Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/89

Rh submission will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that any concession made to him will be instantly converted into a weapon for our destruction?" Why not grant to him such terms as might be granted to the Bourbons, since they would be granted to a much less dangerous and powerful rival? Why not subsist, as we have hitherto done, without the fear of perpetual war or perpetual bondage before our eyes, now that the crown of France has lost its original brightness, and is shorn of those beams which would again sparkle round it, if fixed on the head of a Bourbon? We suspect that our author is not quite in earnest in his professions; because he is not consistent with himself. Is it possible that his anxiety to keep out the Bourbons arises from his fear that peace might creep in with them, at least as a sort of compliment of the season? Is our veteran politician aware, in his own mind, that the single epithets, Corsican, republican, revolutionary, will have more effect in stirring up the embers of war, than all the arguments which he might use to demonstrate the accumulating dangers to be apprehended from the mild paternal sway of the ancient dynasty?

We cannot help saying, however, that we think the elaborate attempt of Vetus to prove the necessary extinction of the power of France under the government of Bonaparte, a total failure. What is the amount of his argument? That in a period when the French were to owe their existence and their power to war, Bonaparte has made them a warlike people, and that they did not sit down quietly to "the cultivation of arts, luxuries, and letters," when the world was beleaguered against them. Is it for Vetus, who reprobates the peace of Amiens, that hollow truce (as he justly calls it), that intermission of war but for a moment, to say of Bonaparte, "His application of public industry is only to the arts of death—all other perishes for want of wholesome nourishment?" What then becomes of the long-resounded charge against him on his exclamation "for ships, colonies, and commerce?" We suspect, that energy in war is not an absolute proof of weakness in peace. He lays down, indeed, a general