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in consequence of this violence, and have been suppressed by the revolutionary armies and their attendant tribunals.

of procuring the means of paying the armies upon the frontier; I have described its destructive effect upon every species of property, and upon every permanent The immediate effect of such a system, resource of revenue; I have also stated must be to disturb the happiness of every to you, the violence and rapine employed private family, to involve all the inferior in order to supply those armies with pro- classes of the people in misery and ruin, visions, with clothing, and with every to suspend every act of honest industry, necessary store; and I have traced the and of useful labour, and to expose all operation of those measures upon the in- who remain in the country, to the comternal trade and cultivation of the coun- plicated calamities of indigence and fatry. I shall now show that the evils mine. To what degree these evils were which attend the raising of this immense expected to operate by the Convention military force highly aggravate those by itself, we may judge from the measures which it is maintained; and that the mere which have been taken to avert them. levy of these armies is in itself an oppres- Towards the latter end of September, a sion of the most grievous nature, and law passed, to compel all farmers, maproductive of the most pernicious conse-nufacturers, or labourers remaining in quences to the interests both of agriculture and of commerce.

The law for the requisition of the whole mass of the people, passed at the latter end of August. By this law every man in France from the age of eighteen to fifty is compelled to give his personal service in the army at the requisition of the national commissioners. The rigour with which this law was executed, will appear from a resolution of the department of Herault sanctioned by the Convention, and since converted into a general law. "Every father and mother shall be bound to declare the place of abode of their children summoned by requisition for the service of the army; every citizen is forbidden to harbour or conceal any persons under requisition. The soldiers of the revolutionary armies are authorized to arrest all persons who shall appear to them to have been put into requisition, and to lodge them in gaol if they endeavour to escape. The proper officers are to search every house twice a week in order to discover any person who may attempt to elude the requisition." To enforce this severe military conscription, a law was passed (to which I have already alluded) subjecting any person who should impede the levy of the army, by words or other wise, to the punishment of death-Not only no parent can venture even to advise his children to remain at home, but in most parts of the Republic the executioner has been the recruiting serjeant, and the unfortunate peasants and labourers in the provinces have been compelled to make their option between the perils of battle, and the unerring stroke of the guillotine. Many insurrections have happened in the several departments

France, to cultivate the lands of those who were absent on the service of the army. This is the regular course of the revolutionary system, to endeavour to remedy the mischievous consequences of one act of oppression, by committing another. Having torn five hundred thousand men from the bosom of their families, and from the cultivation of the earth, they attempt to supply that loss, by the compulsory labour of those who had been rejected from the service of the army; they have recourse to the refuse of their own tyranny; and they rely for the subsistence of France on the miserable remnant of a depressed, impoverished, and dejected people. That an army, raised by such means, should be animated by the enthusiasm of liberty I cannot believe, until I can forget all the circumstances which I have just now described, as well as all the events which have happened in France since the accession of the revolutionary government. That so large a body of men collected together under military discipline, and opposed to an enemy, may feel a great degree of military enthusiasm, is a proposition which I do not mean to contest; but my object has been, in whatever observations I have made on this part of the subject, to direct your attention to the internal state of France as resulting immediately from the operation of these military levies. It is for the wisdom of the House to determine, what must be the condition of that state, whose army is raised by the suspension of agriculture, under the terror of death, and at the daily hazard of insurrection, paid by the destruction of the rights of property, and by the practice of public fraud, and supplied by the annihilation of

domestic trade, and at the risk of internal famine.

You have now before you the principal features both of the theory and practice of the revolutionary government. Reviewing this unexampled system in all its details, you will find special and effectual provision established for the indiscriminate misery and ruin of every rank and order of society. It contains a principle of impartial persecution equally applicable (as the occasion may require) to the separate interests of every distinct class and description of the people, from the gentlemen of landed property, and the opulent bankers and merchants, down to the industrious manufacturer and the laborious peasant. Are these the arts of government? Are these the means by which the discordant interests and the contending passions of mankind can be brought to act in concert and can be directed to the welfare of the community, the end of all political society, and the only solid foundation of power? I speak to an assembly versed in all the great maxims of government, affectionately attached to the genuine principles of liberty, and accustomed to deliberate on whatever can affect the interests of a powerful state, and the happiness of a numerous people: in such an assembly I am persuaded that I should not be contradicted if I were to contend, without any farther proof, that a tyranny so constituted and exercised, must of necessity be odious to the people, and consequently whatever might be its temporary efforts, must rest upon an insecure and uncertain foundation. But I need not rely on general topics, however justly drawn from the constitution of human affairs, and from the character of man in all situations, and in all ages. The people of France (although hitherto unfortunate in the attempt) have not submitted tamely to the oppression of this mean and humiliating usurpation. In no less than forty of the departments, a spirit of indignation has broken out against the government; in many, the people have taken up arms, and waged open war; in some, they have expressed their discontent by riots and insurrections, by opposing the levies for the army, and by refusing to submit to the confiscation of their incomes, and to the plunder of their goods. This spirit has appeared with great strength in all the most opulent commercial towns; but it has not been confined to them; it has

been diffused as widely as the oppression which occasioned it, and its symptoms (varying with opportunities, and with means of exertion) are to be traced in almost every town and village of France. They are to be traced in all those acts of arbitrary power by which the several municipalities have been regenerated, the popular societies purged and purified, and the sense of the people violently suppressed: they are to be traced in all the expeditions of those revolutionary armies and itinerant executioners, who have been embodied for the circulation of the movement of terror, and who traverse the country with express orders to stifle the rising flame of general revolt.

If we are to believe the testimony of the Convention, the object of all these commotions is uniformly the restoration of monarchy; the Convention insists that the discontented spirits in France universally look up to some form of royal authority, as the only standard under which all the friends of order and law can re-assemble with safety, under which they may all forget their former animosities, reconcile their discordant opinions, and unite in a firm league for the destruction of that despotic anarchy which is their common enemy, and which cannot subsist without producing their common destruction. This spirit may have been oppressed for a moment, but it is not extinct. After all the misfortunes which have fallen on those who had the courage to stand foremost in opposition to the plunderers of their country, after all the scenes of blood which have been acted under the authority of the Convention, the agents of their cruelty have been compelled to confess, that although they have gratified their revenge in the massacre of multitudes of their adversaries, they have not been able to subdue the unconquerable "incivism" of the survivors. At Bourdeaux, when the popular society had been taken by storm, when the whole town had been disarmed, when three hundred rich merchants had been imprisoned, and when the revolutionary tribunal, seconded by the patriotism of the executioner, had destroyed every distinguished enemy of anarchy, a letter is written to the municipality of Paris from one of their agents, lamenting," that after having studied the temper of the public mind at Bourdeaux, he must declare, that not one man in that city had yet reached the exalted level of the revolu

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tion. The commissioners of the Conven- | presented on an occasion which seemed tion met regularly in the temple of Reason on the last day of each decade, chaunted hymns in honour of liberty and sound philosophy, and preached sermons worthy of true mountaineers; but they could scarcely collect a congregation."

In other accounts froin Bourdeaux it appears, that it had been found necessary to regenerate the whole company of actors at the theatre to secure the performance of revolutionary plays; but even this measure failed of its effect. The actors were changed, but the audience remained the same; the audience would not endure to hear a single revolutionary verse. To use the phrase of the patriot who reports this transaction, "they hissed all the passages which were most conformable to the order of the day; and the new mayor (the successor of him who had been regenerated by the guillo. tine) was obliged to interpose, and to compel by force the free and sovereign people to receive, without indignation, the homage offered to their sovereignty, and to listen with patience to the panegyric of their freedom."

naturally to call forth every sentiment of gratitude and satisfaction." The commis. sioners, however, were not discouraged, they proceeded with increased vigour: concluding that the effusion of human blood had not yet been sufficient to inspire the people with the enthusiam of true Hberty, they now rejected the use of their favourite engine of death, as being wholly inadequate to the prodigious magnitude of their extensive designs. Mixing the instruments of war with the perverted forms of criminal justice, and blending the solemnity of a public execution with the tumult and slaughter of battle, they executed a project of massacre, such as never before had been attempted or even conceived by the most inventive genius in the arts of cruelty. This effort also disappointed their expectations, and they complain, that "the traitors whom they had punished persisted in their treason even to the hour of their execution.” Death in its most formidable shape, attended with every accumulated circumstance of terror, could not shake the constancy of these brave men. In the face of Although the Convention has repeat- the executioner, in the very mouths of the edly boasted that the seat of the war in cannon pointed against them, they mainthe north-western departments presented tained their principles, they avowed their nothing to the view but a heap of ashes attachments, and in their dying agonies bedewed with the blood of the insurgents, mingled the expressions of veneration for although we have often heard of the total the memory of their murdered sovereign, extirpation of the army of the royalists, and of loyalty to his surviving issue, with that army has as often risen again, and their last prayers to their insulted God. opposed a vigorous resistance to every The effects of this unprecedented barbaforce which has yet been employed against rity were not more favourable on the minds it. Even at Lyons, notwithstanding all of the spectators. Some time after the the feasts and orgies of murder (for so commencement of the new system of exethey were styled by those who celebrated cution, the general of a division of the rethem), the sentiments of the citizens re-volutionary army declares, that "when he main unaltered, and undisguised. After having sequestrated the property of all who were engaged in the insurrection, and having levied a forced loan upon all who were not, for the express purpose of "defraying the expenses of the necessary demolitions," after the actual demolition of all the most beautiful buildings, the execution of the principal citizens, and (according to their own words) "the complete enfranchisement of the city;" the commissioners of the Convention were "astonished at the insensibility of the inhabitants. A sullen silence accompanied every period of the salutary work of regeneration; not one expression of joy was heard for the return of liberty; not one address of thanks or congratulation was

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entered the city of Lyons, although the inhabitants paid him the compliment of shutting up their houses and shops as he marched before their doors, they demon strated, by the most unequivocal gestures, their obstinate adherrence to the crimes of those whose punishment they had beheld." He says, "He met several women dispersed through the streets, and in every face he perceived the expressions of rage and resentment, rather than those of repentance or fear." The commissioners of the Convention appear at length absolutely to despair of thecomplete regeneration of this enfranchised city; in one of their last reports they acknowledge, "that among an hundred and forty thousand inhabitants, they have as yet discovered not more than

ported in difficulty, and relieved from danger, by the vigilant care of a wise and provident legislature. We behold armies not levied by compulsory requisitions, not torn from the plough and the loom by the hands of the executioner, not paid and supplied

fifteen hundred exempt from the guilt of rebellion; and they recommend as the last expedient, that all the inhabitants should be banished from Lyons in bedies of twenty or thirty thousand, and settled in some remote part of France; they express a hope that these colonies, when trans-by prehensions and seizures of private planted into a better soil, may bear the property, but proceeding from the sponfruits of liberty." But where is that happy taneous effort of a brave nation, maintained soil to be found, in which they shall learn without difficulty and without oppression, to forget the indignities which they have and assisted under all the hardships of war suffered, and the cruelties which they have by the voluntary generosity of their fellow beheld? It is observed by the French au- subjects. Instead of the proscription of thor (Camille Desmoulins), that the Ja- honest industry, and the confiscation of all cobin faction has increased the number of private fortunes, instead of peopled priits enemies, by the very means employed to sons and crowded scaffolds, instead of perexterminate them. Massacre will not ex-secuted christianity, and established athetinguish popular discontent. Every victim of injustice and cruelty bequeaths his revenge to his connexions, to his friends, and to his relations or (if all these should be involved in the same common fate with himself) every such execution raises detestation and abhorrence, even in the breast of ordinary spectators, and unites the public opinion against a government which exists only by the daily practice of robbery and murder.

ism, we see property respected, justice allied with mercy, and liberty with law, an inviolable regard for the rights of personal freedom, and a sacred reverence for the principles of religion: and in the public mind, we find a due sense and value of all these blessings, a general conviction that they are all involved in the issue of the present contest, and a firm determination to prosecute it with vigour, as the only means of securing their continuance.

The result of this view, both of the condition of our enemy and of our own, leads to a variety of deductions, all of which are essentially connected with the subject of our present deliberation. It proves that the whole fabric of the government now prevailing in France, is unsound in every part; that the measures by which the efforts of that government have been maintained in the last campaign, are at this moment exhausting the resources of the country, not slowly and gradually, not according to the regular progress of ordi

From this disgusting scene, let us turn our eyes to our own situation, Here the contrast is striking in all its parts. Here (to use the eloquent language of a distinguished member of this House) "We see nothing of the character and genius of arbitrary finance; none of the bold frauds of bankrupt power; none of the wild struggles and plunges of despotism in distress, no lopping off from the capital of debt; no suspension of interest; no robbery under the name of loan; no raising the value, no debasing the substance of the coin." Here we behold public cre-nary evils in the administration of states, dit of every description rising under all the disadvantages of a general war; an ample revenue, flowing freely and copiously from the opulence of a contented people, from the increasing sources of agriculture, not only unimpaired, but actually improved, even in the midst of hostilities; from a commerce, not engaged in a hostile contest with the supreme power of the state, not "enslaved and invested on all sides" by arbitrary restraints, not reproached, suspected, and punished for its accumulating profits, but protected in its gains, unrestrained in its enterprises, sup

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but with a rapidity and violence which at once dissolve the very elements of the system of political economy, and preclude the possibility of recurring even to the same destructive projects in the event of any new exigency; it proves, that these measures are not only temporary and occasional in their very nature, but are expressly admitted to be so by the persons who proposed them; all the most important operations of finance are of this description; and Barrere himself felt the levy of the mass of the people to be a project of such danger, that when he introduced it into the Convention, he justified it upon this single argument," that it would bring the war to a termination in the course of the campaign," meaning that which has

just now been closed. It proves, that such having been the true causes of whatever difficulties we have already experienced, we may entertain a reasonable expectation, that causes so unnatural, together with their monstrous effects, must ultimately yield to a steady and unremitting exertion of our natural and genuine strength, confirmed by the co-operation of our nu merous allies it proves farther, that the same measures which have enabled the ruling faction to resist our attacks, have been so odious to the feelings, and so ruinous to the interests of every class and description of persons in France, as to have entirely alienated a large proportion of the people from the government; and this circumstance becomes a strong additional reason for perseverance in our efforts, as it must tend to facilitate the success of any impression which we may hereafter be enabled to make.

Such are the reasons on which I ground my hopes of our final success in the present war. The necessity of our perseverance, is to be deduced from the same considerations. For it appears, in the first place, from the detail which I have laid before you, that the destructive doctrines, and the false principles of government, of which you dreaded the extension even in their infancy, have now attained full maturity and vigour, and have produced enormities infinitely surpassing whatever you had apprehended from their progressive malignancy, and from their active powers of mischief. It appears that these enormities have been formally digested into a code, and embodied in a regular system, from which has sprung a tyranny so atrocious in form, in substance, in principle, and in practice, that as every man of common humanity must desire to see it destroyed in France, for the sake of the people who suffer under it; so every member of civil society would willingly encounter the calamities of the most protracted war, rather than incur the risk of subjecting his own country to the pernicious effects of such an evil. The question, therefore, which remains to be considered is, whether we can effectually secure ourselves against the inroad of that evil, by any other means than the continuance of our present exertions.

From the facts which I have already enumerated, it is incontestible, that in proportion as this tyranny consumes the property of France, it must entertain projects of ambition and aggrandizement; it

must endeavour to repair its disordered finances by preying upon its neighbours, and to supply the exhausted resource of domestic confiscation by foreign plunder. It is equally evident, on the same general grounds, that it must be the immediate interest of a government founded upon principles wholly contradictory to the received maxims of all surrounding nations, to propagatethe doctrines abroad by which it subsists at home, to assimilate every neighbouring state to its own system, and to subvert every constitution, which can form a disadvantageous contrast with its own absurdities; such a government must therefore, from its nature, be hostile to all regular governments, of whatever form; but, above all, to those which are most strongly contrasted with its own vicious structure, and which afford to their subjects the best securities for the maintenance of order, liberty, justice, and religion. Engaged in a contest with enemies of such a character, nothing can secure us against the danger of their future violence but an effectual reduction of their present power. A peace founded on any other principles would not only be illusory, but must inevitably produce the most fatal consequences to all our most valuable interests. But the government of France neither can nor will accede to terms of peace in any degree conformable to this principle, so indispensably necessary to our security. By an article of the constitution of the 10th of August 1793, it is positively declared, as a fundamental maxim of the foreign policy of France, that she will not conclude peace with an enemy who occupies any part of her territory: this article was not suspended by the institution of the revolutionary government; it was acted upon by the agents of the Convention in the island of Corsica during the course of the last campaign, and their proceedings have been since deliberately approved by the Convention. Under this article it is obvious, that no peace can be concluded with France, unless we previously surrender into her hands all the acquisitions which we have made from her territory in the course of the present campaign; and here the importance of those acquisitions will perhaps be felt even by those who have hitherto undervalued them. We must surrender not only Valenciennes, Conde, and Quesnoy, but our conquests at Newfoundland and in the East and West Indies, and having thus abandoned all means of indemnity, we are to rely upon the good will

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