There is no medium; and I do not think Mr.
Fox to be so dull as not to observe this. His peace would have involved
us instantly in the most extensive and most ruinous wars, at the same
time that it would have made a broad highway (across which no human
wisdom could put an effectual barrier) for a mutual intercourse with the
fraternizing Jacobins on both sides, the consequences of which those
will certainly not provide against who do not dread or dislike them.
34. It is not amiss in this place to enter a little more fully into the
spirit of the principal arguments on which Mr. Fox thought proper to
rest this his grand and concluding motion, particularly such as were
drawn from the internal state of our affairs. Under a specious
appearance, (not uncommonly put on by men of unscrupulous ambition,)
that of tenderness and compassion to the poor, he did his best to appeal
to the judgments of the meanest and most ignorant of the people on the
merits of the war. He had before done something of the same dangerous
kind in his printed letter. The ground of a political war is of all
things that which the poor laborer and manufacturer are the least
capable of conceiving. This sort of people know in general that they
must suffer by war. It is a matter to which they are sufficiently
competent, because it is a matter of feeling. The _causes_ of a war are
not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote
considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances which
_they_ are utterly incapable of comprehending: and, indeed, it is not
every man in the highest classes who is altogether equal to it.
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