The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Volume V Part 10

His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They are more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; and they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do not possess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope for seven philosophers to proceed in their a.n.a.lytical experiments upon Harrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of this one Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to speculation,--fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English understanding.

Abbe Sieyes has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of const.i.tutions ready-made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy: some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity; some of blood color, some of _boue de Paris_; some with directories, others without a direction; some with councils of elders and councils of youngsters, some without any council at all; some where the electors choose the representatives, others where the representatives choose the electors; some in long coats, and some in short cloaks; some with pantaloons, some without breeches; some with five-s.h.i.+lling qualifications, some totally unqualified. So that no const.i.tution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progress of experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly!

Such are their sentiments, I a.s.sure him; such is their language, when they dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have the means to act.

Their geographers and geometricians have been some time out of practice.

It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares.

That figure has lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands for new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the Republic that find him a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after the geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of _ruins_ is far the fittest for making other _ruins_, and so _ad infinitum_. They have calculated what quant.i.ty of matter convertible into nitre is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and his trustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist, Inigo Jones, in Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffeehouses, all alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish,--and, well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true, democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre. Their Academy _del Cimento_, (_per antiphrasin_,) with Morveau and Ha.s.senfratz at its head, have computed that the brave _sans-culottes_ may make war on all the aristocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth out of the rubbish of the Duke of Bedford's buildings.[21]

While the Morveaux and Priestleys are proceeding with these experiments upon the Duke of Bedford's houses, the Sieyes, and the rest of the a.n.a.lytical legislators and const.i.tution-venders, are quite as busy in their trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's va.s.sals into primary a.s.semblies, national guards, first, second, and third requisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the travelling guillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legislative hangmen, supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, and a.s.sessors of the maximum.

The din of all this smithery may some time or other possibly wake this n.o.ble Duke, and push him to an endeavor to save some little matter from their experimental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has received them from the pillage of superst.i.tious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a little, because they are enemies to all corporations and to all religion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his Grace, or his learned council, that all such property belongs to the _nation_,--and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a _citizen_, (that is, according to Condorcet's calculation, six months on an average,) not to pa.s.s for an usurper upon the national property. This is what the _serjeants_-at-law of the rights of man will say to the puny _apprentices_ of the common law of England.

Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may as well think the garden of the Tuileries was well protected with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by the National a.s.sembly to keep the sovereign _canaille_ from intruding on the retirement of the poor King of the French as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the Revolution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no triflers; brave _sans-culottes_ are no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Woburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they will make no difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rush whether his coat is long or short,--whether the color be purple, or blue and buff. They will not trouble _their_ heads with what part of _his_ head his hair is out from; and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some oilier of their legislative butchers: How he cuts up; how he tallows in the caul or on the kidneys.

Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the _sans-culotte_ carca.s.s-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles are p.r.i.c.king their dotted lines upon his hide, and, like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop-windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing, that, all the while they are measuring _him_, his Grace is measuring _me_,--is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor innocent!

"Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."

No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer with resignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed, they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the other day, that, on putting in order some things which had been brought here, on my taking leave of London forever, I looked over a number of fine portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst those was the picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to the day of our final separation.

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his age, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was after his trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,--what part my son, in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the pious pa.s.sion with which he attached himself to all my connections,--with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in courting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt such friends.h.i.+p on such an occasion. I partook, indeed, of this honor with several of the first and best and ablest in the kingdom, but I was behindhand with none of them; and I am sure, that, if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total annihilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things had taken a different turn from what they did. I should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less good-will and more pride, though with far other feelings, than I partook of the general flow of national joy that attended the justice that was done to his virtue.

Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friends.h.i.+p, in those only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when I was attacked in the House of Lords.

Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the favor of that gracious prince who had honored his virtues with the government of the navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would have told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might be becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have told him, that, when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose everything.

On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the public loss of him in this awful crisis!--I speak from much knowledge of the person: he never would have listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this _sans-culotterie_ of France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have repelled him forever from all connection with that horrid medley of madness, vice, impiety, and crime.

Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent, and one of birth. Their interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of both. His family was n.o.ble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was of the oldest and purest n.o.bility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned above all others for love of their native land. Though it was never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues. He valued ancient n.o.bility; and he was not disinclined to augment it with new honors. He valued the old n.o.bility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind,--conceiving that a man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what went before and what was to come after him. Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body of some kind or other of n.o.bility decorated with honor and fortified by privilege. This n.o.bility forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made, without some such order of things as might, through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of the mult.i.tude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves" who began to forge in 1789 the false money of the French Const.i.tution; that it is one fatal objection to all _new_ fancied and _new fabricated_ republics, (among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it,) that the _prejudice_ of an old n.o.bility is a thing that _cannot_ be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but _the thing itself_ is matter of _inveterate_ opinion, and therefore _cannot_ be matter of mere positive inst.i.tution. He felt that this n.o.bility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.

I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine the future out of what we collect from the past, no person living would look with more scorn and horror on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate attainder pa.s.sed on all their posterity, by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de Noailles, and the false Perigords, and the long _et cetera_ of the perfidious _sans-culottes_ of the court, who, like demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, abdicated their dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of all trusts, and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and all the cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves he would have had no pity. Compa.s.sion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave n.o.bility of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, more than all the ca.n.a.ls, meres, and inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race,--in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to whose sceptred pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that surmounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?

Could he with patience bear that the children of that n.o.bility who would have deluged their country and given it to the sea rather than submit to Louis the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory, when his arms were conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers, when his councils were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the D'Aguesseaus,--that these should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas, and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges, that from the rotten carca.s.s of their own murdered country have poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest and at once the most destructive of the cla.s.ses of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laid waste the fairest part of the world?

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous patricians, that happy union of the n.o.ble and the burgher, who with signal prudence and integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the cheris.h.i.+ng fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protection? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy founded on the spurious rights of man?

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.

Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Na.s.sau, who was himself given to England along with the blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which consolidated and married the liberties and the interests of the two nations forever,--could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of contumely, from the country which that family of deliverers had so often rescued from slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, which owes its liberty to his house?

Would Keppel have heard with patience that the conduct to be held on such occasions was to become short by the knees to the faction of the homicides, to entreat them quietly to retire? or, if the fortune of war should drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the security of that which under a foreign name is the most precious part of England? What would he have said, if it was even proposed that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance to protect her against any species of rule that might be erected or even be restored in France) should be formed into a republic under her influence and dependent upon her power?

But above all, what would he have said, if he had heard it made a matter of accusation against me, by his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction to myself, (as from pride I might, but from justice I dare not,) he would have s.n.a.t.c.hed his share of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a dying convulsion to his end.

It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to a.s.sume to myself the glory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to his ministers, and to his Parliament, and to the far greater majority of his faithful people: but had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined to be guided by my advice, and to follow it implicitly, then I should have been the sole author of a war. But it should have been a war on my ideas and my principles. However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits with regard to the war with Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone. He never shall, with the smallest color of reason, accuse me of being the author of a peace with Regicide.--But that is high matter, and ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford.

I have the honor to be, &c.

EDMUND BURKE.

FOOTNOTES:

[15]

Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec saevior ulla Pestis et ira Deum Stygiis sese extulit undis.

Virginei volucrum vultus, fdissima ventris Proluvies, uncaeque ma.n.u.s, et pallida semper Ora fame.

Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that _he_ is Virgil) had not verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived her. Had he lived to our time, he would have been more overpowered with the reality than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the horror of the times before him. Had he lived to see the revolutionists and const.i.tutionalists of France, he would have had more horrid and disgusting features of his harpies to describe, and more frequent failures in the attempt to describe them.

[16] London, J. Dodsley, 1792, 3 vols. 4to.--Vol. II. pp. 324-336, in the present edition.

[17] See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of Buckingham. Temp. Hen. VIII.

[18] At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, etc.

[19] Sir George Savile's act, called The _Nullum Tempus_ Act.

[20] "Templum in modum arcis."--TACITUS, of the temple of Jerusalem.

[21] There is nothing on which the leaders of the Republic one and indivisible value themselves more than on the chemical operations by which; through science, they convert the pride of aristocracy to an instrument of its own destruction,--on the operations by which they reduce the magnificent ancient country-seats of the n.o.bility, decorated with the _feudal_ t.i.tles of Duke, Marquis, or Earl, into magazines of what they call _revolutionary_ gunpowder. They tell us, that hitherto things "had not yet been properly and in a _revolutionary_ manner explored,"--"The strong _chateaus_, those _feudal_ fortresses, that _were ordered to be demolished_ attracted next the attention of your committee. _Nature_ there had _secretly_ regained her _rights_, and had produced saltpetre, for the _purpose_, as it should seem, _of facilitating the execution of your decree by preparing the means of destruction_. From these _ruins_, which _still frown_ on the liberties of the Republic, we have extracted the means of producing good; and those piles which have hitherto glutted the _pride of despots_, and covered the plots of La Vendee, will soon furnish wherewithal to tame the traitors and to overwhelm the disaffected,"--"The _rebellious cities_, also, have afforded a large quant.i.ty of saltpetre. _Commune Affranchie_" (that is, the n.o.ble city of Lyons, reduced in many parts to an heap of ruins) "and Toulon will pay a _second_ tribute to our artillery."--_Report, 1st February_, 1794.

THREE LETTERS

ADDRESSED TO

A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT,

ON THE

PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE.

1796-7.

LETTER I.

ON THE OVERTURES OF PEACE.

My Dear Sir,--Our last conversation, though not in the tone of absolute despondency, was far from cheerful. We could not easily account for some unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The disastrous events which have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to have no end,--these were not the princ.i.p.al causes of our dejection. We feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to oppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud and great, and great because they were proud, a change in the national spirit is the most terrible of all revolutions.

I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot which saddens and perplexes the awful drama of Providence now acting on the moral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am at the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of its...o...b..t the nation with which we are carried along moves at this instant it is not easy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advanced in its aphelion,--but when to return?