Page images
PDF
EPUB

Providence has ordained that all men should have on one another. He is not at this minute perhaps cured of the dread of the power and credit likely to be acquired by those who would save and rescue him. He leaves those who suffer in his cause to their fate; and hopes by various, mean, delusive intrigues, in which I am afraid he is encouraged from abroad, to regain, among traitors and regicides, the power he has joined to take from his own family, whom he quietly sees proscribed before his eyes, and called to answer to the lowest of his rebels, as the vilest of all criminals.

It is to be hoped that the emperour may be Emperour. taught better things by this fatal example. But it is sure that he has advisers who endeavour to fill him with the ideas which have brought his brother-in-law to his present situation. Joseph the Second was far gone in this philosophy, and some, if not most, who serve the emperour, would kindly initiate him into all the mysteries of this free-masonry. They would persuade him to look on the National Assembly not with the hatred of an enemy, but with the jealousy of a rival. They' would make him desirous of doing, in his own domínions, by a royal despotism, what has been done in France by a democratick. Rather than abandon such enterprises, they would persuade him to a strange alliance between those extremes. Their grand object being now, as in his brother's time, at any rate to destroy the higher orders,

[blocks in formation]

they think he cannot compass this end, as certainly he cannot, without elevating the lower. By depressing the one and by raising the other, they hope in the first place to increase his treasures and his army; and with these common instruments of royal power they flatter him that the democracy which they help, in his name, to create, will give him but little trouble. In defiance of the freshest experience, which might shew him that old impossibilities are become modern probabilities, and that the extent to which evil principles may go, when left to their own operation, is beyond the power of calculation, they will endeavour to persuade him that such a democracy is a thing which cannot subsist by itself; that in whose hands soever the military command is placed, he must be, in the necessary course of affairs, sooner or later the master; and, that, being the master of various unconnected countries, he may keep them all in order by employing a military force, which to each of them is foreign. This maxim too, however formerly plausible, will not now hold water. This scheme is full of intricacy, and may cause him every where to lose the hearts of his people. These counsellors forget that a corrupted army was the very cause of the ruin of his brother-inlaw; and that he is himself far from secure from a similar corruption.

Instead

Instead of reconciling himself heartily and bond Brabant. fide according to the most obvious rules of policy to the states of Brabant, as they are constituted, and who in the present state of things stand on the same foundation with the monarchy itself, and who might have been gained with the greatest facility, they have advised him to the most unkingly proceeding which, either in a good or in a bad light, has ever been attempted. Under a pretext taken from the spirit of the lowest chicane, they have counselled him wholly to break the publick faith, to annul the amnesty, as well as the other conditions through which he obtained an entrance into the provinces of the Netherlands, under the guarantee of Great Britain and Prussia. He is made to declare his adherence to the indemnity in a criminal sense, but he is to keep alive in his own name, and to encourage in others, a civil process in the nature of an action of damages for what has been suffered during the troubles. Whilst he keeps up this hopeful law-suit in view of the damages he may recover against individuals, he loses the hearts of a whole people, and the vast subsidies which his ancestors had been used to receive from them.

conduct

This design once admitted, unriddles the mystery Emperour's of the whole conduct of the emperour's ministers with regard with regard to France. As soon as they saw the life of the king and queen of France no longer as

[blocks in formation]

to France.

they thought in danger, they entirely changed their plan with regard to the French nation. I believe that the chiefs of the Revolution (those who led the constituting assembly) have contrived, as far as they can do it, to give the emperour satisfaction on this head. He keeps a continual tone and posture of menace to secure this his only point. But it must be observed, that he all along grounds his departure from the engagement at Pilnitz to the princes, on the will and actions of the king and the majority of the people, without any regard to the natural and constitutional orders of the state, or to the opinions of the whole house of Bourbon. Though it is manifestly under the constraint of imprisonment and the fear of death, that this unhappy man has been guilty of all those humilities which have astonished mankind, the advisers of the emperour will consider nothing but the physical person of Louis, which, even in his present degraded and infamous state, they regard as of sufficient authority to give a compleat sanction to the persecution and utter ruin of all his family, and of every person who has shewn any degree of attachment or fidelity to him, or to his cause; as well as competent to destroy the whole ancient constitution and frame of the French monarchy.

The present policy, therefore, of the Austrian politicians is to recover despotism through democracy; or, at least, at any expence, every where to

ruin the description of men who are every where the objects of their settled and systematick aversion, but more especially in the Netherlands. Compare this with the emperour's refusing at first all intercourse with the present powers in France, with his endeavouring to excite all Europe against them, and then, his not only withdrawing all assistance and all countenance from the fugitives who had been drawn by his declarations from their houses, situations, and military commissions, many even from the means of their very existence, but treating them with every species of insult and outrage.

Combining this unexampled conduct in the emperour's advisers, with the timidity (operating as perfidy) of the king of France, a fatal example is held out to all subjects, tending to shew what little support, or even countenance, they are to expect from those for whom their principle of fidelity may induce them to risk life and fortune. The emperour's advisers would not for the world rescind one of the acts of this or of the late French assembly; nor do they wish any thing better at present for their master's brother of France, than that he should really be, as he is nominally, at the head of the system of persecution of religion and good order, and of all descriptions of dignity, natural and instituted; they only wish all this done with a little more respect to the king's person, and

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »