The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V | Page 6

perhaps Europe never stood) to give assurances to our allies,
strength to our government, and a check to the common enemy of
Europe, he substituted nothing but a criminal charge on the conduct of
the British government for calling Parliament together, and an
engagement to inquire into that conduct.
8. If it had pleased God to suffer him to succeed in this his project for

the amendment to the address, he would forever have ruined this nation,
along with the rest of Europe. At home all the Jacobin societies, formed
for the utter destruction of our Constitution, would have lifted up their
heads, which had been beaten down by the two proclamations. Those
societies would have been infinitely strengthened and multiplied in
every quarter; their dangerous foreign communications would have
been left broad and open; the crown would not have been authorized to
take any measure whatever for our immediate defence by sea or land.
The closest, the most natural, the nearest, and at the same time, from
many internal as well as external circumstances, the weakest of our
allies, Holland, would have been given up, bound hand and foot, to
France, just on the point of invading that republic. A general
consternation would have seized upon all Europe; and all alliance with
every other power, except France, would have been forever rendered
impracticable to us. I think it impossible for any man, who regards the
dignity and safety of his country, or indeed the common safety of
mankind, ever to forget Mr. Fox's proceedings in that tremendous crisis
of all human affairs.
9. Mr. Fox very soon had reason to be apprised of the general dislike of
the Duke of Portland's friends to this conduct. Some of those who had
even voted with him, the day after their vote, expressed their
abhorrence of his amendment, their sense of its inevitable tendency,
and their total alienation from the principles and maxims upon which it
was made; yet the very next day, that is, on Friday, the 14th of
December, he brought on what in effect was the very same business,
and on the same principles, a second time.
10. Although the House does not usually sit on Saturday, he a third
time brought on another proposition in the same spirit, and pursued it
with so much heat and perseverance as to sit into Sunday: a thing not
known in Parliament for many years.
11. In all these motions and debates he wholly departed from all the
political principles relative to France (considered merely as a state, and
independent of its Jacobin form of government) which had hitherto
been held fundamental in this country, and which he had himself held
more strongly than any man in Parliament. He at that time studiously
separated himself from those to whose sentiments he used to profess no
small regard, although those sentiments were publicly declared. I had

then no concern in the party, having been, for some time, with all
outrage, excluded from it; but, on general principles, I must say that a
person who assumes to be leader of a party composed of freemen and
of gentlemen ought to pay some degree of deference to their feelings,
and even to their prejudices. He ought to have some degree of
management for their credit and influence in their country. He showed
so very little of this delicacy, that he compared the alarm raised in the
minds of the Duke of Portland's party, (which was his own,) an alarm
in which they sympathized with the greater part of the nation, to the
panic produced by the pretended Popish plot in the reign of Charles the
Second,--describing it to be, as that was, a contrivance of knaves, and
believed only by well-meaning dupes and madmen.
12. The Monday following (the 17th of December) he pursued the same
conduct. The means used in England to coöperate with the Jacobin
army in politics agreed with their modes of proceeding: I allude to the
mischievous writings circulated with much industry and success, as
well as the seditious clubs, which at that time added not a little to the
alarm taken by observing and well-informed men. The writings and the
clubs were two evils which marched together. Mr. Fox discovered the
greatest possible disposition to favor and countenance the one as well
as the other of these two grand instruments of the French system. He
would hardly consider any political writing whatsoever as a libel, or as
a fit object of prosecution. At a time in which the press has been the
grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion, and,
I may say, of human society itself, to carry the doctrines of its liberty
higher than ever it has been known by its most extravagant assertors,
even in