The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
But it may be said, do we mean to apply these remarks to Bonaparte? As
far as relates to any merits of the war-faction. It was they who
implicated him with the cause of the French people, as ‘the child and
champion of Jacobinism.’ We cannot express our opinion better than in
the words of Mr. Whitebread, ‘that England had made Bonaparte, and he
had undone himself.’ He was the creature of the Pitt-school. Was the
iron scourge which he has held over Europe put into his hands by the
peace-party? Were the battles of Austerlitz and Jena—were the march to
Vienna, the possession of Berlin, the invasion of Spain, the expedition
to Russia, and the burning of Moscow, the consequences of the signing or
of the breaking of the treaty of Amiens?
The author of the letters of Vetus, (who we suppose is silenced by _The
Times_, for asserting that the Bourbons have no more a lawful right to
the throne of France, at this moment, than the Stuarts had to the throne
of England twenty years after the Revolution of 1688,) is of opinion,
that this war is merely national, merely the old grudge between the two
countries; and that the Bourbons, the Republic, and Bonaparte, are
equally hostile to England, and we to them. In this, as in most things
else, our opinion is the opposite of his. There is only one period of
the history of the two countries, which, reversed, furnishes an exact
counterpart to the present contest, both in its avowed principles and
secret motives—we mean the war waged by Louis XIV. against this country
and its allies, for nearly as long a period after the English
Revolution. The difference in the results of these two revolutions has
been this: that from the insular situation of this country, which
enables us to do either right or wrong, nearly with impunity, and which
makes our means of defence greater, and our means of offence
proportionably less—that from this collateral cause, the internal
struggle, in proportion to the danger, was less bloody in our own case,
and the re-action of our efforts to defend ourselves from the imposition
of a foreign yoke and of hereditary slavery, less violent and fatal to
other states. All the differences have arisen from the character of the
two nations, and from local and accidental circumstances: there was none
in the abstract political principle. We gave them the example of their
Revolution; we also gave them an example of ‘national fortitude’ in
maintaining it. We—the people of England, (not an upstart jacobite
faction in the Hanoverian line,) are proud of having imitators; and we
think it not unlikely that the French, if forced upon it, may behave on
this occasion as the English behaved, when an hereditary pretender came
over to us, backed by the aid of foreign arms, to assert his lawful
claim to the throne—that is, in other words, to be the natural
proprietor of a whole people. We twice sent him back again with all his
myrmidons; we would not be made a property of. We felt that in not doing
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