In it there is no glory to God on high, and not the least tincture of good-will to man.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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Such a peace is not the peace which the remnant of Christianity celebrates at this holy season.
It is not peace with France which secures that feeble government; it is that peace which, if it shall continue, decisively ruins Spain.
We see every standing principle of policy, every old governing opinion of nations, completely gone, and with it the foundation of all their establishments.
This arrangement, considered in itself, but much more as it indicates a complete union of France with Spain, is truly alarming.
The effect is no less than the total subversion of the balance of power in the West Indies, and indeed everywhere else.
She has solemnly surrendered to the regicides and butchers of the Bourbon family what that court never ventured, perhaps never wished, to bestow on the patriarchal stock of her own august house.
She has yielded the largest and fairest part of one of the largest and fairest islands in the West Indies, perhaps on the globe, to the usurped powers of France.
None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical rejects.
There is no centaur of fiction, no poetic satyr of the woods, nothing short of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt, dog in head and man in body, that can give an idea of it.
Here we have formed a new, unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,--a double-natured monster, republic above and monarchy below.
The great trunk of Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the construction of a French Regicide Republic.
But, oh, the blindness of the greatest statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which lie hid in the dark prolific womb of futurity!
It is not from Dunkirk to Hamburg that the ports are in the hands of France: they are in the hands of France from Hamburg to Gibraltar.
The Regicide Republic and the still nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain are united,--and are united upon a principle of jealousy, if not of bitter enmity, to Great Britain.
But this great matter of political deliberation cannot be put out of our thoughts by his silence.
When these things are at all to be sold, they are the vilest commodities at market.
But are we quite sure, that, when we have surrendered half Europe to them in hope of this compensation, the Republic will confer upon us those privileges of dishonor?
But commerce in exchange for empire, for safety, for glory!
Would that, when all our manly sentiments are thus changed, our manly language were changed along with them, and that the English tongue were not employed to utter what our ancestors never dreamed could enter into an English heart!
The Christian world may shift for itself, Europe may groan in slavery, we may be dishonored by receiving law from an enemy,--but all is well, provided the compensation to us be adequate.
But, alas! the short date of human elevation!
The noble advocate for peace has, indeed, perfectly well exploded this daring and outrageous system of pride and tyranny.
I need say no more on the insult offered not only to all equity and justice, but to the common sense of mankind, in deciding legal property by physical principles, and establishing the convenience of a party as a rule of public law.
Having fixed herself as the arbiter of physical dominion, she construed the limits of Nature by her convenience.
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