false policy, though if the matters had been then taken up and pursued, such a step could not have appeared so evidently desperate as now it is. So far from pursuing Mr. Pitt, I know that then, and for some time after, some of Mr. Fox's friends were actually, and with no small earnestness, looking out to a coalition with that gentleman. For years I never heard this circumstance of Mr. Pitt's misconduct on that occasion mentioned by Mr. Fox, either in publick or in private, as a ground for opposition to that minister. All opposition, from that period to this very session, has proceeded upon the separate measures as they separately arose, without any vindictive retrospect to Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784. My memory, however, may fail me. I must appeal to the printed debates, which (so far as Mr. Fox is concerned) are unusually accurate. 52. Whatever might have been in our power, at an early period, at this day I see no remedy for what was done in 1784. I had no great hopes even at the time. I was therefore very eager to record a remonstrance on the journals of the house of commons, as a caution against such a popular delusion in times to come; and this I then feared, and now am certain, is all that could be done. I know of no way of animadverting on the Crown. I know of no mode of calling to account the house of lords, who threw out the India bill, in a way not much to their credit. As little, or rather less, am I able to coerce the people at large, who behaved very unwisely and intemperately on that occasion. Mr. Pitt was then accused, by me as well as others, of attempting to be minister without enjoying the confidence of the house of commons, though he did enjoy the confidence of the Crown. That house of commons, whose confidence he did not enjoy, unfortunately did not itself enjoy the confidence (though we well deserved it) either of the Crown or of the publick. For want of that confidence, the then house of commons did not survive the contest. Since that period Mr. Pitt has enjoyed the confidence of the Crown, and of the lords, and of the house of commons, through two successive parliaments; and I suspect that he has ever since, and that he does still, enjoy as large a portion, at least, of the confidence of the people without doors, as his great rival. Before whom, then, is Mr. Pitt to be impeached, and by whom? The more I consider the matter, the more firmly I am convinced, that the idea of proscribing Mr. Pitt indirectly, when you cannot directly punish him, is as chimerical a project, and as unjustifiable, as it would be to have proscribed Lord North. For supposing, that by indirect ways of opposition, by opposition upon measures which do not relate to the business of 1784, but which on other grounds might prove unpopular, you were to drive him from his seat, this would be no example whatever of punishment for the matters we charge as offences in 1784. On a cool and dispassionate view of the affairs of this time and country, it appears obvious to me, that one or the other of those two great men, that | is, Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, must be minister. They are, I am sorry for it, irreconcilable. Mr. Fox's conduct in this session has rendered the idea of his power a matter of serious alarm to many people, who were very little pleased with the proceedings of Mr. Pitt in the beginning of his administration. They like neither the conduct of Mr. Pitt, in 1784, nor that of Mr. Fox, in 1793; but they estimate which of the evils is most pressing at the time, and what is likely to be the consequence of a change. If Mr. Fox be wedded, they must be sensible, that his opinions and principles, on the now existing state of things at home and abroad, must be taken as his portion. In his train must also be taken the whole body of gentlemen who are pledged to him and to each other, and to their common politicks and principles.-I believe no king of Great Britain ever will adopt, for his confidential servants, that body of gentlemen, holding that body of principles. Even if the present king or his successor should think fit to take that step, I apprehend a general discontent of those, who wish that this nation and that Europe should continue in their present state, would ensue; a discontent, which, combined with the principles and progress of the new men in power, would shake this kingdom to its foundations. I do not believe any one political conjuncture can be more certain than this. 53. Without at all defending or palliating Mr. Pitt's conduct in 1784, I must observe, that the crisis of 1793, with regard to every thing at home and abroad, is full as important as that of 1784 ever was; and, if for no other reason, by being present, is much more important. It is not to nine years ago we are to look for the danger of Mr. Fox's and Mr. Sheridan's conduct, and that of the gentlemen who act with them. It is at this very time, and in this very session, that, if they had not been strenuously resisted, they would not merely have discredited the house of commons, (as Mr. Pitt did in 1784, when he persuaded the king to reject their advice, and to appeal from them to the people,) but in my opinion, would have been the means of wholly subverting the house of commons and the house of peers, and the whole constitution actual and virtual, together with the safety and independence of this nation, and the peace and settlement of every state in the now christian world. It is to our opinion of the nature of jacobinism, and of the probability, by corruption, faction, and force, of its gaining ground every where, that the question whom and what you are to support is to be determined. For my part, without doubt or hesitation, I look upon jacobinism as the most dreadful and the most shameful evil, which ever afflicted mankind, a thing which goes beyond the power of all calculation in its mischief; and that if it is suffered to exist in France, we must in England, and speedily too, fall into that calamity. 54. I figure to myself the purpose of these gentlemen accomplished, and this ministry destroyed. I see that the persons, who in that case must rule, ble, and which must end in the ruin of the country, if it should continue and spread. Mr. Pitt may be the worst of men, and Mr. Fox may be the best; but, at present, the former is in the interest of his country, and of the order of things long established in Europe: Mr. Fox is not. I have, for one, been born in this order of things, and would fain die in it. I am sure it is sufficient to make men as virtuous, as happy, and as knowing, as any thing which Mr. Fox, and his friends abroad or at home, would substitute in its place; and I should be sorry that any set of politicians should obtain power in England, whose principles or schemes should lead them to countenance persons or factions whose object is to introduce some new devised order of things into England, or to support that order, where it is already introduced, in France; a place, in which if it can be fixed, in my mind, it must have a certain and decided influence in and upon this kingdom. This is my account of my conduct to my private friends. I have already said all I wish to say, or nearly so, to the publick. I write this with pain, and with a heart full of grief. can be no other than Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. | species of modern politicks not easily comprehensiGrey, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Thurlow, Lord Lauderdale, and the Duke of Norfolk, with the other chiefs of the friends of the people, the parliamentary reformers, and the admirers of the French Revolution. The principal of these are all formally pledged to their projects. If the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam should be admitted into that system, (as they might and probably would be,) it is quite certain they could not have the smallest weight in it; less, indeed, than what they now possess, if less were possible: because they would be less wanted than they now are; and because all those who wished to join them, and to act under them, have been rejected by the Duke of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam themselves; and Mr. Fox, finding them thus by themselves disarmed, has built quite a new fabrick, upon quite a new foundation. There is no trifling on this subject. We see very distinctly before us the ministry that would be formed, and the plan that would be pursued. If we like the plan, we must wish the power of those who are to carry it into execution: but to pursue the political exaltation of those whose political measures we disapprove, and whose principles we dissent from, is a PREFACE TO THE ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT TO HIS CONSTITUENTS. TRANSLATED BY THE LATE WILLIAM BURKE, ESQ. 1794. THE French Revolution has been the subject of actor in all the scenes which he presents. No various speculations, and various histories. As man can object to him as a royalist: the royal might be expected, the royalists and the repub-party, and the Christian religion, never had a licans have differed a good deal in their accounts more determined enemy. In a word it is BRISof the principles of that Revolution, of the springs sor. It is Brissot, the republican, the jacobin, which have set it in motion, and of the true cha- and the philosopher, who is brought to give an racter of those who have been, or still are, the account of jacobinism, and of republicanism, and principal actors on that astonishing scene. of philosophy. They, who are inclined to think favourably of that event, will undoubtedly object to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of a royalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmly attached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and not of friends to despotism, the royal party is composed,) that their very affection to this generous and manly cause, and their abhorrence of a Revolution, not less fatal to liberty than to government, may possibly lead them in some particulars to a more harsh representation of the proceedings of their adversaries, than would be allowed by the cold neutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of errour arises from a source highly laudable; but the exactness of truth may suffer even from the feelings of virtue. History will do justice to the intentions of worthy men; but it will be on its guard against their infirmities; it will examine, with great strictness of scrutiny, whatever appears from a writer in favour of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapes him, and makes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight. It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius of jacobinism, and its effects, is not confined to the period in which that faction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those very important, particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of the preceding period, before the great schism, and whilst the jacobins acted as one body; insomuch, that the far greater part of the proceedings of the ruling powers, since the commencement of the Revolution in France, so strikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot, were the acts of Brissot himself and his associates. All the members of the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the common liberty and safety. A question will very naturally be asked, what could induce Brissot to draw such a picture? He must have been sensible it was his own. The answer is the inducement was the same with that In this important controversy, the translator of which led him to partake in the perpetration of the following work brings forward to the English all the crimes, the calamitous effects of which he tribunal of opinion the testimony of a witness describes with the pen of a master-ambition. His beyond all exception. His competence is un-faction having obtained their stupendous and undoubted. He knows every thing which concerns this Revolution to the bottom. He is a chief natural power, by rooting out of the minds of his unhappy countrymen every principle of religion, i morality, loyalty, fidelity, and honour, discovered, that, when authority came into their hands, it would be a matter of no small difficulty for them to carry on government on the principles by which they had destroyed it. The rights of men, and the new principles of liberty and equality, were very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of tranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respect in the title and the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a prince succeeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of a succession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, found nothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity, and dutiful allegiance, to Mess. Brissot, Vergniaux, Condorcet, Anacharsis Cloots, and Thomas Paine. Amongst his colleagues were Claviere and Servan. All the three have, since that time, either lost their heads by the axe of their associates in rebellion, or to evade their own revolutionary justice, have fallen by their own hands. These ministers were regarded by the king as in a conspiracy to dethrone him. Nobody who considers the circumstances which preceded the deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequent conduct of those ministers, can hesitate about the reality of such a conspiracy. The king certainly had no doubt of it; he found himself obliged to remove them; and the necessity, which first obliged him to choose such regicide ministers, constrained him to replace them by Dumourier the jacobin, and some others of little efficiency, though of a better description. A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy, Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent, seditious, and atrocious libel, that has probably ever been penned. This paper Roland a few days after delivered to the National Assembly, who instantly published and dispersed it all over France; and in order to give it the stronger operation they declared, that he and his brother ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None of the writings, which have inflamed the jacobin spirit to a savage fury, ever worked up a fiercer ferment through the whole mass of the republicans in every part of France. In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern the people, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult, but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials and by such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. If, as the disguise became them, they began to assume the mask of an austere and rigid virtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in some of them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult and confusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order, discipline, quiet, and obedience to Under the thin veil of prediction, he strongly authority; they even shewed some sort of dispo- recommends all the abominable practices which sition to protect such property as had not been afterwards followed. In particular he inflamed confiscated. They, who on every occasion had the minds of the populace against the respectable discovered a sort of furious thirst of blood, and a and conscientious clergy, who became the chief greedy appetite for slaughter, who avowed and objects of the massacre, and who were to him the gloried in the murders and massacres of the four-chief objects of a malignity and rancour that one teenth of July, of the fifth and sixth of October, and of the tenth of August, now began to be squeamish and fastidious with regard to those of the second of September. In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the tenth of August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained not the smallest credit for humanity. They endeavoured to establish a distinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up, and sealed for their own purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they prepared for their enemies. Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction:-his morals had furnished little matter of exception against him;-old, domestick, and uxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was therefore set up as the Cato of the republican party, which did not abound in such characters. This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, in which he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal present made by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministers under the new constitution. • Presented to the king June 13, delivered to him the preceding could hardly think to exist in a human heart. We have the relicks of his fanatical persecution here. We are in a condition to judge of the merits of the persecutors and of the persecuted---I do not say the accusers and accused; because, in all the furious declamations of the atheistick faction against these men, not one specifick charge has been made upon any one person of those who suffered in their massacre, or by their decree of exile. The king had declared that he would sooner perish under their axe (he too well saw what was preparing for him) than give his sanction to the iniquitous act of proscription, under which those innocent people were to be transported. On this proscription of the clergy a principal part of the ostensible quarrel between the king and those ministers had turned. From the time of the authorized publication of this libel, some of the manœuvres long and uniformly pursued for the king's deposition became more and more evident and declared. The tenth of August came on, and in the manner in which Roland had predicted; it was followed by the same consequences. The king was deposed, after cruel massacres, in the courts and Monday.-Translator. the apartments of his palace, and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason to his old master, Roland was by his new masters named minister of the home department. formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which, he more than insinuates, was the work of his late unhappy master; who was universally known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty subjects to an excess. 66 "Without the day of the tenth," says he, "it "is evident that we should have been lost. The "court, prepared for a long time, waited for the "hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to display over Paris the standard of death, and to "reign there by terrour. The sense of the people, (le sentiment,) always just and ready when their "opinion is not corrupted, foresaw the epoch "marked for their destruction, and rendered it "fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the fourteenth of July, 1789, to the present time;" It is in the nature of things," continues he, " and in that of the human heart, that victory should bring with it some excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars long after the tempest; but every thing "has bounds, which ought at length to be ob"served." 66 66 The massacres of the second of September were begotten by the massacres of the tenth of August. They were universally foreseen and hourly expected. During this short interval between the two murderous scenes, the furies, male and female, cried out havock as loudly and as fiercely as ever. The ordinary jails were all filled with prepared victims; and, when they overflowed, churches were turned into jails. At this time the relentless Roland had the care of the general police; he had for his colleague the bloody Danton, who was minister of justice :-the insidious Petion was mayor of Paris-the treacherous Manuel was procurator of the Common-hall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authors of this" massacre. Lest the national guards should, by their very name, be reminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow citizens, the common council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think of resisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers nor their arms were at all formidable,) obliged those guards to draw the charges from their musquets, and took away their bayonets. One of their journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he formerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to the paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the gallies; but, by the benignity Yesterday," says he, "the ministers were of the late king, this felon (to be one day ad- "denounced: vaguely indeed as to the matter, vanced to the rank of a regicide) had been par-" because subjects of reproach were wanting; doned and released at the intercession of the am- "but with that warmth and force of assertion, bassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitude was such "which strike the imagination and seduce it for a as might naturally have been expected; and it has " moment, and which mislead and destroy confilately been rewarded as it deserved. This libe- "dence, without which no man should remain in rated galley-slave was raised, in mockery of all "place in a free government. Yesterday again, in criminal law, to be minister of justice: he became an assembly of the presidents of all the sections, from his elevation a more conspicuous object of "convoked by the ministers, with a view of conaccusation, and he has since received the punish- ciliating all minds, and of mutual explanation, ment of his former crimes in proscription and "I perceive that distrust which suspects, interrodeath. gates, and fetters operations." It will be asked, how the minister of the home department was employed at this crisis? The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the third of September (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the tenth of August. He considers the slaughter of that day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy, which (with a full knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been • Letter to the National Assembly, signed-The Minister of In this memorable epistle, he considers such excesses as fatalities arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be punished. He allows a space of time for the duration of these agitations and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his measure, he thinks it may be long. But he would have things to cease at length. But when, and where ?-When they may approach his own person. In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) this virtuous minister of the home department, and all the magistracy of Paris, spent the first day of the massacre, the atrocity of which has spread horrour and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that the putting a stop to the massacre had any part in the object of their meeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was a minister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of his fellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferent about its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says, "that their hidden. "enemies may make use of this agitation" (the tender appellation which he gives to horrid massacre) "to hurt their best friends, and their most "able defenders. Already the example begins ; the interior, ROLAND, dated Paris, Sept. 3d, 4th year of Liberty. |