For the fate of the miscreant parricides
themselves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of men,
of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in
prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave
no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. We
are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.
Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold his
kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of Holland, whose blood,
prodigally poured out, had, more than all the canals, meres, and
inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold
them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human
race,--in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity
or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to
whose sceptred pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that
surmounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of
Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?
Could he with patience bear that the children of that nobility who would
have deluged their country and given it to the sea rather than submit to
Louis the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory, when his arms
were conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers,
when his councils were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when
his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the D'Aguesseaus,--that
these should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the
Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas,
and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons,
and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges,
that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have poured
out innumerable swarms of the lowest and at once the most destructive of
the classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laid
waste the fairest part of the world?
Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous patricians, that
happy union of the noble and the burgher, who with signal prudence and
integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the
cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to
themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their
protection? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totally
destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy
founded on the spurious rights of man?
He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests
of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country of
Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest
repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant
flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with
his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and
turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his
insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.
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