Another political question arises about the mode of government which ought to be established. I think the proclamation (which I read before I had proceeded far in this memorial) puts it on the best footing, by postponing that arrangement to a time of peace.
When our politics lead us to enterprise a great and almost total political revolution in Europe, we ought to look seriously into the consequences of what we are about to do. Some eminent persons discover an apprehension that the monarchy, if restored in France, may be restored in too great strength for the liberty and happiness of the natives, and for the tranquillity of other states. They are therefore of opinion that terms ought to be made for the modification of that monarchy. They are persons too considerable, from the powers of their mind, and from their situation, as well as from the real respect I have for them, who seem to entertain these apprehensions, to let me pass them by unnoticed.
As to the power of France as a state, and in its exterior relations, I confess my fears are on the part of its extreme reduction. There is undoubtedly something in the vicinity of France, which makes it naturally and properly an object of our watchfulness and jealousy, whatever form its government may take. But the difference is great between a plan for our own security and a scheme for the utter destruction of France. If there were no other countries in the political map but these two, I admit that policy might justify a wish to lower our neighbor to a standard which would even render her in some measure, if not wholly, our dependant. But the system of Europe is extensive and extremely complex. However formidable to us, as taken in this one relation, France is not equally dreadful to all other states. On the contrary, my clear opinion is, that the liberties of Europe cannot possibly be preserved but by her remaining a very great and preponderating power. The design at present evidently pursued by the combined potentates, or of the two who lead, is totally to destroy her as such a power. For Great Britain resolves that she shall have no colonies, no commerce, and no marine. Austria means to take away the whole frontier, from the borders of Switzerland to Dunkirk. It is their plan also to render the interior government lax and feeble, by prescribing, by force of the arms of rival and jealous nations, and without consulting the natural interests of the kingdom, such arrangements as, in the actual state of Jacobinism in France, and the unsettled state in which property must remain for a long time, will inevitably produce such distraction and debility in government as to reduce it to nothing, or to throw it back into its old confusion. One cannot conceive so frightful a state of a nation. A maritime country without a marine and without commerce; a continental country without a frontier, and for a thousand miles surrounded with powerful, warlike, and ambitious neighbors! It is possible that she might submit to lose her commerce and her colonies: her security she never can abandon. If, contrary to all expectations, under such a disgraced and impotent government, any energy should remain in that country, she will make every effort to recover her security, which will involve Europe for a century in war and blood. What has it cost to France to make that frontier? What will it cost to recover it? Austria thinks that without a frontier she cannot secure the Netherlands. But without her frontier France cannot secure herself. Austria has been, however, secure for an hundred years in those very Netherlands, and has never been dispossessed of them by the chance of war without a moral certainty of receiving them again on the restoration of peace. Her late dangers have arisen not from the power or ambition of the king of France. They arose from her own ill policy, which dismantled all her towns, and discontented all her subjects by Jacobinical innovations. She dismantles her own towns, and then says, "Give me the frontier of France!" But let us depend upon it, whatever tends, under the name of security, to aggrandize Austria, will discontent and alarm Prussia. Such a length of frontier on the side of France, separated from itself, and separated from the mass of the Austrian country, will be weak, unless connected at the expense of the Elector of Bavaria (the Elector Palatine) and other lesser princes, or by such exchanges as will again convulse the Empire.
Take it the other way, and let us suppose that France so broken in spirit as to be content to remain naked and defenceless by sea and by land. Is such a country no prey? Have other nations no views? Is Poland the only country of which it is worth while to make a partition? We cannot be so childish as to imagine that ambition is local, and that no others can be infected with it but those who rule within certain parallels of latitude and longitude. In this way I hold war equally certain. But I can conceive that both these principles may operate: ambition on the part of Austria to cut more and more from France; and French impatience under her degraded and unsafe condition. In such a contest will the other powers stand by? Will not Prussia call for indemnity, as well as Austria and England? Is she satisfied with her gains in Poland? By no means. Germany must pay; or we shall infallibly see Prussia leagued with France and Spain, and possibly with other powers, for the reduction of Austria; and such may be the situation of things, that it will not be so easy to decide what part England may take in such a contest.
I am well aware how invidious a task it is to oppose anything which tends to the apparent aggrandizement of our own country. But I think no country can be aggrandized whilst France is Jacobinized. This post removed, it will be a serious question how far her further reduction will contribute to the general safety, which I always consider as included. Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves in some way or other. Can we say that even at this very hour we are not invidiously aggrandized? We are already in possession of almost all the commerce of the world. Our empire in India is an awful thing. If we should come to be in a condition not only to have all this ascendant in commerce, but to be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent upon our good pleasure, we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
As to France, I must observe that for a long time she has been stationary. She has, during this whole century, obtained far less by conquest or negotiation than any of the three great Continental powers. Some part of Lorraine excepted, I recollect nothing she has gained,—no, not a village. In truth, this Lorraine acquisition does little more than secure her barrier. In effect and substance it was her own before.
However that may be, I consider these things at present chiefly in one point of view, as obstructions to the war on Jacobinism, which must stand as long as the powers think its extirpation but a secondary object, and think of taking advantage, under the name of indemnity and security, to make war upon the whole nation of France, royal and Jacobin, for the aggrandizement of the allies, on the ordinary principles of interest, as if no Jacobinism existed in the world.
So far is France from being formidable to its neighbors for its domestic strength, that I conceive it will be as much as all its neighbors can do, by a steady guaranty, to keep that monarchy at all upon its basis. It will be their business to nurse France, not to exhaust it. France, such as it is, is indeed highly formidable: not formidable, however, as a great republic; but as the most dreadful gang of robbers and murderers that ever was embodied. But this distempered strength of France will be the cause of proportionable weakness on its recovery. Never was a country so completely ruined; and they who calculate the resurrection of her power by former examples have not sufficiently considered what is the present state of things. Without detailing the inventory of what organs of government have been destroyed, together with the very materials of which alone they can be recomposed, I wish it to be considered what an operose affair the whole system of taxation is in the old states of Europe. It is such as never could be made but in a long course of years. In France all taxes are abolished. The present powers resort to the capital, and to the capital in kind. But a savage, undisciplined people suffer a robbery with more patience than an impost. The former is in their habits and their dispositions. They consider it as transient, and as what, in their turn, they may exercise. But the terrors of the present power are such as no regular government can possibly employ. They who enter into France do not succeed to their resources. They have not a system to reform, but a system to begin. The whole estate of government is to be reacquired.
What difficulties this will meet with in a country exhausted by the taking of the capital, and among a people in a manner new-principled, trained, and actually disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is, and who may have occupied themselves by revolving in their thoughts what they were to do, if it fell to their lot to reëstablish the affairs of France. What support or what limitations the restored monarchy must have may be a doubt, or how it will pitch and settle at last. But one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt: that the settlement cannot be immediate; but that it must be preceded by some sort of power, equal at least in vigor, vigilance, promptitude, and decision, to a military government. For such a preparatory government, no slow-paced, methodical, formal, lawyer-like system, still less that of a showy, superficial, trifling, intriguing court, guided by cabals of ladies, or of men like ladies, least of all a philosophic, theoretic, disputatious school of sophistry,—none of these ever will or ever can lay the foundations of an order that can last. Whoever claims a right by birth to govern there must find in his breast, or must conjure up in it, an energy not to be expected, perhaps not always to be wished for, in well-ordered states. The lawful prince must have, in everything but crime, the character of an usurper. He is gone, if he imagines himself the quiet possessor of a throne. He is to contend for it as much after an apparent conquest as before. His task is, to win it: he must leave posterity to enjoy and to adorn it. No velvet cushions for him. He is to be always (I speak nearly to the letter) on horseback. This opinion is the result of much patient thinking on the subject, which I conceive no event is likely to alter.
A valuable friend of mine, who I hope will conduct these affairs, so far as they fall to his share, with great ability, asked me what I thought of acts of general indemnity and oblivion, as a means of settling France, and reconciling it to monarchy. Before I venture upon any opinion of my own in this matter, I totally disclaim the interference of foreign powers in a business that properly belongs to the government which we have declared legal. That government is likely to be the best judge of what is to be done towards the security of that kingdom, which it is their duty and their interest to provide for by such measures of justice or of lenity as at the time they should find best. But if we weaken it not only by arbitrary limitations of our own, but preserve such persons in it as are disposed to disturb its future peace, as they have its past, I do not know how a more direct declaration can be made of a disposition to perpetual hostility against a government. The persons saved from the justice of the native magistrate by foreign authority will owe nothing to his clemency. He will, and must, look to those to whom he is indebted for the power he has of dispensing it. A Jacobin faction, constantly fostered with the nourishment of foreign protection, will be kept alive.