I

LECTURE XLII.

REIGN OF TERROR.

HAVE been now, for many lectures, endeavouring to convey to you some general impression of the system of terror of the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

I cannot suppose your minds unaffected by what you have heard.

I must now, however, call upon you to observe, in conclusion, the effect that was produced on others at the time, and, above all, the estimate that was formed of the whole by the matured mind of Mr. Burke.

The details of this dreadful portion of history you will enter into hereafter, by the perusal of proper books and memoirs; but already you must have learnt enough, even from these few lectures, to enable you to judge of the remarks I am going to read to you, from his Letters on the Regicide Peace, written in 1796. Consider, as you listen to me, how far he is or is not justified in the awful representations he has there given of this system; when you doubt, suspend your opinions till you

have read and heard more.

I have before mentioned to you, that I should hold it no mean praise, if I could assist you in properly appreciating the works of this distinguished man on the French Revolution; assist you in separating the wisdom from the enthusiasm, the philosophy from the declamation, the just statement from the violence and exaggeration, which may all alike be occasionally found, it must be confessed, in his immortal pages; but it is for you to observe the one, and be not affected by the other. That he was the first to understand the state of Europe, and that he best understood it, cannot, I think, be now denied. But whether he best understood the remedy that could be best tried for this unparalleled situation of society, is quite

another question. Observe, then, the estimate he has given, and how continually every word he writes has a reference to some circumstance or other that took place at Paris, and that you have even already received some notice of, in the course of these lectures, particularly when I was alluding to the pages of the Moniteurs. "Instead of the religion and the law," says he, speaking of the French Revolutionists, " by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are built. Its foundation is laid in regicide, in Jacobinism, and in atheism; and it has joined to those principles, a body of systematic manners, which secures their operation. I call a commonwealth regicide, which lays it down as a fixed law of nature, and a fundamental right of man, that all government, not being a democracy, is an usurpation; that all kings, as such, are usurpers; and for being kings, may and ought to be put to death, with their wives, families, and adherents." Mr. Burke then alludes to the festival of the 10th of August, as illustrating these, his representations. "Jacobinism," he continues, "is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property. When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of destroying the pre-existing laws and institutions of their country; when they secure to themselves an army, by dividing amongst the people of no property the estates of the ancient and lawful proprietors; when a state recognises those acts, &c. &c. I call this Jacobinism by establishment. I call it atheism by establishment, when any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world; when it shall offer to him no religious or moral worship; when it shall abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree; when it shall persecute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers; when it shall generally shut up or pull down churches; when the few buildings that remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of general detestation, and the severest animadversion

of the law; when in the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual self-denial" (you will observe these comprehensive words), "in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent, theatric rites, in honour of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic; when schools and seminaries are founded at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with the horrible maxims of their impiety; when, wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil; I call this atheism by establishment. When to these establishments of regicide, of jacobinism, and of atheism, you add the correspondent system of manners, no doubt can be left on the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the human race. Manners are of more importance than laws; upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend: the law touches us but here and there, and now and then; manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, and insensible operation, like the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives, according to their quality; they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this the new French legislators were aware; therefore, with the same method, and under the same authority, they settled a system of manners, the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned, that ever has been known, and, at the same time, the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious. Nothing in the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion of a hat or shoe, was left to accident. All has been the result of design, all has been matter of institution. No mechanical means could be devised, in favour of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that has not been employed. The noblest passions, love of glory, the love of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its propagation; all sorts of shows and exhibitions, calculated to inflame and vitiate the imagination, and pervert the moral sense, have been contrived; they have, sometimes, brought forth five or six hundred drunken women, calling at the bar of the Assembly for the

the

blood of their own children, as being Royalists or Constitutionalists. Sometimes they have got a body of wretches, calling themselves fathers, to demand the murder of their sons; boasting that Rome had but one Brutus, but that they could show five hundred. There were instances, in which they inverted and retaliated the impiety, and produced sons, who called for the execution of their parents. The foundation of their republic is laid in moral paradoxes; their patriotism is always prodigy: all those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature recoils, are their chosen, and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth. The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural affections. They, on the contrary, have omitted no pains to eradicate every benevolent, noble propensity, in the mind of men. In their culture it is a rule, always, to graft virtues on vices. They think every thing unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private. All their new institutions (and with them every thing is new) strike at the root of our social nature. Other legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavoured, by every act, to make it sacred. The Christian religion, by confining it to pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has, by these two things, done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilization of the world, than by any other part, in this whole scheme of Divine Wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in the synagogue of Antichrist, I mean in that forge and manufactory of all evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789. Those monsters employed the same, or greater industry, to desecrate and degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy and honourable. By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronounced that marriage was no better than a common civil contract. The same discipline which hardens their hearts, relaxes their morals. Whilst courts of justice were thrust out by revolu

tionary tribunals, and silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion, there were no fewer than nineteen or twenty theatres, great and small, most of them kept open at the public expense, and all of them crowded every night. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness, amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter, went on, as regularly, as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it from good authority, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was hired out for a show of dancing dogs. The whole body of this new scheme of manners, in support of the new scheme of politics, I consider as a strong and decisive proof of determined ambition and systematic hostility. I defy the most refined ingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of the Jacobin republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious, legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed resolution of keeping no terms with that world. It has not been, as has been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only broken with their old government; they made a schism with the whole universe, and that schism extended to almost every thing great and small."

I have quoted for you nearly the whole of these remarkable passages in Mr. Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace, for the reasons I have mentioned. No doubt, at last the Jacobins kept no terms with the rest of the world; and such a crisis of the world was produced, as was quite unexampled in the history of it. Fortunate, indeed, are you, who can turn to consider it as a scene that has passed away, as a danger that society has escaped. No idea whatever can be conveyed to you; none, not the faintest, of what was experienced by those who lived at the time, who every day read and heard of such scenes as I have alluded to, and yet saw, at the same time, the French armies every where bearing down all opposition; and these presumptuous renovators of the world, these tyrannical propagators of liberty, partly by their popular doctrines, and partly by their armies, revolutionizing every country they