I am authorized to say for Mr. Burke, that he considers that cause
assigned for the outrage offered to him as ten times worse than the
outrage itself. There is such a strange confusion of ideas on this
subject, that it is far more difficult to understand the nature of the
charge than to refute it when understood. Mr. Fox's friends were, it
seems, seized with a sudden panic terror lest he should pass for a
republican. I do not think they had any ground for this apprehension.
But let us admit they had. What was there in the Quebec Bill, rather
than in any other, which could subject him or them to that imputation?
Nothing in a discussion of the French Constitutions which might arise on
the Quebec Bill, could tend to make Mr. Fox pass for a republican,
except he should take occasion to extol that state of things in France
which affects to be a republic or a confederacy of republics. If such an
encomium could make any unfavorable impression on the king's mind,
surely his voluntary panegyrics on that event, not so much introduced as
intruded into other debates, with which they had little relation, must
have produced that effect with much more certainty and much greater
force.
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