Edmund Burke

Thirdly, they tell you what they conceive to be the perfidious policy which dictates your delusive offer: that is, the design of cheating not only them, but the people of England, against whose interest and inclination this war is supposed…

In old language it would be called a most haughty, offensive, and insolent rejection of all treaty.

They make no scruple beforehand to tell you the whole of what they intend; and this is what we call, in the modern style, the acceptance of a proposition for peace!

I therefore wish to ask what hope we can have of their good faith, who, as the very basis of the negotiation, assume the ill faith and treachery of those they have to deal with?

The very idea of a negotiation for peace, whatever the inward sentiments of the parties may be, implies some confidence in their faith, some degree of belief in the professions which are made concerning it.

Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride!

Very few declarations of war have ever shown so much and so unqualified animosity.

No such state-paper, as a preliminary to a negotiation for peace, has ever yet appeared.

To leave no doubt of its spirit, as soon as the rumor of this act of condescension could get abroad, it was formally announced with an explanation from authority, containing an invective against the ministry of Great Britain, their…

The passport, such a passport and safe-conduct as would be granted to thieves who might come in to betray their accomplices, and no better, was granted to British supplication.

To admit it for a moment were to erect this power, usurped at home, into a legislature to govern mankind.

In other words, they are powerful to usurp, impotent to restore; and equally by their power and their impotence they aggrandize themselves, and weaken and impoverish you and all other nations.

But whatever they have put their seal on, for the purposes of their ambition, and the ruin of their neighbors, this alone is invulnerable, impassible, immortal.

They have set this holy code at nought with ignominy and scorn.

Even the fundamental sacred rights of man they have not scrupled to profane.

They have swept away the very constitutions under which the legislatures acted and the laws were made.

Without the least ceremony or compliment, they have sent out of the world whole sets of laws and lawgivers.

Who has made that law but the Regicide Republic itself, whose laws, like those of the Medes and Persians, they cannot alter or abrogate, or even so much as take into consideration?

In other words, their will is the law, not only at home, but as to the concerns of every nation.

It is a declaration, pendente lite, in the middle of a war, one principal object of which was originally the defence, and has since been the recovery, of these very countries.

All these are integrant parts of the Republic, not to be subject to any discussion, or to be purchased by any equivalent.

That is, the Allies are to give up whatever conquests they have made or may make upon France; but all which she has violently ravished from her neighbors, and thought fit to appropriate, are not to become so much as objects of negotiation.

Their openness and candor consist in a direct avowal of their despotism and ambition.

It is a specimen of what may be expected from the masters we are preparing for our humbled country.

It is insolent in words, in manner; but in substance it is not only insulting, but alarming.