government in France, but the very nature of that system which they have established render a treaty of peace upon safe or honourable terms impracticable in the present moment, and consequently require a vigorous and unremitting prosecution of the war. the author of the Rights of Man? Is it any profession, assurance, or act of the revolutionary government of France? You all know it is not. The confidence of a wise people could never be rested on such weak and unsubstantial foundations. The real cause of our present sense of security is to be found in our own exertions combined with those of our allies. By those exertions we were enabled to withstand and repel the first assault of the arms and principles of France; and the continuance of the same effort now forms our only barrier against the return of the same danger. Who then shall venture to persuade you to cast away the defence which has afforded you Hitherto, I have addressed my arguments to the whole House; in what I shall now urge, I must declare, that I do not mean to address myself to those few among us who did not share the common sentiment of the House, and of the public in that period of general alarm which immediately preceded this war. But I appeal to those who, previous to the commencement of the war, felt in common with the great body of the people a well-protection against all the objects of your grounded apprehension for the safety of our happy constitution, and of the general interests of civil society; do they now feel the same degree of anxiety? Even in the midst of hostilities, in the very heat of the contest, and after a campaign which, although greatly successful in its general result, has neither been exempt from difficulty, nor from the ordinary vicissitudes of a state of war, do they not now feel in their own breasts, and perceive in the public mind, such a degree of confidence in the security of all that can be dear and valuable to British subjects, as they would have gladly purchased before the war, even by surrendering a part of those interests, the whole of which was menaced in that gloomy period of general consternation? former apprehension, to subvert the foundations of your present confidence, and to resort for your future safety, to the inconsistent decrees, to the contradictory declarations, and to the vague assurances of a guilty, desperate, and distracted faction, which offers no possible ground of security either in the principles of its policy, or in the stability of its power? All the circumstances of your situation are now before you. You are now to make your option, you are now to decide whether it best becomes the dignity, the wisdom, and the spirit of a great nation to rely for her existence on the arbitrary will of a restless and implacable enemy, or on her own sword: you are now to decide, whether you will entrust to the valour and skill of British fleets and BriWhat change of circumstances, what tish armies, to the approved faith and happy combination of events has calmed united strength of your numerous and the anxiety, and revived the depressed powerful allies, the defence of the limited spirits of the nation? Is it the decree of monarchy of these realms, of the consticounter-fraternity, declaring that France tution of parliament, of all the established will no longer interfere in the internal af- ranks and orders of society among us, of fairs of independent states, but reserving the sacred rights of property, and of the to her the sovereignty of all those coun- whole frame of our laws, our liberties and tries which were overrun by her arms, our religion; or whether you will dein the first career of her inordinate ambi- liver over the guardianship of all these tion? Is it the reply of Robespierre to blessings to the justice of Cambon, the the manifestoes of all the princes of Eu- plunderer of the Netherlands, who, to susrope, in which he pronounces kings to be tain the baseless fabric of his depreciated the master-piece of human corruption, assignats, defrauds whole nations of their in which he libels every monarch in Eu. rights of property, and mortgages the rope, but protests that France has no in-aggregate wealth of Europe; to the motention to disturb monarchy, if the subjects of kings are still weak enough to submit to such an institution? Is it the murder of Brissot and his associates? Is it the disgrace and imprisonment of Anacharsis Clootz, the author of the Revolutionary Diplomatics; or of Thomas Paine, deration of Danton, who first promulgated that unknown law of nature, which ordains, that the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, and the Rhine should be the only boundaries of the French dominion; to the religion of Robespierre, whose practice of piety is the murder of his own sovereign, who exhorts all mankind to embrace the same faith, and to assassinate their kings for the honour of God; to the friendship of Barrere, who avows, in the face of all Europe, that the fundamental article of the revolutionary government of France is the ruin and annihilation of the British empire; or finally, to whatever may be the accidental caprice of any new band of malefactors, who, in the last convulsions of their exhausted country, may be destined to drag the present tyrants to their own scaffolds, to seize their lawless power, to emulate the depravity of their example, and to rival the enormity of their crimes. tion, than that in which he had warned us to keep in sight the "real grounds and origin of the present war." For his part, he knew not how to obey the call, for he knew not how to keep in sight that which had never yet been in his view. The "real grounds" of the war had never yet been explained, either to that House or to the nation; but shifting clouds had veiled them from the public eye. The noble lord, however, appears to have understood his majesty's allusion; he recollects the "real grounds" upon which the war was, in point of fact, undertaken; that is, he knows the means by which we had been brought into this war ;-we had been brought into it by repeated declamations on all that the frenzy, folly, and rashness of individuals in France, had either said or written, by which the passions of this country could be roused, or their fears excited, in order to second the views of those who had determined to plunge us into it at all events; therefore the noble lord, consistently enough, imagined that a repetition of the same means which induced us to commence hostilities, was the best method of persuading us to continue them. Hence all this passionate declamation, hence this laborious farrago of extracts and anecdotes-of extracts from a book, which the noble lord allowed every one to have read; and anecdotes, of which he ad Mr. Sheridan said, that the noble lord had divided a speech, more remarkable for its ability than its brevity, into two parts: the first, a detail of all the atroci ties that had been committed during the whole course of the Revolution in France; the second, a kind of posthumous arraignment of the offences of Brissot and his associates. As he did not perceive any noble or learned member inclined to rise on behalf of the accused, as he conceived the pleadings on the part of the prosecution to be closed, and as the Speaker was evidently not proceeding to sum up the evidence, he hoped he might be permitted to recall the attention of the House to the real object of that day's consideration. He admired the emphasis of the noble lord, in reading his volumi-mitted that no man who saw the newspanous extracts from his various French documents; he admired, too, the ingenuity he had displayed, in his observations upon those extracts; but he could not help farther expressing his admiration, that the noble lord should have thought proper to have taken up so many hours in quoting passages in which not one word in ten was to the purpose; and often where they did apply to the question; they directly overset the principles they were brought forward to support. The noble lord's purpose was to prove, that France had begun the war with Great Britain: this, he appeared to think he had established the moment he had shown that Brissot and others had promulgated, in print, a great many foolish and a great many wicked, general principles, mischievous to all established governments; and this, indeed, had been the only way in which any one had ever endeavoured to fix the act of hostile aggression upon France. No part of the king's speech, it seems, more fully met the noble lord's approba pers, could be ignorant. But what was the sum of all that he had told the House? that great and dreadful enormities had been and were still committing in France. All this was most true; but what did it prove? What, but that eternal and unalterable truth, that a long established despotism so far degraded and debased human nature, as to render its subjects, on the first recovery of their rights, unfit for the exercise of them; but never would he meet but with reprobation, that mode of argument which went to estalish as an inference from this truth, that those who had been long slaves, ought therefore to remain so for ever. No; the lesson ought to be a tenfold horror of that despotic form of government which had so changed the nature of civilized man, and a still more jealous apprehension of any system tending to withhold the rights and liberties of our fellow creatures. But, it was said, the madness of the French people was not confined to their own country, we, and all the powers of Europe had to dread it. tive love of harmony and of social order implanted in the heart of man; so ruinous to external force, as well as to internal peace, prosperity and happiness, that it cannot stand. This is the conclusion which the noble lord wishes to draw from all the facts and opinions he has detailed. I close with him. I will admit his facts. I will admit that the system now prevalent in France is all that he has called it; and what ought to be our conclusion with respect to such a government? What, but that we ought to leave to the natural work True; but was this also difficult to be accounted for? Had not the surrounding states goaded them into a still more savage state of desperation? We had unsettled their reason, and then reviled their insanity; we called them monsters, and hunted them like monsters; we drove them to the extremities that produced the evils we arraigned; we baited them like wild beasts, until at length we made them so. The conspiracy of Pilnitz, and the brutal threats of the royal abettors of that plot against the rights of nations and of man, had, in truthings of the discords which it is calculated to answer for all the additional horrors which had since disgraced and incensed humanity. Such has been your conduct towards France, that you have created the passions which you persecute; you mark a nation to be cut off from the world, you covenant for their extermination: you swear to hunt them in their inmost recesses; you load them with every species of execration; and now you come forth with whining declamations on the horror of their turning upon you with the fury which you inspired. Sir, I should think it sufficient to answer thus generally to all the pathetic appeals to the passions, so constantly resorted to on this subject; but the noble lord, I am ready to admit, has, on the present occasion, endeavoured to ground more of argument, in one point of view, on the inflammatory passages and anecdotes he has quoted, than has been usual with those who have most practised this mode of treating the subject. I cannot, however, agree with the noble lord that he has omitted any advantage to his case, for the sake of saving our time. In going over the pamphlet of Brissot, he tells us, rather whimsically, that he passes over this passage, and runs over that, when all the while he specifically details what he professes only to glance at, and repeats twice over what he declares he will scarcely touch upon. In fact, he has passed over nothing but the question; and now mark the purpose of all this; observe the important conclusion for which, he says himself, he has dwelt so long on these facts, and I admit it to be a great and serious one. Laying aside all question of aggression on the part of France, or of necessity on our part, to enter into the war-all this is done, it seems, to show the House, that the system now adopted by the government of that country is so abhorrent to the feelings of human nature; so contrary to the instinc to engender, the task of its overthrow; that if it will not stand of itself, it is not necessary for us to attack it. Without disputing any of his premises for the present, I will grant the noble lord not only his principle, but the foundation upon which he builds it. I agree with him, that it is contrary to the eternal and unalterable laws of nature, and to the decrees of the maker of man and of nations, that a government founded on, and maintained by, injustice, rapine, murder, and atheism, can have a fixed endurance; that there are self-sown, in its own bosom, the seeds of its inevitable dissolution. But if so, whence is our mission to become the destroying angel to guide and hasten the anger of the Deity? Who calls on us to offer, with more than mortal arrogance, the alliance of a mortal arm to the Omnipotent; or to snatch the uplifted thunder from his hand and point our erring aim at the devoted fabric which his original will has fated to fall and crumble in that ruin, which it is not in the means of man to accelerate or prevent? I accede to him the piety of his principle: let him accede to me the justice of my conclusion: or let him attend to experience, if not to reason, and must he not admit, that hitherto all the attempts of this apparently powerful, but certainly presumptuous crusade of vengeance, have appeared unfavoured by fortune, and by Providence; that they have hitherto had no other effect than to strengthen the powers, to whet the rapacity, to harden the heart, to inflame the fury, and to augment the crimes of that government, and that people, whom we have rashly sworn to subdue, to chastise, and to reform. The noble lord appears to have been aware that the number of passages he has quoted from Brissot's book, and other publications, must be considered as having no other object than to excite the mirth, or inflame the passions of the House, un less he had concluded by drawing some inference from them, applicable to the real subject in discussion; and this at length, he has condescended to attempt by affirming, that they all tended to prove that France not only must have been the aggressor, and England the attacked party, but that France is still the party desirous of continuing the war. But how have his quotations borne him out? That Brissot and Robespierre, previous to the experiment on Brabant, equally wished to propagate principles of Republicanism in every country of Europe. I will grant to him, if he pleases, that the latter endeavoured to effect it by force in Brabant, while the former wished to accomplish it by reason, and the example of prosperity which he hoped France would afford. But what does all this prove, when the noble lord, in the very same breath, is obliged to confess, that a short experience made both parties retract their opinion and practice; and that so far from boasting of having provoked a war with England upon such principles, or for such purposes, the strongest reproach that either faction could throw upon the other was, in mutual accusation, of having been the cause of war with the only power in Europe, with whom France was eager to continue at peace? On this head, says the noble lord, Robespierre imputes it to Brissot; Brissot retorts it upon Robespierre; the Jacobins charge it upon the Girondists; the Girondists recriminate upon the Jacobins: the Mountain thunders it upon the Valley, and the Valley re-echoes it back against the Mountain;" all facts, tending to contradict the assertion which the noble lord professed to establish by them, and making still plainer, that there was no one party in France which was not earnest to avoid a rupture which this country, nor any party which we may not at this moment reasonably believe to be inclined to put an end to hostilities. The noble lord, however, thinks he has established a great deal when he has proved, that all the parties in the Convention were, at the same time, fond of the system of" fraternizing," as it is called, or of making proselytes to the general principles of Republicanism. It may be so; but it would not have been uncandid in the noble lord to have dated the origin of this system, and to have marked the provocation to it; nor unfair to have acknowledged, that even this principle also has been since completely abandoned by [VOL. XXX.] all parties. If he refers to it, as a motive for our entertaining ajust jealousy of them, he ought to admit their abandonment of it as a ground for our abandoning that jea lousy. If their professing such a doctrine, was a provocation to hostility on our part, their retracting it is an opening to reconciliation. From the moment they solemnly disavowed all intention or disposition to interfere in the governments of other nations, why should not we have renounced any intention of interfering in theirs? But instead of this, what has been our conduct? We continue to remind and reproach the French with their unjust and insolent conduct in respect to Brabant and Geneva, at the same time that we adopt ourselves, and act upon, the very principles they have abjured. Who did not reprobate the folly and profligacy of endeavouring to force upon the people of Brabant French forms, French principles, and French creeds? Of dragging them to the tree of liberty, and forcing them to dance round its root, or to hang upon its branches? But what has been the conduct of Great Britain, so loud in the condemnation of such tyranny, under the mask of liberty? What has been her conduct to Genoa? to Switzerland? to Tuscany? and, as far as she dared, to Denmark and to Sweden? For her insolence has been accompanied by its usual attendant, meanness. Her injustice has been without magnanimity. She wished to embark the world in the confederacy against France, the moment she thought proper to join it; the neutrality, of which she herself boasted but a month before, became instantly a heinous crime in any other state of Europe: and how has she proceeded? With those that are powerful, and whose assistance would have been important, she has only expostulated and prevaricated; but in how little, as well as odious a light has she appeared, when threatening and insulting those petty states, whose least obedience to her tyrannic mandates might bring great peril on themselves, and whose utmost efforts could give but little aid to the allies? The noble lord has with a just indignation, execrated the cruel and perfidious conduct of the fraternizing French to the Brabanters; but will he defend the fraternity of the just and magnanimous English to the Genoese? Have we not adopted the very words as well as spirit of democratic tyranny? We say to the timid, helpless Genoese, “you have no right to judge for yourselves; we know [41] had been borne by the French, with a submission which nothing but their desire of peace with this country could have produced, amidst the fury and pride which actuated their conduct towards all the rest of Europe. They solicited, they expostulated, they pressed for explanation and negociation; and even after their ambassador had been driven from this country, they sent a new negociator; nor did the sincerity of their professions for peace with us depend on words alone; for to preserve this object, they actually ab. stained from the invasion of Holland, when within their grasp, when their arms appeared irresistible, and success inevitable. Every fact spoke aloud that we forced France into the quarrel. Which party first said the words "We are at war," is a matter of trivial and childish distinction; nor do I in this place mean to argue that Great Britain was wrong in so preferring a state of open war against France, and joining in the general confederacy against her; nay, I will, for the present, grant that it was a war of sound sense, policy, and justice, but still it was a war of choice on the part of Great Britain; and from that responsibility, the minister never can, nor shall, disengage himself. Embarked, however, as we are in the war, it must, no doubt, be a matter of astonishment to many gentlemen, to find the advocates of ministers so eternally labouring the proof of France having been the aggressor. The prominent point for the present discussion seems rather, under our circumstances, to be, how shall we end the conflict, whoever began it; or if peace cannot be had, how we shall prosecute the war with vigour and success. But the object of these gentlemen, in recurring to the other ground, is obvious. They will not hear of peace; they do not wish for it; and finding themselves feeble in argument, to show that the country ought to be of their opinion, they endeavour to establish a belief, that it is France who does not wish for peace with us; and this they think they do establish, by proving, that is, by asserting, that it was France who provoked the war. If the war commenced in self-defence and necessity on our part, self-defence and necessity must continue it. They would evade the question, whether it is our interest to have peace, by arguing, that it is not in our power; from this delusion, it is of the utmost importance that the public mind should be rescued. All the professed ob |jects for which we went to war have been obtained; our ally, Holland, is safe; Brabant is recovered; the ideas of adding to the extent of their own country, or of interfering in the governments of others, but as measures of warfare and retaliation have been unequivocally disavowed by the present government of France; and notwithstanding all their lofty boasts and insulting threats, which are, in truth, the mere retorts of passion, to our vile declamations against them, there is no question but that they would be ready to treat with us, or with any of the allied powers, tomorrow, simply upon the principle of being left to the exercise of their own will within their own boundaries. Let the experiment be made; if they prefer war, then the noble lord will have some reason to maintain, that their minds were always disposed to that measure, and that war could not have been avoided on our part. But till then, I am astonished that the minister who sits near the noble lord, does not feel it necessary to his own dignity himself to oppose this paltry argument. When he hears this called a war of neces sity and defence, I wonder he does not feel ashamed of the meanness which it spreads over the whole of his cause, and the contradiction which it throws among the greater part of his arguments. Will he answer this one question distinctly? If France had abstained from any act of aggression against Great Britain, and her ally Holland, should we have remained inactive spectators of the last campaign, and left the contest to Austria and Prussia, and whatever allies they could themselves have obtained? If he says this, mark the dilemma into which he brings himself, his supporters, and the nation. This war is called a war unlike all other wars that ever man was engaged in. It is a war in which the interests of individual nations is absorbed in the wider consideration of the interest of mankind: it is a war in which personal provocation is lost in the outrage offered generally to civilized man: it is a war for the preservation of the possessions, the morals, and the religion of the world: it is a war for the maintenance of human order, and the existence of human society. Does he then mean to say, that he would have sat still, that Great Britain would have sat still, with arms folded, and, recli ning in luxuriant ease on her commercial couch, have remained an unconcerned spectator of this mighty conflict, and have left the cause of civil order, government, |