For this purpose we must put Europe before us, which plainly is, just now, in all its parts, in a state of dismay, derangement, and confusion, and, very possibly amongst all its sovereigns, full of secret heartburning, distrust, and mutual accusation. Perhaps it may labor under worse evils. There is no vigor anywhere, except the distempered vigor and energy of France. That country has but too much life in it, when everything around is so disposed to tameness and languor. The very vices of the French system at home tend to give force to foreign exertions. The generals must join the armies. They must lead them to enterprise, or they are likely to perish by their hands. Thus, without law or government of her own, France gives law to all the governments in Europe.
This great mass of political matter must have been always under the view of thinkers for the public, whether they act in office or not. Amongst events, even the late calamitous events were in the book of contingency. Of course they must have been in design, at least, provided for. A plan which takes in as many as possible of the states concerned will rather tend to facilitate and simplify a rational scheme for preserving Spain (if that were our sole, as I think it ought to be our principal object) than to delay and perplex it.
If we should think that a provident policy (perhaps now more than provident, urgent and necessary) should lead us to act, we cannot take measures as if nothing had been done. We must see the faults, if any, which have conducted to the present misfortunes: not for the sake of criticism, military or political, or from the common motives of blaming persons and counsels which have not been successful, but in order, if we can, to administer some remedy to these disasters, by the adoption of plans more bottomed in principle, and built on with more discretion. Mistakes may be lessons.
There seem, indeed, to have been several mistakes in the political principles on which the war was entered into, as well as in the plans upon which it was conducted,—some of them very fundamental, and not only visibly, but I may say palpably erroneous; and I think him to have less than the discernment of a very ordinary statesman, who could not foresee, from the very beginning, unpleasant consequences from those plans, though not the unparalleled disgraces and disasters which really did attend them: for they were, both principles and measures, wholly new and out of the common course, without anything apparently very grand in the conception to justify this total departure from all rule.
For, in the first place, the united sovereigns very much injured their cause by admitting that they had nothing to do with the interior arrangements of France,—in contradiction to the whole tenor of the public law of Europe, and to the correspondent practice of all its states, from the time we have any history of them. In this particular, the two German courts seem to have as little consulted the publicists of Germany as their own true interests, and those of all the sovereigns of Germany and Europe. This admission of a false principle in the law of nations brought them into an apparent contradiction, when they insisted on the reëstablishment of the royal authority in France. But this confused and contradictory proceeding gave rise to a practical error of worse consequence. It was derived from one and the same root: namely, that the person of the monarch of France was everything; and the monarchy, and the intermediate orders of the state, by which the monarchy was upheld, were nothing. So that, if the united potentates had succeeded so far as to reëstablish the authority of that king, and that he should be so ill-advised as to confirm all the confiscations, and to recognize as a lawful body and to class himself with that rabble of murderers, (and there wanted not persons who would so have advised him,) there was nothing in the principle or in the proceeding of the united powers to prevent such an arrangement.
An expedition to free a brother sovereign from prison was undoubtedly a generous and chivalrous undertaking. But the spirit and generosity would not have been less, if the policy had been more profound and more comprehensive,—that is, if it had taken in those considerations and those persons by whom, and, in some measure, for whom, monarchy exists. This would become a bottom for a system of solid and permanent policy, and of operations conformable to that system.
The same fruitful error was the cause why nothing was done to impress the people of France (so far as we can at all consider the inhabitants of France as a people) with an idea that the government was ever to be really French, or indeed anything else than the nominal government of a monarch, a monarch absolute as over them, but whose sole support was to arise from foreign potentates, and who was to be kept on his throne by German forces,—in short, that the king of France was to be a viceroy to the Emperor and the king of Prussia.
It was the first time that foreign powers, interfering in the concerns of a nation divided into parties, have thought proper to thrust wholly out of their councils, to postpone, to discountenance, to reject, and, in a manner, to disgrace, the party whom those powers came to support. The single person of a king cannot be a party. Woe to the king who is himself his party! The royal party, with the king or his representatives at its head, is the royal cause. Foreign powers have hitherto chosen to give to such wars as this the appearance of a civil contest, and not that of an hostile invasion. When the Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, sent aids to the chiefs of the League, they appeared as allies to that league, and to the imprisoned king (the Cardinal de Bourbon) which that league had set up. When the Germans came to the aid of the Protestant princes, in the same series of civil wars, they came as allies. When the English came to the aid of Henry the Fourth, they appeared as allies to that prince. So did the French always, when they intermeddled in the affairs of Germany: they came to aid a party there. When the English and Dutch intermeddled in the succession of Spain, they appeared as allies to the Emperor, Charles the Sixth. In short, the policy has been as uniform as its principles were obvious to an ordinary eye.
According to all the old principles of law and policy, a regency ought to have been appointed by the French princes of the blood, nobles, and parliaments, and then recognized by the combined powers. Fundamental law and ancient usage, as well as the clear reason of the thing, have always ordained it during an imprisonment of the king of France: as in the case of John, and of Francis the First. A monarchy ought not to be left a moment without a representative having an interest in the succession. The orders of the state ought also to have been recognized in those amongst whom alone they existed in freedom, that is, in the emigrants.
Thus, laying down a firm foundation on the recognition of the authorities of the kingdom of France, according to Nature and to its fundamental laws, and not according to the novel and inconsiderate principles of the usurpation which the united powers were come to extirpate, the king of Prussia and the Emperor, as allies of the ancient kingdom of France, would have proceeded with dignity, first, to free the monarch, if possible,—if not, to secure the monarchy as principal in the design; and in order to avoid all risks to that great object, (the object of other ages than the present, and of other countries than that of France,) they would of course avoid proceeding with more haste or in a different manner than what the nature of such an object required.