The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
Dear Sir,--I thank you for the bundle of state-papers which I received
yesterday. I have travelled through the negotiation,--and a sad,
founderous road it is. There is a sort of standing jest against my
countrymen,--that one of them on his journey having found a piece of
pleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again. This
proposal, with regard to the worthy traveller's final destination, was
certainly a blunder. It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction;
for the way was pleasant. In the irksome journey of the Regicide
negotiations it is otherwise: our "paths are not paths of pleasantness,
nor our ways the ways to peace." All our mistakes, (if such they are,)
like those of our Hibernian traveller, are mistakes of repetition; and
they will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest as his
well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see we
persevere. Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore a
new one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have been
in motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance we resolve to measure
back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track.
Backward and forward,--oscillation, space,--the travels of a postilion,
miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage,--we have been, and
we are yet to be, jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stones
and the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill-kept, broken-up,
treacherous French causeway!
The Declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid before
Parliament contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attempts
and all our failures,--a concise, but correct narrative of the painful
steps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris,--a clear
exposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of that
experiment,--an honest confession of our departure from all the rules
and all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudence
in the conduct of it,--and to crown the whole, a fair account of the
atrocious manner in which the Regicide enemies had broken up what had
been so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, and
with all scorn, driving our suppliant ambassador out of the limits of
their usurpation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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