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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12)




A piece has been sent to me, called "Some Remarks on the Apparent
Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October, 1795," with a
French motto: "_Que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit? Attendre
le jour_." The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to
announce something uncommon. In the time I have lived to, I always seem
to walk on enchanted ground. Everything is new, and, according to the
fashionable phrase, revolutionary. In former days authors valued
themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations.
Accordingly, they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an
eternal duration to their works. The quite contrary is our present
fashion. Writers value themselves now on the instability of their
opinions and the transitory life of their productions. On this kind of
credit the modern institutors open their schools. They write for youth,
and it is sufficient, if the instruction "lasts as long as a present
love, or as the painted silks and cottons of the season."

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great
exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and
duration. The title is "Some Remarks on the _Apparent_ Circumstances of
the War _in the Fourth Week of October_, 1795." The time is critically
chosen. A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a
bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another. A day
or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy
month in which it is said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and
drown themselves. In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with
symptoms of public suicide. However, there is one comfort to be taken
even from the gloomy time of year. It is a rotting season. If what is
brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long. Even
buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather,
if they are ill-contrived tenements, do not threaten long to incumber
the earth. The author tells us (and I believe he is the very first
author that ever told such a thing to his readers) "that the _entire
fabric_ of his speculations might be overset by unforeseen
vicissitudes," and what is far more extraordinary, "that even the
_whole_ consideration might be _varied whilst he was writing those
pages."_ Truly, in my poor judgment, this circumstance formed a very
substantial motive for his not publishing those ill-considered
considerations at all. He ought to have followed the good advice of his
motto: "_Que faire encore dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour_." He
ought to have waited till he had got a little more daylight on this
subject. Night itself is hardly darker than the fogs of that time.

Finding the _last week in October_ so particularly referred to, and not
perceiving any particular event, relative to the war, which happened on
any of the days in that week, I thought it possible that they were
marked by some astrological superstition, to which the greatest
politicians have been subject. I therefore had recourse to my Rider's
Almanack. There I found, indeed, something that characterized the work,
and that gave directions concerning the sudden political and natural
variations, and for eschewing the maladies that are most prevalent in
that aguish intermittent season, "the last week of October." On that
week the sagacious astrologer, Rider, in his note on the third column of
the calendar side, teaches us to expect "_variable and cold weather";_
but instead of encouraging us to trust ourselves to the haze and mist
and doubtful lights of that changeable week, on the answerable part of
the opposite page he gives us a salutary caution (indeed, it is very
nearly in the words of the author's motto): "_Avoid_," says he, "_being
out late at night and in foggy weather, for a cold now caught may last
the whole winter_."[9] This ingenious author, who disdained the prudence
of the Almanack, walked out in the very fog he complains of, and has led
us to a very unseasonable airing at that time. Whilst this noble writer,
by the vigor of an excellent constitution, formed for the violent
changes he prognosticates, may shake off the importunate rheum and
malignant influenza of this disagreeable week, a whole Parliament may go
on spitting and snivelling, and wheezing and coughing, during a whole
session. All this from listening to variable, hebdomadal politicians,
who run away from their opinions without giving us a month's
warning,--and for not listening to the wise and friendly admonitions of
Dr. Cardanus Rider, who never apprehends he may change his opinions
before his pen is out of his hand, but always enables us to lay in at
least a year's stock of useful information.

At first I took comfort. I said to myself, that, if I should, as I fear
I must, oppose the doctrines of _the last week of October_, it is
probable that by this time they are no longer those of the eminent
writer to whom they are attributed. He gives us hopes that long before
this he may have embraced the direct contrary sentiments. If I am found
in a conflict with those of the last week of October, I may be in full
agreement with those of the last week in December, or the first week in
January, 1796. But a second edition, and a French translation, (for the
benefit, I must suppose, of the new Regicide Directory,) have let down a
little of these flattering hopes. We and the Directory know that the
author, whatever changes his works seemed made to indicate, like a
weathercock grown rusty, remains just where he was in the last week of
last October. It is true, that his protest against binding him to his
opinions, and his reservation of a right to whatever opinions he
pleases, remain in their full force. This variability is pleasant, and
shows a fertility of fancy:--

Qualis in aethereo felix Vertumnus Olympo
Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet.

Yet, doing all justice to the sportive variability of these weekly,
daily, or hourly speculators, shall I be pardoned, if I attempt a word
on the part of us simple country folk? It is not good for _us_, however
it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with
variable politics. I consider different relations as prescribing a
different conduct. I allow, that, in transactions with an enemy, a
minister may, and often must, vary his demands with the day, possibly
with the hour. With an enemy, a fixed plan, variable arrangements. This
is the rule the nature of the transaction prescribes. But all this
belongs to treaty. All these shiftings and changes are a sort of secret
amongst the parties, till a definite settlement is brought about. Such
is the spirit of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of
things between enmity and friendship. In this change the subjects of the
transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their cocoons. The
gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state. This
mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great
politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a
matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be
diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for
our slow and coarse understandings. Our appetite demands a _piece of
resistance_. We require some food that will stick to the ribs. We call
for sentiments to which we can attach ourselves,--sentiments in which we
can take an interest,--sentiments on which we can warm, on which we can
ground some confidence in ourselves or in others. We do not want a
largess of inconstancy. Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of
poverty at home. There is a difference, too, between deliberation and
doctrine: a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts
to teach. His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region,
but they cannot free us from the effects of the error into which we have
been betrayed. His active Will-o'-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess
where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a
lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets,
I come to the lesson itself. On the fullest consideration of it, I am
utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is, in the
detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or
recommend. His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the
way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion. It is not only fugitive
in its duration, but is slippery in the extreme whilst it lasts.
Examining it part by part, it seems almost everywhere to contradict
itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his
opinions, has exercised this privilege in every section of his remarks.
For this reason, amongst others, I follow the advice which the able
writer gives in his last page, which is, "to consider the _impression_
of what he has urged, taken from the _whole_, and not from detached
paragraphs." That caution was not absolutely necessary. I should think
it unfair to the author and to myself to have proceeded otherwise. This
author's _whole_, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well
comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be
again referred to the whole. Without this latter attention, several of
the passages would certainly remain covered with an impenetrable and
truly oracular obscurity.

The great, general, pervading purpose, of the whole pamphlet is to
reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France. In this
general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken. The other
purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to
show, first, that the time of the Remarks was the favorable time for
making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy's side
their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms as he is pleased
to offer was rationally to be expected; the third purpose was, to make
some sort of disclosure of the terms which, if the Regicides are pleased
to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept: these form
the basis of the negotiation which the author, whoever he is, proposes
to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings which I
hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the
observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to
attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or
fraternity, or whatever you may call it,--that is, the real quality and
character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of
no importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks.
That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has
been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the
first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple
name of _France_. The word France is slipped in just as if the
government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has astonished,
terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author,
"will do this,"--"it is the interest of France,"--"the returning honor
and generosity of France," &c., &c.--always merely France: just as if
we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the
commonwealth of Christian Europe,--and as if our dispute had turned upon
a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace
might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain
or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one
side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without
the hocus-pocus of _abstraction_. We have been in a grievous error: we
thought that we had been at war with _rebels_ against the lawful
government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly
France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by
sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we
have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented
sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten
thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification,
and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics.
Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the
_concrete_, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals
who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,--if we
were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of
amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and
tender-hearted Sieyes, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the
humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek
butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that
had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer,
Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity
and 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 new-coined 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 Fra 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 reestablish "_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 side,
elevated on the same platform, and shouldering, with the vile image of
their grim and bloody idol, the inviolable majesty of his throne? The
sentiments of these declarations are the very reverse: they could not be
other. Speaking of the spirit of that usurpation, the royal manifesto
describes, with perfect truth, its internal tyranny to have been
established as the very means of shaking the security of all other
states,--as "_disposing arbitrarily of the property and blood of the
inhabitants of France, in order to disturb the tranquillity of other
nations, and to render all Europe the theatre of the same crimes and of
the same misfortunes_." It was but a natural inference from this fact,
that the royal manifesto does not at all rest the justification of this
war on common principles: that it was "_not only to defend his own
rights, and those of his allies_," but "_that all the dearest interests
of his people imposed upon him a duty still more important_,--_that of
exerting his efforts for the preservation of civil society itself, as
happily established among the nations of Europe_." On that ground, the
protection offered is to "those who, by declaring for a _monarchical
government_, shall shake off the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy." It is
for that purpose the declaration calls on them "to join the standard of
an _hereditary monarchy_,"--declaring that the _peace and safety_ of
this kingdom and the other powers of Europe "_materially depend on the
reestablishment of order in France_." His Majesty does not hesitate to
declare that "_the reestablishment of monarchy, in the person of Louis
the Seventeenth, and the lawful heirs of the crown, appears to him_ [his
Majesty] _the best mode of accomplishing these just and salutary
views_."

This is what his Majesty does not hesitate to declare relative to the
political safety and peace of his kingdom and of Europe, and with regard
to France under her ancient hereditary monarchy in the course and order
of legal succession. But in comes a gentleman, in the fag end of
October, dripping with the fogs of that humid and uncertain season, and
does not hesitate in diameter to contradict this wise and just royal
declaration, and stoutly, on his part, to make a counter
declaration,--that France, so far as the political interests of England
are concerned, will not remain, under the despotism of Regicide, and
with the better part of Europe in her hands, so much an object of
jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch. When I hear
the master and reason on one side, and the servant and his single and
unsupported assertion on the other, my part is taken.

This is what the Octobrist says of the political interests of England,
which it looks as if he completely disconnected with those of all other
nations. But not quite so: he just allows it possible (with an "at
least") that the other powers may not find it quite their interest that
their territories should be conquered and their subjects tyrannized over
by the Regicides. No fewer than ten sovereign princes had, some the
whole, all a very considerable part of their dominions under the yoke of
that dreadful faction. Amongst these was to be reckoned the first
republic in the world, and the closest ally of this kingdom, which,
under the insulting name of an independency, is under her iron yoke,
and, as long as a faction averse to the old government is suffered there
to domineer, cannot be otherwise. I say nothing of the Austrian
Netherlands, countries of a vast extent, and amongst the most fertile
and populous of Europe, and, with regard to us, most critically
situated. The rest will readily occur to you.

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