Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/60

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to be converted into an insidious ground of renewed war for other purposes, if this offensive and unmanly imposture is to be avowed and practised upon us in the face of day, then we know what will be the duty of Parliament and of the country. The wars, in which the Governments of Europe have been engaged, have not succeeded the worse when the people took an effective share in them. We should hope that the interference of the people will not be necessary to effect the restoration of peace.

It is curious to hear these systematic opponents of peace, (with infuriate and insensate looks scattering firebrands and death,) at the same time affecting the most tender concern for the miseries of war; or like that good-natured reconciler of differences, Iago, hypocritically shifting the blame from themselves—"What, stab men in the dark!" They ask with grave faces, with very grave faces, "Who are the authors, the propagators, and practisers of this dreadful war system? who the aggressors? who the unrelenting persecutors of peace?" War is their everlasting cry, "one note day and night;" during war, during peace, during negociation, in success, in adversity; and yet they dare to tax others as the sole authors of the calamities which they would render eternal, sooner than abate one jot of their rancorous prejudices. One of these writers (the Editor of The Times) asserts with an air of great confidence, while he himself is hallooing as loud as he can among the indefatigable war-pack, that Bonaparte is the cause, the sole author of all the calamities of Europe for the last fourteen years; and what is remarkable, he brings as a proof of this sweeping assertion, a state paper, written under the Pitt Administration of pacific memory, deprecating all conciliation with the French at the very period from which the writer dates the wanton, unprovoked aggressions of Bonaparte, and which paper he quotes at length, as an admirable description of the mode by which we are to avert the calamities of Europe for the next fourteen years, as we have done for the last. Better late than never. So industrious an inquirer need not despair of effectually averting our future miseries, and pacifying the world,