ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’Sir Fopling Flutter

‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’

Sir Fopling Flutter

Dec. 10, 1813.

‘Nothing,’ continues Vetus, ‘can be more opposite to this great policy, than to fight and to render back the fruits of our successes. We may be assured, that those with whom we contend are ready enough to improvetheirvictories. If we are not equally so,we shall never be at rest. If the enemy beats us, he wins our provinces.—[What provinces of ours?]—If we beat him, we restore all. What more profitable game could he desire! Truly, at this rate, our neighbours must be arrant fools if they leave us one week’s repose!’

There is a spirit of Machiavelian policy in this paragraph which is very commendable. It reminds us of the satirist’s description of ‘fools aspiring to be knaves.’ It is, in fact, this fear of being outwitted by the French, that constantly makes us the dupes of our suspicions of them, as it is a want of confidence in our own strength or firmness, that leads us to shew our courage by defiance. True courage, as well as true wisdom, is not distrustful of itself. Vetus recommends it to us to act upon the maxims of the common disturbers of mankind, of ‘this obdurate and rapacious foe,’ as the only means to secure general tranquillity. He wishes to embody the pretended spirit and principles of French diplomacy in a code,—the acknowledged basis of which should be either universal conquest, or endless hostility. We have, it seems, no chance of repelling the aggressions of the French, but by retaliating them not only on themselves, but on other states. At least, the author gives a pretty broad hint of what he means by the improvement ofourvictories, when hetalks of annexing Holland and Danish Zealand to Hanover, as ‘her natural prey,’insteadof their being the dependencies of France. This is certainly one way of trimming the balance of power in Europe, and placing the independence of nations in a most happy dilemma. The inventor of this new and short way with foreign states only laments that Hanover, ‘under British auspices,’ has not been before-hand with France in imitating Prussia in her seizure of the Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other. He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic, plodding, insipid,commercialspirit by Prussia and Russia. But now that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang, nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir ourselves as effectually as he does,for the good of mankind! But Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not sound logic. He wishes by acoup surto prevent an unfair and dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly, is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because the nature and essence of war isa trial of strength; and, therefore, to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus, ‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders itnecessaryto keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from repeating his attack; and,therefore, to hold inflexiblywhat we have acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost, but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them. He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.

It is neither the actual possession, northe willto keep certain acquisitions, but thepowerto keep them, and,at the same time, to extort other concessions from an enemy, that must determine the basis of all negociations, that are not founded on verbal chimeras.

‘We are taught, indeed, to take for granted, that a peace, whose conditions bear hard on either party, will be the sooner broken by that party; and, therefore, that we have an indirect interest in sacrificing a portion of our conquests.’ The general principle here stated is self-evident, and one would think indisputable. For the very ground of war is a peace whose conditions are thought tobear hardon one of the parties, and yet, according to Vetus, the only way to make peace durable, to prevent the recurrence of an appeal to force, is to impose such hard conditions on an enemy, as it is his interest, and must be his inclination, to breakby force. An opinion of the disproportion between our general strength, and our actual advantages, seems to be the necessary ground of war, but it is here converted into the permanent source of peace. The origin of the common prejudice is, however, very satisfactorily illustrated in the remainder of the paragraph. ‘This language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The blind opponents of every ministerwho happens to be engaged in conducting a war’ [Is war then a mere affair of accident?] ‘can see no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim againstimmoderateexertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and undermining the honest disappointment’ [Quere expectations] ‘of the people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much’ [of that little] ‘undone by negociation. But besides being a factious expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny that we affect any thing more by granting an enemy what arecalled favourable terms, than convince him that he may go to war with England, gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty.’ Here Vetusentirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace, ifnot hard, must be immediatelyfavourable! Because we grant an enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which, by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. ‘The only valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the diminution of our rival’s, by the resources and dominions we have wrested from him.’ First, this security can be good only on one side: secondly, it is not good at all: the only security for peace is not in the actual losses or distresses incurred by states, but in the settled conviction that they cannotbetterthemselves by war. But all these contradictions are nothing to Vetus, who alone does not fluctuate between the extremes of faction, but is still true to war—and himself.

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 theRomans 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 asrepublicanandCorsican, ‘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 thehealthier, and to Englandnot 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 precededthe truceof which I am speaking,the French governmentinvolvedusin 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 loadedmewith 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 ofFurorandOccasion, 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 beenamoured 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 wordimpliesa 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 thesans-culotterieof 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,excludeseven 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 kindof 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 aButbefore the wordPeace, 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 thatfirstof earthly goods, peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his Lordship addedwhat was worth all the rest—BUT we must have asecurepeace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we negociate, and never grant tosuchan enemy conditions, which under the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her tocontingentdangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond even thecalibreof 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 haschased away every doubtful expressionof 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.Iask only thatsecurepeace,—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 withthe 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 ofencroachment.’[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 peacewhich 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 ourdreadful 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 toThe Times,The Courier,The Morning Post,The Sun, andThe 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 demandcompensation for what we have suffered, it is butjustice, 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 breatheeternalwar; 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 momentbecomesnecessary 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 anaked questionof 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 exactpreciselythat measure of humiliation from France, and that we do recommendthat critical advance towards her destruction, that may combine the utmostattainablesatisfaction for our past grievances with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France, since thefatalbattle of Hastings, what hasthis 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 someintervals 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 judgmentthe best securityfor Great Britain, and therefore,if practicable, her most imperious duty, would bethe absolute conquest of France. But since that,unfortunately, is an event whichat presentwe are not likely to accomplish,the second best securityis’ (one would think not to attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her,if we can, to a degree of weakness consistentwith 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 byhis hatred, as to commandhis emissariesin London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, whichhis own persevering and atrocious outrageshave 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 Timesnot 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 sovereignat all timesthreatens 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 ofour second best securitymay 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 acritical 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 hermost 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 acriticaladvance 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 thismaximumof 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 ‘sosmall 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 ofthis Corsicanunder 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 existenceof this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading system of government, can we hope to see Francecrushed and ground down below the capacity of contending for ages to comewith 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] ‘achanceof 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 hispersonaland political destruction. But once released from the terror of his arm,what genuine Englishmancan 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. Vetushowever, 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 willreturn 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 argumentswhich 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 ofthis 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, grownold 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.] ‘Andfrom whomare 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 isFrance 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 conscientiouslybelieve, 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.

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