The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands; all the arms, all the revenues of the publick, all the confiscations of individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a body of Janizaries to over-rule and awe property. The heads of these wretches they never suffered to cool. They supply them with a food for fury varied by the day besides the sensual state of intoxication from which they are rarely free. They have made the priests and people formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil, moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive, sentiment, habit, and practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state or order, under any name whatsoever. The other description, the oppressed-are people of some property; they are the small relicks of the persecuted landed interest; they are the burghers and the farmers. By the very circumstance of their being of some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be very considerable as a number. In cities the nature of their occupations renders them domestick and feeble; in the country it confines them to their farm for subsistence. The national guards are all changed and reformed. Every thing suspicious in the description of which they were composed is rigorously disarmed. Committees, called of vigilance and safety, are every where formed; a most severe and scrutinizing inquisition, far more rigid than any thing ever known or imagined. Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their liberty, and even to their lives. Numbers scarcely credible have been executed, and their property confiscated. At Paris, and in most other towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole-which they cannot obtain without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters. Multitudes of all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned. I have reason to believe, that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty thousand actually in jail-a large proportion of people of property in any state. If a father of a family should shew any disposition to resist, or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children are cruelly to answer for it. It is by means of these hostages, that they keep the troops, which they force by masses (as they call it) into the fieldtrue to their colours. Another of their resources is not to be forgotten. They have lately found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme sovereign authority, which no monarch has been able yet to give to any representation of his. The commissioners of the National Convention, who are the members of the Convention itself, and really exercise all its powers, make continual circuits through every province, and visits to every army. There they supersede all the ordinary au • Some accounts make them five times as many. thorities civil and military, and change and alter every thing at their pleasure. So that in effect no deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants. Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision in a moment under the guillotine, and before the arrival of these commissioners, Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a sort of miracle; and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets had not been at the door to give them not only strong, but prompt and immediate, succour, especially, as neither this nor any other sea-port town in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions, manners, and connexions, among the lower sort of people in those places. This I take to be the true state of things in France; so far as it regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association, capable of acting or of treating in corps. As to the oppressed individuals, they are many; and as discontented as men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts, with which they are crushed. They want no stimulus to throw off this dreadful yoke; but they do want (not manifestoes, which they have had even to surfeit, but) real protection, force, and succour. The disputes and questions of men at their ease, do not at all affect their minds, or ever can occupy the minds of men in their situation. These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have done their mischief. The question is not between the rabble of systems, Fayetteism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism, or Federalism, on the one side, and the fundamental laws of France on the other-or between all these systems amongst themselves. It is a controversy (weak indeed and unequal on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber; between the prisoner and the jailor; between the neck and the guillotine. Four-fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperour of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder. But then these men can do little or nothing for themselves. They have no arms, nor magazines, nor chiefs, nor union, nor the possibility of these things within themselves. On the whole therefore I lay it down as a certainty, that, in the jacobins, no change of mind is to be expected-and that no others in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative existence. The truth is, that France is out of itself-The moral France is separated from the geographical. The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of publick law, (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude,) they are in Flanders, and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the state, there are all the parliaments of the kingdom. This being, as I conceive, the true state of France, as it exists territorily, and as it exists morally, the question will be, with whom we are to concert our arrangements; and whom we are to use as our instruments in the reduction, in the pacification, and in the settlement of France. The work to be done must indicate the workmen. Supposing us to have national objects, we have two principal, and one secondary. The first two are so intimately connected as not to be separated even in thought; the re-establishment of royalty, and the re-establishment of property. One would think it requires not a great deal of argument to prove, that the most serious endeavours to restore royalty will be made by royalists. Property will be most energetically restored by the ancient proprietors of that kingdom. When I speak of royalists, I wish to be understood of those who were always such from principle. Every arm lifted up for royalty from the beginning was the arm of a man so principled. I do not think there are ten exceptions. The principled royalists are certainly not of force to effect these objects by themselves. If they were, the operations of the present great combination would be wholly unnecessary. What I contend for is, that they should be consulted with, treated with, and employed; and that no foreigners whatsoever are either in interest so engaged, or in judgment and local knowledge so competent, to answer all these purposes, as the natural proprietors of the country. one Frenchman is worth twenty foreigners. La Vendee is a proof of this. If we wish to make an impression on the minds of any persons in France, or to persuade them to join our standard, it is impossible that they should not be more easily led, and more readily formed and disciplined, (civilly and martially disciplined,) by those who speak their language, who are acquainted with their manners, who are conversant with their usages and habits of thinking, and who have a local knowledge of their country, and some remains of ancient credit and consideration, than with a body congregated from, all tongues and tribes. Where none of the respectable native interests are seen in the transaction, it is impossible that any declarations can convince those that are within, or those that are without, that any thing else than some sort of hostility in the style of a conqueror is meant. At best it will appear to such wavering persons, (if such there are,) whom we mean to fix with us, a choice whether they are to continue a prey to domestick banditti, or to be fought for as a carrion carcass, and picked to the bone by all the crows and vultures of the sky. They may take protection, (and they would I doubt not,) but they can have neither alacrity nor zeal in such a cause. When they see nothing but bands of English, Spaniards, Neapolitans, Sardinians, Prussians, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Sclavonians, Croatians, acting as principals, it is impossible they should think we come with a beneficent design. Many of those fierce and barbarous people have already given proofs how little they regard any French party whatsoever. Some of these nations the people of France are jealous of; such are the English, and the Spaniards-others they despise; such are the Italians others they hate and dread; such are the German and Danubian powers. At best such interposition of ancient enemies excites apprehension; but in this case, how can they suppose that we come to maintain their legitimate monarchy in a truly paternal French government, to protect their privileges, their laws, their religion, and their property, when they see us make use of no one person who has any interest in them, any knowledge of them, or any the least zeal for them? On the contrary, they see, that we do not suffer any of those who have shewn a zeal in that cause, which we seem to make our own, to come freely into any place in which the allies obtain any footing. Their number for an exiled party is also considerable. Almost the whole body of the landed proprietors of France, ecclesiastical and civil, have been steadily devoted to the monarchy. This body does not amount to less than seventy thousand- —a very great number in the composition of the respectable classes in any society.-I am sure, that if half that number of the same description were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly any thing that I should call the people of England. On the faith of the emperour and the king of Prussia, a body of ten thousand nobility on horseback, with the king's two brothers at their head, served with the king of Prussia in the campaign of 1792, and equipped themselves with If we wish to gain upon any people, it is right the last shilling of their ruined fortunes and ex- to see what it is they expect. We have had a prohausted credit.* It is not now the question howposal from the royalists of Poitou. They are well that great force came to be rendered useless and totally dissipated. I state it now, only to remark that a great part of the same force exists, and would act if it were enabled. I am sure every thing has shewn us that in this war with France, entitled, after a bloody war maintained for eight months against all the powers of anarchy, to speak the sentiments of the royalists of France. Do they desire us to exclude their princes, their clergy, their nobility? The direct contrary. They ear thousand men; and if this course is pursued, it is to be feared, that the whole body of the French nobility may be extinguished. Several hundreds have also perished by famine, and various accidents. nestly solicit that men of every one of these descriptions should be sent to them. They do not call for English, Austrian, or Prussian officers. They call for French emigrant officers. They call for the exiled priests. They have demanded the Compte d'Artois to appear at their head. These are the demands (quite natural demands) of those who are ready to follow the standard of monarchy. The great means therefore of restoring the monarchy which we have made the main object of the war, is to assist the dignity, the religion, and the property of France, to repossess themselves of the means of their natural influence. This ought to be the primary object of all our politicks, and all our military operations. Otherwise every thing will move in a preposterous order, and nothing but confusion and destruction will follow. We must not judge of other parts of France by the temporary submission of Toulon, with two vast fleets in its harbour, and a garrison far more numerous than all the inhabitants able to bear arms. If they were left to themselves, I am quite sure they would not retain their attachment to monarchy of any name for a single week. better expended than in the maintenance of this body of civil troops for re-establishing order in France, and for thus securing its civilization to Europe. This means, if properly used, is of value inestimable. To administer the only cure for the unheard-of disorders of that undone country, I think it infinitely happy for us, that God has given into our hands more effectual remedies than human contrivance could point out. We have in our bosom, and in the bosom of other civilized states, nearer forty than thirty thousand persons, providentially preserved not only from the cruelty and violence, but from the contagion of the horrid practices, sentiments, and language of the jacobins, and even I know that misfortune is not made to win sacredly guarded from the view of such abominable respect from ordinary minds. I know that there is scenes. If we should obtain, in any considerable a leaning to prosperity however obtained, and a district, a footing in France, we possess an immense prejudice in its favour; I know there is a disposi- body of physicians and magistrates of the mind, tion to hope something from the variety and in- whom we now know to be the most discreet, constancy of villany, rather than from the tire- gentle, well-tempered, conciliatory, virtuous, and some uniformity of fixed principle. There have pious persons, who in any order probably existed been, I admit, situations in which a guiding person in the world. You will have a missioner of peace or party might be gained over, and through him and order in every parish. Never was a wiser or them, the whole body of a nation. For the national economy than in the charity of the Enghope of such a conversion, and of deriving ad-lish and of other countries. Never was money vantage from enemies, it might be politick for a while to throw your friends into the shade. But examples drawn from history in occasions like the present will be found dangerously to mislead us. France has no resemblance to other countries which have undergone troubles and been purified by them. If France, jacobinized as it has been for four full years, did contain any bodies of authority and disposition to treat with you, (most assuredly she does not,) such is the levity of those who have expelled every thing respectable in their country, such their ferocity, their arrogance, their mutinous spirit, their habits of defying every thing human and divine, that no engagement would hold with them for three months; nor indeed could they cohere together for any purpose of civilized society, if left as they now are. There must be a means not only of breaking their strength within themselves, but of civilizing them; and these two things must go together, before we can possibly treat with them, not only as a nation, but with any division of them. Descriptions of men of their own race, but better in rank, superiour in property and decorum, of honourable, decent, and orderly habits, are absolutely necessary to bring them to such a frame as to qualify them so much as to come into contact with a civilized nation. A set of those ferocious savages with arms in their hands, left to themselves in one part of the country, whilst you proceed to another, would break forth into outrages at least as bad as their former. They must, as fast as gained, (if ever they are gained,) be put under the guide, direction, and government, of better Frenchmen than themselves, or they will instantly relapse into a fever of aggravated jacobinism. Nor is this corps of instruments of civilization confined to the first order of that state, I mean the clergy. The allied powers possess, also, an exceedingly numerous, well-informed, sensible, ingenious, high principled, and spirited body of cavaliers in the expatriated landed interest of France, as well qualified at least, as I (who have been taught by time and experience to moderate my calculation of the expectancy of human abilities) ever expected to see in the body of any landed gentlemen and soldiers by their birth. France is well winnowed and sifted. Its virtuous men are, I believe, amongst the most virtuous, as its wicked are amongst the most abandoned upon earth. Whatever in the territory of France may be found to be in the middle between these must be attracted to the better part. This will be compassed, when every gentleman, every where being restored to his landed estate, each on his patrimonial ground, may join the clergy in reanimating the loyalty, fidelity, and religion of the people; that these gentlemen proprietors of land may sort that people according to the trust they severally merit, that they may arm the honest and well affected, and disarm and disable the factious and ill disposed. No foreigner can make this discrimination, nor these arrangements. The ancient corporations of burghers according to their several modes should be restored, and placed (as they ought to be) in the hands of men of gravity and property in the cities or bailliages, according to the proper consti princes of their own blood might at length be brought to think the cause of kings, and of kings of their race, wounded in the murder and exile of the branch of France, of as much importance as the killing of a brace of partridges? If they were absolutely idle, and only eat in sloth their bread of sorrow and dependence, they would be forgotten, or at best thought of as wretches unworthy of their pretensions, which they had done nothing to support. If they err from our interests, what care has been taken to keep them in those interests? or what desire has ever been shewn to employ them in any other way than as instruments of their own degradation, shame, and ruin? The parliament of Paris, by whom the title of the regent is to be recognised (not made) according to the laws of the kingdom, is ready to recognise it, and to register it, if a place of meeting was given to them, which might be within their own jurisdiction, supposing that only locality was required for the exercise of their functions: for it is one of the advantages of monarchy, to have no local seat. It may maintain its rights out of the sphere of its territorial jurisdiction, if other tutions of the commons or third estate of France. Regent's en Objection As to their knocking at every door, made to the (which seems to give offence,) can deavour to go any thing be more natural? Abanto Spain. doned, despised, rendered in a manner outlaws by all the powers of Europe, who have treated their unfortunate brethren with all the giddy pride and improvident insolence of blind unfeeling prosperity; who did not even send them a compliment of condolence on the murder of their brother and sister; in such a state is it to be wondered at, or blamed, that they tried every way, likely or unlikely, well or ill chosen, to get out of the horrible pit into which they are fallen, and that in particular they tried whether the I am well apprized, that the little intriguers, and whisperers, and self-conceited, thoughtless babblers, worse than either, run about to depreciate the fallen virtue of a great nation. But whilst they talk, we must make our choice they or the jacobins. We have no other option. As to those, who in the pride of a prosperity, not obtained by their wisdom, valour, or industry, think so well of themselves, and of their own abilities and virtues, and so ill of other men; truth obliges me to say, that they are not founded in their presumption concerning themselves, nor in their contempt of the French princes, magistrates, nobility, and clergy. Instead of inspiring me with dislike and distrust of the unfortunate, engaged with us in a common cause against our jacobin enemy, they take all away my esteem for their own characters, and all my deference to their judgment. There are some few French gentlemen indeed who talk a language not wholly different from this jargon. Those whom I have in my eye, I respect as gallant soldiers, as much as any one can do, but on their political judgment and prudence I have not the slightest reliance, nor on their knowledge of their own country, or of its laws and constitution. They are, if not enemies, at least not friends, to the orders of their own state; not to the princes, the clergy, or the nobility; they possess only an attachment to the monarchy, or rather to the persons of the late king and queen. In all other respects their conversation is jacobin. I am afraid they, or some of them, go into the closets of ministers, and tell them that the affairs of France will be better arranged by the allied powers than by the landed proprietors of the kingdom, or by the princes who have a right to govern; and that if any French are at all to be employed in the settlement of their country, it ought to be only those who have never declared any decided opinion, or taken any active part in the Revolution.* I suspect that the authors of this opinion are mere soldiers of fortune, who, though men of integrity and honour, would as gladly receive military rank from Russia, or Austria, or Prussia, as from the regent of France. Perhaps their not having as much importance at his court as they could wish may incline them to this strange imagination. Perhaps having no property in old France, they are more indifferent about its restoration. Their language is certainly flattering to all ministers in all courts. We all are men; we all love to be told of the extent of our own power and our own faculties. If we love glory, we are jealous of partners, and afraid even of our own instruments. It is of all modes of flattery the most effectual to be told, that you can regulate the affairs of another kingdom better than its hereditary proprietors. It is formed to flatter the principle of conquest so natural to all men. It is this principle which is now making the partition of Poland. The powers concerned have been told by some perfidious Poles, and perhaps they believe, that their usurpation is a great benefit to the people, especially to the common people. However this may turn out with regard to Poland, I am quite sure that France could not be so well under a foreign direction as under that of the representatives of its own king, and its own ancient estates. I think I have myself studied France as much as most of those whom the allied courts are likely to employ in such a work. I have likewise of myself as partial and as vain an opinion as men commonly have of themselves. But if I could command the whole military arm of Europe, I am sure, that a bribe of the best province in that kingdom would not tempt me to intermeddle in their affairs, except in perfect concurrence and concert with the natural, legal interests of the country, composed of the ecclesiastical, the military, the several corporate bodies of justice, and of burghership, making under a monarch (I repeat it again and again) the French nation according to its fundamental constitution. No considerate statesman would undertake to meddle with it upon any other condition. which it is allowable or forbidden to take a part in the concerns of men, whether they are considered individually or in a collective capacity, whenever charity to them, or a care of my own safety, calls forth my activity? Circumstances perpetually variable, directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which never vary, must alone prescribe a conduct fitting on such occasions. The latest casuists of publick law are rather of a republican cast, and, in my mind, by no means so averse as they ought to be to a right in the people (a word, which, ill defined, is of the most dangerous use) to make changes at their pleasure in the fundamental laws of their country. These writers, however, when a country is divided, leave abundant liberty for a neighbour to support any of the parties according to his choice.+ This interference must indeed always be a right, whilst the privilege of doing good to others, and of averting from them every sort of evil, is a right: circumstances may render that right a duty. It depends wholly on this, whether it be a bona fide charity to a party, and a prudent precaution with regard to yourself, or whether under the pretence of aiding one of the parties in a nation, you act in such a manner as to aggravate its calamities, and accomplish its final destruction. In truth it is not the interfering or keeping aloof, but iniquitous intermeddling, or treacherous inaction, which is praised or blamed by the decision of an equitable judge. It will be a just and irresistible presumption against the fairness of the interposing power, that he takes with him no party or description of men in the divided state. It is not probable, that these parties should all, and all alike, be more adverse to the true interests of their country, and less capable of forming a judgment upon them, than those who are absolute strangers to their affairs, and to the character of the actors in them, and have but a remote, feeble, and secondary sympathy with their interest. Sometimes a calm and healing arbiter may be necessary; but he is to compose differences, not to give laws. It is impossible that any one should not feel the full force of that presumption. Even people, whose politicks for the supposed good of their own country, lead them to take advantage of the dissensions of a neighbourThe government of that kingdom is fundamen- ing nation in order to ruin it, will not directly tally monarchical. The publick law of Europe propose to exclude the natives, but they will take has never recognised it in any other form of go- that mode of consulting and employing them, vernment. The potentates of Europe have, by which most nearly approaches to an exclusion. that law, a right, an interest, and a duty, to know In some particulars they propose what amounts with what government they are to treat, and what to that exclusion, in others they do much worse. they are to admit into the federative society, or, in They recommend to ministry, "that no Frenchother words, into the diplomatick republick of man who has given a decided opinion, or acted Europe. This right is clear and indisputable. What other and further interference they have a right to the interiour of the concerns of another people, is a matter on which, as on every political subject, no very definite or positive rule can well be laid down. Our neighbours are men; and who will attempt to dictate the laws, under This was the language of the ministerialists. 66 66 a decided part in this great Revolution, for or against it, should be countenanced, brought for"ward, trusted, or employed, even in the strictest "subordination to the ministers of the allied powers." Although one would think that this advice would stand condemned on the first proposition, yet as it has been made popular, and has ↑ Vattel. |