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
When this war was ended, (I cannot stay now to examine how,) the object
of the war was the object of the treaty. When it was found
impracticable, or less desirable than before, wholly to exclude a branch
of the Bourbon race from that immense succession, the point of Utrecht
was to prevent the mischiefs to arise from the influence of the greater
upon the lesser branch. His Lordship is a great member of the diplomatic
body; he has, of course, all the fundamental treaties which make the
public statute law of Europe by heart: and, indeed, no active member of
Parliament ought to be ignorant of their general tenor and leading
provisions. In the treaty which closed that war, and of which it is a
fundamental part, because relating to the whole policy of the compact,
it was agreed that Spain should not give anything from her territory in
the West Indies to France. This article, apparently onerous to Spain,
was in truth highly beneficial. But, oh, the blindness of the greatest
statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which
lie hid in the dark prolific womb of futurity! The great trunk of
Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the
construction of a French Regicide Republic. Here we have formed a new,
unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,--a double-natured
monster, republic above and monarchy below. There is no centaur of
fiction, no poetic satyr of the woods, nothing short of the hieroglyphic
monsters of Egypt, dog in head and man in body, that can give an idea of
it. None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is
thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical
rejects.
In this metamorphosis, the first thing done by Spain, in the honey-moon
of her new servitude, was, with all the hardihood of pusillanimity,
utterly to defy the most solemn treaties with Great Britain and the
guaranty of Europe. She has yielded the largest and fairest part of one
of the largest and fairest islands in the West Indies, perhaps on the
globe, to the usurped powers of France. She completes the title of those
powers to the whole of that important central island of Hispaniola. She
has solemnly surrendered to the regicides and butchers of the Bourbon
family what that court never ventured, perhaps never wished, to bestow
on the patriarchal stock of her own august house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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