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
It is not for his Holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of our
own weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. That
prince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. The
artists of the French Revolution had given their very first essays and
sketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a far
more cruel "murdering piece" than had over entered into the imagination
of painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing arms
the possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by all
the ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who during that period have
reigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our late
negotiation ceded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, lately
amongst the most flourishing (perhaps the most flourishing for their
extent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove the
sincerity of our resolution to make peace with the Republic of
Barbarism? That venerable potentate and pontiff is sunk deep into the
vale of years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; his
dominions are more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years,
defended as they were, not by force, but by reverence: yet, in all these
straits, we see him display, amidst the recent ruins and the new
defacements of his plundered capital, along with the mild and decorated
piety of the modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome.
Does he, who, though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused to
receive pecuniary compensations for the protection he owed to his people
of Avignon, Carpentras, and the Venaissin,--does he want proofs of our
good disposition to deliver over that people, without any security for
them, or any compensation to their sovereign, to this cruel enemy? Does
he want to be satisfied of the sincerity of our humiliation to France,
who has seen his free, fertile, and happy city and state of Bologna, the
cradle of regenerated law, the seat of sciences and of arts, so
hideously metamorphosed, whilst he was crying to Great Britain for aid,
and offering to purchase that aid at any price? Is it him, who sees that
chosen spot of plenty and delight converted into a Jacobin ferocious
republic, dependent on the homicides of France,--is it him, who, from
the miracles of his beneficent industry, has done a work which defied
the power of the Roman emperors, though with an enthralled world to
labor for them,--is it him, who has drained and cultivated the Pontine
Marshes, that we are to satisfy of our cordial spirit of conciliation
with those who, in their equity, are restoring Holland again to the
seas, whose maxims poison more than the exhalations of the most deadly
fens, and who turn all the fertilities of Nature and of Art into an
howling desert? Is it to him that we are to demonstrate the good faith
of our submissions to the Cannibal Republic,--to him, who is commanded
to deliver up into their hands Ancona and Civita Vecchia, seats of
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