The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Part 12

The origin and growth of moral impulses, as distinguished from external and immediate motives.

The necessary dependence of taste on moral impulses and habits; and the nature of taste (relatively to judgment in general and to genius) defined, ill.u.s.trated and applied. Under this head I comprise the substance of the Lectures given, and intended to have been given, at the Royal Inst.i.tution, on the distinguished English Poets, in ill.u.s.tration of the general principles of Poetry, together with suggestions concerning the affinity of the Fine Arts to each other, and the principles common to them all: Architecture; Gardening; Dress; Music; Painting; Poetry.

The opening out of new objects of just admiration in our own language, and information of the present state and past history of Swedish, Danish, German and Italian literature, (to which, but as supplied by a friend, I may add the Spanish, Portuguese and French,) as far as the same has not been already given to English readers, or is not to be found in common French authors.

Characters met with in real life; anecdotes and results of my life and travels, &c. &c. as far as they are ill.u.s.trative of general moral laws, and have no immediate leaning on personal or immediate politics.

Education in its widest sense, private and national sources of consolation to the afflicted in misfortune or disease, or dejection of mind from the exertion and right application of the reason, the imagination, and the moral sense; and new sources of enjoyment opened out, or an attempt (as an ill.u.s.trious friend once expressed the thought to me) to add suns.h.i.+ne to daylight, by making the happy more happy. In the words 'dejection of mind,' I refer particularly to doubt or disbelief of the moral government of the world, and the grounds and arguments for the religious hopes of human nature."

The first number, printed on stamped paper, was dated June 8th, 1809. He commences this work with the following motto:

"Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas, in hot reformations, is what men more zealous than considerate, call 'making clear work', the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested; mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice; so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human inst.i.tutions, that the very people who are most eager for it, are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction.

Then the abuse a.s.sumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent nature of the remedies."

('Burke's speech on the 11th of February, 1780'.)

TO MY READERS.

"Conscious that I am about to deliver my sentiments on a subject of the utmost delicacy, I have selected the general motto to all my political lucubrations, from an authority equally respected by both parties. I have taken it from an orator, whose eloquence enables Englishmen to repeat the name of Demosthenes and Cicero, without humiliation; from a statesman, who has left to our language a bequest of glory unrivalled and all our own, in the keen-eyed, yet far-sighted genius, with which he has made the profoundest general principles of political wisdom, and even the recondite laws of human pa.s.sions, bear upon particular measures and pa.s.sing events. While of the harangues of Pitt, Fox, and their compeers on the most important occurrences, we retain a few unsatisfactory fragments alone, the very flies and weeds of Burke s.h.i.+ne to us through the purest amber, imperishably enshrined, and valuable from the precious material of their embalment. I have extracted the pa.s.sage not from that Burke, whose latter exertions have rendered his works venerable as oracular voices from the sepulchre of a patriarch, to the upholders of the government and society in their existing state and order; but from a speech delivered by him while he was the most beloved, the proudest name with the more anxious friends of liberty; while he was the darling of those who, believing mankind to have been improved, are desirous to give to forms of government a similar progression. From the same anxiety, I have been led to introduce my opinions on this most hazardous subject, by a preface of a somewhat personal character. And though the t.i.tle of my address is general, yet, I own, I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who, from various printed and unprinted calumnies, have judged most unfavourably of my political tenets; aid to those whose favour I have chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal mistake. To both, I affirm, that the opinions and arguments, I am about to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and those only in lesser points, and known only to the companions of my fire-side. From both and from all my readers, I solicit a gracious attention to the following explanations: first, on the congruity of the following numbers, with the general plan and object of 'The Friend;' and secondly, on the charge of arrogance or presumption, which may be adduced against the author for the freedom, with which in these numbers, and in others that will follow on other subjects, he presumes to dissent from men of established reputation, or even to doubt of the justice, with which the public laurel-crown, as symbolical of the 'first' cla.s.s of genius and intellect, has been awarded to sundry writers since the revolution, and permitted to wither around the brows of our elder benefactors, from Hooker to Sir P. Sidney, and from Sir P. Sidney, to Jeremy Taylor and Stillingfleet."

The work ceased at the 27th number, March 15th, 1810. As is usually the case when authors become their own publishers, there was a pecuniary loss; but as long as printing lasts, it must remain a record of his powers.

Yet the critics, if critics they were worthy to be called, discovered only feebleness of mind, when in the attempt to make themselves acquainted with his principles, they professed, either through ignorance, or indolence, not to understand him. When his mental powers had so far advanced, he felt a conviction of the truth of the Triune power, [10] and at once saw that there was no important truth, in which this Triad was not contained. As ours was a const.i.tutional government, composed of three great powers (of the three great estates of the realm, as Queen Elizabeth would say, the church, the n.o.bles, and the commonalty,) when these, Coleridge observed, were exactly balanced, the government was in a healthy state, but excess in any one of these powers, disturbed the balance and produced disorder, which was attended by dissatisfaction and discord. A political writer, he laboured to maintain this balance; and when either power was threatened by any disturbance, threw in a counterweight, sometimes on one side and sometimes on another, as he, according to his philosophical opinions, thought they deserved either censure or praise. [11] For this 'apparent'

fluctuation he was termed, by those men who never understood his principles, vacillating and inconsistent: but he cast his "bread upon the waters," and in due time it returned to him.

There must come a time when the works of Coleridge will be fairly weighed against the agreeable time-killing publications of our day; works for which their frivolous authors have reaped an abundant harvest while this giant in literature gained scarcely a dwarf's portion. But Truth, though perhaps slowly, must finally prevail. Mr. Coleridge remarks, that for his own guidance he was greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the ant.i.thetic and allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim he had been accustomed to word thus:

"until you 'understand a writer's ignorance', presume yourself 'ignorant of his understanding'."

This was for him a golden rule, and which, when he read the philosophical works of others, he applied most carefully to himself. If an unlearned individual takes up a book, and, on opening it, finds by certain characters that it is a book on Algebra, he modestly puts, it down with perhaps an equally modest observation. "I never learned the Mathematics, and am ignorant of them: they are not suited to my taste, and I do not require them." But if perchance, he should take up a philosophical work, this modesty is not exercised: though he does not comprehend it, he will not acknowledge the fact; he is piqued however, and not satisfied with a mere slighting observation, but often ends, as disappointed vanity usually does, in shallow abuse. The political, the critical, the philosophical views of Coleridge, were all grand, and from his philosophical views he never deviated; all fluctuating opinions rolled by him, not indeed unheeded, but observed with sympathy and with regret, when not founded on those permanent principles which were to benefit and give good government to man.

Coleridge, it is well known, was no adept in matters of business, and so little skilled in ephemeral literature as not to be able to profit by any weekly publication. The first edition of The Friend was published weekly, on paper with the government stamp, and that reached, as before related, its twenty-seventh number.

Such a work was not suited to his genius: in fact, no periodical which required rapid writing on slight amusing subjects, with punctuality in publication, which demanded steadiness of health, and the absence of those sedative causes arising, in part, from his benevolent heart and sensitive nature, ever would have suited him. To write like a novelist--to charm ennui--is that which is required of a modern author who expects pecuniary recompense. Although he needed such recompense, the character of his genius unfitted him for the attainment of it; and had he continued the work, the expenditure would have ended in still greater pecuniary loss. One of his last political essays is that taken from the Morning Post, of March 19, 1800, on the character of Pitt. [12]

These Essays were soon forgotten, though this, at the time, was much read and admired as part of the history of the man and his political feelings. It was the effect which Buonaparte believed to have been produced by these on the public mind that tempted him to try to incarcerate Coleridge. Some time after, Otto, the French amba.s.sador at our Court, was ready with a bribe, in the hope to obtain from Coleridge a complimentary essay to his sovereign. The offer of the bribe would have deterred him from writing any more on the subject. Had he been willing to sell himself--to write a flattering character of the great hero--to raise that hero in the estimation of Europe, he would have been amply recompensed.

In his 'Biographia Literaria,' he says,

"But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays have contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view, in giving dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings, indeed, the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I dare a.s.sume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and a.n.a.lysed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguis.h.i.+ng the jacobin from the republican, the democrat and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst part of that system may be legitimately deduced."

With this view the following Essays and Observations have been republished here,--as ill.u.s.trative of his early opinions to be compared with those of his more advanced life,--to shew the injustice of his political opponents, who never seemed to have troubled themselves about principle,--and the necessary growth of intellectual power giving deeper insight, with the additional value of experience and its consequences.

PITT.

From the Morning Post, March 19, 1800.

"Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resembled each other. His work would perhaps have been more interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected those rather who had attained to the possession of similar influence, or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circ.u.mstances are with which we have observed it co-exist. In our days, the two persons who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply, and the most diffusively, are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and in these two are prerented to us similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters.

William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connections, and parental ambition, were his mould; he was cast, rather than grew.

A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he 'might have been', was compered into that, which he 'was to be'. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the 'thing' on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained, were present to his intuition; hence he a.s.sociated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them.

But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of 'words'; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always full grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing intellect.

Vanity, early satiated, formed and elevated itself into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity, he lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At college he was a severe student; his mind was founded and elemented in words and generalities, and these two formed all the superstructure. That revelry and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt's conduct was correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline in the special pleader's office, and at the bar, carried on the scheme of his education with unbroken uniformity. His first political connections were with the reformers; but those who accuse him of sympathising or coalescing with their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts.

Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds that possess a power and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt's ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavours to realise his father's plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no living root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the Parliament, supported the popular opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in the high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in his wards.h.i.+p--we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wards.h.i.+p the fates of the world were placed!

The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left; whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always amid objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was unpopulous, because those objects of hope to which his habitual wishes had transferred, and as it were 'projected', his existence, were all familiar and long-established objects! A plant sown and reared in a hot-house, for whom the very air, that surrounded him, had been regulated by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had penetrated only through gla.s.ses and covers; who had had the sun without the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had pattered; on whom the dews of Heaven had not fallen! A being who had had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses, no unbia.s.sed and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing that const.i.tutes individuality in intellect, nothing that teaches brotherhood in affection! Such was the man--such, and so denaturalized the spirit, on whose wisdom and philanthropy the lives and living enjoyments of so many millions of human beings were made unavoidably dependent.

From this time a real enlargement of mind became almost impossible.

Pre-occupations, intrigue, the undue pa.s.sion and anxiety, with which all facts must be surveyed; the crowd and confusion of those facts, none of them seen, but all communicated, and by that very circ.u.mstance, and by the necessity of perpetually cla.s.sifying them, trans.m.u.ted into words and generalities; pride; flattery; irritation; artificial power; these, and circ.u.mstances resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren heights; which command indeed a vast and extensive prospect, but attract so many clouds and vapours, that most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, was favourable to his fame. He heaped period on period; persuaded himself and the nation, that extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was eloquence; and that eloquence implied wisdom.

His father's struggles for freedom, and his own attempts, gave him an almost unexampled popularity; and his office necessarily a.s.sociated with his name all the great events that happened during his administration. There were not however wanting men who saw through this delusion: and refusing to attribute the industry, integrity, and enterprising spirit of our merchants, the agricultural improvements of our landholders, the great inventions of our manufacturers, or the valour and skilfulness of our sailors, to the merits of a minister, they have continued to decide on his character from those acts and those merits, which belong to him, and to him alone. Judging him by this standard, they have been able to discover in him no one proof or symptom of a commanding genius. They have discovered him never controlling, never creating, events, but always yielding to them with rapid change, and sheltering himself from inconsistency by perpetual indefiniteness. In the Russian war, they saw him abandoning meanly what he had planned weakly, and threatened insolently. In the debates on the Regency, they detected the laxity of his const.i.tutional principles, and received proofs that his eloquence consisted not in the ready application of a general system to particular questions, but in the facility of arguing for or against any question by specious generalities, without reference to any system. In these debates he combined what is most dangerous in democracy with all that is most degrading in the old superst.i.tions of monarchy; and taught an inherency of the office in the person, in order to make the office itself a nullity, and the premiers.h.i.+p, with its accompanying majority, the sole and permanent power of the state. And now came the French Revolution. This was a new event: the old routine of reasoning, the common trade of politics, were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly unprepared for it: half favouring, half condemning, ignorant of what he favoured, and why he condemned, he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance with the general nature of man, and the consequent 'prescience' of Mr. Burke.

After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheld and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests! and when at least the immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these 'words' (words signifying 'places' and 'dead objects', and signifying nothing more), he adopted other words in their places, other generalities--Atheism and Jacobinism--phrases, which he learnt from Mr. Burke, but without learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words: Since the death of Mr.

Burke the forms, and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have undergone many and important changes: how, indeed, is it possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience! But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repet.i.tion of the same 'general phrases'. This is his element: deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence; but you cannot deprive him of them. Press him to specify an 'individual' fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and he answers, Security! Call upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims--Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions; generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of finance he is still, as ever, the words of abstractions.

Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports, commerce and revenue--all flouris.h.i.+ng, all splendid! Never was such a prosperous country as England under his administration! Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbours, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine. This (it is replied) is owing to our PROSPERITY,--all 'prosperous' nations are in great distress for food!--Still PROSPERITY, still GENERAL PHRASES, unenforced by one single image, one 'single fact' of real national amelioration; of any one comfort enjoyed, where it was not before enjoyed; of any one cla.s.s of society becoming healthier, or wiser, or happier. These are 'things', these are realities, and these Mr. Pitt has neither the imagination to body forth, or the sensibility to feel for. Once, indeed, in an evil hour, intriguing for popularity, he suffered himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for the real, the individual; and he brought in his POOR BILL!! When we hear the minister's talents for finance so loudly trumpeted, we turn involuntarily to his POOR BILL--to that acknowledged abortion--that unanswerable evidence of his ignorance respecting all the fundamental relations and actions of property, and of the social union!

As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being: words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument, and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said, no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day, a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation; but while he speaks, the effect varies according to the character of his auditor. The man of no talent is swallowed up in surprise; and when the speech is ended, he remembers his feelings, but nothing distinct of that which produced them: (how opposite an effect to that of nature and genius, from whose works the idea still remains, when the feeling is pa.s.sed away, remains to connect itself with the other feelings, and combine with new impressions!) The mere man of talent hears him with admiration; the mere man of genius with contempt; the philosopher neither admires nor contemns, but listens to him with a deep and solemn interest, tracing in the effects of his eloquence the power of words and phrases, and that peculiar const.i.tution of human affairs in their present state, which so eminently favours this power.

Such appears to us to be the prime minister of Great Britain, whether we consider him as a statesman or an orator. The same character betrays itself in his private life; the same coldness to realities, to images of realities, and to all whose excellence relates to reality: he has patronized no science, he has raised no man of genius from obscurity, he counts no one prime work of G.o.d among his friends. From the same source, he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation, which, keeping up the glow of self-importance, and the sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation of ideas.

These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his fortune, the circ.u.mstances that enabled such a mind to acquire and retain such a power, would form the subject of a philosophical history, and that too of no scanty size. We can scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work, which would comprise subjects so important and delicate as the causes of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence; the machinery and state intrigue of marriages; the overbalance of the commercial interest; the panic of property struck by the late revolution; the short-sightedness of the careful; the carelessness of the far-sighted; and all those many and various events which have given to a decorous profession of religion, and a seemliness of private morals, such an unwonted weight in the attainment and preservation of public power. We are unable to determine whether it be more consolatory or humiliating to human nature, that so many complexities of event, situation, character, age, and country, should be necessary in order to the production of a Mr. Pitt."

On the day following the editor promised the character of Buonaparte, but the surmise of a visit from the French minister, then at our court, was sufficient to put a stop to its publication; accordingly it 'never appeared'. Coleridge was requested by the proprietor and editor to report a speech of Pitt's, which at this time was expected to be one of great eclat.

Accordingly, early in the morning off Coleridge set, carrying with him his supplies for the campaign: those who are acquainted with the gallery of the house on a press night, when a man can scarcely find elbow room, will better understand how incompetent Coleridge was for such an undertaking; he, however, started by seven in the morning, but was exhausted long before night. Mr. Pitt, for the first quarter of an hour spoke fluently, and in his usual manner, and sufficiently to give a notion of his best style; this was followed by a repet.i.tion of words, and words only; he appeared to "talk against time," as the phrase is.

Coleridge fell asleep, and listened occasionally only to the speeches [13] that followed. On his return, the proprietor being anxious for the report, Coleridge informed him of the result, and finding his anxiety great, immediately 'volunteered' a speech for Mr. Pitt, which he wrote off hand, and which answered the purpose exceedingly well: it is here presented. The following day, and for days after the publication, the proprietor received complimentary letters announcing the pleasure received at the report, and wis.h.i.+ng to know who was the reporter. The secret was, however, kept, and the real author of the speech concealed; but one day Mr. Canning calling on business, made similar inquiries, and received the same answer. Canning replied, "It does more credit to the author's head than to his memory.

[14] The honourable gentleman calls upon ministers to state the object of the war in one sentence. I can state it in one word: it is Security. I can state it in one word, though it is not to be explained but in many. The object of the war is security: security against a danger, the greatest that ever threatened this country; the greatest that ever threatened mankind; a danger the more terrible, because it is unexampled and novel. It is a danger which has more than menaced the safety and independence of all nations; it is a danger which has attacked the property and peace of all individuals; a danger which Europe has strained all its sinews to repel; and which no nation has repelled so successfully as the British; because no nation has acted so energetically, so sincerely, so uniformly on the broad basis of principle; because no other nation has perceived with equal clearness and decision the necessity, not only of combating the evil abroad, but of stifling it at home; because no nation has breasted with so firm a constancy the tide of jacobinical power; because no nation has pierced with so steadfast an eye, through the disguises of jacobinical hypocrisy; but now, it seems, we are at once to remit our zeal and our suspicion; that Jacobinism, which alarmed us under the stumbling and drunken tyranny of Robespierre; that Jacobinism, which insulted and roused us under the short-sighted ambition of the five Directors; that Jacobinism, to which we have sworn enmity through every s.h.i.+fting of every b.l.o.o.d.y scene, through all those abhorred mockeries which have profaned the name of liberty to all the varieties of usurpation; to this Jacobinism we are now to reconcile ourselves, because all its arts and all its energies are united under one person, the child and the champion of Jacobinism, who has been reared in its principles, who has fought its battles, who has systematised its ambition, at once the fiercest instrument of its fanaticism, and the gaudiest puppet of its folly!

The honourable gentleman has discovered, that the danger of French power and French principles is at an end, because they are concentred, and because to uniformity of design is added an unity of direction; he has discovered that all the objects of French ambition are relinquished, because France has sacrificed even the 'appearances' of freedom to the best means of realising them; in short that now, for the first time, Jacobinism is not to be dreaded, because now, for the first time, it has superadded to itself the compactness of despotism.

But the honourable gentleman presses hard, and requires me to be definite and explicit. What, says he, do you mean by destroying the power of Jacobinism? Will, you persevere in the war, until you have received evidence that it is extinct in this country, extinct in France, extinct in the mind of every man? No! I am not so shamefully ignorant of the laws that regulate the soul of man. The mind once tainted with Jacobinism can never be wholly free from the taint; I know no means of purification; when it does not break out on the surface, it still lurks in the vitals; no antidote can approach the subtlety of the venom, no length of quarantine secure us against the obstinacy of the pestilence.

Those who are now telling us, that all danger from revolutionary principles is now pa.s.sed by, are yet endeavouring to call up again the very arguments which they used at the commencement of the war, in the youth and rampancy of Jacobinism; and repeat the same language, with which they then attempted to lull the nation into security, combined with the same acts of popular irritation. They are telling us, that ministers disregard peace; that they are prodigal of blood; insensible to the miseries, and enemies to the liberties of mankind; that the extinction of Jacobinism is their pretext, but that personal ambition is their motive; and that we have squandered two hundred millions on an object, unattainable were it desirable, and were it not unattainable, yet still to be deprecated. Sir, will men be governed by mere words without application? This country, Sir, will not. It knows that to this war it owes its prosperity, its const.i.tution, whatever is fair or useful in public or domestic life, the majesty of her laws, the freedom of her wors.h.i.+p, and the sacredness of our firesides. For these it has spent two hundred millions, for these it would spend two hundred millions more; and, should it be necessary, Sir, I doubt not that I could find those two hundred millions, and still preserve her resources unimpaired. The only way to make it not necessary is to avail ourselves of the hearty co-operation of our allies, and to secure and invigorate that co-operation by the firmness and vigour of our own conduct. The honourable gentleman then comes back upon me, and presses me upon the supposed dissonance between our views and those of our allies. But surely there may allowably exist in the minds of different men different means of arriving at the same security. This difference may, without breaking the ties of effective union, exist even in this house; how much more then in different kingdoms? The Emperor of Russia may have announced the restoration of monarchy, as exclusively his object. This is not considered as the ultimate object by this country, but as the best means and most reliable pledge of a higher object, viz. our own security, and that of Europe; but we do not confine ourselves to this, as the only possible means.

From this shade of difference we are required to infer the impossibility of cordial co-operation! But here the honourable gentleman falls into a strange contradiction. He affirms the restoration of monarchy an unjust object of the war, and refuses expressly and repeatedly to vote a single farthing on such a ground; and yet the supposed secession of Russia from the allied powers, the secession of that government, whose 'exclusive' object is the restoration of monarchy, is adduced by him as another and equal ground for his refusal. Had the Emperor of Russia persevered in directing his utmost forces to the attainment of that object, to which Austria will not pledge herself, and which the honourable gentleman considers as an unjust object, then the honourable gentleman would have been satisfied. But I will not press too hard on the honourable gentleman, or lay an undue weight on an inadvertence. I will deal most fairly with him if I did believe, which I do not, that Austria saw no advantages in the restoration of monarchy, yet still I would avail myself of her efforts, without changing my own object. Should the security of Britain and Europe result from the exertions of Austria, or be aided by her influence, I should think it my duty to advise his Majesty to lend the Emperor every financial a.s.sistance, however those exertions and that influence might spring from principles not in unison with our own.

If the honourable gentleman will tell me, that the object of Austria is to regain the Netherlands, and to reconquer all she may leave lost in Germany and Italy, so far from feeling this as a cause of distress, I feel it a ground of consolation, as giving us the strongest a.s.surance of his sincerity, added to that right which we possess of believing Austria sincere, from our experience that Austria, above all, must know the insecurity of peace with Jacobins. This, Sir, would be a ground of consolation and confident hope; and though we should go farther than the Emperor of Germany, and stop short of Russia, still, however, we should all travel in the same road. Yet even were less justifiable objects to animate our ally, were ambition her inspiring motive, yet even on that ground I contend that her arms and victories would conduce to our security. If it tend to strip France of territory and influence, the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Austria is elevated by comparison into a blessing devoutly to be wished! The aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Austria, founded on the ruins of Jacobinism, I contend, Sir, to be a truly British object. But, Sir, the honourable gentleman says, he thinks the war neither just nor necessary, and calls upon me, without the qualifying reservations and circuitous distinctions of a special pleader; in short, without BUTS or IFS, to state the real object; and affirms that in spite of these buts and ifs, the restoration of monarchy in France is the real and sole object of ministers, and that all else contained in the official notes are unmeaning words and distinctions fallacious, and perhaps meant to deceive. Is it, Sir, to be treated as a fallacious distinction, that the restoration of monarchy is not my sole or ultimate object; that my ultimate object is security, that I think no pledge for that security so unequivocal as the restoration of monarchy, and no means so natural and so effectual?

'but' if you can present any other mode, that mode I will adopt. I am unwilling to accept an inadequate security; but the nature of the security which it may be our interest to demand, must depend on the relative and comparative dangers of continuing the war, or concluding a peace. And 'if' the danger of the war should be greater than that of a peace, and 'if' you can shew to me that there is no chance of diminis.h.i.+ng Jacobinism by the war, and 'if' you can evince that we are exhausting our means more than our enemies are exhausting theirs, then I am ready to conclude a peace without the restoration of monarchy.

These are the 'ifs' and the 'buts', which I shall continue to introduce, not the insidious and confounding subtleties of special pleading, but the just and necessary distinctions of intelligible prudence; I am conscious of sincere and honest intentions in the use of them, and I desire to be tried by no other than G.o.d and my country.

But are we not weakening ourselves? Let any man calmly, and with the mind of an Englishman, look round on the state of our manufactures, our commerce, on all that forms and feeds the sources of national wealth, and to that man I can confidently leave the following questions to be answered. From the negotiations at Lisle to the present moment has England or France weakened itself in the greater degree? Whether, at the end of this campaign, France is not more likely to suffer the feebleness ensuing on exhausted finance than England?

If Jacobinism, enthroned in Buonaparte, should resist both the pressure of foreign attack, and its own inherent tendencies to self-destruction, whether it must not derive such power of resistance from the use of such revolutionary and convulsive efforts, as involve, and almost imply a consequent state of feebleness? And whether therefore, if any unexpected reverse of fortune should make it expedient or necessary for us to compromise with Jacobinism, it would not be better for us to compromise with it at the end of the campaign, than at present? And by parity of reasoning, whether it be not true (even on the supposition that Jacobinism is not to be routed, disarmed, and fettered); yet, that even on this supposition, the longer we defer a peace, the safer that peace will be!