MR. BURKE'S THREE LETTERS ADDRESSED TO A MEMBER OF THE PRESENT PARLIAMENT, ON THE PROPOSALS FOR PEACE WITH THE REGICIDE DIRECTORY OF FRANCE, 1796. LETTER I. ON THE OVERTURES OF PEACE. MY DEAR SIR, UR last conversation, though not in the tone of abfolute despondency, was far from chearful. We could not eafily account for fome unpleafant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The difaftrous events, which have followed one upon another in a long unbroken funereal train, moving in a proceffion, that seemed to have no end, these were not the principal caufes of our dejection. We feared more from what threatened to fail within, than what menaced to opprefs us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud and great, and great because they were proud, a change in the national fpirit is the moft terrible of all revolutions. I fhall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot, which faddens and perplexes the awful awful drama of Providence, now acting on the moral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am at the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of its orbit the nation, with which we are carried along, moves at this inftant, it is not eafy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advanced in its aphelion.— But when to return? Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, our business is with what is likely to be affected for the better or the worse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon men and human affairs, it is of no fmall moment to distinguish things of accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered. It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation from our courfe. I am not quite of the mind of those speculators, who feem affured, that neceffarily, and by the constitution of things, all ftates have the fame periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude, that are found in the individuals who compofe them. Pa rallels of this fort rather furnish fimilitudes to illuftrate or to adorn, than fupply analogies froni whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to be forced into an analogy are not found in the fame claffes of exiftence. Individuals are phyfical beings, fubject to laws univerfal and invariable. The immediate caufe acting in thefe laws may be ob fcure: any fcure: the general refults are fubjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths are not physical but moral effences. They are artificial combinations; and in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws which neceffarily influence the ftability of that kind of work made by that kind of agent. There is not in the physical order (with which they do not appear to hold any affignable connexion) a diftinct caufe by which of thofe fabricks muft neceffarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, in my opinion, does the moral world produce any thing more determinate on that fubject, than what may ferve as an amufement, (liberal indeed, and ingenious, but ftill only an amusement) for speculative men. I doubt whether the hiftory of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be fo, to furnish grounds for a fure theory on the internal caufes which neceffarily affect the fortune of a State. I am far from denying the operation of fuch causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obfcure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign caufes that tend to raife, to deprefs, and fometimes to overwhelm a community. It is often impoffible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral caufes we may affign and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that |