For whose use, entertainment, or instruction are all those overstrained and overlabored proceedings in council, in negotiation, and in speeches in Parliament intended? What royal cabinet is to be enriched with these high-finished pictures of the arrogance of the sworn enemies of kings and the meek patience of a British administration? In what heart is it intended to kindle pity towards our multiplied mortifications and disgraces? At best it is superfluous. What nation is unacquainted with the haughty disposition of the common enemy of all nations? It has been more than seen, it has been felt,—not only by those who have been the victims of their imperious rapacity, but, in a degree, by those very powers who have consented to establish this robbery, that they might be able to copy it, and with impunity to make new usurpations of their own.
The King of Prussia has hypothecated in trust to the Regicides his rich and fertile territories on the Rhine, as a pledge of his zeal and affection to the cause of liberty and equality. He has seen them robbed with unbounded liberty and with the most levelling equality. The woods are wasted, the country is ravaged, property is confiscated, and the people are put to bear a double yoke, in the exactions of a tyrannical government and in the contributions of an hostile irruption. Is it to satisfy the Court of Berlin that the Court of London is to give the same sort of pledge of its sincerity and good faith to the French Directory? It is not that heart full of sensibility, it is not Lucchesini, the minister of his Prussian Majesty, the late ally of England, and the present ally of its enemy, who has demanded this pledge of our sincerity, as the price of the renewal of the long lease of his sincere friendship to this kingdom.
It is not to our enemy, the now faithful ally of Regicide, late the faithful ally of Great Britain, the Catholic king, that we address our doleful lamentation: it is not to the Prince of Peace, whose declaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of general tranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive-branch in his beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark of clean birds at Paris.
Surely it is not to the Tetrarch of Sardinia, now the faithful ally of a power who has seized upon all his fortresses and confiscated the oldest dominions of his house,—it is not to this once powerful, once respected, and once cherished ally of Great Britain, that we mean to prove the sincerity of the peace which we offered to make at his expense. Or is it to him we are to prove the arrogance of the power who, under the name of friend, oppresses him, and the poor remains of his subjects, with all the ferocity of the most cruel enemy?
It is not to Holland, under the name of an ally, laid under a permanent military contribution, filled with their double garrison of barbarous Jacobin troops and ten times more barbarous Jacobin clubs and assemblies, that we find ourselves obliged to give this pledge.
Is it to Genoa that we make this kind promise,—a state which the Regicides were to defend in a favorable neutrality, but whose neutrality has been, by the gentle influence of Jacobin authority, forced into the trammels of an alliance,—whose alliance has been secured by the admission of French garrisons,—and whose peace has been forever ratified by a forced declaration of war against ourselves?
It is not the Grand Duke of Tuscany who claims this declaration,—not the Grand Duke, who for his early sincerity, for his love of peace, and for his entire confidence in the amity of the assassins of his house, has been complimented in the British Parliament with the name of "the wisest sovereign in Europe": it is not this pacific Solomon, or his philosophic, cudgelled ministry, cudgelled by English and by French, whose wisdom and philosophy between them have placed Leghorn in the hands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the only profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the republic always the same, always one and indivisible.
It is not Venice, whose principal cities the enemy has appropriated to himself, and scornfully desired the state to indemnify itself from the Emperor, that we wish to convince of the pride and the despotism of an enemy who loads us with his scoffs and buffets.
It is not for his Holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of our own weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. That prince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. The artists of the French Revolution had given their very first essays and sketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a far more cruel "murdering piece" than had over entered into the imagination of painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing arms the possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by all the ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who during that period have reigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our late negotiation ceded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, lately amongst the most flourishing (perhaps the most flourishing for their extent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove the sincerity of our resolution to make peace with the Republic of Barbarism? That venerable potentate and pontiff is sunk deep into the vale of years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; his dominions are more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years, defended as they were, not by force, but by reverence: yet, in all these straits, we see him display, amidst the recent ruins and the new defacements of his plundered capital, along with the mild and decorated piety of the modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome. Does he, who, though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused to receive pecuniary compensations for the protection he owed to his people of Avignon, Carpentras, and the Venaissin,—does he want proofs of our good disposition to deliver over that people, without any security for them, or any compensation to their sovereign, to this cruel enemy? Does he want to be satisfied of the sincerity of our humiliation to France, who has seen his free, fertile, and happy city and state of Bologna, the cradle of regenerated law, the seat of sciences and of arts, so hideously metamorphosed, whilst he was crying to Great Britain for aid, and offering to purchase that aid at any price? Is it him, who sees that chosen spot of plenty and delight converted into a Jacobin ferocious republic, dependent on the homicides of France,—is it him, who, from the miracles of his beneficent industry, has done a work which defied the power of the Roman emperors, though with an enthralled world to labor for them,—is it him, who has drained and cultivated the Pontine Marshes, that we are to satisfy of our cordial spirit of conciliation with those who, in their equity, are restoring Holland again to the seas, whose maxims poison more than the exhalations of the most deadly fens, and who turn all the fertilities of Nature and of Art into an howling desert? Is it to him that we are to demonstrate the good faith of our submissions to the Cannibal Republic,—to him, who is commanded to deliver up into their hands Ancona and Civita Vecchia, seats of commerce raised by the wise and liberal labors and expenses of the present and late pontiffs, ports not more belonging to the Ecclesiastical State than to the commerce of Great Britain, thus wresting from his hands the power of the keys of the centre of Italy, as before they had taken possession of the keys of the northern part from the hands of the unhappy King of Sardinia, the natural ally of England? Is it to him we are to prove our good faith in the peace which we are soliciting to receive from the hands of his and our robbers, the enemies of all arts, all sciences, all civilization, and all commerce?
Is it to the Cispadane or to the Transpadane republics, which have been forced to bow under the galling yoke of French liberty, that we address all these pledges of our sincerity and love of peace with their unnatural parents?