The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.Wordsworth, William
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The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.
Wordsworth, William
English literature -- 19th century
I have yet to speak of the influence of such concessions upon the French
Ruler and his army. With what Satanic pride must he have contemplated
the devotion of his servants and adherents to _their_ law, the
steadiness and zeal of their perverse loyalty, and the faithfulness with
which they stand by him and each other! How must his heart have
distended with false glory, while he contrasted these qualities of his
subjects with the insensibility and slackness of his British enemies!
This notice has, however, no especial propriety in this place; for, as
far as concerns Bonaparte, his pride and depraved confidence may be
equally fed by almost all the conditions of this instrument. But, as to
his army, it is plain that the permission (whether it be considered as
by an express article formally granted, or only involved in the general
conditions of the treaty), to bear away in triumph the harvest of its
crimes, must not only have emboldened and exalted it with arrogance, and
whetted its rapacity; but that hereby every soldier, of which this army
was composed, must, upon his arrival in his own country, have been a
seed which would give back plenteously in its kind. The French are at
present a needy people, without commerce or manufactures,--unsettled in
their minds and debased in their morals by revolutionary practices and
habits of warfare; and the youth of the country are rendered desperate
by oppression, which, leaving no choice in their occupation, discharges
them from all responsibility to their own consciences. How powerful then
must have been the action of such incitements upon a people so
circumstanced! The actual sight, and, far more, the imaginary sight and
handling of these treasures, magnified by the romantic tales which must
have been spread about them, would carry into every town and village an
antidote for the terrors of conscription; and would rouze men, like the
dreams imported from the new world when the first discoverers and
adventurers returned, with their ingots and their gold dust--their
stories and their promises, to inflame and madden the avarice of the
old. 'What an effect,' says the Governor of Cadiz, 'must it have upon
the people,' (he means the Spanish people,) 'to know that a single
soldier was carrying away 2580 livres tournois!' What an effect, (he
might have said also,) must it have upon the French!--I direct the
reader's attention to this, because it seems to have been overlooked;
and because some of the public journals, speaking of the Convention,
(and, no doubt, uttering the sentiments of several of their
readers,)--say 'that they are disgusted with the transaction, not
because the French have been permitted to carry off a few diamonds, or
some ingots of silver; but because we confessed, by consenting to the
treaty, that an army of 35,000 British troops, aided by the Portugueze
nation, was not able to compel 20,000 French to surrender at
discretion.' This is indeed the root of the evil, as hath been shewn;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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