The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
It is full as singular as any of the other singularities in this work,
that the Remarker, talking so much as he does of cessions and
compensations, passes by Spain in his general settlement, as if there
were no such country on the globe,--as if there were no Spain in Europe,
no Spain in America. But this great matter of political deliberation
cannot be put out of our thoughts by his silence. She _has_ furnished
compensations,--not to you, but to France. The Regicide Republic and the
still nominally subsisting monarchy of Spain are united,--and are united
upon a principle of jealousy, if not of bitter enmity, to Great Britain.
The noble writer has here another matter for meditation. It is not from
Dunkirk to Hamburg that the ports are in the hands of France: they are
in the hands of France from Hamburg to Gibraltar. How long the new
dominion will last I cannot tell; but France the Republic has conquered
Spain, and the ruling party in that court acts by her orders and exists
by her power.
The noble writer, in his views into futurity, has forgotten to look back
to the past. If he chooses it, he may recollect, that, on the prospect
of the death of Philip the Fourth, and still more on the event, all
Europe was moved to its foundations. In the treaties of partition that
first were entered into, and in the war that afterwards blazed out to
prevent those crowns from being actually or virtually united in the
House of Bourbon, the predominance of France in Spain, and above all, in
the Spanish Indies, was the great object of all these movements in the
cabinet and in the field. The Grand Alliance was formed upon that
apprehension. On that apprehension the mighty war was continued during
such a number of years as the degenerate and pusillanimous impatience of
our dwindled race can hardly bear to have reckoned: a war equal, within
a few years, in duration, and not, perhaps, inferior in bloodshed, to
any of those great contests for empire which in history make the most
awful matter of recorded memory.
Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
Horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris auris,
In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum
Omnibus humanis esset terraque marique.--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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