CHAPTER III.

CONTINUATION.-EXTERIOR OBSTACLES.-HYPOCRISY OF

LIBERTY, THE ENGLISHMAN.

The English False Ideal.-England deceived France by France.- Real Causes of England's greatness.-Montesquieu's Political Romance. Right obscured and stifled by Physics. - Pretended constitutional equilibrium. False European equilibrium of Powers. - England's efforts to neutralise Holland, Portugal, and France.-Having no Moral Idea, England has no power over France.-Her hatred of France.-Two Irishmen assist that hatred.- Lally-Tollendal.- Kind-hearted men provoke a Universal Warfare.-Burke's ravings.-Unanimity between the Priest and the Englishman.-Hateful credulity of the English Nation.-France loves and welcomes the English. Results of the struggle between the two Nations.-The Englishman has become a simple piece of Machinery.-The Frenchman has remained Man.

THE old Gothic principle, unaided, would never have been able to stop and lead astray the youthful impulse of France. No power would have been sufficient. The only thing that was able to lead her wrong, and which in fact did so, was an illusion, a false and spurious ideal by which she might be duped, deceived, and diverted from her thoughts.

It is a cruel sight to behold France bringing forth between two witches, the old negress of the middle ages, Confession, Inquisition, and the other, the young English one, with her vain and mendacious language, covering sordid interest with political fictions in which she herself does not believe.

Long had the latter been working at the ruin of France, employing the genius of France to deceive her. Three men, eminently French, were, in the course of that century, caressed and gained over by that cunning England, so haughty in attitude, but so coaxing and base as soon as ever her own interest intervenes. She clutched Voltaire by her unprincipled Bolingbroke, by a semblance of religious liberty (whilst crushing Ireland). She ensnared Mirabeau, at first very averse to her, by her Anglo-Genoese who assisted him in his idleness and often wrote for him; she had found him frightened

MONTESQUIEU'S LETTERS.

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between a deceased monarchy and an imminent republic, and offered him her spurious system as a plank in a shipwreck.

The most fatal seduction was that of Montesquieu. It would be too long to explain here how that brilliant genius (so easily caught by vanity), was followed, seized, and secured by the English, after the success of his Persian Letters; how cunning mediocrity mystified genius. Genius, as we know, is too often credulous, sympathetic, inclined to admire, and, which renders it easy to capture, usually systematical: you have only to exhibit a nation rather flattering to its systems, and it will follow more tamely than a child.

However, none can be cheated by such means but those who are already deceived beforehand, those who have in their very hearts the germ of error. I say in their hearts, because error penetrates almost always at the side where morality is weakest. Yes, it must be confessed that if that genius, so great, so noble and gentle, so eminently humane, has nevertheless exercised a fatal influence over the political morality of Europe, it is because, great as he was, he obeyed a sentiment that is anything but grand, but which leads astray all the weak-hearted : respect and admiration for success.

Wherever success appears, the vulgar behold wisdom. England was successful. Our ingenious Gascon undertook to explain English wisdom, and sought for the cause of her extraordinary success in the perfection of her government and the profound mechanism of her constitution. His ignorance assisted him. Unacquainted with either the history or the law of the country of which he spoke, he was more at his ease in placing there the system with which he amused his mind. Xenophon laid the scene of his reveries among the Persians, Plato in Egypt and Atlantis. Thus England became the Atlantis of Montesquieu. England's greatness proceeded from three things which he seems to have little understood. In this place, I can do no more than indicate them.

1. The principal author and creator of that great power in the seventeenth century was France herself, I mean the imbecility of Catholic France, the confessors of Louis XIV., who urged him against Holland, his natural ally, thus casting Holland into the arms of England, and thereby giving to the latter the dominion of the seas.

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ENGLAND AN ARISTOCRACY.

2. England, the faithful guardian of the barbarous laws of the middle ages, of feudal iniquity (hereditary birth-rights, &c.), had to choose between two things,-to become just, or to find a way of getting rid of the victims of injustice. She adopted the latter course, and has periodically cast her children into the ocean. She was able to support this cancer of iniquity which is consuming her, only by means of these periodical purgations. Hence the incessant need of emigrations, those colonies from age to age.

3. After England's sublime hour, that of the Invincible Armada and Shakspeare, that time when English genius soared like a great sea-eagle, that genius descended lower and lower, tended to applications, became more and more practical, minutely precise, special and specifying. An overwhelming aristocracy, keeping it in degradation, has made it a workman, an artist. She has thus created, without prejudice to her outward colonies, a sort of interior colony, an England in England, and one so enormous and prodigious that it may one day sink the island and bury it in the ocean.

English greatness, riches at least and an industrial development, have their principal origin in this genius of precision, application, and specification. England has always gained in this sense; but, on the other hand, for extent and profundity, for the faculties of high generalisation, in matters of art and philosophy, nobody certainly can say that she has improved since Shakspeare.

As for her very complicated constitution, about which so much noise has been made, it may nevertheless be reduced to one word. The first power is aristocracy, the second aristocracy, and the third aristocracy. This aristocracy goes on incessantly recruiting its body with all those who grow rich. "To be rich in order to be noble," is the absorbing thought of the Englishman. Property, specially territorial and feudal, is the religion of the country.

English institutions are, almost all, local, special, insular, and impossible to export. Never had the English imagined that anybody would be so mad as to borrow from their island, laws that are so entirely its own. But here is a Frenchman who undertakes to prove that all this Gothic chaos of customs and heaps of precedents, often contradictory, and which puzzle

their most learned practitioners,that this chaos is order itself, that it is the eternal model exhibited to mankind. Nay more, with the power of his imagination, he sees and recognises in it an image of the celestial system, equilibrium, gravitation, &c. Before your Newton had discovered the heavenly system, said he to them, it existed in your laws. . .

"What is the law? a relation. And this relation varies according to climate. The happy relation of equilibrium, the balance of powers, is the true political basis, on which every society is grounded.”*

What a subject of astonishment it would have been for the great juris-consults, those pontiffs of the Stoic law, to hear all this language of physics and mechanics,-equilibrium, poise, counter-poise, and gravitation!

Oh! it was not for such a material and materialist law, that Papinian gave the tyrant the sublime answer which caused his martyrdom. It was not for such a law that our great Dumoulin braved the poniard, and was four times on the point of being assassinated. Neither did politicians, such as Barnevelt and De Witt, when they chanted in torture Justum et tenacem, imagine that right was a physical matter; they believed in the right of the mind.

However, we must not lay the whole blame of this abasement of law on M. de Montesquieu. As early as the seventeenth century, a false Jesuitical spiritualism had turned the minds of men towards the sphere in which liberty was then bursting forth, the material sciences, transfigured by Galileo. Politics, yielding to their ascendancy, had gradually assumed their language. Descartes contributed to this by the popularity of his works, even by his romances of physics; and Newton came with his glory and immense authority, with Voltaire for his translator! Then equilibrium, gravitation, appeared to be the universal law of the world, both moral and physical.

People forgot that law is, so to speak, the contrary of physics. The latter balances powers and seeks the equilibrium

*Note, that this idea of law, however low it may be, was a remarkable progress over the entirely English theory of Hobbes and Locke, who see the just only in the useful. Besides the English seize and immediately profit by Montesquieu's idea. His book appeared in 1748, and in 1753 they open with great ostentation the Commentaries of Blackstone, his imitator and commentator

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of forces.

BALANCE OF POWER.

But the very essence of law is to hold the weak and the strong in equal consideration, to put the small and impotent in the balance and judge that they weigh just as much as the powerful.

This is the sublime faculty of law, by which it despises nature, and places the heavens themselves under foot! . . Avaunt physics! Avaunt mechanics! This is holy ground! Remain without. This is a world absurd and unintelligible to you, in which judgment is given, in contempt of all your mathematics, that the less is equal to or surpasses the greater, and that the weaker party is the stronger.

Lay aside, then, your pretensions to reduce morality to physics; away with your mechanical politics which place right in the balance of powers.

Right is right, and good is good; no other definition is necessary; for every human heart will understand. Such was the starting-point of our masters, the great Stoics who grounded Roman jurisprudence on this basis. Such, likewise, is the result of true philosophy, of Rousseau and Kant, those great revolutionists, and such the primary creed of our Revolution.

What did this famous equilibrium effect, when put in practice?

If the balance of powers really existed, as Bentham and others have very properly remarked, it would end merely in complete immobility. It would be nothing more than the maintenance of the statu quo. Would this be a maintenance of order? Not always. It is possible for the statu quo to be the immobility of disorder and render it permanent.

The social statu quo, surrounded in England with fine guarantees, which, by the by, entertaining man's dignity, did but consecrate for every body his actual right; to these the right of having everything, to those the right of starving. There was one thing to remedy this, of which we have spoken, the custom of throwing a part of the population into the sea.

The statu quo had been eagerly desired in Europe, after the sanguinary horrors of the wars of religion. The world unable any longer to move in its exhausted state, allowed itself to be persuaded that the balance of interests would be sufficient for order, right being altogether left out of the