to gibbet his memory, or to deify him in their Pantheon with their Marat and their Mirabeau.
It is asserted that this government promises stability. God of his mercy forbid! If it should, nothing upon earth besides itself can be stable. We declare this stability to be the ground of our making peace with them. Assuming it, therefore, that the men and the system are what I have described, and that they have a determined hostility against this country,—an hostility not only of policy, but of predilection,—then I think that every rational being would go along with me in considering its permanence as the greatest of all possible evils. If, therefore, we are to look for peace with such a thing in any of its monstrous shapes, which I deprecate, it must be in that state of disorder, confusion, discord, anarchy, and insurrection, such as might oblige the momentary rulers to forbear their attempts on neighboring states, or to render these attempts less operative, if they should kindle new wars. When was it heard before, that the internal repose of a determined and wicked enemy, and the strength of his government, became the wish of his neighbor, and a security, against either his malice or his ambition? The direct contrary has always been inferred from that state of things: accordingly, it has ever been the policy of those who would preserve themselves against the enterprises of such a malignant and mischievous power to cut out so much work for him in his own states as might keep his dangerous activity employed at home.
It is said, in vindication of this system, which demands the stability of the Regicide power as a ground for peace with them, that, when they have obtained, as now it is said (though not by this noble author) they have, a permanent government, they will be able to preserve amity with this kingdom, and with others who have the misfortune to be in their neighborhood. Granted. They will be able to do so, without question; but are they willing to do so? Produce the act; produce the declaration. Have they made any single step towards it? Have they ever once proposed to treat?
The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,—that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their government had not strength enough to master. This I utterly deny. I insist upon it as a fact, that, in the daring commencement of all their hostilities, and their astonishing perseverance in them, so as never once, in any fortune, high or low, to propose a treaty of peace to any power in Europe, they have never been actuated by the people: on the contrary, the people, I will not say have been moved, but impelled by them, and have generally acted under a compulsion, of which most of us are as yet, thank God, unable to form an adequate idea. The war against Austria was formally declared by the unhappy Louis the Sixteenth; but who has ever considered Louis the Sixteenth, since the Revolution, to have been the government? The second Regicide Assembly, then the only government, was the author of that war; and neither the nominal king nor the nominal people had anything to do with it, further than in a reluctant obedience. It is to delude ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a state of anarchy: it is something far worse. Anarchy it is, undoubtedly, if compared with government pursuing the peace, order, morals, and prosperity of the people; but regarding only the power that has really guided from the day of the Revolution to this time, it has been of all governments the most absolute, despotic, and effective that has hitherto appeared on earth. Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies. We do not call a republic with annual magistrates an anarchy: theirs is that kind of republic; but the succession is not effected by the expiration of the term of the magistrate's service, but by his murder. Every new magistracy, succeeding by homicide, is auspicated by accusing its predecessors in the office of tyranny, and it continues by the exercise of what they charged upon others.
This strong hand is the law, and the sole law, in their state. I defy any person to show any other law,—or if any such should be found on paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance, regarded or practised. In all their successions, not one magistrate, or one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult; everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one revolutionary cabal, operating within itself upon itself. That cabal is all in all. France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of, where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest and most recondite parts of their household concerns. The helots of Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery. Much would these servile wretches call for our pity under that unheard-of yoke, if for their perfidious and unnatural rebellion, and for their murder of the mildest of all monarchs, they did not richly deserve a punishment not greater than their crime.
On the whole, therefore, I take it to be a great mistake to think that the want of power in the government furnished a natural cause of war; whereas the greatness of its power, joined to its use of that power, the nature of its system, and the persons who acted in it, did naturally call for a strong military resistance to oppose them, and rendered it not only just, but necessary. But at present I say no more on the genius and character of the power set up in France. I may probably trouble you with it more at large hereafter: this subject calls for a very full exposure: at present it is enough for me, if I point it out as a matter well worthy of consideration, whether the true ground of hostility was not rightly conceived very early in this war, and whether anything has happened to change that system, except our ill success in a war which in no principal instance had its true destination as the object of its operations. That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted; but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted, dispirited, and must submit. This would be intelligible. The world would be inclined to pardon the abject conduct of an undone nation. But let us not conceal from ourselves our real situation, whilst, by every species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of it to the enemy.
The writer of the Remarks in the Last Week of October appears to think that the present government in France contains many of the elements which, when properly arranged, are known to form the best practical governments,—and that the system, whatever may become its particular form, is no longer likely to be an obstacle to negotiation. If its form now be no obstacle to such negotiation, I do not know why it was ever so. Suppose that this government promised greater permanency than any of the former, (a point on which I can form no judgment,) still a link is wanting to couple the permanence of the government with the permanence of the peace. On this not one word is said: nor can there be, in my opinion. This deficiency is made up by strengthening the first ringlet of the chain, that ought to be, but that is not, stretched to connect the two propositions. All seems to be done, if we can make out that the last French edition of Regicide is like to prove stable.
As a prognostic of this stability, it is said to be accepted by the people. Here again I join issue with the fraternizers, and positively deny the fact. Some submission or other has been obtained, by some means or other, to every government that hitherto has been set up. And the same submission would, by the same means, be obtained for any other project that the wit or folly of man could possibly devise. The Constitution of 1790 was universally received. The Constitution which followed it, under the name of a Convention, was universally submitted to. The Constitution of 1793 was universally accepted. Unluckily, this year's Constitution, which was formed, and its genethliacon sung by the noble author while it was yet in embryo, or was but just come bloody from the womb, is the only one which in its very formation has been generally resisted by a very great and powerful party in many parts of the kingdom, and particularly in the capital. It never had a popular choice even in show: those who arbitrarily erected the new building out of the old materials of their own Convention were obliged to send for an army to support their work: like brave gladiators, they fought it out in the streets of Paris, and even massacred each other in their house of assembly, in the most edifying manner, and for the entertainment and instruction of their Excellencies the foreign ambassadors, who had a box in this constitutional amphitheatre of a free people.
At length, after a terrible struggle,
