Edmund Burke - The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)

36. There is no point which the faction of fraternity in England have labored more than to excite in the poor the horror of any war with France upon any occasion. When they found that their open attacks upon our Constitution in favor of a French republic were for the present repelled, they put that matter out of sight, and have taken up the more plausible and popular ground of general peace, upon merely general principles; although these very men, in the correspondence of their clubs with those of France, had reprobated the neutrality which now they so earnestly press. But, in reality, their maxim was, and is, "Peace and alliance with France, and war with the rest of the world."

37. This last motion of Mr. Fox bound up the whole of his politics during the session. This motion had many circumstances, particularly in the Norwich correspondence, by which the mischief of all the others was aggravated beyond measure. Yet this last motion, far the worst of Mr. Fox's proceedings, was the best supported of any of them, except his amendment to the address. The Duke of Portland had directly engaged to support the war;—here was a motion as directly made to force the crown to put an end to it before a blow had been struck. The efforts of the faction have so prevailed that some of his Grace's nearest friends have actually voted for that motion; some, after showing themselves, went away; others did not appear at all. So it must be, where a man is for any time supported from personal considerations, without reference to his public conduct. Through the whole of this business, the spirit of fraternity appears to me to have been the governing principle. It might be shameful for any man, above the vulgar, to show so blind a partiality even to his own country as Mr. Fox appears, on all occasions, this session, to have shown to France. Had Mr. Fox been a minister, and proceeded on the principles laid down by him, I believe there is little doubt he would have been considered as the most criminal statesman that ever lived in this country. I do not know why a statesman out of place is not to be judged in the same manner, unless we can excuse him by pleading in his favor a total indifference to principle, and that he would act and think in quite a different way, if he were in office. This I will not suppose. One may think better of him, and that, in case of his power, he might change his mind. But supposing, that, from better or from worse motives, he might change his mind on his acquisition of the favor of the crown, I seriously fear, that, if the king should to-morrow put power into his hands, and that his good genius would inspire him with maxims very different from those he has promulgated, he would not be able to get the better of the ill temper and the ill doctrines he has been the means of exciting and propagating throughout the kingdom. From the very beginning of their inhuman and unprovoked rebellion and tyrannic usurpation, he has covered the predominant faction in France, and their adherents here, with the most exaggerated panegyrics; neither has he missed a single opportunity of abusing and vilifying those who, in uniform concurrence with the Duke of Portland's and Lord Fitzwilliam's opinion, have maintained the true grounds of the Revolution Settlement in 1688. He lamented all the defeats of the French; he rejoiced in all their victories,—even when these victories threatened to overwhelm the continent of Europe, and, by facilitating their means of penetrating into Holland, to bring this most dreadful of all evils with irresistible force to the very doors, if not into the very heart, of our country. To this hour he always speaks of every thought of overturning the French Jacobinism by force, on the part of any power whatsoever, as an attempt unjust and cruel, and which he reprobates with horror. If any of the French Jacobin leaders are spoken of with hatred or scorn, he falls upon those who take that liberty with all the zeal and warmth with which men of honor defend their particular and bosom friends, when attacked. He always represents their cause as a cause of liberty, and all who oppose it as partisans of despotism. He obstinately continues to consider the great and growing vices, crimes, and disorders of that country as only evils of passage, which are to produce a permanently happy state of order and freedom. He represents these disorders exactly in the same way and with the same limitations which are used by one of the two great Jacobin factions: I mean that of Pétion and Brissot. Like them, he studiously confines his horror and reprobation only to the massacres of the 2d of September, and passes by those of the 10th of August, as well as the imprisonment and deposition of the king, which were the consequences of that day, as indeed were the massacres themselves to which he confines his censure, though they were not actually perpetrated till early in September. Like that faction, he condemns, not the deposition, or the proposed exile or perpetual imprisonment, but only the murder of the king. Mr. Sheridan, on every occasion, palliates all their massacres committed in every part of France, as the effects of a natural indignation at the exorbitances of despotism, and of the dread of the people of returning under that yoke. He has thus taken occasion to load, not the actors in this wickedness, but the government of a mild, merciful, beneficent, and patriotic prince, and his suffering, faithful subjects, with all the crimes of the new anarchical tyranny under which the one has been murdered and the others are oppressed. Those continual either praises or palliating apologies of everything done in France, and those invectives as uniformly vomited out upon all those who venture to express their disapprobation of such proceedings, coming from a man of Mr. Fox's fame and authority, and one who is considered as the person to whom a great party of the wealthiest men of the kingdom look up, have been the cause why the principle of French fraternity formerly gained the ground which at one time it had obtained in this country. It will infallibly recover itself again, and in ten times a greater degree, if the kind of peace, in the manner which he preaches, ever shall be established with the reigning faction in France.

38. So far as to the French practices with regard to France and the other powers of Europe. As to their principles and doctrines with regard to the constitution of states, Mr. Fox studiously, on all occasions, and indeed when no occasion calls for it, (as on the debate of the petition for reform,) brings forward and asserts their fundamental and fatal principle, pregnant with every mischief and every crime, namely, that "in every country the people is the legitimate sovereign": exactly conformable to the declaration of the French clubs and legislators:—"La souveraineté est une, indivisible, inalienable, et imprescriptible ; elle appartient à la nation; aucune section du peuple ni aucun individu ne peut s'en attribuer l'exercise." This confounds, in a manner equally mischievous and stupid, the origin of a government from the people with its continuance in their hands. I believe that no such doctrine has ever been heard of in any public act of any government whatsoever, until it was adopted (I think from the writings of Rousseau) by the French Assemblies, who have made it the basis of their Constitution at home, and of the matter of their apostolate in every country. These and other wild declarations of abstract principle, Mr. Fox says, are in themselves perfectly right and true; though in some cases he allows the French draw absurd consequences from them. But I conceive he is mistaken. The consequences are most logically, though most mischievously, drawn from the premises and principles by that wicked and ungracious faction. The fault is in the foundation.

39. Before society, in a multitude of men, it is obvious that sovereignty and subjection are ideas which cannot exist. It is the compact on which society is formed that makes both. But to suppose the people, contrary to their compacts, both to give away and retain the same thing is altogether absurd. It is worse, for it supposes in any strong combination of men a power and right of always dissolving the social union; which power, however, if it exists, renders them again as little sovereigns as subjects, but a mere unconnected multitude. It is not easy to state for what good end, at a time like this, when the foundations of all ancient and prescriptive governments, such as ours, (to which people submit, not because they have chosen them, but because they are born to them,) are undermined by perilous theories, that Mr. Fox should be so fond of referring to those theories, upon all occasions, even though speculatively they might be true,—which God forbid they should! Particularly I do not see the reason why he should be so fond of declaring that the principles of the Revolution have made the crown of Great Britain elective ,—why he thinks it seasonable to preach up with so much earnestness, for now three years together, the doctrine of resistance and revolution at all,—or to assert that our last Revolution, of 1688, stands on the same or similar principles with that of France. We are not called upon to bring forward these doctrines, which are hardly ever resorted to but in cases of extremity, and where they are followed by correspondent actions. We are not called upon by any circumstance, that I know of, which can justify a revolt, or which demands a revolution, or can make an election of a successor to the crown necessary, whatever latent right may be supposed to exist for effectuating any of these purposes.