The introductory comment on the Revolution in Holland is a clue to the whole of our author’s political system, which we shall here endeavour to explain. He looks askance with ‘leer malign’ on the remotest prospect of good to other nations. Every addition to the general stock of liberty or happiness, is to him so much taken from our own. He sees nothing gratifying in that prosperity or independence, which is shared (or any part of it) with foreign nations. He trembles with needless apprehension at the advantages in store for them, which he anticipates only to prevent, and is indifferent to our own welfare, interests, honour—except as they result from the privations, distress, and degradation of the rest of the world. Hatred, suspicion, and contempt for other nations are the first and last principles of the love which ‘an upright Englishman’ bears to his country. To prevent their enjoying a moment’s repose, or indulging even in a dream of future comfort, he would involve his own country in incessant distraction and wretchedness, and risk its final ruin on the cast of a die!—Vetus professes, with some reason, not to be enamoured of quotation: but he may, perhaps, allow us to refer to an author, who, though not so deep read in Vattel and the writings of the jurists, had just and penetrating views of human nature. ‘Think, there’s livers out of England. What’s England in the world’s map? In a great pool a swan’s nest.’ Now this ‘swan’s nest’ is indeed to us more than all the world besides—to cherish, to protect, to love, and honour it. But if we expect it to be so to the rest of the world—if we do not allow them to cultivate their own affections, to improve their own advantages, to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy.
Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term ‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the sans-culotterie of scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the welfare of our own country, excludes even the shadow of a pretension to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by passion and prejudice.
Alter his cold exordium on the Revolution in Holland, our consistent politician enters with warmth on Lord Castlereagh’s speech on the subsidiary treaties, in which he finds a But before the word Peace, which has a most happy efficacy in healing the wounds inflicted on his tortured apprehensions, by the explicit, unqualified declaration of Lord Liverpool in the other House. ‘After describing the laudable solicitude of Ministers for the attainment of that first of earthly goods, peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his Lordship added what was worth all the rest—BUT we must have a secure peace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we negociate, and never grant to such an enemy conditions, which under the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her to contingent dangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond even the calibre of Lord Castlereagh’s talents as a statesman.) ‘These,’ proceeds Vetus, ‘were nearly the words; they certainly do not compromise his meaning.’ (Our author cannot be much mistaken in attributing to his Lordship any words which seeming to have some meaning, in reality have none.) ’ Here then the noble Secretary has chased away every doubtful expression of his colleague.’ (‘Why so,—this horrible shadow’ of peace ‘being gone,’ Vetus ‘is himself again.’)
‘The sentiment delivered by the sovereign on the throne is now given to us with a construction, at which we need no longer be alarmed. I ask only that secure peace,—a peace consistent with English safety—void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour, otherwise the ambition and arrogance of Bonaparte, which, as compared with the relief of one day’s hunger to the meanest peasant in this our native land, are baubles not worth a name!’—This is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable specimens we ever met with of that figure in rhetoric, designated by an excellent writer as ‘the figure of encroachment.’[[8]] Vetus, by a series of equations (certainly not mathematical ones) at length arrives at a construction of peace at which he is no longer alarmed; at the identical peace which he wants, and the only one he will admit,—a peace preposterous in its very terms, and in its nature impracticable,—a peace ‘void of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour’ of the enemy, which are to pass with them as well as with us, for so much ‘arrogance and ambition.’ This is the only peace consistent with English safety—this is the secure peace of Lord Castlereagh—the fair and honourable peace announced from the throne—the very peace which Lord Liverpool meant to describe when he startled Vetus by the doubtful expression of a peace ‘consistent with the honour, rights, and interests of France’—‘of such a peace as we in her situation should be disposed to grant.’ To the mind of Vetus, which is indeed the very receptacle for contradictions ‘to knot and gender in,’ these two sorts of peace appear to be perfectly compatible, and the one a most happy explanation of the other, viz. a peace void of every shadow of regard to the rights and honour of a rival nation, and a peace consistent with those rights and that honour. If this is not ‘mere midsummer madness,’ we do not know what is. Or if any thing can surpass it (‘for in this lowest deep of absurdity a lower deep still opens to receive us, gaping wide’) it is the forlorn piece of sentimental mummery by which it is attempted to protract this endless war of proscription against the pretensions of France, under the mask of relieving the wants and distresses of the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed contemptible and mischievous baubles.
‘What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? Are they still in pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them? When we demand compensation for our dreadful sufferings, it is but what justice grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires. Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy supremacy of Bonaparte!’
First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the patriotic contributors to The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post, The Sun, and The Star, must have had in writing, and their admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand compensation for what we have suffered, it is but justice, if we can at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer; but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew, by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of Vetus’s style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years engaged in a desperate and (for some reason or other) an unequal struggle against France;—by playing at double or quits, she has just recovered from the very brink of destruction; and the keepers of our political E.O. tables treat us as traitors and miscreants, who would dissuade her from sitting down once more to finish the game, and ruin her adversary.
‘—It is asked,—“Do we propose to humble France? Do we propose to destroy her? If so, we breathe eternal war; if so, we convert the aggressor into the sufferer, and transfer all the dignity and authority of justice to the enemy against whom we arm!”’ Yes, against whom we arm for the avowed purpose of his destruction. From the moment that we make the destruction of an enemy (be he who he may) the indispensable condition of our safety, our destruction from that moment becomes necessary to his, and an act of self-defence. Not much liking this dilemma from which our author has more than once ‘struggled to get free,’ he in the next passage makes a wide career indeed, in order, no doubt, to return to the charge with better effect hereafter. ‘The question of peace or eternal war is not a naked question of right and wrong. It is a question, whose morality is determined by its reference to our preservation as a people. To such interrogatories I answer without reserve, that we ought to exact precisely that measure of humiliation from France, and that we do recommend that critical advance towards her destruction, that may combine the utmost attainable satisfaction for our past grievances with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France, since the fatal battle of Hastings, what has this nation of Saxon warriors’—(We hardly know ourselves in the learned livery of Vetus’s style. He himself is doubtless descended from some very old family settled here before the Conquest)—‘What has this nation of Saxon warriors ever yet endured from France but injury and affliction?’ Yet we have made a shift to exist as a nation under all this load of calamity. We still breathe and live notwithstanding some intervals of repose, some short resting places afforded us, before this morbid inspector of health, like another Doctor Pedro Positive, injoined his preposterous regimen of incessant war as necessary to lasting peace, and to our preservation as a people!
‘Modern France’ continues Vetus, rising in his argument, has no principle so deeply rooted as that of everlasting enmity to England. ‘I confess for this reason that in my uncorrupted judgment the best security for Great Britain, and therefore, if practicable, her most imperious duty, would be the absolute conquest of France. But since that, unfortunately, is an event which at present we are not likely to accomplish, the second best security is’ (one would think not to attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her, if we can, to a degree of weakness consistent with our immediate repose.’ After thus modestly postponing the absolute conquest of France to a more convenient opportunity, he adds the following incredible sentence. ‘If the enemy should be so far borne away by his hatred, as to command his emissaries in London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, which his own persevering and atrocious outrages have rendered in the mind of every Englishman indispensable to the safety of these islands, the woeful alternative of perpetual war very plainly originates not with Great Britain but with Bonaparte!’ That is to say, The Times not long ago laid it down as a fixed, unalterable maxim, without reference to terms of one sort or another, that we were never to make peace with Bonaparte; Vetus in this very letter enters into an elaborate apology, for that multitude of wise, honest, and virtuous persons who think his existence as a sovereign at all times threatens our existence as a nation, and it is because we entered our protest against this ‘frantic outcry raised by degenerate Englishmen,’ that Bonaparte is here made to charge his emissaries in London to announce that he prefers eternal war to the acceptance of conditions, the moderation of which conditions or of our second best security may be judged of when we are told that the best, and indeed only real security for Great Britain, and therefore her most imperious duty, would be the absolute conquest of France. Vetus is, however, contented with such terms of peace as will imply only a critical advance to her destruction, and if Bonaparte is not contented with the same terms, the alternative of eternal war, it seems, originates with him and not with Vetus.[[9]]
But we deny that though this best security for Great Britain, the absolute conquest of France, were in her power, that it would be her most imperious duty to effect it. And we deny it, because on the same ground a better security still for Great Britain would be the conquest or destruction of Europe and the world; and yet we do not think it her imperious duty, even if she could, to accomplish the one, or to make a critical advance to the other. For if it is once laid down and acted upon as a maxim in national morality, that the best and most desirable security of a state is in the destruction of its neighbours, or that there is to be an unrelenting ever watchful critical approximation to this object as far as possible, there is an end of civil society. The same principle of not stopping short of this maximum of selfish security will impose the same imperious duty of rankling jealousy, and inexorable hostility on others. Our speculator’s ‘best possible security’ for the independence of states, is nothing but a watchword for mutual havoc, and wide-spreading desolation. Terrified with the phantom of imaginary danger, he would have us rush headlong on the reality. We are obstinately to refuse the enjoyment of a moment’s repose, and proceed to commit wilful dilapidation on the estate of our happiness, because it is not secured to us by an everlasting tenure. Placed at the mercy of the malice or hypocrisy of every venal alarmist, our only resource must be to seek a refuge from our fears in our own destruction, or to find the gratification of our revenge in that of others. But a whole nation is no more justified in obtaining this best of all possible securities for itself, by the immediate subversion of other states, than the assassin is justified in taking the life of another, to prevent the possibility of any future attempt upon his own. For in proportion as a state is weak and incapable of subjugating us, is the manifest injustice of any such precaution;—and in proportion as a state is formidable, and likely to excite serious apprehension for our own safety, is the danger and folly of setting an example which may be retaliated with so much greater effect, and ‘like a devilish engine, recoil upon ourselves.’ That exclusive patriotism which claims for our country an exemption from ‘contingent danger,’ which would place its wealth, its power, or even its safety beyond the reach of chance and the fluctuation of human affairs, claims for it an exemption from the common lot of human nature. That exclusive patriotism which seeks to enforce this claim (equally impious and unwise) by the absolute conquest of rival states, tempts the very ruin it professes to avert.
But Vetus mistakes the nature of patriotism altogether. He would transform that principle which was intended for the tutelary genius of nations, into the destroying demon of the world. He ransacks past history to revive old grudges; he anticipates the future to invent new ones. In his whole system, there is not room for ‘so small a drop of pity as a wren’s eye.’ His patriotism is the worm that dies not; a viper gnawing at the heart. He would strip this feeling of everything but the low cunning, and brutal ferocity of the savage state, and then arm it with all the refinements of scholastic virtue, and the most rigid logic. The diverging rays of human reason which should be diffused to cheer and enlighten the moral world, are in him collected into a focus of raging zeal to burn and destroy. It is well for mankind that in the order of the universe, our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own antidote within them. The only justification of our narrow, selfish passions, is their short-sightedness:—were it not for this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would not leave them the smallest interval of rest. It is well that the ungovernable impulses of fear and hatred are excited only by gross, palpable objects; and are therefore transient, and limited in their operation. It is well that those motives which do not owe their birth to reason, should not afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into abstract principles of right and wrong?