other powers.

I have promised to say something of the justice of the war in its principle, not as a war of defence but as a war of interference; though I think the less is said on this subject the better; it can only open ‘another Iliad of woes.’ It must lead to a train of recollections that can be of no use to us at present; or revive sentiments and a spirit that should be recalled only (if it were possible) to be disclaimed. The less we retain of a spirit of offence, and the sooner we forget ourselves in the character of aggressors, in however just a cause, the better shall we be qualified for our present posture of defence: for there is no ground of resistance so sure as a determined belief, for the time at least, that all aggression must be wrong. I am far from thinking that the arbitrary conduct of a government, even where it does not affect ourselves, is not a just ground of war, or that the conduct of the French government was not marked by a spirit of violent and unjust ambition. Of course if that spirit can be resisted with effect, there is no injustice, and there is a great deal of policy in doing it. But before we can plead generous indignation and an uncontrolable love of justice in excuse for our rashness and imprudence, it must be clear that pride, revenge, and the lust of dominion have had no share in producing this ardent concern for the rights and liberties of mankind. It is not the nature or justice of the occasion, but the use intended to be made of it; the principles and views on which we act, and the character of those with whom we are associated in a common cause, that gives us a right to arrogate to ourselves the title of assertors of the liberties of mankind. If, however, our motives are not such as to be above all suspicion, it is not enough that we are able to hide them from ourselves, unless we can at the same time impose upon those who have not the same interest in being deceived by the thin disguise that covers them. Instead then of enquiring into the abstract justice of the war (a sort of enquiry now very nearly exploded, and which would be of little use in guiding our practical conclusions), let us examine in what manner our remonstrances would be likely to be received by the government to whom they were addressed, and how far the common feelings of humanity would compel them ‘to bow their crested pride’ at the feet of their accusers. Would they forget then that the undue and dangerous influence in the affairs of Europe, which was so loudly complained of, had been the consequence of the combined efforts of all Europe to accomplish their destruction, and was so far from being the cause of the hostility of other states, that it was their only security against it? That their unjust and tyrannical encroachments on the independence of the neighbouring states had been made in defending their own independence from the aggressions of which they were made the instruments? They would say, that to think of restoring the independence of those countries would be putting into the hands of a mortal enemy, whom you have just disarmed, the weapons with which he may most surely effect your destruction; that whatever advantages they had gained had been bought with their blood, shed for their country; that if there had been any instance of unjust aggression, or inordinate ambition, it might at least be accounted for from that natural jealousy of others, and that fierce impatience of control, that must become habitual to those who had had every kind of difficulty to encounter, and who had triumphed over all opposition. The gigantic strength and towering greatness of France had arisen from her convulsive struggles for existence, and in the cause of that liberty which was denied her. They, who had insulted her weakness and blasted her hopes, had no right to complain of her strength or her despair. Those who had not been able to make their country free and happy, would be instigated by a just revenge to make her great and formidable to her enemies. They might say, ‘You left us no choice between the highest point of glory, and the most abject submission; we must either be conquerors or slaves. If you gained an advantage, you pursued it; if you were defeated, you returned to the charge; neither success nor misfortune inclined you to listen to terms of accommodation: we saw that we could never hope for peace, but either by giving to France such an ascendancy as would overawe the rest of Europe, or by throwing ourselves at last on the mercy of our unrelenting foe. We had not forgotten the partition of Poland, the massacres of Ismael and Warsaw; and we could not satisfy ourselves but that those who had had the chief concern in these events, or had witnessed them without dismay, might have other objects in view in entering France, besides the tranquillity of the people, the restoration of order, or a disinterested regard for the safety of thrones, and the independence of Europe. We could not conceive that an implacable enmity to France was a full atonement for all other crimes, or a security for every virtue. Pursued, hunted down, driven to madness, we turned upon our pursuers, and trampled them under our feet; and in the career of our fury, and the plenitude of our triumph, you charge us with excesses, from which we ourselves were the greatest sufferers; and with not having observed those rules of justice and moderation, which reason required of us. We were to have no indemnity, no security: we were to give back every conquest, as soon as made; to fight every battle over again; to rely solely on the faith or generosity of our adversaries, as a pledge that no advantage would be taken of our confidence; or, if it were ten times betrayed, we were not to complain, as we had no right to advantages obtained by unjust violence, in a cause that exposed us to the enmity and detestation of the human race: we were to plead guilty to our own condemnation; to set the seal on our own infamy, and to receive as a mark of favour and lenity, whatever implied our admission into the common rank and privileges of mankind; and, after endless sacrifices and exertions, we were only to prepare for new struggles and insults, without ever hoping to end them. But from whom were we to learn this extreme moderation, or that respect for the rights of justice or the ties of humanity, which could be no defence to us? Why were we not to pursue the objects of our ambition, with the same obstinacy as those with whom we had to contend pursued the objects of their revenge? It could hardly be expected that all the concessions were to be made by those who were intoxicated with the pride of victory, in favour of those who had reaped nothing but disappointment, and who were only urged on by a sullen despair. In this manner was the war protracted, year after year, by open hostility, by civil dissentions, and pretended treaties; lingered out under various pretexts, which were artfully substituted for each other as occasion required, so as to make it impossible ever to arrive at any decisive issue to the contest. When defeated, the continuance of the war was necessary to their own defence and safety; when flushed with victory for a time, then nothing less than full indemnity for the past, as well as security for the future would satisfy them; and then their favourite object, the subjugation of France, and destruction of the republic, was resumed with fresh ardour, and tempted them on till their hopes again ended in defeat and ruin: thus adapting every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, they constantly returned in the same circle to the point from which they set out, and war was always necessary, peace always unattainable. Or if at any time the fainting resolution and exhausted strength of our adversaries seemed to promise us that repose which was so necessary to us, we saw the dying embers of war again eagerly rekindled by a country that, standing aloof from the contagion, shouted from her rocky shores to see the flames that consumed the vitals of Europe. The bitterest enmity that our early struggles in the cause of liberty had drawn down upon us was to be shewn by a people “that had long insulted the slavery of Europe, by the loudness of its boasts of freedom.” English solicitation and English gold were always ready to defeat that object, which was to be the reward of so many triumphs, and of so many years of suffering, of havoc, uncertainty, and dismay. A reluctant peace was at length extorted from her: but her jealousy, avarice, and pride made her choose to risk every thing rather than remain in a state so unnatural to her. Delicate in her moral sentiments, disinterested in all her proceedings, she was shocked at some violences of ours, which permitted her no longer to remain an indifferent spectator of the calamities of other nations, and she sought the first opportunity of evading the treaty that had been concluded, by alarming the fears of her merchants for the safety of their Eastern possessions. She lost no time in rousing to her aid her former confederates in wrong. By her incantations, the hydra-headed monster, which we thought we had finally subdued, again feels new life and vigour restored to it, unites its severed folds, and with its triple crown moves onward to its prey, and France must submit or perish, that England may preserve her commerce.’ In some such manner as this would a Frenchman repel the charges brought against his countrymen; and, if we allow for the strength of national prejudices, there appears to be some appearance of reason in what he says.[^[1]] If the present quarrel had been so managed as to have been completely disentangled from the former one, we should have been better able to answer their reproaches, and I think to resist their menaces. Had not Austria been precipitated unwisely into that quarrel in the manner she was, she could not have fallen to the ground without a struggle.

In what further remarks I have to make, I shall consider whether the system of internal policy pursued by the late minister was in its general tendency likely to increase the spirit of independence, and consequently the security of the country. It seems to me a desirable object to refer as much as possible of our proceedings both at home and abroad to the influence of that minister’s character on the national feelings, and to the blind confidence generally placed in his talents and integrity. The errors that we have been led into by a confidence of this sort will be sooner retrieved than if they proceeded from a change in our own habits and dispositions. It is well if we can save the credit of our national character, a little at the expence of our understandings; for I cannot think that our confidence in that minister was well bestowed. I know it is a general maxim, that we are not to war with the dead. We ought not, indeed, to trample on their bodies; but with their minds we may and must make war, unless we would be governed by them after they are dead. They who wish their sentiments to survive them in the memories of men, must also expect to live in their censures.

The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and preserved in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it appears) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other talent that might interfere with the only one which he possessed in a supreme degree, and which indeed may be made to include the appearance of all others—an artful use of words, and a certain dexterity of logical arrangement. In these alone his power consisted; and the defect of all other qualities, which usually constitute greatness, contributed to the more complete success of these. Having no strong feelings, no distinct perceptions, his mind having no link, as it were, to connect it with the world of external nature, every subject presented to him nothing more than a tabula rasa, on which he was at liberty to lay whatever colouring of language he pleased; having no general principles, no comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of action, there was nothing to hinder him from pursuing any particular purpose by any means that offered; having never any plan, he could not be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride and obstinacy were the only rules of his conduct. Having no insight into human nature, no sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension of their real designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the consequences of things, and would believe nothing till it actually happened. The fog and haze in which he saw every thing communicated itself to others, and the total indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most ingenious misrepresentation could have done. Indeed, in defending his conduct he never seemed to consider himself as at all responsible for the success of his measures, or that future events were in our own power; but that as the best laid schemes might fail, and there was no providing against all possible contingencies, this was a sufficient excuse for our plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd enterprise without the least regard to consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely to the possible and the impossible, and he appeared to regard the probable and improbable, the only foundation of moral prudence or political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its weakness.[^[2]] From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to have believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality of the facts, but that the things depended on the order in which he arranged them in words: you would not suppose him to be agitating a serious question, which had real grounds to go upon, but to be declaiming upon an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools. He never set himself to examine the force of the objections that were brought against his measures, or attempted to establish them upon clear, solid grounds of his own; but constantly contented himself with first gravely stating the logical form, or dilemma to which the question reduced itself, and then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded to amuse his hearers by a series of rhetorical common-places, connected together in grave, sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods, without ever shewing their real application to the subject in dispute. Thus if any member of the opposition disapproved of any measure, and enforced his objections by pointing out the many evils with which it is fraught, or the difficulties attending its execution, his only answer was, ‘that it was true there might be inconveniences attending the measure proposed, but we were to remember, that every expedient that could be devised might be said to be nothing more than a choice of difficulties, and that all that human prudence could do was to consider on which side the advantages lay; that for his part he conceived that the present measure was attended with more advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other that could be adopted; that if we were diverted from our object by every appearance of difficulty, the wheels of government would be clogged by endless delays and imaginary grievances; that most of the objections made to the measure appeared to him trivial, others of them unfounded and improbable; or that if a scheme free from all these objections could be proposed, it might after all prove inefficient; while, in the mean time, a material object remained unprovided for, or the opportunity of action was lost.’ This mode of reasoning is admirably described by Hobbes, in speaking of the writings of some of the Schoolmen, of whom he says, that ‘they had learned the trick of imposing what they list upon their readers, and declining the force of true reason by verbal forks, that is distinctions which signify nothing, but serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men.’ That what I have here stated comprehends the whole force of his mind, which consisted solely in this evasive dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a copiousness of words and common-place topics, will, I think, be evident to any one who carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the reputation or personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to look in them for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He has not left behind him a single memorable saying—not one profound maxim—one solid observation—one forcible description—one beautiful thought—one humourous picture—one affecting sentiment. He has made no addition whatever to the stock of human knowledge. He did not possess any one of those faculties which contribute to the instruction and delight of mankind—depth of understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit, vivacity, clear and solid judgment. But it may be asked, If these qualities are not to be found in him, where are we to look for them? And I may be required to point out instances of them. I shall answer then, that he had none of the profound, legislative wisdom, piercing sagacity, or rich, impetuous, high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly eloquence, strong sense, exact knowledge, vehemence and natural simplicity of Fox; the ease, brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It is not merely that he had not all these qualities in the degree that they were severally possessed by his rivals, but he had not any of them in any degree. His reasoning is a technical arrangement of unmeaning common-places, his eloquence merely rhetorical, his style monotonous and artificial. If he could pretend to any one excellence in an eminent degree, it was to taste in composition. There is certainly nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity pervading them throughout; but in the confined, mechanical, passive mode of eloquence which he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit errors than to avoid them. A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way. However, habit, joined to the peculiar mechanical memory which he possessed, carried his correctness to a degree which, in an extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous; he perhaps hardly ever uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular and connected. In this respect, he not only had the advantage over his own contemporaries, but perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in this singular faculty. But for this, he would always have passed for a common man; and to this the constant sameness, and, if I may say so, vulgarity of his ideas must have contributed not a little, as there was nothing to distract his mind from this one object of his unintermitted attention; and as even in his choice of words he never aimed at anything more than a certain general propriety and stately uniformity of style. His talents were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was placed; where it was his business not to overcome others, but to avoid being overcome. He was able to baffle opposition, not from strength or firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his resistance, which gave no hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no force could bind the loose phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless, and his pride humbled by such rebuke,’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,

‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound

Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’[^[3]]

By this lucky combination of strength and weakness, he succeeded in maintaining an undiminished influence over the opinions of his own country for a number of years, in wielding her energies as he pleased, and guiding the counsels of almost all Europe. With respect to his influence on the continent, that is an illusion that is past, and not worth inquiring about; but it may still be of some use to inquire by what means he strengthened his influence at home, as this may more immediately concern our future conduct. This I think he effected in two ways: by lessening the free spirit of the country as much as he could, and by giving every possible encouragement to its commercial spirit. I shall not here examine how far both these designs were wise and salutary at the time; but I conceive that neither a spirit of dependence nor an unbounded and universal spirit of trade will be the best security for our safety at present. An indifference to liberty is not likely to increase the love of independence; nor is an exclusive regard to private gain likely to produce a disinterested concern for the public welfare. Mr. Pitt, in making war, always considered peace as an object perfectly indifferent in itself; and, in securing the prerogative of the crown, seemed to think that the privileges of the people did not deserve a moment’s attention. I do not in this mean to condemn his conduct: perhaps we may suppose that the restrictions which he introduced on the liberty of the subject, and the spirit of passive obedience and non-resistance which was every where industriously diffused, the contempt and obloquy which were poured on the very name of liberty, might be required by the circumstances of the time, and necessary to prevent the contagion of a dangerous example, and the mischiefs of civil anarchy and confusion. The public were perhaps justly surfeited with metaphysical treatises overturning the foundation of all civil rights, and the very notion of liberty, with historical disquisitions proving that the popular spirit of political institutions was the bane of all internal quiet and happiness, the source of endless violence and bloodshed, and the final cause of their dissolution; that human happiness could never reach its utmost point of perfection but under the mild and tranquil reign of universal despotism; that the forms of all governments were alike indifferent, provided they secured the same servile obedience and death-like apathy in the state. Perhaps it was then necessary that we should be told, ex cathedrâ, that the people had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them: perhaps it was right that we should be amused with apologies for the corrupt influence of the crown; that integrity, honour, the love of justice, public spirit, or a zeal for the interests of the community should be laughed at as absurd chimeras, and that an ardent love of liberty, or determined resistance to powerful oppression should be treated as madness and folly. But however wise or necessary a temporary fashion of this kind might be to counteract the poison of other views and sentiments, I am sure it can neither be wise nor safe to continue it at present. We ought to do every thing in our power to get rid of the effects of so dangerous a habit as soon as possible. The fewer curbs there are on the spirit of the people, the more vigorous and determined will it shew itself; the greater the encouragement that is given to the principles of liberty, and the greater confidence that is placed in the general disposition of the country, the greater and more irresistible will be their habitual attachment to liberty and independence. You give a manifest advantage to an enemy if you in any way lessen the sources of enthusiasm, or in any way check the ardour, confine the energy, degrade the sentiments, or discountenance the erect, manly, independent spirit of your country. It is dangerous to let any thing fall into disrepute or contempt which may serve as a watchword to startle the dull ear, or rouse the frozen blood; but to this purpose it is not enough that the name is retained, if the habitual feeling is destroyed. A tame acquiescence in every encroachment of power or exertion of undue influence, a disposition to assert our own rights or those of others no further than fear or interest permit, a habit of looking on the welfare of our country or the rights of mankind as secondary considerations, no further to be regarded than as they are connected with our own danger or convenience, these are not the symptoms of the durable greatness and independence of a people. The causes of the ruin of states have been almost always laid in the relaxation of their moral habits and political prejudices. No kingdom can be secure in its independence against a greater power that is not free in its spirit, as well as in its institutions. I shall be happy if I have been mistaken in thinking these observations at all applicable to our own country: but the observations themselves are serious, and worth attending to. They are such as have been recognised in all nations and ages, except those indeed where their having been so would have rendered them suspected.

On the other hand, a commercial spirit is a very weak as well as dangerous substitute for a spirit of freedom: a sense of self-interest, of mere mercenary advantage, can but ill supply the place of principle. The love of gain, however active or persevering this principle may be in accomplishing its own particular ends, can never be safely trusted to as an ally in a cause where there are other objects to be attended to. Men who are actuated by this sole principle will very obstinately, no doubt, defend their wealth, while they can retain it; but when that is no longer the case, they will think nothing else worth retaining, and meanly compromise their independence for their safety. That common birthright which they receive from nature, in which every Englishman has an equal interest as such, appears of little value in their eyes. Liberty is in their eyes a coarse homely figure, but for the jewels that sparkle in her hair, and the rings on her fingers. It is inconceivable to them how a man can have any attachment to a simple shed, or can take any pride in his title to that respect, which is due to him only because he feels himself to be free. They will defend England as connected with her colonies, with her proud canopies of Eastern state, her distant spicy groves and the rich spoils of her Western isles; but will they defend her as she is England, as their country? Strip her of her conquests, her slaves, and her plantations, her bales of goods, her gold and silver, and leave her only herself, what would there be in all the rest worth the labour of a struggle? Her barren acres, her brave, simple, generous, honest-hearted, hardy race of men, her liberty, her fame, her integrity they look upon with the most sovereign contempt and indifference, and would be ready to sacrifice them all for the purchase of some new golden settlement, ‘some happier island in the watery waste—

‘Where slaves no more their native land behold,

But fiends torment, and Christians thirst for gold.’

They would defend their country not as her children, but as her masters; as a property, not as a state. There may be the same pride and luxury in other classes of men, but they are accompanied with other feelings, and drawn from other sources. It has been a customary compliment to consider those as best entitled to come forward conspicuously in defence of their country who had what is called the greatest stake in it. This is perhaps true of the real, old hereditary nobility and gentry, of those who find their names enrolled high in the annals of their country, whose affections have grown to her soil as it were in a long course of centuries, who have an interest in looking forward to posterity, and a pride in looking back upon their ancestors, who have not only present possessions and advantages to defend, but feelings of inveterate prejudice and inbred honour to defend them. The loss of respect, or of their former privileges, is a change which to them appears like something out of the course of nature, to which no force or accidental circumstances can ever reconcile them. They are also men of liberal education; and this is a great point gained. There is certainly this advantage in a classical education, if not counteracted by other causes, that it gives men long views; it accustoms the mind to take an interest in things foreign to itself, to love virtue for its own sake, to prefer fame to life, and glory to riches, and to fix our thoughts on the great and permanent instead of narrow and selfish objects. It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and to feel respect for that which is made venerable by its nature and antiquity instead of that low and servile dread which bows only to present power and upstart authority. It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed either a delicate sense of honour, or an inflexible regard to truth and justice. But the spirit of trade is the very reverse of all this. It is the principle of this set of men to cry ‘Long life to the conqueror,’ to feel a contempt for all obligations that are not founded in self-interest, and to consider all generous pursuits and the hope of unfading renown as romance and folly. ‘Virtue is not their habit, they are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory.’ They would not give a hundred hogsheads of sugar or a half-year’s income for all the posthumous fame that was ever acquired in the world. If things should unhappily ever come to extremities, they are not the people who will retrieve them, either by their exertions or example. They have neither grand and elevated views, nor the warm, genuine feelings of nature. They have no principles of action. Irresolute, temporizing, every thing is with them made a subject of selfish calculation. Their friendships as well as their enmities are the creatures of the occasion. Confident, insolent in the day of success, and while their cause is triumphant, they are as soon dejected and driven to despair, when they find the tide turned against them. Fortune is with them the first of goddesses: success the only title to authority and respect; and possession the truest right. Accustomed to all the fluctuations of hope and fear, they consider nothing stable in human affairs; thrown into the possession of power and affluence by accidents which they know not how to account for, it can hardly seem strange to them that they should again be stripped of them. They do not ‘lay the fault upon themselves but on their stars, that they are underlings.’ If I hear a man say that we are to give up our public principles whenever circumstances render it necessary, that we are to inquire upon all occasions not what is right, but what is prudent to be done, that those feelings, which lead us to adhere to the cause of truth and justice if at all unpopular, or to incur any personal risk or inconvenience in defending what is right, are weak and vulgar prejudices, I know that that man will be first to truckle to an enemy, and the last voluntarily to risk his life in defence of his independence.

The courage of the soldier and the citizen are essentially different. The one is momentary and involuntary; the other permanent and voluntary. It is one thing to do all in your power to repel danger when it is unavoidable, and another to expose yourself to it when you may avoid going into it. Fear, or rashness, or necessity may be supposed to kindle all the fury of battle: but principle alone can make us willing to return to the charge after defeat. It is for this re-action that we ought to be chiefly prepared. For this nothing can prepare us but a true love of our country, not taken up as a fashion, but felt as a duty; a spirit of resistance not measured by our convenience, but by the strength of our attachment and the real value of the object; but steady enthusiasm; but a determination never to submit while hope or life remained, and an indifference to every thing else but that one great object.

What resistance has Holland ever made to the power of France from the first moment? Commerce had spread its sordid mantle completely over her. Wrapped closely up in this, she fell without resistance and without a groan: she was not of a temper to fall in love with danger, to court disasters. Since that time she has not made a struggle or breathed a sigh for her release, but lies supine, secure, unmoved, and torpid,

‘Dull as her lakes that slumber in the storm.’

Two hundred years of commerce and riches, which had gone over her, since, in that noble struggle for thirty years together, she had defied the whole power and the utmost vengeance of Spain, had prepared her for this striking change. But England is not yet quite commercial: the spirit of trade has not spread its poison through the whole mass of our blood and vital juices! As I do not wish that England (with all her high hopes, and called to a far different destiny) may ever share the fate of Holland, I do not wish that she may ever resemble her in herself; that every other feeling should give way to that of interest alone, but that she may tremble at ever realizing the warning picture of the poet,

——‘When, stript of all her charms,

The land of scholars, and the nurse of arms,

Where noble stems transmit the patriot flame,

Where kings have toil’d and poets wrote for fame,

One sink of level avarice shall lie,

And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonour’d die.’

Though a state cannot look to its commerce for its security, it may be involved in endless difficulty and danger by the views of commercial aggrandizement. The views of men wholly engrossed in such pursuits are altogether low and mechanical. If they see far, it is always in a straight line before them; their sagacity is confined to what immediately concerns their own interest. They are so intent upon that one object that they overlook every thing else; and their eagerness to accumulate is such, that they would rather hazard all than relinquish a pursuit which promises them some new acquisition. While they are successful, it is impossible to persuade them that they ever can be otherwise, or to restrain their rashness by any considerations of prudence or humanity. Actuated only by gross, palpable objects, and full of themselves, they laugh at all distant danger. All general reasonings on the principles of human nature, or the operation of causes by which they do not find themselves influenced, appear to them perfectly futile and visionary. ‘They think there is nothing real but that which they can handle; which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers.’ As they believe money to be the only substantial good, they are also persuaded that it is the only instrument of power. With this they think themselves invulnerable, and that the more of it they have, the more secure they are. As long as their credit remains unimpaired, and their remittances are regularly made, they consider the fate of battles and the intrigues of cabinets as of very little comparative importance. They look up with more awe and admiration to a stock-jobbing broker surrounded with his clerks than they do to a victorious general at the head of his army. The rise and fall of stocks, and the demand for our manufactures abroad, are in their opinion the only criterions of national prosperity. On the other hand, whatever affects their own interest, the loss of an island, or the stopping up of a port, is found immediately to threaten the ruin of the country. Their fears are as rash and groundless as their confidence. Every thing in which they themselves are concerned is viewed through a magnifying medium, and demands all our vigilance and attention, while every thing else dwindles into insignificance. I therefore think there ought to be as little connection as possible between the measures of government and the maxims of the Exchange, and that the interests of a great empire ought not to be managed by a company of factors.

I have thus expressed the sentiments which occurred to me on the present situation of our affairs, and some of the steps which led to it. I have done this as freely and unreservedly as I could, because if they are wrong, it is not likely that they will be much attended to; but if they are right, they may be of some use. And I conceive that even they who may think the view I have taken of the measures of the last administration, and the application of particular observations to our own conduct altogether unfounded, will not deny the truth of the general principles on which they are built. Or that the sentiments of justice, of honour, of reason and liberty, by which I think our views and conduct ought to have been regulated, can be too deeply impressed on our minds.

End of Free Thoughts on Public Affairs

POLITICAL ESSAYS,
WITH
SKETCHES OF PUBLIC CHARACTERS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This work was published in 1819 with the following title-page:—‘Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. By William Hazlitt. “Come, draw the curtain, shew the picture.” London: Printed for William Hone, 45, Ludgate Hill. 1819.’ A ‘Second edition,’ with the same title and motto, ‘published by John Templeman, 39, Tottenham-Court-Road; and Simpkin and Marshall, Stationers’-court,’ appeared in 1822, but was probably a mere re-issue. The text of the 1819 edition is here reprinted.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

To JOHN HUNT, Esq.

The tried, steady, zealous, and conscientious advocate of the liberty of his country, and the rights of mankind;—

One of those few persons who are what they would be thought to be; sincere without offence, firm but temperate; uniting private worth to public principle; a friend in need, a patriot without an eye to himself; who never betrayed an individual or a cause he pretended to serve—in short, that rare character, a man of common sense and common honesty,

This volume is respectfully and gratefully inscribed by

The Author.

PREFACE

I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority. Again, I am no believer in the doctrine of divine right, either as it regards the Stuarts or the Bourbons; nor can I bring myself to approve of the enormous waste of blood and treasure wilfully incurred by a family that supplanted the one in this country to restore the others in France. It is to my mind a piece of sheer impudence. The question between natural liberty and hereditary slavery, whether men are born free or slaves, whether kings are the servants of the people, or the people the property of kings (whatever we may think of it in the abstract, or debate about it in the schools)—in this country, in Old England, and under the succession of the House of Hanover, is not a question of theory, but has been long since decided by certain facts and feelings, to call which in question would be equally inconsistent with proper respect to the people, or common decency towards the throne. An English subject cannot call this principle in question without renouncing his country; an English prince cannot call it in question without disclaiming his title to the crown, which was placed by our ancestors on the head of his ancestors, on no other ground and for no other possible purpose than to vindicate this sacred principle in their own persons, and to hold it out as an example to posterity and to the world. An Elector of Hanover, called over here to be made king of England, in contempt and to the exclusion of the claims of the old, hereditary possessors and pretenders to the throne, on any other plea except that of his being the chosen representative and appointed guardian of the rights and liberties of the people (the consequent pledge and guarantee of the rights and liberties of other nations) would indeed be a solecism more absurd and contemptible than any to be found in history. What! Send for a petty Elector of a petty foreign state to reign over us from respect to his right to the throne of these realms, in defiance of the legitimate heir to the crown, and ‘in contempt of the choice of the people!’ Oh monstrous fiction! Miss Flora Mac Ivor would not have heard of such a thing: the author of Waverley has well answered Mr. Burke’s ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.’[^[4]] Let not our respect for our ancestors, who fought and bled for their own freedom, and to aid (not to stifle) the cause of freedom in other nations, suffer us to believe this poor ideot calumny of them. Let not our shame at having been inveigled into crusades and Holy Alliances against the freedom of mankind, suffer us to be made the dupes of it ourselves, in thought, in word, or deed. The question of genuine liberty or of naked slavery, if put in words, should be answered by Englishmen with scorn: if put in any other shape than words, it must be answered in a different way, unless they would lose the name of Englishmen! An Englishman has no distinguishing virtue but honesty: he has and can have no privilege or advantage over other nations but liberty. If he is not free, he is the worst of slaves, for he is nothing else. If he feels that he has wrongs and dare not say so, he is the meanest of hypocrites; for it is certain that he cannot be contented under them.—This was once a free, a proud, and happy country, when under a constitutional monarchy and a Whig king, it had just broken the chains of tyranny that were prepared for it, and successfully set at defiance the menaces of an hereditary pretender; when the monarch still felt what he owed to himself and the people, and in the opposite claims which were set up to it, saw the real tenure on which he held his crown; when civil and religious liberty were the watch-words by which good men and true subjects were known to one another, not by the cant of legitimacy; when the reigning sovereign stood between you and the polluted touch of a bigot and a despot who stood ready to seize upon you and yours as his lawful prey; when liberty and loyalty went hand in hand, and the Tory principles of passive obedience and non-resistance were more unfashionable at court than in the country; when to uphold the authority of the throne, it was not thought necessary to undermine the privileges or break the spirit of the nation; when an Englishman felt that his name was another name for independence, ‘the envy of less happier lands,’ when it was his pride to be born, and his wish that other nations might become free; before a sophist and an apostate had dared to tell him that he had no share, no merit, no free agency, in the glorious Revolution of 1688, and that he was bound to lend a helping hand to crush all others, that implied a right in the people to chuse their own form of government; before he was become sworn brother to the Pope, familiar to the Holy Inquisition, an encourager of the massacres of his Protestant brethren, a patron of the Bourbons, and jailor to the liberties of mankind! Ah, John Bull! John Bull! thou art not what thou wert in the days of thy friend, Arbuthnot! Thou wert an honest fellow then: now thou art turned bully and coward.

This is the only politics I know; the only patriotism I feel. The question with me is, whether I and all mankind are born slaves or free. That is the one thing necessary to know and to make good: the rest is flocci, nauci, nihili, pili. Secure this point, and all is safe: lose this, and all is lost. There are people who cannot understand a principle; nor perceive how a cause can be connected with an individual, even in spite of himself, nor how the salvation of mankind can be bound up with the success of one man. It is in vain that I address to them what follows.—‘One fate attends the altar and the throne.’ So sings Mr. Southey. I say, that one fate attends the people and the assertor of the people’s rights against those who say they have no rights, that they are their property, their goods, their chattels, the live-stock on the estate of Legitimacy. This is what kings at present tell us with their swords, and poets with their pens. He who tells me this deprives me not only of the right, but of the very heart and will to be free, takes the breath out of the body of liberty, and leaves it a dead and helpless corse, destroys ‘at one fell swoop’ the dearest hopes, and blasts the fairest prospects of mankind through all ages and nations, sanctifies slavery, binds it as a spell on the understanding, and makes freedom a mockery, and the name a bye-word. The poor wretch immured in the dungeons of the Inquisition may breathe a sigh to liberty, may repeat its name, may think of it as a blessing, if not to himself, to others; but the wretch imprisoned in the dungeon of Legitimacy, the very tomb of freedom, that ‘painted sepulchre, white without, but full of ravening and all uncleanness within,’ must not even think of it, must not so much as dream of it, but as a thing forbid: it is a profanation to his lips, an impiety to his thoughts; his very imagination is enthralled, and he can only look forward to the never-ending flight of future years, and see the same gloomy prospect of abject wretchedness and hopeless desolation spread out for himself and his species. They who bow to thrones and hate mankind may here feast their eyes with blight, mildew, the blue pestilence and glittering poison of slavery, ‘bogs, dens, and shades of death—a universe of death.’ This is that true moral atheism, the equal blasphemy against God and man, the sin against the Holy Ghost, that lowest deep of debasement and despair to which there is no lower deep. He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul. The plague-spot has not tainted me quite; I am not leprous all over, the lie of Legitimacy does not fix its mortal sting in my inmost soul, nor, like an ugly spider, entangle me in its slimy folds; but is kept off from me, and broods on its own poison. He who did this for me, and for the rest of the world, and who alone could do it, was Buonaparte. He withstood the inroads of this new Jaggernaut, this foul Blatant Beast, as it strode forward to its prey over the bodies and minds of a whole people, and put a ring in its nostrils, breathing flame and blood, and led it in triumph, and played with its crowns and sceptres, and wore them in its stead, and tamed its crested pride, and made it a laughing-stock and a mockery to the nations. He, one man, did this, and as long as he did this, (how, or for what end, is nothing to the magnitude of this mighty question) he saved the human race from the last ignominy, and that foul stain that had so long been intended, and was at last, in an evil hour and by evil hands, inflicted on it. He put his foot upon the neck of kings, who would have put their yoke upon the necks of the people: he scattered before him with fiery execution, millions of hired slaves, who came at the bidding of their masters to deny the right of others to be free. The monument of greatness and of glory he erected, was raised on ground forfeited again and again to humanity—it reared its majestic front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith of the common enemies of mankind. If he could not secure the freedom, peace, and happiness of his country, he made her a terror to those who by sowing civil dissension and exciting foreign wars, would not let her enjoy those blessings. They who had trampled upon Liberty could not at least triumph in her shame and her despair, but themselves became objects of pity and derision. Their determination to persist in extremity of wrong only brought on themselves repeated defeat, disaster, and dismay: the accumulated aggressions their infuriated pride and disappointed malice meditated against others, returned in just and aggravated punishment upon themselves: they heaped coals of fire upon their own heads; they drank deep and long, in gall and bitterness, of the poisoned chalice they had prepared for others: the destruction with which they had threatened a people daring to call itself free, hung suspended over their heads, like a precipice, ready to fall upon and crush them. ‘Awhile they stood abashed,’ abstracted from their evil purposes, and felt how awful freedom is, its power how dreadful. Shrunk from the boasted pomp of royal state into their littleness as men, defeated of their revenge, baulked of their prey, their schemes stripped of their bloated pride, and with nothing left but the deformity of their malice, not daring to utter a syllable or move a finger, the lords of the earth, who had looked upon men as of an inferior species, born for their use, and devoted to be their slaves, turned an imploring eye to the people, and with coward hearts and hollow tongues invoked the name of Liberty, thus to get the people once more within their unhallowed gripe, and to stifle the name of Liberty for ever. I never joined the vile and treacherous cry of spurious humanity in favour of those who have from the beginning of time, and will to the end of it, make a butt of humanity, and its distresses their sport. I knew that shameful was this new alliance between kings and people; fatal this pretended league: that ‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.’ I was right in this respect. I knew my friends from my foes. So did Lord Castlereagh: so did not Benjamin Constant. Did any of the Princes of Europe ever regard Buonaparte as any thing more than the child and champion of Jacobinism? Why then should I: for on that point I bow to their judgments as infallible. Passion speaks truer than reason. If Buonaparte was a conqueror, he conquered the grand conspiracy of kings against the abstract right of the human race to be free; and I, as a man, could not be indifferent which side to take. If he was ambitious, his greatness was not founded on the unconditional, avowed surrender of the rights of human nature. But with him, the state of man rose exalted too. If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor he could not become, a tyrant by right divine. Tyranny in him was not sacred: it was not eternal: it was not instinctively bound in league of amity with other tyrannies; it was not sanctioned by all the laws of religion and morality. There was an end of it with the individual: there was an end of it with the temporary causes, which gave it birth, and of which it was only the too necessary re-action. But there are persons of that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be satisfied with any thing short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that is enshrined in traditions, in laws, in usages, in the outward symbols of power, in the very idioms of language; that has struck its roots into the human heart, and clung round the human understanding like a nightshade; that overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very enormity of the evil; that is cemented with gold and blood; guarded by reverence, guarded by power; linked in endless succession to the principle by which life is transmitted to the generations of tyrants and slaves, and destroying liberty with the first breath of life; that is absolute, unceasing, unerring, fatal, unutterable, abominable, monstrous. These true devotees of superstition and despotism cried out Liberty and Humanity in their desperate phrenzy at Buonaparte’s sudden elevation and incredible successes against their favourite idol, ‘that Harlot old, the same that is, that was, and is to be,’ but we have heard no more of their triumph of Liberty and their douce humanité, since they clapped down the hatches upon us again, like wretches in a slave-ship who have had their chains struck off and pardon promised them to fight the common enemy; and the poor Reformers who were taken in to join the cry, because they are as fastidious in their love of liberty as their opponents are inveterate in their devotion to despotism, continue in vain to reproach them with their temporary professions, woeful grimaces, and vows made in pain, which ease has recanted; but to these reproaches the legitimate professors of Liberty and Humanity do not even deign to return the answer of a smile at their credulity and folly. Those who did not see this result at the time were, I think, weak; those who do not acknowledge it now are, I am sure, hypocrites.—To this pass have we been brought by the joint endeavours of Tories, Whigs, and Reformers; and as they have all had a hand in it, I shall here endeavour to ascribe to each their share of merit in this goodly piece of work. It is, perhaps, a delicate point, but it is of no inconsiderable importance, that the friends of Freedom should know the strength of their enemies, and their own weakness as well; for

——‘At this day,

When a Tartarean darkness overspreads

The groaning nations; when the impious rule,

By will or by established ordinance,

Their own dire agents, and constrain the good

To acts which they abhor; though I bewail

This triumph, yet the pity of my heart

Prevents me not from owning that the law

By which mankind now suffers, is most just.

For by superior energies; more strict

Affiance to each other; faith more firm

In their unhallowed principles; the bad

Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,

The vacillating, inconsistent good.’

A Reformer is not a gregarious animal. Speculative opinion leads men different ways, each according to his particular fancy:—it is prejudice or interest that drives before it the herd of mankind. That which is, with all its confirmed abuses and ‘tickling commodities,’ is alone solid and certain: that which may be or ought to be, has a thousand shapes and colours, according to the eye that sees it, is infinitely variable and evanescent in its effects. Talk of mobs as we will, the only true mob is that incorrigible mass of knaves and fools in every country, who never think at all, and who never feel for any one but themselves. I call any assembly of people a mob (be it the House of Lords or House of Commons) where each person’s opinion on any question is governed by what others say of it, and by what he can get by it. The only instance of successful resistance in the House of Commons to Ministers for many years was in the case of the Income-Tax; which touched their own pockets nearly. This was ‘a feeling disputation,’ in which selfishness got the better of servility, while reason and humanity might have pleaded in vain. The exception proved the rule; and this evidence was alone wanting to establish their character for independence and disinterestedness. When some years ago Mr. Robson brought forward in the House the case of an Exchequer Bill for 3l. 16s. which had been refused payment at the Bank, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Mr. Addington, now Lord Sidmouth) rose, and in a tone of indignation, severely reprimanded Mr. Robson for having prematurely brought forward a fact which he knew to be impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson and his motion for inquiry. The next day, Mr. Robson repeated his charge, and Mr. Addington rose, and in the same tone of official authority, brow-beat Mr. Robson for having brought forward, as something reprehensible and extraordinary, what he said happened every day, though the day before he had undertaken of his own accord to pronounce it impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson and his motion for inquiry. What was it to them whether Mr. Robson was right or wrong? It was their cue (I speak this of the House of Commons of 1803) to support the Minister, whether right or wrong! Every corporate body, or casual concourse of people, is nothing more than a collection of prejudices, and the only arguments current with them, a collection of watch-words. You may ring the changes for ever on the terms Bribery and Corruption with the people in Palace-yard, as they do in the Room over the way on Religion, Loyalty, Public Credit, and Social Order. There is no difference whatever in this respect between the Great Vulgar and the Small, who are managed just in the same way by their different leaders. To procure unanimity, to get men to act in corps, we must appeal for the most part to gross and obvious motives, to authority and passion, to their vices, not their virtues: we must discard plain truth and abstract justice as doubtful and inefficient pleas, retaining only the names and the pretext as a convenient salvo for hypocrisy! He is the best leader of a party who can find out the greatest number of common-places faced with the public good; and he will be the stoutest partisan who can best turn the lining to account.—Tory sticks to Tory: Whig sticks to Whig: the Reformer sticks neither to himself nor to any body else. It is no wonder he comes to the ground with all his schemes and castle-building. A house divided against itself cannot stand. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped. A Reformer is necessarily and naturally a Marplot, for the foregoing and the following reasons. First, he does not very well know what he would be at. Secondly, if he did, he does not care very much about it. Thirdly, he is governed habitually by a spirit of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable. He is a bad tool to work with; a part of a machine that never fits its place; he cannot be trained to discipline, for he follows his own idle humours, or drilled into an obedience to orders, for the first principle of his mind is the supremacy of conscience, and the independent right of private judgment. A man to be a Reformer must be more influenced by imagination and reason than by received opinions or sensible impressions. With him ideas bear sway over things; the possible is of more value than the real; that which is not, is better than that which is. He is by the supposition a speculative (and somewhat fantastical) character; but there is no end of possible speculations, of imaginary questions, and nice distinctions; or if there were, he would not willingly come to it; he would still prefer living in the world of his own ideas, be for raising some new objection, and starting some new chimera, and never be satisfied with any plan that he found he could realise. Bring him to a fixed point, and his occupation would be gone. A Reformer never is—but always to be blest, in the accomplishment of his airy hopes and shifting schemes of progressive perfectibility. Let him have the plaything of his fancy, and he will spoil it, like the child that makes a hole in its drum: set some brilliant illusion before his streaming eyes, and he will lay violent hands upon it, like little wanton boys that play with air-bubbles. Give him one thing, and he asks for another; like the dog in the fable, he loses the substance for the shadow: offer him a great good, and he will not stretch out his hand to take it, unless it were the greatest possible good. And then who is to determine what is the greatest possible good? Among a thousand pragmatical speculators, there will be a thousand opinions on this subject; and the more they differ, the less will they be inclined to give way or compromise the matter. With each of these, his self-opinion is the first thing to be attended to; his understanding must be satisfied in the first place, or he will not budge an inch; he cannot for the world give up a principle to a party. He would rather have slavery than liberty, unless it is a liberty precisely after his own fashion: he would sooner have the Bourbons than Buonaparte; for he truly is for a Republic, and if he cannot have that, is indifferent about the rest. So (to compare great things with small) Mr. Place, of Charing-Cross, chose rather that Mr. Hobhouse should lose his Election than that it should not be accompanied with his Resolutions; so he published his Resolutions, and lost Mr. Hobhouse his Election. That is, a patriot of this stamp is really indifferent about every thing but what he cannot have; instead of making his option between two things, a good or an evil, within his reach, our exquisite Sir sets up a third thing as the object of his choice, with some impossible condition annexed to it,—to dream, to talk, to write, to be meddlesome and troublesome about, to serve him for a topic of captious discontent or vague declamation, and which if he saw any hopes of cordial agreement or practical co-operation to carry it into effect, he would instantly contrive to mar, and split it into a thousand fractions, doubts, and scruples, to make it an impossibility for any thing ever to be done for the good of mankind, which is merely the plaything of his theoretical imbecility and active impertinence! The Goddess of his idolatry is and will always remain a cloud, instead of a Juno. One of these virtuosos, these Nicolas Gimcracks of Reform, full of intolerable and vain conceit, sits smiling in the baby-house of his imagination, ‘pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw,’ trimming the balance of power in the looking-glass of his own self-complacency, having every thing his own way at a word’s speaking, making the ‘giant-mass’ of things only a reflection of his personal pretensions, approving every thing that is right, condemning every thing that is wrong, in compliment to his own character, considering how what he says will affect not the cause, but himself; keeping himself aloof from party-spirit, and from every thing that can cast a shade on the fancied delicacy of his own breast, and thus letting the cause of Liberty slip through his fingers, and be spilt like water on the ground:—while another, more bold than he, in a spirit of envy and ignorance, quarrels with all those who are labouring at the same oar, lays about him like mad, runs a-muck at every one who has done, or is likely to do, any thing to promote the common object, and with his desperate club dashes out his neighbour’s brains, and thinks he has done a good piece of service to the cause, because he has glutted his own ill-humour and self-will, which he mistakes for the love of liberty and a zeal for truth! Others, not able to do mischief enough singly, club their senseless contradictions and unmanageable humours together, turn their attention to cabal and chicane, get into committees, make speeches, move or second resolutions, dictate to their followers, set up for the heads of a party, in opposition to another party; abuse, vilify, expose, betray, counteract and undermine each other in every way, and throw the game into the hands of the common enemy, who laughs in his sleeve, and watches them and their little perverse, pettifogging passions at work for him, from the high tower of his pride and strength! If an honest and able man arises among them, they grow jealous of him, and would rather, in the petty ostracism of their minds, that their cause should fail, than that another should have the credit of bringing it to a triumphant conclusion. They criticise his conduct, carp at his talents, denounce his friends, suspect his motives, and do not rest, till by completely disgusting him with the name of Reform and Reformers, they have made him what they wish, a traitor and deserter from a cause that no man can serve! This is just what they like—they satisfy their malice, they have to find out a new leader, and the cause is to begin again! So it was, and so it will be, while man remains the little, busy, mischievous animal described in Gulliver’s Travels!—A pretty hopeful set to make head against their opponents—a rope of sand against a rock of marble—with no centre of gravity, but a collection of atoms whirled about in empty space by their own levity, or jostling together by numberless points of repulsion, and tossed with all their officious projects and airy predictions, by the first breath of caprice or shock of power, into that Limbo of Vanity, where embryo statesmen and drivelling legislators dance the hays of Reform, ‘perpetual circle, multiform and mix, and hinder all things,’ proud of the exclusive purity of their own motives, and the unattainable perfection of their own plans!—How different from the self-centred, well-knit, inseparable phalanx of power and authority opposed to their impotent and abortive designs! A Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries Long Life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side—the side of corruption and prerogative. He says what others say; he does as he is prompted by his own advantage. He knows on which side his bread is buttered, and that St. Peter is well at Rome. He is for going with Sancho to Camacho’s wedding, and not for wandering with Don Quixote in the desert, after the mad lover. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to Reform, but broad is the way that leadeth to Corruption, and multitudes there are that walk therein. The Tory is sure to be in the thickest of them. His principle is to follow the leader; and this is the infallible rule to have numbers and success on your side, to be on the side of success and numbers. Power is the rock of his salvation; priestcraft is the second article of his implicit creed. He does not trouble himself to inquire which is the best form of government—but he knows that the reigning monarch is ‘the best of kings.’ He does not, like a fool, contest for modes of faith; but like a wise man, swears by that which is by law established. He has no principles himself, nor does he profess to have any, but will cut your throat for differing with any of his bigotted dogmas, or for objecting to any act of power that he supposes necessary to his interest. He will take his Bible-oath that black is white, and that whatever is, is right, if it is for his convenience. He is for having a slice in the loan, a share in a borough, a situation in the church or state, or for standing well with those who have. He is not for empty speculations, but for full pockets. He is for having plenty of beef and pudding, a good coat to his back, a good house over his head, and for cutting a respectable figure in the world. He is Epicuri de grege porcus—not a man but a beast. He is styed in his prejudices—he wallows in the mire of his senses—he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood. Truth and falsehood are, to him, something to buy and sell; principle and conscience, something to eat and drink. He tramples on the plea of Humanity, and lives, like a caterpillar, on the decay of public good. Beast as he is, he knows that the King is the fountain of honour, that there are good things to be had in the Church, treats the cloth with respect, bows to a magistrate, lies to the tax-gatherer, nicknames the Reformers, and ‘blesses the Regent and the Duke of York.’ He treads the primrose path of preferment; ‘when a great wheel goes up a hill, holds fast by it, and when it rolls down, lets it go.’ He is not an enthusiast, a Utopian philosopher or a Theophilanthropist, but a man of business and the world, who minds the main chance, does as other people do, and takes his wife’s advice to get on in the world, and set up a coach for her to ride in, as fast as possible. This fellow is in the right, and ‘wiser in his generation than the children of the light.’ The ‘servile slaves’ of wealth and power have a considerable advantage over the independent and the free. How much easier is it to smell out a job than to hit upon a scheme for the good of mankind! How much safer is it to be the tool of the oppressor than the advocate of the oppressed! How much more fashionable to fall in with the opinion of the world, to bow the knee to Baal, than to seek for obscure and obnoxious truth! How strong are the ties that bind men together for their own advantage, compared with those that bind them to the good of their country or of their kind! For as the Reformer has no guide to his conclusions but speculative reason, which is a source not of unanimity or certainty, but of endless doubt and disagreement, so he has no ground of attachment to them but a speculative interest, which is too often liable to be warped by sinister motives, and is a flimsy barrier against the whole weight of worldly and practical interests opposed to it. He either tires and grows lukewarm after the first gloss of novelty is over, and is thrown into the hands of the adverse party, or to keep alive an interest in it, he makes it the stalking-horse of his ambition, of his personal enmity, of his conceit or love of gossipping; as we have seen. An opinion backed by power and prejudice, rivetted and mortised to the throne, is of more force and validity than all the abstract reason in the world, without power and prejudice. A cause centred in an individual, which is strengthened by all the ties of passion and self-interest, as in the case of a king against a whole people, is more likely to prevail than that of a scattered multitude, who have only a common and divided interest to hold them together, and ‘screw their courage to the sticking-place,’ against an influence, that is never distracted or dissipated; that neither slumbers nor sleeps; that is never lulled into security, nor tamed by adversity; that is intoxicated with the insolence of success, and infuriated with the rage of disappointment; that eyes its one sole object of personal aggrandisement, moves unremittingly to it, and carries after it millions of its slaves and train-bearers. Can you persuade a king to hear reason, to submit his pretensions to the tribunal of the people, to give up the most absurd and mischievous of his prerogatives? No: he is always true to himself, he grasps at power and hugs it close, as it is exorbitant or invidious, or likely to be torn from him; and his followers stick to him, and never boggle at any lengths they are forced to go, because they know what they have to trust to in the good faith of kings to themselves and one another. Power then is fixed and immoveable, for this reason, because it is lodged in an individual who is driven to madness by the undisputed possession, or apprehended loss of it; his self-will is the key-stone that supports the tottering arch of corruption, steadfast as it leans on him:—liberty is vacillating, transient, and hunted through the world, because it is entrusted to the breasts of many, who care little about it, and quarrel in the execution of their trust. Too many cooks spoil the broth. The principle of tyranny is in fact identified with a man’s pride and the servility of others in the highest degree; the principle of liberty abstracts him from himself, and has to contend in its feeble course with all his own passions, prejudices, interests, and those of the world and of his own party; the cavils of Reformers, the threats of Tories, and the sneers of Whigs.[^[5]]

A modern Whig is but the fag-end of a Tory. The old Whigs were in principle what the modern Jacobins are, Anti-Jacobites, that is, opposers of the doctrine of divine right, the one in the soil of England, the other by parity of reasoning in the soil of France. But the Opposition have pressed so long against the Ministry without effect, that being the softer substance, and made of more yielding materials, they have been moulded into their image and superscription, spelt backwards, or they differ as concave and convex, or they go together like substantive and adjective, or like man and wife, they two have become one flesh. A Tory is the indispensable prop to the doubtful sense of self-importance, and peevish irritability of negative success, which mark the life of a Whig leader or underling. They ‘are subdued even to the very quality’ of the Lords of the Treasury Bench, and have quarrelled so long that they would be quite at a loss without the ordinary food of political contention. To interfere between them is as dangerous as to interfere in a matrimonial squabble. To overturn the one is to trip up the heels of the other. Their hostility is not directed against things at all, nor to effectual and decisive opposition to men, but to that sort of petty warfare and parliamentary tracasserie, of which there is neither end nor use, except making the parties concerned of consequence in their own eyes, and contemptible in those of the nation. They will not allow Ministers to be severely handled by any one but themselves, nor even that: but they say civil things of them in the House of Commons, and whisper scandal against them at Holland House. This shews gentlemanly refinement and good breeding; while my Lord Erskine ‘calls us untaught knaves, unmannerly to come betwixt the wind and his nobility.’ But the leaden bullets and steel bayonets, the ultima ratio regum, by which these questions are practically decided, do their business in another-guess manner; they do not stand on the same ceremony. Soft words and hard blows are a losing game to play at: and this, one would think, the Opposition, if they were sincere, must have found out long ago. But they rather wish to screen the Ministry, as their locum tenens in the receipt of the perquisites of office and the abuse of power, of which they themselves expect the reversion.

‘Strange that such difference should be

Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

The distinction between a great Whig and Tory Lord is laughable. For Whigs to Tories ‘nearly are allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ So I cannot find out the different drift (as far as politics are concerned) of the ********* and ********* Reviews, which remind one of Opposition coaches, that raise a great dust or spatter one another with mud, but both travel the same road and arrive at the same destination. When the Editor of a respectable Morning Paper reproached me with having called Mr. Gifford a cat’s-paw, I did not tell him that he was a glove upon that cat’s-paw. I might have done so. There is a difference between a sword and a foil. The Whigs do not at all relish that ugly thing, a knock-down blow; which is so different from their endless see-saw way of going about a question. They are alarmed, ‘lest the courtiers offended should be:’ for they are so afraid of their adversaries, that they dread the re-action even of successful opposition to them, and will neither attempt it themselves, nor stand by any one that does. Any writer who is not agreeable to the Tories, becomes obnoxious to the Whigs; he is disclaimed by them as a dangerous colleague, merely for having ‘done the cause some service;’ is considered as having the malicious design to make a breach of the peace, and to interrupt with most admired disorder the harmony and mutual good understanding which subsists between Ministers and the Opposition, and on the adherence to which they are alone suffered to exist, or to have a shadow of importance in the state. They are, in fact, a convenient medium to break the force of popular feeling, and to transmit the rays of popular indignation against the influence and power of the crown, blunted and neutralized by as many qualifications and refractions as possible. A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer—that is, a coward to both sides of a question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two. He is a poor purblind creature, who halts between two opinions, and complains that he cannot get any two people to think alike. He is a cloak for corruption, and a mar-plot to freedom. He will neither do any thing himself, nor let any one else do it. He is on bad terms with the Government, and not on good ones with the people. He is an impertinence and a contradiction in the state. If he has a casting weight, for fear of overdoing the mark, he throws it into the wrong scale. He is a person of equally feeble understanding and passions. He has some notion of what is right, just enough to hinder him from pursuing his own interest: he has selfish and worldly prudence enough, not to let him embark in any bold or decided measure for the advancement of truth and justice. He is afraid of his own conscience, which will not let him lend his unqualified support to arbitrary measures; he stands in awe of the opinion of the world, which will not let him express his opposition to those measures with warmth and effect. His politics are a strange mixture of cross-purposes. He is wedded to forms and appearances, impeded by every petty obstacle and pretext of difficulty, more tenacious of the means than the end—anxious to secure all suffrages, by which he secures none—hampered not only by the ties of friendship to his actual associates, but to all those that he thinks may become so; and unwilling to offer arguments to convince the reason of his opponents lest he should offend their prejudices, by shewing them how much they are in the wrong; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage;’ stickling for the letter of the Constitution, with the affectation of a prude, and abandoning its principles with the effrontery of a prostitute to any shabby Coalition he can patch up with its deadly enemies. This is very pitiful work; and, I believe, the public with me are tolerably sick of the character. At the same time, he hurls up his cap with a foolish face of wonder and incredulity at the restoration of the Bourbons, and affects to chuckle with secret satisfaction over the last act of the Revolution, which reduced him to perfect insignificance. We need not wonder at the results, when it comes to the push between parties so differently constituted and unequally matched. We have seen what those results are. I cannot do justice to the picture, but I find it done to my hands in those prophetic lines of Pope, where he describes the last Triumph of Corruption:—

‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore:

Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.

Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess;

Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless:

In golden chains the willing world she draws,

And her’s the Gospel is, and her’s the Laws;

Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,

And sees pale virtue carted in her stead.

Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,

Old England’s genius, rough with many a scar,

Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,

His flag inverted trails along the ground:

Our youth, all liveried o’er with foreign gold,

Before her dance, behind her crawl the old!

See thronging millions to the Pagod run,

And offer country, parent, wife, or son!

Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,

That not to be corrupted, is the shame.

In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in power,

’Tis avarice all, ambition is no more!

See all our nobles begging to be slaves!

See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!

All, all look up with reverential awe

At crimes that ‘scape or triumph o’er the law;

While truth, worth, wisdom daily they decry:

“Nothing is sacred now but villainy.”

Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)

Shew there was one who held it in disdain.’

POLITICAL ESSAYS, &c.

THE MARQUIS WELLESLEY

‘And such other gambol faculties he hath, as shew a weak mind, and an able body.’

April 13, 1813.

The Marquis Wellesley’s opening speech on India affairs was chiefly remarkable for its length, and the manner in which it was delivered. This nobleman seems to have formed himself on those lines in Pope:—

‘All hail him victor in both gifts of song,

Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.’

He aspires with infinite alacrity to the character of a great orator; and, if we were disposed to take the will for the deed, we should give him full credit for it. We confess, those of his speeches which we have heard, appear to us prodigies of physical prowess and intellectual imbecility. The ardour of his natural temperament, stimulating and irritating the ordinary faculties of his mind, the exuberance of his animal spirits, contending with the barrenness of his genius, produce a degree of dull vivacity, of pointed insignificance, and impotent energy, which is without any parallel but itself. It is curious, though somewhat painful, to see this lively little lord always in the full career of his subject, and never advancing a jot the nearer; seeming to utter volumes in every word, and yet saying nothing; retaining the same unabated vehemence of voice and action without any thing to excite it; still keeping alive the promise and the expectation of genius without once satisfying it—soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm, harrowed up by some plain matter-of-fact, writhing with agony under a truism, and launching a common-place with all the fury of a thunderbolt![^[6]]

MR. SOUTHEY, POET LAUREAT

Sept. 18, 1813.

The laurel is at length destined, unexpectedly, to circle the brows of this gentleman, where it will look almost like a civic crown. The patriot and the poet (two venerable names, which we should wish never to see disunited) is said to owe his intended elevation to the intercession of Mr. Croker, to whom, it will be recollected, he has dedicated his Life of Lord Nelson, with an appropriate motto in the title-page, from the poem of Ulm and Trafalgar. Mr. Croker having applied to the Regent in favour of his friend, the Prince is understood to have given his ready assent, observing, that Mr. Southey’s efforts in the Spanish cause alone, rendered him highly worthy of the situation. As Mr. Croker, however, was taking his leave, he was met by Lord Liverpool and the Marquis of Hertford, the latter of whom, as chamberlain, had, it seems, made an offer of the place to Mr. Walter Scott, who had signified his acceptance of it. Some little difficulty naturally arose on the occasion, but it was agreed that the two poets should settle the point of precedence between themselves. A friendly altercation, unlike that of the shepherds in Virgil, now took place between Mr. Scott and Mr. Southey, each waving his own pretensions, and giving the palm of victory to the other. But it was finally determined, that as Mr. Scott, though he would not allow himself to be the greatest, was at least the richest poet of the two, Mr. Southey, who had most need of this post of honour and of profit, should have it. So ends this important affair; and, without any ill-will to Mr. Southey, we should not have been disappointed if it had ended differently. Whatever may be the balance of poetical merit, Mr. Scott, we are quite sure, has always been a much better courtier than Mr. Southey; and we are of opinion that the honours of a Court can nowhere be so gracefully or deservedly bestowed as on its followers. His acceptance of this mark of court favour would not have broken in upon that uniformity of character, which we think no less beautiful and becoming in life than in a poem. But, perhaps, a passion for new faces extends to the intrigues of politics as well as of love; and a triumph over the scruples of delicacy enhances the value of the conquest in both cases. To have been the poet of the people, may not render Mr. Southey less a court favourite; and one of his old Sonnets to Liberty must give a peculiar zest to his new Birth-day Odes. His flaming patriotism will easily subside into the gentle glow of grateful loyalty; and the most extravagant of his plans of reform end in building castles in Spain!

MR. SOUTHEY’S NEW-YEAR’S ODE

Jan. 8, 1814.

Mr. Southey’s Ode has at length appeared—not as was announced, under the title of ‘Carmen Annuum,’ but under that of ‘Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814.’ We see no reason why the author might not have adopted the title of Horace’s Ode entire, and have called it Carmen Seculare, which would have been the best account he could give of it. We fear Mr. Southey will not form a splendid exception to the numberless instances which prove that there is something in the air of a court, not favourable to the genius of poetry. He has not deprived himself of the excuse made by one of his predecessors, of versatile memory, in extenuation of the degeneracy of his courtly lays,—‘That poets succeed best in fiction.’ The Ode is in the ballad style, peculiar to Mr. Southey and his poetical friends. It has something of the rustic simplicity of a country virgin on her first introduction at Duke’s Place, or of Pamela on the day of her marriage with Mr. B. Or rather it resembles a fancy birth-day suit, a fashionable livery worn inside out, a prince’s feather with a sprig of the tree of liberty added to it,—the academy of compliments turned into quaint Pindarics,—is a sort of methodistical rhapsody, chaunted by a gentleman-usher, and exhibits the irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain. It is romantic without interest, and tame without elegance. It is exactly such an ode as we expected Mr. Southey to compose on this occasion. We say this from our respect for the talents and character of this eminent writer. He is the last man whom we should expect to see graceful in fetters, or from whom we should look for the soul of freedom within the liberties of a court!—The commencement of the Ode is as follows, and it continues throughout much as it begins:—

‘In happy hour doth he receive

The Laurel, meed of famous bards of yore,

Which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore,

In happy hour, and well may he rejoice,

Whose earliest task must be

To raise the exultant hymn for victory,

And join a nation’s joy with harp and voice,

Pouring the strain of triumph on the wind,

Glory to God, his song—deliverance to mankind!

Wake, lute and harp! &c. &c.’

Mr. Southey has not exactly followed the suggestion of an ingenious friend, to begin his poem with the appropriate allusion,

‘Awake, my sack-but!’

The following rhymes are the lamest we observed. He says, speaking of the conflict between the Moors and Spaniards,

‘Age after age, from sire to son,

The hallowed sword was handed down;

Nor did they from that warfare cease,

And sheath that hallowed sword in peace,

Until the work was done.’

Indeed, if Mr. S. can do no better than this, in his drawing-room verses, he should get some contributor to the Lady’s Magazine to polish them for him.

We have turned over the Ode again, which extends to twenty pages, in the hope of finding some one vigorous or striking passage for selection, but in vain. The following is the most likely to please in a certain quarter:—

‘Open thy gates, O Hanover! display

Thy loyal banners to the day!

Receive thy old illustrious line once more!

Beneath an upstart’s yoke oppress’d,

Long has it been thy fortune to deplore

That line, whose fostering and paternal sway

So many an age thy grateful children blest.

The yoke is broken now!—a mightier hand

Hath dash’d—in pieces dash’d—the iron rod.

To meet her princes, the delivered land

Pours her rejoicing multitudes abroad;

The happy bells, from every town and tower,

Roll their glad peals upon the joyful wind;

And from all hearts and tongues, with one consent,

The high thanksgiving strain is sent—

Glory to God! Deliverance to mankind!’

In various stanzas, Bonaparte is called an upstart, a ruffian, &c. We confess, we wish to see Mr. Southey, like Virgil, in his Georgics, ‘scatter his dung with a grace.’

We do not intend to quarrel with our Laureat’s poetical politics, but the conclusion is one which we did not anticipate from the author. We have always understood that the Muses were the daughters of Memory!

‘And France, restored and shaking off her chain,

Shall join the Avengers in the joyful strain—

Glory to God! Deliverance for mankind!’

The poem has a few notes added to it, the object of which seems to be to criticise the political opinions of the Edinburgh Reviewers with respect to Spain, and to prove that the author is wiser after the event than they were before it, in which he has very nearly succeeded.

Mr. Southey announces a new volume of Inscriptions, which must furnish some curious parallelisms.

DOTTREL-CATCHING

TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE

Jan. 27, 1814.

Sir, The method of taking this bird is somewhat singular, and is described in an old book in the following terms:

‘The Dottrel is a foolish bird of the crane species, very tall, awkward, and conceited. The Dottrel-catcher, when he has got near enough, turns his head round sideways, and makes a leg towards him: the bird, seeing this, returns the civility, and makes the same sidelong movement. These advances are repeated with mutual satisfaction, till the man approaches near enough, and then the bird is taken.’

A poet-laureat or a treasury sophist is often taken much in the same way. Your Opposionist, Sir, was ever a true gull. From the general want of sympathy, he sets more store by it than it is worth; and for the smallest concession, is prevailed upon to give up every principle, and to surrender himself, bound hand and foot, the slave of a party, who get all they want of him, and then—‘Spunge, you are dry again!’

A striking illustration of the common treatment of political drudges has lately occurred in the instance of a celebrated writer, whose lucubrations are withheld from the public, because he has declared against the project of restoring the Bourbons. As the court and city politicians have spoken out on this subject, permit me, Sir, to say a word in behalf of the country. I have no dislike whatever, private or public, to the Bourbons, except as they may be made the pretext for mischievous and impracticable schemes. At the same time I have not the slightest enthusiasm in their favour. I would not sacrifice the life or limb of a single individual to restore them. I have very nearly the same feelings towards them which Swift has expressed in his account of the ancient and venerable race of the Struldbruggs. It is true, they might in some respects present a direct contrast to Bonaparte. A tortoise placed on the throne of France would do the same thing. The literary sycophants of the day, Sir, are greatly enamoured (from some cause or other) with hereditary imbecility and native want of talent. They are angry, not without reason, that a Corsican upstart has made the princes of Europe look like wax-work figures, and given a shock to the still life of kings. They wish to punish this unpardonable presumption, by establishing an artificial balance of weakness throughout Europe, and by reducing humanity to the level of thrones. We may perhaps in time improve this principle of ricketty admiration to Eastern perfection, where every changeling is held sacred, and that which is the disgrace of human intellect is hailed as the image of the Divinity!

It is said that in France the old royalists and the revolutionary republicans are agreed in the same point. Bonaparte is the point of union between these opposite extremes, the common object of their hate and fear. I can conceive this very possible from what I have observed among ourselves. He has certainly done a great deal to mortify the pride of birth in the one, and the vanity of personal talents in the others. This is a very sufficient ground of private pique and resentment, but not of national calamity or eternal war. I am, Sir, your humble servant,

EICONOCLASTES SATYRANE.

THE BOURBONS AND BONAPARTE

Dec. 6, 1813.

The following paragraph in a daily paper is equally worthy of notice for magnificence of expression and magnanimity of sentiment:—

‘When or under what circumstances the great Commander may think fit to carry his forces against the large military or commercial depôts of the south of France, we do not pretend to form conjectures. We are confident, that as nothing will disturb the calm and meditative prudence of his plans, so nothing will arrest the rapidity of their execution. We trust alike in his caution and in his resolution: but, perhaps, there may be in store for him a higher destination than the capture of a town or the reduction of a province. What if the army opposed to him should resolve to avenge the cause of humanity, and to exchange the bloody and brutal tyranny of a Bonaparte for the mild paternal sway of a Bourbon? Could a popular French general open to himself a more glorious career at the present moment, than that which Providence seemed to have destined to the virtuous Moreau? Or is it possible that any power now existing in France could stop such a general and such an army, supported by the unconquered Wellington and his formidable legions, if they were to resolve boldly to march to Paris, and bring the usurper to the block! Every disposable soldier in France is on the Adour, or on the Rhine. In the case we are supposing, there would be no enemy to encounter, unless the northern frontier were at once denuded of troops, and the road to Paris on that side laid open to the allies. This is no question of the attachment of the French nation to one dynasty or to another: it is a question of military enterprise, in the minds of military adventurers. The simple possibility, not to say the high moral probability, that in a moment of general defection, an army which has so much in its hands may run with the stream of popular feeling throughout Europe, is enough to make the tyrant tremble on his throne. Lord Wellington is doubtless prepared to take advantage of so desirable an occurrence, in case it should happen without his previous interference: but we wish him to interfere; we wish that he were authorised plainly and openly to offer his mighty co-operation to any body of men who would shake off the Tyrant’s yoke in France, as has been done in Italy, in Germany, and in Holland!’

This is a fair specimen of that kind of declamation which has for a long time swayed the affairs of Europe, and which, if the powers of Europe are wise by experience, will not influence them much longer. It is this spirit of treating the French people as of a different species from ourselves—as a monster or a non-entity—of disposing of their government at the will of every paragraph-monger—of arming our hatred against them by ridiculous menaces and incessant reproaches—of supposing that their power was either so tremendous as to threaten the existence of all nations, or so contemptible that we could crush it by a word,—it is this uniform system, practised by the incendiaries of the press, of inflaming our prejudices and irritating our passions, that has so often made us rush upon disaster, and submit to every extremity rather than forego the rancorous and headstrong desire of revenge.

The writer of the paragraph talks familiarly of marching to Paris, and bringing Bonaparte to the block. He seems to wonder at the delay which has already taken place. This is the very style of ancient Pistol, ‘Bid him prepare, for I will cut his throat.’ This high tone of impotent menace and premature triumph always ‘reverbs its own hollowness.’ It is the echo of fear. Instead of a proud repose on our own strength and courage, these writers only feel secure in the destruction of an adversary. The natural intoxication of success is heightened into a sort of delirium by the recollection of the panic into which they had been thrown. The Times’ editor thinks that nothing can be so easy as for an army ‘to run with the stream of popular feeling’ from one end of Europe to the other. Strange that these persons, like desperate adventurers, are incorrigible to experience. They are always setting out on the same forlorn hope. The tide of fortune, while it sets in strong against us, they prove to be the most variable of all things; but it no sooner changes in our favour, than it straight

‘Flows on to the Propontic,

And knows no ebb.’

To encourage themselves in the extravagance of their voluntary delusions, they are as prodigal of titles of honour as the college of heralds, and erect a standard of military fame, with all the authority, but not with the impartiality of history. Lord Wellington is ‘the great commander,’ and ‘the unconquered general,’ while ‘the little captain,’ and ‘the hero’ or ‘the deserter of Smorgonne,’ are the only qualifications of Bonaparte. If such are the true denominations and relative proportions of these two generals, then it is quite right to give to each of them the honour due;—if they are not, then it is quite wrong to stake the welfare of nations on a turn of expression—to put little equivocal scraps of paper into false scales, and decide the fate of Europe by nicknames. The scales in which Sir Humphrey Davy weighs the 500th part of a drachm, are not so slight nor insignificant as those in which his vilifiers, The Times, balance the destinies of the world.

‘What,’ it is asked with a certain air of profundity and mystery, ‘What if the army opposed to him [Lord Wellington] should resolve to exchange the bloody tyranny of Bonaparte for the paternal sway of a Bourbon!’

Why, if the French wish to shake off the galling yoke of a military Usurper, we say, let them do it in God’s name. Let them, whenever they please, imitate us in our recal of the Stuarts; and, whenever they please, in our banishment of them thirty years afterwards. But let them not, in the name of honour or of manhood, receive the royal boon of liberty at the point of the bayonet. It would be setting a bad precedent—it would be breaking in upon a great principle—it would be making a gap in the general feeling of national independence. For we are to observe, that this rational, popular, patriotic preference of the mild paternal sway of the Bourbons is to be enforced upon them by the powerful co-operation of the unconquered Wellington and his formidable legions. This is, in fact, returning to the original ground of the whole quarrel, and the question for them to consider, is whether all the evils and miseries which they may have endured in resisting these forcible appeals from foreign powers, are the strongest reasons why they should at length gratefully resign themselves to that tender concern for their sufferings, which so much persevering kindness, and disinterested preference of their interests to our own unequivocally proves. The impression produced by these formidable emissaries of mild paternity must, indeed, be only that of filial love and reverence. The constant role of these same Bourbons, now recognized, now disowned by the surrounding states, now held up as bugbears to frighten, and now brought forward as decoys to allure them, for awhile kept entirely in the back-ground, and then again set over them like puppets, in every reverse of fortune, must excite, one would suppose, some very pleasant associations, and give them some little insight into the nature of the machinery which is played off against them. In other nations, at least, these sort of tentatives would lead not to submission, but to indignation. It cannot be denied, however, that the French character has peculiar susceptibilities. France, like a modern coquet, may be fascinated once more by the courtly graces of discarded royalty; or, on the other hand, recollecting the malice and the impotence of which she was so long the victim, like Hellenore, entertained by the jolly satyrs, may wisely refuse to return to the cold and irksome embraces of the drivelling Malbecco. But our politician wishes all this not to be left to their own free will, but that we should interfere. We can easily believe it; ‘it was ever the fault of our English nation’ to wish to interfere with what did not concern them, for the very reason that they could interfere with comparative impunity. What is sport to them is death to others. The writer also draws a parallel, as if it were a feasible case, between Holland, Spain, and Germany throwing off a foreign yoke, and the French throwing off their own; in other words, submitting to a foreign one. We beg pardon of these acute discriminators. We know they have an answer. We leave them in possession of the nice distinction—between a foreign yoke, and a yoke imposed by foreigners!

‘This,’ says the writer in The Times, ‘is not a question of attachment to one dynasty or another, but a question of military enterprize between military adventurers.’ Does our speculator mean by this to confer the privileges of military adventurers, en plein droit, on the Emperor Alexander and the Crown Prince of Sweden? But whatever he means, it is clear that he is not consistent in what he says; for he has said just before, that the object of this so often repeated march to Paris is ‘to bring the Usurper to the block!’ Here, then, it is a question, not between contending generals, but between a usurper and a lawful monarch. So true it is that those who have most need of their assistance have the worst memories! ‘What,’ exclaims our enthusiast, ‘would there be to oppose such a general and such an army, aided by the unconquered Wellington,’ &c. First, ‘this is the very coinage of his brain.’ There’s no such general and no such army.

But granting the supposition to be true, the patriotic general, who should open to himself a glorious passage through the heart of his country, and attempt to make it the vassal of England, under the monstrous pretence of allegiance to his Sovereign, might perhaps meet the fate which Providence destined for the virtuous Moreau. Perhaps the French may think that as their affected loyalty could be only a cover for the most dastardly submission, so their hypocrisy and treachery to themselves might be justly retaliated upon them, by making the restoration of thrones a mask for the dismemberment of kingdoms. They may have acquired by experience some knowledge of that enlargement of view and boldness of nerve, which is inspired by the elevation of success. They may consider, that ‘when the wild and savage passions are set afloat, they are not so easily regulated’ according to the dictates of justice or generosity. Some of them may even go so far as to think that all the respect of the Emperor of Russia for the talents and virtues of Moreau might be insufficient to deter him from memorizing another Warsaw at Paris! Of this we are tolerably certain, that there are not wanting staunch friends of order and civilization in this country who would advise and applaud such a catastrophe ‘to the very echo,’ as a masterpiece of political justice, chaunt Te Deum over the ruins, and very seriously invite the good people of France to join in the chorus! But we are not ‘the echo that shall applaud again.’ We shall not hail such a catastrophe, nor such a triumph. For out of the desolation would arise a poisoned stench that would choak almost the breath of life, and one low, creeping fog of universal despotism, that would confound the Eastern and the Western world together in darkness that might be felt. We do not wish for this final consummation, because we do not wish the pulse of liberty to be quite destroyed, or that the mass of our common nature should become a lifeless corpse, unable to rouse itself against never-ending wrongs, or that the last spark of generous enthusiasm should be extinguished in that moral atheism, which defaces and mangles the image of God in man. We do not wish that liberty should ever have a deer’s heart given her, to live in constant fear of the fatal, inevitable venal pack behind her; but that she may still have the heart of a lioness, whose mighty roar keeps the hunters at bay, and whose whelps revenge their parent’s death!

Rather than such an event should take place, if such an extremity were possible, we should even wish that a general and an army of our own, devoted by The Times to a far different service, might be empowered to make a firm stand against it: to stop the tide of barbarous despotism as they had already rolled back that of ungovernable ambition, and to say, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Such an interference in such a cause would indeed give to Great Britain the character which she claims of being the Vindicator of the World. It would be to assume an attitude and a port indeed, loftier than she ever yet presented to the admiration of mankind; and would create a bulwark of strength round her, that would encircle her as with ‘impaling fire’!

VETUS

Nov. 19, 1813.

This patriot and logician in a letter in The Times of Friday, labours to stifle the most distant hope of peace in its birth. He lays down certain general principles which must for ever render all attempts to restore it vain and abortive. With the watchword of Eternal war with Bonaparte blazoned on his forehead, in the piety of his pacific zeal, he challenges Bonaparte as the wanton, unprovoked, implacable enemy of the peace of mankind. We will also venture to lay down a maxim, which is—That from the moment that one party declares and acts upon the avowed principle that peace can never be made with an enemy, it renders war on the part of that enemy a matter of necessary self-defence, and holds out a plea for every excess of ambition or revenge. If we are to limit our hostility to others only with their destruction, we impose the adoption of the same principle on them as their only means of safety. There is no alternative. But this is probably the issue to which Vetus wishes to bring the question. This writer not only outlaws Bonaparte, but in a summary way, disfranchises the French nation at large of the right of making peace or war. ‘Who,’ he exclaims in wanton defiance of common sense, ‘are the French nation? To us a rank non-entity. We have only to do with Napoleon Bonaparte—with his rights, his interests, his honour. Who are to be the sole judges of his rights? We and our allies!’ Admirable politician!

The events which have lately taken place on the Continent, and the moderate and manly tone in which those events have been received by Ministers, have excited the utmost degree of uneasiness and alarm in the minds of certain persons, who redouble the eagerness of their cries for war. The cold blooded fury and mercenary malice of these panders to mischief, can only be appeased by the prospect of lasting desolation. They rave, foam at the mouth, and make frantic gestures at the name of peace. These high-priests of Moloch daily offer up to their grim idol the same nauseous banquet of abuse and lies. Round them ‘a cry of hell-hounds never ceasing bark,’ that with greedy appetite devour the offal. Every day they act over the same foul imposture, and repeat their monstrous masque. These mighty soothsayers look forward to another restoration of Europe after another twenty years of havoc and destruction. After urging her to the very edge of the precipice from which she has only just recovered, breathless and affrighted, they wish to goad her on once more to the same mad career. The storm is for the moment over-past, but they will not suffer the vessel of the state to enter the harbour, in the hope that they may still plunder the wreck, and prey upon the carcases. The serpent’s hiss, the assassin’s yell, the mowing and chattering of apes, drown the voice of peace; and Vetus, like the solemn owl, joins in the distance, and prolongs the dreary note of death!

ON THE COURIER AND TIMES NEWSPAPERS

Jan. 21, 1814.

The following passage, among others of the same calibre, has lately appeared in The Courier:—

‘The party call upon us to speak out. We thought it not very easy for any charge of not speaking out to be urged against us. However, we obey their call most willingly. “Does The Courier, they ask, mean to insinuate, that because the South of France is more inclined to favour their pretensions, the Bourbons ought to have frigates allotted them to traverse the Bay of Biscay, and join the standard of Lord Wellington?” To this we reply, yes; decisively yes!—We say we would have a Bourbon proceed to the South of France. We hope we have spoken out on this point. One more remains;—Would we “set up some new obstacle to the progress of the negociation that is on foot?” Yes, if we thought there was any negociation on foot with Bonaparte. But we trust there is not—we trust there never will be.’

And this at a time when it has been formally signified from the throne that there was no objection on the part of England to treat with the French Ruler; when Lord Liverpool has said publicly that no conditions of peace would be insisted on, which we, placed in the situation of France, should not think it reasonable to grant; when we, in concert with the Allies, have announced to France, that it is neither our intention nor our wish to interfere with their internal government, but to secure the independence and safety of the continent; and when Lord Castlereagh has gone from this country for the purpose, avowed and understood, of giving effect to that declaration, and of fixing the basis of a peace to be recognized by the common powers of Europe. To produce such a passage, at such a moment, required that union of impudence and folly which has no parallel elsewhere. From the quarter from which it comes, it could not surprize us; it is consistent; it is in keeping; it is of a piece with the rest. It is worthy of those harpies of the press, whose business is to scare away the approach of peace by their obscene and dissonant noises, and to tear asunder the olive-branch, whenever it is held out to us, with their well-practised beaks; who fill their hearts with malice, and their mouths with falsehood; who strive to soothe the dastard passion of their employers by inflaming those of the multitude; creatures that would sell the lives of millions for a nod of greatness, and make their country a by-word in history, to please some punk of quality.

We are to understand from no less an authority than that of The Courier, that Lord Castlereagh is sent out professedly to make peace, but in reality to hinder it: and we learn from an authority equally respectable (The Times) that nothing can prevent the destruction of Bonaparte but this country’s untimely consenting to make peace with him. And yet we are told in the same breath, that the charge of eternal war which we bring against these writers, is the echo of the French war-faction, who, at the commencement of every series of hostilities, and at the conclusion of every treaty, have accused this country of a want of good faith and sincere disposition to peace. We are told, that if the French do not force Bonaparte to make peace now, which yet these writers are determined to prevent him from doing, ‘they are sunk beneath the worshippers of cats and onions.’ These ‘knavish but keen’ politicians tell the French people in so many words—‘We will not make peace with your government, and yet, if it does not make peace with us, we will force what Government we please upon you.’ What effect this monstrous and palpable insult must have upon the French nation, will depend upon the degree of sense and spirit they have left among them. But with respect to ourselves, if the line of policy pointed out by these juggling fiends is really meant to be pursued, if a pretended proposal to treat for peace on certain grounds is only to be converted into an insidious ground of renewed war for other purposes, if this offensive and unmanly imposture is to be avowed and practised upon us in the face of day, then we know what will be the duty of Parliament and of the country. The wars, in which the Governments of Europe have been engaged, have not succeeded the worse when the people took an effective share in them. We should hope that the interference of the people will not be necessary to effect the restoration of peace.

It is curious to hear these systematic opponents of peace, (with infuriate and insensate looks scattering firebrands and death,) at the same time affecting the most tender concern for the miseries of war; or like that good-natured reconciler of differences, Iago, hypocritically shifting the blame from themselves—‘What, stab men in the dark!’ They ask with grave faces, with very grave faces, ‘Who are the authors, the propagators, and practisers of this dreadful war system? who the aggressors? who the unrelenting persecutors of peace?’ War is their everlasting cry, ‘one note day and night;’ during war, during peace, during negociation, in success, in adversity; and yet they dare to tax others as the sole authors of the calamities which they would render eternal, sooner than abate one jot of their rancorous prejudices. One of these writers (the Editor of The Times) asserts with an air of great confidence, while he himself is hallooing as loud as he can among the indefatigable war-pack, that Bonaparte is the cause, the sole author of all the calamities of Europe for the last fourteen years; and what is remarkable, he brings as a proof of this sweeping assertion, a state paper, written under the Pitt Administration of pacific memory, deprecating all conciliation with the French at the very period from which the writer dates the wanton, unprovoked aggressions of Bonaparte, and which paper he quotes at length, as an admirable description of the mode by which we are to avert the calamities of Europe for the next fourteen years, as we have done for the last. Better late than never. So industrious an inquirer need not despair of effectually averting our future miseries, and pacifying the world, if it is to be done by referring back to state papers of this description, or by resuming the principles of those good old anti-jacobin times, or by finishing the war as it was begun. There would be no end of precedents and documents for prosecuting the war with vigour under every variety of circumstances, in order never to bring it to a conclusion. As a proof of the aggressions and implacable hatred of France, he might cite that monument of romantic and disinterested generosity ‘of heroic sentiment and manly enterprise,’ on the part of the Allies, the treaty of Pilnitz.[^[7]] He might proceed to those pacific manifestations—Lord Hawkesbury’s march to Paris—the Bellum internecinum of Mr. Windham, and his consistent phrenzy at the treaty of Amiens—Mr. Pitt’s abstract impossibility of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with the French Republic, or with the child and champion of Jacobinism—Mr. Burke’s Regicide Peace—the project of starving France in 1796—of hurling her down the gulph of bankruptcy in 1797—the coalitions of different periods in which England saved herself and Europe from peace by her energy, or her example—the contemptuous rejection of every offer of negociation in every situation, the unwearied prosecution of the war on the avowed principle that we were never to leave it off as long as we could carry it on, or get any one to carry it on for us, or till we had buried ourselves under the ruins of the civilized world (a prediction which we narrowly escaped verifying)—all these undeniable proofs and substantial demonstrations of our fond desires, our longings after peace, and of the determination of France to aggrandize herself by war and conquest, would, indeed, with the ingenious glosses of our well-meaning commentator form a very entertaining volume, and would at least teach us, if not what to follow, what we ought to shun, in our future advances to this first of earthly blessings, so long and studiously and systematically withheld from us—only to render its attainment more certain and more precious!

To the other solid grounds of an indefinite prolongation of this war, religious, moral, political, commercial, constitutional, continental, Jacobinical, Revolutionary, Corsican, foreign or domestic—our apologist, in the true spirit of the French petit maitre in Roderic Random, has now added a ground of his own, of equal efficacy and validity with the former, viz. that we are to carry it on in the character of gentlemen and men of honour. We are to fight for the restoration of the Bourbons, say The Times, ‘that we may have gentlemen and men of honour to fight with.’ There is some prudence in this resolution; it goes on the old principle, that we are not to fight except with our match. Don Quixote, after he had been soundly drubbed by the Yanguesian carriers, recollected that he ought not to have engaged with plebeians. The writer whom we have here quoted, told us, some time ago, from a greater authority certainly than that of The Times, the true grounds of war, or ‘that we might spill our blood for our country, for our liberty, for our friends, for our kind;’ but we do not remember, among these legitimate sources of the waste of human blood, that we were to shed it for a punctilio. If war were to be decided by the breaking of white and black sticks among gentlemen-ushers, or even by the effusion of courtly phrases in The Courier and The Times, we should have no objection to this fastidious refinement; but we cannot consent to shed the best blood of Europe, nor that of ‘the meanest peasant in this our native land,’ in order that the delicate honour of the Carlton House Minority may not be stained, nor the purity of their moral taste perverted, by an intercourse with any but gentlemen and men of honour. And thou, Carl John, what hast thou to say to this new plea of the old school?—Or why, not being clad with the inherent right to ‘monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,’—dost thou insult over the King of Denmark, menace Holstein, and seize upon Norway, and yet tellest thy little son, that the time is coming, when conquerors shall be no more?—The Times’ editor scornfully rejects our practical opinion on the probability of restoring the Bourbons, because it seems we always reject every proposition that makes the continuance of war necessary. Be it so. But do not these persons also attach the highest degree of probability, or, when they are so inclined, moral certainty, to every thing that tends to make peace unattainable? It is true we did not, as they say, anticipate the reverses of the French Emperor before they happened. If we did not anticipate them before, it was because we had nothing in past experience to guide us to such a conclusion, except, indeed, the constant unverified predictions of The Times and The Courier. If these inspired writers had the slightest intimation of them one moment before they happened, we are willing to bow down to them, and they shall be our Gods. But of this we are sure, from all experience, that the way to render the fruits of those reverses uncertain, or to defeat them altogether, is the very mode of proceeding recommended by the ceaseless partizans of interminable hostilities. If the French are a nation of men—if they have the common faculties of memory, of understanding, and foresight; if they are, as they have been pronounced by one no ways favourable to them, ‘the most civilized, and with one exception, the most enlightened people in Europe,’ surely, if any thing can kindle in their minds ‘the flame of sacred vehemence, and move the very stones to mutiny,’ it is the letting loose upon them the mohawks of Europe, the Cossacks, with General Blucher’s manifesto in their hands. It is restoring to Bonaparte the very weapon which we had wrested from him, the mighty plea of the independence of nations; it is reclothing his power with those adamantine scales ‘which fear no discipline of human hands,’ the hearts and wills of a whole people, threatened with emasculation of their moral and physical powers, by half a dozen libellers of the human species, and a horde of barbarians scarcely human. Even the writer in The Times acknowledges that the Cossacks entering France as a sort of masters of the ceremonies to the Bourbons, is only better, and less likely to excite horror and dismay, than their entering it in their own rights and persons. It may be so. The bear bringing in the monkey on his back may be more inviting than the bear alone. But we should think that either portent must be fatal, that neither hieroglyphic will be favourably interpreted.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

‘Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass,

But there goes more to a substantial ass;

Our modern wits such monstrous fools have shewn,

They seem not of Heaven’s making but their own.’—Dryden.

Dec. 2, 1813.

There is a degree of shameless effrontery which disarms and baffles contempt by the shock which it gives to every feeling of moral rectitude or common decency; as there is a daring extravagance in absurdity which almost challenges our assent by confounding and setting at defiance every principle of human reasoning. The ribald paragraphs, which fill the columns of our daily papers, and disgrace the English language, afford too many examples of the former assertion; the Letters of Vetus are a striking instance of the latter.

It would have been some satisfaction to us, in the ungrateful task which we had imposed upon ourselves, if, in combating the conclusions of Vetus, we could have done justice to the ingenuity of his arguments, or the force of his illustrations. But his extreme dogmatism is as destitute of proofs, as it is violent in itself. His profound axioms are in general flat contradictions; and he scarcely makes a single statement in support of any proposition which does not subvert it. In the Parliamentary phrase, he constantly stultifies himself. The glaring and almost deliberate incongruity of his conclusion is such as to imply a morbid defect of comprehension, a warped or overstrained understanding. Absorbed in an inveterate purpose, bent on expanding some vapid sophism into a cumbrous system, he is insensible to the most obvious consequences of things; and his reason is made the blind pander to his prejudices.

We are not converts to this author’s style, any more than to his reasoning. Indeed the defects of the one very much assist those of the other, and both have the same character. There is a perpetual effort to make something out of nothing, and to elevate a common-place into sublimity. The style of Vetus is not very different from that of Don Adriano de Armado; every word is as who should say, ‘I am Sir Oracle.’ Like the hero of Cervantes, haranguing the shepherds, he assaults the very vault of Heaven with the arrogance of his tone, and the loudness of his pretensions. Nothing can exceed the pompous quaintness, and laborious foolery of many of his letters. He unfolds the book of fate, assumes the prophet or historian, by virtue of alliteration and antithesis;—sustains the balance of power by well-poised periods, or crushes a people under a ponderous epithet. The set style of Vetus does not conform easily to the march of human affairs; and he is often forced to torture the sense to ‘hitch it’ in a metaphor. While he is marshalling his words, he neglects his arguments, which require all his attention to connect them together; and in his eagerness to give additional significance to his sentences, he loses his own meaning.

We shall proceed to the task we at first proposed, viz. that of supplying marginal notes to the voluminous effusions of Vetus, and shall continue our comments as often as he furnishes us with the text.

We agree with the sentiment with which he commences his last Letter, that it is ‘particularly desirable to follow up the question of peace’ at the present crisis, but not with the reason which he assigns for his extreme anxiety to enter upon the question, ‘because this is just the moment to dread the entertainment of a pacific overture.’ We can readily believe that at no other moment than when he dreads its approach, would Vetus ever breathe a syllable on the subject of peace, and then only to avert it. Whenever ‘a spurious and mawkish beneficence’ gives an alarm of peace, the dogs of war stand ready on the slip to hunt it down.

‘I have stated to you’ (To the Editor of the Times) ‘as the only legitimate basis of a treaty, if not on the part of the continental Allies, at least for England herself, that she should conquer all she can, and keep all she conquers. This is not by way of retaliation, however just, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an indispensable condition of her own safety and existence.’

That which is here said to be the only legitimate basis of a treaty is one, which if admitted and acted upon, would make it impossible that any treaty should ever be formed. It is a basis, not of lasting peace, but of endless war. To call that the basis of a treaty which precludes the possibility of any concession or compensation, of every consideration either of the right or power of each party to retain its actual acquisitions, is one of those misnomers which the gravity of Vetus’s manner makes his readers overlook. After the imposing and guarded exordium which ushers in the definition of our only legitimate basis of a treaty, we are not prepared to expect Vetus’s burlesque solution of the difficulty—‘that we are not to treat at all.’ The human mind is naturally credulous of sounding professions, and reluctantly admits the existence of what is very common, and common for that reason—pompous nonsense. It seems, however, that this basis of a treaty is to apply only to one of the contracting powers, namely, England, it is equivocal as to the Allies, and with respect to France, it is, we suppose, meant to be altogether null. For in a former letter, after asking, ‘Who are to be the judges of his (Bonaparte’s) rights?’ he answers emphatically, ‘We and our Allies!’ Bobadil did not come up to this exquisite pacificator of the world! To make common sense of Vetus’s axiom with reference to any state whatever, ‘that it should keep all it conquers,’ it seems necessary to add this trifling condition, ‘if it can.’ And with respect to Great Britain in particular, if from her peculiar situation she has the power to keep all she conquers without being amenable to any other tribunal than her own will, this very circumstance proves that the exercise of that power is not necessary to her safety and existence. Again, if England has an interest of her own, quite independent on and separate from that of the continent, what has she to do with continental Allies? If her interests may be and are interwoven with those of the rest of Europe, is it too much to expect from her a common sacrifice to the common cause? We quarrel with France on continental grounds; we strip her of her colonies to support the quarrel; and yet we refuse to restore any part of them, in order to secure peace. If so, we are only ostensible parties in the contest, and in reality robbers.

‘The first policy of a wise people is to make rival nations afraid to disturb them, to impress their enemies with a terrific sense,’ (how magnificent is this epic mode of expression) ‘that to attack them is to suffer not only transient defeats, but deep, grievous, and irrecoverable losses; and to hold in abhorrence any peace which shall not be a living record of their own superiority, and a monument worthy of those warriors, through whose noble blood it was obtained.’

If the losses sustained in war were to be irrecoverable, it is easy to foresee that the seat of empires would be very soon changed in almost all cases whatever. But Vetus here, as is customary with him when it tends to enforce the hyperbolical effect of his style, assumes as a broad ground of national wisdom, a physical impossibility. It is not in the nature of things that the losses of rival States should be irrecoverable. Vetus would do better to decree at once that the possessions of nations are unassailable as well as irrecoverable, which would prevent war altogether. But still more preposterous is the madness or malice of the assertion, that no peace can be made by a wise nation, which is not a living record of their own superiority. ‘This is the key-stone which makes up the arch’ of Vetus’s indestructible war-system. Can it have escaped even the short-sighted logic of this writer, that to make superiority an indispensable condition of a wise peace is to proscribe peace altogether, because certainly this superiority cannot belong at the same time to both parties, and yet we conceive that the consent of both parties is necessary to a peace? Any other peace, we are told, than that which is at all times impracticable between rival states, ought not only never to be made, but it ought to be held in abhorrence, we ought to shudder at its approach as the last of evils, and throw it to an immeasurable distance from us. This is indeed closing up the avenues to peace, and shutting the gates of mercy on mankind, in a most consummate and scientific manner. Our philosophic rhetorician appears also to forget, in that high tone in which he speaks of the monuments raised by the noble blood of warriors, that these sort of monuments are cemented by the blood of others as well as by our own, and tell the survivors a double story. His heated imagination seems to have been worked up into a literal belief of his own assertion, that the French nation are a rank non-entity; or he supposes that there is some celestial ichor in our veins, which we alone shed for our country, while other nations neither bleed nor suffer from war, nor have a right to profit by peace. This may be very well in poetry, or on the stage, but it will not pass current in diplomacy. Vetus, indeed, strains hard to reconcile inconsistencies, and to found the laws of nations on the sentiments of exclusive patriotism. But we should think that the common rules of peace and war, which necessarily involve the rights, interests, and feelings of different nations, cannot be dictated by the heroic caprices of a few hair-brained egotists, on either side of the question.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’

Sir Fopling Flutter

Dec. 10, 1813.

‘Nothing,’ continues Vetus, ‘can be more opposite to this great policy, than to fight and to render back the fruits of our successes. We may be assured, that those with whom we contend are ready enough to improve their victories. If we are not equally so, we shall never be at rest. If the enemy beats us, he wins our provinces.—[What provinces of ours?]—If we beat him, we restore all. What more profitable game could he desire! Truly, at this rate, our neighbours must be arrant fools if they leave us one week’s repose!’

There is a spirit of Machiavelian policy in this paragraph which is very commendable. It reminds us of the satirist’s description of ‘fools aspiring to be knaves.’ It is, in fact, this fear of being outwitted by the French, that constantly makes us the dupes of our suspicions of them, as it is a want of confidence in our own strength or firmness, that leads us to shew our courage by defiance. True courage, as well as true wisdom, is not distrustful of itself. Vetus recommends it to us to act upon the maxims of the common disturbers of mankind, of ‘this obdurate and rapacious foe,’ as the only means to secure general tranquillity. He wishes to embody the pretended spirit and principles of French diplomacy in a code,—the acknowledged basis of which should be either universal conquest, or endless hostility. We have, it seems, no chance of repelling the aggressions of the French, but by retaliating them not only on themselves, but on other states. At least, the author gives a pretty broad hint of what he means by the improvement of our victories, when he talks of annexing Holland and Danish Zealand to Hanover, as ‘her natural prey,’ instead of their being the dependencies of France. This is certainly one way of trimming the balance of power in Europe, and placing the independence of nations in a most happy dilemma. The inventor of this new and short way with foreign states only laments that Hanover, ‘under British auspices,’ has not been before-hand with France in imitating Prussia in her seizure of the Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other. He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic, plodding, insipid, commercial spirit by Prussia and Russia. But now that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang, nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir ourselves as effectually as he does, for the good of mankind! But Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not sound logic. He wishes by a coup sur to prevent an unfair and dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly, is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because the nature and essence of war is a trial of strength; and, therefore, to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus, ‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders it necessary to keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from repeating his attack; and, therefore, to hold inflexibly what we have acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost, but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them. He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.

It is neither the actual possession, nor the will to keep certain acquisitions, but the power to keep them, and, at the same time, to extort other concessions from an enemy, that must determine the basis of all negociations, that are not founded on verbal chimeras.

‘We are taught, indeed, to take for granted, that a peace, whose conditions bear hard on either party, will be the sooner broken by that party; and, therefore, that we have an indirect interest in sacrificing a portion of our conquests.’ The general principle here stated is self-evident, and one would think indisputable. For the very ground of war is a peace whose conditions are thought to bear hard on one of the parties, and yet, according to Vetus, the only way to make peace durable, to prevent the recurrence of an appeal to force, is to impose such hard conditions on an enemy, as it is his interest, and must be his inclination, to break by force. An opinion of the disproportion between our general strength, and our actual advantages, seems to be the necessary ground of war, but it is here converted into the permanent source of peace. The origin of the common prejudice is, however, very satisfactorily illustrated in the remainder of the paragraph. ‘This language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The blind opponents of every minister who happens to be engaged in conducting a war’ [Is war then a mere affair of accident?] ‘can see no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim against immoderate exertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and undermining the honest disappointment’ [Quere expectations] ‘of the people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much’ [of that little] ‘undone by negociation. But besides being a factious expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny that we affect any thing more by granting an enemy what are called favourable terms, than convince him that he may go to war with England, gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty.’ Here Vetus entirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace, if not hard, must be immediately favourable! Because we grant an enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which, by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. ‘The only valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the diminution of our rival’s, by the resources and dominions we have wrested from him.’ First, this security can be good only on one side: secondly, it is not good at all: the only security for peace is not in the actual losses or distresses incurred by states, but in the settled conviction that they cannot better themselves by war. But all these contradictions are nothing to Vetus, who alone does not fluctuate between the extremes of faction, but is still true to war—and himself.

But there is, in our opinion, a third extreme of English faction (if Vetus will spare us the anomaly) not less absurd, and more mischievous than either of the others: we mean those who are the blind adherents of every minister who happens to be engaged in a war, however unnecessarily or wantonly it may have been begun, or however weakly and wickedly carried on: who see no danger in repeated disgraces, and impending ruin, provided we are obstinately bent on pursuing the same dreadful career which has led to them; who, when our losses come thronging in upon us, urge us to persist till we recover the advantages we have lost, and, when we recover them, force us on till we lose all again: with whom peace, in a time of adverse fortune, is dishonour, and in the pride of success, madness: who only exaggerate ‘our pretensions at a peace,’ that they may never be complied with: who assume a settled unrelenting purpose in our adversary to destroy us, in order to inspire us with the same principle of never-ending hostility against him: who leave us no alternative but eternal war, or inevitable ruin: who irritate the hatred and the fears of both parties, by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of defiance, suspicion, and the most galling contempt: who, adapting every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, constantly return in the same circle to the point from which they set out: with whom peace is always unattainable, war always necessary!

We shall pass over Vetus’s historic researches, the wars of the Romans and Carthaginians (the formal latitude of Vetus’s pen delights in these great divisions of human affairs), and come to what is more to our purpose.

In modern times he first comes to the treaty of 1763, only (as far as we can find) to affix the epithet ‘American rebels’ as a sort of Pragmatic Sanction to our colonists, with whom, he says, France joined a few years afterwards, and, ‘in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king, aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy.’ Yet, notwithstanding this long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one, stigmatized as republican and Corsican, ‘with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,’ as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus himself ‘would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the healthier, and to England not less hostile, sovereignty of the banished house of Bourbon.’ Why then pertinaciously affix these obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse interpreters of truth.

To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, ‘the conditions of peace must bear hard on one of the parties,’ Vetus asks, ‘Were the powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering her any second wrong?’ Now this is an instance precisely in point to prove the direct reverse of Vetus’s doctrine: for here was a treaty in which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.

‘Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a moment?’ This is still altering the record. The question is not about submitting to hard conditions, but about imposing them. Besides, ‘the aggravated and multiplied molestations, injuries, and insults, which these courts were doomed to suffer,’ might be accounted for from those which they had in vain attempted to inflict on France, and from their still more wretched complaisance in being made the tools of a court which was not continental.

‘Then comes the peace of Amiens, our peace of Amiens—a peace born, educated, nourished, and matured in this very philanthropic spirit of gentleness and forgiveness. In the war which preceded the truce of which I am speaking, the French government involved us in considerably more than two hundred millions of debt.’ Vetus then proceeds to state that we made peace without any liquidation of this claim, without satisfaction, without a bond, (what else?) without a promise, without a single guinea! ‘I will have ransom, most egregious ransom.’ Why was it ever heard of that one government paid the debts in which another had involved itself in making war upon it?

‘The language of England,’ says our author, ‘was correctly what follows:—You, Monsieur, have loaded me with unspeakable distresses and embarrassments,’ (all this while, be it recollected, our affairs were going on most prosperously and gloriously in the cant of The Times) ‘you have robbed me of half my fortune, and reduced me to the brink of beggary,’ (the French by all accounts were in the gulph of bankruptcy) ‘you have torn away and made slaves of my friends and kindred,’ (indeed) ‘you have dangerously wounded me, and murdered my beloved children, who armed to defend their parent.’—This is too much, even for the dupes of England. Stick, Vetus, to your statistics, and do not make the pathetic ridiculous! Sophistry and affectation may confound common sense to a certain degree, but there is a point at which our feelings revolt against them.

We have already remarked on what Vetus says of Hanover; he probably will not wish us to go farther into it. Of Bonaparte he says, of course, that nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that he will convert the smallest concession made to him into a weapon for our destruction. That is, we have it in our power to set him at defiance, to insult him, to ‘bring him to the block,’ etc., whenever we please; and yet we are so completely in his power, so dependent on him, that the smallest concession must be fatal to us, will be made the instrument of our inevitable destruction. Thus is the public mind agitated and distracted by incredible contradictions, and made to feel at once ‘the fierce extremes’ of terror and triumph, of rashness and despair. ‘Our safety lies in his weakness, not in his will.’ If so, or if it depends on either of the conditions here stated, we are in no very pleasant situation. But our real safety depends on our own strength, and steady reliance on it, and not on the arguments of Vetus.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘Madmen’s epistles are no gospels.’

Dec. 16, 1813.

The last Letter of Vetus begins with an allusion to the events which have lately taken place in Holland. He then proceeds—‘What final effect this popular movement by the Dutch may have upon the future interests and prosperity of England is a question to be discussed with deliberate caution—with extreme solicitude—and with the chance, I trust, the distant chance, of its conducting us to no very gratifying conclusion!’ There is something in this passage truly characteristic, and well worthy of our notice. Vetus is, it seems, already jealous of the Dutch. The subtle venom of his officious zeal is instantly put in motion by the prospect of their national independence and commercial prosperity; and his pen is, no doubt, prepared, on the slightest provocation of circumstances, to convert them from an ally to be saved, into a rival and an enemy to be crushed. He, however, waives for the present the solemn discussion, till he can find some farther grounds to confirm him in his extreme solicitude and mysterious apprehensions. The perverse readiness of Vetus to pick a quarrel out of everything, or out of nothing, is exactly described in Spenser’s Allegory of Furor and Occasion, which if we thought him ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ we would recommend to his perusal.

The introductory comment on the Revolution in Holland is a clue to the whole of our author’s political system, which we shall here endeavour to explain. He looks askance with ‘leer malign’ on the remotest prospect of good to other nations. Every addition to the general stock of liberty or happiness, is to him so much taken from our own. He sees nothing gratifying in that prosperity or independence, which is shared (or any part of it) with foreign nations. He trembles with needless apprehension at the advantages in store for them, which he anticipates only to prevent, and is indifferent to our own welfare, interests, honour—except as they result from the privations, distress, and degradation of the rest of the world. Hatred, suspicion, and contempt for other nations are the first and last principles of the love which ‘an upright Englishman’ bears to his country. To prevent their enjoying a moment’s repose, or indulging even in a dream of future comfort, he would involve his own country in incessant distraction and wretchedness, and risk its final ruin on the cast of a die!—Vetus professes, with some reason, not to be enamoured of quotation: but he may, perhaps, allow us to refer to an author, who, though not so deep read in Vattel and the writings of the jurists, had just and penetrating views of human nature. ‘Think, there’s livers out of England. What’s England in the world’s map? In a great pool a swan’s nest.’ Now this ‘swan’s nest’ is indeed to us more than all the world besides—to cherish, to protect, to love, and honour it. But if we expect it to be so to the rest of the world—if we do not allow them to cultivate their own affections, to improve their own advantages, to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy.

Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term ‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the sans-culotterie of scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the welfare of our own country, excludes even the shadow of a pretension to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by passion and prejudice.

Alter his cold exordium on the Revolution in Holland, our consistent politician enters with warmth on Lord Castlereagh’s speech on the subsidiary treaties, in which he finds a But before the word Peace, which has a most happy efficacy in healing the wounds inflicted on his tortured apprehensions, by the explicit, unqualified declaration of Lord Liverpool in the other House. ‘After describing the laudable solicitude of Ministers for the attainment of that first of earthly goods, peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his Lordship added what was worth all the rest—BUT we must have a secure peace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we negociate, and never grant to such an enemy conditions, which under the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her to contingent dangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond even the calibre of Lord Castlereagh’s talents as a statesman.) ‘These,’ proceeds Vetus, ‘were nearly the words; they certainly do not compromise his meaning.’ (Our author cannot be much mistaken in attributing to his Lordship any words which seeming to have some meaning, in reality have none.) ’ Here then the noble Secretary has chased away every doubtful expression of his colleague.’ (‘Why so,—this horrible shadow’ of peace ‘being gone,’ Vetus ‘is himself again.’)

‘The sentiment delivered by the sovereign on the throne is now given to us with a construction, at which we need no longer be alarmed. I ask only that secure peace,—a peace consistent with English safety—void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour, otherwise the ambition and arrogance of Bonaparte, which, as compared with the relief of one day’s hunger to the meanest peasant in this our native land, are baubles not worth a name!’—This is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable specimens we ever met with of that figure in rhetoric, designated by an excellent writer as ‘the figure of encroachment.’[^[8]] Vetus, by a series of equations (certainly not mathematical ones) at length arrives at a construction of peace at which he is no longer alarmed; at the identical peace which he wants, and the only one he will admit,—a peace preposterous in its very terms, and in its nature impracticable,—a peace ‘void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour’ of the enemy, which are to pass with them as well as with us, for so much ‘arrogance and ambition.’ This is the only peace consistent with English safety—this is the secure peace of Lord Castlereagh—the fair and honourable peace announced from the throne—the very peace which Lord Liverpool meant to describe when he startled Vetus by the doubtful expression of a peace ‘consistent with the honour, rights, and interests of France’—‘of such a peace as we in her situation should be disposed to grant.’ To the mind of Vetus, which is indeed the very receptacle for contradictions ‘to knot and gender in,’ these two sorts of peace appear to be perfectly compatible, and the one a most happy explanation of the other, viz. a peace void of every shadow of regard to the rights and honour of a rival nation, and a peace consistent with those rights and that honour. If this is not ‘mere midsummer madness,’ we do not know what is. Or if any thing can surpass it (‘for in this lowest deep of absurdity a lower deep still opens to receive us, gaping wide’) it is the forlorn piece of sentimental mummery by which it is attempted to protract this endless war of proscription against the pretensions of France, under the mask of relieving the wants and distresses of the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed contemptible and mischievous baubles.

‘What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? Are they still in pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them? When we demand compensation for our dreadful sufferings, it is but what justice grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires. Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy supremacy of Bonaparte!’

First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the patriotic contributors to The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post, The Sun, and The Star, must have had in writing, and their admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand compensation for what we have suffered, it is but justice, if we can at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer; but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew, by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of Vetus’s style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years engaged in a desperate and (for some reason or other) an unequal struggle against France;—by playing at double or quits, she has just recovered from the very brink of destruction; and the keepers of our political E.O. tables treat us as traitors and miscreants, who would dissuade her from sitting down once more to finish the game, and ruin her adversary.

‘—It is asked,—“Do we propose to humble France? Do we propose to destroy her? If so, we breathe eternal war; if so, we convert the aggressor into the sufferer, and transfer all the dignity and authority of justice to the enemy against whom we arm!”’ Yes, against whom we arm for the avowed purpose of his destruction. From the moment that we make the destruction of an enemy (be he who he may) the indispensable condition of our safety, our destruction from that moment becomes necessary to his, and an act of self-defence. Not much liking this dilemma from which our author has more than once ‘struggled to get free,’ he in the next passage makes a wide career indeed, in order, no doubt, to return to the charge with better effect hereafter. ‘The question of peace or eternal war is not a naked question of right and wrong. It is a question, whose morality is determined by its reference to our preservation as a people. To such interrogatories I answer without reserve, that we ought to exact precisely that measure of humiliation from France, and that we do recommend that critical advance towards her destruction, that may combine the utmost attainable satisfaction for our past grievances with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France, since the fatal battle of Hastings, what has this nation of Saxon warriors’—(We hardly know ourselves in the learned livery of Vetus’s style. He himself is doubtless descended from some very old family settled here before the Conquest)—‘What has this nation of Saxon warriors ever yet endured from France but injury and affliction?’ Yet we have made a shift to exist as a nation under all this load of calamity. We still breathe and live notwithstanding some intervals of repose, some short resting places afforded us, before this morbid inspector of health, like another Doctor Pedro Positive, injoined his preposterous regimen of incessant war as necessary to lasting peace, and to our preservation as a people!

‘Modern France’ continues Vetus, rising in his argument, has no principle so deeply rooted as that of everlasting enmity to England. ‘I confess for this reason that in my uncorrupted judgment the best security for Great Britain, and therefore, if practicable, her most imperious duty, would be the absolute conquest of France. But since that, unfortunately, is an event which at present we are not likely to accomplish, the second best security is’ (one would think not to attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her, if we can, to a degree of weakness consistent with our immediate repose.’ After thus modestly postponing the absolute conquest of France to a more convenient opportunity, he adds the following incredible sentence. ‘If the enemy should be so far borne away by his hatred, as to command his emissaries in London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, which his own persevering and atrocious outrages have rendered in the mind of every Englishman indispensable to the safety of these islands, the woeful alternative of perpetual war very plainly originates not with Great Britain but with Bonaparte!’ That is to say, The Times not long ago laid it down as a fixed, unalterable maxim, without reference to terms of one sort or another, that we were never to make peace with Bonaparte; Vetus in this very letter enters into an elaborate apology, for that multitude of wise, honest, and virtuous persons who think his existence as a sovereign at all times threatens our existence as a nation, and it is because we entered our protest against this ‘frantic outcry raised by degenerate Englishmen,’ that Bonaparte is here made to charge his emissaries in London to announce that he prefers eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, the moderation of which conditions or of our second best security may be judged of when we are told that the best, and indeed only real security for Great Britain, and therefore her most imperious duty, would be the absolute conquest of France. Vetus is, however, contented with such terms of peace as will imply only a critical advance to her destruction, and if Bonaparte is not contented with the same terms, the alternative of eternal war, it seems, originates with him and not with Vetus.[^[9]]

But we deny that though this best security for Great Britain, the absolute conquest of France, were in her power, that it would be her most imperious duty to effect it. And we deny it, because on the same ground a better security still for Great Britain would be the conquest or destruction of Europe and the world; and yet we do not think it her imperious duty, even if she could, to accomplish the one, or to make a critical advance to the other. For if it is once laid down and acted upon as a maxim in national morality, that the best and most desirable security of a state is in the destruction of its neighbours, or that there is to be an unrelenting ever watchful critical approximation to this object as far as possible, there is an end of civil society. The same principle of not stopping short of this maximum of selfish security will impose the same imperious duty of rankling jealousy, and inexorable hostility on others. Our speculator’s ‘best possible security’ for the independence of states, is nothing but a watchword for mutual havoc, and wide-spreading desolation. Terrified with the phantom of imaginary danger, he would have us rush headlong on the reality. We are obstinately to refuse the enjoyment of a moment’s repose, and proceed to commit wilful dilapidation on the estate of our happiness, because it is not secured to us by an everlasting tenure. Placed at the mercy of the malice or hypocrisy of every venal alarmist, our only resource must be to seek a refuge from our fears in our own destruction, or to find the gratification of our revenge in that of others. But a whole nation is no more justified in obtaining this best of all possible securities for itself, by the immediate subversion of other states, than the assassin is justified in taking the life of another, to prevent the possibility of any future attempt upon his own. For in proportion as a state is weak and incapable of subjugating us, is the manifest injustice of any such precaution;—and in proportion as a state is formidable, and likely to excite serious apprehension for our own safety, is the danger and folly of setting an example which may be retaliated with so much greater effect, and ‘like a devilish engine, recoil upon ourselves.’ That exclusive patriotism which claims for our country an exemption from ‘contingent danger,’ which would place its wealth, its power, or even its safety beyond the reach of chance and the fluctuation of human affairs, claims for it an exemption from the common lot of human nature. That exclusive patriotism which seeks to enforce this claim (equally impious and unwise) by the absolute conquest of rival states, tempts the very ruin it professes to avert.

But Vetus mistakes the nature of patriotism altogether. He would transform that principle which was intended for the tutelary genius of nations, into the destroying demon of the world. He ransacks past history to revive old grudges; he anticipates the future to invent new ones. In his whole system, there is not room for ‘so small a drop of pity as a wren’s eye.’ His patriotism is the worm that dies not; a viper gnawing at the heart. He would strip this feeling of everything but the low cunning, and brutal ferocity of the savage state, and then arm it with all the refinements of scholastic virtue, and the most rigid logic. The diverging rays of human reason which should be diffused to cheer and enlighten the moral world, are in him collected into a focus of raging zeal to burn and destroy. It is well for mankind that in the order of the universe, our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own antidote within them. The only justification of our narrow, selfish passions, is their short-sightedness:—were it not for this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would not leave them the smallest interval of rest. It is well that the ungovernable impulses of fear and hatred are excited only by gross, palpable objects; and are therefore transient, and limited in their operation. It is well that those motives which do not owe their birth to reason, should not afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into abstract principles of right and wrong?

The whole of Vetus’s reasoning is founded on the false notions of patriotism which we have here pointed out, and which we conceive to be totally inconsistent with ‘the just principles of negociation.’ The remainder of his letter, which unfolds his motives for a pacific arrangement with Bonaparte, is founded entirely on the same jaundiced and distempered views. Many wise, many honest, many virtuous persons, he says, have maintained, not without reason, ‘the incompetency of this Corsican under any circumstances to discharge the obligations of a state of peace.’ But he, more wise, more honest, more virtuous, sees a hope, a shadow of peace, rising like a cloudy speck out of a quarter where it was least expected. ‘The stone which the builders rejected, is become the corner-stone of his Temple of Peace.’—‘It does not appear to Vetus, that a peace with Bonaparte is now unattainable on terms sufficient for our safety.’ He thinks there is no man so proper to make peace with as this Corsican, this Revolutionist,—no one so proper to govern France—to the complete exclusion of the Bourbons, whose pretensions he scouts analytically, logically, and chronologically, and who, it seems, had always the same implacable animosity against this country as Bonaparte, without a tythe of his ability. [Surely this circumstance might plead a little in their favour with Vetus.] And why so? Whence arises this unexpected partiality shewn to Bonaparte? Why it is ‘from the strong conviction that by no other means so decisive as the existence of this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading system of government, can we hope to see France crushed and ground down below the capacity of contending for ages to come with the force of the British Empire, moved by the spirit of freedom! Regarding France under every known form of government as the irreconcileable foe of England, I have beheld with almost unmingled joy the growth and accumulation of this savage despotism!’ To be sure ‘while there appeared to some persons,’ [Vetus was not one of them] ‘a chance of his enslaving the Continent, and hurling the mass of subjugated nations against our shores—then, indeed, those who entertained such fears were justified in seeking his personal and political destruction. But once released from the terror of his arm, what genuine Englishman can fail to rejoice in the privilege of consigning Bonaparte and the French people, for better for worse, to the paradise of each other’s embraces?’ Vetus then proceeds to inveigh at great length against the persons and pretensions of the Bourbons. Leaving them to the mercy of this good-natured remembrancer, we shall only observe, that he decides the impolicy of restoring the Bourbons, by asking, whether their restoration would not be advantageous to France, and consequently (he infers very consistently with himself) injurious to this country. Looking forward but half a century, he sees France gradually regain under the old regime ‘her natural ascendancy over Great Britain, from which she falls, and must fall every hour more rapidly from the necessary operation of those principles on which the Corsican dynasty is founded.’ Nay, looking on farther than the expiration of the same half century, he sees ‘sloth, weakness, and poverty, worse than ever sprung from Turkish policy, proceeding from this odious, self-dissolving power, and a gulph of irretrievable destruction, already yawning for our eternal foe.’

It is not long ago since Vetus drew an historical parallel between this country and Carthage, encouraging us to expect the same fate from France which Carthage received from Rome, and to act upon this fanciful comparison as a solid ground of wisdom. Now all at once ‘this mendicant in argument, this perfect juggler in politics,’ inverts the perspective, takes a prophetic view of the events of the next fifty years, and France is seen dwindling into another Turkey, which the genius of British freedom grinds to powder, and crushes beneath her feet! These great statesmen-like views of things, ‘this large discourse of reason, looking before and after,’ are, we confess, beyond us. We recollect indeed a similar prophecy to that of Vetus, couched in nearly the same terms, when in the year 1797, the French were said to be ‘on the verge, nay, in the very gulph of bankruptcy,’ and that their finances could not hold out six months longer. Vetus however, taught by the failure of past prognostics, constructs his political calculations for the ensuing century, instead of the ensuing year, and puts off the day of reckoning to a period when he and his predictions will be forgotten.

Such are the charitable grounds on which our author wishes to secure Bonaparte on the throne of France, and thinks that peace may at present be made with him, on terms consistent with our safety. He is not, like others, ‘ready to shake hands with the Usurper over the tomb of the murdered D’Enghien, provided he will return to the paths of religion and virtue;’ but he will shake hands with him over the ruins of the liberty and happiness of France, on the express condition that ‘he never returns to the paths of religion and morality.’ Vetus is willing to forget the injuries which Bonaparte may have done to England, for the sake of the greater mischiefs he may do to France. These are the ‘obligations’ which Vetus owes to him—this the source of his gratitude, the sacred pledge that reconciles him to ‘that monster whom England detests.’ He is for making peace with the ‘tyrant,’ to give him an opportunity to rivet on the chains of France, and fix her final doom. But is Vetus sincere in all this? His reasoning comes in a very questionable shape; and we the more doubt it, because he has no sooner (under the auspices of Bonaparte) hurled France down the gulf of irretrievable destruction, than he immediately resumes the old topic of eternal war or perpetual bondage, as the only alternative which this country can look to. Why, if he is in earnest, insist with Lord Castlereagh on the caution with which we must grant terms to ‘such an enemy,’ to this disabled and paralyzed foe? Why assert, as Vetus did in his very last letter, that ‘nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that any concession made to him will be instantly converted into a weapon for our destruction?’ Why not grant to him such terms as might be granted to the Bourbons, since they would be granted to a much less dangerous and powerful rival? Why not subsist, as we have hitherto done, without the fear of perpetual war or perpetual bondage before our eyes, now that the crown of France has lost its original brightness, and is shorn of those beams which would again sparkle round it, if fixed on the head of a Bourbon? We suspect that our author is not quite in earnest in his professions, because he is not consistent with himself. Is it possible that his anxiety to keep out the Bourbons arises from his fear that peace might creep in with them, at least as a sort of compliment of the season? Is our veteran politician aware, in his own mind, that the single epithets, Corsican, republican, revolutionary, will have more effect in stirring up the embers of war, than all the arguments which he might use to demonstrate the accumulating dangers to be apprehended from the mild paternal sway of the ancient dynasty?

We cannot help saying, however, that we think the elaborate attempt of Vetus to prove the necessary extinction of the power of France under the government of Bonaparte, a total failure. What is the amount of his argument? That in a period when the French were to owe their existence and their power to war, Bonaparte has made them a warlike people, and that they did not sit down quietly to ‘the cultivation of arts, luxuries, and letters,’ when the world was beleaguered against them. Is it for Vetus, who reprobates the peace of Amiens, that hollow truce (as he justly calls it), that intermission of war but for a moment, to say of Bonaparte, ‘His application of public industry is only to the arts of death—all other perishes for want of wholesome nourishment’? What then becomes of the long-resounded charge against him on his exclamation ‘for ships, colonies, and commerce’? We suspect, that energy in war is not an absolute proof of weakness in peace. He lays down, indeed, a general principle (true enough in itself) that a government, in its nature and character at variance with the people, must be comparatively weak and insecure; yet, in applying this maxim, he proves not that the French people and government are at irreconcileable variance, but that the one has become entirely subdued and assimilated to the other. But hear him speak for himself. ‘The causes of the overthrow of the old government are foreign to our present purpose. The consequence has been the birth of this bloody and scorching despotism,—this giant, armed from his mother’s womb with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire. Can such a government be fit for such a people? Can a tyranny, operating by direct violence and characteristic of the earliest periods in the most barbarous condition of mankind, have any quality adapted to the wants or feelings of a nation, grown old in arts, luxuries, and letters? Is it not plain to the least acute observer, that where the principles of such a government, and such a stage of society, are so vehemently contrasted, there can be no immediate alliance; but that an incessant counteraction must ensue—that the government or the people must change their character before a just harmony and co-operation can exist between them; in other words, that one of them must yield!’

[Well, this is the very thing which, in the next sentence, he shews has actually taken place.] ‘And from whom are we to infer this ultimate submission to its rival? Has the tyrant loosed his chains?—has he relaxed his hold, or flung aside the whip of scorpions? No! it is France herself which has given way. It is the French nation who gradually recede from the rest of the civilized world.’ That is, it is France who, contrary to Vetus’s argument, in receding gradually from the rest of the civilized world, has been identified with the government, and become that whip of scorpions in the hands of Bonaparte, which has been the scourge and dread of all Europe. It is thus that our author always defeats himself. He is fond of abstruse reasoning and deep investigation in exact proportion to his incapacity for them—as eunuchs are amorous through impotence!

But though he fails in his argument, the moral is not less instructive. He teaches us on what grounds a genuine English patriot goes to war, and on what terms he will make peace. A patriot of this exclusive stamp, who is troubled with none of the symptoms of a ‘spurious and mawkish beneficence,’ threatens France with the restoration of the Bourbons, only to throw her into the convulsions of anarchy, and withdraws that kindly interference, only that she may sink into the more fatal lethargy of despotism. It is the same consistent patriot who kindles the fires of La Vendée, and whenever it suits his purpose, is no longer borne away by the ‘torrent of royal, flaming, unreflecting sympathies!’ It is the same tried friend of his country, who carries on a twenty years’ war for the preservation of our trade and manufactures, and when they are mentioned as inducements for peace, disdains ‘all gross, commercial calculations.’ It is the same conscientious politician, who at one time makes war for the support of social order, and the defence of our holy religion;—who, at another, hails the disappearance of ‘the last glimmering of education among a people grown old in arts and letters,’ and who rejoices ‘to see the Christian religion made studiously contemptible by the poverty and debasement of its professors!’ It is the same true patriot, the same Vetus, who ‘beholds with unmingled joy, the growth and accumulation of a savage despotism, which is to crush and bow down France under our feet;’—who holds ‘the whip of scorpions over her head;’—who ‘arms a scorching tyranny with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire’ against her;—who pushes her headlong down ‘the yawning gulf of irretrievable destruction;’ it is the same Vetus, who, suddenly recovering all the severity of justice, and all the tenderness of humanity, makes a piteous outcry about ‘the dreadful sufferings we have endured,’ in attempting to heap coals of fire on our adversary, demands the payment of ‘two hundred millions of debt, in which her government have wantonly involved us,’ complains of our being ‘driven to beggary and want’ in this unnatural conflict, calls for the release of our countrymen, ‘sent into hopeless captivity,’ and invokes the murdered names of those children of the state, who ‘armed to defend a beloved parent, and an injured country!’ Even Vetus shrinks from the enormity of such inconsistencies, and excuses himself by saying, ‘Do I feel the spontaneous and unprovoked desire that such a mass of evil should be perpetuated for any portion of mankind? God forbid. But it is, I conscientiously believe, a question, which of these countries shall destroy the other. In that case, my part is taken—France must be ruined, to save our native country from being ruined. If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it. Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us.’ Here then our bane and antidote are both before us: perpetual war or perpetual bondage;—a pleasant alternative!—but it is an alternative of Vetus’s making, and we shall not, if we can help it, submit to either of his indispensable conditions. We shall not learn of him, for ‘his yoke is not easy, nor his burden light.’ If this be our inevitable lot, ‘he cannot help it.’ No; but he can help laying the blame of his own irritable and mischievous conclusions on Nature and Providence; or at least we think it our duty to guard ourselves and others against the fatal delusion.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

‘Take him, and cut him out in little stars.’

Jan. 3, 1814.

We undertook, some time ago, the task of ascertaining the true value of this writer’s reasoning, by removing the cumbrous load of words which oppress his understanding, as well as that of his readers; and we find that ‘our occupation is not yet gone.’ His last letter, indeed, furnishes us with comparatively slender materials. His style is considerably abated. With Bottom in the play, he may be said to ‘aggravate his voice so, that he roars you an ’twere any sucking dove.’ His swaggering paradoxes dwindle into unmeaning common-places; his violent dogmas into tame equivocations. There is scarcely an attempt made to defend his own extreme opinions, or to repel the charge of gross and glaring inconsistency which we brought against them. He makes indeed a faint effort to screen certain general positions from the odium and contempt they deserve, by explaining them away, and to shift off the responsibility of others, by directly denying them. Vetus has, in fact, marched boldly on in a fog of splendid words, till he unexpectedly finds himself on the edge of a precipice, and he seems willing to retreat from it as well as his accustomed solemnity, and the incumbrances of his style will permit. It may, perhaps, be some consolation, if we remind him that he is not the first enthusiast on record, who mistook a cloud for a goddess. His present situation is certainly no very pleasant one: it a good deal resembles that of Parolles, when he undertook the recovery of his drum.

The most striking part of Vetus’s last letter is his gratuitous tirade against what has been called the modern philosophy, as if this were the only alternative (whereas it is in truth the antithesis or converse) of his system of exclusive patriotism. Our contradiction of his first principle, that the basis of a peace with France is to be one which does not leave a shadow of regard to her honour, rights, or interest, and that the terms of peace to which she is in duty bound to accede, must be such as to imply a critical advance to her destruction—our utter rejection of this new-fangled theory of negociation he considers as ‘a sucker from the root of that poisonous vegetable, the doctrine of universal benevolence,’ and deprecates our reasoning on the subject as ‘a blossom which threatens the desolation of the moral world!’ We really cannot attribute to our opinions any such power or any such tendency as the morbid imagination of our political hypochondriac lends to them. The arguments of Vetus on this question seem a sort of transcript of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, or of one of Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures at Lincoln’s Inn; and are very tolerable, dull, common-place declamation—a little bordering on fustian. But, as is the invariable fate of Vetus’s arguments, they contain a flat contradiction to the principle he is aiming to establish. Though the passage has little to do with the immediate question, we shall give it as a literary curiosity. It is an instance of one of those lapses of thought, of that epilepsy of the mind, which we have already pointed out as the distinguishing characteristic of this author’s understanding. His object is to exclude all general reasoning, or the seeds of what he absurdly calls ‘theo-philanthropy’ from the feelings of patriotism; and in his eagerness to do this, he effectually explodes and laughs to scorn all patriotism, as a branch of the same theo-philanthropy, as impracticable and romantic folly. His words are these:—

‘One of these patriots enacts the part of a drawling hypocritical projector, whom no natural affection can move, nor individual happiness enliven. He is a regular brother of a well known sect, which we of this generation have had the misfortune to behold in high activity—and which, having seen, it is but wisdom to remember. The men I speak of were those who in some degree precipitated the French revolution, and who entirely perverted its possible uses, the mongrel race of metaphysical enthusiasts, who undertook to change the objects of human feeling, that they might disappoint more effectually the ends for which it was bestowed. Such were the worshippers of the strumpet goddess Reason; a deity, in herself, and in the prostitute who represented her, convertible to purposes equally abandoned. The next step, after acknowledging this divinity, was to make a display of her power. Mankind were to be reasoned out of all human sensibilities; but the loss was to be supplied by reasoning them into a new assortment of human sensibilities, on a larger and nobler scale. Brotherly regard was a puny sentiment; what was a single brother to him who felt that millions of freemen were his brothers! Marriage, too, that holy and heavenly[^[10]] and heart-sustaining institution, what with its graceful and beautiful assemblage of bland obligations and virtuous sympathies—how stood the fixed relation of husband and wife? Why, treason to natural liberty!—“exclusive tenderness”—a bar to the performance of those unconfined embraces, which spoke the reign of universal love. Parental affection, and filial piety, also, were still less worthy to escape the blight of this ruthless philosophical reform. How narrow was the father’s mansion! How diminutive the mind that could look with reverence to the beings that gave it birth, when the republic, sole heiress of philanthropy and freedom—the great republic, offered herself as the fond and universal parent. Nor could the sire, who argued logically, bewail the sacrifice of his devoted offspring. His children—not his, but their country’s children—were to be educated by and for that country. His paternal feelings were not to be extinguished—no, nothing more than transferred to the state, and ennobled by the magnitude of the object. This same republic was a perfect “Scrub.” She was to play the sister, husband, wife, son, and mother—confiscating and appropriating the individual duties, rights, and charities of mankind—ransacking the deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as prizes to her sovereign will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.

‘But the phrenzy did not terminate here. It was not enough that all the relations of life should merge in that of citizen: even “exclusive patriotism” was a vulgar thought. In the paroxysms of disorder, it was sometimes proposed, that the citizen himself should evaporate into a citizen of the world. The universal republic—the vast family of mankind—the deputations from the human race—became instruments with the knaves who led, and visions for the dupes who admired. There can really be no objection to this superfine theory, but that it is inconsistent with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man—that it unfixes our moral land-marks—melts into air every practical virtue and definite duty—substitutes words for salutary deeds—and by directing our most natural and useful passions to objects indistinct or unattainable, leaves these powerful agents afloat, and ends by abusing them to the production of crime and misery. Such were the results of that system of speculation, which assumed for its basis the existence of a species of beings far above the pitch of humanity, and which, in its application to human affairs, reduces them to the level of brutes.

‘A sucker from the root of this poisonous vegetable is again in blossom, and threatens the desolation of the moral world. We are called upon to abdicate the right and obligation of preferring and protecting our native country, that is, of enjoying our proper advantages, and of discharging our specific trusts—and for what? Why, that we may undertake the preposterous office, and execute the factitious duty of handing over to a mortal enemy the greatness to which we have waded through blood and fire, and raising his empire on the ruins of our own. Beware, we are warned, of neglecting the rights of the adversary. It is our peculiar business to guard the rights of France.’[^[11]]

The whole of this pompous episode is a mere diversion to the question. Vetus, some time ago, asked, in a tone which could not be mistaken, ‘Who are the French nation? A rank non-entity. Who are to be the sole judges of the rights and pretensions of what once was France? We, and our allies!’—and when we protest against this unheard-of basis of a negociation between rival states, he answers with a tedious prize-dissertation on the doctrine of universal benevolence, and the perfectibility of man. Vetus insists on a peace (the only peace fit for a wise nation) that shall remain a proud monument of its own superiority,—that is, a peace which can never be made between any two states, a peace that does not admit of the shadow of regard to the rights, interests, or honour of the enemy, a peace that implies a critical advance to the destruction of France. But it seems, that all this proud display of pedantic phraseology, by which he attempted to ‘confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears,’ now means nothing more than that we are to guard and protect our native country, and not surrender our own rights to the enemy. There needed no oracle to tell us that. But Vetus, having set out on the forlorn hope of political paradox, is himself ashamed to turn back to a trite truism, and contends that there is no safety for this country but in the destruction of the enemy, and no patriotism which is not inconsistent with the rights, liberties, and even existence of other countries. We deny it. We say there is a patriotism consistent with the claims of reason, justice, and humanity; and another exclusive of them. The latter is Vetus’s patriotism; the former is ours. This we have stated before. We do not wonder that Vetus has not answered it; for it does not admit of an answer.

It seems, however, that the view we have taken (in common with all civilized nations) of this subject, is ‘a sucker from the poisonous root of universal benevolence’; and Vetus’s prejudices, coupling with that strumpet Reason, beget in his mind a sort of ‘mongrel metaphysical enthusiasm,’ in which he sees visions, and has revelations of the general nature of man. He tells us, we are regular adepts in that school which, under the direction of the goddess, or the strumpet, Reason, (for with him they are both the same) trampled on all human sensibilities, and the charities of private life, to offer them up as a sacrifice to that monstrous fiction, their country, and then to that more monstrous fiction, their kind. This is the most curious defence of patriotism we ever met with, and a striking instance of the pains which this laborious reasoner takes to confute himself. Our country, according to this patriotic writer, is ‘a perfect Scrub,’ a kind of Sin and Death business, a contradiction, and a dire chimera, ‘confiscating and appropriating the individual duties, rights, and charities of mankind—ransacking the deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as prizes to her sovereign will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.’ It is ‘a superfine theory, inconsistent with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man, and which, by pretending to raise us far above the pitch of humanity, degrades us below the level of brutes.’ But then ‘there is a phrenzy still greater’ than this, which is the love of mankind. This is the consummation of enormity, and the triumph of the strumpet-goddess. Vetus has here fallen into a more desperate dilemma than any he has yet encountered in his perilous way. We present him with the choice of a pair of alternatives: either he must mean that the love of the republic, or our country, which he treats with such profound contempt and abhorrence, is only bad when it destroys the private and natural affections, or he must exclude at once every shadow of regard to the rights, liberties, and happiness of mankind, and then the same thing will follow of patriotism itself, which, as he says truly, is an emanation from the same impure source, human reason, and so to establish his favourite principle of exclusive patriotism, he gets rid of it altogether. ‘The latter end of this writer’s reasoning always forgets the beginning.’ We will tell Vetus the hinge on which this whole controversy turns, and what is the radical error of the system of general philanthropy, which he has attempted to expose. It is, that it is an exclusive system, and is therefore unfitted for the nature of man, who is a mixed being, made up of various principles, faculties, and feelings. All these are good in their place and degree, as well as the affections that spring from them—natural affection, patriotism, benevolence: it is only exclusive selfishness, exclusive patriotism, exclusive philanthropy, that are inconsistent with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man: Vetus in avoiding one extreme has fallen into another, for the extremes not only ‘of faction’ but of folly meet; though we should be loth to compare the splendid dreams of the philosophical enthusiast, who wished to raise man above the pitch of his common nature, to the groveling, sordid, shuffling paradoxes of Vetus, who would degrade him below the level of the brutes, and whose maxims are as repugnant to common sense, and the practical rules of life, as they are devoid of every thing elegant in imagination, or consistent in reasoning.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONCLUDED)

‘What do you read, my lord?—Words, words, words.

What is the matter?——Nothing.’

Jan. 5, 1814.

We gave in our last article Vetus’s quaint denunciation of the principles of patriotism and philanthropy. It appears by this, that the same ‘jargon of metaphysics,’ and the same vapid rhetoric may be employed against both these sacred and inviolable feelings, by any one who is weak and vain enough to suppose that language was given us, not to communicate truth to others, but to impose falsehood on ourselves. Does Vetus mean to assert, that his topics are fatal to all patriotism, as well as all philanthropy? Or (which is the alternative) that they are fatal to neither, properly understood,—that there is a true and a false patriotism, a true and a false philanthropy? What will ‘the acknowledged saviours of Europe, the magnanimous defenders of the commonwealth of nations, the liberators of Spain, the recreators of Portugal, the regenerators of Germany,’ say to Vetus’s exclusive patriotism? Or, we would ask, whether the abuse of reason, of which he complains in certain moderns, is a sufficient cause that we should explode it altogether? In the dialect of Don Quixote’s books of chivalry, must ‘the unreasonableness of their reason so unreason our reason,’ that we are to reject the faculty, both root and branch? Shall we impiously renounce the goddess, because she has been personated by a strumpet? Reason is the queen of the moral world, the soul of the universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the foundation of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain, let down from heaven, which links all animated and all intelligent natures in one common system—and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation, and fanatic prejudice we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world, to blot out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break in pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us, with loud taunts and bitter imprecations, that reason, which has been the lofty theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, their opponents, but is coeval with, and inseparable from the nature and faculties of man,—is the image of his Maker stamped upon him at his birth, the understanding breathed into him with the breath of life, and in the participation of which alone he is raised above the brute creation, and his own physical nature!—Vetus labours hard to persuade us, that the goddess and the strumpet are really one person, equally ‘convertible to the same abandoned purposes;’ that reason and sophistry are the same thing. He may find his account in endeavouring to confound them; but his indifference betrays the hollowness of his claims to true reason, as the false mother was detected by her willingness to compromise her own pretensions, only to be revenged on her rival.

Vetus has, however, without knowing it, stumbled on an important truth, which is, that patriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and must be the creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring of physical or local attachment. Our country is a complex abstract existence, known only to the understanding. It is an immense riddle, containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought and passion. Patriotism is not, in a strict or exclusive sense, a natural or personal affection, but a law of our rational and moral nature, strengthened and determined by particular circumstances and associations, but not born of them, nor wholly nourished by them. It is not possible that we should have an individual attachment to sixteen millions of men, any more than to sixty millions. We cannot be attached, except rationally and ‘logically,’ to places we never saw, and people we never heard of. Is not the name of Englishman a general term, as well as that of man? How many varieties does it not combine within it? Are the opposite extremities of the globe our native place, because they are a part of that geographical and political denomination, our country? Does natural affection expand in circles of latitude and longitude? What personal or instinctive sympathy has the English peasant with the African slave-driver, or East India nabob? None but the most ‘drawling hypocritical’ sophist will say that there is any. These wretched bunglers in metaphysics would fain persuade us to discard all public principle, and all sense of abstract justice, as a violation of natural affection, and yet do not see that the love of our country is itself in the order of our general affections, except, indeed, that exclusive sort which consists in a mere negation of humanity and justice. The common notions of patriotism are, in fact, transmitted to us from the savage tribes, or from the states of Greece and Rome, where the fate and condition of all was the same, or where the country of the citizen was the town in which he was born. Where this is no longer the case, where our country is no longer contained within the narrow circle of the same walls, where we can no longer behold its glimmering horizon from the top of our native mountains—beyond these limits it is not a natural but an artificial idea, and our love of it either an habitual dictate of reason, or a cant term. It was said by an acute observer, and eloquent writer, that the love of mankind was nothing but the love of justice: the same might be said, with considerable truth, of the love of our country. It is little more than another name for the love of liberty, of independence, of peace and social happiness. We do not say, that other indirect and collateral circumstances do not go to the superstructure of this sentiment, (as language,[^[12]] literature, manners, national customs,) but this is the broad and firm basis. All other patriotism, not founded on, or not consistent with truth, justice, and humanity, is a painted sepulchre, fair without, but full of ravening and all uncleanness within. ‘It leaves our passions afloat, and ends with abusing them to crime and misery.’ It is the watchword of faction, the base pander of avarice and pride, the ready tool in the hands of those who, having no sense of public duty, and disclaiming all pretensions to common humanity, sacrifice the lives of millions to the madness of one, and are eager to offer up their country a devoted victim at the shrine of power, as the miserable slave is yoked to the foul Eastern idol,[^[13]] and crushed beneath its chariot wheels! Thus the hired scribbler of a profligate newspaper sits secure and self-satisfied at his desk—with a venomed word, or a lie that looks like truth, sends thousands of his countrymen to death,—receives his pay, and scribbles on, regardless of the dying and the dead!—And this is patriotism.

The tempora mollia fandi do not belong to Vetus any more than to ourselves. He is, like us, but an uncouth courtier, a rough, sturdy, independent politician, who thinks and speaks for himself. He complains of ‘the soft nonsense whispered in the higher circles,’ and gossipped in The Morning Post, in favour of peace. Be it so, for once, that these soft whispers are fraught with ruin, dishonour, and slavery to this country. Yet, if the effeminate and dastard sound once floats through the air, borne on the downy wing of fashion—if it is whispered from the prince to the peer, and from lords to ladies, from ministers to their clerks, from their clerks to the treasury-prints, and from the knaves who write to the dupes who read—even the warning voice of Vetus will not be able to prevent the Syren sound from spreading in gentle murmurs, and ‘smoothing the raven down of discord, till it smiles.’ And will Vetus pretend such ignorance both of the court and of the country, as not to know, that whether the word is war or peace, the same effect will follow—that whether the breath of kings breathe ‘airs from heaven or blasts from hell,’ the same well-attuned system of undulating sounds will disperse them wide in eddying circles, and the same round of smiles and whispers and significant shrugs will be repeated, whether the country bleeds or starves, is enslaved within, or conquered without? All those who do not catch the soft whisper, and mimic the gracious smile, and join the magic circle, are no better than hypocrites, madmen, and traitors to their country! We know it well.

Vetus in vain attempts to repel the charge which we brought against The Times, whose profession of eternal war with Bonaparte we said was incompatible with the possibility of his making peace with us, by asserting that this doctrine is ‘an audacious plagiarism, from the portfolio of the French Minister.’ We have not such near access to the portfolio of the French Government as this writer; but we have access to The Times, and there we find this audacious plagiarism written in large letters in almost every page. We say that wherever the doctrine is found (whoever invented or whoever adopted it), there is an insuperable bar to peace. If it is found on one side, that is the responsible side; if it is found on both, neither can reproach the other with the continuance of hostilities. This statement is plain and unanswerable. Does Vetus think to ‘thrust us from a level consideration by a confident brow, and the throng of words which come with such affected gravity from him’? He disclaims the doctrine for himself. Why then is he so eager to justify it in The Times? They are caught in the fact; they are taken with the manner; and Vetus would divert us from executing summary justice on them, by offering himself as security that they are only the receivers of the stolen goods; ‘the audacious plagiarists,’ instead of the atrocious inventors of this mischievous doctrine. Besides, the answer is a wretched evasion, and makes the assertion itself senseless and nugatory. The principle of The Times was and is (if they have not retracted it) that we are never to make peace with Bonaparte at all, that is, though he would make peace with us, (otherwise the words have no meaning) and then comes the gloss of Vetus, which is, that we will not make peace with him, only because he will not make peace with us. Ridiculous!—Vetus asks, ‘Who has been the founder of this shocking creed—who the aggressor—who the unrelenting enemies of peace?’ May we not answer—‘The incessant war-faction of England’? Why would Vetus strip ‘these acknowledged saviours of Europe’ of the praise which is so justly due to them, or degrade them from that proud eminence which they have maintained with so much persevering fortitude? We cannot withhold from these persons our sincere conscientious thanks for all the benefits which this war has conferred on our country, on Europe, and the world. While France strove insidiously to ruin us by peace, these firm patriots have always been determined to save us by war—from ‘England’s greatest and most magnanimous politician,’ down to the last desperate incendiary of The Times, who is only willing to conclude ‘a Regicide Peace’ by celebrating ‘the condign and solemn punishment of Bonaparte!’[^[14]]

Vetus says, that ‘eternal war is no expression of his, and that it is a deliberate falsehood in us who assert that he has used it, or that this country has no alternative between eternal war and eternal bondage.’ ‘It is not England,’ he says, ‘but France—not Vetus, but the French government—who has broached the creed, and one of the two countries must in the end destroy the other.’

If it is a falsehood, it is a deliberate one, for we do deliberately assert that he uses these words, and inculcates this doctrine incessantly. But instead of contradicting Vetus, it is better to let him contradict himself; no one else can do it so effectually. In his last letter but one he has these words:—‘It is, I conscientiously believe, a question, which of these two countries shall destroy the other. In that case my part is taken.—France must be ruined to save our native country from being ruined.—If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it.—Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us.’ Either the interpretation of this passage is that which we have given to it, or, as Vetus says, ‘the English language must be constructed anew.’

He now, indeed, mitigates the dread sentence he had passed upon us, by saying, not that we have no alternative but either war, or slavery, or peace. We are glad that Vetus has introduced this new clause in our favour into the codicil; it was not in the original will, or expressed in such faint characters, that we, with the rest of the public, missed the intended benefaction. Just in the same manner, that profound politician and humane writer, the author of the Essay on Population, found out that the only possible checks to excessive population, were vice and misery, which were, therefore, to be considered as the greatest blessings of mankind, and having gained a vast reputation by this singular discovery, he then recollected what every one knew before, that there was another check to this principle, viz. moral restraint, and that consequently vice and misery were not the greatest blessings of society.

We did not state it as an inconsistency in Vetus, that he held out France as an object of terror, and yet recommended a negociation with Bonaparte, because his government tended to weaken France, but we did state it as a rank inconsistency in Vetus to hold up Bonaparte as an object of peculiar terror to this country, and yet to represent his government as tottering on the brink of deplorable weakness and unavoidable ruin. Vetus could not meet the objection, and he has altered the terms.

Vetus concludes his letter with the following note:—

‘The stupid impertinence’ (charged on the attacks made upon him) ‘has no relation to The Morning Chronicle, with which I am disposed to part in peace. One feels a tolerance towards that paper, for the talents which once adorned it; and of the continuance of which I should rejoice to see more proof in its late attacks on Vetus. We have little common faith in politics, but we have, I trust, a common stake in the spirit and dignity of the press.’

We are obliged to Vetus for this amicable offer, of the sincerity of which we entertain no doubt. As to the talent shown in our attacks on him, we are ready to admit that it is little enough; but we at the same time think that if it had been greater, it would have been more than the occasion required. We have no enmity to Vetus, but to his extravagance, and if he will correct that, he will save us the trouble of correcting it for him. We are ready to believe that this writer has talents and acquirements which might be made useful to the public, if he would forego his mistaken pretensions to extraordinary wisdom and eloquence. The qualities of profound thought and splendid imagery are seldom found singly in the same person, and the union of both together is an undertaking much beyond the capacity of Vetus. And now we leave him to return to his indigestions with ‘what appetite he may.’[^[15]]

ON THE LATE WAR

April 3, 1814.

The systematic patrons of eternal war are always returning, when they dare, to the point from which they set out twenty years ago; the war with them has not yet lost its original character: they have long memories: they never lose sight of their objects and principles. We cannot but admire their candour as well as their consistency, and would wish to imitate it. It is deemed necessary by the everlasting war-faction to prove in their own justification, ‘that the march to Paris was not chimerical in 1793,’ by carrying it into effect now, and to blot France out of the map of Europe, three-and-twenty years after the event had been announced by that great prophet and politician, Mr. Burke. This splendid reverie is not yet accomplished. The triumph of the Pitt-school over the peace-faction is not yet complete; but we are put in complete possession of what is required to make it so. As the war with them was a war of extermination, so the peace, not to fix a lasting stigma on their school and principles, must be a peace of extermination. This is what we always said and thought of those principles and that school. This is their triumph, their only triumph—the true crown of their hopes, the consummation of their utmost wishes, nothing short of which can satisfy their proud pretensions, or finish this just and necessary war, as it was begun. Otherwise, no peace for them; otherwise, they will have failed in both branches of that happy dilemma, hit upon by the beneficent genius of ‘the great statesman, now no more,’ the necessity of destroying France, or being ourselves destroyed in the attempt. If they succeed in neither experiment, all that they have done is surely lost labour. They have then a right to their revenge, ‘their pound of carrion-flesh’—‘’tis theirs, ’tis dearly bought, and they will have it.’ Be it so. But we shall let them feast alone: we are not man-eaters. We shall not join the barbarous yell of this worse than Thracian rout, nor figure in at the close of their dance of death, nor applaud the catastrophe of their twenty years’ tragedy. We did not approve it in its commencement or progress; nor will we hail its threatened conclusion. We have had, and we will have, no hand in the plot, the execution, the scene-shifting, or the decoration. We leave the full credit of it to the original authors; and, in spite of all the puffing of the Bayes’s of the Pitt-school, the only answer they will get from us is, ‘’Tis an indifferent piece of work: would ’twere done!’ Though the torch of The Times blazes over Paris, ‘fierce as a comet’; though The Sun sees the lilied banner of the Bourbons floating before Lord Wellington in the plains of Normandy; though The Courier is setting out post-haste to break up the negociations at Chatillon; and The Morning Herald sheds tears of joy over the fashionable virtues of the rising generation, and finds that we shall make better man-milliners, better lacqueys, and better courtiers than ever—we remain sceptical as to the success, and more than sceptical as to the necessity of this last cast of our political dicers, and desperate venture of our licenced dealers and chapmen in morality and massacre. In our opinion, lives enough have been thrown away to prove, that the survivors are only born to bear fardels. This is the moral of the piece, if it succeeds on the principles of the Pitt-school, and all short of that is mere gratuitous mischief. The war, conducted on those principles and for those purposes, ‘was not, and it cannot come to good.’ Its failure, or its success, must be fatal.

The war, as it was carried on from the first by the Pitt-school, and as they would now revive it, was not a national quarrel, but a question about a political principle. It had no more to do with France or England as geographical denominations, than the wars between the Guelphs and Gibelines. It was not a war of mercantile advantage, or a trial of strength between two countries, which must be decided by the turn of events, by the probable calculation of loss and profit, but a war against an opinion, which could, therefore, never cease, but with the extirpation of that opinion. Hence there could be neither safety, nor honour, nor justice, in any terms of peace with the French government, because, by the supposition, it was not with its power or its conduct, but with its existence, that we were at war. Hence the impossibility of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with France. Hence Mr. Burke’s regicide war. Hence the ridiculousness asserted by The Courier, of even attempting negociation with this hated power. Hence the various and contradictory aspects which the war assumed after its first outset, and all of which answered the purpose equally well, because there was another pivot on which the whole turned, the sheet-anchor which never loosed its hold, and which enabled ‘the pilot to weather the storm.’ It was not a temporary or local question of the boundaries, the possessions, or particular rights of rival states, but a question, in which all states are at all times equally interested, of the internal right of any people to choose its own form of government. Whether this was a just ground of war or not, is another question; but it was the true one—that which gave its character to the war, and accounts for all its consequences. It was a war of proscription against a great and powerful state, for having set the example of a people ridding itself of an odious and despicable tyranny. It was the question of the balance of power between kings and people; a question, compared with which the balance of power in Europe is petty and insignificant. That what we have here stated, are the real and paramount grounds of this bloody and inveterate contest in the minds of the war-faction is, what we apprehend they will not, in their present state of frenzy, deny. They are the only ones that always survive the shock of accident and the fluctuation of circumstances, and which are always recurred to when all others fail, and are constantly avowed in the face of day, whenever the least probability of success attends them. It has been declared again and again, month after month, and year after year, that no peace should be made with France till the last remaining effort had been tried to attain this object. We were to bury ourselves with our great war-minister, under the ruins of the civilized world, sooner than relax in our exertions, or recede from our object. No sacrifices were to be held too dear—no sufferings too great in the prosecution of this sacred cause. No other than the last extremity was to force peace from us. Nothing short of the complete subjugation of France was to satisfy us—nothing short of our own ruin was to drive us to despair. We were like wrestlers, struggling on the edge of a precipice, one (or both) of whom must be certain of destruction. Such were the mad, mischievous, and unprincipled terms, on which a pampered crew of sycophants have played away the welfare, the repose, the liberties, and happiness of mankind, and on which they would now urge us to stake our all again, to realize their favourite scheme of the march to Paris, and the annihilation of the French people.

The consequences of the Pitt project were inevitable. From the moment that the existence of France as a nation was declared to be incompatible with that of the surrounding states—that she was denounced as a nuisance which must be abated, and set up as a mark for the vengeance of the rest of the world, the struggle necessarily became convulsive, and the re-action terrible. Is it then a matter of wonder, that in this unnatural strife, France, proscribed, hunted down, put out of the pale of nations, endeavoured rather to reduce others to the last extremity than to be reduced to it herself? Or are we entitled to wreak that vengeance upon her which we could not at first execute, because the engine which we had prepared to crush her has recoiled with the greatest violence upon ourselves? It has been said that we less easily forgive the injuries we do or meditate against others, than those we receive from them. There are, we know, persons to whom the celebrated line of the historian is, at all times, applicable: Odia in longum jaciens, quæ conderet, auctaque promeret. We are not surprised to find that the good intentions of these persons towards France, though she did not submit to the original tender made to her of their kind interference and paternal care, have not spoiled by keeping. If Titus complained with so much bitterness, that he had lost a day to virtue, what must not some modern friends to mankind feel, when they reflect that they have lost so many years in the execution of their just and beneficent plans!—In spite of Mr. Southey’s reasoning in his Carmen Triumphale, about joining ‘the avengers of mankind,’ we conceive that the wheel has gone once round already, ‘full circle home,’ and that now it had better stand still.

But it may be said, do we mean to apply these remarks to Bonaparte? As far as relates to any merits of the war-faction. It was they who implicated him with the cause of the French people, as ‘the child and champion of Jacobinism.’ We cannot express our opinion better than in the words of Mr. Whitebread, ‘that England had made Bonaparte, and he had undone himself.’ He was the creature of the Pitt-school. Was the iron scourge which he has held over Europe put into his hands by the peace-party? Were the battles of Austerlitz and Jena—were the march to Vienna, the possession of Berlin, the invasion of Spain, the expedition to Russia, and the burning of Moscow, the consequences of the signing or of the breaking of the treaty of Amiens?

The author of the letters of Vetus, (who we suppose is silenced by The Times, for asserting that the Bourbons have no more a lawful right to the throne of France, at this moment, than the Stuarts had to the throne of England twenty years after the Revolution of 1688,) is of opinion, that this war is merely national, merely the old grudge between the two countries; and that the Bourbons, the Republic, and Bonaparte, are equally hostile to England, and we to them. In this, as in most things else, our opinion is the opposite of his. There is only one period of the history of the two countries, which, reversed, furnishes an exact counterpart to the present contest, both in its avowed principles and secret motives—we mean the war waged by Louis XIV. against this country and its allies, for nearly as long a period after the English Revolution. The difference in the results of these two revolutions has been this: that from the insular situation of this country, which enables us to do either right or wrong, nearly with impunity, and which makes our means of defence greater, and our means of offence proportionably less—that from this collateral cause, the internal struggle, in proportion to the danger, was less bloody in our own case, and the re-action of our efforts to defend ourselves from the imposition of a foreign yoke and of hereditary slavery, less violent and fatal to other states. All the differences have arisen from the character of the two nations, and from local and accidental circumstances: there was none in the abstract political principle. We gave them the example of their Revolution; we also gave them an example of ‘national fortitude’ in maintaining it. We—the people of England, (not an upstart jacobite faction in the Hanoverian line,) are proud of having imitators; and we think it not unlikely that the French, if forced upon it, may behave on this occasion as the English behaved, when an hereditary pretender came over to us, backed by the aid of foreign arms, to assert his lawful claim to the throne—that is, in other words, to be the natural proprietor of a whole people. We twice sent him back again with all his myrmidons; we would not be made a property of. We felt that in not doing so we should be traitors, not only to our country, but to our kind—the worst species of treason to our country. It is curious that the ‘deepest enmity which the French people have drawn down upon them by their early struggles in the same cause, should be shewn by that government who had long insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of its boasts of freedom.’ We do not know how it is, but so it has happened, that in the thirty years of war which have graced the annals of the present reign, there has been a considerable want of sympathy between the crown and the people, as if the quarrel were merely the cause of kings, in which the people had no concern. Has this circumstance arisen from any unpleasant sense of obligation, or consciousness of a little irregularity and deviation from the right line in the descent of the crown, no more accounted for in Mr. Burke’s Reflections, than the declination of atoms in Epicurus’s philosophy? The restoration of the Bourbons in France will be the re-establishment of the principles of the Stuarts in this country.[^[16]]

PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT