34 Ch. 33 1793 OPPRESSIVE RULE OF THE BOURBONS. freedom has been enjoyed which is not always ascertained under more regulated forms of Government. But a despotism combined with a privileged order, claiming immunity from the common burdens, assuming a right to impose burdens and restrictions on other classes, and excluding the rest of the community from any participation in the honourable and profitable service of the State, constituted a system of tyranny, oppression, and injustice, which no people of spirit and intelligence could endure. Every young Frenchman born in the third estate, which comprised the whole nation except the sovereign and nobility, found himself hopelessly shut out from all the higher offices of the Church, the State and the Military Service. The cultivator of the soil found in every hamlet a petty tyrant in the Seigneur who could rob him of his labour, or ruin him by burdens which he could not bear. These men might not like the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal; but they never thought of bringing back the privileged orders, of setting up again the barriers which closed the career of life to merit and ambition, of re-establishing the taille and the corvée. And every Frenchman would have preferred the worst Government, which despotic and feudal institutions, or the crazed infatuation of his countrymen, could inflict, rather than submit to a Government dictated by a foreign Emperor or an invader of his country. The proclamation of the RESISTANCE TO FOREIGN INTERVENTION. Duke of Brunswick and the occupation of French territory in the name of a foreign potentate, made domestic affairs a secondary consideration. Military glory and the integrity of the empire were of the first importance; and the three-coloured flag became the emblem of national independence, as well as of civil liberty. Ch. 33. 1793 35 The energy and fire with which the French Conduct of the Whigs. people and their Government repelled the invaders of the country and defied the armaments of Europe, contrasted forcibly with the listlessness and hesitation of their numerous and powerful enemies. England alone shewed a determination to persevere in the war. The whig party, which had maintained an unbroken consistency of opposition to the American war through its various fortunes, which had survived the disasters of the Coalition, and which had held together during long years of hopeless opposition, was disbanded and scattered by events which should have rallied and consolidated the great party of the Revolution. When Fox, with the generous Intemperate language of impetuosity of his nature, hailed the first outbreak Fox. of French liberty, some of his oldest friends and supporters were silent. They thought his congratulations premature, and his language too strong. In memorable phrases, the great orator pronounced the French Revolution to be the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any age or country. This language was used at a time when violence and injustice of the grossest kind had been perpetrated 36 Ch. 33. 1793 ORGANIC CHANGE NECESSARY IN FRANCE. by the popular party in France. But an English statesman, the leader of that famous party which had always been foremost in the struggle for liberty, might well declare his sympathy for the cause in which the French people were engaged without approving of the outrages on the royal family, or the sweeping demolition of the whole fabric of their ancient Government. No man who was acquainted with the state of the Government and people of France before the Revolution, would have been disposed to measure nicely the excesses of the people in the first transport of their emancipation from a tyranny, perhaps, the most odious that ever, for any length of time, oppressed a civilized nation. The case of France was not a case for reform. It was not even a case for a mere political revolution. Organic change was demanded not only in the institutions, but in the moral and social condition of the country. The necessity could hardly have been avoided of breaking up the whole system of society, and laying it down anew. A just discrimination between the state of France and the state of England, would have gone far to allay those fears of the contagion of French principles, which the speeches and writings of Burke did so much to inflame. There were faults in our institutions, but the institutions themselves were sound; Our representative system, which was the most faulty, contained all the elements of a free legislature, and required only moderate reform to make it efficient, if not perfect. We had a Crown with a limited 37 STATE OF OPINION IN ENGLAND. 1793 and defined prerogative; we had an aristocracy Ch. 33. without exclusive privileges; we had an established church with complete toleration, while every office in the state, and every occupation in the country, was open to merit and ambition. A Government like this had nothing to fear from the example of a nation delirious with liberty. A few enthusiasts, and a few malcontents embittered by disappointment, or seeking advancement, which they could not fairly earn, might dream of a democratic republic; but the sense of the nation was favourable to institutions, under which Englishmen had enjoyed a greater amount of liberty and prosperity, than any other people in the world. Men of sober judgment saw no ground to fear that the populace of London would break into Windsor Castle and carry George the Third by force to St. James's; or that the House of Commons would be overawed by a Jacobin club, or that the Goddess of Reason would be worshipped in Westminster Abbey. But the arguments used by the most eminent assailants, and by the most eminent defenders of the French Revolution, were equally calculated to pervert public opinion in this country, and to precipitate a war which temperate counsels might have averted. Burke, who maintained that every thing the French had done since 1789 was wrong, and that they had wantonly destroyed instead of amending their old institutions, always inferred, and sometimes asserted in terms, that there was no material 38 Ch. 33 1793 COMPARISON OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION distinction between the case of the French people in 1788 and the case of the English people a century before. But, in fact, no two cases could be more unlike. A monarchy which, for centuries, had gone on adding prerogative to prerogative; an aristocracy which enforced the feudal privileges of the middle ages with unabated rigour; a church which tolerated no freedom of conscience, were treated on the same footing with a monarchy which had been reduced within narrow limits by the incessant assertion of popular rights; with an aristocracy which had no exclusive privileges; with a Church which was at once the offspring and the emblem of religious freedom. In 1688, the people of England had been long in possession of their liberties. Their title to freedom of the person, they traced back for nearly five hundred years. They obeyed no laws which were not made by the joint authority of king, lords, and commons in parliament assembled; they paid no taxes but those which were imposed by their own representatives. And when the king stepped beyond the limits which the Constitution had prescribed, and assumed to dispense with the laws of the realm, the nation declared that he had violated the implied compact under which he reigned, and thereby forfeited his crown. If the people of England were justified in their act, much more were the people of France justified in rising against their Government. It was no question of a mere excess of prerogative with which they had to deal. The whole of their |