The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI | Page 9

astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author, "will do this,"--"it is the interest of France,"--"the returning honor and generosity of France," &c., &c.--always merely France: just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe,--and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error: we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France, friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by sleight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. "Blessings on his soul that first invented sleep!" said Don Sancho Panza the Wise. All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals! In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be, if things were proposed to us in the concrete, and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals who compose this France by their proper names and descriptions,--if we were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and tender-hearted Siey��s, with the all-accomplished Reubell, with the humane guillotinists of Bordeaux, Tallien and Isabeau, with the meek butcher, Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer, Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord,--nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman, Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. "Make your peace with France." That word France sounds quite as well as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France, and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis-d'or.
Having, therefore, slipped the persons with whom we are to treat out of view, we are next to be satisfied that the French Revolution, which this peace is to fix and consolidate, ought to give us no just cause of apprehension. Though the author labors this point, yet he confesses a fact (indeed, he could not conceal it) which renders all his labors utterly fruitless. He confesses that the Regicide means to dictate a pacification, and that this pacification, according to their decree passed but a very few days before his publication appeared, is to "unite to their empire, either in possession or dependence, new barriers, many frontier places of strength, a large sea-coast, and many sea-ports." He ought to have stated it, that they would annex to their territory a country about a third as large as France, and much more than half as rich, and in a situation the most important for command that it would be possible for her anywhere to possess.
To remove this terror, (even if the Regicides should carry their point,) and to give us perfect repose with regard to their empire, whatever they may acquire, or whomsoever they might destroy, he raises a doubt "whether France will not be ruined by retaining these conquests, and whether she will not wholly lose that preponderance which she has held in the scale of European powers, and will not eventually be destroyed by the effect of her present successes, or, at least, whether, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, she [France] will remain an object of as much jealousy and alarm as she was under the reign of a monarch." Here, indeed, is a paragraph full of meaning! It gives matter for meditation almost in every word of it. The secret of the pacific politicians is out. This republic, at all hazards, is to be maintained. It is to be confined within some bounds, if we can; if not, with every possible acquisition of power, it is still to be cherished and supported. It is the return of the monarchy we are to dread,