revenge and not a slaughter planned like the crimes of the Revolution in national panic. Life was held in scant respect under the old régime. Few things could be more savage than the spirit of the old laws of France. A picturesque illustration of their brutality is given by Mr. Morley in his book on Voltaire.1 In 1762 Morellet published a selection of the most cruel and revolting portions of the procedure of the Holy Office, drawn from the Directorium Inquisitorium of Eymeric, a grand Inquisitor of the fourteenth century. "Malesherbes in giving Morellet the requisite permission to print his Manual had amazed his friend by telling him, that though he might suppose he was giving to the world a collection of extraordinary facts and unheard of processes, yet in truth the jurisprudence of Eymeric and his inquisition was, as nearly as possible, identical with the criminal jurisprudence of France at that very moment." Many who wept over the Church because her possessions were seized, and her priests driven from their homes, forgot her own iron and inexorable cruelty in the heyday of her strength and her prosperity. In a society where men and women were sent to the stake, or to the wheel, or to torture for speaking against the Virgin Mary, it was not strange that a populace beside itself with suspicion, panic, and unruly dominion thought the life of man of little account and the forms of justice not very precious. Men were pitiless; they were grown up under a pitiless law. Their terror and revenges were cruel and savage, but they had at least an august example in a Church fearful for her privilege and unforgiving to her adversaries, who had seemed to have forgotten for all time her sublime message of mercy to mankind. The crimes of the Revolution will never be judged too lightly; Fox never excused them, but he saw it was unjust to attribute to the \seven devils of democracy vices and wickedness which were far older than the Revolution. It is indeed the truest, and in one sense the bitterest condemnation of the crimes of

1 Voltaire, p. 228.

the Revolution whether at home or abroad, that they were not new but the crimes of old France. Fox saw this truth, which escaped Burke; he divined also the intimate relation which existed between the excesses and the dread of invasion. It is now known that the success or the failure, of the invaders was followed almost automatically by the tightening or the relaxation of the spirit of slaughter at home. Revenge itself has something of the gentle touch of mercy by the side of panic, and it was panic_more than anything else which splashed Paris with the blood of her children.

It was a true instinct that kept Fox amidst all these` horrors unalterably attached to the cause of the Revolution. Let us remember how its first acts must have struck him. He saw a great assembly of men drawn from all parts of France calling for religious toleration, demanding that no man should be arrested except in cases provided for by law, asserting that the free communication of ideas and of opinions was one of the most precious of the rights of men, abolishing a cruel criminal procedure, destroying the system under which judges bought their office from the king, and declaring that the nation itself was sovereign. He saw, in a word, the downfall of feudalism. We can understand with what rapture of hope and confidence Fox, who had fought so many losing battles for freedom, watched what seemed the spontaneous triumph of Liberalism and Humanity in the very citadel of despotism. It was no difficult matter to satirise all these professions, when the hour of violence and slaughter came. Toleration when men must accept a dictatorship or go to the guillotine, no more arbitrary punishment and the spectre of the Revolutionary Tribunal perpetually darkening Paris, the free commerce of ideas and no persuasion but the bloody will of the sansculotte!

1 Cf. Speeches, vol. v. p. 157. "Those who were concerned in framing the infamous manifestoes of the Duke of Brunswick, those who negotiated the treaty of Pilnitz, the impartial voice of posterity will pronounce to have been the principal authors of all those enormities which have afflicted humanity, and desolated Europe."

It is easy to laugh over the patriots and philosophers discussing the metaphysics of revolution, and the rights of man, with the red-handed mob of Paris at their doors, and revolutions they never dreamt of rumbling over France. Yet we who can judge of these things from afar know that Fox was right when he stubbornly believed the collapse of the old system to have been the greatest thing that had happened in the world. Bloodshed and violence, murder and sudden death did not make up the Revolution, they divided but did not distinguish the new from the old, and the final triumph of the new order meant that the rights of nations conquered the rights of kings, and that the unnoticed millions of France were become the people of France. With the Revolution there came into politics a spirit of justice which inspired all the movements of the nineteenth century, and was destined to create not only a new social France but a new political Europe. The French Revolution gave morality a place in politics. Fox was right in his view that its ideas, fantastic, vapouring, and trivial as their expression often seemed, outweighed the curses its excesses brought on humanity. The cataclysm which produced the September massacres produced also the Code Napoléon. Those ideas were enduring things, and not the transient apparitions of a mad philosophy.

Even the Paris that massacred, and rioted, and wrote its own shame in blood and injustice with a mad defiance, for all Europe to see, that bowed its head for tyrants from Robespierre to Napoleon, groaned and slew and died beneath the gleam of the dawn. We can see this because we are not blinded by the violence which was nature's retribution on grey-headed failure. Fox saw it in the midst of all the bloodstained shapes the Revolution bore. He knew that the cause of the Revolution was the cause of human liberty, that it was the cause of the French nation, and that there was at any rate one method by which the spirit of that Revolution could not be exorcised or crushed, the method of proscription and a conspiracy of kings.

CHAPTER X

FOX'S POLICY IN 1792

Fox's earlier view of France. His anti-Bourbon sentiment. How far justified? The Revolution transforms the diplomatic arrangements of Europe. Fox's view of the Coalition. The questions at issue between France and England in 1792–93. Pitt's relations with Chauvelin and Maret. Fox's relations with Chauvelin and Talleyrand. Danton's policy. Fox's opposition to the war. Pitt's illusions about its gravity.

Fox

OX'S conduct in opposing the French Commercial Treaty of 1786 and the war of 1793 has been spoken of as one of his "amazing vagaries." Such a charge argues a curious blindness to the grounds of his policy before the Revolution, and to the reasons which made him five years earlier speak of France as "the inevitable enemy." The spirit of his earlier policy may be summed up as the spirit of a peaceful Chatham. Peaceful it emphatically was. Fox hated war, and the mimicry of war; he hated war for conquest and for trade; he hated too a peremptory and domineering insolence in foreign affairs. His immortal speech on Pitt's mistake over Oczakow is perhaps the most tremendous chastisement that has ever been given to that diplomacy of which Hazlitt said that its bark is worse than its bite. No man was ever so merciless to ὕβρις. But Fox's peace was not the peace of isolation. He had all the Whig hatred of the Bute tradition and that Peace of Paris which had made his father so notorious. He held that England should play an active and a constant part in Europe in the maintenance of the "balance of

power." "By the balance of power he meant, not that every state should be kept precisely to its existing frontiers, but that no state should be allowed to become a danger to the rest." To him, as to other Whigs, there was one dynasty which appeared to aim at that supremacy. The Bourbons seemed to him the "bad sleepers" of Europe. He saw their handiwork whenever troubles arose, and he thought the vigilance of their ambition must be encountered by a diplomacy as constant, and as vigilant. This view made him as anxious as Chatham had been for a Russian alliance, it made him indignant that a French attack had been invited by the policy which distracted our energies and spent our resources in the American quarrel, it made him support strongly Pitt's action in Holland in 1789, and oppose as strongly Pitt's Commercial Treaty in 1786. France, he argued, was our inevitable enemy; for behind every Cabinet at Versailles there were the master forces of Bourbon ambition.

That Fox carried this view to an extreme point in his opposition to the Commercial Treaty, and that Pitt and Shelburne formed a more enlightened judgment, may readily be admitted. But his view of the French system of foreign policy was not unreasonable. The two great French Ministers under the Bourbon régime in Fox's lifetime were Choiseul (1763-1770) and Vergennes. Choiseul's whole aim had been to strengthen France for a war with England, which he regarded as certain, and with that object to build up within the Austro-French alliance a combination of Bourbon powers. The renewal of the family compact was a concrete example of his policy. Vergennes, who became foreign minister in 1774 risked and finally ruined the finances of his country in opposition to Turgot's advice, because the American War gave a favourable opportunity of attacking England. These things and, in particular, the disingenuous conduct Vergennes had practised towards England were still fresh in the minds of English politicians when Vergennes reversed his policy with the idea of forming an Anglo-French opposition