Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/81

 the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed contemptible and mischievous baubles.

"What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? Are they still in pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them? When we demand compensation for our dreadful sufferings, it is but what justice grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires. Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy supremacy of Bonaparte!"

First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the patriotic contributors to The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post, The Sun and The Star, must have had in writing, and their admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand compensation for what we have suffered, it is but justice, if we can at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer; but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew, by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of Vetus's style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years engaged in a