Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

concord, — nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. "Make your peace with France." That word France sounds quite as well. as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this newcoined France, and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis-d'or.

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

To remove this terror, (even if the Regicides should

carry their point,) and to give us perfect repose with regard to their empire, whatever they may acquire, or whomsoever they might destroy, he raises a doubt "whether France will not be ruined by retaining these conquests, and whether she will not wholly lose that preponderance which she has held in the scale of European powers, and will not eventually be destroyed by the effect of her present successes, or, at least, whether, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, she [France] will remain an object of as much jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch." Here, indeed, is a paragraph full of meaning! It gives matter for meditation almost in every word of it. The secret of the pacific politicians is out. This republic, at all hazards, is to be maintained. It is to be confined within some bounds, if we can; if not, with every possible acquisition of power, it is still to be cherished and supported. It is the return of the monarchy we are to dread, and therefore we ought to pray for the permanence of the Regicide authority. Esto perpetua! is the devout ejaculation of our Frà Paolo for the Republic one and indivisible. It was the monarchy that rendered France dangerous: Regicide neutralizes all the acrimony of that power, and renders it safe and social. The October speculator is of opinion that monarchy is of so poisonous a quality that a moderate territorial power is far more dangerous to its neighbors under that abominable regimen than the greatest empire in the hands of a republic. This is Jacobinism sublimed and exalted into most pure and perfect essence. It is a doctrine, I admit, made to allure and captivate, if anything in the world can, the Jacobin Directory, to mollify the ferocity of Regicide, and to persuade

those patriotic hangmen, after their reiterated oaths. for our extirpation, to admit this well-humbled nation to the fraternal embrace. I do not wonder that this tub of October has been racked off into a French cask. It must make its fortune at Paris. That translation seems the language the most suited to these sentiments. Our author tells the French Jacobins, that the political interests of Great Britain are in perfect unison with the principles of their government, — that they may take and keep the keys of the civilized world, for they are safe in their unambitious and faithful custody. We say to them, "We may, indeed, wish you to be a little less murderous, wicked, and atheistical, for the sake of morals; we may think it were better you were less new-fangled in your speech, for the sake of grammar; but, as politicians, provided you keep clear of monarchy, all our fears, alarms, and jealousies are at an end: at least, they sink into nothing in comparison of our dread of your detestable royalty." A flatterer of Cardinal Mazarin said, when that minister had just settled the match between the young Louis the Fourteenth and a daughter of Spain, that this alliance had the effect of faith and had removed mountains, that the Pyrenees were levelled by that marriage. You may now compliment Reubell in the same spirit on the miracles of regicide, and tell him that the guillotine of Louis the Sixteenth had consummated a marriage between Great Britain and France, which dried up the Channel, and restored the two countries to the unity which it is said they had before the unnatural rage of seas and earthquakes had broke off their happy junction. It will be a fine subject for the poets who are to prophesy the blessings of this peace.

I am now convinced that the Remarks of the last week of October cannot come from the author to whom they are given, they are such a direct contradiction to the style of manly indignation with which he spoke of those miscreants and murderers in his excellent memorial to the States of Holland, to that very state which the author who presumes to personate him does not find it contrary to the political interests of England to leave in the hands of these very miscreants, against whom on the part of England he took so much pains to animate their republic. This cannot be; and if this argument wanted anything to give it new force, it is strengthened by an additional reason, that is irresistible. Knowing that noble person, as well as myself, to be under very great obligations to the crown, I am confident he would not so very directly contradict, even in the paroxysm of his zeal against monarchy, the declarations made in the name and with the fullest approbation of our sovereign, his master, and our common benefactor. In those declarations you will see that the king, instead of being sensible of greater alarm and jealousy from a neighboring crowned head than from these regicides, attributes all the dangers of Europe to the latter. Let this writer hear the description given in the royal declaration of the scheme of power of these miscreants, as "a system destructive of all public order, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number, by arbitrary imprisonments, by massacres which cannot be remembered without horror, and at length by the execrable murder of a just and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who with an unshaken firmness has shared all the misfortunes of her royal consort, his protracted sufferings, his

cruel captivity, his ignominious death." After thus describing, with an eloquence and energy equalled only by its truth, the means by which this usurped power had been acquired and maintained, that government is characterized with equal force. His Majesty, far

from thinking monarchy in France to be a greater object of jealousy than the Regicide usurpation, calls upon the French to reëstablish "a monarchical government" for the purpose of shaking off "the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy, of that anarchy which has broken all the most sacred bonds of society, dissolved all the relations of civil life, violated every right, confounded every duty, which uses the name of liberty to exercise the most cruel tyranny, to annihilate all property, to seize on all possessions, which founds its power on the pretended consent of the people, and itself carries fire and sword through extensive provinces, for having demanded their laws, their religion, and their lawful sovereign."

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

In those admirable pieces does his Majesty discover this new opinion of his political security, in having the chair of the scorner, that is, the discipline of atheism, and the block of regicide, set up by his

« ForrigeFortsæt »