CHAPTER IX

BURKE AND HIS PARTY—­PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION—­IRELAND—­LAST YEARS

For some months after the publication of the Reflections, Burke kept up the relations of an armed peace with his old political friends.  The impeachment went on, and in December (1790) there was a private meeting on the business connected with it, between Pitt, Burke, Fox, and Dundas, at the house of the Speaker.  It was described by one who knew, as most snug and amiable, and there seems to have been a general impression in the world at this moment that Fox might by some means be induced to join Pitt.  What troubled the slumbers of good Whigs like Gilbert Elliot, was the prospect of Fox committing himself too strongly on French affairs.  Burke himself was in the deepest dejection at the prospect; for Fox did not cease to express the most unqualified disapproval of the Reflections; he thought that, even in point of composition, it was the worst thing that Burke had ever published.  It was already feared that his friendship for Sheridan was drawing him farther away from Burke, with whom Sheridan had quarrelled, into a course of politics that would both damage his own reputation and break up the strong union of which the Duke of Portland was the nominal head.

New floods in France had not yet carried back the ship of state into raging waters.  Pitt was thinking so little of danger from that country that he had plunged into a policy of intervention in the affairs of Eastern Europe.  When writers charge Burke with breaking violently in upon Pitt’s system of peace abroad and reform at home, they overlook the fact that before Burke had begun to preach his crusade against the Jacobins, Pitt had already prepared a war with Russia.  The nation refused to follow.  They agreed with Fox that it was no concern of theirs whether or not Russia took from Turkey the country between the Boug and Dniester; they felt that British interests would be more damaged by the expenses of a war than by the acquisition by Russia of Ockzakow.  Pitt was obliged to throw up the scheme, and to extricate himself as well as he could from rash engagements with Prussia.  It was on account of his services to the cause of peace on this occasion that Catherine ordered the Russian ambassador to send her a bust of Fox in white marble, to be placed in her colonnade between Demosthenes and Cicero.  We may take it for granted that after the Revolution rose to its full height the bust of Fox accompanied that of Voltaire down to the cellar of the Hermitage.