" Parlons du parti que j'ai pris; il est bien Justine dans ma conscience. — Ni cette ville coupable, ni cette assemblee plus cou- pable encore, ne meritoicnt que je me justifie; mais j'ai a cuur que vous, et les personnes qui pensent comme \ ondamnent pas. — Ma sante, je vous jure, me rendoit mes foncrjon sibles; mais meme en les mettanl de c6t4 il a etc au dessus de mes forces de supporter plus longtems l'horreur que me causoit ce — ces tetes — cette reine presque igorgie, — ce roi, aniene telave, — entrant a Paris, au milieu de ses assassins, et precede des tStes de ses malheureux gardes — ecs perfides janissaires, ces assase femmes cannibales, ee eri de iocs i.r.s f.vf.iiies a la i.an. dans le moment oil le roi entre sa capitale avec deux evSqoes de son conseil dans sa voiture. Un coup de fusil, que j'ai vu tirer dans un des corosses de In reine. M. liailly appellant cela un beau jour. L*assemblee ayant declare froidement le matin, qu'il n'i'toi' p sa dignite d'aller toute entiere environner le roi. M. Mirab sant impunement dans cette assemblee, que le vaisseau di loin d'etre arrcte dans sa course, a'elanceroil avec plus ile rapidite que jamais vers sa regeneration. M. Barnave, riant avec lui, quand des flots de Ban c mlaient autoui de nous. Le vertueux REVOLUTION IN FRANC L. 99 Although this work of our new light and know- ledge did not go to the length that in all probability it was intended it should be carried, yet I must think "that such treatment of any human creatures must be shocking to any but those who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But I cannot stop here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature, and not being illuminated by a single ray of this new- sprung modern light, I confess to you, Sir, that the exalted rank of the persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty, and the amiable qualities of the descendants of so many kings and emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, insensible only through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages Mounier* echappant par miracle a vingt assassins, qui avoient voulu faire de sa tete un trophee de plus. Voila ce qui me fit jurer de ne plus mettre le pied dans eette carer ne d'Antropvp/iagcs [the National Assembly] ou je n'avois plus de force d'elever la voix, ou depuis six semaines je l'avois elevee en vain.
" Moi, Mounier, et tous les honnetes gens, ont pense que le dernier effort a faire pour le bien etoit d'en sortir. Aucune idee de crainte nes'est approchee de moi. Je rougirois de m'en defendre. J'avois encore reeu sur la route de la part de ce peuple, moins coupable que ceux qui l'ont enivre de fureur, des acclamations, et des applaudisse- ments, dont d'autres auroient ete flattes, et qui m'ont fait fremir. C'est a l'indignation, c'est a rhoneur, c'est aux convulsions phy- siques, que leseul aspect du sang me fait eprouver que j'ai cede. On brave un seul mort; on la brave plusieurs fois, quand elle peut ft.-, utile. Mais aucune puissance sous le ciel, mais aucune opinion publique ou privee n'ont le droit de me condamner a souifrir inutile- mjnt mille supplices par minute, et a perir de desespoir, de rage, au milieu des triomphes, du crime que je n'ai pu arreter. lis me pros- criront, ils confisqueront mes biens. Je labourerai la terre, et je ne les verrai plus. Viola ma justification. Vous pourrez la lire, la montrer, la laisser copier; tant pis pour ceux qui ne la comprendront pas; ce ne sera alors moi qui auroit en tort de leur donner."
This military man had not so good nerves as the peaceable gentle- man of the Old Jewry. — See Mons. Mounier's 'narrative of these transactions; a man of honour, and virtue, and talents, and there- fore a fugitive.
* N. P. Mr. Mounier was then speaker of the National Assembly. He has since been obliged to live in exile, though one of the firmest assertors of liberty.
tu which their parents were exposed, instead of being a subject of exultation, adds not a little to my 'ility on that most melancholy occasion. 1 hear that the august person, who was the principal object of our preacher's triumph, though he supported himself, felt much on that shameful occasion. As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person, that were massacred in cold blood about him: as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be inure grieved for them, than solicitous tor himself. It derogates little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honour of bis humanity. I am very sorry to say it, very sorry indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it is not becoming to praise the virtues of the great.
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that day, one i- interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well,) and that she bears all the suc- ceeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of ad- dresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that, like her. she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from REVOLUTION IN FUANCE. 101 the last disgrace; and that if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delight- ful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, — glittering like the morning- star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophis- ters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of 102 REFLECTIONS ON THE honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which in- spired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry j and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble, equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners.
But now all is to be changed. All the plea illusions which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incor- porated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society are to be dissolved by REVOLUTION IX FRANCE. 103 this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and anti- quated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and.an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only com- mon homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way, gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections <ni the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attach- ment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. These public affections, combined with manners, I quired sometimes as supplements, Bomethx correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of, poems, is equally true as to states: Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of maun every nation, which a well-formed mind would In- disposed to relish. To make us love our country. our country ought to be lovely.
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish j and it will find other and worse means for its sup- port. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear. freed both kings and subjects from the precaution of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by pre- ventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 105 When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your Revolu- tion was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions, is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial.
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined, — I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy — the one by 'profession, the other by patronage — kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes, than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not 106 REFLECTIONS ON 1HE aspired to be the master! Along with its natural., protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures: are them- selves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you. for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manu- factures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but if com- merce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing here- after?
I wish you may not be going fast, ami by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception.;: coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings ot the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science i-- presump- REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 10?
tuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
It is not clear, whether in England we learned those grand and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to me to be — gentis incunabula nostra. France has always more or less influenced manners in England: and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a con- cern in what is done in France. Excuse me, there- fore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day — I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now stand, with every thing respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for har- bouring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price, and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? — For this plain reason — because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tre- mendous uncertainty of human greatness; because US REFLI i riONS ON ilil in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct \ our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into re- flection; our minds (as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
Indeed the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph matter of exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day; a principal actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors — so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage; and after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of a new democracy posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first intuitive glance, without any ela- borate process of reasoning, will show that this method of political computation would justify every extent of crime. They would see, that on these principles, even where the very worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of the conspirators, than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery and blood. They would soon see, that criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must be the L 110 aEFLECTIONS ON THE consequences of losing, in the splendour of those triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch;" that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Six- teenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the prerogatives of which, a long- line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put him in pos- session. A misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was horn king of France. But un>- fortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose whole reign were a series of conces- sions to his subjects, who was willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his people to a share of freedom, not known, perhaps not desired, by their ancestors; such a prince, though he should be subject to the common frailties attached to men and to princes, though he should have once thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on against his person, and the remnants of his authority; though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of Paris, and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished out- rages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of that loWand degenerate fashion REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. Ill of mind, that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings, who know to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and, by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism, to guard against the very first approaches of freedom. Against such as these they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could have been made clear to me, that the king and queen of France (those I mean who were such before the triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacreing the National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in certain publications,) I should think their captivity just. If this be true, much more ought to have been done — but done, in my opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity, than to make a choice. Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the Ninth, been the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, after the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina, after the murder of Monaldcschi, had fallen into your hands, Sir, or into mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different.
112 REFLECTIONS ON THE If the French king, or king of the French, (or by whatever name he is known in the new vocabu- lary of your constitution,) has in his own person, and that of his queen, really deserved these unavowed, but unavenged, murderous attempts, and those sub- sequent indignities more cruel than murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate executory trust, which I understand is to be placed in him; nor is befit to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an office in a new^eommonwealth, than that of a deposed tyrant, could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals. and afterwards to trust him in your highest con- cerns, as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not consistent in reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice. Those who could make such an appointment must be guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet committed against the people. As this is the only crime in which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently. 1 conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insinuations. 1 think no better of all the other calumnies.