Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/86

 which do not owe their birth to reason, should not afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into abstract principles of right and wrong?

The whole of Vetus's reasoning is founded on the false notions of patriotism which we have here pointed out, and which we conceive to be totally inconsistent with "the just principles of negociation." The remainder of his letter, which unfolds his motives for a pacific arrangement with Bonaparte, is founded entirely on the same jaundiced and distempered views. Many wise, many honest, many virtuous persons, he says, have maintained, not without reason, "the incompetency of this Corsican under any circumstances to discharge the obligations of a state of peace." But he, more wise, more honest, more virtuous, sees a hope, a shadow of peace, rising like a cloudy speck out of a quarter where it was least expected. "The stone which the builders rejected, is become the corner-stone of his Temple of Peace."—"It does not appear to Vetus, that a peace with Bonaparte is now unattainable on terms sufficient for our safety." He thinks there is no man so proper to make peace with as this Corsican, this Revolutionist,—no one so proper to govern France—to the complete exclusion of the Bourbons, whose pretensions he scouts analytically, logically, and chronologically, and who, it seems, had always the same implacable animosity against this country as Bonaparte, without a tythe of his ability. [Surely this circumstance might plead a little in their favour with Vetus.] And why so? Whence arises this unexpected partiality shewn to Bonaparte? Why it is "from the strong conviction that by no other means so decisive as the existence of this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading system of government, can we hope to see France crushed and ground down below the capacity of contending for ages to come with the force of the British Empire, moved by the spirit of freedom! Regarding France under every known form of government as the irreconcileable foe