As I used sometimes to correspond with Mr.Burke believing him then to be a man of sounder principles than his book shows him to be, I wrote to him last winter from Paris, and gave him an account how prosperously matters were going on.Among other subjects in that letter, I referred to the happy situation the National Assembly were placed in; that they had taken ground on which their moral duty and their political interest were united.They have not to hold out a language which they do not themselves believe, for the fraudulent purpose of making others believe it.Their station requires no artifice to support it, and can only be maintained by enlightening mankind.It is not their interest to cherish ignorance, but to dispel it.They are not in the case of a ministerial or an opposition party in England, who, though they are opposed, are still united to keep up the common mystery.The National Assembly must throw open a magazine of light.It must show man the proper character of man; and the nearer it can bring him to that standard, the stronger the National Assembly becomes.
In contemplating the French Constitution, we see in it a rational order of things.The principles harmonise with the forms, and both with their origin.It may perhaps be said as an excuse for bad forms, that they are nothing more than forms; but this is a mistake.Forms grow out of principles, and operate to continue the principles they grow from.It is impossible to practise a bad form on anything but a bad principle.It cannot be ingrafted on a good one; and wherever the forms in any government are bad, it is a certain indication that the principles are bad also.
I will here finally close this subject.I began it by remarking that Mr.Burke had voluntarily declined going into a comparison of the English and French Constitutions.He apologises (in page 241) for not doing it, by saying that he had not time.Mr.Burke's book was upwards of eight months in hand, and is extended to a volume of three hundred and sixty-six pages.
As his omission does injury to his cause, his apology makes it worse; and men on the English side of the water will begin to consider, whether there is not some radical defect in what is called the English constitution, that made it necessary for Mr.Burke to suppress the comparison, to avoid bringing it into view.
As Mr.Burke has not written on constitutions so neither has he written on the French Revolution.He gives no account of its commencement or its progress.He only expresses his wonder."It looks," says he, "to me, as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe.All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world."As wise men are astonished at foolish things, and other people at wise ones, I know not on which ground to account for Mr.Burke's astonishment;but certain it is, that he does not understand the French Revolution.It has apparently burst forth like a creation from a chaos, but it is no more than the consequence of a mental revolution priorily existing in France.
The mind of the nation had changed beforehand, and the new order of things has naturally followed the new order of thoughts.I will here, as concisely as I can, trace out the growth of the French Revolution, and mark the circumstances that have contributed to produce it.
The despotism of Louis XIV., united with the gaiety of his Court, and the gaudy ostentation of his character, had so humbled, and at the same time so fascinated the mind of France, that the people appeared to have lost all sense of their own dignity, in contemplating that of their Grand Monarch; and the whole reign of Louis XV., remarkable only for weakness and effeminacy, made no other alteration than that of spreading a sort of lethargy over the nation, from which it showed no disposition to rise.
The only signs which appeared to the spirit of Liberty during those periods, are to be found in the writings of the French philosophers.Montesquieu, President of the Parliament of Bordeaux, went as far as a writer under a despotic government could well proceed; and being obliged to divide himself between principle and prudence, his mind often appears under a veil, and we ought to give him credit for more than he has expressed.
Voltaire , who was both the flatterer and the satirist of despotism, took another line.His forte lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions which priest-craft, united with state-craft, had interwoven with governments.It was not from the purity of his principles, or his love of mankind (for satire and philanthropy are not naturally concordant), but from his strong capacity of seeing folly in its true shape, and his irresistible propensity to expose it, that he made those attacks.They were, however, as formidable as if the motive had been virtuous; and he merits the thanks rather than the esteem of mankind.
On the contrary, we find in the writings of Rousseau, and the Abbe Raynal, a loveliness of sentiment in favour of liberty, that excites respect, and elevates the human faculties; but having raised this animation, they do not direct its operation, and leave the mind in love with an object, without describing the means of possessing it.
The writings of Quesnay, Turgot, and the friends of those authors, are of the serious kind; but they laboured under the same disadvantage with Montesquieu; their writings abound with moral maxims of government, but are rather directed to economise and reform the administration of the government, than the government itself.
