But I put Spain out of the question: she is a province of the Jacobin empire, and she must make peace or war according to the orders she receives from the Directory of Assassins.
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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Alas! she has already paid for her own ransom the fund of equivalent,--and a dreadful equivalent it is, to England and to herself.
I don't find it denied, that, when a treaty is entered into for peace, a demand will be made on the Regicides to surrender a great part of their conquests on the Continent. 'Will they, in the present state of the war, make that surrender…
The moment this war came to be considered as a war merely of profit, the actual circumstances are such that it never could become really a war of alliance.
There could be no tie of honor in a society for pillage.
It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded.
It would not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary providence of God.
If built upon a basis fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin.
An arrangement of peace in its nature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events.
If the same spirit continues, when peace is made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it will be made upon the same false principle.
The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the false policy of the war.
If armies and fortresses were a defence against Jacobinism, Louis the Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful monarch over an happy people.
But the security wanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly dangerous in its fortresses nor in its territories as in its spirit and its principles.
They think there is nothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle, which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers.
Littleness in object and in means to them appears soundness and sobriety.
The jesters and buffoons shame them out of everything grand and elevated.
A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of states passes with them for romance, and the principles that recommend it for the wanderings of a disordered imagination.
There is no trade so vile and mechanical as government in their hands.
In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species.
That once well laid as a basis of empire, opportunities never could be wanting to regain or to replace what had been lost, and dreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of their adversaries.
The leaders of that sect secured the centre of Europe; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious.
It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France.
It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all.
Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it.
They saw the thing right from the very beginning.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
