V
There was little justice in Colonel Fitz-Patrick’s satire. Nine-tenths of Mr. Fox’s partisans, old and young, were deserting his standard when Mr. Canning quitted him. The cultivated mind of England was, as it has been said in two or three of these sketches, against the line which the Whig leader persisted to take with respect to the French Revolution—even after its excesses; and it is easy to conceive that the cause of Liberty and Fraternity should have become unfashionable when these weird sisters were seen brandishing the knife, and dancing round the guillotine. Admitting, however, the legitimacy of the horror with which the assassins of the Committee of Public Safety inspired the greater portion of educated Englishmen, it is still a question whether England should have provoked their hostility; for, after the recall of our ambassador and our undisguised intention of making war, the Republic’s declaration of it was a matter of course.
“Where could be the morality,” said Mr. Pitt’s opponents, “of bringing fresh calamities upon a land which so many calamities already desolated? Where the policy of concentrating and consolidating so formidable an internal system by an act of foreign aggression? And if the struggle we then engaged in was in itself inhuman and impolitic, what was to be said as to the time at which we entered upon it?
“The natural motives that might have suggested a French war, were—the wish to save an unhappy monarch from an unjust and violent death; the desire to subdue the arrogance of a set of miscreants who, before they were prepared to execute the menace, threatened to overrun the world with their principles and their arms. If these were our motives, why not draw the sword, before the Sovereign whose life we wished to protect had perished? Why defer our conflict with the French army until, flushed with victory and threatened with execution in the event of defeat, raw recruits were changed into disciplined and desperate soldiers? Why reserve our defence of the unhappy Louis till he had perished on the scaffold—our war against the French Republic until the fear of the executioner and the love of glory had made a nation unanimous in its defence? Success was possible when Prussia first entered on the contest: it was impossible when we subsidized her to continue it.”
The antagonists of the First Minister urged these arguments with plausibility. His friends replied, “that Mr. Pitt had been originally against all interference in French affairs; that the conflict was not of his seeking; that the conduct of the French government and the feelings of the English people had at last forced him into it; that he had not wished to anticipate its necessity; but that if he had, the minister of a free country cannot go to war at precisely the moment he would select; he cannot guard against evils which the public itself does not foresee. He must go with the public, or after it; and the public mind in England had, like that of the Ministers, only become convinced by degrees that peace was impossible.
“As to neutrality, if it could be observed when the objects at stake were material, it could not be maintained when those objects were moral, social, and religious.
“When new ideas were everywhere abroad, inflaming, agitating men’s minds, these ideas were sure to find everywhere partisans or opponents, and to attempt to moderate the zeal of one party merely gave power to the violence of the other.
“It was necessary to excite the English people against France, in order to prevent French principles, as they were then called, from spreading and fixing themselves in England.”
Such was the language and such the opinions of many eminent men with whom Mr. Canning was now associated, when, after a year’s preliminary silence, he made his first speech in the House of Commons.