The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
Chapter 73 : The parliaments were not wholly free from faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior

The parliaments were not wholly free from faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior and accidental, and not so much the vice of their const.i.tution itself as it must be in your new contrivance of s.e.xennial elective judicatories. Several English commend the abolition of the old tribunals, as supposing that they determined everything by bribery and corruption. But they have stood the test of monarchic and republican scrutiny. The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those bodies, when they were dissolved in 1771; those who have again dissolved them would have done the same, if they could; but both inquisitions having failed, I conclude that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare amongst them.

It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, to preserve their ancient power of registering, and of remonstrating at least upon, all the decrees of the National a.s.sembly, as they did upon those which pa.s.sed in the time of the monarchy. It would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence. The vice of the ancient democracies, and one cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled, as you do, by occasional decrees, _psephismata_. This practice soon broke in upon the tenor and consistency of the laws; it abated the respect of the people towards them, and totally destroyed them in the end.

Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the time of the monarchy, existed in the Parliament of Paris, in your princ.i.p.al executive officer, whom, in spite of common sense, you persevere in calling king, is the height of absurdity. You ought never to suffer remonstrance from him who is to execute. This is to understand neither council nor execution, neither authority nor obedience. The person whom you call king ought not to have this power, or he ought to have more.

Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of imitating your monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench of independence, your object is to reduce them to the most blind obedience. As you have changed all things, you have invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges, who, I suppose, are to determine according to law, and then you let them know, that, at some time or other, you intend to give them some law by which they are to determine. Any studies which they have made (if any they have made) are to be useless to them. But to supply these studies, they are to be sworn to obey all the rules, orders, and instructions which from time to time they are to receive from the National a.s.sembly. These if they submit to, they leave no ground of law to the subject. They become complete and most dangerous instruments in the hands of the governing power, which, in the midst of a cause, or on the prospect of it, may wholly change the rule of decision. If these orders of the National a.s.sembly come to be contrary to the will of the people who locally choose those judges, such confusion must happen as is terrible to think of. For the judges owe their place to the local authority, and the commands they are sworn to obey come from those who have no share in their appointment. In the mean time they have the example of the court of _Chatelet_ to encourage and guide them in the exercise of their functions. That court is to try criminals sent to it by the National a.s.sembly, or brought before it by other courses of delation. They sit under a guard to save their own lives. They know not by what law they judge, nor under what authority they act, nor by what tenure they hold. It is thought that they are sometimes obliged to condemn at peril of their lives. This is not perhaps certain, nor can it be ascertained; but when they acquit, we know they have seen the persons whom they discharge, with perfect impunity to the actors, hanged at the door of their court.

The a.s.sembly, indeed, promises that they will form a body of law, which shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth. That is, by their short laws, they will leave much to the discretion of the judge, whilst they have exploded the authority of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a thing perilous at best) deserving the appellation of a _sound_ discretion.

It is curious to observe, that the administrative bodies are carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals. That is, those persons are exempted from the power of the laws who ought to be the most entirely submitted to them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts ought of all men to be the most strictly held to their duty. One would have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares, if you did not mean that those administrative bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our King's Bench, where all corporate officers might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their functions, and would find coercion, if they trespa.s.sed against their legal duty. But the cause of the exemption is plain. These administrative bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through democracy to oligarchy. They must therefore be put above the law. It will be said that the legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them. They are, undoubtedly. They are unfit for any rational purpose. It will be said, too, that the administrative bodies will be accountable to the general a.s.sembly. This, I fear, is talking without much consideration of the nature of that a.s.sembly or of these corporations. However, to be subject to the pleasure of that a.s.sembly is not to be subject to law, either for protection or for constraint.

This establishment of judges as yet wants something to its completion.

It is to be crowned by a new tribunal. This is to be a grand state judicature; and it is to judge of crimes committed against the nation, that is, against the power of the a.s.sembly. It seems as if they had something in their view of the nature of the high court of justice erected in England during the time of the great usurpation. As they have not yet finished this part of the scheme, it is impossible to form a direct judgment upon it. However, if great care is not taken to form it in a spirit very different from that which has guided them in their proceedings relative to state offences, this tribunal, subservient to their inquisition, _the Committee of Research_, will extinguish the last sparks of liberty in France, and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation. If they wish to give to this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not evoke from or send to it the causes relative to their own members, at their pleasure. They must also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of Paris.[126]

Has more wisdom been displayed in the const.i.tution of your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judicature? The able arrangement of this part is the more difficult, and requires the greater skill and attention, not only as a great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing principle in the new body of republics which you call the French nation. Truly, it is not easy to divine what that army may become at last. You have voted a very large one, and on good appointments, at least fully equal to your apparent means of payment. But what is the principle of its discipline? or whom is it to obey? You have got the wolf by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you are well circ.u.mstanced for a free deliberation relatively to that army, or to anything else.

The minister and secretary of state for the War Department is M. de La Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his colleagues in administration, is a most zealous a.s.sertor of the Revolution, and a sanguine admirer of the new Const.i.tution which originated in that event. His statement of facts relative to the military of France is important, not only from his official and personal authority, but because it displays very clearly the actual condition of the army in France, and because it throws light on the principles upon which the a.s.sembly proceeds in the administration of this critical object. It may enable us to form some judgment how far it may be expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of France.

M. de La Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes to give an account of the state of his department, as it exists under the auspices of the National a.s.sembly. No man knows it so well; no man can express it better. Addressing himself to the National a.s.sembly, he says,--

"His Majesty has _this day_ sent me to apprise you of the multiplied disorders of which _every day_ he receives the most distressing intelligence. The army [_le corps militaire_] threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy. Entire regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order established by your decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the most awful solemnity. Compelled by my duty to give you information of these excesses, my heart bleeds, when I consider who they are that have committed them. Those against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to this day have been so full of honor and loyalty, and with whom for fifty years I have lived the comrade and the friend.

"What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once led them astray? Whilst you are indefatigable in establis.h.i.+ng uniformity in the empire and moulding the whole into one coherent and consistent body, whilst the French are taught by you at once the respect which the laws owe to the rights of man and that which the citizens owe to the laws, the administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance and confusion. I see in more than one corps the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken,--the most unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise,--the ordinances without force,--the chiefs without authority,--the military chest and the colors carried off,--the authority of the king himself [_risum teneatis_] proudly defied,--the officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven away, and some of them prisoners in the midst of their corps, dragging on a precarious life in the bosom of disgust and humiliation. To fill up the measure of all these horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats out under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers.

"These evils are great; but they are not the worst consequences which may be produced by such military insurrections. Sooner or later they may menace the nation itself. _The nature of things requires_ that the army should never act but as _an instrument_. The moment that, erecting itself into a deliberate body, it shall act according to its own resolutions, _the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy_: a species of political monster which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.

"After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the common soldiers and non-commissioned officers, without the knowledge, or even in contempt of the authority, of their superiors?--although the presence and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to such monstrous democratic a.s.semblies [_comices_]."

It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture,--finished as far as its canvas admits, but, as I apprehend, not taking in the whole of the nature and complexity of the disorders of this military democracy, which, the minister at war truly and wisely observes, wherever it exists, must be the true const.i.tution of the state, by whatever formal appellation it may pa.s.s. For, though he informs the a.s.sembly that the more considerable part of the army have not cast off their obedience, but are still attached to their duty, yet those travellers who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best rather observe in them the absence of mutiny than the existence of discipline.

I cannot help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon the expressions of surprise which this minister has let fall relative to the excesses he relates. To him the departure of the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and honor seems quite inconceivable. Surely those to whom he addresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They know the doctrines which they have preached, the decrees which they have pa.s.sed, the practices which they have countenanced. The soldiers remember the sixth of October. They recollect the French guards. They have not forgot the taking of the king's castles in Paris and at Ma.r.s.eilles. That the governors in both places were murdered with impunity is a fact that has not pa.s.sed out of their minds. They do not abandon the principles, laid down so ostentatiously and laboriously, of the equality of men. They cannot shut their eyes to the degradation of the whole n.o.blesse of France, and the suppression of the very idea of a gentleman. The total abolition of t.i.tles and distinctions is not lost upon them. But M. du Pin is astonished at their disloyalty, when the doctors of the a.s.sembly have taught them at the same time the respect due to laws. It is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men with arms in their hands are likely to learn. As to the authority of the king, we may collect from the minister himself (if any argument on that head were not quite superfluous) that it is not of more consideration with these troops than it is with everybody else. "The king," says he, "has over and over again repeated his orders to put a stop to these excesses; but in so terrible a crisis, _your_ [the a.s.sembly's]

concurrence is become indispensably necessary to prevent the evils which menace the state. _You_ unite to the force of the legislative power _that of opinion_, still more important." To be sure, the army can have no opinion of the power or authority of the king. Perhaps the soldier has by this time learned, that the a.s.sembly itself does not enjoy a much greater degree of liberty than that royal figure.

It is now to be seen what has been proposed in this exigency, one of the greatest that can happen in a state. The minister requests the a.s.sembly to array itself in all its terrors, and to call forth all its majesty.

He desires that the grave and severe principles announced by them may give vigor to the king's proclamation. After this we should have looked for courts civil and martial, breaking of some corps, decimating of others, and all the terrible means which necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress of the most terrible of all evils; particularly, one might expect that a serious inquiry would be made into the murder of commandants in the view of their soldiers. Not one word of all this, or of anything like it. After they had been told that the soldiery trampled upon the decrees of the a.s.sembly promulgated by the king, the a.s.sembly pa.s.s new decrees, and they authorize the king to make new proclamations. After the secretary at war had stated that the regiments had paid no regard to oaths, _pretes avec la plus imposante solennite_, they propose--what? More oaths. They renew decrees and proclamations as they experience their insufficiency, and they multiply oaths in proportion as they weaken in the minds of men the sanctions of religion. I hope that handy abridgments of the excellent sermons of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and Helvetius, on the Immortality of the Soul, on a Particular Superintending Providence, and on a Future State of Rewards and Punishments, are sent down to the soldiers along with their civic oaths. Of this I have no doubt; as I understand that a certain description of reading makes no inconsiderable part of their military exercises, and that they are full as well supplied with the ammunition of pamphlets as of cartridges.

To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous democratic a.s.semblies [_comitia, comices_] of the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination, I believe the most astonis.h.i.+ng means have been used that ever occurred to men, even in all the inventions of this prolific age. It is no less than this:--The king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority and encouragement, that the several corps should join themselves with the clubs and confederations in the several munic.i.p.alities, and mix with them in their feasts and civic entertainments! This jolly discipline, it seems, is to soften the ferocity of their minds, to reconcile them to their bottle companions of other descriptions, and to merge particular conspiracies in more general a.s.sociations.[127] That this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers, as they are described by M. de La Tour du Pin, I can readily believe,--and that, however mutinous otherwise, they will dutifully submit themselves to _these_ royal proclamations. But I should question whether all this civic swearing, clubbing, and feasting would dispose them, more than at present they are disposed, to an obedience to their officers, or teach them better to submit to the austere rules of military discipline. It will make them admirable citizens after the French mode, but not quite so good soldiers after any mode. A doubt might well arise, whether the conversations at these good tables would fit them a great deal the better for the character of _mere instruments_, which this veteran officer and statesman justly observes the nature of things always requires an army to be.

Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline by the free conversation of the soldiers with the munic.i.p.al festive societies, which is thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may judge by the state of the munic.i.p.alities themselves, furnished to us by the war minister in this very speech. He conceives good hopes of the success of his endeavors towards restoring order _for the present_ from the good disposition of certain regiments; but he finds something cloudy with regard to the future. As to preventing the return of confusion, "for this the administration" (says he) "cannot be answerable to you, as long as they see the munic.i.p.alities arrogate to themselves an authority over the troops which your inst.i.tutions have reserved wholly to the monarch. You have fixed the limits of the military authority and the munic.i.p.al authority. You have bounded the action which you have permitted to the latter over the former to the right of requisition; but never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons in these munic.i.p.alities to break the officers, to try them, to give orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their guard, to stop them in their marches ordered by the king, or, in a word, to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities or even market-towns through which they are to pa.s.s."

Such is the character and disposition of the munic.i.p.al society which is to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true principles of military subordination, and to lender them machines in the hands of the supreme power of the country! Such are the distempers of the French troops! Such is their cure! As the army is, so is the navy. The munic.i.p.alities supersede the orders of the a.s.sembly, and the seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the munic.i.p.alities. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the a.s.sembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a h.o.a.ry head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand compounders in politics who shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a certain inward fanatical a.s.surance and illumination upon all subjects,--upon the credit of which, one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the a.s.sembly not to attend to old men, or to any persons who value themselves upon their experience. I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify, and take this test,--wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own relish; but I think, if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,--nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] _Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!_

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system which they call a Const.i.tution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying the debility of the a.s.sembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed munic.i.p.alities. The military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy. I wish everybody carefully to peruse the eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de La Tour du Pin. He attributes the salvation of the munic.i.p.alities to the good behavior of some of the troops. These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of the munic.i.p.alities, which is confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worst disposed, which is the strongest. But the munic.i.p.alities affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are necessary for their protection. Indeed, they must command them or court them. The munic.i.p.alities, by the necessity of their situation, and by the republican powers they have obtained, must, with relation to the military, be the masters, or the servants, or the confederates, or each successively, or they must make a jumble of all together, according to circ.u.mstances. What government is there to coerce the army but the munic.i.p.ality, or the munic.i.p.ality but the army? To preserve concord where authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the a.s.sembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves; and they hope to preserve themselves from a purely military democracy by giving it a debauched interest in the munic.i.p.al.

If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the munic.i.p.al clubs, cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part. With them will be their habits, affections, and sympathies. The military conspiracies which are to be remedied by civic confederacies, the rebellious munic.i.p.alities which are to be rendered obedient by furnis.h.i.+ng them with the means of seducing the very armies of the state that are to keep them in order,--all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the confusion from which they have arisen. There must be blood. The want of common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities, will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in one time and in one part. They will break out in others; because the evil is radical and intrinsic. All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken still more and more the military connection of soldiers with their officers, as well as add military and mutinous audacity to turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army, the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier,--first and last in his attention, observance, and esteem. Officers, it seems, there are to be, whose chief qualification must be temper and patience.

They are to manage their troops by electioneering arts. They must bear themselves as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means power may be occasionally in their hands, the authority by which they are to be nominated becomes of high importance.

What you may do finally does not appear: nor is it of much moment, whilst the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all the parts of your republic, as well as the puzzled relation of those parts to each other and to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to have given the provisional nomination of the officers, in the first instance, to the king, with a reserve of approbation by the National a.s.sembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. They must soon perceive that those who can negative indefinitely in reality appoint. The officers must therefore look to their intrigues in the a.s.sembly as the sole certain road to promotion. Still, however, by your new Const.i.tution, they must begin their solicitation at court. This double negotiation for military rank seems to me a contrivance, as well adapted as if it were studied for no other end, to promote faction in the a.s.sembly itself relative to this vast military patronage,--and then to poison the corps of officers with factions of a nature still more dangerous to the safety of government, upon any bottom on which it can be placed, and destructive in the end to the efficacy of the army itself. Those officers who lose the promotions intended for them by the crown must become of a faction opposite to that of the a.s.sembly which has rejected their claims, and must nourish discontents in the heart of the army against the ruling powers. Those officers, on the other hand, who, by carrying their point through an interest in the a.s.sembly, feel themselves to be at best only second in the good-will of the crown, though first in that of the a.s.sembly, must slight an authority which would not advance and could not r.e.t.a.r.d their promotion. If, to avoid these evils, you will have no other rule for command or promotion than seniority, you will have an army of formality; at the same time it will become more independent and more of a military republic. Not they, but the king is the machine. A king is not to be deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing. What is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head of the army, who to that army is no object of grat.i.tude or of fear? Such a cipher is not fit for the administration of an object of all things the most delicate, the supreme command of military men. They must be constrained (and their inclinations lead them to what their necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority. The authority of the a.s.sembly itself suffers by pa.s.sing through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen. The army will not long look to an a.s.sembly acting through the organ of false show and palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience to a prisoner. They will either despise a pageant, or they will pity a captive king. This relation of your army to the crown will, if I am not greatly mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics.

It is besides to be considered, whether an a.s.sembly like yours, even supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ, through which its orders were to pa.s.s, is fit for promoting the obedience and discipline of an army. It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an a.s.sembly which is to have only a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders,--especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.

Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master,--the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your a.s.sembly, the master of your whole republic.

How came the a.s.sembly by their present power over the army? Chiefly, to be sure, by debauching the soldiers from their officers. They have begun by a most terrible operation. They have touched the central point about which the particles that compose armies are at repose. They have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system, depends. The soldier is told he is a citizen, and has the rights of man and citizen. The right of a man, he is told, is, to be his own governor, and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-government.

It is very natural he should think that he ought most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience. He will therefore, in all probability, systematically do what he does at present occasionally: that is, he will exercise at least a negative in the choice of his officers. At present the officers are known at best to be only permissive, and on their good behavior. In fact, there have been many instances in which they have been cas.h.i.+ered by their corps. Here is a second negative on the choice of the king: a negative as effectual, at least, as the other of the a.s.sembly. The soldiers know already that it has been a question, not ill received in the National a.s.sembly, whether they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers, or some proportion of them. When such matters are in deliberation, it is no extravagant supposition that they will incline to the opinion most favorable to their pretensions. They will not bear to be deemed the army of an imprisoned king, whilst another army in the same country, with whom too they are to feast and confederate, is to be considered as the free army of a free Const.i.tution. They will cast their eyes on the other and more permanent army: I mean the munic.i.p.al. That corps, they well know, does actually elect its own officers. They may not be able to discern the grounds of distinction on which they are not to elect a Marquis de La Fayette (or what is his new name?) of their own. If this election of a commander-in-chief be a part of the rights of men, why not of theirs? They see elective justices of peace, elective judges, elective curates, elective bishops, elective munic.i.p.alities, and elective commanders of the Parisian army. Why should they alone be excluded? Are the brave troops of France the only men in that nation who are not the fit judges of military merit, and of the qualifications necessary for a commander-in-chief? Are they paid by the state, and do they therefore lose the rights of men? They are a part of that nation themselves, and contribute to that pay. And is not the king, is not the National a.s.sembly, and are not all who elect the National a.s.sembly, likewise paid? Instead of seeing all these forfeit their rights by their receiving a salary, they perceive that in all these cases a salary is given for the exercise of those rights. All your resolutions, all your proceedings, all your debates, all the works of your doctors in religion and politics, have industriously been put into their hands; and you expect that they will apply to their own case just as much of your doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure.

Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore the moment any difference arises between your National a.s.sembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you,--or rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. You see, by the report of your war minister, that the distribution of the army is in a great measure made with a view of internal coercion.[129]

You must rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by which you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make of it. The king is to call out troops to act against his people, when the world has been told, and the a.s.sertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies a.s.sert to themselves an independent const.i.tution and a free trade. They must be constrained by troops. In what chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able to read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their commerce monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others? As the colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again,--ma.s.sacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted! It was but the other day that the farmers of land in one of your provinces refused to pay some sorts of rents to the lord of the soil. In consequence of this, you decree that the country-people shall pay all rents and dues, except those which as grievances you have abolished; and if they refuse, then you order the king to march troops against them.

You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. The leaders of the present system tell them of their rights, as men, to take fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings without the least appearance of authority even from the a.s.sembly, whilst, as the sovereign legislative body, that a.s.sembly was sitting in the name of the nation; and yet these leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in these very disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the principles and follow the examples which have been guarantied by their own approbation.

The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feodality as the barbarism of tyranny; and they tell them afterwards how much of that barbarous tyranny they are to bear with patience. As they are prodigal of light with regard to grievances, so the people find them sparing in the extreme with regard to redress. They know that not only certain quit-rents and personal duties, which you have permitted them to redeem, (but have furnished no money for the redemption,) are as nothing to those burdens for which you have made no provision at all; they know that almost the whole system of landed property in its origin is feudal,--that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original proprietors made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous instruments,--and that the most grievous effects of the conquest axe the land-rents of every kind, as without question they are.

The peasants, in all probability, are the descendants of these ancient proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if they fail, in any degree, in the t.i.tles which they make on the principles of antiquaries and lawyers, they retreat into the citadel of the rights of men. There they find that men are equal; and the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, ought not to be monopolized to foster the pride and luxury of any men, who by nature are no better than themselves, and who, if they do not labor for their bread, are worse. They find, that, by the laws of Nature, the occupant and subduer of the soil is the true proprietor,--that there is no prescription against Nature,--and that the agreements (where any there are) which have been made with the landlords during the time of slavery are only the effect of duresse and force,--and that, when the people reentered into the rights of men, those agreements were made as void as everything else which had been settled under the prevalence of the old feudal and aristocratic tyranny. They will tell you that they see no difference between an idler with a hat and a national c.o.c.kade and an idler in a cowl or in a rochet. If you ground the t.i.tle to rents on succession and prescription, they tell you from the speech of M. Camus, published by the National a.s.sembly for their information, that things ill begun cannot avail themselves of prescription,--that the t.i.tle of those lords was vicious in its origin,--and that force is at least as bad as fraud. As to the t.i.tle by succession, they will tell you that the succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property, and not rotten parchments and silly subst.i.tutions,--that the lords have enjoyed their usurpation too long,--and that, if they allow to these lay monks any charitable pension, they ought to be thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a false claimant to his goods.

When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason on which you have set your image and superscription, you cry it down as base money, and tell them you will pay for the future with French guards and dragoons and hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand authority of a king, who is only the instrument of destroying, without any power of protecting either the people or his own person. Through him, it seems, you will make yourselves obeyed. They answer,--"You have taught us that there are no gentlemen; and which of your principles teach us to bow to kings whom we have not elected? We know, without your teaching, that lands were given for the support of feudal dignities, feudal t.i.tles, and feudal offices. When you took down the cause as a grievance, why should the more grievous effect remain? As there are now no hereditary honors and no distinguished families, why are we taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have sent down our old aristocratic landlords in no other character and with no other t.i.tle but that of exactors under your authority. Have you endeavored to make these your rent-gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us with their arms reversed, their s.h.i.+elds broken, their impresses defaced,--and so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do not even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physically they may be the same men,--though we are not quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal ident.i.ty. In all other respects they are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their honors, t.i.tles, and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to do; and it is one instance among many, indeed, of your a.s.sumption of undelegated power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their clubs, their mobs, and their national guards, directing you at their pleasure, and giving that as law to you, which, under your authority, is transmitted as law to us. Through you, these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all. Why should not you attend as much to the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers relative to distinctions and t.i.tles of honor, by which neither they nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals? Before this measure of yours we might have thought we were not perfectly equal; we might have entertained some old, habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords; but we cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect to them you could have made the law that degrades them. You have forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect; and now you send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion."

The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics, who have opened schools for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid and conclusive. It is obvious, that, on a mere consideration of the right, the leaders in the a.s.sembly would not in the least have scrupled to abrogate the rents along with the t.i.tles and family ensigns. It would be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings, and to complete the a.n.a.logy of their conduct. But they had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed property by confiscation. They had this commodity at market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so freely intoxicated themselves. The only security which property enjoys in any one of its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity with regard to some other. They have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and what subverted.

Neither have they left any principle by which any of their munic.i.p.alities can be bound to obedience,--or even conscientiously obliged not to separate from the whole, to become independent, or to connect itself with some other state. The people of Lyons, it seems, have refused lately to pay taxes. Why should they not? What lawful authority is there left to exact them? The king imposed some of them.

The old States, methodized by orders, settled the more ancient. They may say to the a.s.sembly,--"Who are you, that are not our kings, nor the States we have elected, nor sit on the principles on which we have elected you? And who are we, that, when we see the _gabelles_ which you have ordered to be paid wholly shaken off, when we see the act of disobedience afterwards ratified by yourselves, who are we, that we are not to judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay, and are not to avail ourselves of the same powers the validity of which you have approved in others?" To this the answer is, "We will send troops." The last reason of kings is always the first with your a.s.sembly. This military aid may serve for a time, whilst the impression of the increase of pay remains, and the vanity of being umpires in all disputes is flattered. But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the hand that employs it. The a.s.sembly keep a school, where, systematically, and with unremitting perseverance, they teach principles and form regulations destructive to all spirit of subordination, civil and military,--and then they expect that they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by an anarchic army.

The munic.i.p.al army, which, according to their new policy, is to balance this national army, if considered in itself only, is of a const.i.tution much more simple, and in every respect less exceptionable. It is a mere democratic body, unconnected with the crown or the kingdom, armed and trained and officered at the pleasure of the districts to which the corps severally belong; and the personal service of the individuals who compose, or the fine in lieu of personal service, are directed by the same authority.[130] Nothing is more uniform. If, however, considered in any relation to the crown, to the National a.s.sembly, to the public tribunals, or to the other army, or considered in a view to any coherence or connection between its parts, it seems a monster, and can hardly fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great national calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general const.i.tution than the systasis of Crete, or the confederation of Poland, or any other ill-devised corrective which has yet been imagined, in the necessities produced by an ill-constructed system of government.

Having concluded my few remarks on the const.i.tution of the supreme power, the executive, the judicature, the military, and on the reciprocal relation of all these establishments, I shall say something of the ability showed by your legislators with regard to the revenue.

In their proceedings relative to this object, if possible, still fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. When the States met, it seemed to be the great object to improve the system of revenue, to enlarge its collection, to cleanse it of oppression and vexation, and to establish it on the most solid footing. Great were the expectations entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was by this grand arrangement that France was to stand or fall; and this became, in my opinion very properly, the test by which the skill and patriotism of those who ruled in that a.s.sembly would be tried. The revenue of the state is the state. In effect, all depends upon it, whether for support or for reformation. The dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon the quant.i.ty and the kind of virtue that may be exerted in it. As all great qualities of the mind which operate in public, and are not merely suffering and pa.s.sive, require force for their display, I had almost said for their unequivocal existence, the revenue, which is the spring of all power, becomes in its administration the sphere of every active virtue. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, inst.i.tuted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, and cannot spread and grow under confinement, and in circ.u.mstances straitened, narrow, and sordid.

Through the revenue alone the body politic can act in its true genius and character; and therefore it will display just as much of its collective virtue, and as much of that virtue which may characterize those who move it, and are, as it were, its life and guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just revenue. For from hence not only magnanimity, and liberality, and beneficence, and fort.i.tude, and providence, and the tutelary protection of all good arts derive their food, and the growth of their organs, but continence, and self-denial, and labor, and vigilance, and frugality, and whatever else there is in which the mind shows itself above the appet.i.te, are nowhere more in their proper element than in the provision and distribution of the public wealth. It is therefore not without reason that the science of speculative and practical finance, which must take to its aid so many auxiliary branches of knowledge, stands high in the estimation not only of the ordinary sort, but of the wisest and best men; and as this science has grown with the progress of its object, the prosperity and improvement of nations has generally increased with the increase of their revenues; and they will both continue to grow and flourish as long as the balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals and what is collected for the common efforts of the state bear to each other a due reciprocal proportion, and are kept in a close correspondence and communication. And perhaps it may be owing to the greatness of revenues, and to the urgency of state necessities, that old abuses in the const.i.tution of finances are discovered, and their true nature and rational theory comes to be more perfectly understood; insomuch that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in one period than a far greater is found to be in another, the proportionate wealth even remaining the same. In this state of things, the French a.s.sembly found something in their revenues to preserve, to secure, and wisely to administer, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud a.s.sumption might justify the severest tests, yet, in trying their abilities on their financial proceedings, I would only consider what is the plain, obvious duty of a common finance minister, and try them upon that, and not upon models of ideal perfection.

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and forever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. On these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of those in the National a.s.sembly who have taken to themselves the management of this arduous concern.

Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by a report of M. Vernier, from the Committee of Finances, of the second of August last, that the amount of the national revenue, as compared with its produce before the Revolution, was diminished by the sum of two hundred millions, or _eight millions sterling_, of the annual income,--considerably more than one third of the whole.

If this be the result of great ability, never surely was ability displayed in a more distinguished manner or with so powerful an effect.

No common folly, no vulgar incapacity, no ordinary official negligence, even no official crime, no corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility, which we have seen in the modern world, could in so short a time have made so complete an overthrow of the finances, and, with them, of the strength of a great kingdom.--_Cedo qui vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito?_

The sophisters and declaimers, as soon as the a.s.sembly met, began with decrying the ancient const.i.tution of the revenue in many of its most essential branches, such as the public monopoly of salt. They charged it, as truly as unwisely, with being ill-contrived, oppressive, and partial. This representation they were not satisfied to make use of in speeches preliminary to some plan of reform; they declared it in a solemn resolution or public sentence, as it were judicially pa.s.sed upon it; and this they dispersed throughout the nation. At the time they pa.s.sed the decree, with the same gravity they ordered the same absurd, oppressive, and partial tax to be paid, until they could find a revenue to replace it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly, some of whom were charged with other contributions, perhaps equivalent, were totally disinclined to bear any part of the burden, which by an equal distribution was to redeem the others. As to the a.s.sembly, occupied as it was with the declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with their arrangements for general confusion, it had neither leisure nor capacity to contrive, nor authority to enforce, any plan of any kind relative to the replacing the tax, or equalizing it, or compensating the provinces, or for conducting their minds to any scheme of accommodation with the other districts which were to be relieved. The people of the salt provinces, impatient under taxes d.a.m.ned by the authority which had directed their payment, very soon found their patience exhausted. They thought themselves as skilful in demolis.h.i.+ng as the a.s.sembly could be.

They relieved themselves by throwing off the whole burden. Animated by this example, each district, or part of a district, judging of its own grievance by its own feeling, and of its remedy by its own opinion, did as it pleased with other taxes.

We are next to see how they have conducted themselves in contriving equal impositions, proportioned to the means of the citizens, and the least likely to lean heavy on the active capital employed in the generation of that private wealth from whence the public fortune must be derived. By suffering the several districts, and several of the individuals in each district, to judge of what part of the old revenue they might withhold, instead of better principles of equality, a new inequality was introduced of the most oppressive kind. Payments were regulated by dispositions. The parts of the kingdom which were the most submissive, the most orderly, or the most affectionate to the commonwealth, bore the whole burden of the state. Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government. To fill up all the deficiencies in the old impositions, and the new deficiencies of every kind which were to be expected, what remained to a state without authority? The National a.s.sembly called for a voluntary benevolence,--for a fourth part of the income of all the citizens, to be estimated on the honor of those who were to pay. They obtained something more than could be rationally calculated, but what was far indeed from answerable to their real necessities, and much less to their fond expectations. Rational people could have hoped for little from this their tax in the disguise of a benevolence,--tax weak, ineffective, and unequal,--a tax by which luxury, avarice, and selfishness were screened, and the load thrown upon productive capital, upon integrity, generosity, and public spirit,--a tax of regulation upon virtue. At length the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying means (with little success) of exacting their benevolence by force.

This benevolence, the rickety offspring of weakness, was to be supported by another resource, the twin brother of the same prolific imbecility.

The patriotic donations were to make good the failure of the patriotic contribution. John Doe was to become security for Richard Roe. By this scheme they took things of much price from the giver, comparatively of small value to the receiver; they ruined several trades; they pillaged the crown of its ornaments, the churches of their plate, and the people of their personal decorations. The invention of those juvenile pretenders to liberty was in reality nothing more than a servile imitation of one of the poorest resources of doting despotism. They took an old, huge, full-bottomed periwig out of the wardrobe of the antiquated frippery of Louis the Fourteenth, to cover the premature baldness of the National a.s.sembly. They produced this old-fas.h.i.+oned formal folly, though it had been so abundantly exposed in the Memoirs of the Duke de Saint-Simon,--if to reasonable men it had wanted any arguments to display its mischief and insufficiency. A device of the same kind was tried in my memory by Louis the Fifteenth, but it answered at no time. However, the necessities of ruinous wars were some excuse for desperate projects. The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise.

But here was a season for disposition and providence. It was in a time of profound peace, then enjoyed for five years, and promising a much longer continuance, that they had recourse to this desperate trifling.

They were sure to lose more reputation by sporting, in their serious situation, with these toys and playthings of finance, which have filled half their journals, than could possibly be compensated by the poor temporary supply which they afforded. It seemed as if those who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circ.u.mstances, or wholly unequal to their necessities. Whatever virtue may be in these devices, it is obvious that neither the patriotic gifts nor the patriotic contribution can ever be resorted to again. The resources of public folly are soon exhausted. The whole, indeed, of their scheme of revenue is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir for the hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the springs and living fountains of perennial supply. The account not long since furnished by M. Necker was meant, without question, to be favorable. He gives a flattering view of the means of getting through the year; but he expresses, as it is natural he should, some apprehension for that which was to succeed. On this last prognostic, instead of entering into the grounds of this apprehension, in order, by a proper foresight, to prevent the prognosticated evil, M. Necker receives a sort of friendly reprimand from the President of the a.s.sembly.

As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to say anything of them with certainty, because they have not yet had their operation; but n.o.body is so sanguine as to imagine they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide gaping breach which their incapacity has made in their revenues. At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fict.i.tious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence, but of want, the creature not of credit, but of power, they imagine that our flouris.h.i.+ng state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flouris.h.i.+ng condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction.

They forget that in England not one s.h.i.+lling of paper money of any description is received but of choice,--that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited,--and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again.

Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on 'Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty s.h.i.+llings a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it,--instead of being a subst.i.tute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation,--that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.