Burke was the man who might have been expected before all others to know that in every system of government, whatever may have been the crimes of its origin, there is sure, by the bare necessity of things, to rise up a party or an individual, whom their political instinct will force into resistance to the fatalities of anarchy.  Man is too strongly a political animal for it to be otherwise.  It was so at each period and division in the Revolution.  There was always a party of order, and by 1795, when Burke penned these reckless philippics, order was only too easy in France.  The Revolution had worn out the passion and moral enthusiasm of its first years, and all the best men of the revolutionary time had been consumed in a flame of fire.  When Burke talked about this war being wholly unlike any war that ever was waged in Europe before, about its being a war for justice on the one side, and a fanatical bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes to the plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk to the moral level of Frederick and Catherine, or for that matter, of Louis the Fourteenth himself.  This war was only too like the other great wars of European history.  The French Government had become political, exactly in the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herzberg were political.  The French Republic in 1797 was neither more nor less aggressive, immoral, piratical, than the monarchies which had partitioned Poland, and had intended to redistribute the continent of Europe to suit their own ambitions.  The Coalition began the game, but France proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of their game.  Jacobinism may have inspired the original fire which made her armies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp had now gone out of fashion, and to denounce a peace with the Directory because the origin of their government was regicidal, was as childish as it would have been in Mazarin to decline a treaty of regicide peace with the Lord Protector.

What makes the Regicide Peace so repulsive is not that it recommends energetic prosecution of the war, and not that it abounds in glaring fallacies in detail, but that it is in direct contradiction with that strong, positive, rational, and sane method which had before uniformly marked Burke’s political philosophy.  Here lay his inconsistency, not in abandoning democratic principles, for he had never held them, but in forgetting his own rules that nations act from adequate motives relative to their interests, and not from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that there is a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extinguishes in the minds of a civilised people.  “Steady independent minds,” he had once said, “when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers.”  Show the thing that you ask for, he cried during the American