264 FRANCE DECLARES WAR. [1793. comprised 411 vessels of all rates, of which only 135 were in commission.* "At no previous period had France possessed so powerful a navy," says Mr. James. The English fleet was not so readily manned as the French fleet. The appeals to republican enthusiasm to fit out privateers were more stimulating than the sober addresses to the loyalty of our mercantile classes. On the 31st of December the French Minister of Marine addressed a letter to the friends of liberty in the sea-ports:-"The government of England is arming. The king and his parliament intend to make war against us. Will the English republicans suffer it? Already these free men show their discontent, and the repugnance which they have to bear arms against their brothers the French. Well! we will fly to their succour; we will make a descent on the island; we will lodge there fifty thousand caps of liberty; we will plant there the sacred tree; and we will stretch out our arms to our republican brethren. The tyranny of their government shall soon be destroyed." M. Chauvelin returned to Paris with the same wild notions of the amount of disaffection. He judged, as foreigners are too apt to judge, that our freedom of writing and speaking the safety-valves of the political machine-indicated violence and revolt. The war was probably inevitable; but the French Convention took the initiative in declaring war. On the 11th of February, a Message from the king was delivered to the two Houses, in which it was stated that "the Assembly now exercising the powers of government in France have, without previous notice, directed acts of hostility to be committed against the persons and property of his majesty's subjects, in breach of the law of nations, and of the most positive stipulations of treaty; and have since, on the most groundless pretensions, declared war against his majesty and the United Provinces." * See Tables to James's "History," No. I. Resolutions proposed by Mr. Fox against war with France-Commercial distress-Parliamentary Reform opposed by Mr. Pitt-Traitorous Correspondence Bill-Pitt, Burke, Fox,-the diversity of their views of England's policy-Sanguine expectations of warlike success-Dumouriez in Holland-Battle of Neerwinden-Defection of Dumouriez-Measures of the Jacobins-Revolutionary Tribunal-Committee of Public Salvation-Excessive prices of commodities in Paris-Produced by the depreciation of Assignats-Plunder of the ShopsLaw of Maximum--Forced Levy of troops-La Vendée in insurrection-Mr. Fox's motion for Peace-Insurrection against the Girondin Deputies-Their arrest and flight-Assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday-Note on the French Revolutionary Kalendar. THE opposition of Mr. Fox to the war with France, supported as he was by only a small band of his friends, was consistent and unremitting. He moved an amendment to the Address on the King's Message respecting the Declaration of War, and was defeated without a division. He proposed, a week after this royal Message had been delivered, a series of Resolutions, the object of which was to declare, that it was not for the honour or interest of Great Britain to make war upon France, on account of the internal circumstances of that country; that the complaints against the conduct of the French government were not sufficient to justify war in the first instance without having attempted to obtain redress by negotiation; that the pretended grounds of the war with France, the security of Europe, and the rights of independent nations, had been disregarded in the case of Poland; that no engagements ought to be entered into with other powers which might prevent Great Britain making a separate peace. After an acrimonious VOL. VIL T 266 OPPOSITION TO THE WAR BY MR. FOX. 66 [1793. debate, Mr. Fox's motion was rejected by an overwhelming majority, only forty-four members supporting the Resolutions. Again, and again, Fox advocated negotiations for peace with those, whoever they were, who had the government of France in their hands. "Why," he said, "was every man in England to be a sufferer because the people of France were in con-fusion? Let them ask every man in the kingdom who had any commercial dealings, whether the accounts he received from all parts of the kingdom did not call for a conclusion to this war.”* The embarrassments in trade had been so serious, from whatever cause, that Parliament had sanctioned an issue of five millions in exchequer bills, to be advanced by commissioners, in loans to commercial firms who could give security for repayment. The demand for peace, upon the plea that war produced distress and privation to the bulk of the people, was thus met by Burke, in one of his most virulent personal attacks upon Fox :-"The ground of a political war is, of all things, that which the poor labourer and manufacturer are the least. capable of conceiving. This sort of people know in general that they must suffer by war. It is a matter to which they are sufficiently competent, because it is a matter of feeling. The causes of a war are not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances, which they are utterly incapable of comprehending; and, indeed, it is not every man in the higher classes who is altogether equal to it." According to this doctrine, the war with the French republican government was "a political war," of the justice or expediency of which only the initiated in the mysteries of statesmanship were competent to form an opinion. The bulk of the people might feel the consequences of such a war, but they had no capacity for the investigation of its causes, and had therefore only to confide and suffer. Pitt, proud and confident as he was, made no attempt to measure this war by the calculating foresight only of official wisdom. He was driven into the war, undoubtedly against his wishes, by the violence of popular opinion rather than by the calculations of his own statesmanship. He did not claim an infallibility which regarded with contempt the general tone of public feeling. He carried the greater portion of the industrial community with him in his resistance to extreme democratic principles, by describing with a rhetoric that could not exaggerate the reality, the cruelties and oppressions perpetrated in France under the names of Liberty and Equality. He defended his own abandonment of the cause of Parliamentary Reform by dwelling upon the consequences of extended suffrage in France. In the great debate on Mr. Grey's motion for Reform, previous to which petitions had been read praying for Universal Suffrage, Mr. Pitt said, "In what is called the government of the multitude, they are not the many who govern the few, but the few who govern the many. It is a species of tyranny which adds insult to the wretchedness of its subjects, by styling its own arbitrary decrees the voice of the people, and sanctioning its acts of oppression and cruelty under the pretence of the national will. . . . The question is, whether you will abide by your Constitution, or hazard a change, with all that dreadful train of 1793.] TRAITOROUS CORRESPONDENCE BILL. 267 consequences with which we have seen it attended in a neighbouring kingdom?" The fanaticism of the republicans who ruled France has been compared to that of the Mussulmans, "who, with the Koran in one hand, and the sword in the other, went forth conquering and converting." The fiery zeal of the higher and middle classes of England has been compared to that of the Crusaders, "who raised the cry of Deus vult at Clermont." + The watchword of "King and Constitution " was, on one side of the Channel, as potent as the war-whoop of "Liberty and Equality" on the other side. There was no great reason and foresight" required to plunge each nation into a conflict of twenty years. The The passions that were involved in this political war impelled the alarmists to call for such stringent measures of precaution and coercion as Great Britain had not witnessed since the days of the exiled Stuarts. Chancellor, lord Loughborough, was ready with a "Traitorous Correspondence Bill," drawn by the Attorney-General, sir John Scott, and introduced by him to the House of Commons on the 15th of March. They considered the law of Edward III. against adhering to the king's enemies ast insufficient to prevent the French being supplied with arms and stores, and they made it high treason even to enter into an agreement for supplying them. They called for the penalties of treason against those who should invest capital in the French funds or in the purchase of lands in France. Forfeiture and corruption of blood were not to follow a conviction; but, on the other hand, the evidence of two witnesses, and the further protections secured to the accused by the statutes of William and Anne, were to be set aside. The arbitrary tendencies of the Lord Chancellor and his Attorney-General could not be more strongly exhibited than in the proposition that a man might be hanged, drawn, and quartered, upon the evidence of one witness, without being furnished with a copy of the indictment against him; and without the privilege of being defended by counsel. The Bill passed the House of Commons in spite of the opposition of Fox, Sheridan, and Erskine; but in the House of Lords this attempt to take from the accused the means of defence, under the appearance of lenity, was modified. The penalties of the law of treason, and its protections, remained as before. Ths definition of treasonable acts was very widely extended. The minister who had never sanctioned any act of the executive, or any proposal of the legislature, of an unconstitutional or arbitrary tendency, was now to become identified with measures such as Englishmen regarded as belonging to past generations of oppression. The minister who had built his reputation upon his financial prudence was to lay a load of debt upon his country that even now seems fabulous. Mr. Pitt began this tremendous contest by undervaluing the power of a nation whose government, if government it could be called, was one of factions without a common head, each contending for supremacy; of a nation that had lost every ordinary source of strength,-settled laws, established property, natural leaders, public credit. Obscure men, such as Jourdan, who had carried a pack from fair to fair, were commanding the French armies. * "Parliamentary History," vol. xxx. col. 902-Debate of May 7. 268 PITT, BURKE, FOX, [1793. Men taken from the ranks, it was held, could know nothing of strategy, and could have no authority over their fellows. In despising their origin and training, it was forgotten that the passion for Equality gave them a more powerful influence in the French armies than was ever wielded by the titled Marshals of the old monarchy. The English minister sent the king's second son, whose military experience had been limited to a field-day in Hyde-Park, to terrify the raw levies of the republic with two regiments of Guards; and with a contingent of Hanoverians and Hessians, all disciplined upon the most approved principles of "the bookish theorick." Mr. Pitt knew that Austria and Prussia hated each other-would act upon no common agreement for large and disinterested purposes in the conduct of the French war. He knew that Russia and Prussia were intent upon aggressions as hateful and as dangerous as the pretensions of the French republicans; that not until they were gorged with the spoils of Poland would they seriously direct their thoughts to the common dangers of established governments; but that meanwhile they would let the war take the languid course of a Coalition without a presiding mind to direct it to salutary ends, or to arrest the selfish schemes which some indulged of territorial aggrandizement. And yet Mr. Pitt had no doubt that the expedition which he sent to Holland in March under the duke of York, and his armaments against the West India islands, constituted that vigorous prosecution of the war which he promised when he brought forward his Budget; and he could not comprehend why Mr. Fox had no confidence in numerous foreign alliances, saying that “he dreaded our being led into dangerous engagements for the prosecution of the most unjustifiable purposes." It soon became manifest that the war was not carried on with that vigour on the part of the Allies which alone could ensure success; that purposes wholly unjustifiable interfered with that unanimity which justice and disinterestedness alone could inspire. In a very few months it was found out that there was a new element in this contest, in dealing with which historical experience was no guide. In October, 1793, Burke acknowledged that a state of things had arisen, " of which, in its totality, if History furnishes any examples at all, they are very remote and feeble." Who, he says, could have imagined new and unlooked-for combinations and modifications of political matters, in which property should, through the whole of a vast kingdom, lose all its importance and even its influence ;—who could have thought that a formidable revolution in a great empire should have been made by men of letters who would become the sovereign rulers;—that atheism could produce one of the most violently operative principles of fanaticism;-that administrative bodies in a state of the utmost confusion, and of but a momentary duration, should be able to govern the country and its armies with an authority which the most settled senates, and the most respected monarchs, scarcely had in the same degree? "This, for one, I confess I did not foresee," says Burke, and he gives the reason of his own shortsightedness as the apology for others: "I believe very few were able to enter into the effects of mere terror For four years we have seen loans made, treasuries supplied, and armies levied and maintained, more numerous than France ever showed in the field, by the effects of fear alone."* The * "Policy of the Allies." The words in Italics are so in the original. |