The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V | Page 8

dangerous by the links of real faction and pretended commerce, would
have been (had Mr. Fox succeeded) enabled to carry on the war against
us by our own resources. For this purpose that enemy would have had
his agents and traitors in the midst of us.
18. When at length war was actually declared by the usurpers in France
against this kingdom, and declared whilst they were pretending a
negotiation through Dumouriez with Lord Auckland, Mr. Fox still
continued, through the whole of the proceedings, to discredit the
national honor and justice, and to throw the entire blame of the war on
Parliament, and on his own country, as acting with violence,
haughtiness, and want of equity. He frequently asserted, both at the
time and ever since, that the war, though declared by France, was

provoked by us, and that it was wholly unnecessary and fundamentally
unjust.
19. He has lost no opportunity of railing, in the most virulent manner
and in the most unmeasured language, at every foreign power with
whom we could now, or at any time, contract any useful or effectual
alliance against France,--declaring that he hoped no alliance with those
powers was made, or was in a train of being made.[1] He always
expressed himself with the utmost horror concerning such alliances. So
did all his phalanx. Mr. Sheridan in particular, after one of his
invectives against those powers, sitting by him, said, with manifest
marks of his approbation, that, if we must go to war, he had rather go to
war alone than with such allies.
20. Immediately after the French declaration of war against us,
Parliament addressed the king in support of the war against them, as
just and necessary, and provoked, as well as formally declared against
Great Britain. He did not divide the House upon this measure; yet he
immediately followed this our solemn Parliamentary engagement to the
king with a motion proposing a set of resolutions, the effect of which
was, that the two Houses were to load themselves with every kind of
reproach for having made the address which they had just carried to the
throne. He commenced this long string of criminatory resolutions
against his country (if King, Lords, and Commons of Great Britain, and
a decided majority without doors are his country) with a declaration
against intermeddling in the interior concerns of France. The purport
of this resolution of non-interference is a thing unexampled in the
history of the world, when one nation has been actually at war with
another. The best writers on the law of nations give no sort of
countenance to his doctrine of non-interference, in the extent and
manner in which he used it, even when there is no war. When the war
exists, not one authority is against it in all its latitude. His doctrine is
equally contrary to the enemy's uniform practice, who, whether in
peace or in war, makes it his great aim not only to change the
government, but to make an entire revolution in the whole of the social
order in every country.
The object of the last of this extraordinary string of resolutions moved
by Mr. Fox was to advise the crown not to enter into such an
engagement with any foreign power so as to hinder us from making a

separate peace with France, or which might tend to enable any of those
powers to introduce a government in that country other than such as
those persons whom he calls the people of France shall choose to
establish. In short, the whole of these resolutions appeared to have but
one drift, namely, the sacrifice of our own domestic dignity and safety,
and the independency of Europe, to the support of this strange mixture
of anarchy and tyranny which prevails in France, and which Mr. Fox
and his party were pleased to call a government. The immediate
consequence of these measures was (by an example the ill effects of
which on the whole world are not to be calculated) to secure the
robbers of the innocent nobility, gentry, and ecclesiastics of France in
the enjoyment of the spoil they have made of the estates, houses, and
goods of their fellow-citizens.
21. Not satisfied with moving these resolutions, tending to confirm this
horrible tyranny and robbery, and with actually dividing the House on
the first of the long string which they composed, in a few days
afterwards he encouraged and supported Mr. Grey in producing the
very same string in a new form, and in moving, under the shape of an
address of Parliament to the crown, another virulent libel on all its own
proceedings in this session, in which not only all the ground of the
resolutions was again travelled over, but much new inflammatory
matter was introduced. In particular,