‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’
Sir Fopling Flutter
Dec. 10, 1813.
‘Nothing,’ continues Vetus, ‘can be more opposite to this great policy, than to fight and to render back the fruits of our successes. We may be assured, that those with whom we contend are ready enough to improve their victories. If we are not equally so, we shall never be at rest. If the enemy beats us, he wins our provinces.—[What provinces of ours?]—If we beat him, we restore all. What more profitable game could he desire! Truly, at this rate, our neighbours must be arrant fools if they leave us one week’s repose!’
There is a spirit of Machiavelian policy in this paragraph which is very commendable. It reminds us of the satirist’s description of ‘fools aspiring to be knaves.’ It is, in fact, this fear of being outwitted by the French, that constantly makes us the dupes of our suspicions of them, as it is a want of confidence in our own strength or firmness, that leads us to shew our courage by defiance. True courage, as well as true wisdom, is not distrustful of itself. Vetus recommends it to us to act upon the maxims of the common disturbers of mankind, of ‘this obdurate and rapacious foe,’ as the only means to secure general tranquillity. He wishes to embody the pretended spirit and principles of French diplomacy in a code,—the acknowledged basis of which should be either universal conquest, or endless hostility. We have, it seems, no chance of repelling the aggressions of the French, but by retaliating them not only on themselves, but on other states. At least, the author gives a pretty broad hint of what he means by the improvement of our victories, when he talks of annexing Holland and Danish Zealand to Hanover, as ‘her natural prey,’ instead of their being the dependencies of France. This is certainly one way of trimming the balance of power in Europe, and placing the independence of nations in a most happy dilemma. The inventor of this new and short way with foreign states only laments that Hanover, ‘under British auspices,’ has not been before-hand with France in imitating Prussia in her seizure of the Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other. He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic, plodding, insipid, commercial spirit by Prussia and Russia. But now that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang, nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir ourselves as effectually as he does, for the good of mankind! But Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not sound logic. He wishes by a coup sur to prevent an unfair and dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly, is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because the nature and essence of war is a trial of strength; and, therefore, to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus, ‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders it necessary to keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from repeating his attack; and, therefore, to hold inflexibly what we have acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost, but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them. He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.
It is neither the actual possession, nor the will to keep certain acquisitions, but the power to keep them, and, at the same time, to extort other concessions from an enemy, that must determine the basis of all negociations, that are not founded on verbal chimeras.
‘We are taught, indeed, to take for granted, that a peace, whose conditions bear hard on either party, will be the sooner broken by that party; and, therefore, that we have an indirect interest in sacrificing a portion of our conquests.’ The general principle here stated is self-evident, and one would think indisputable. For the very ground of war is a peace whose conditions are thought to bear hard on one of the parties, and yet, according to Vetus, the only way to make peace durable, to prevent the recurrence of an appeal to force, is to impose such hard conditions on an enemy, as it is his interest, and must be his inclination, to break by force. An opinion of the disproportion between our general strength, and our actual advantages, seems to be the necessary ground of war, but it is here converted into the permanent source of peace. The origin of the common prejudice is, however, very satisfactorily illustrated in the remainder of the paragraph. ‘This language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The blind opponents of every minister who happens to be engaged in conducting a war’ [Is war then a mere affair of accident?] ‘can see no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim against immoderate exertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and undermining the honest disappointment’ [Quere expectations] ‘of the people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much’ [of that little] ‘undone by negociation. But besides being a factious expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny that we affect any thing more by granting an enemy what are called favourable terms, than convince him that he may go to war with England, gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty.’ Here Vetus entirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace, if not hard, must be immediately favourable! Because we grant an enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which, by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. ‘The only valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the diminution of our rival’s, by the resources and dominions we have wrested from him.’ First, this security can be good only on one side: secondly, it is not good at all: the only security for peace is not in the actual losses or distresses incurred by states, but in the settled conviction that they cannot better themselves by war. But all these contradictions are nothing to Vetus, who alone does not fluctuate between the extremes of faction, but is still true to war—and himself.
But there is, in our opinion, a third extreme of English faction (if Vetus will spare us the anomaly) not less absurd, and more mischievous than either of the others: we mean those who are the blind adherents of every minister who happens to be engaged in a war, however unnecessarily or wantonly it may have been begun, or however weakly and wickedly carried on: who see no danger in repeated disgraces, and impending ruin, provided we are obstinately bent on pursuing the same dreadful career which has led to them; who, when our losses come thronging in upon us, urge us to persist till we recover the advantages we have lost, and, when we recover them, force us on till we lose all again: with whom peace, in a time of adverse fortune, is dishonour, and in the pride of success, madness: who only exaggerate ‘our pretensions at a peace,’ that they may never be complied with: who assume a settled unrelenting purpose in our adversary to destroy us, in order to inspire us with the same principle of never-ending hostility against him: who leave us no alternative but eternal war, or inevitable ruin: who irritate the hatred and the fears of both parties, by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of defiance, suspicion, and the most galling contempt: who, adapting every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, constantly return in the same circle to the point from which they set out: with whom peace is always unattainable, war always necessary!
We shall pass over Vetus’s historic researches, the wars of the Romans and Carthaginians (the formal latitude of Vetus’s pen delights in these great divisions of human affairs), and come to what is more to our purpose.
In modern times he first comes to the treaty of 1763, only (as far as we can find) to affix the epithet ‘American rebels’ as a sort of Pragmatic Sanction to our colonists, with whom, he says, France joined a few years afterwards, and, ‘in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king, aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy.’ Yet, notwithstanding this long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one, stigmatized as republican and Corsican, ‘with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,’ as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus himself ‘would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the healthier, and to England not less hostile, sovereignty of the banished house of Bourbon.’ Why then pertinaciously affix these obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse interpreters of truth.