Oh! exclaims Mr. Perceval, there was no deadly raging general pestilence! What then? Is not the principle the same? Must millions suffer, must the earth be cumbered with carcasses, before the christian statesman will deviate from his barbarous policy? Is a momentary expediency to set aside the principle in such a case? Oh! no! by no means! exclaims the pious minister Perceval. My policy is just, and humane; fixed on immutable truths emanating directly from true religion, and quite consonant to the christian dispensation; the sick people shall have bark, I am far from wishing to prevent them from getting bark. God forbid! I am not so inhuman. Yes, they shall have bark, but their ruler must first submit to me. “Port thy helm,” quoth the Quaker, “or thee wilt miss her, friend!” War against hospitals! Oh! No! “I do not war against the hospital, I see the black flag waving over it and I respect it; to be sure: I throw my shells on to it continually, but that is not to hurt the sick, it is only to make the governor capitulate.” And this is the pious sophistry by which the christian Mr. Perceval is to be defended!
But Mr. Cobbett was in favour of this measure! Listen to him! By all means! Let us hear Mr. Cobbett; let us hear his “vigorous sentences,” his opinions, his proofs, his arguments, the overflowings of his “true English spirit and feeling” upon the subject of Mr. Perceval’s administration. Yes! yes! I will listen to Mr. Cobbett, and what is more, I will yield implicit belief to Mr. Cobbett, where I cannot, with any feeling of truth, refute his arguments and assertions.
Mr. Cobbett defended the Jesuit’s bark bill upon the avowed ground that it was to assert our sovereignty of the seas, not our actual power on that element, but our right to rule there as we listed. That is to say, that the other people of the world were not to dare traffic, not to dare move upon that high road of nations, not to presume to push their commercial intercourse with each other, nay, not even to communicate save under the controul and with the license of England. Now, if we are endowed by Heaven with such a right, in the name of all that is patriotic and English, let it be maintained. Yet it seems a strange plea in justification of the christian Mr. Perceval—it seems strange that he should be applauded for prohibiting the use of bark to the sick people of Portugal and Spain, and France, Holland, Flanders, Italy, and the Ionian islands, for to all these countries the prohibition extended, on the ground of our right to domineer on the wide sea; and that he should also be applauded for declaiming against the cruelty, the ambition, the domineering spirit of Napoleon. I suppose we were appointed by heaven to rule on the ocean according to our caprice, and Napoleon had only the devil to sanction his power over the continent. We were christians, “truly British christians,” as the Tory phrase goes; and he was an infidel, a Corsican infidel. Nevertheless we joined together, each under our different dispensations, yes, we joined together, we agreed to trample upon the rest of the world; and that trade, which we would not allow to neutrals, we, by mutual licenses, carried on ourselves, until it was discovered that the sick wanted bark, sorely wanted it; then we, the truly British christians, prohibited that article. We deprived the sick people of the succour of bark; and without any imputation on our christianity, no doubt because the tenets of our faith permit us to be merciless to our enemies, provided a quaker winks at the act! Truly the logic, the justice, and the christianity of this position, seem to be on a par.
All sufferings lead to sickness, but we must make our enemies suffer, if we wish to get the better of them, let them give up the contest and their sufferings will cease: wherefore there is nothing in this stopping of medicine. This is Mr. Cobbett’s argument, and Mr. Cobbett’s words are adopted by Mr. Perceval’s son. To inflict suffering on the enemy was then the object of the measure, and of course the wider the suffering spread the more desirable the measure. Now suffering of mind as well as of body must be here meant, because the dead and dying are not those who can of themselves oblige the government of a great nation to give up a war; it must be the dread of such sufferings increasing, that disposes the great body of the people to stop the career of their rulers. Let us then torture our prisoners; let us destroy towns with all their inhabitants; burn ships at sea with all their crews; carry off children and women, and torment them until their friends offer peace to save them. Why do we not? Is it because we dread retaliation? or because it is abhorrent to the usages of christian nations? The former undoubtedly, if the younger Mr. Perceval’s argument adopted from Cobbett is just; the latter if there is such a thing as christian principle. That principle once sacrificed to expediency, there is nothing to limit the extent of cruelty in war.
So much for Mr. Cobbett upon the Jesuit’s bark bill, but one swallow does not make a summer; his “true English spirit and feeling” breaks out on other occasions regarding Mr. Perceval’s policy, and there, being quite unable to find any weakness in him, I am content to take him as a guide. Something more, however, there is, to advance on the subject of the Jesuit’s bark bill, ere I yield to the temptation of enlivening my pages with Cobbett’s “vigorous sentences.”
Hansard’s Debates. Mr. Wilberforce, no small name amongst religious men and no very rigorous opponent of ministers, described this measure in the house, as a bill “which might add to the ferocity and unfeeling character of the contest, but could not possibly put an end to the contest.”
Mr. Grattan said, “we might refuse our Jesuit’s bark to the French soldiers; we might inflict pains and penalties, by the acrimony of our statutes, upon those who were saved from the severity of war; but the calculation was contemptible.”
Mr. Whitbread characterized the bill as “a most abominable measure calculated to hold the country up to universal execration. It united in itself detestable cruelty with absurd policy.”
Lord Holland combatted the principle of the bill, which he said “would distress the women and children of Spain and Portugal more than the enemy.”