Chapter IV: Preface (3)

But there is, in our opinion, a third extreme of English faction (if Vetus will spare us the anomaly) not less absurd, and more mischievous than either of the others: we mean those who are the blind adherents of every minister who happens to be engaged in a war, however unnecessarily or wantonly it may have been begun, or however weakly and wickedly carried on: who see no danger in repeated disgraces, and impending ruin, provided we are obstinately bent on pursuing the same dreadful career which has led to them; who, when our losses come thronging in upon us, urge us to persist till we recover the advantages we have lost, and, when we recover them, force us on till we lose all again: with whom peace, in a time of adverse fortune, is dishonour, and in the pride of success, madness: who only exaggerate ‘our pretensions at a peace,’ that they may never be complied with: who assume a settled unrelenting purpose in our adversary to destroy us, in order to inspire us with the same principle of never-ending hostility against him: who leave us no alternative but eternal war, or inevitable ruin: who irritate the hatred and the fears of both parties, by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of defiance, suspicion, and the most galling contempt: who, adapting every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, constantly return in the same circle to the point from which they set out: with whom peace is always unattainable, war always necessary!

We shall pass over Vetus’s historic researches, the wars of the Romans and Carthaginians (the formal latitude of Vetus’s pen delights in these great divisions of human affairs), and come to what is more to our purpose.

In modern times he first comes to the treaty of 1763, only (as far as we can find) to affix the epithet ‘American rebels’ as a sort of Pragmatic Sanction to our colonists, with whom, he says, France joined a few years afterwards, and, ‘in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king, aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy.’ Yet, notwithstanding this long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one, stigmatized as _republican_ and _Corsican_, ‘with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,’ as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus himself ‘would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the _healthier_, and to England _not less hostile_, sovereignty of the banished house of Bourbon.’ Why then pertinaciously affix these obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse interpreters of truth.

To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, ‘the conditions of peace must bear hard on one of the parties,’ Vetus asks, ‘Were the powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering her any second wrong?’ Now this is an instance precisely in point to prove the direct reverse of Vetus’s doctrine: for here was a treaty in which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.

‘Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a moment?’ This is still altering the record. The question is not about submitting to hard conditions, but about imposing them. Besides, ‘the aggravated and multiplied molestations, injuries, and insults, which these courts were doomed to suffer,’ might be accounted for from those which they had in vain attempted to inflict on France, and from their still more wretched complaisance in being made the tools of a court which was not continental.

‘Then comes the peace of Amiens, our peace of Amiens—a peace born, educated, nourished, and matured in this very philanthropic spirit of gentleness and forgiveness. In the war which preceded _the truce_ of which I am speaking, _the French government_ involved _us_ in considerably more than two hundred millions of debt.’ Vetus then proceeds to state that we made peace without any liquidation of this claim, without satisfaction, without a bond, (_what else?_) without a promise, without a single guinea! ‘I will have ransom, most egregious ransom.’ Why was it ever heard of that one government paid the debts in which another had involved itself in making war upon it?

‘The language of England,’ says our author, ‘was correctly what follows:—You, Monsieur, have loaded _me_ with unspeakable distresses and embarrassments,’ (_all this while, be it recollected, our affairs were going on most prosperously and gloriously in the cant of The Times_) ‘you have robbed me of half my fortune, and reduced me to the brink of beggary,’ (_the French by all accounts were in the gulph of bankruptcy_) ‘you have torn away and made slaves of my friends and kindred,’ (_indeed_) ‘you have dangerously wounded me, and murdered my beloved children, who armed to defend their parent.’—This is too much, even for the dupes of England. Stick, Vetus, to your statistics, and do not make the pathetic ridiculous! Sophistry and affectation may confound common sense to a certain degree, but there is a point at which our feelings revolt against them.

We have already remarked on what Vetus says of Hanover; he probably will not wish us to go farther into it. Of Bonaparte he says, of course, that nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that he will convert the smallest concession made to him into a weapon for our destruction. That is, we have it in our power to set him at defiance, to insult him, to ‘bring him to the block,’ etc., whenever we please; and yet we are so completely in his power, so dependent on him, that the smallest concession must be fatal to us, will be made the instrument of our inevitable destruction. Thus is the public mind agitated and distracted by incredible contradictions, and made to feel at once ‘the fierce extremes’ of terror and triumph, of rashness and despair. ‘Our safety lies in his weakness, not in his will.’ If so, or if it depends on either of the conditions here stated, we are in no very pleasant situation. But our real safety depends on our own strength, and steady reliance on it, and not on the arguments of Vetus.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘Madmen’s epistles are no gospels.’

_Dec. 16, 1813._

The last Letter of Vetus begins with an allusion to the events which have lately taken place in Holland. He then proceeds—‘What final effect this popular movement by the Dutch may have upon the future interests and prosperity of England is a question to be discussed with deliberate caution—with extreme solicitude—and with the chance, I trust, the distant chance, of its conducting us to no very gratifying conclusion!’ There is something in this passage truly characteristic, and well worthy of our notice. Vetus is, it seems, already jealous of the Dutch. The subtle venom of his officious zeal is instantly put in motion by the prospect of their national independence and commercial prosperity; and his pen is, no doubt, prepared, on the slightest provocation of circumstances, to convert them from an ally to be saved, into a rival and an enemy to be crushed. He, however, waives for the present the solemn discussion, till he can find some farther grounds to confirm him in his extreme solicitude and mysterious apprehensions. The perverse readiness of Vetus to pick a quarrel out of everything, or out of nothing, is exactly described in Spenser’s Allegory of _Furor_ and _Occasion_, which if we thought him ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ we would recommend to his perusal.

The introductory comment on the Revolution in Holland is a clue to the whole of our author’s political system, which we shall here endeavour to explain. He looks askance with ‘leer malign’ on the remotest prospect of good to other nations. Every addition to the general stock of liberty or happiness, is to him so much taken from our own. He sees nothing gratifying in that prosperity or independence, which is shared (or any part of it) with foreign nations. He trembles with needless apprehension at the advantages in store for them, which he anticipates only to prevent, and is indifferent to our own welfare, interests, honour—except as they result from the privations, distress, and degradation of the rest of the world. Hatred, suspicion, and contempt for other nations are the first and last principles of the love which ‘an upright Englishman’ bears to his country. To prevent their enjoying a moment’s repose, or indulging even in a dream of future comfort, he would involve his own country in incessant distraction and wretchedness, and risk its final ruin on the cast of a die!—Vetus professes, with some reason, not to be enamoured of quotation: but he may, perhaps, allow us to refer to an author, who, though not so deep read in Vattel and the writings of the jurists, had just and penetrating views of human nature. ‘Think, there’s livers out of England. What’s England in the world’s map? In a great pool a swan’s nest.’ Now this ‘swan’s nest’ is indeed to us more than all the world besides—to cherish, to protect, to love, and honour it. But if we expect it to be so to the rest of the world—if we do not allow them to cultivate their own affections, to improve their own advantages, to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy.

Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term ‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word _implies_ a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the _sans-culotterie_ of scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the welfare of our own country, _excludes_ even the shadow of a pretension to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by passion and prejudice.

Alter his cold exordium on the Revolution in Holland, our consistent politician enters with warmth on Lord Castlereagh’s speech on the subsidiary treaties, in which he finds a _But_ before the word _Peace_, which has a most happy efficacy in healing the wounds inflicted on his tortured apprehensions, by the explicit, unqualified declaration of Lord Liverpool in the other House. ‘After describing the laudable solicitude of Ministers for the attainment of that _first_ of earthly goods, peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his Lordship added _what was worth all the rest_—BUT we must have a _secure_ peace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we negociate, and never grant to _such_ an enemy conditions, which under the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her to _contingent_ dangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond even the _calibre_ of Lord Castlereagh’s talents as a statesman.) ‘These,’ proceeds Vetus, ‘were nearly the words; they certainly do not compromise his meaning.’ (Our author cannot be much mistaken in attributing to his Lordship any words which seeming to have some meaning, in reality have none.) ’ Here then the noble Secretary has _chased away every doubtful expression_ of his colleague.’ (‘Why so,—this horrible shadow’ of peace ‘being gone,’ Vetus ‘is himself again.’)

‘The sentiment delivered by the sovereign on the throne is now given to us with a construction, at which we need no longer be alarmed. _I_ ask only that _secure_ peace,—a peace consistent with English safety—_void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour, otherwise the ambition and arrogance of Bonaparte_, which, as compared with _the relief of one day’s hunger to the meanest peasant in this our native land_, are baubles not worth a name!’—This is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable specimens we ever met with of that figure in rhetoric, designated by an excellent writer as ‘the figure of _encroachment_.’[8] Vetus, by a series of equations (certainly not mathematical ones) at length arrives at a construction of peace at which he is no longer alarmed; at the identical peace which he wants, and the only one he will admit,—a peace preposterous in its very terms, and in its nature impracticable,—a peace ‘void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour’ of the enemy, which are to pass with them as well as with us, for so much ‘arrogance and ambition.’ This is the only peace consistent with English safety—this is the secure peace of Lord Castlereagh—the fair and honourable peace announced from the throne—the very peace which Lord Liverpool meant to describe when he startled Vetus by the doubtful expression of a peace ‘consistent with the honour, rights, and interests of France’—‘of such a peace as we in her situation should be disposed to grant.’ To the mind of Vetus, which is indeed the very receptacle for contradictions ‘to knot and gender in,’ these two sorts of peace appear to be perfectly compatible, and the one a most happy explanation of the other, viz. a peace void of every shadow of regard to the rights and honour of a rival nation, and a peace consistent with those rights and that honour. If this is not ‘mere midsummer madness,’ we do not know what is. Or if any thing can surpass it (‘for in this lowest deep of absurdity a lower deep still opens to receive us, gaping wide’) it is the forlorn piece of sentimental mummery by which it is attempted to protract this endless war of proscription against the pretensions of France, under the mask of relieving the wants and distresses of the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed contemptible and mischievous baubles.

‘What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? _Are they still in pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them?_ When we demand compensation for our _dreadful sufferings_, it is but what justice grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires. Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy supremacy of Bonaparte!’

First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the patriotic contributors to _The Times_, _The Courier_, _The Morning Post_, _The Sun_, and _The Star_, must have had in writing, and their admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand compensation for what we have suffered, it is but _justice_, if we can at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer; but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew, by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of Vetus’s style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years engaged in a desperate and (for some reason or other) an unequal struggle against France;—by playing at double or quits, she has just recovered from the very brink of destruction; and the keepers of our political E.O. tables treat us as traitors and miscreants, who would dissuade her from sitting down once more to finish the game, and ruin her adversary.

‘—It is asked,—“Do we propose to humble France? Do we propose to destroy her? If so, we breathe _eternal_ war; if so, we convert the aggressor into the sufferer, and transfer all the dignity and authority of justice to the enemy against whom we arm!”’ Yes, against whom we arm for the avowed purpose of his destruction. From the moment that we make the destruction of an enemy (be he who he may) the indispensable condition of our safety, our destruction from that moment _becomes_ necessary to his, and an act of self-defence. Not much liking this dilemma from which our author has more than once ‘struggled to get free,’ he in the next passage makes a wide career indeed, in order, no doubt, to return to the charge with better effect hereafter. ‘The question of peace or eternal war is not a _naked question_ of right and wrong. It is a question, whose morality is determined by its reference to our preservation as a people. To such interrogatories I answer without reserve, that we ought to exact _precisely_ that measure of humiliation from France, and that we do recommend _that critical advance towards her destruction_, that may combine the utmost _attainable_ satisfaction for our past grievances with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France, since the _fatal_ battle of Hastings, what has _this nation of Saxon warriors_’—(We hardly know ourselves in the learned livery of Vetus’s style. He himself is doubtless descended from some very old family settled here before the Conquest)—‘What has this nation of Saxon warriors ever yet endured from France but injury and affliction?’ Yet we have made a shift to exist as a nation under all this load of calamity. We still breathe and live notwithstanding some intervals of repose, some short resting places afforded us, before this morbid inspector of health, like another Doctor Pedro Positive, injoined his preposterous regimen of incessant war as necessary to lasting peace, and to our preservation as a people!

‘Modern France’ continues Vetus, rising in his argument, has no principle so deeply rooted as that of everlasting enmity to England. ‘I confess for this reason that in my uncorrupted judgment _the best security_ for Great Britain, and therefore, _if practicable, her most imperious duty_, would be _the absolute conquest of France_. But since that, _unfortunately_, is an event which _at present_ we are not likely to accomplish, _the second best security_ is’ (one would think not to attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her, _if we can_, to a degree of weakness consistent _with our immediate repose_.’ After thus modestly postponing the absolute conquest of France to a more convenient opportunity, he adds the following incredible sentence. ‘If the enemy should be so far borne away by _his hatred_, as to command _his emissaries_ in London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, which _his own persevering and atrocious outrages_ have rendered in the mind of every Englishman indispensable to the safety of these islands, the woeful alternative of perpetual war very plainly originates not with Great Britain but with Bonaparte!’ That is to say, _The Times_ not long ago laid it down as a fixed, unalterable maxim, without reference to terms of one sort or another, that we were never to make peace with Bonaparte; Vetus in this very letter enters into an elaborate apology, for that multitude of wise, honest, and virtuous persons who think his existence as a sovereign _at all times_ threatens our existence as a nation, and it is because we entered our protest against this ‘frantic outcry raised by degenerate Englishmen,’ that Bonaparte is here made to charge his emissaries in London to announce that he prefers eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, the moderation of which conditions or of _our second best security_ may be judged of when we are told that the best, and indeed only real security for Great Britain, and therefore her most imperious duty, would be the absolute conquest of France. Vetus is, however, contented with such terms of peace as will imply only a _critical advance to her destruction_, and if Bonaparte is not contented with the same terms, the alternative of eternal war, it seems, originates with him and not with Vetus.[9]

But we deny that though this best security for Great Britain, the absolute conquest of France, were in her power, that it would be her most imperious duty to effect it. And we deny it, because on the same ground a better security still for Great Britain would be the conquest or destruction of Europe and the world; and yet we do not think it her imperious duty, even if she could, to accomplish the one, or to make a _critical_ advance to the other. For if it is once laid down and acted upon as a maxim in national morality, that the best and most desirable security of a state is in the destruction of its neighbours, or that there is to be an unrelenting ever watchful critical approximation to this object as far as possible, there is an end of civil society. The same principle of not stopping short of this _maximum_ of selfish security will impose the same imperious duty of rankling jealousy, and inexorable hostility on others. Our speculator’s ‘best possible security’ for the independence of states, is nothing but a watchword for mutual havoc, and wide-spreading desolation. Terrified with the phantom of imaginary danger, he would have us rush headlong on the reality. We are obstinately to refuse the enjoyment of a moment’s repose, and proceed to commit wilful dilapidation on the estate of our happiness, because it is not secured to us by an everlasting tenure. Placed at the mercy of the malice or hypocrisy of every venal alarmist, our only resource must be to seek a refuge from our fears in our own destruction, or to find the gratification of our revenge in that of others. But a whole nation is no more justified in obtaining this best of all possible securities for itself, by the immediate subversion of other states, than the assassin is justified in taking the life of another, to prevent the possibility of any future attempt upon his own. For in proportion as a state is weak and incapable of subjugating us, is the manifest injustice of any such precaution;—and in proportion as a state is formidable, and likely to excite serious apprehension for our own safety, is the danger and folly of setting an example which may be retaliated with so much greater effect, and ‘like a devilish engine, recoil upon ourselves.’ That exclusive patriotism which claims for our country an exemption from ‘contingent danger,’ which would place its wealth, its power, or even its safety beyond the reach of chance and the fluctuation of human affairs, claims for it an exemption from the common lot of human nature. That exclusive patriotism which seeks to enforce this claim (equally impious and unwise) by the absolute conquest of rival states, tempts the very ruin it professes to avert.

But Vetus mistakes the nature of patriotism altogether. He would transform that principle which was intended for the tutelary genius of nations, into the destroying demon of the world. He ransacks past history to revive old grudges; he anticipates the future to invent new ones. In his whole system, there is not room for ‘so small a drop of pity as a wren’s eye.’ His patriotism is the worm that dies not; a viper gnawing at the heart. He would strip this feeling of everything but the low cunning, and brutal ferocity of the savage state, and then arm it with all the refinements of scholastic virtue, and the most rigid logic. The diverging rays of human reason which should be diffused to cheer and enlighten the moral world, are in him collected into a focus of raging zeal to burn and destroy. It is well for mankind that in the order of the universe, our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own antidote within them. The only justification of our narrow, selfish passions, is their short-sightedness:—were it not for this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would not leave them the smallest interval of rest. It is well that the ungovernable impulses of fear and hatred are excited only by gross, palpable objects; and are therefore transient, and limited in their operation. It is well that those motives which do not owe their birth to reason, should not afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into abstract principles of right and wrong?

The whole of Vetus’s reasoning is founded on the false notions of patriotism which we have here pointed out, and which we conceive to be totally inconsistent with ‘the just principles of negociation.’ The remainder of his letter, which unfolds his motives for a pacific arrangement with Bonaparte, is founded entirely on the same jaundiced and distempered views. Many wise, many honest, many virtuous persons, he says, have maintained, not without reason, ‘the incompetency of _this Corsican_ under any circumstances to discharge the obligations of a state of peace.’ But he, more wise, more honest, more virtuous, sees a hope, a shadow of peace, rising like a cloudy speck out of a quarter where it was least expected. ‘The stone which the builders rejected, is become the corner-stone of his Temple of Peace.’—‘It does not appear to Vetus, that a peace with Bonaparte is now unattainable on terms sufficient for our safety.’ He thinks there is no man so proper to make peace with as this Corsican, this Revolutionist,—no one so proper to govern France—to the complete exclusion of the Bourbons, whose pretensions he scouts analytically, logically, and chronologically, and who, it seems, had always the same implacable animosity against this country as Bonaparte, _without a tythe of his ability_. [Surely this circumstance might plead a little in their favour with Vetus.] And why so? Whence arises this unexpected partiality shewn to Bonaparte? Why it is ‘from the strong conviction that by no other means so decisive as the existence of this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading system of government, can we hope to see France _crushed and ground down below the capacity of contending for ages to come_ with the force of the British Empire, _moved by the spirit of freedom_! Regarding France under every known form of government as the irreconcileable foe of England, _I have beheld with almost unmingled joy the growth and accumulation of this savage despotism_!’ To be sure ‘while there appeared to some persons,’ [Vetus was not one of them] ‘a _chance_ of his enslaving the Continent, and hurling the mass of subjugated nations against our shores—then, indeed, those who entertained such fears were justified in seeking his _personal_ and political destruction. But once released from the terror of his arm, _what genuine Englishman_ can fail to rejoice in the privilege of consigning Bonaparte and the French people, for better for worse, to the paradise of each other’s embraces?’ Vetus then proceeds to inveigh at great length against the persons and pretensions of the Bourbons. Leaving them to the mercy of this good-natured remembrancer, we shall only observe, that he decides the impolicy of restoring the Bourbons, by asking, whether their restoration would not be advantageous to France, and consequently (he infers very consistently with himself) _injurious to this country_. Looking forward but half a century, he sees France gradually regain under the old regime ‘her natural ascendancy over Great Britain, from which she falls, and must fall every hour more rapidly from the necessary operation of those principles on which the Corsican dynasty is founded.’ Nay, looking on farther than the expiration of the same half century, he sees ‘sloth, weakness, and poverty, worse than ever sprung from Turkish policy, proceeding from this odious, self-dissolving power, and a gulph of irretrievable destruction, already yawning for our eternal foe.’

It is not long ago since Vetus drew an historical parallel between this country and Carthage, encouraging us to expect the same fate from France which Carthage received from Rome, and to act upon this fanciful comparison as a solid ground of wisdom. Now all at once ‘this mendicant in argument, this perfect juggler in politics,’ inverts the perspective, takes a prophetic view of the events of the next fifty years, and France is seen dwindling into another Turkey, which the genius of British freedom grinds to powder, and crushes beneath her feet! These great statesmen-like views of things, ‘this large discourse of reason, looking before and after,’ are, we confess, beyond us. We recollect indeed a similar prophecy to that of Vetus, couched in nearly the same terms, when in the year 1797, the French were said to be ‘on the verge, nay, in the very gulph of bankruptcy,’ and that their finances could not hold out six months longer. Vetus however, taught by the failure of past prognostics, constructs his political calculations for the ensuing century, instead of the ensuing year, and puts off the day of reckoning to a period when he and his predictions will be forgotten.

Such are the charitable grounds on which our author wishes to secure Bonaparte on the throne of France, and thinks that peace may at present be made with him, on terms consistent with our safety. He is not, like others, ‘ready to shake hands with the Usurper over the tomb of the murdered D’Enghien, provided he will _return to the paths of religion and virtue_;’ but he will shake hands with him over the ruins of the liberty and happiness of France, on the express condition that ‘he never returns to the paths of religion and morality.’ Vetus is willing to forget the injuries which Bonaparte may have done to England, for the sake of the greater mischiefs he may do to France. These are the ‘obligations’ which Vetus owes to him—this the source of his gratitude, the sacred pledge that reconciles him to ‘that monster whom England detests.’ He is for making peace with the ‘tyrant,’ to give him an opportunity to rivet on the chains of France, and fix her final doom. But is Vetus sincere in all this? His reasoning comes in a very questionable shape; and we the more doubt it, because he has no sooner (under the auspices of Bonaparte) hurled France down the gulf of irretrievable destruction, than he immediately resumes the old topic of eternal war or perpetual bondage, as the only alternative which this country can look to. Why, if he is in earnest, insist with Lord Castlereagh on the caution with which we must grant terms to ‘such an enemy,’ to this disabled and paralyzed foe? Why assert, as Vetus did in his very last letter, that ‘nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that any concession made to him will be instantly converted into a weapon for our destruction?’ Why not grant to him such terms as might be granted to the Bourbons, since they would be granted to a much less dangerous and powerful rival? Why not subsist, as we have hitherto done, without the fear of perpetual war or perpetual bondage before our eyes, now that the crown of France has lost its original brightness, and is shorn of those beams which would again sparkle round it, if fixed on the head of a Bourbon? We suspect that our author is not quite in earnest in his professions, because he is not consistent with himself. Is it possible that his anxiety to keep out the Bourbons arises from his fear that peace might creep in with them, at least as a sort of compliment of the season? Is our veteran politician aware, in his own mind, that the single epithets, Corsican, republican, revolutionary, will have more effect in stirring up the embers of war, than all the arguments which he might use to demonstrate the accumulating dangers to be apprehended from the mild paternal sway of the ancient dynasty?

We cannot help saying, however, that we think the elaborate attempt of Vetus to prove the necessary extinction of the power of France under the government of Bonaparte, a total failure. What is the amount of his argument? That in a period when the French were to owe their existence and their power to war, Bonaparte has made them a warlike people, and that they did not sit down quietly to ‘the cultivation of arts, luxuries, and letters,’ when the world was beleaguered against them. Is it for Vetus, who reprobates the peace of Amiens, _that hollow truce_ (as he justly calls it), that intermission of war but for a moment, to say of Bonaparte, ‘His application of public industry is only to the arts of death—all other perishes for want of wholesome nourishment’? What then becomes of the long-resounded charge against him on his exclamation ‘for ships, colonies, and commerce’? We suspect, that energy in war is not an absolute proof of weakness in peace. He lays down, indeed, a general principle (true enough in itself) that a government, in its nature and character at variance with the people, must be comparatively weak and insecure; yet, in applying this maxim, he proves not that the French people and government are at irreconcileable variance, but that the one has become entirely subdued and assimilated to the other. But hear him speak for himself. ‘The causes of the overthrow of the old government are foreign to our present purpose. The consequence has been the birth of _this bloody and scorching despotism_,—this giant, armed from his mother’s womb with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire. Can such a government be fit for such a people? Can a tyranny, operating by direct violence and characteristic of the earliest periods in the most barbarous condition of mankind, have any quality adapted to the wants or feelings of a nation, grown _old in arts_, luxuries, and letters? Is it not plain to the least acute observer, that where the principles of such a government, and such a stage of society, are so vehemently contrasted, there can be no immediate alliance; but that an incessant counteraction must ensue—that the government or the people must change their character before a just harmony and co-operation can exist between them; _in other words, that one of them must yield_!’

[Well, this is the very thing which, in the next sentence, he shews has actually taken place.] ‘And _from whom_ are we to infer this ultimate submission to its rival? Has the tyrant loosed his chains?—has he relaxed his hold, or flung aside the whip of scorpions? No! it is _France herself which has given way_. It is the French nation who gradually recede from the rest of the civilized world.’ That is, it is France who, contrary to Vetus’s argument, in receding gradually from the rest of the civilized world, has been identified with the government, and become that whip of scorpions in the hands of Bonaparte, which has been the scourge and dread of all Europe. It is thus that our author always defeats himself. He is fond of abstruse reasoning and deep investigation in exact proportion to his incapacity for them—as eunuchs are amorous through impotence!

But though he fails in his argument, the moral is not less instructive. He teaches us on what grounds a genuine English patriot goes to war, and on what terms he will make peace. A patriot of this exclusive stamp, who is troubled with none of the symptoms of a ‘spurious and mawkish beneficence,’ threatens France with the restoration of the Bourbons, only to throw her into the convulsions of anarchy, and withdraws that kindly interference, only that she may sink into the more fatal lethargy of despotism. It is the same consistent patriot who kindles the fires of La Vendée, and whenever it suits his purpose, is no longer borne away by the ‘torrent of royal, flaming, unreflecting sympathies!’ It is the same tried friend of his country, who carries on a twenty years’ war for the preservation of our trade and manufactures, and when they are mentioned as inducements for peace, disdains ‘all gross, commercial calculations.’ It is the same conscientious politician, who at one time makes war for the support of social order, and the defence of our holy religion;—who, at another, hails the disappearance of ‘the last glimmering of education among a people grown old in arts and letters,’ and who rejoices ‘to see the Christian religion made studiously contemptible by the poverty and debasement of its professors!’ It is the same true patriot, the same Vetus, who ‘beholds with unmingled joy, the growth and accumulation of a savage despotism, which is to crush and bow down France under our feet;’—who holds ‘the whip of scorpions over her head;’—who ‘arms a scorching tyranny with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire’ against her;—who pushes her headlong down ‘the yawning gulf of irretrievable destruction;’ it is the same Vetus, who, suddenly recovering all the severity of justice, and all the tenderness of humanity, makes a piteous outcry about ‘the dreadful sufferings we have endured,’ in attempting to heap coals of fire on our adversary, demands the payment of ‘two hundred millions of debt, in which her government have wantonly involved us,’ complains of our being ‘driven to beggary and want’ in this unnatural conflict, calls for the release of our countrymen, ‘sent into hopeless captivity,’ and invokes the murdered names of those children of the state, who ‘armed to defend a beloved parent, and an injured country!’ Even Vetus shrinks from the enormity of such inconsistencies, and excuses himself by saying, ‘Do I feel the spontaneous and unprovoked desire that such a mass of evil should be perpetuated for any portion of mankind? _God forbid._ But it is, _I conscientiously_ believe, a question, _which of these countries shall destroy the other_. In that case, my part is taken—France must be ruined, to save our native country from being ruined. If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it. _Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us._’ Here then our bane and antidote are both before us: perpetual war or perpetual bondage;—a pleasant alternative!—but it is an alternative of Vetus’s making, and we shall not, _if we can help it_, submit to either of his indispensable conditions. We shall not learn of him, for ‘his yoke is not easy, nor his burden light.’ If this be our inevitable lot, ‘he cannot help it.’ No; but he can help laying the blame of his own irritable and mischievous conclusions on Nature and Providence; or at least we think it our duty to guard ourselves and others against the fatal delusion.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

‘Take him, and cut him out in little stars.’

_Jan. 3, 1814._

We undertook, some time ago, the task of ascertaining the true value of this writer’s reasoning, by removing the cumbrous load of words which oppress his understanding, as well as that of his readers; and we find that ‘our occupation is not yet gone.’ His last letter, indeed, furnishes us with comparatively slender materials. His style is considerably abated. With Bottom in the play, he may be said to ‘aggravate his voice so, that he roars you an ’twere any sucking dove.’ His swaggering paradoxes dwindle into unmeaning common-places; his violent dogmas into tame equivocations. There is scarcely an attempt made to defend his own extreme opinions, or to repel the charge of gross and glaring inconsistency which we brought against them. He makes indeed a faint effort to screen certain general positions from the odium and contempt they deserve, by explaining them away, and to shift off the responsibility of others, by directly denying them. Vetus has, in fact, marched boldly on in a fog of splendid words, till he unexpectedly finds himself on the edge of a precipice, and he seems willing to retreat from it as well as his accustomed solemnity, and the incumbrances of his style will permit. It may, perhaps, be some consolation, if we remind him that he is not the first enthusiast on record, who mistook a cloud for a goddess. His present situation is certainly no very pleasant one: it a good deal resembles that of Parolles, when he undertook the recovery of his drum.

The most striking part of Vetus’s last letter is his gratuitous _tirade_ against what has been called the modern philosophy, as if this were the only alternative (whereas it is in truth the antithesis or converse) of his system of exclusive patriotism. Our contradiction of his first principle, that the basis of a peace with France is to be one which does not leave a shadow of regard to her honour, rights, or interest, and that the terms of peace to which she is in duty bound to accede, must be such as to imply a _critical advance_ to her destruction—our utter rejection of this new-fangled theory of negociation he considers as ‘a sucker from the root of that poisonous vegetable, the doctrine of universal benevolence,’ and deprecates our reasoning on the subject as ‘a blossom which threatens the desolation of the moral world!’ We really cannot attribute to our opinions any such power or any such tendency as the morbid imagination of our political hypochondriac lends to them. The arguments of Vetus on this question seem a sort of transcript of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, or of one of Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures at Lincoln’s Inn; and are very tolerable, dull, common-place declamation—a little bordering on fustian. But, as is the invariable fate of Vetus’s arguments, they contain a flat contradiction to the principle he is aiming to establish. Though the passage has little to do with the immediate question, we shall give it as a literary curiosity. It is an instance of one of those lapses of thought, of that epilepsy of the mind, which we have already pointed out as the distinguishing characteristic of this author’s understanding. His object is to exclude all general reasoning, or the seeds of what he absurdly calls ‘theo-philanthropy’ from the feelings of patriotism; and in his eagerness to do this, he effectually explodes and laughs to scorn all patriotism, as a branch of the same theo-philanthropy, as impracticable and romantic folly. His words are these:—

‘One of these patriots enacts the part of a drawling hypocritical projector, whom no natural affection can move, nor individual happiness enliven. He is a regular brother of a well known sect, which we of this generation have had the misfortune to behold in high activity—and which, having seen, it is but wisdom to remember. The men I speak of were those who in some degree precipitated the French revolution, and who entirely perverted its possible uses, the mongrel race of metaphysical enthusiasts, who undertook to change the objects of human feeling, that they might disappoint more effectually the ends for which it was bestowed. Such were the worshippers of the strumpet goddess Reason; a deity, in herself, and in the prostitute who represented her, convertible to purposes equally abandoned. The next step, after acknowledging this divinity, was to make a display of her power. Mankind were to be _reasoned_ out of _all_ human sensibilities; but the loss was to be supplied by reasoning them into a new assortment of human sensibilities, on a larger and nobler scale. Brotherly regard was a puny sentiment; what was a single brother to him who felt that millions of freemen were his brothers! Marriage, too, that holy and heavenly[10] and heart-sustaining institution, what with its graceful and beautiful assemblage of bland obligations and virtuous sympathies—how stood the fixed relation of husband and wife? Why, treason to natural liberty!—“exclusive tenderness”—a bar to the performance of those unconfined embraces, which spoke the reign of universal love. Parental affection, and filial piety, also, were still less worthy to escape the blight of this ruthless philosophical reform. How narrow was the father’s mansion! How diminutive the mind that could look with reverence to the beings that gave it birth, when the republic, sole heiress of philanthropy and freedom—the great republic, offered herself as the fond and universal parent. Nor could the sire, who argued logically, bewail the sacrifice of his devoted offspring. His children—not his, but their country’s children—were to be educated by and for that country. His paternal feelings were not to be extinguished—no, nothing more than transferred to the state, and ennobled by the magnitude of the object. This same republic was a perfect “Scrub.” She was to play the sister, husband, wife, son, and mother—confiscating and appropriating the individual duties, rights, and charities of mankind—ransacking the deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as prizes to her sovereign will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.

‘_But the phrenzy did not terminate here._ It was not enough that all the relations of life should merge in that of citizen: even “exclusive patriotism” was a vulgar thought. In the paroxysms of disorder, it was sometimes proposed, that the citizen himself should evaporate into a citizen of the world. The universal republic—the vast family of mankind—the deputations from the human race—became instruments with the knaves who led, and visions for the dupes who admired. There can really be no objection to this superfine theory, but that it is inconsistent with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man—that it unfixes our moral land-marks—melts into air every practical virtue and definite duty—substitutes words for salutary deeds—and by directing our most natural and useful passions to objects indistinct or unattainable, leaves these powerful agents afloat, and ends by abusing them to the production of crime and misery. Such were the results of that system of speculation, which assumed for its basis the existence of a species of beings far above the pitch of humanity, and which, in its application to human affairs, reduces them to the level of brutes.

‘A sucker from the root of this poisonous vegetable is again in blossom, and threatens the desolation of the moral world. We are called upon to abdicate the right and obligation of preferring and protecting our native country, that is, of enjoying our proper advantages, and of discharging our specific trusts—and for what? Why, that we may undertake the preposterous office, and execute the factitious duty of handing over to a mortal enemy the greatness to which we have waded through blood and fire, and raising his empire on the ruins of our own. Beware, we are warned, of neglecting the rights of the adversary. It is our peculiar business to guard the rights of France.’[11]

The whole of this pompous episode is a mere diversion to the question. Vetus, some time ago, asked, in a tone which could not be mistaken, ‘Who are the French nation? A rank non-entity. Who are to be the sole judges of the rights and pretensions of what once was France? We, and our allies!’—and when we protest against this unheard-of basis of a negociation between rival states, he answers with a tedious prize-dissertation on the doctrine of universal benevolence, and the perfectibility of man. Vetus insists on a peace (the only peace fit for a wise nation) that shall remain a proud monument of its own superiority,—that is, a peace which can never be made between any two states, a peace that does not admit of the shadow of regard to the rights, interests, or honour of the enemy, a peace that implies a critical advance to the destruction of France. But it seems, that all this proud display of pedantic phraseology, by which he attempted to ‘confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears,’ now means nothing more than that we are to guard and protect our native country, and not surrender our own rights to the enemy. There needed no oracle to tell us that. But Vetus, having set out on the forlorn hope of political paradox, is himself ashamed to turn back to a trite truism, and contends that there is no safety for this country but in the destruction of the enemy, and no patriotism which is not inconsistent with the rights, liberties, and even existence of other countries. We deny it. We say there is a patriotism consistent with the claims of reason, justice, and humanity; and another _exclusive_ of them. The latter is Vetus’s patriotism; the former is ours. This we have stated before. We do not wonder that Vetus has not answered it; for it does not admit of an answer.