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

I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the
observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to
attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or

fraternity, or whatever you may call it,--that is, the real quality and
character of the party you have to deal with. This I find, as a thing of no
importance, has everywhere escaped the author of the October Remarks.
That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has
been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the
first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple
name of France. The word France is slipped in just as if the
government stood exactly as before that Revolution which has
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 Sieyès, 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