To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, ‘the conditions of peace must bear hard on one of the parties,’ Vetus asks, ‘Were the powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering her any second wrong?’ Now this is an instance precisely in point to prove the direct reverse of Vetus’s doctrine: for here was a treaty in which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.

‘Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a moment?’ This is still altering the record. The question is not about submitting to hard conditions, but about imposing them. Besides, ‘the aggravated and multiplied molestations, injuries, and insults, which these courts were doomed to suffer,’ might be accounted for from those which they had in vain attempted to inflict on France, and from their still more wretched complaisance in being made the tools of a court which was not continental.

‘Then comes the peace of Amiens, our peace of Amiens—a peace born, educated, nourished, and matured in this very philanthropic spirit of gentleness and forgiveness. In the war which preceded the truce of which I am speaking, the French government involved us in considerably more than two hundred millions of debt.’ Vetus then proceeds to state that we made peace without any liquidation of this claim, without satisfaction, without a bond, (what else?) without a promise, without a single guinea! ‘I will have ransom, most egregious ransom.’ Why was it ever heard of that one government paid the debts in which another had involved itself in making war upon it?

‘The language of England,’ says our author, ‘was correctly what follows:—You, Monsieur, have loaded me with unspeakable distresses and embarrassments,’ (all this while, be it recollected, our affairs were going on most prosperously and gloriously in the cant of The Times) ‘you have robbed me of half my fortune, and reduced me to the brink of beggary,’ (the French by all accounts were in the gulph of bankruptcy) ‘you have torn away and made slaves of my friends and kindred,’ (indeed) ‘you have dangerously wounded me, and murdered my beloved children, who armed to defend their parent.’—This is too much, even for the dupes of England. Stick, Vetus, to your statistics, and do not make the pathetic ridiculous! Sophistry and affectation may confound common sense to a certain degree, but there is a point at which our feelings revolt against them.

We have already remarked on what Vetus says of Hanover; he probably will not wish us to go farther into it. Of Bonaparte he says, of course, that nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that he will convert the smallest concession made to him into a weapon for our destruction. That is, we have it in our power to set him at defiance, to insult him, to ‘bring him to the block,’ etc., whenever we please; and yet we are so completely in his power, so dependent on him, that the smallest concession must be fatal to us, will be made the instrument of our inevitable destruction. Thus is the public mind agitated and distracted by incredible contradictions, and made to feel at once ‘the fierce extremes’ of terror and triumph, of rashness and despair. ‘Our safety lies in his weakness, not in his will.’ If so, or if it depends on either of the conditions here stated, we are in no very pleasant situation. But our real safety depends on our own strength, and steady reliance on it, and not on the arguments of Vetus.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘Madmen’s epistles are no gospels.’

Dec. 16, 1813.

The last Letter of Vetus begins with an allusion to the events which have lately taken place in Holland. He then proceeds—‘What final effect this popular movement by the Dutch may have upon the future interests and prosperity of England is a question to be discussed with deliberate caution—with extreme solicitude—and with the chance, I trust, the distant chance, of its conducting us to no very gratifying conclusion!’ There is something in this passage truly characteristic, and well worthy of our notice. Vetus is, it seems, already jealous of the Dutch. The subtle venom of his officious zeal is instantly put in motion by the prospect of their national independence and commercial prosperity; and his pen is, no doubt, prepared, on the slightest provocation of circumstances, to convert them from an ally to be saved, into a rival and an enemy to be crushed. He, however, waives for the present the solemn discussion, till he can find some farther grounds to confirm him in his extreme solicitude and mysterious apprehensions. The perverse readiness of Vetus to pick a quarrel out of everything, or out of nothing, is exactly described in Spenser’s Allegory of Furor and Occasion, which if we thought him ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ we would recommend to his perusal.