Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke

DIPLOMACY OF HUMILIATION.

It happens frequently that pride may reject a public advance, while interest listens to a secret suggestion of advantage. The opportunity has been afforded. At a very early period in the diplomacy of humiliation, a gentleman was sent on an errand, of which, from the motive of it, whatever the event might be, we can never be ashamed. Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation. It is its very character to submit to such things. There is a consanguinity between benevolence and humility. They are virtues of the same stock. Dignity is of as good a race; but it belongs to the family of fortitude. In the spirit of that benevolence we sent a gentleman to beseech the Directory of regicide not to be quite so prodigal as their republic had been of judicial murder. We solicited them to spare the lives of some unhappy persons of the first distinction, whose safety at other times could not have been an object of solicitation. They had quitted France on the faith of the declaration of the rights of citizens. They never had been in the service of the regicides, nor at their hands had received any stipend. The very system and constitution of government that now prevails was settled subsequently to their emigration. They were under the protection of Great Britain, and in his majesty's pay and service. Not an hostile invasion, but the disasters of the sea, had thrown them upon a shore more barbarous and inhospitable than the inclement ocean under the most pitiless of its storms. Here was an opportunity to express a feeling for the miseries of war; and to open some sort of conversation, which (after our public overtures had glutted their pride), at a cautious and jealous distance, might lead to something like an accommodation. What was the event? A strange uncouth thing, a theatrical figure of the opera, his head shaded with three-coloured plumes, his body fantastically habited, strutted from the back scenes, and, after a short speech, in the mock heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered the gentleman who came to make the representation into the custody of a guard, with directions not Paris in two hours.