But passing by contradictions, as no fair objections to reasoning, this state of things would naturally, at other times, and in other governments, have produced a disposition to peace, almost on any terms.
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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But, in that state of their country, did the Regicide government solicit peace or amity with other nations, or even lay any specious grounds for it, in propositions of affected moderation, or in the most loose and general conciliatory…
This their law of empire was promulgated without any requisition on that subject, and proclaimed in a style and upon principles which never had been heard of in the annals of arrogance and ambition.
She prescribed the limits to her empire, not upon principles of treaty, convention, possession, usage, habitude, the distinction of tribes, nations, or languages, but by physical aptitudes.
Having fixed herself as the arbiter of physical dominion, she construed the limits of Nature by her convenience.
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.
The noble advocate for peace has, indeed, perfectly well exploded this daring and outrageous system of pride and tyranny.
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.
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!
But commerce in exchange for empire, for safety, for glory!
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?
When these things are at all to be sold, they are the vilest commodities at market.
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.
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.
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!
The great trunk of Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the construction of a French Regicide Republic.
Here we have formed a new, unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,--a double-natured monster, republic above and monarchy below.
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.
None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical rejects.
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.
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.
The effect is no less than the total subversion of the balance of power in the West Indies, and indeed everywhere else.
This arrangement, considered in itself, but much more as it indicates a complete union of France with Spain, is truly alarming.
We see every standing principle of policy, every old governing opinion of nations, completely gone, and with it the foundation of all their establishments.
It is not peace with France which secures that feeble government; it is that peace which, if it shall continue, decisively ruins Spain.
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