Jacobinism may have inspired the original fire which made her armies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp had now gone out of fashion, and to denounce a peace with the Directory because the origin of their government was regicidal, was as childish as it would have been in Mazarin to decline a treaty of regicide peace with the Lord Protector.
What makes the _Regicide Peace_ so repulsive is not that it recommends energetic prosecution of the war, and not that it abounds in glaring fallacies in detail, but that it is in direct contradiction with that strong, positive, rational, and sane method which had before uniformly marked Burke's political philosophy.

Here lay his inconsistency, not in abandoning democratic principles, for he had never held them, but in forgetting his own rules that nations act from adequate motives relative to their interests, and not from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that there is a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extinguishes in the minds of a civilised people.

"Steady independent minds," he had once said, "when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as _government_ under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers." Show the thing that you ask for, he cried during the American war, to be reason, show it to be common sense.

We have a measure of the reason and common sense of Burke's attitude in the _Regicide Peace_, in the language which it inspired in Windham and others, who denounced Wilberforce for canting when he spoke of peace; who stigmatised Pitt as weak and a pander to national avarice for thinking of the cost of the war; and who actually charged the liverymen of London who petitioned for peace with open sedition.
It is a striking illustration of the versatility of Burke's moods that immediately before sitting down to write the _Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace_ he had composed one of the most lucid and accurately meditated of all of his tracts, which, short as it is, contains ideas on free trade which were only too far in advance of the opinion of his time.

In 1772 a Corn Bill had been introduced--it was passed in the following year--of which Adam Smith said that it was like the laws of Solon, not the best in itself, but the best which the situation and tendency of the times would admit.