LETTER III. ON THE RUPTURE of the NEGOTIATION; THE TERMS OF PEACE PROPOSED; AND THE RESOURCES OF THE COUNTRY FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF THE WAR. MY DEAR SIR, I THANK you for the bundle of state papers, which I received yesterday. I have traveled through the negotiation; and a sad, founderous road it is. There is a sort of standing jest against my countrymen, that one of them on his journey having found a piece of pleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again. This proposal, with regard to the worthy traveler's final destination, was certainly a blunder. It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction, for the way was pleasant. In the irksome journey of the regicide negotiations, it is otherwise: our "paths are not paths of pleasantness, nor our ways the ways to peace." All our mistakes (if such they are) like those of our Hibernian traveler, are mistakes of repetition; and they will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest, as his well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see we persevere. Fatigued with our former course; too listless to explore a new one; kept in action by inertness; moving only because we have been in motion; with a sort of plodding perseverance, we resolve to measure back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track. Backward and forward; oscillation not progression; much going in a scanty space; the travels of a postilion, miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage; we have been, and we are yet to be jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stones, and the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill-kept, broken up, treacherous French causeway! The declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid before parliament, contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attempts, and all our failures; a concise but correct narrative of the painful steps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris; a clear exposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of that experiment; an honest confession of our departure from all the rules and all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudence, in the conduct of it; and to crown the whole, a fair account of the atrocious manner in which the regicide enemies had broken up what had been so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, and with all scorn driving our suppliant ambassador, out of the limits of their usurpation. Even after all that I have lately seen, I was a little surprised at this exposure. A minute display of hopes formed without foundation, and of labors pursued without fruit, is a thing not very flattering to self-estination. But truth has its rights, and it will assert them. The declaration, after doing all this with a mortifying candor, concludes the whole recapitulation with an engagement still more extraordinary than all the unusual matter it contains. It says, “That his majesty, who had entered into this negotiation with good faith, who has suffered no impediment to prevent his prosecuting it with earnestness and sincerity, has now only to lament its abrupt termination, and to renew in the face of all Europe the solemn declaration, that whenever his enemies shall be disposed to enter upon the work of a general pacification in a spirit of conciliation and equity, nothing shall be wanting on his part to contribute to the accomplishment of that great object." If the disgusting detail of the accumulated insults we have received, in what we have very properly called our "solicitation," to a gang of felons and murderers, had been produced as a proof of the utter inefficacy of that mode of proceeding with that description of persons, I should have nothing at all to object to it. It might furnish matter conclusive in argument, and instructive in policy: but with all due submission to high authority, and with all decent deference to superior lights, it does not seem quite clear to a discernment no better than mine, that the premises in that piece conduct irresistibly to the conclusion. A labored display of the ill consequences which have attended an uniform course of submission of every mode of contumelious insult, with which the despotism of a proud, capricious, insulting and implacable foe has chosen to buffet our patience, does not appear, to my poor thoughts, to be properly brought forth as a preliminary to justify a resolution of persevering in the very same kind of conduct, towards the very same sort of person, and on the very same principles. We state our experience, and then we come to the manly resolution of acting in contradiction to it. All that has passed at Paris, to the moment of our being shamefully hissed off that stage, has been nothing but a more solemn representation, on the theatre of the nation, of what had been before in rehearsal at Bâsle. As it is not only confessed by us, but made a matter of charge on the enemy, that he had given us no encouragement to believe there was a change in his disposition or in his policy at any time subsequent to the period of his rejecting our first overtures, there seems to have been no assignable motive for sending Lord Malmesbury to Paris, except to expose his humbled country to the worst indignities and the first of the kind, as the declaration very truly observes, that have been known in the world of negotiation. An honest neighbor of mine is not altogether unhappy in the application of an old common story to a present occasion. It may be said of my friend, what Horace says of a neighbor of his, "garrit aniles ex re fabellas." Conversing on this strange subject, he told me a current story of a simple English country 'squire, who was persuaded by certain dilettanti of his acquaintance to see the world, and to become knowing in men and manners. Among other celebrated places, it was recommended to him to visit Constantinople. He took their advice. After various adventures, not to our purpose to dwell upon, he happily arrived at that famous city. As soon as he had a little reposed himself from his fatigue, he took a walk into the streets; but he had not gone far, before a "malignant and a turban'd Turk" had his choler roused by the careless and assured air, with which this infidel strutted about in the metropolis of true believers. In this temper, he lost no time in doing to our traveler the honors of the place. The Turk crossed over the way, and with perfect good-will gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seat of honor. To resent, or to return the compliment in Turkey, was quite out of the question. Our traveler, since he could no otherwise acknowledge this kind of favor, received it with the best grace in the world-he made one of his most ceremonious bows, and begged the kicking mussulman, "to accept his perfect assurances of high consideration." Our countryman was too wise to imitate Othello in the use of the dagger. He thought it better, as better it was, to assuage his bruised dignity with half a yard square of balmy diplomatic diachylon. In the disasters of their friends, people are seldom wanting in a laudable patience. When they are such as do not threaten to end fatally, they become even matter of pleasantry. The English fellow-travelers of our sufferer, finding him a little out of spirits, entreated him not to take so slight a business so very seriously. They told him it was the custom of the country; that every country had its customs; that the Turkish manners were a little rough; but that in the main the Turks were a good-natured people; that what would have been a deadly affront any where else, was only a little freedom there; in short, they told him to think no more of the matter, and to try his fortune in another promenade. But the 'squire, though a little clownish, had some home-bred sense. What! have I come, at all this expense and trouble, all the way to Constantinople only to be kicked? Without going beyond my own stable, my groom, for half a crown, would have kicked me to my heart's content. I don't mean to stay in Constantinople eight and forty hours, nor ever to return to this rough, good-natured people, that have their own customs. In my opinion the 'squire was in the right. He was satisfied with his first ramble and his first injuries. But reason of state and common sense are two things. If it were not for this difference, it might not appear of absolute necessity, after having received a certain quantity of buffetings by advance, that we should send a peer of the realm to the scum of the earth, to collect the debt to the last farthing; and to receive, with infinite aggravation, the same scorns which had been paid to our supplication through a commoner : But it was proper, I suppose, that the whole of our country, in all its orders, should have a share of the indignity; and, as in reason, that the higher orders should touch the larger proportion. This business was not ended, because our dignity was wounded, or because our patience was worn out with contumely and scorn. We had not disgorged one particle of the nauseous doses with which we were so liberally crammed by the mountebanks of Paris, in order to drug and diet us into perfect tameness. No; we waited, till the morbid strength of our boulimia for their physic had exhausted the well-stored dispensary of their empiricism. It is impossible to guess at the term to which our forbearance would have extended. The regicides were more fatigued with giving blows than the callous cheek of British diplomacy was hurt in receiving them. They had no way left for getting rid of this mendicant perseverance, but by sending for the beadle, and forcibly driving our embassy "of shreds and patches," with all its mumping cant, from the inhospitable door of cannibal castle "Where the gaunt mastiff, growling at the gate, |