LETTER XLIX. REV. R. FELLOWES. Lichfield, March. 10, 1800. * I HAVE much for which to thank you; for an intention of visiting Lichfield, whose accomplishment would have delighted me, and whose counteraction I regret; for your active solicitude for the preservation of my life, threatened by a dangerous malady; and for a new composition, which does your talents and your principles the highest honour. It appears to me that reason, truth, and demonstration support your arguments in this work, and that imagination adorns them with very brilliant hues. I have ever thought, with you, that the inevitable, and factious struggles for power in a republic, and still more in what is termed a pure democracy, are, in a greater degree, injurious to the security and peace of the people, than even a * Morality united with Policy; or, Reflections on the Old and New Government of France. Printed for John White, Horace's Head, Fleet Street, 1800.-S. despotic monarchy, and have exclaimed with Goldsmith, "I fly from petty tyrants to the throne;" therefore must it gratify me highly to see my own general ideas on the subject thus analyzed, proved, and illustrated, by one for whom I feel so much esteem. Suffer me, however, to confess my opinion, that respecting the direly-featured French revolution, with the cause to which you chiefly impute it, viz. the depravity and licentious conduct of the French clergy, which made the generality of the people infidels, and the rest gloomy and useless bigots, other causes combined. Remember the contemptuous ridicule on their imputed slavery, which had, through ages, been a prominent feature in our senatorial oratory, on our stage, in our very pulpits; how incessantly it stung and goaded them from those proud islanders, beneath whose prosperity and greatness the genius of France stood rebuked. This, our everavowed disdain of their submission to despotism, I think one of the preparatory causes, but the emancipation of America far the most efficient. It has long appeared to me that the chastisement of retributory consequence has visited this country, and the court of France; the first for its injustice, the second for its treachery in that Transatlantic war. But, for the unjust attempt of England upon those established privileges, which formed the constitution of her colonies, I verily believe France had never, at least not in this age, ceased to be a monarchy, and that the calamities of an exterminating contest had been spared to Europe. The French court foresaw the mischiefs which the English were bringing upon themselves, and guilefully and basely encouraged them to pursue their destructive scheme of violence, by promised support and alliance, and then, most dishonourably and dishonestly, fought with America against England, engaging Spain and Holland in the combination. Poor Louis the XVI. always declared the reluctance with which he yielded to the solicitation of his queen and ministers to this betraying and faithless plan, the resulting evils of which, towards France, fell afterwards so heavy on himself, his family, and his nobles. The emancipation of our colonies, and its glory to them, became a seducing example to the French populace, and planted in their hearts the seeds of revolt, avenging upon that government its violated faith; avenging, also, upon this country, in the calamities of the present contest, its injustice. to America. Nor yet is the cup of retribution full, since England is insanely bent upon prolonging, in interminable prospect, the desolation, the cruel miseries and ruinous expense of the war. Such is her jealousy, and impotent rage of crushing the monster, whose conception her long series of sarcastic reproach for imputed slavery had promoted, and to whose birth she was the certain, though involuntary midwife, by her tyrannous attempt upon American freedom. She is now making the same unjust assault upon the longestablished privileges of Ireland. At first I hailed the revolution in France as a glorious attempt to procure for that country the blessings of a limited monarchy, but I soon saw, in the tyranny exerted towards its mild monarch, and in the interference of the neighbouring nations, that the result would prove a fatal blow to rational liberty in Europe, and most of all, in this country; that it would, as you finely express it, place British freedom upon a narrow and wasting isthmus, between anarchy and despotism. Had this revolution happened beneath the reign of a tyrant, it might have acted upon other kingdoms with a warning influence against tyranny. As it was, our king and parliament, with ninetenths of the English people, impute it chiefly, and but that they choose to call in the aid of reli gious zeal to support sanguinary measures, most opposite to the gospel precepts, they would, exclusively, impute the overthrow of monarchy in France to the concessions made by the king in favour of his subjects liberties. Hence every rational and religious plan for the reformation of abuses is termed Jacobinism. Hence Mr Pitt dared to say, in the senate, not a month ago, that to assert that the interests of the few ought to be subordinate to those of the many, was maintaining the vital principle of Jacobinism. Hence, while he and his adherents justly represent our foes as crippled in their navy, their commerce ruined, and most of their military conquests wrested from their possession, they are absurd enough to declare that there can be no security for England in a peace with France; as if that ruin to us, which, under her monarchy, and in the plenitude of her power and greatness, she could not effect, she was likely to compass in the disordered and exhausted state in which she must long remain. France never kept peace with England when she thought it for her interest to break it; neither did this country with her! What has ever been will ever be, whether the Gallic government be republic, democratic, consular, or monarchical; but each nation stands now more in need of a |