The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Volume V Part 2

All opposition, from that period to this very session, has proceeded upon the separate measures as they separately arose, without any vindictive retrospect to Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784. My memory, however, may fail me. I must appeal to the printed debates, which (so far as Mr.

Fox is concerned) are unusually accurate.

52. Whatever might have been in our power at an early period, at this day I see no remedy for what was done in 1784. I had no great hopes even at the time. I was therefore very eager to record a remonstrance on the journals of the House of Commons, as a caution against such a popular delusion in times to come; and this I then feared, and now am certain, is all that could be done. I know of no way of animadverting on the crown. I know of no mode of calling to account the House of Lords, who threw out the India Bill in a way not much to their credit. As little, or rather less, am I able to coerce the people at large, who behaved very unwisely and intemperately on that occasion. Mr. Pitt was then accused, by me as well as others, of attempting to be minister without enjoying the confidence of the House of Commons, though he did enjoy the confidence of the crown. That House of Commons, whose confidence he did not enjoy, unfortunately did not itself enjoy the confidence (though we well deserved it) either of the crown or of the public. For want of that confidence, the then House of Commons did not survive the contest. Since that period Mr. Pitt has enjoyed the confidence of the crown, and of the Lords, and _of the House of Commons_, through two successive Parliaments; and I suspect that he has ever since, and that he does still, enjoy as large a portion, at least, of the confidence of the people without doors as his great rival. Before whom, then, is Mr. Pitt to be impeached, and by whom? The more I consider the matter, the more firmly I am convinced that the idea of proscribing Mr. Pitt _indirectly_, when you cannot _directly punish_ him, is as chimerical a project, and as unjustifiable, as it would be to have proscribed Lord North. For supposing that by indirect ways of opposition, by opposition upon measures which do not relate to the business of 1784, but which on other grounds might prove unpopular, you were to drive him from his seat, this would be no example whatever of punishment for the matters we charge as offences in 1784. On a cool and dispa.s.sionate view of the affairs of this time and country, it appears obvious to me that one or the other of those two great men, that is, Mr.

Pitt or Mr. Fox, must be minister. They are, I am sorry for it, irreconcilable. Mr. Fox's conduct _in this session_ has rendered the idea of his power a matter of serious alarm to many people who were very little pleased with the proceedings of Mr. Pitt in the beginning of his administration. They like neither the conduct of Mr. Pitt in 1784, nor that of Mr. Fox in 1793; but they estimate which of the evils is most pressing at the time, and what is likely to be the consequence of a change. If Mr. Fox be wedded, they must be sensible that his opinions and principles on the now existing state of things at home and abroad must be taken as his portion. In his train must also be taken the whole body of gentlemen who are pledged to him and to each other, and to their common politics and principles. I believe no king of Great Britain ever will adopt, for his confidential servants, that body of gentlemen, holding that body of principles. Even if the present king or his successor should think fit to take that step, I apprehend a general discontent of those who wish that this nation and that Europe should continue in their present state would ensue,--a discontent which, combined with the principles and progress of the new men in power, would shake this kingdom to its foundations. I do not believe any one political conjecture can be more certain than this.

53. Without at all defending or palliating Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784, I must observe, that the crisis of 1793, with regard to everything at home and abroad, is full as important as that of 1784 ever was, and, if for no other reason, by being present, is much more important. It is not to nine years ago we are to look for the danger of Mr. Fox's and Mr.

Sheridan's conduct, and that of the gentlemen who act with them. It is at _this_ very time, and in _this_ very session, that, if they had not been strenuously resisted, they would not only have discredited the House of Commons, (as Mr. Pitt did in 1784, when he persuaded the king to reject their advice, and to appeal from them to the people,) but, in my opinion, would have been the means of wholly subverting the House of Commons and the House of Peers, and the whole Const.i.tution actual and virtual, together with the safety and independence of this nation, and the peace and settlement of every state in the now Christian world. It is to our opinion of the nature of Jacobinism, and of the probability, by corruption, faction, and force, of its gaining ground everywhere, that the question whom and what you are to support is to be determined.

For my part, without doubt or hesitation, I look upon Jacobinism as the most dreadful and the most shameful evil which ever afflicted mankind, a thing which goes beyond the power of all calculation in its mischief,--and that, if it is suffered to exist in France, we must in England, and speedily too, fall into that calamity.

54. I figure to myself the purpose of these gentlemen accomplished, and this ministry destroyed. I see that the persons who in that case must rule can be no other than Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Grey, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Thurlow, Lord Lauderdale, and the Duke of Norfolk, with the other chiefs of the Friends of the People, the Parliamentary reformers, and the admirers of the French Revolution. The princ.i.p.al of these are all formally pledged to their projects. If the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam should be admitted into that system, (as they might and probably would be,) it is quite certain they could not have the smallest weight in it,--less, indeed, than what they now possess, if less were possible: because they would be less wanted than they now are; and because all those who wished to join them, and to act under them, have been rejected by the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam themselves; and Mr. Fox, finding them thus by themselves disarmed, has built quite a new fabric, upon quite a new foundation.

There is no trifling on this subject. We see very distinctly before us the ministry that would be formed and the plan that would be pursued. If we like the plan, we must wish the power of those who are to carry it into execution; but to pursue the political exaltation of those whose political measures we disapprove and whose principles we dissent from is a species of modern politics not easily comprehensible, and which must end in the ruin of the country, if it should continue and spread. Mr.

Pitt may be the worst of men, and Mr. Fox may be the best; but, at present, the former is in the interest of his country, and of the order of things long established in Europe: Mr. Fox is not. I have, for one, been born in this order of things, and would fain die in it. I am sure it is sufficient to make men as virtuous, as happy, and as knowing as anything which Mr. Fox, and his friends abroad or at, home, would subst.i.tute in its place; and I should be sorry that any set of politicians should obtain power in England whose principles or schemes should lead them to countenance persons or factions whose object is to introduce some new devised order of things into England, or to support that order where it is already introduced, in France,--a place in which if it can be fixed, in my mind, it must have a certain and decided influence in and upon this kingdom.

This is my account of my conduct to my private friends. I have already said all I wish to say, or nearly so, to the public. I write this with pain and with an heart full of grief.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is an exception, that in one of his last speeches (but not before) Mr. Fox seemed to think an alliance with Spain might be proper.

PREFACE

TO THE

ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT

TO HIS CONSt.i.tUENTS.

TRANSLATED BY

THE LATE WILLIAM BURKE, ESQ.

1794.

PREFACE TO BRISSOT'S ADDRESS.

The French Revolution has been the subject of various speculations and various histories. As might be expected, the royalists and the republicans have differed a good deal in their accounts of the principles of that Revolution, of the springs which have set it in motion, and of the true character of those who have been, or still are, the princ.i.p.al actors on that astonishing scene.

They who are inclined to think favorably of that event will undoubtedly object to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of a royalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmly attached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and not of friends to despotism, the royal party is composed,)--that their very affection to this generous and manly cause, and their abhorrence of a Revolution not less fatal to liberty than to government, may possibly lead them in some particulars to a more harsh representation of the proceedings of their adversaries than would be allowed by the cold neutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of error arises from a source highly laudable; but the exactness of truth may suffer even from the feelings of virtue. History will do justice to the intentions of worthy men, but it will be on its guard against their infirmities; it will examine with great strictness of scrutiny whatever appears from a writer in favor of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapes him, and makes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight.

In this important controversy, the translator of the following work brings forward to the English tribunal of opinion the testimony of a witness beyond all exception. His competence is undoubted. He knows everything which concerns this Revolution to the bottom. He is a chief actor in all the scenes which he presents. No man can object to him as a royalist: the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a more determined enemy. In a word, it is BRISSOT. It is Brissot, the republican, the Jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give an account of Jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy.

It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius of Jacobinism and its effects is not confined to the period in which that faction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those very important particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of the preceding period before the great schism, and whilst the Jacobins acted as one body; insomuch that the far greater part of the proceedings of the ruling powers since the commencement of the Revolution in France, so strikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot, were the acts of Brissot himself and his a.s.sociates. All the members of the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the common liberty and safety.

A question will very naturally be asked,--What could induce Brissot to draw such a picture? He must have been sensible it was his own. The answer is,--The inducement was the same with that which led him to partake in the perpetration of all the crimes the calamitous effects of which he describes with the pen of a master,--ambition. His faction, having obtained their stupendous and unnatural power by rooting out of the minds of his unhappy countrymen every principle of religion, morality, loyalty, fidelity, and honor, discovered, that, when authority came into their hands, it would be a matter of no small difficulty for them to carry on government on the principles by which they had destroyed it.

The rights of men and the new principles of liberty and equality were very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of tranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respect in the t.i.tle and in the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a prince succeeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of a succession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, found nothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity and dutiful allegiance to Messrs. Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Anacharsis Clootz, and Thomas Paine.

In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern the people, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult, but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials and by such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. Ill as the disguise became them, they began to a.s.sume the mask of an austere and rigid virtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in some of them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult and confusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order, discipline, quiet, and obedience to authority; they even showed some sort of disposition to protect such property as had not been confiscated. They who on every occasion had discovered a sort of furious thirst of blood and a greedy appet.i.te for slaughter, who avowed and gloried in the murders and ma.s.sacres of the 14th of July, of the 5th and 6th of October, and of the 10th of August, now began to be squeamish and fastidious with regard to those of the 2nd of September.

In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the 10th of August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained not the smallest credit for humanity. They endeavored to establish a distinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they prepared for their enemies.

Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction. His morals had furnished little matter of exception against him. Old, domestic, and uxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was therefore set up as the _Cato_ of the republican party, which did not abound in such characters.

This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, in which he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal present made by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministers under the new Const.i.tution. Amongst his colleagues were Claviere and Servan. All the three have since that time either lost their heads by the axe of their a.s.sociates in rebellion, or, to evade their own revolutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands.

These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethrone him. n.o.body who considers the circ.u.mstances which preceded the deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, n.o.body who attends to the subsequent conduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such a conspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himself obliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him to choose such regicide ministers constrained him to replace them by Dumouriez the Jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of a better description.

A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy, Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent, seditious, and atrocious libel that has probably ever been penned. This paper Roland a few days after delivered to the National a.s.sembly,[2] who instantly published and dispersed it over all France; and in order to give it the stronger operation, they declared that he and his brother ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of the writings which have inflamed the Jacobin spirit to a savage fury ever worked up a fiercer ferment through the whole ma.s.s of the republicans in every part of France.

Under the thin veil of _prediction_, he strongly _recommends_ all the abominable practices which afterwards followed. In particular, he inflamed the minds of the populace against the respectable and conscientious clergy, who became the chief objects of the ma.s.sacre, and who were to him the chief objects of a malignity and rancor that one could hardly think to exist in an human heart.

We have the relics of his fanatical persecution here. We are in a condition to judge of the merits of the persecutors and of the persecuted: I do not say the accusers and accused; because, in all the furious declamations of the atheistic faction against these men, not one specific charge has been made upon any one person of those who suffered in their ma.s.sacre or by their decree of exile.

The king had declared that he would sooner perish under their axe (he too well saw what was preparing for him) than give his sanction to the iniquitous act of proscription under which those innocent people were to be transported.

On this proscription of the clergy a princ.i.p.al part of the ostensible quarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the time of the authorized publication of this libel, some of the manoeuvres long and uniformly pursued for the king's deposition became more and more evident and declared.

The 10th of August came on, and in the manner in which Roland had predicted: it was followed by the same consequences. The king was deposed, after cruel ma.s.sacres in the courts and the apartments of his palace and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason to his old master, Roland was by his new masters named Minister of the Home Department.

The ma.s.sacres of the 2nd of September were begotten by the ma.s.sacres of the 10th of August. They were universally foreseen and hourly expected.

During this short interval between the two murderous scenes, the furies, male and female, cried out havoc as loudly and as fiercely as ever. The ordinary jails were all filled with prepared victims; and when they overflowed, churches were turned into jails. At this time the relentless Roland had the care of the general police;--he had for his colleague the b.l.o.o.d.y Danton, who was Minister of Justice; the insidious Petion was Mayor of Paris; the treacherous Manuel was Procurator of the Common Hall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authors of this ma.s.sacre. Lest the national guard should, by their very name, be reminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow-citizens, the Common Council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think of resisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers nor their arms were at all formidable,) obliged those guards to draw the charges from their muskets, and took away their bayonets. One of their journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he formerly called the Galley Journal. The t.i.tle was well suited to the paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the galleys; but, by the benignity of the late king, this felon (to be one day advanced to the rank of a regicide) had been pardoned and released at the intercession of the amba.s.sadors of Tippoo Sultan. His grat.i.tude was such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately been rewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, in mockery of all criminal law, to be Minister of Justice: he became from his elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has since received the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death.

It will be asked, how the Minister of the Home Department was employed at this crisis. The day after the ma.s.sacre had commenced, Roland appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after the commencement of the ma.s.sacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the a.s.sembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the _bon-ton_ of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the b.l.o.o.d.y proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy which (with a full knowledge of the falsehood of his a.s.sertion) he a.s.serts to have been formed for a ma.s.sacre of the people of Paris, and which he more than insinuates was the work of his late unhappy master,--who was universally known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty subjects to an excess.

"Without the day of the 10th," says he, "it is evident that we should have been lost. The court, prepared for a long time, waited for the hour which was to acc.u.mulate all treasons, to display over Paris the standard of death, and to reign there by terror. The sense of the people, (_le sentiment_,) always just and ready when their opinion is not corrupted, foresaw the epoch marked for their destruction, and rendered it fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the 14th of July, 1789, to the present time:--"It is in the nature of things,"

continues he, "and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring with it _some_ excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars _long_ after the tempest; but _everything has bounds_, which ought _at length_ to be observed."

In this memorable epistle, he considers such _excesses_ as fatalities arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be punished. He allows a s.p.a.ce of time for the duration of these agitations; and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his measure, he thinks it may be _long_. But he would have things to cease _at length_. But when? and where?--When they may approach his own person.

"_Yesterday_," says he, "the ministers _were denounced: vaguely_, indeed, as to the _matter_, because subjects of reproach were wanting; but with that warmth and force of a.s.sertion which strike the imagination and seduce it for a moment, and which mislead and destroy confidence, without which no man should remain in place in a free government.

_Yesterday, again_, in an a.s.sembly of the presidents of all the sections, convoked by the ministers, with the view of conciliating all minds, and of mutual explanation, I perceived _that distrust which suspects, interrogates, and fetters operations_."

In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) this virtuous Minister of the Home Department, and all the magistracy of Paris, spent the first day of the ma.s.sacre, the atrocity of which has spread horror and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that the putting a stop to the ma.s.sacre had any part in the object of their meeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was a minister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of his fellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferent about its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says "that their hidden enemies may make use of this _agitation_" (the tender appellation which he gives to horrid ma.s.sacre) "to hurt _their best friends and their most able defenders. Already the example begins_: let it restrain and arrest a _just_ rage. Indignation carried to its height commences proscriptions which fall only on the _guilty_, but in which error and particular pa.s.sions may shortly involve the _honest man_."

He saw that the able artificers in the trade and mystery of murder did not choose that their skill should be unemployed after their first work, and that they were full as ready to cut off their rivals as their enemies. This gave him _one_ alarm that was serious. This letter of Roland, in every part of it, lets out the secret of all the parties in this Revolution. _Plena rimarum est; hoc atque illac perfluit_. We see that none of them condemn the occasional practice of murder,--provided it is properly applied,--provided it is kept within the bounds which each of those parties think proper to prescribe. In this case Roland feared, that, if what was occasionally useful should become habitual, the practice might go further than was convenient. It might involve the best friends of the last Revolution, as it had done the heroes of the first Revolution: he feared that it would not be confined to the La Fayettes and Clermont-Tonnerres, the Duponts and Barnaves, but that it might extend to the Brissots and Vergniauds, to the Condorcets, the Petions, and to himself. Under this apprehension there is no doubt that his humane feelings were altogether unaffected.

His observations on the ma.s.sacre of the preceding day are such as cannot be pa.s.sed over. "Yesterday," said he, "was a day upon the events of which it is perhaps necessary to leave a _veil_. I know that the people with their vengeance _mingled a sort of justice_: they did not take for victims _all_ who presented themselves to their fury; they directed it to _them who had for a long time been spared by the sword of the law_, and who they _believed_, from the peril of circ.u.mstances, should be sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to _villains and traitors_ to misrepresent this _effervescence_, and that it must be checked; I know that we owe to all France the declaration, that the _executive power_ could not foresee or prevent this excess; I know that it is due to the const.i.tuted authorities to place a limit to it, or consider themselves as abolished."

In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veil over it,--which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and to extinguish all compa.s.sion for the sufferers. He apologizes for it; in fact, he justifies it. He who (as the reader has just seen in what is quoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at "vague denunciations," when made against himself, and from which he then feared nothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed to consider the charge of a conspiracy to ma.s.sacre the Parisians, brought against his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or rather upon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrous proceedings against him. He is not ashamed to call the murder of the unhappy priests in the Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation whatsoever, a "_vengeance_ mingled with a _sort of justice_"; he observes that they "had been a long time spared by the sword of the law," and calls by antic.i.p.ation all those who should represent this "_effervescence_" in other colors _villains and traitors_: he did not than foresee how soon himself and his accomplices would be under the necessity of a.s.suming the pretended character of this new sort of "_villany and treason_", in the hope of obliterating the memory of their former real _villanies and treasons_; he did not foresee that in the course of six months a formal manifesto on the part of himself and his faction, written by his confederate Brissot, was to represent this "_effervescence_" as another "_St. Bartholomew_" and speak of it as "_having made humanity shudder, and sullied the Revolution forever_."[4]

It is very remarkable that he takes upon himself to know the motives of the a.s.sa.s.sins, their policy, and even what they "believed." How could this be, if he had no connection with them? He praises the murderers for not having taken as yet _all_ the lives of those who had, as he calls it, "_presented themselves_ as victims to their fury." He paints the miserable prisoners, who had been forcibly piled upon one another in the Church of the Carmelites by his faction, as _presenting themselves_ as victims to their fury,--as if death was their choice, or (allowing the idiom of his language to make this equivocal) as if they were by some accident _presented_ to the fury of their a.s.sa.s.sins: whereas he knew that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent victims in the places where they had deposited them and were sure to find them. The very selection, which he praises as a _sort of justice_ tempering their fury, proves beyond a doubt the foresight, deliberation, and method with which this ma.s.sacre was made. He knew that circ.u.mstance on the very day of the commencement of the ma.s.sacres, when, in all probability, he had begun this letter,--for he presented it to the a.s.sembly on the very next.