A letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a noble lord: on the attacks made upon him and his pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, early in the present sessions of Parliament.

MY LORD,

I COULD hardly flatter myself with the hope, that so very early in the season I should have to acknowledge obligations to the Duke of Bedford and to the Earl of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time in conferring upon me, that sort of honour, which it is alone within their competence, and which it is cer∣tainly most congenial to their nature and their manners to bestow.

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, by the zealots of the new sect in philosophy and politicks, of which these noble persons think so charitably, and of which others think so justly, to me, is no matter of uneasiness or surprise. To have incurred the displeasure of the Duke of Orleans or the Duke of Bedford, to

fall under the censure of Citizen Brissot or of his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, I ought to consider as proofs, not the least satisfactory, that I have produced some part of the effect I proposed by my endeavours. I have laboured hard to earn, what the noble Lords are generous enough to pay. Personal offence I have given them none. The part they take against me is from zeal to the cause. It is well! It is perfectly well! I have to do homage to their justice. I have to thank the Bedfords and the Lauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully acquitted to∣wards me whatever arrear of debt was left un∣discharged by the Priestleys and the Paines.

Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own wrong: I at least have nothing to complain of. They have gone beyond the demands of justice. They have been (a little perhaps beyond their intention) favourable to me. They have been the means of bring∣ing out, by their invectives, the handsome things which Lord Grenville has had the goodness and condescension to say in my be∣half. Retired as I am from the world, and from all it's affairs and all it's pleasures, I con∣fess it does kindle, in my nearly extinguished

feelings, a very vivid satisfaction to be so at∣tacked and so commended. It is soothing to my wounded mind, to be commended by an able, vigorous, and well informed statesman, and at the very moment when he stands forth with a manliness and resolution, worthy of him∣self and of his cause, for the preservation of the person and government of our Sovereign, and therein for the security of the laws, the liberties, the morals, and the lives of his people. To be in any fair way connected with such things, is indeed a distinction. No philosophy can make me above it: no melancholy can depress me so low, as to make me wholly insensible to such an honour.

Why will they not let me remain in obscu∣rity and inaction? Are they apprehensive, that if an atom of me remains, the sect has something to fear? Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca's, my skin might be made into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle, against a tyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe, and all the human race?

My Lord, it is a subject of aweful meditation. Before this of France, the annals of all time

have not furnished an instance of a compleat revolution. That revolution seems to have ex∣tended even to the constitution of the mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it re∣sembles what Lord Verulam says of the operations of nature: It was perfect, not only in all its ele∣ments and principles, but in all it's members and it's organs from the very beginning. The moral scheme of France furnishes the only pattern ever known, which they who admire will instantly resemble. It is indeed an inexhaustible reper∣tory of one kind of examples. In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classed with the living, I am not safe from them. They have tygers to fall upon animated strength. They have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The national menagerie is collected by the first phy∣siologists of the time; and it is defective in no description of savage nature. They pursue, even such as me, into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary tribunals. Nei∣ther sex, nor age—not the sanctuary of the tomb is sacred to them. They have so determined a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the departed, the sad immunities of the grave. They are not wholly without an ob∣ject. Their turpitude purveys to their malice;

and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assas∣sinate the living. If all revolutionists were not proof against all caution, I should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever known in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and by their sorceries, to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event, than the prediction of their own disastrous fate▪ —"Leave, oh leave me to repose!"

In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bed∣ford for his attack upon me and my mortuary pension. He cannot readily comprehend the transaction he condemns. What I have ob∣tained was the fruit of no bargain; the produc∣tion of no intrigue; the result of no compromise; the effect of no solicitation. The first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately or imme∣diately, to his Majesty or any of his Ministers. It was long known that the instant my engage∣ments would permit it, and before the heaviest of all calamities had for ever condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that design. I was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any statesman, or any party, when the Ministers so generously and so nobly carried

into effect the spontaneous bounty of the Crown. Both descriptions have acted as became them. When I could no longer serve them, the Mini∣sters have considered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them, the revolutionists have trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal to the manner in which the be∣nefit was conferred. It came to me indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which no circumstance of fortune could af∣ford me any real pleasure. But this was no fault in the Royal Donor, or in his Ministers, who were pleased, in acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the publick, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man.

It would ill become me to boast of any thing. It would as ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the value of a long life, spent with unexampled toil in the service of my country. Since the total body of my services, on ac∣count of the industry which was shewn in them, and the fairness of my intentions, have ob∣tained the acceptance of my Sovereign, it would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the Duke of Bedford and the Corresponding Society, or, as far as in me lies, to permit a dis∣pute on the rate at which the authority appointed

by our Constitution to estimate such things, has been pleased to set them.

Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and contempt. By me they have been so al∣ways. I knew that as long as I remained in publick, I should live down the calumnies of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If I happened to be now and then in the wrong, as who is not, like all other men, I must bear the consequence of my faults and my mistakes. The libels of the present day, are just of the same stuff as the libels of the past. But they derive an importance from the rank of the per∣sons they come from, and the gravity of the place where they were uttered. In some way or other I ought to take some notice of them. To assert myself thus traduced is not vanity or arro∣gance. It is a demand of justice; it is a demon∣stration of gratitude. If I am unworthy, the Ministers are worse than prodigal. On that hy∣pothesis, I perfectly agree with the Duke of Bed∣ford.

For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put myself on my country. I ought to be allowed a reasonable freedom, because I stand upon my deliverance; and no culprit ought to

plead in irons. Even in the utmost latitude of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum. Whatever it may be in the eyes of these noble persons themselves, to me, their situation calls for the most profound respect. If I should happen to trespass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always be supposed, that a con∣fusion of characters may produce mistakes; that in the masquerades of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical adventures happen; odd things are said and pass off. If I should fail a single point in the high respect I owe to those illustrious persons, I cannot be sup∣posed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of the House of Peers, but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauder∣dale of Palace Yard;—The Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There they are on the pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my humble level; and, virtually at least, to have waved their high privilege.

Making this protestation, I refuse all re∣volutionary tribunals, where men have been put to death for no other reason, than that they had obtained favours from the Crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old English law, that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline

his Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a juror to pass upon the value of my services. Whatever his natural parts may be, I cannot recognize in his few and idle years, the competence to judge of my long and laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my quantum meruit. Poor rich man! He can hardly know any thing of publick industry in it's exertions, or can estimate it's com∣pensations when it's work is done. I have no doubt of his Grace's readiness in all the calcula∣tions of vulgar arithmetick; but I shrewdly sus∣pect, that he is very little studied in the theory of moral proportions; and has never learned the Rule of Three in the arithmetick of policy and state.

His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensa∣tion can possibly reward them. Between money and services of this kind, (I said it long since* 1.1, when I was not myself concerned) there is no com∣mon measurer. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a re∣ward for what, mere animal life must indeed sus∣tain,

but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not had more than suffi∣cient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ, as well as he, a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a more confined applica∣tion, I certainly stand in need of every kind of relief and easement much more than he does. When I say I have not received more than I de∣serve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No! Far, very far, from it! Before that presence, I claim no merit at all. Every thing towards me is favour, and bounty. One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud and insulting foe.

His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt, by charging my acceptance of his Majesty's grant as a departure from my ideas, and the spirit of my conduct with regard to oecono∣my. If it be, my ideas of oeconomy were false and ill founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's ideas of oeconomy I have contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to cer∣tain bills brought in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him, that there is no∣thing in my conduct that can contradict either the letter or the spirit of those acts.—Does he mean the pay-office act? I take it for granted he does not. The act to which he alludes is,

I suppose, the establishment act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has ever read the one or the other. The first of these systems cost me, with every assistance which my then situation gave me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common through all the offices, and general in the pub∣lick at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize the office of Paymaster General. I undertook it, however; and I suc∣ceeded in my undertaking. Whether the mili∣tary service, or whether the general oeconomy of our finances have profited by that act, I leave to those who are acquainted with the army, and with the treasury, to judge.

An opinion full as general prevailed also at the same time, that nothing could be done for the re∣gulation of the civil-list establishment. The very attempt to introduce method into it, and any li∣mitations to it's services, was held absurd. I had not seen the man, who so much as suggest∣ed one oeconomical principle, or an oeconomical expedient, upon that subject. Nothing but coarse amputation, or coarser taxation, were then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or the least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong zeal, or factious fury, were the whole contribution brought by the most

noisy on that occasion, towards the satisfaction of the publick, or the relief of the Crown.

Let me tell my youthful Censor, that the necessities of that time required something very different from what others then sug∣gested, or what his Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of the most cri∣tical periods in our annals.

Astronomers have supposed, that if a certain comet, whose path intersected the ecliptick, had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in it's ex∣centrick course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the rights of man, (which

"from it's horrid hair shakes pestilence, and war,"

and

"with fear of change perplexes Monarchs"

) had that comet crossed upon us in that internal state of Eng∣land, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried, out of the highway of heaven, into all the vices, crimes, horrours and miseries of the French revolution.

Happily, France was not then jacobinized. Her hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off; but we preserved the body: We

lost our Colonies; but we kept our Constitu∣tion. There was, indeed, much intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of re∣form. Such was the distemper of the publick mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas, and maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called parliamentary reforms, went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had the honour of leading up the death-dance of Democratick Re∣volution. Other projects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very existence of the kingdom under any constitution. There are who remember the blind fury of some, and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger; there, the same inaction from a stupid insensibi∣lity to it; here, well-wishers to the mischief;

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there, indifferent lookers-on. At the same time, a sort of National Convention, dubious in its nature, and perilous in its example, nosed Parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendance over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of Legislature itself. In Ireland things ran in a still more eccentrick course. Government was unnerved, confounded, and in a manner suspended. It's equipoise was totally gone. I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man of admirable parts; of general knowledge; of a versatile understanding fitted for every sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry; of a delightful temper; and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man▪ to deny that he wanted something of the vi∣gilance, and spirit of command, that the time required. Indeed, a darkness, next to the fog of this awful day, loured over the whole region For a little time the helm appeared abandoned—

Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere coelo Nec meminisse viae mediâ Palinurus in undâ.

At that time I was connected with men 〈◊〉〈◊〉 high place in the community. They loved L••¦berty

as much as the Duke of Bedford can do; and they understood it at least as well. Perhaps their politicks, as usual, took a tincture from their character, and they cultivated what they loved. The Liberty they pursued was a Liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion, and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did not wish, that Liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in it's perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon man∣kind. To preserve the Constitution entire, and practically equal to all the great ends of it's for∣mation, not in one single part, but in all it's parts, was to them the first object. Popularity and power they regarded alike. These were with them only different means of obtaining that ob∣ject; and had no preference over each other in their minds, but as one or the other might af∣ford a surer or a less certain prospect of arriving at that end. It is some consolation to me, in the chearless gloom which darkens the evening of my life, that with them I commenced my political career, and never for a moment, in reality, nor in appearance, for any length of time, was separated from their good wishes and good opinion.

By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, but just then, and in the midst of

that hunt of obloquy, which ever has pursued me with a full cry through life, I had obtained a very considerable degree of publick confi∣dence. I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind of popular opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no stranger to the insecurity of it's tenure. I do not boast of it. It is mentioned, to shew, not how highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use I made of it. I endeavoured to turn that short-lived advantage to myself into a permanent benefit to my Country. Far am I from detracting from the merit of some Gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occasion. No!—It is not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice to the aids that I receive. I have, through life, been willing to give every thing to others; and to reserve nothing for myself, but the inward conscience, that I had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to discipline, to di∣rect the abilities of the Country for it's ser∣vice, and to place them in the best light to improve their age, or to adorn it. This con∣science I have. I have never suppressed any man; never checked him for a moment in his course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I was always ready, to the height of my means (and they were always infinitely below my desires) to for∣ward those abilities which overpowered my own.

He is an ill-furnished undertaker, who has no machinery but his own hands to work with. Poor in my own faculties, I ever thought myself rich in theirs. In that period of difficulty and dan∣ger, more especially, I consulted, and sincerely co-operated with men of all parties, who seemed disposed to the same ends, or to any main part of them. Nothing, to prevent disorder, was omitted: when it appeared, nothing to subdue it, was left uncounselled, nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—I do not say, I saved my Country; I am sure I did my Country important service. There were few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledge it, and that time was thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honourable pro∣vision should be made for him.

So much for my general conduct through the whole of the portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense then entertained of that conduct by my country. But my charac∣ter, as a reformer, in the particular instances which the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so con∣nected in principle with my opinions on the hi∣deous changes, which have since barbarized

France, and spreading thence, threaten the po∣litical and moral order of the whole world, that it seems to demand something of a more detail∣ed discussion.

My oeconomical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, the suppression of a paltry pen∣sion or employment, more or less. Oeconomy in my plans was, as it ought to be, secondary, sub∣ordinate, instrumental. I acted on state prin∣ciples. I found a great distemper in the com∣monwealth; and, according to the nature of the evil and of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of con∣tra-indicants. On one hand Government, daily growing more invidious for an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this dissolution confined to Government com∣monly so called. It extended to Parliament; which was losing not a little in it's dignity and estimation, by an opinion of it's not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the People, (partly na∣tural and partly infused into them by art) ap∣peared in so wild and inconsiderate a man∣ner, with regard to the oeconomical object

(for I set aside for a moment the dreadful tam∣pering with the body of the Constitution itself) that if their petitions had literally been complied with, the State would have been convulsed; and a gate would have been opened, through which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the Publick from the mischiefs of the false reform but it's absurdity; which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of the people who would know they had failed in the accom∣plishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to any thing rather than to their own proceedings. But there were then persons in the world, who nourished complaint; and would have been tho∣roughly disappointed if the people were ever sa∣tisfied. I was not of that humour. I wished that they should be satisfied. It was my aim to give to the People the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought was right whether they desired it or not, before it had been modified for them into senseless petitions. I knew that there is a manifest marked distinc∣tion, which ill men, with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction be∣tween

Change and Reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be cer∣tainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary mo∣dification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which un∣derwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.

All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of every thing; they refused to reform any thing; and they left no∣thing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The con∣sequences are before us,—not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the publick

security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of th•• young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are sad∣dened; our very studies are poisoned and per∣verted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dread∣ful innovation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotick anarchy, which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neigh∣bouring State. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, un∣ravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal * 1.2.

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this compleat innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, in the whole body of it's solidity and compound mass, at which, as Ham∣let says, the face of Heaven glows with horrour and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind, and every feeling heart, perfectly thought-sick, without a thorough ab∣horrence of every thing they say, and every thing they do, I am amazed at the morbid strength, or the natural infirmity of his mind.

It was then not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced my Plan of Reform. Without troubling myself with the exactness of the logical diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite. It was to prevent that evil, that I proposed the measures, which his Grace is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleas∣ed, to recall to my recollection. I had (what

I hope that Noble Duke will remember in all his operations) a State to preserve, as well as a State to reform. I had a People to gratify, but not to inflame, or to mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what I did, as for what I prevented from being done. In that situation of the publick mind, I did not undertake, as was then proposed, to new model the House of Commons or the House of Lords; or to change the authority under which any officer of the Crown acted, who was suffered at all to exist. Crown, Lords, Commons, judicial system, system of administration, existed as they had existed before; and in the mode and manner in which they had always existed. My measures were, what I then truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, healing and medi∣atorial. A complaint was made of too much influence in the House of Commons; I re∣duced it in both Houses; and I gave my reasons article by article for every reduction, and shewed why I thought it safe for the service of the State. I heaved the lead every inch of way I made. A disposition to ex∣pence was complained of; to that I op∣posed, not mere retrenchment, but a system of oeconomy, which would make a random ex∣pence without plan or foresight, in future not

easily practicable. I proceeded upon principles of research to put me in possession of my mat∣ter; on principles of method to regulate it; and on principles in the human mind and in civil affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation. I conceived nothing arbitrarily; nor proposed any thing to be done by the will and pleasure of others, or my own; but by reason, and by reason only. I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of my understanding to this it's obscure twi∣light, all the operations of opinion, fancy, in∣clination, and will, in the affairs of Govern∣ment, where only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate. Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will and to caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in Kings, in Senates, or in People.

On a careful review, therefore, and analysis of all the component parts of the Civil List, and on weighing them each against other, in order to make, as much as possible, all of them a sub∣ject of estimate (the foundation and corner∣stone of all regular provident oeconomy) it ap∣peared to me evident, that this was impracti∣cable, whilst that part, called the Pension List,

was totally discretionary in it's amount. For this reason, and for this only, I proposed to re∣duce it, both in it's gross quantity, and in it's larger individual proportions, to a certainty: lest, if it were left without a general limit, it might eat up the Civil List service; if suffered to be granted in portions too great for the fund, it might defeat it's own end; and by unlimited allowances to some, it might disable the Crown in means of providing for others. The Pension List was to be kept as a sacred fund; but it could not be kept as a constant open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if some demands could wholly devour it. The tenour of the Act will shew that it re∣garded the Civil List only, the reduction of which to some sort of estimate was my great object.

No other of the Crown funds did I meddle with, because they had not the same rela∣tions. This of the four and a half per cents does his Grace imagine had escaped me, or had escaped all the men of business, who acted with me in those regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and that pensions had been always granted on it, before his Grace was born. This fund was full in my eye. It was full in the eyes of those who worked with me. It was left on principle. On principle I did what was then

done; and on principle what was left undone was omitted. I did not dare to rob the nation of all funds to reward merit. If I pressed this point too close, I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which I went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me; but if any one thinks it worth his while to know the rules that guided me in my plan of reform, he will read my printed speech on that subject; at least what is contained from page 230 to page 241 in the second Volume of the collection which a friend has given himself the trouble to make of my publications. Be this as it may, these two Bills (though atchieved with the greatest labour, and management of every sort, both within and without the House) were only a part, and but a small part, of a very large system, comprehending all the objects I stated in opening my proposition, and indeed many more, which I just hinted at in my Speech to the Electors of Bristol, when I was put out of that representation. All these, in some state or other of forwardness, I have long had by me.

But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds? I think them the least of my services! The time gave them an occasional value: What I have done in the way of political oeco∣nomy was far from confined to this body of

measures. I did not come into Parliament to con my lesson. I had earned my pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen's Chapel. I was prepared and disciplined to this political war∣fare. The first session I sat in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole com∣mercial, financial, constitutional and foreign in∣terests of Great Britain and it's Empire. A great deal was then done; and more, far more would have been done, if more had been per∣mitted by events. Then in the vigour of my manhood, my constitution sunk under my la∣bour. Had I then died, (and I seemed to my∣self very near death) I had then earned for those who belonged to me, more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are of power to estimate. But in truth, these services I am called to ac∣count for, are not those on which I value myself the most. If I were to call for a reward (which I have never done) it should be for those in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I shewed the most industry, and had the least suc∣cess; I mean in the affairs of India. They are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit. Others may value

them most for the intention. In that, surely, they are not mistaken.

Does his Grace think, that they who ad∣vised the Crown to make my retreat easy, con∣sidered me only as an oeconomist? That, well understood, however, is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have made political oeconomy an object of my humble studies, from my very early youth to near the end of my service in parliament, even before, (at least to any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of speculative men in other parts of Europe. At that time, it was still in it's infancy in England, where, in the last century, it had it's origin. Great and learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and deigned to communicate with me now and then on some particulars of their immortal works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally in some of the ear∣liest things I published. The House has been witness to their effect, and has profited of them more or less, for above eight and twenty years.

To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled,

and rocked, and dandled into a Legislator; "Nitor in adversum" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings, of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my pass∣port, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my Country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with it's laws, and the whole system of it's interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me. I had no arts, but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand.

Had his Grace condescended to enquire concerning the person, whom he has not thought it below him to reproach, he might have found, that in the whole course of my life, I have ne∣ver, on any pretence of oeconomy, or on any other pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between any man and his reward of

service, or his encouragement in useful talent and pursuit, from the highest of those services and pursuits to the lowest. On the contrary I have, on an hundred occasions, exerted myself with singular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable pretensions. I have more than once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends for carrying the matter to something bordering on abuse. This line of conduct, whatever it's merits might be, was partly owing to natural disposition; but I think full as much to reason and principle. I looked on the consi∣deration of publick service, or publick orna∣ment, to be real and very justice: and I ever held, a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst oeconomy in the world. In saving money, I soon can count up all the good I do; but when by a cold penury, I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of it's active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation. Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have done has been ge∣neral and systematick. I have never entered into those trifling vexations and oppressive de∣tails, that have been falsely, and most ridicu∣lously laid to my charge.

Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barré and Mr. Dunning between the proposition and execution of my plan? No! surely, no! Those pensions were within my principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions, their titles,—all they had; and if more they had, I should have been but pleased the more. They were men of talents; they were men of service. I put the profession of the law out of the ques∣tion in one of them. It is a service that rewards itself. But their publick service, though, from their abilities unquestionably of more value than mine, in it's quantity and in it's duration was not to be mentioned with it. But I never could drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any mat∣ter whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle and huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none; nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for every thing that was with-held, and with obloquy for every thing that was given. I was thus left to support the grants of a name ever dear to me, and ever venerable to the world, in favour of those, who were no friends of mine or of his, against the rude attacks of those who were at that time friends to the grantees, and their own zealous partizans. I have never heard the Earl of Lau∣derdale complain of these pensions. He finds

nothing wrong till he comes to me. This is impartiality, in the true modern revolutionary style.

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regard∣ed order and oeconomy, is stable and eternal; as all principles must be. A particular order of things may be altered; order itself cannot lose its value. As to other particulars, they are va∣riable by time and by circumstances. Laws of regulation are not fundamental laws. The pub∣lick exigencies are the masters of all such laws. They rule the laws, and are not to be ruled by them. They who exercise the legislative power at the time must judge.

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him, that mere parsimony is not oecono∣my. It is separable in theory from it; and in fact it may, or it may not, be a part of oeconomy, according to circumstances. Expence, and great expence, may be an essential part in true oecono∣my. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is however ano∣ther and an higher oeconomy. Oeconomy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no com∣parison,

no judgment. Meer instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false oeconomy in perfection. The other oeconomy has larger views. It demands a discri∣minating judgment, and a firm sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none but meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever will produce. No state, since the foundation of society, has been impoverished by that species of profusion. Had the oeconomy of selection and proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the Crown.

His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the far greater part of my conduct in life. It is free for him to do so. There will always be some difference of opinion in the value of political services. But there is one merit of mine, which he, of all men living, ought to be

the last to call in question. I have supported with very great zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opinions, or if his Grace likes another expression better, those old preju∣dices which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and titles. I have omitted no exertion to prevent him and them from sinking to that level, to which the meretricious French faction, his Grace at least coquets with, omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could to discountenance their enquiries into the for∣tunes of those, who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own. I have strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bed∣ford in that situation, which alone makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a wit∣ness of the use he makes of that pre-eminence.

But be it, that this is virtue! Be it, that there is virtue in this well selected rigour; yet all vir∣tues are not equally becoming to all men and at all times. There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our existence, ought to put a generous antipathy in action; crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm and animated pursuit. But all things, that concern, what I may call, the preventive police of morality, all things mere∣ly

rigid, harsh and censorial, the antiquated mo∣ralists, at whose feet I was brought up, would not have thought these the fittest matter to form the favourite virtues of young men of rank. What might have been well enough, and have been re∣ceived with a veneration mixed with awe and terrour, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of propriety in the young Scipios, the ornament of the Roman Nobility, in the flower of their life. But the times, the mo∣rals, the masters, the scholars have all under∣gone a thorough revolution. It is a vile illibe∣ral school, this new French academy of the sans culottes. There is nothing in it that is fit for a Gentleman to learn.

Whatever it's vogue may be, I still flatter myself, that the parents of the growing ge∣neration will be satisfied with what is to be taught to their children in Westminster, in Eaton, or in Winchester: I still indulge the hope that no grown Gentleman or Nobleman of our time will think of finishing at Mr. Thelwall's lecture whatever may have been left incompleat at the old Universities of his country. I would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto, what was said of a Roman Censor or Praetor (or

what was he), who in virtue of a Senatûs con∣sultum shut up certain academies,

"Cludere Ludum Impudentiae jussit."

Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the breaking up for the holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long va∣cation in all such schools.

The awful state of the time, and not myself or my own justification, is my true object in what I now write; or in what I shall ever write or say. It little signifies to the world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the Duke of Bed∣ford. What I say about either of us is nothing more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will ea∣sily perceive, to convey my sentiments on matters far more worthy of your attention. It is when I stick to my apparent first subject that I ought to apologize, not when I depart from it. I there∣fore must beg your Lordship's pardon for again resuming it after this very short digression; assuring you that I shall never altogether lose sight of such matter as persons abler than I am may turn to some profit.

The Duke of Bedford conceives, that he is obliged to call the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant to me, which he considers as excessive and out of all bounds.

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods; and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and in∣congruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the Crown-grants to his own fa∣mily. This is "the stuff of which his dreams are made." In that way of putting things toge∣ther his Grace is perfectly in the right. The grants to the House of Russel were so enormous, as not only to outrage oeconomy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolicks in the ocean of the Royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating many a rood," he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with

the spray,—every thing of him and about him is from the Throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the Royal favour?

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of pa∣rallel between the publick merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble Duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly de∣serves the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to publick service, why truly it would not be more ridiculous for me to com∣pare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid de∣scent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services, and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say, that he has any publick merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed Pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his are de∣rivative. It is his ancestor, the original pen∣sioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund

of merit, which makes his Grace so very deli∣cate and exceptions about the merit of all other grantees of the Crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said 'tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or it's history? He would naturally have said on his side, 'tis this man's fortune.—He is as good now, as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions,—that's all?

Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the Crown those pro∣digies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious indi∣viduals? I would willingly leave him to the He∣rald's College, which the philosophy of the Sans culottes, (prouder by far than all the Garters, and Norroys and Clarencieux, and Rouge Dragons that ever pranced in a procession of what his friends call aristocrates and despots) will abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians, re∣corders, and blazoners of virtues and arms, differ wholly from that other description of historians, who never assign any act of politicians to a good m••tive. These gentle historians, on the contrary,

dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They seek no further for merit than the preamble of a patent, or the inscription on a tomb. With them every man created a peer is first an hero ready made. They judge of every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and the more offices the more ability. Every General-officer with them is a Marlbo∣rough; every Statesman a Burleigh; every Judge a Murray or a Yorke. They, who alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance, make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages of Gwillim, Edmonson, and Collins.

To these recorders, so full of good nature to the great and prosperous, I would willingly leave the first Baron Russel, and Earl of Bedford, and the merits of his grants. But the aulnager, the weigher, the meter of grants, will not suffer us to acquiesce in the judgment of the Prince reign∣ing at the time when they were made. They are never good to those who earn them. Well then; since the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word of the So∣vereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their house.

The first peer of the name, the first pur∣chaser of the grants, was a Mr. Russel, a per∣son of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry the Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants was not taken from the antient demesne of the Crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcase to the jackall in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, in∣finitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dis∣like to a grant like mine, not only in it's quan∣tity, but in it's kind so different from his own.

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sove∣reign; his from Henry the Eighth.

Mine had not it's fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank * 1.3, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men. His grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on every thing that was great and noble. Mine has been, in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscating Princes, confiscating chief Governors, or confiscating Demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice and envy.

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions, was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a Prince, who plun∣dered

a part of his national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pil∣lage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation.

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favourite and chief adviser to a Prince, who left no liberty to their native coun∣try. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it.— Mine was to support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer and more compre∣hensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language and religion, in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of 〈◊〉〈◊〉 British Crown.

His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness and depopulation on his country. Mine were under a benevolent Prince, in promoting the commerce, manufac∣tures and agriculture of his kingdom; in which his Majesty shews an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil.

His founder's merit, was the merit of a gen∣tleman raised by the arts of a Court, and the protection of a Wolsey, to the eminence of a great and potent Lord. His merit in that eminence was by instigating a tyrant to in∣justice, to provoke a people to rebellion — My merit was, to awaken the sober part of the country, that they might put themselves on their guard against any one potent Lord, or any greater number of potent Lords, or any combination of great leading men of any sort, if ever they should attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the reverse order, that is, by instigating a cor∣rupted populace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace's ancestor sup∣ported, and of which he profited in the manner

we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth.

The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's house, was that of being concerned as a counsellor of state in advising, and in his person executing the conditions of a disho∣nourable peace with France; the surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our out-guard on the Continent. By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle in the mouth of that power, was, not many years afterwards, finally lost. My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of it's rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it could assume; the worst indeed which the prime cause and principle of all evil could possibly give it. It was my endeavour by every means to excite a spirit in the house, where I had the honour of a seat, for carrying on with early vigour and decision, the most clearly just and necessary war, that this or any nation ever carried on; in order to save my country from the iron yoke of it's power, and from the more dreadful contagion of it's principles; to pre∣serve, while they can be preserved pure and un∣tainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety,

good nature, and good humour of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral, and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of it's most intense malignity.

The labours of his Grace's founder merited the curses, not loud but deep, of the Commons of England, on whom he and his master had effected a compleat Parliamentary Reform, by making them in their slavery and humiliation, the true and ade∣quate representatives of a debased, degraded, and undone people. My merits were, in hav∣ing had an active, though not always an osten∣tatious share, in every one act, without excep∣tion, of undisputed constitutional utility in my time, and in having supported on all occasions, the authority, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons of Great Britain. I ended my services by a recorded and fully reasoned asser∣tion on their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional conduct. I laboured in all things to merit their inward approbation, and (along with the assist∣ants of the largest, the greatest, and best of my endeavours) I received their free, unbiassed, publick, and solemn thanks.

Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the Crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford's fortune as balanced against mine. In the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think, that none but of the House of Russel are entitled to the favour of the Crown? Why should he ima∣gine that no King of England has been capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me; he is a little mis∣taken; all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford. All discernment did not lose it's vi∣sion when his Creator closed his eyes. Let him remit his rigour on the disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no enquiry into the origin of his fortune. They will regard with much more satisfaction, as he will contemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever in his pedigree has been dulcified by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallick tincture of the spring. It is little to be doubted, that several of his forefathers in that long series, have degenerated into honour and virtue. Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror, the counsels of the lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt him in the trou∣bles

of his country, to seek another enormous fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility, and the plunder of another church. Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth, and all the resources of his wealth, to crush rebellious principles which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious movements, that have no provocation in ty∣ranny.

Then will be forgot the rebellions, which, by a doubtful priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished. On such a conduct in the noble Duke, many of his countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and in the dashing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that if the fates had found no other way in which they could give a * 1.4Duke of Bedford and his opulence as props to a tottering world, then the butchery of the Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated; it might be regarded even with complacency, whilst in the heir of confiscation they saw the sympathizing comforter of the martyrs, who suffer under the cruel confiscation of this day; whilst they beheld with admiration

his zealous protection of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manly support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry of his native land. Then his Grace's merit would be pure and new, and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honour. As he pleased he might re∣flect honour on his predecessors, or throw it for∣ward on those who were to succeed him. He might be the propagator of the stock of honour, or the root of it, as he thought proper.

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, ac∣cording to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in sci∣ence, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal senti∣ment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stag∣nant

wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring, of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a publick creature; and had no enjoyment what∣ever, but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute; has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might sug∣gest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am strip∣ped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and

ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable de∣gree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neigh∣bours of his, who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and oeconomical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone be∣fore me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to shew that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bed∣ford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

The Crown has considered me after long ser∣vice: the Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by

advance. He has had a long credit for any service which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those, who take up, even puny arms, to defend an order of things, which, like the Sun of Hea∣ven, shines alike on the useful and the worth∣less. His grants are engrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been enriched and strength∣ened. This prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bringing to it's perfection * 1.5. The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as pre∣scriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They are secure against

all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws, on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the govern∣ments of the world. The learned professors of the Rights of Man regard prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against old possession —but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice.

Such are their ideas; such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reve∣rence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple* 1.6, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Mo∣narchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep

of Windsor, rising in the majesty of pro∣portion, and girt with the double belt of it's kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our Sovereign Lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the Lords and Commons of this realm,—the triple cord, which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitu∣tional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm gua∣rantees of each others being, and each others rights; the joint and several securities, each in it's place and order, for every kind and every quality, of property and of dignity—As long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe: and we are all safe together—the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppres∣sion and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it: and so it will be,

Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.—

But if the rude inroad of Gallick tumult, with it's sophistical Rights of Man, to falsify the ac∣count,

and it's sword as a makeweight to throw into the scale, shall be introduced into our city by a misguided populace, set on by proud great men, themselves blinded and in∣toxicated by a frantick ambition, we shall, all of us, perish and be overwhelmed in a com∣mon ruin. If a great storm blow on our coast, it will cast the whales on the strand as well as the periwinkles. His Grace will not survive the poor grantee he despises, no not for a twelvemonth. If the great look for safety in the services they render to this Gallick cause, it is to be foolish, even above the weight of privi∣lege allowed to wealth. If his Grace be one of these whom they endeavour to proselytize, he ought to be aware of the character of the sect, whose doctrines he is invited to embrace. With them, insurrection is the most sacred of revolu∣tionary duties to the state. Ingratitude to bene∣factors is the first of revolutionary virtues. Ingratitude is indeed their four cardinal vir∣tues compacted and amalgamated into one; and he will find it in every thing that has hap∣pened since the commencement of the phi∣losophick revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of having performed the duty of insurrection against the order he lives in (God forbid he ever should), the merit of others

will be to perform the duty of insurrec∣tion against him. If he pleads (again God for∣bid he should, and I do not suspect he will) his ingratitude to the Crown for it's creation of his family, others will plead their right and duty to pay him in kind. They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. His deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of his evidence room, and burnt to the tune of ça ira in the courts of Bedford (then Equality) House.

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile reproaches to me with a friendly admoni∣tion to himself? Can I be blamed, for pointing out to him in what manner he is like to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philosophers of France should proselytize any considerable part of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should conquer that Government, to which his Grace does not seem to me to give all the support his own security demands? Surely it is proper, that he, and that others like him, should know the true genius of this sect; what their opinions are; what they have done: and to whom; and what, (if a prognostick is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of men) it is certain they will do hereafter. He

ought to know, that they have sworn assistance, the only engagement they ever will keep, to all in this country, who bear a resemblance to themselves, and who think as such, that The whole duty of man consists in destruction. They are a misallied and disparaged branch of the house of Nimrod. They are the Duke of Bed∣ford's natural hunters; and he is their natural game. Because he is not very profoundly reflect∣ing, he sleeps in profound security: they, on the contrary, are always vigilant, active, en∣terprizing, and though far removed from any knowledge, which makes men estimable or use∣ful, in all the instruments and resources of evil, their leaders are not meanly instructed, or in∣sufficiently furnished. In the French Revolu∣tion every thing is new; and, from want of pre∣paration to meet so unlooked for an evil, every thing is dangerous. Never, before this time, was a set of literary men, converted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before, did a den of bravoes and banditti, assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despicable enemies. But if they are formidable as foes, as friends they are

dreadful indeed. The men of property in France confiding in a force, which seemed to be irre∣sistible, because it had never been tried, ne∣glected to prepare for a conflict with their enemies at their own weapons. They were found in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, the ca∣valry, the iron, and the gunpowder of an hand∣ful of bearded men, whom they did not know to exist in nature. This is a comparison that some, I think, have made; and it is just. In France they had their enemies within their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of them. But they had not sagacity to discern their savage character. They seemed tame, and even caressing. They had nothing but douce humanité in their mouth. They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed their re∣pose. Military glory was no more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly would they hear of self defence, which they reduced within such bounds, as to leave it no defence at all. All this while they meditated the confiscations and massa∣cres we have seen. Had any one told these un∣fortunate Noblemen and Gentlemen, how, and

by whom, the grand fabrick of the French mo∣narchy under which they flourished would be subverted, they would not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have turned from him as what they call a mauvais plaisant. Yet we have seen what has happened. The persons who have suffered from the cannibal philosophy of France, are so like the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace's probably not speaking quite so good French, could enable us to find out any difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles as he, and were of full as illustrious a race: some few of them had fortunes as ample; several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well educated, and as compleat in all the lineaments of men of honour as he is: And to all this they had added the powerful outguard of a military profession, which, in it's nature, renders men somewhat more cautious than those, who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed posses∣sions. But security was their ruin. They are dashed to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the wrecks. If they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never could have happened.

I assure his Grace, that if I state to him the designs of his enemies, in a manner which may appear to him ludicrous and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not exactly hap∣pened, point by point, but twenty-four mile from our own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified faction, more encouraged, than others are warned, by what has happened in France, look at him and his landed posses∣sions, as an object at once of curiosity and rapacity. He is made for them in every part of their double character. As robbers, to them he is a noble booty: as speculatists, he is a glorious subject for their experimental phi∣losophy. He affords matter for an extensive analysis, in all the branches of their science, geometrical, physical, civil and political. These philosophers are fanaticks; independent of any interest, which if it operated alone would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such an headlong rage towards every des∣perate trial, that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the slightest of their experi∣ments. I am better able to enter into the cha∣racter of this description of men than the noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the World. Without any considerable pre∣tensions to literature in myself, I have aspired

to the love of letters. I have lived for a great many years in habitudes with those who profes∣sed them. I can form a tolerable estimate of what is likely to happen from a character, chiefly dependent for fame and fortune, on knowledge and talent, as well in it's morbid and perverted state, as in that which is sound and natural. Naturally men so formed and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the World. But when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in that state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of Hell to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred meta∣physician. It comes nearer to the cold malig∣nity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the prin∣ciple of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, un∣mixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls "the compunctious visitings of nature," will some∣times knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their nature.

Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued, with the contemplation of human suffering thro' the wild waste of centuries added to centuries, of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their horizon—and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The geometricians, and the chymists bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the dan∣ger, which may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers, con∣sider men in their experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or in a recipient of mephitick gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon him, and every thing that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed

animal, that has been long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs, or upon four.

His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult upon the Rights of Man. They are more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republicks; and they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are now republicks in Italy, in Germany and in Swisserland, which do not pos∣sess any thing like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope for seven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments, upon Harington's seven different forms of republicks, in the acres of this one Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to speculation; fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still more to stupify the dull English understanding. Abbé Sieyes has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered; suited to every season and every fancy; some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their

simplicity; others for their complexity; some of blood colour; some of boue de Paris; some with directories, others without a direction; some with councils of elders, and councils of youngsters; some without any council at all. Some where the electors choose the representa∣tives; others, where the representatives choose the electors. Some in long coats, and some in short cloaks; some with pantaloons; some with∣out breeches. Some with five shilling qualifica∣tions; some totally unqualified. So that no con∣stitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revo∣lutionary judgment, and legalised premeditated murder, in any shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is, that the progress of ex∣perimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly! Such are their sentiments, I assure him; such is their language when they dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have the means to act.

Their geographers, and geometricians, have been some time out of practice. It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares. That figure has lost the charms of it's

novelty. They want new lands for new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the repub∣lick that find him a good subject, the chymists have bespoke him after the geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his Grace's lands, the chymists are not less taken with his buildings. They consider mor∣tar as a very anti-revolutionary invention in it's present state; but properly employed, an ad∣mirable material for overturning all establish∣ments. They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have calculated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and his trustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist Inigo Jones, in Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish; and well sifted, and lixi∣viated, to chrystalize into true democratick ex∣plosive insurrectionary nitre. Their Academy del Cimento (per antiphrasin) with Morveau and Hassenfrats at it's head, have computed that the brave Sans-culottes may make war on all the aristocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth, out of

the rubbish of the Duke of Bedford's build∣ings * 1.7.

While the Morveaux and Priestleys are pro∣ceeding with these experiments upon the Duke

of Bedford's houses, the Seieyes, and the rest of the analytical legislators, and constitution-venders, are quite as busy in their trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's vassals into primary assemblies, national guards, first, se∣cond and third requisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the travelling guillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legislative hangmen, supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, and assessors of the maximum.

The din of all this smithery may some time or other possibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an endeavour to save some little matter from their experimental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the Crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has received them from the pillage of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a little, because they are enemies to all corporations, and to all religion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his Grace, or his learn∣ed council, that all such property belongs to the nation; and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a citizen, (that is, according to Condorcet's cal∣culation, six months on an average,) not to pass

for an usurper upon the national property. This is what the Serjeants at law of the Rights of Man, will say to the puny apprentices of the common law of England.

Is the Genius of Philosophy not yet known? You may as well think the Garden of the Tuil∣leries was well protected with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by the National Assembly to keep the sovereign canaille from intruding on the retirement of the poor King of the French, as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the Revolution and their natural prey. Deep Philosophers are no triflers; brave Sans culottes are no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Wooburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Wooburn: they will make no difference be∣tween the Superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a Covent Garden of another de∣scription. They will not care a rush whether his coat is long or short; whether the colour be purple or blue and buff. They will not trouble their heads, with what part of his head, his hair is cut from; and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some other of their legislative butchers, How he

cuts up? how he tallows in the cawl or on the kidneys?

Is it not a singular phoenomenon, that whilst the Sans culotte Carcase Butchers, and the Phi∣losophers of the shambles, are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, and like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing, that all the while they are measuring him, his Grace is measuring me; is invidiously comparing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the de∣fender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath—poor innocent!

Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

No man lives too long, who lives to do with spirit, and suffer with resignation, what Pro∣vidence pleases to command or inflict: but in∣deed they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the other day, that on putting in order some things which had been brought here on my taking leave of London for

ever, I looked over a number of fine portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst these was the pic∣ture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to the day of our final separation.

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his age; and I loved, and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was after his trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory, what part my son in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the pious passion with which he at∣tached himself to all my connections, with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in courting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt, such friendship on such an occasion. I par∣took indeed of this honour, with several of the

first, and best, and ablest in the kingdom, but I was behind hand with none of them; and I am sure, that if to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total annihilation of every trace of honour and virtue in it, things had taken a different turn from what they did, I should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less good will and more pride, though with far other feelings, than I partook of the ge∣neral flow of national joy that attended the jus∣tice that was done to his virtue.

Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in retro∣spect alone: and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship, in those only whom we have lost for ever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when I was attacked in the House of Lords.

Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and with a mild, parental repre∣hension to his nephew the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the favour of that gracious prince, who had honoured his virtues

with the government of the navy of Great Bri∣tain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not undeservedly shewn to the friend of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would have told him, that to whomever else these reproaches might be becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have told him that when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose every thing.

On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel; but the publick loss of him in this aweful crisis—! I speak from much knowledge of the person, he never would have listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this Sans Culotterie of France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his publick duty, his principles, his pre∣judices, would have repelled him for ever from all connection with that horrid medley of mad∣ness, vice, impiety, and crime.

Lord Keppel had two countries; one of descent, and one of birth. Their interests and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of both. His family was no∣ble and it was Dutch: that is, he was of

the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned above all others for love of their native land. Though it was never shewn in insult to any human be∣ing, Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disin∣clined to augment it with new honours. He valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind; con∣ceiving that a man born in an elevated place, in himself was nothing, but every thing in what went before, and what was to come after him. Without much speculation, but by the sure in∣stinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain unsophisticated natural understanding, he felt, that no great Commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist, without a body of some kind or other of nobility, decorated with honour, and fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a na∣tion, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabrick could be well made without some such order of things

as might, through a series of time afford a ra∣tional hope of securing unity, coherence, con∣sistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. That to talk of hereditary monarchy without any thing else of hereditary reverence in the Com∣monwealth, was a low-minded absurdity; fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves," who began to forge in 1789, the false money of the French Constitution— That it is one fatal objection to all new fancied and new fabricated Republicks, (among a people, who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and insolently re∣jected it,) that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that cannot be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be re∣plenished: men may be taken from it, or aggre∣gated to it, but the thing itself is matter of inve∣terate opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive institution. He felt, that this no∣bility, in fact does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.

I knew the man I speak of; and, if we can divine the future, out of what we collect from the past, no person living would look with more

scorn and horrour on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate attainder passed on all their poste∣rity, by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Viscomtes de No∣ailles, and the false Perigords, and the long et caetera of the perfidious Sans Culottes of the court, who like demoniacks, possessed with a spirit of fallen pride, and inverted ambition, ab∣dicated their dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of all trusts, and by breaking to pieces a great link of society, and all the cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their coun∣try. For the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves he would have had no pity. Com∣passion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in prisons, or on scaffolds, or are pin∣ing in beggary and exile, would leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of Holland, whose blood pro∣digally poured out, had, more than all the ca∣nals,

meers, and inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold them bowed in the basest servitude, to the basest and vilest of the human race; in servitude to those who in no respect, were superior in dignity, or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants, to whose sceptered pride they had opposed an elevation of soul, that surmounted, and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?

Could he with patience bear, that the chil∣dren of that nobility, who would have deluged their country and given it to the sea, rather than submit to Louis XIV. who was then in his me∣ridian glory, when his arms were conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers; when his councils were directed by the Colberts, and the Louvois; when his tribu∣nals were filled by the Lamoignons and the Daguessaus—that these should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegru's, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rollands, and Brissots, and Gorsas, and Robespierres, the Reubels, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of Regicides, robbers, and revolu∣tionary judges, that, from the rotten carcase of

their own murdered country, have poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest, and at once the most destructive of the classes of animated nature, which like columns of locusts, have laid waste the fairest part of the world?

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous Patricians, that happy union of the noble and the burgher, who with signal prudence and integrity, had long governed the cities of the confederate Republick, the cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to them∣selves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protection? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favour of a robbing Democracy, founded on the spurious rights of man?

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience, that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the Law of Nations, and one of the richest repositories of all Law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the pre∣sumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild profligate

intrigue and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian Republick?

Could Keppel, who idolized the house of Nassau, who was himself given to England, along with the blessings of the British and Dutch revolutions; with revolutions of stability; with revolutions which consolidated and married the liberties and the interests of the two nations for ever, could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange expelled as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of contu∣mely, from the country, which that family of de∣liverers had so often rescued from slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, which owes it's liberty to his house?

Would Keppel have heard with patience, that the conduct to be held on such occasions was to become short by the knees to the faction of the homicides, to intreat them quietly to retire? or if the fortune of war should drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the security of that, which under a fo∣reign

name is the most precious part of Eng∣land? What would he have said, if it was even proposed that the Austrian Netherlands (which ought to be a barrier to Holland, and the tie of an alliance, to protect her against any species of rule that might be erected, or even be restored in France) should be formed into a republick under her influence and dependent upon her power?

But above all, what would, he have said, if he had heard it made a matter of accusation against me, by his nephew the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction to myself, as from pride I might, but from justice I dare not, he would have snatched his share of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a dying convulsion to his end.

It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to assume to myself the glory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to his Ministers, and to his Parliament, and to the far greater majority of his faithful people: But had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined to be guided by my advice, and to follow it impli∣citly—then I should have been the sole author of a war. But it should have been a war on

my ideas and my principles. However let hi•• Grace think as he may of my demerits with re¦gard to the war with Regicide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone. He never shall with the smallest colour of reason, accuse me o•• being the author of a peace with Regicide▪ But that is high matter; and ought not to be mixed with any thing of so little moment, as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford.

I have the honour to be, &c. EDMUND BURKE

Notes

• * 1.1

  Speech on Oeconomical Reform, 1780.
• * 1.2

  Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec saevior ulla Pestis, & ira Deûm Stygiis sese extulit undis. Virginei volucrum vultus; faedissima ventris Proluvies; uncaeque manus; & pallida semper Ora fame—

  Here the Poet breaks the line, because he (and that He is Virgil) had not verse or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived her. Had he lived to our time, he would have been more overpowered with the reality than he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the horror of the times before him. Had he lived to see the Revolutionists and Constitutionalists of France, he would have had more horrid and disgusting features of his harpies to describe, and more frequent failures in the attempt to describe them.
• * 1.3

  See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of Buckingham. Temp. Hen. 8.
• * 1.4

  At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, &c.
• * 1.5

  Sir George Savile's Act, called the Nullum Tempus Act.
• * 1.6

  Templum in modum arcis. Tacitus of the Temple of Jerusalem.
• * 1.7

  There is nothing, on which the leaders of the Repub∣lick, one and indivisible, value themselves, more than on the chymical operations, by which, through science, they con∣vert the pride of Aristocracy, to an instrument of it's own de∣struction—on the operations by which they reduce the magni∣ficent ancient country seats of the nobility, decorated with the feudal titles of Duke, Marquis, or Earl, into magazines of what they call revolutionary gunpowder. They tell us, that hitherto things

  "had not yet been properly and in a revolutionary manner explored."

  —

  "The strong cha∣teaus, those feudal fortresses, that were ordered to be demo∣lished, attracted next the attention of your Committee. Nature there had secretly regained her rights, and had pro∣duced salt-petre for the purpose, as it should seem, of facili∣tating the execution of your decree by preparing the means of de∣struction. From these ruins, which still frown on the liberties of the Republick, we have extracted the means of producing good; and those piles, which have hitherto glutted the pride of Despots, and covered the plots of La Vendée, will soon furnish wherewithal to tame the traitors, and to overwhelm the disaffected."

  —

  "The rebellious cities also, have afforded a large quantity of salt-petre. Commune Affranchie, (that is, the noble city of Lyons re∣duced in many parts to an heap of ruins) and Toulon will pay a second tribute to our artillery."

  Report 1st. February 1794.