1790 2026
This is an AI modernization of Reflections on the Revolution in France into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
This is a letter. A young Frenchman had written to Edmund Burke asking what he thought of events in Paris, and the reply ran to a book, published in London in November 1790. Burke was Irish-born and had spent thirty years in the House of Commons attacking the abuse of power. He had defended the American colonists, pressed the case for Ireland, and was in the middle of a seven-year impeachment of Warren Hastings over what the East India Company had done in Bengal. Everyone expected him to congratulate the French. The immediate provocation was a sermon preached in London to the Revolution Society by Richard Price, welcoming the Revolution, and the first stretch of the book is about that sermon and the clubs that applauded it.
When he wrote, the Revolution was a year old. Louis XVI was still king, there was no Terror, no war, no guillotine, and most educated English opinion thought the French were doing what England had done in 1688. Burke predicted that the paper money would collapse, that the confiscations would go further, that the Assembly could not control its own army, and that the thing would end when some popular general who understood the art of conciliating the soldiery drew the eyes of all men on himself and became master of the whole republic. Napoleon was twenty and took power in 1799, two years after Burke died. At the time the book was treated as the raving of a man who had lost his judgment. It cost him most of his political friendships, and it was answered immediately, by Thomas Paine in Rights of Man and by Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed two years later and is in this collection.
One word will mislead a reader who does not know what it meant. Burke's defence of prejudice is not a defence of bigotry. Prejudice for him is inherited judgment, the stock of habits and attachments a people takes for granted and cannot justify on demand, and his claim is that it holds more accumulated reason than any individual can generate in an argument. From that follows the rest: that a society is not a machine that can be taken apart and rebuilt to a drawing, and that rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
He is also, often, indefensible, and none of it has been softened here. The passage on Marie Antoinette and the ten thousand swords embarrassed his own allies. The phrase about the swinish multitude was thrown back at him for a hundred years. The jeering page about Lord George Gordon's conversion to Judaism is the ugliest thing in the book. The text is complete, with his footnotes kept in place and his long French and Latin quotations given in English beside the originals. Hobbes and Rousseau are in this collection too, and Burke is arguing with Rousseau by name.
Section One: The Letter, and the Club That Congratulated a Revolution
Section Two: Dr Price's Sermon, and Whether We Choose Our Kings
Section Three: The Right to Cashier a King for Misconduct
Section Four: The Right to Frame a Government for Ourselves
Section Five: What France Might Have Done Instead
Section Six: Who the Men of the National Assembly Actually Are
Section Seven: The Rights of Men, and What They Are Not
Section Eight: The Sixth of October, and the Age of Chivalry
Section Nine: Why I Feel Differently, and a Defence of Prejudice
Section Ten: The Church Establishment, and the Seizure of Its Property
Section Eleven: The New Constitution, and How It Was Built
Section Twelve: The Finances, and the Paper Money
Section Thirteen: What I Wish for My Own Country
Dear Sir,
You are good enough to ask me again, and with some insistence, for my thoughts on the recent proceedings in France. I will not let you imagine that I think my opinions valuable enough to want to be asked for them. They are of too little consequence for me to be very anxious either to give them or to withhold them. It was out of regard for you, and for you only, that I hesitated when you first asked to have them. In the first letter I had the honour of writing to you, which I am at last sending, I wrote neither for nor on behalf of any set of men, and I shall not do so in this one either. My errors, if I have made any, are my own. My reputation alone has to answer for them.
You will see from the long letter I have sent you that although I heartily wish France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and although I think you are bound, by any honest statecraft, to provide a permanent body for that spirit to live in and an effective instrument for it to act through, I have the misfortune to entertain grave doubts about several important points in your recent proceedings.
When you last wrote, you supposed I might be counted among those who approve of certain proceedings in France, because of the solemn public seal of approval those proceedings have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society.
I do have the honour of belonging to more than one club in which the constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution of 1688 are held in high reverence, and I count myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigour. It is because I do that I think it necessary there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how they are mixed up with people who, on the pretext of zeal for the Revolution and the constitution, too often wander from their true principles, and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit that produced the one and presides over the other. Before I go on to answer the more substantial particulars in your letter, let me give you what information I have been able to get about the two clubs that have thought fit, as bodies, to interfere in the affairs of France — first assuring you that I am not, and never have been, a member of either.
The first, which calls itself the Constitutional Society, or the Society for Constitutional Information, or something of that kind, has been going, I believe, for seven or eight years. Its purpose appears to be charitable, and so far laudable: it was intended to circulate, at the members' expense, a great many books that few other people would go to the expense of buying, and which might otherwise sit in the booksellers' hands to the great loss of a useful body of men. Whether the books so charitably circulated were ever as charitably read is more than I know. Possibly several of them have been exported to France and, like goods for which there is no demand here, may have found a market with you. I have heard a great deal of talk about the light to be drawn from books sent over from here. What improvement they may have undergone on the voyage — some liquors, they say, are the better for crossing the sea — I cannot tell; but I have never heard a man of common judgment, or with the least degree of information, say a word in praise of most of the publications that society circulates, and nobody except some of themselves has ever thought their proceedings of any serious consequence.
Your National Assembly seems to hold much the same opinion of this poor charitable club as I do. As a nation you reserved your whole stock of eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their fellows in the Constitutional Society were in fairness entitled to some share of it. Since you have singled out the Revolution Society as the great object of your national thanks and praise, you will think me excusable for making its recent conduct the subject of my remarks. The National Assembly of France has given these gentlemen importance by adopting them, and they return the favour by acting as a committee in England for spreading the principles of the National Assembly. From now on we must regard them as a kind of privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members of the diplomatic body. This is one of the revolutions that have given splendour to obscurity and distinction to merit nobody had noticed. Until very lately I do not recall ever hearing of this club. I am quite sure it never occupied a moment of my thoughts, nor, I believe, of anybody's outside their own set. I find on inquiry that on the anniversary of the Revolution of 1688 a club of Dissenters — of what denomination I do not know — have long had the custom of hearing a sermon in one of their meeting houses, and afterwards spending the day cheerfully at the tavern, as other clubs do. But I never heard that any public measure or political system, much less the merits of the constitution of a foreign nation, had ever been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivities, until, to my inexpressible surprise, I found them in a sort of public capacity, sending a congratulatory address that gave an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France.
In the club's older principles and conduct, so far at least as they were ever declared, I see nothing I could take exception to. I think it very likely that for some purpose new members may have joined them, and that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense benefits but are careful to hide the hand that distributes the dole, may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may have reason to suspect about private management, I shall state nothing as certain except what is public.
For my own part, I should be sorry to be thought concerned, directly or indirectly, in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my private and individual capacity, in theorising about what has been done, or is being done, on the public stage anywhere, ancient or modern — in the republic of Rome or the republic of Paris. But having no general apostolic mission, being the citizen of a particular state, and being bound to a considerable degree by its public will, I should think it at the least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation without the express authority of the government I live under.
I should be still more unwilling to enter into such a correspondence under anything like an ambiguous description, which to many people unfamiliar with our usages might make the address I had joined in look like the act of persons in some sort of chartered capacity, recognised by the laws of this kingdom and authorised to speak the mind of some part of it. It is because of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorised general descriptions, and of the deceit that can be practised under them — and not from mere formality — that the House of Commons would reject the most cringing petition on the most trifling subject if it came signed in the manner for which you have thrown open the folding doors of your presence chamber, ushering it into your National Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and as great a bustle of applause, as if you had been visited by the whole representative majesty of the English nation. If what this society thought fit to send out had been a piece of argument, it would have mattered little whose argument it was. It would be neither more nor less convincing for the party it came from. But this is only a vote and a resolution. It stands solely on authority, and in this case on the mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought, in my opinion, to have been attached to their document. The world would then have the means of knowing how many they are, who they are, and what their opinions may be worth, judging by their personal abilities, their knowledge, their experience, or their standing and authority in this state. To me, who am only a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and too ingenious. It has too much the air of a political stratagem, adopted in order to give, under a high-sounding name, an importance to this club's public declarations which, when the matter came to be closely inspected, they did not altogether deserve. It is a policy with very much the complexion of a fraud.
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, whoever he may be; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public life. I think I begrudge liberty to other nations as little as they do. But I cannot come forward and give praise or blame to anything concerning human actions and human affairs on a bare view of the object, stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances — which with some gentlemen count for nothing — are what in reality give every political principle its distinguishing colour and its particular effect. Circumstances are what make every civil and political scheme beneficial or harmful to mankind. Speaking abstractly, government is a good thing, and so is liberty; and yet could I in common sense have congratulated France ten years ago on her enjoyment of a government — for she had a government then — without inquiring what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation on its freedom? Am I seriously to congratulate a madman who has escaped from the protective restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty, merely because liberty in the abstract may be classed among the blessings of mankind? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broken out of prison on the recovery of his natural rights? That would be to play out all over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysical Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and for a while that is all I can possibly know about it. The wild gas has plainly broken loose. But we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence has subsided a little, until the liquid has cleared, and until we can see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. Before I venture to congratulate men publicly on a blessing, I must be tolerably sure they have really received one. Flattery corrupts the receiver and the giver alike, and adulation does the people no more good than it does kings. I should therefore hold back my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was told how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All of these are good things too, in their way; and without them liberty is not a benefit while it lasts, and is unlikely to last long. The effect of liberty on individuals is that they may do as they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations that may soon have to be turned into complaints. Prudence would say as much in the case of separate, isolated private men. But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considering people, before they declare themselves, will watch what use is made of power — and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new hands, whose principles, tempers and dispositions they have little or no experience of, and in situations where those who appear to be most active on the scene may possibly not be the real movers.
All these considerations, however, were beneath the transcendent dignity of the Revolution Society. While I remained in the country, from where I had the honour of writing to you, I had only an imperfect idea of what they had been doing. On coming to town I sent for an account of their proceedings, published by their own authority, containing a sermon by Dr Price along with letters from the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and the Archbishop of Aix and several other documents. The whole publication, with its manifest design of connecting the affairs of France with those of England by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect of that conduct on the power, credit, prosperity and tranquillity of France was becoming more evident every day. The shape of the constitution to be settled for their future government was becoming clearer. We are now in a position to make out with tolerable exactness the true nature of the thing we are being held up to imitate. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some circumstances, in others a prudence of a higher order may justify us in speaking our minds. The beginnings of confusion here in England are feeble enough at present; but in your country we have seen an infancy still more feeble growing by the minute into a strength that can heap mountains on mountains and make war on Heaven itself. Whenever the neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for being too anxious than ruined by being too confident.
Concerned chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means unconcerned for yours, I want to set out at greater length what was at first intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall still keep your affairs in view and go on addressing myself to you. Allowing myself the freedom of writing a letter, I shall throw out my thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method. I begin with the proceedings of the Revolution Society, but I shall not confine myself to them. How could I? It looks to me as though I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, and perhaps of more than Europe. Taking all the circumstances together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing thing that has yet happened in the world. In many instances the most wonderful things are brought about by the most absurd and ridiculous means, in the most ridiculous ways, and apparently by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, of every sort of crime jumbled together with every sort of folly. Watching this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily follow one another in the mind, and sometimes mix: contempt and indignation by turns, laughter and tears by turns, scorn and horror by turns.
It cannot be denied, however, that to some people this strange scene appeared in quite another light. In them it inspired nothing but exultation and rapture. They saw in what has been done in France nothing but a firm and temperate exercise of freedom, so consistent on the whole with morality and with piety as to deserve not only the secular applause of dashing Machiavellian politicians but to make it a fit subject for all the devout outpourings of sacred eloquence.
On the morning of the fourth of November last, Dr Richard Price, an eminent Nonconformist minister, preached at the Dissenting meeting house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which some good moral and religious sentiments, not badly expressed, are mixed into a sort of porridge of assorted political opinions and reflections — but the Revolution in France is the chief ingredient in the cauldron. I regard the address the Revolution Society sent to the National Assembly through Earl Stanhope as originating in the principles of that sermon, and as a corollary of them. It was proposed by the preacher of the sermon. It was passed by men who came straight from the sermon still steaming, with no censure or qualification, stated or implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen concerned should wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know how to acknowledge the one and disavow the other. They may do it. I cannot.
For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man closely connected with literary intriguers and plotting philosophers, with political theologians and theological politicians, at home and abroad. I know they set him up as a kind of oracle, because, with the best intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes — speaks as the interested party would have him speak — and chants his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs.
That sermon is in a style which I believe has not been heard in this kingdom, from any pulpit that is tolerated or encouraged in it, since 1648, when a predecessor of Dr Price, the Reverend Hugh Peters, made the vault of the king's own chapel at St James's ring with the honour and privilege of the saints, who, with the "high praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron." Few harangues from the pulpit, except in the days of your League in France or of our Solemn League and Covenant in England, have ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation than this lecture in the Old Jewry. But even supposing something like moderation were visible in this political sermon, politics and the pulpit are terms that have little in common. No sound ought to be heard in church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as the cause of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who abandon their proper character to assume one that does not belong to them are for the most part ignorant both of the character they leave and of the one they take up. Wholly unacquainted with the world they are so fond of meddling in, and inexperienced in all the affairs they pronounce on with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions politics excites. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the quarrels and animosities of mankind.
Footnote: Psalm 149.
This pulpit style, revived after being so long out of use, struck me as a novelty, and a novelty not entirely without danger. I do not charge every part of the discourse equally with that danger. The hint dropped to a noble and reverend lay divine, supposed to hold high office in one of our universities, and to other lay divines "of rank and literature", may be proper and timely, if somewhat new. If these noble Seekers should find nothing to satisfy their pious fancies in the old stock of the national Church, or in all the rich variety to be had in the well-stocked warehouses of the Dissenting congregations, Dr Price advises them to improve on Nonconformity and each set up a separate meeting house on his own particular principles. It is somewhat remarkable that this reverend divine should be so eager to have new churches set up and so perfectly indifferent about the doctrine that may be taught in them. His zeal is of a curious kind. It is not for spreading his own opinions but for spreading any opinions. It is not for the diffusion of truth but for the propagation of contradiction. Let the noble teachers only dissent; it does not matter from whom or from what. That great point once secured, it is taken for granted their religion will be rational and manly.
I doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits our calculating divine reckons up from this "great company of great preachers". It would certainly add a valuable set of unclassifiable specimens to the ample collection of known classes, genera and species that at present adorn the hortus siccus, the dried-flower album, of Dissent. A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquess, or a noble earl, or a bold baron would certainly increase and vary the amusements of this town, which is beginning to grow tired of the unchanging round of its insipid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles expected from their titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the hopes formed of them. They will not become polemical divines in the literal as well as the figurative sense, or be inclined to drill their congregations so that they may, as in former blessed times, preach their doctrines to regiments of dragoons and to corps of infantry and artillery. Such arrangements, however favourable to the cause of compulsory freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally conducive to national tranquillity. These few restrictions are, I hope, no great stretches of intolerance, no very violent exercises of despotism.
Footnote: Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr Richard Price, 3rd edition, pp. 17 and 18.
Footnote: "Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public authority ought, if they can find no worship out of the Church which they approve, to set up a separate worship for themselves; and by doing this, and giving an example of a rational and manly worship, men of weight from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world." — P. 18, Dr Price's Sermon.
But of our preacher I may say, "Utinam nugis tota illa dedisset et tempora sævitiæ" — would that he had given all those hours to trifles instead of to cruelty. Not everything in this thundering bull of his is so harmless in its tendency. His doctrines strike at our constitution in its vital parts. He tells the Revolution Society, in this political sermon, that His Majesty "is almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people." As for the kings of the world, every one of whom except this one is swept by this arch-pontiff of the rights of men into a single clause of ban and anathema — with all the fullness and more than the boldness of the papal deposing power at its twelfth-century height — and proclaimed a usurper by circles of longitude and latitude across the whole globe, it is for them to consider how they admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries who are to tell their subjects they are not lawful kings. That is their concern. Ours, as a domestic matter of some importance, is to consider seriously how solid the only principle is on which these gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be entitled to their allegiance.
This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British throne, is either nonsense, and therefore neither true nor false, or else it asserts a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional position. According to this spiritual doctor of politics, if His Majesty does not owe his crown to the choice of his people, he is no lawful king. Now nothing could be less true than that His Majesty holds the crown of this kingdom in that way. Therefore, if you follow their rule, the king of Great Britain, who most certainly does not owe his high office to any form of popular election, is in no respect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers who reign — or rather rob — all over the face of this miserable world, without any sort of right or title to their people's allegiance. The policy behind this general doctrine, so qualified, is plain enough. The propagators of this political gospel hope that their abstract principle — that a popular choice is necessary to the lawful existence of the sovereign power — will pass unnoticed while the king of Great Britain is exempted from it. Meanwhile their congregations' ears would gradually be habituated to it, as though it were a first principle admitted without dispute. For the present it would operate only as a theory, pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence and laid by for future use. Condo et compono quæ mox depromere passim: I store and stow away what I may soon bring out. By this policy, while our government is soothed with an exemption in its favour that it has no claim to, the security it has in common with all governments, so far as opinion is security, is taken away from it.
So these politicians proceed, while little notice is taken of their doctrines. But when they come to be examined on the plain meaning of their words and the direct tendency of what they teach, then the equivocations and the slippery constructions come into play. When they say the king owes his crown to the choice of his people, and is therefore the only lawful sovereign in the world, they will perhaps tell us they mean no more than that some of the king's predecessors were called to the throne by some sort of choice, and that he therefore owes his crown to the choice of his people. By this miserable subterfuge they hope to make their proposition safe by making it meaningless. They are welcome to the refuge they seek from their offence, since they take shelter in their own folly. For if you allow that interpretation, how does their idea of election differ from our idea of inheritance? And how does settling the crown on the Brunswick line, derived from James the First, make our monarchy any more legal than that of any of the neighbouring countries? At some time or other, to be sure, all the founders of dynasties were chosen by those who called them to govern. There is ground enough for the opinion that all the kingdoms of Europe were at some remote period elective, with more or fewer limits on who could be chosen. But whatever kings may have been here or elsewhere a thousand years ago, and in whatever way the ruling dynasties of England or France may have begun, the king of Great Britain is today king by a fixed rule of succession, according to the laws of his country. And while the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by him — as they are — he holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a king among them, individually or collectively, though I have no doubt they would soon set themselves up as an electoral college if things were ripe enough to give effect to their claim. His Majesty's heirs and successors, each in his time and order, will come to the crown with the same contempt for their choice with which His Majesty succeeded to the one he wears.
Whatever success their evasion may have in explaining away the gross error of fact, which supposes that His Majesty owes his crown to the choice of his people — though he does hold it with their goodwill — nothing can evade their full and explicit declaration about the principle of a right in the people to choose, which is directly maintained and tenaciously held to. All the oblique hints about election rest on this proposition and refer back to it. In case the foundation of the king's exclusive legal title should be taken for a mere flourish of flattering freedom, the political divine goes on to assert dogmatically that by the principles of the Revolution the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights, all of which, for him, make up one system and lie together in one short sentence: that we have acquired a right
Footnote: P. 34, Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr Price.
1. "To choose our own governors."
2. "To cashier them for misconduct."
3. "To frame a government for ourselves."
This new and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction alone. The body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disown it. They will resist any practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their country, made at the time of that very Revolution which is being appealed to in favour of the fictitious rights claimed by the society that abuses its name.
These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasoning about the Revolution of 1688, have another revolution — the one that happened in England about forty years before it — and the recent French Revolution so much before their eyes and in their hearts that they are constantly confusing all three together. We must separate what they confuse. We must recall their wandering fancies to the acts of the Revolution we revere, in order to discover its true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of 1688 are to be found anywhere, they are in the statute called the Declaration of Right. In that most wise, sober and considered declaration, drawn up by great lawyers and great statesmen and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts, not one word is said, and not one hint given, of a general right "to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to form a government for ourselves."
This Declaration of Right — the act of the 1st of William and Mary, session 2, chapter 2 — is the cornerstone of our constitution, reinforced, explained, improved, and settled for ever in its fundamental principles. It is called "An act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown." You will notice that these rights and this succession are declared in one body and bound indissolubly together.
A few years later a second opportunity arose for asserting a right of election to the crown. With the prospect of a total failure of issue from King William and from the princess who afterwards became Queen Anne, the settlement of the crown, and a further security for the liberties of the people, came before the legislature again. Did they this second time make any provision for legalising the crown on the spurious Revolution principles of the Old Jewry? No. They followed the principles that prevailed in the Declaration of Right, indicating with more precision who was to inherit in the Protestant line. This act too, by the same policy, incorporated our liberties and a hereditary succession in one and the same act. Instead of a right to choose our own governors, they declared that the succession in that line — the Protestant line drawn from James the First — was absolutely necessary "for the peace, quiet, and security of the realm", and that it was equally pressing on them "to maintain a certainty in the succession thereof, to which the subjects may safely have recourse for their protection." Both these acts, in which we hear the unerring, unambiguous oracles of Revolution policy, instead of countenancing the delusive fortune-teller's prediction of a "right to choose our governors", prove conclusively how utterly opposed the wisdom of the nation was to turning a case of necessity into a rule of law.
Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William, a small and temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession. But it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case and concerning an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum: a privilege does not become a precedent. If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, it was without doubt the Revolution. That it was not done then is proof that the nation held it ought never to be done at all. Nobody is so completely ignorant of our history as not to know that the majority in Parliament, of both parties, were so little inclined to anything resembling that principle that at first they were determined to place the vacant crown not on the head of the Prince of Orange but on that of his wife Mary, King James's daughter, the eldest of the children of that king, whom they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be to repeat a very trite story to recall to your memory all the circumstances that showed their accepting King William was not properly a choice. For everyone who did not wish in effect to recall King James, or to drown their country in blood, and to bring their religion, laws and liberties back into the danger they had just escaped, it was an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense the word can bear.
In the very act by which Parliament departed, for a time and in a single case, from the strict order of inheritance, in favour of a prince who, though not next, was very near in the line of succession, it is curious to see how Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the Declaration of Right, conducted himself on that delicate occasion. It is curious to see with what address this temporary break in continuity is kept out of sight, while everything in the act of necessity that could support the idea of a hereditary succession is brought forward, nursed, and made the most of by that great man and by the legislature that followed him. Leaving the dry, imperative style of an act of Parliament, he has the Lords and Commons break into a pious legislative ejaculation and declare that they consider it "as a marvellous providence, and merciful goodness of God to this nation, to preserve their said Majesties' royal persons most happily to reign over us on the throne of their ancestors, for which, from the bottom of their hearts, they return their humblest thanks and praises." The legislature plainly had in view the Act of Recognition of the first year of Queen Elizabeth, chapter 3, and that of James the First, chapter 1, both strongly declaring the inheritable nature of the crown; and in many places they follow, with nearly literal precision, the words and even the form of thanksgiving found in those old declaratory statutes.
The two Houses, in King William's act, did not thank God that they had found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their own governors, much less to make election the only lawful title to the crown. That they had been in a position to avoid even the appearance of it, as far as possible, was regarded by them as a providential escape. They threw a politic, well-worked veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights they meant to perpetuate in the improved order of succession, or that might provide a precedent for any future departure from what they had then settled for ever. Accordingly, so as not to slacken the sinews of their monarchy, and to keep close to the practice of their ancestors as it appeared in the declaratory statutes of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, in the next clause they vest, by recognition, in their Majesties all the legal prerogatives of the crown, declaring "that in them they are most fully, rightfully, and entirely invested, incorporated, united, and annexed." In the clause that follows, to prevent questions arising from any pretended titles to the crown, they declare — observing here too the traditional language along with the traditional policy of the nation, and repeating as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James — that on preserving "a certainty in the SUCCESSION thereof the unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation doth, under God, wholly depend."
Footnote: 1st Mary, session 3, chapter 1.
They knew that a doubtful title of succession would look far too much like an election, and that an election would be utterly destructive of the "unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation", which they thought considerations of some weight. To provide for these things, and so to shut out for ever the Old Jewry doctrine of "a right to choose our own governors", they follow with a clause containing the most solemn pledge, taken from the earlier act of Queen Elizabeth — as solemn a pledge as ever was or can be given in favour of a hereditary succession, and as solemn a renunciation as could be made of the principles this society imputes to them: "The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of all the people aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs, and posterities forever; and do faithfully promise that they will stand to, maintain, and defend their said Majesties, and also the limitation of the crown, herein specified and contained, to the utmost of their powers," and so on.
So far is it from being true that we acquired a right at the Revolution to elect our kings, that if we had possessed such a right before, the English nation at that moment most solemnly renounced and abdicated it, for themselves and for all their posterity for ever. These gentlemen may value themselves as much as they please on their Whig principles; but I have no wish to be thought a better Whig than Lord Somers, or to understand the principles of the Revolution better than the men who brought it about, or to read into the Declaration of Right mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating style engraved the words and the spirit of that immortal law on our statute book and on our hearts.
It is true that, aided by the powers that came from force and opportunity, the nation was at that time in some sense free to take whatever course it pleased for filling the throne — but only free to do so on the same grounds on which it might have abolished the monarchy altogether, and every other part of its constitution. They did not, however, think such bold changes within their commission. It is indeed difficult, perhaps impossible, to set limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power, such as Parliament exercised at that time. But the limits of a moral competence, which subjects even the most indisputably sovereign powers, and subjects momentary will to permanent reason and to the steady maxims of faith, justice and settled fundamental policy, are perfectly intelligible and perfectly binding on everyone who exercises any authority in the state, under any name or any title. The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons — nor even to dissolve itself, nor to give up, if it wished to, its share in the legislature of the kingdom. A king may abdicate for his own person, but he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong a reason, or a stronger, the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such an invasion and such a surrender. The constituent parts of a state are as much obliged to keep public faith with one another, and with everyone who has any serious interest depending on their engagements, as the whole state is bound to keep faith with separate communities. Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law would be left but the will of whatever force prevailed. On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, a hereditary succession by law: in the old line a succession by common law, in the new by statute law operating on the principles of the common law, not changing the substance but regulating the manner and naming the persons. Both kinds of law have the same force and are derived from an equal authority, flowing from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione reipublicæ, and as such are equally binding on king and people alike, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the same body politic.
It is far from impossible, if we do not let ourselves be tangled in the mazes of metaphysical sophistry, to reconcile the use of a fixed rule with an occasional deviation from it — the sacredness of a hereditary principle of succession in our government with a power of changing its application in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity, if we take the measure of our rights from the way we exercised them at the Revolution, the change is to be confined to the diseased part only, to the part that made the deviation necessary; and even then it is to be done without decomposing the whole civil and political mass in order to originate a new civil order out of the first elements of society.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk losing the very part of the constitution it most religiously wished to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and the Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those moments the nation had lost the binding element in its ancient building; and yet it did not pull the whole fabric down. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the defective part of the old constitution through the parts that were not damaged. They kept the old parts exactly as they were, so that the recovered part could be fitted to them. They acted through the ancient organised estates in the shape of their old organisation, and not through the loose moleculæ of a disbanded people. Perhaps at no time did the sovereign legislature show a more tender regard for that fundamental principle of British constitutional policy than at the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried a little way out of the line it had moved in before; but the new line was drawn from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent, still a hereditary descent in the same blood, though a hereditary descent qualified by Protestantism. In altering the direction while keeping the principle, the legislature showed that it held the principle inviolable.
On this principle the law of inheritance had been amended before, in the old days and long before the era of the Revolution. Some time after the Conquest great questions arose about the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became doubtful whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when heirship per stirpes took effect, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a kind of immortality through all its transmigrations —
Multosque per annos Stat fortuna domûs, et avi numerantur avorum.
This is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, and however he came in, whether he got the crown by law or by force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.
The gentlemen of the Society for Revolutions see nothing in the Revolution of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution, and they take the deviation from the principle for the principle itself. They pay little attention to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they might notice that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country. Once such an indefensible maxim is established — that no throne is lawful but an elective one — not one act of the princes who reigned before this era of fictitious election can be valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate certain of their predecessors, who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and disqualify, retrospectively, every king who reigned before the Revolution, and so to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to invalidate, annul or call into question, along with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of statute law that was passed under the men they treat as usurpers? To annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties, of at least as great value as any that have been passed at or since the Revolution? If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what becomes of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? Of the Petition of Right? Of the Habeas Corpus Act? Do these new doctors of the rights of men presume to assert that King James the Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, by the rules of a then unqualified succession, was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of England before he had done any of the acts that were justly construed as an abdication of his crown? If he was not, a great deal of trouble in Parliament might have been saved at the very period these gentlemen commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, not a usurper. The princes who succeeded under the act of Parliament that settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and her Protestant descendants came in as much by a title of inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law as it stood at his accession, and the princes of the House of Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown not by election but by the law as it stood at their several accessions, by Protestant descent and inheritance, as I hope I have sufficiently shown.
The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. Its terms bind "us, and our heirs, and our posterity, to them, their heirs, and their posterity", being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words in which the Declaration of Right bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both a hereditary crown and a hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of building an establishment that would secure the kind of succession which shuts out a choice of the people for ever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice our own country offered them, and searched in foreign lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of our future rulers was to derive its title to govern millions of men through a series of ages?
The Princess Sophia was named in the Act of Settlement of the 12th and 13th of King William as a stock and root of inheritance for our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administrator of a power she might never exercise, and in fact never did. She was adopted for one reason and one only: because, says the act, "the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and is hereby declared to be the next in succession in the Protestant line", and so on; "and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being Protestants." Parliament made this limitation so that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line would not only be continued in future, but — what they thought very material — would be connected through her with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First, so that the monarchy might keep an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved, with safety to our religion, in the old approved way of descent, in which, if our liberties had once been endangered, they had often been preserved through all the storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege. They did well. No experience has taught us that our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and kept as sacred as our hereditary right by any course or method other than a hereditary crown. An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution. Was it that the legislature, in the act limiting the crown to the Hanoverian line drawn through the female descendants of James the First, lacked a due sense of the inconveniences of having two or three, or possibly more, foreigners in succession to the British throne? No. They had a due sense of the evils that might come from such foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them. But no more decisive proof could be given of the full conviction of the British nation that the principles of the Revolution did not authorise them to elect kings at their pleasure, without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our government, than that they went on adopting a plan of hereditary Protestant succession in the old line with all the dangers and inconveniences of a foreign line full in their view, and pressing on their minds with the utmost force.
A few years ago I should have been ashamed to burden a matter so well able to support itself with the then unnecessary support of any argument. But this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed and printed. My dislike of revolutions, whose signals have so often been given from pulpits; the spirit of change that has gone abroad; the total contempt that prevails with you, and may come to prevail with us, for all ancient institutions when they are set against a present sense of convenience or the bent of a present inclination — all these considerations make it advisable, in my opinion, to call our attention back to the true principles of our own domestic laws, so that you, my French friend, may begin to know them, and that we may go on cherishing them. We ought not, on either side of the water, to let ourselves be imposed on by the counterfeit goods that certain people, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms as raw commodities of British growth, though they are wholly alien to our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back into this country manufactured in the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty.
The people of England will not ape fashions they have never tried, or go back to ones they have found mischievous on trial. They look on the legal hereditary succession of their crown as one of their rights, not one of their wrongs — as a benefit, not a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not a badge of servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, as of inestimable value, and they consider the undisturbed succession of the crown a pledge of the stability and permanence of every other member of our constitution.
Before I go any further, let me take notice of some paltry tricks that the champions of election as the only lawful title to the crown are ready to use, in order to make defending the just principles of our constitution a somewhat invidious task. These sophists substitute a fictitious cause and imaginary persons, whom they suppose you to be defending, whenever you defend the inheritable nature of the crown. It is common with them to argue as if they were in conflict with some of those exploded fanatics of slavery who used to maintain — what I believe no creature maintains now — "that the crown is held by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right". Those old fanatics of single arbitrary power laid it down as dogma that hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts did indeed speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other form of government, and as if a right to govern by inheritance were strictly indefeasible in every person found in the succession to a throne, and in every circumstance — which no civil or political right can be. But an absurd opinion about the king's hereditary right to the crown does not damage a rational one, founded on solid principles of law and policy. If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to spoil the subjects they deal with, we should have no law and no religion left in the world. But an absurd theory on one side of a question is no justification for alleging a false fact, or promulgating mischievous maxims, on the other.
The second claim of the Revolution Society is "a right of cashiering their governors for misconduct". Perhaps our ancestors' fear of setting a precedent for "cashiering for misconduct" is why the declaration of the act that implied King James's abdication was, if it had any fault, rather too guarded and too circumstantial. But all this guarding, and all this piling up of circumstances, serves to show the spirit of caution that prevailed in the national councils at a moment when men irritated by oppression, and elated by a triumph over it, are apt to give themselves up to violent and extreme courses. It shows how anxious the great men who directed affairs at that great event were to make the Revolution the parent of a settlement and not the nursery of future revolutions.
Footnote: "That King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the Constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant."
No government could stand for a moment if it could be blown down by anything as loose and indefinite as an opinion of "misconduct". The men who led at the Revolution grounded their virtual abdication of King James on no such light and uncertain principle. They charged him with nothing less than a design, confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt acts, to subvert the Protestant Church and State and their fundamental, unquestionable laws and liberties; they charged him with having broken the original contract between king and people. This was more than misconduct. A grave and overruling necessity obliged them to take the step they took, and they took it with infinite reluctance, as under the most rigorous of all laws. Their trust for preserving the constitution in future was not placed in future revolutions. The grand policy behind all their regulations was to make it almost impossible for any future sovereign to force the estates of the kingdom to resort to those violent remedies again. They left the crown what in the eye and estimation of law it had always been: perfectly irresponsible. And in order to lighten the crown still further, they loaded responsibility onto ministers of state. By the statute of the 1st of King William, session 2, called "the act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown", they enacted that ministers should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration. Soon afterwards they secured the frequent meetings of Parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representatives and of the great men of the kingdom. In the next great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King William, for the further limitation of the crown and for better securing the rights and liberties of the subject, they provided "that no pardon under the great seal of England should be pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons in Parliament". The rule laid down for government in the Declaration of Right, the constant inspection of Parliament, and the practical claim of impeachment they thought an infinitely better security, not only for their constitutional liberty but against the vices of an administration, than reserving a right so difficult in practice, so uncertain in its outcome, and often so mischievous in its consequences, as this "cashiering of their governors".
Dr Price in his sermon very properly condemns the practice of addressing kings in grossly flattering terms. Instead of that fulsome style, he proposes that His Majesty should be told, on occasions of congratulation, that "he is to consider himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of his people". As a compliment, this new form of address does not seem very soothing. Those who are servants in name as well as in fact do not like to be reminded of their situation, their duty and their obligations. The slave in the old play tells his master, "Hæc commemoratio est quasi exprobratio" — to be reminded of a favour is as good as to be reproached with it. It is not pleasant as a compliment; it is not wholesome as instruction. And after all, if the king were to bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in so many words, and even to take the title Servant of the People as his royal style, I cannot imagine how either he or we would be much the better for it. I have seen very high-handed letters signed "Your most obedient, humble servant". The proudest domination ever endured on earth took a title of even greater humility than the one now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and nations were trampled under the foot of a man calling himself "The Servant of Servants", and orders for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of "The Fisherman".
Footnote: Pp. 23, 23, 24.
I should have thought all this no more than a sort of flippant, empty talk, in which, as in a stale vapour, several people let the spirit of liberty evaporate — if it were not plainly in support of the idea, and part of the scheme, of "cashiering kings for misconduct". Seen in that light it deserves some remark.
Kings are undoubtedly the servants of the people in one sense, because their power has no other rational end than the general advantage. But it is not true that they are servants in the ordinary sense, at least under our constitution: the essence of a servant's position is to obey somebody else's commands and to be removable at pleasure. The king of Great Britain obeys nobody. All other persons, individually and collectively, are under him and owe him a legal obedience. The law, which knows neither how to flatter nor how to insult, calls this high magistrate not our servant, as this humble divine calls him, but "our sovereign lord the king"; and we for our part have learned to speak only the original language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian pulpits.
Since he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in him, our constitution has made no provision of any kind for making him, as a servant, responsible in any degree. Our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like the Justicia of Aragon, nor of any legally appointed court, nor of any legally settled process, for subjecting the king to the responsibility that belongs to all servants. In this he is no different from the Commons and the Lords, who in their several public capacities can never be called to account for their conduct — although the Revolution Society chooses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that "a king is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible to it".
Our ancestors at the Revolution would have deserved their fame for wisdom very ill if they had found no security for their freedom except in making their government feeble in its operation and precarious in its tenure — if they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power than civil confusion. Let these gentlemen state who this representative public is to whom they will say the king, as a servant, is responsible. It will then be time enough for me to produce the positive statute law that says he is not.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, which these gentlemen talk about so easily, can rarely if ever be performed without force. It then becomes a case of war and not of constitution. Laws are ordered to hold their tongues among weapons, and tribunals fall to the ground along with the peace they can no longer uphold. The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just: "Justa bella quibus NECESSARIA" — those wars are just which are necessary. The question of dethroning a king, or, if these gentlemen prefer the phrase, of "cashiering" him, will always be, as it always has been, an extraordinary question of state and wholly outside the law: a question, like every other question of state, of dispositions and of means and of probable consequences, rather than of positive rights. As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be debated by common minds. The theoretical line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure and not easily defined. It is not a single act or a single event that determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged indeed before it can even be thought of, and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease indicates the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer, in extremities, this critical, ambiguous, bitter medicine to a diseased state. Times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons. The wise will decide from the gravity of the case; the irritable from their sensitivity to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold from love of honourable danger in a generous cause. But with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resort of the thinking and the good.
The third head of right asserted from the pulpit of the Old Jewry — the "right to form a government for ourselves" — has at least as little support from anything done at the Revolution, in precedent or in principle, as the first two of their claims. The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. If you want to know the spirit of our constitution, and the policy that prevailed in that great period which has secured it to this hour, look for both in our histories, in our records, in our acts of Parliament and journals of Parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry and the after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the first you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill suited to our temper and our wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance of authority. The very idea of manufacturing a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. At the time of the Revolution we wished, and we still wish, to derive everything we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. On that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to graft any shoot alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reforms we have made so far have proceeded on the principle of referring back to antiquity, and I hope — indeed I am persuaded — that any that may be made hereafter will be carefully framed on precedent, authority and example by analogy.
Our oldest reformation is Magna Carta. You will find that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him down to Blackstone, are industrious in proving the pedigree of our liberties. They set out to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna Carta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry the First, and that both were nothing more than a re-affirmation of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. As a matter of fact these authors appear to be right for the most part, though perhaps not always. But if the lawyers are mistaken in some particulars, that proves my point all the more strongly, because it shows the powerful predisposition towards antiquity with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and of all the people they wish to influence, have always been filled, and the settled policy of this kingdom in regarding its most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance.
Footnote: See Blackstone's Magna Carta, printed at Oxford, 1759.
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles the First, called the Petition of Right, Parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom" — claiming their franchises not on abstract principles, "as the rights of men", but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony handed down from their forefathers. Selden and the other profoundly learned men who drew up this Petition of Right were at least as well acquainted with all the general theories about the "rights of men" as anyone who discourses in our pulpits or on your tribune — quite as well as Dr Price, or as the Abbé Sieyès. But for reasons worthy of the practical wisdom that displaced their theoretical science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to everything that can be dear to a man and a citizen, over that vague speculative right which would have exposed their secure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild and litigious spirit.
The same policy runs through all the laws that have been made since for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary, in the famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two Houses do not utter a syllable about "a right to frame a government for themselves". You will see that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws and liberties that had long been possessed and had lately been endangered. "Taking into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being again subverted," they open all their proceedings by naming among those best means, "in the first place", to do "as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient rights and liberties, to declare"; and then they pray the king and queen "that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom."
Footnote: 1 William and Mary.
You will notice that from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance, handed down to us from our forefathers and to be handed on to our posterity — as an estate belonging specifically to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
This policy seems to me the result of profound reflection — or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the product of a selfish temper and narrow views. People who never look back to their ancestors will not look forward to their posterity either. Besides, the people of England know very well that the idea of inheritance supplies a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without in the least excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages a state gains by proceeding on these maxims are locked up fast, as in a sort of family settlement, held as in a kind of perpetual trust. By a constitutional policy that works on the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold and we transmit our government and our privileges in the same way that we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of statecraft, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence come down to us, and pass on from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body made up of transitory parts — in which, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom that moulds together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at any one moment is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied course of perpetual decay, fall, renewal and progress. So, by keeping to the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new, and in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By sticking to our forefathers in this way and on these principles, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given our frame of government the image of a relation in blood: binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, and keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected affections, our state, our hearths, our graves and our altars.
By this same plan of conforming to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other benefits, and no small ones, from regarding our liberties as an inheritance. Always acting as though in the presence of canonised forefathers, the spirit of freedom, which left to itself leads to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual inborn dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably clinging to, and disgracing, those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It has an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrious ancestors. It has its bearings and its heraldic arms. It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, its evidences and its titles. We win reverence for our civil institutions on the same principle by which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those they are descended from. All your sophists cannot produce anything better adapted to preserving a rational and manly freedom than the course we have followed, who have chosen our nature rather than our theories, our hearts rather than our inventions, as the great storehouses and magazines of our rights and privileges.
You might, if you had chosen, have profited by our example and given your recovered freedom a matching dignity. Your privileges, though they had lapsed, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, had suffered waste and dilapidation while you were out of possession of it; but you still had the walls of a noble and venerable castle in some parts, and its foundations everywhere. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected, but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as anyone could wish. In your old estates you had that variety of parts corresponding to the various descriptions of people your community was happily composed of. You had all that combination and all that opposition of interests, that action and counteraction, which in the natural world and in the political world alike draws the harmony of the universe out of the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you regarded as such a great blemish in your old constitution and in our present one, interpose a healthy check on all hasty resolutions. They make deliberation a matter not of choice but of necessity. They make every change a subject of compromise, which naturally breeds moderation. They produce temperaments that prevent the grievous evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations and make all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, whether by the few or by the many, for ever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate points of view in the several orders; while by pressing the whole down with the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been kept from warping and springing out of their allotted places.
You had all these advantages in your ancient estates, and yet you chose to act as though you had never been formed into a civil society and had everything to begin over again. You began badly, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up in trade without any capital. If the last few generations of your countrymen seemed to you to have little lustre, you might have passed them over and drawn your claims from an earlier race of ancestors. Under a pious preference for those ancestors your imagination would have made them into a standard of virtue and wisdom above the common practice of the moment, and you would have risen towards the example you aspired to imitate. In respecting your forefathers you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to regard the French as a people of yesterday, a nation of low-born, servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. You would not have been content, in order to furnish your apologists over here with an excuse for several of your enormities at the expense of your own honour, to be represented as a gang of Maroons suddenly broken loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be forgiven for abusing a liberty you were unused to and ill fitted for.
Would it not have been wiser, my worthy friend, to be thought what I for one have always thought you: a generous and gallant nation, long misled to its own disadvantage by its high and romantic feelings of fidelity, honour and loyalty; that events had gone against you, but that you were not enslaved through any mean or servile disposition; that even in your most devoted submission you were moved by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? If you had given it to be understood that in the delusion of this amiable error you had gone further than your wise ancestors, and that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges while keeping the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour — or if, distrusting yourselves and not clearly making out the almost obliterated constitution of your ancestors, you had looked across to your neighbours in this country, who have kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe, improved and adapted to its present state — then by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have made the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism off the earth by showing that freedom is not only reconcilable with law but, when it is well disciplined, an ally of it. You would have had a revenue that was productive without being oppressive. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution, a powerful monarchy, a disciplined army, a reformed and respected clergy; a nobility with its edges taken off but its spirit intact, to lead your virtue and not to smother it; a liberal order of commons to rival that nobility and to recruit it; and a protected, contented, industrious and obedient people, taught to look for and to recognise the happiness that virtue can find in every condition of life. That is where the true moral equality of mankind lies — not in that monstrous fiction which, by putting false ideas and vain expectations into the heads of men destined to travel the obscure path of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter the real inequality it can never remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those it must leave in a humble state as of those it is able to raise to a more splendid condition, though not a happier one. You had a smooth and easy career of happiness and glory laid open before you, beyond anything recorded in the history of the world; but you have shown that difficulty is good for man.
Add up your gains. See what has been got by those extravagant and presumptuous theories that taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment when they became genuinely despicable. By following those false lights France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation ever paid for the most unequivocal blessings. France has bought poverty with crime. France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest; she has abandoned her interest in order to prostitute her virtue. Every other nation has begun the building of a new government, or the reform of an old one, by establishing some rite of religion or other, or by enforcing it more exactly. Every other people has laid the foundations of civil freedom in stricter manners and a more austere and masculine system of morality. France, when she slackened the reins of royal authority, doubled the licence of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners and an insolent irreligion in opinion and practice, and has spread through every rank of life, as if she were sharing out a privilege or opening up some benefit that had been kept back, all the unhappy corruptions that used to be the diseases of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France.
France, through the treachery of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of mild counsel in the cabinets of princes and stripped it of its most powerful arguments. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannical distrust, and taught kings to tremble at what will hereafter be called the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will now regard anyone who advises them to place unlimited confidence in their people as subverters of their thrones, as traitors aiming at their destruction by leading their easy good nature, under specious pretexts, into admitting combinations of bold and faithless men to a share of their power. This alone, if there were nothing else, is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your Parliament of Paris told your king that in calling the estates together he had nothing to fear but the extravagant excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin their counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such sanguine assurances tend to lull authority to sleep, to encourage it to plunge rashly into perilous adventures of untried policy, to neglect the provisions, preparations and precautions that distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the beneficial effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage and insult than any people has ever been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most bloodthirsty tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand held out with favours, graces and immunities in it.
This was unnatural. The rest follows in order. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; courts subverted; industry without vigour; commerce dying; the revenue unpaid and yet the people impoverished; a church plundered and a state no better off for it; civil and military anarchy made into the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence. And to crown it all, the paper securities of a new, precarious, tottering power — the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared plunder — held out as a currency to support an empire, in place of the two great recognised metals that stand for the lasting conventional credit of mankind, and which vanished and hid themselves in the earth they came from as soon as the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted.
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results of a desperate struggle by determined patriots, forced to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No. Nothing of the kind. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we turn our eyes, are not the devastation of a civil war. They are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in a time of profound peace. They are the display of an authority that is inconsiderate and presumptuous because it has been unresisted and irresistible. The men who have squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes in this manner, who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils — the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of a state — met on their way with little opposition, or rather with none at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. Their pioneers went before them and demolished everything and laid it level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they shed for the country they have ruined. They have sacrificed nothing to their projects of any more consequence than their shoe buckles, while they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and plunging thousands of worthy men and worthy families into tears and poverty and distress. Their cruelty has not even been the base product of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorising treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, massacres and burnings throughout their harassed land. But the cause of it all was plain from the beginning.
This unforced choice, this fond preference for evil, would seem perfectly unaccountable if we did not consider what the National Assembly is made of — I do not mean its formal constitution, objectionable enough as that now stands, but the materials it is largely composed of, which matter ten thousand times more than all the formalities in the world. If we knew nothing of this assembly but its title and its function, no colours could paint anything more venerable to the imagination. Seen in that light, the mind of an inquirer, overawed by so solemn an image as the virtue and wisdom of a whole people gathered into one focus, would pause and hesitate before condemning things even of the very worst appearance. Instead of blameable they would seem merely mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatever can make the men who compose any system of authority anything other than God and nature and education and their habits of life have made them. The people have no capacities beyond these to give. Virtue and wisdom may be what they aim at in their choice, but their choice confers neither on the men they lay their ordaining hands upon. They have no undertaking from nature and no promise from revelation for any such powers.
After I had read through the list of the persons and descriptions elected to the Tiers État, nothing they afterwards did could seem astonishing. Among them, it is true, I saw some men of known rank and some of shining talents; but not one man of any practical experience in government was to be found. The best of them were only men of theory. But whatever the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance and mass of a body that gives it its character and must in the end determine its direction. In all bodies, those who mean to lead must also, to a considerable degree, follow. They have to fit their proposals to the taste and the talent and the disposition of the men they wish to conduct. So if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very large part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world — and which for that reason cannot be counted on — will prevent the men of talent scattered through it from becoming merely the expert instruments of absurd projects. If, as is more likely, instead of that unusual degree of virtue they are driven by sinister ambition and a lust for showy glory, then the feeble part of the assembly, which they conform to at first, becomes in its turn the dupe and the instrument of their designs. In this political trade the leaders will have to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.
To secure any degree of sobriety in the proposals made by the leaders of a public assembly, they ought to respect, and perhaps to some degree to fear, the men they are conducting. To be led in any way but blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not to be actors, at least to be judges — and judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing can secure a steady and moderate conduct in such assemblies but that the body of them should be respectably composed in point of station in life, of permanent property, of education, and of the habits that enlarge and liberalise the understanding.
In the calling of the States-General of France, the first thing that struck me was a great departure from the ancient course. I found the representation of the third estate composed of six hundred persons. They were equal in number to the representatives of both the other orders together. If the orders were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the question of expense, matter much. But once it became clear that the three orders were to be melted down into one, the policy and the necessary effect of this numerous representation became obvious. A very small desertion from either of the other two orders must throw the power of both into the hands of the third. In fact, the whole power of the state was soon resolved into that body. What it was made of therefore became infinitely more important.
Judge my surprise, Sir, when I found that a very large proportion of the Assembly — a majority, I believe, of the members who actually attended — consisted of practitioners of the law. And not of distinguished judges, who had given their country pledges of their learning, prudence and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned university professors; but for far the greater part, as with such numbers it had to be, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions, but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attorneys, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the stirrers-up and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has turned out, everything that was to follow.
The degree of esteem in which any profession is held becomes the measure of the esteem in which its members hold themselves. Whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers may have been — and in many they were undoubtedly very considerable — in that military kingdom no part of the profession had been much regarded except the very highest, who often joined great family splendour to their professional offices and were invested with great power and authority. Those were certainly highly respected, and with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not much esteemed, and the mechanical part of the profession stood in very low repute.
Whenever supreme authority is vested in a body composed like this, it must plainly produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands of men not brought up in the habit of respecting themselves, who had no previous fortune of character at stake, and who could not be expected to bear with moderation, or to manage with discretion, a power that they themselves must be more surprised than anyone to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself that these men, snatched suddenly and as if by enchantment out of the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated by a greatness they had not been prepared for? Who could imagine that men habitually meddling, daring, subtle, busy, of litigious dispositions and restless minds, would fall easily back into their old condition of obscure squabbling and laborious, low, unprofitable trickery? Who could doubt that, at any cost to a state they understood nothing about, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood only too well? This was not an event that depended on chance or contingency. It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the nature of things. They must join in — if their capacity did not allow them to lead — any project that could procure them a litigious constitution, and lay open to them the innumerable lucrative jobs that follow in the train of all great convulsions and revolutions in a state, and particularly of all great and violent transfers of property. Was it to be expected that they would attend to the stability of property, when their own livelihood had always depended on whatever made property questionable, ambiguous and insecure? Their objects would grow larger with their elevation; but their disposition, their habits and their way of accomplishing their designs must stay the same.
Well, but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other sorts of men, of soberer minds and larger understandings. Were they to be overawed, then, by the pre-eminent authority and solemn dignity of a handful of country bumpkins who have seats in that assembly, some of whom are said to be unable to read and write — and by no greater a number of tradesmen who, though somewhat better instructed and more conspicuous in the order of society, had never known anything beyond their counting house? No. Both these sorts were far better formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers than to be a counterweight to them. With so dangerous a disproportion, the whole must inevitably be governed by them.
To the faculty of law was joined a fairly considerable proportion of the faculty of medicine. That faculty had not, any more than the law, enjoyed its proper esteem in France. Its members must therefore have the qualities of men not accustomed to feelings of dignity. But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they actually do, the bedsides of the sick are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators. Then came the dealers in stocks and funds, who must be eager at any cost to change their imaginary paper wealth for the more solid substance of land. To these were joined men of other descriptions, from whom as little knowledge of or attention to the interests of a great state was to be expected, and as little regard for the stability of any institution — men formed to be instruments, not controls. Such, in general, was the composition of the Tiers État in the National Assembly, in which hardly the slightest trace was to be seen of what we call the natural landed interest of the country.
We know that the British House of Commons, without shutting its doors to merit in any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in inherited and in acquired wealth, in cultivated talent, and in military, civil, naval and political distinction, that the country can supply. But supposing — what can hardly be supposed as a case at all — that the House of Commons were composed in the same way as the Tiers État in France: would this dominion of pettifogging be borne with patience, or even imagined without horror? God forbid that I should insinuate anything derogatory to a profession that is another priesthood, administering the rites of sacred justice. But while I revere men in the functions that belong to them, and would do as much as one man can to prevent their being excluded from any, I cannot flatter them by giving the lie to nature. They are good and useful in the mixture; they must be mischievous if they preponderate so far as to become virtually the whole. Their very excellence in their own particular functions may be far from a qualification for others. It cannot escape notice that when men are too much confined to professional and technical habits, and become as it were ingrained by constant employment in that narrow circle, they are disabled rather than qualified for anything depending on a knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive and connected view of the various, complicated, external and internal interests that go to form that many-sided thing called a state.
After all, even if the House of Commons were of a wholly professional and technical composition, what is the power of the House of Commons — circumscribed and hemmed in by the immovable barriers of laws, usages and positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of Lords, and existing at every moment at the discretion of the crown to continue, prorogue or dissolve us? The power of the House of Commons, direct and indirect, is indeed great, and long may it be able to preserve its greatness and the spirit that belongs to true greatness in full. And it will do so as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from becoming the makers of law for England. But the power of the House of Commons, at its least diminished, is a drop of water in the ocean compared with the power residing in a settled majority of your National Assembly. Since the destruction of the orders, that assembly has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution, they have the power to make a constitution that will conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or on earth can serve as a check on them. What must be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions of men who are qualified — or who dare — not merely to make laws under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out an entirely new constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the monarch on the throne down to the vestry of a parish? But
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined and indefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical unfitness of the man for the function must be the greatest we can conceive happening in the management of human affairs.
Having considered the composition of the third estate as it originally stood, I looked at the representatives of the clergy. There too it appeared that quite as little regard had been paid, in the principles of their election, to the general security of property or to the fitness of the deputies for their public purposes. That election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere country curates to the great and arduous work of remodelling a state: men who had never seen the state so much as in a picture; men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure village; who, sunk in hopeless poverty, could regard all property, secular or ecclesiastical, with no eye but envy; among whom there must be many who for the smallest hope of the meanest share in the plunder would readily join any attempt on a body of wealth in which they could scarcely expect any share except in a general scramble. Instead of balancing the power of the active pettifoggers in the other assembly, these curates must necessarily become the active helpers, or at best the passive instruments, of the very men who had habitually guided them in their petty village concerns. Nor could they be the most conscientious of their kind, who, presuming on their inadequate understanding, could intrigue for a trust that took them away from their natural relation to their flocks and their natural sphere of action, to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This preponderating weight, added to the force of the body of pettifoggers in the Tiers État, completed that momentum of ignorance, rashness, presumption and lust for plunder that nothing has been able to resist.
To observant men it must have been clear from the beginning that the majority of the third estate, joined with such a deputation from the clergy as I have described, would, while it pursued the destruction of the nobility, inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order those individuals would have a sure fund to pay their new followers with. Squandering away the things that made their fellows happy would be no sacrifice to them at all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they show of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard for a dignity they share with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle — the germ, as it were — of public affection. It is the first link in the chain by which we go on to a love of our country and of mankind. The interest of that portion of the social arrangement is a trust in the hands of everyone who composes it; and as none but bad men would justify abusing it, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.
In the time of our civil troubles in England there were several people — I do not know whether you have any such in your Assembly in France — like the Earl of Holland of that day, who by themselves or their families had brought odium on the throne by its prodigal dispensation of favours to them, and who afterwards joined the rebellions that arose out of the discontents they had themselves caused: men who helped to subvert the very throne to which some of them owed their existence and others all the power they used to ruin their benefactor. If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of person, or if others are allowed to share in the objects they would monopolise, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void left in their avarice. Bewildered by the complication of their diseased passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and confused, inexplicable to others and uncertain to themselves. On every side they find their unprincipled ambition running up against limits in any fixed order of things; but in the fog and haze of confusion everything is enlarged and appears to have no limit at all.
When men of rank sacrifice every idea of dignity to an ambition with no distinct object, and work with low instruments for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this appear in France now? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious — a kind of meanness in all the prevailing policy, a tendency in everything that is done to lower, along with individuals, all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolutions have been conducted by men who, while they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by raising the dignity of the people whose peace they disturbed. They had long views. They aimed at ruling their country, not at destroying it. They were men of great civil and great military talents, and if they were the terror of their age they were also its ornament. They were not like Jew brokers contending with one another over who could best patch up, with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper, the wretchedness and ruin their degenerate counsels had brought on their country. The compliment paid to one of the great bad men of the old stamp — Cromwell — by his kinsman, a favourite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he achieved in the success of his ambition:
"Still as you rise, the state, exalted too, Finds no distemper whilst 't is changed by you; Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys."
These disturbers were not so much men usurping power as men asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to light up and beautify the world. They conquered their competitors by outshining them. The hand that smote the country like a destroying angel also communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say — God forbid — that the virtues of such men are to be set as a balance against their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects. Such, as I said, was our Cromwell. Such was your whole race of Guises, Condés and Colignys. Such were the Richelieus, who in quieter times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as better men and in a less doubtful cause, were your Henry the Fourth and your Sully, though they were nursed in civil confusions and not wholly free of their taint. It is a thing to wonder at, how very soon France, when she had a moment to breathe, recovered and emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war ever known in any nation. Why? Because among all their massacres they had not killed the mind of their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation had not been extinguished. On the contrary, it had been kindled and inflamed. The organs of the state, however battered, still existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the rewards, all the distinctions, remained. But your present confusion, like a paralysis, has struck at the fountain of life itself. Everyone in your country who is in a position to be moved by a principle of honour is disgraced and degraded, and can feel no sensation of life except a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this generation will quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artisans and clowns and money-jobbers, usurers and Jews who will always be their fellows and sometimes their masters. Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalise. In every society made up of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things: they overload the building of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The associations of tailors and carpenters that the republic — of Paris, for instance — is composed of cannot be equal to the situation into which, by the worst of usurpations, a usurpation on the prerogatives of nature, you are attempting to force them.
The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the States-General, said, in a flourish of oratory, that all occupations were honourable. If he meant only that no honest employment is disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the truth. But in asserting that anything is honourable, we imply some distinction in its favour. The occupation of a hairdresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to anyone, to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if men like them, individually or collectively, are allowed to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.
Footnote: Ecclesiasticus, chapter 38, verses 24, 25. "The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose talk is of bullocks?" Verse 27: "So every carpenter and workmaster, that laboreth night and day," etc. Verse 33: "They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor sit high in the congregation: they shall not sit on the judge's seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment: they cannot declare justice and judgment, and they shall not be found where parables are spoken." Verse 34: "But they will maintain the state of the world." I do not determine whether this book is canonical, as the Gallican Church until lately considered it, or apocryphal, as it is taken to be here. I am sure it contains a great deal of sense and truth.
I do not take you, my dear Sir, to be of that sophistical, quibbling spirit, or of that ungenerous dullness, which demands for every general observation or sentiment an explicit list of the correctives and exceptions that reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions of reasonable men. You do not imagine that I wish to confine power, authority and distinction to blood and names and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumed. Wherever they are actually found, they carry, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, Heaven's own passport to human place and honour. Woe to the country that would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it, and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to shed lustre and glory round a state. And woe to the country too that, going to the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean and narrow view of things, and a sordid, mercenary occupation a preferable title to command. Everything ought to be open — but not indifferently to every man. No rotation, no appointment by lot, no method of election operating in the spirit of drawing lots or taking turns can be generally good in a government concerned with extensive objects, because none of them has any tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to fit the one to the other. I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power from an obscure condition ought not to be made too easy, or too much a matter of course. If rare merit is the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honour ought to be set on a height. If it is entered through virtue, let it be remembered too that virtue is never tested except by some difficulty and some struggle.
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state that does not represent its ability as well as its property. But since ability is a vigorous and active principle, and property is sluggish, inert and timid, property can never be safe from the invasions of ability unless it is, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented too in great masses of accumulation, or it is not properly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of acquiring it and conserving it, is to be unequal. The great masses, therefore, which excite envy and tempt rapacity, must be put beyond the possibility of danger. They then form a natural rampart round the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property, divided among many in the natural course of things, does not work the same way. Its defensive power is weakened as it is spread out. In that diffusion each man's portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself he could get by dissipating other people's accumulations. The plunder of the few would in fact give an inconceivably small share to each in the distribution among the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation, and those who lead them to plunder never intend any such distribution.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting things about it, and the thing that most tends to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness serve our virtue; it grafts benevolence even onto avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction that goes with hereditary possession, being the most concerned in it, are the natural securities for this transmission. With us the House of Peers is formed on this principle. It is composed wholly of hereditary property and hereditary distinction, and is made for that reason the third branch of the legislature, and, in the last resort, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions. The House of Commons too, though not necessarily, is always so composed in fact for far the greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they will — and they have their chance of being among the best — at the very worst they are the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. For though hereditary wealth and the rank that goes with it are too much idolised by creeping sycophants and by the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in the shallow speculations of the petulant, presuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference — not exclusive appropriation — given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolitic.
It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True, if the constitution of a kingdom is a problem in arithmetic. This sort of talk does well enough with a lamp-post as its second; to men who may reason calmly it is ridiculous. The will of the many and their interest must very often differ, and the difference will be great when they make an evil choice. A government of five hundred country attorneys and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four million men, even if it were chosen by forty-eight million; nor is it any the better for being guided by a dozen persons of quality who have betrayed their trust in order to get that power. At present you seem to have strayed off the high road of nature in everything. The property of France does not govern it. Of course property is being destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence. All you have got for the present is a paper circulation and a stock-jobbing constitution. And as for the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, on the republican system of eighty-three independent municipalities — to say nothing of the parts they are made up of — can ever be governed as one body, or ever be set in motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its own ruin. These commonwealths will not long bear being subject to the republic of Paris. They will not bear having that one body monopolise the captivity of the king and the dominion over the assembly that calls itself national. Each will keep its own portion of the spoil of the Church for itself, and will not allow that spoil, or the juster fruits of its own industry, or the natural produce of its own soil, to be sent off to swell the insolence or pamper the luxury of the tradesmen of Paris. In that they will see none of the equality on the pretext of which they were tempted to throw off their allegiance to their sovereign, and the ancient constitution of their country with it. There can be no capital city in such a constitution as they have lately made. They have forgotten that in framing democratic governments they have virtually dismembered their country. The person they persist in calling king has not a hundredth part of the power left him that would be needed to hold this collection of republics together. The republic of Paris will indeed try to complete the corruption of the army, and to perpetuate the Assembly illegally, without any recourse to its constituents, as the means of continuing its despotism. It will make efforts, by becoming the heart of a boundless paper circulation, to draw everything to itself. But in vain. All this policy will in the end prove as feeble as it is now violent.
If this is your actual situation, compared with the situation you were called to as if by the voice of God and man, I cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on the choice you have made, or on the success that has attended your efforts. As little can I recommend to any other nation a course founded on such principles and productive of such effects. That I must leave to those who can see further into your affairs than I can, and who know best how far your actions serve their designs. The gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were so early with their congratulations, appear to be strongly of the opinion that there is some political scheme relating to this country in which your proceedings may somehow be useful. For your Dr Price, who seems to have theorised himself into no small degree of fervour on the subject, addresses his hearers in these very remarkable words: "I cannot conclude without recalling particularly to your recollection a consideration which I have more than once alluded to, and which probably your thoughts have been all along anticipating; a consideration with which my mind is impressed more than can express: I mean the consideration of the favorableness of the present times to all exertions in the cause of liberty."
It is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at the time big with some extraordinary design, and it is very likely that the thoughts of his audience, who understood him better than I do, ran ahead of him all along in his reflection and through the whole train of consequences it led to.
Before I read that sermon I really thought I lived in a free country, and it was an error I cherished, because it made me like the country I lived in the better. I was of course aware that a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty not only from invasion but from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty. But I regarded that treasure as a possession to be secured rather than a prize to be fought for. I did not see how the present time came to be so very favourable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The present time differs from any other only in the circumstance of what is being done in France. If the example of that nation is to have an influence here, I can easily see why some of their proceedings, which have an unpleasant look and are not entirely reconcilable with humanity, generosity, good faith and justice, are excused with such milky good nature towards the perpetrators and borne with such heroic fortitude on behalf of the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example you mean to follow.
But granting that, we are led to a very natural question. What is this cause of liberty, and what are these exertions in its favour, for which the example of France is so singularly encouraging? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, along with all the laws, all the courts and all the ancient chartered bodies of the kingdom? Is every landmark in the country to be abolished in favour of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews and speculators, or given away to bribe newly invented municipal republics into a share of the sacrilege? Are all taxes to be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution, or patriotic presents? Are silver shoe buckles to be substituted for the land tax and the malt tax to support the naval strength of this kingdom? Are all orders, ranks and distinctions to be jumbled together, so that out of universal anarchy joined to national bankruptcy three or four thousand democracies may be formed into eighty-three, and so that they may all, by some unknown power of attraction, be organised into one? Is it for this great end that the army is to be seduced away from its discipline and its loyalty, first by every kind of debauchery and then by the terrible precedent of a bounty in the form of increased pay? Are the curates to be seduced away from their bishops by holding out the delusive hope of a share in the spoils of their own order? Are the citizens of London to be drawn away from their allegiance by being fed at the expense of their fellow subjects? Is a compulsory paper currency to be substituted for the legal coin of this kingdom? Is what remains of the plundered stock of the public revenue to be spent on the wild project of maintaining two armies to watch each other and to fight each other? If these are the ends and the means of the Revolution Society, I admit they are well matched, and France can furnish them with precedents for both.
I see that your example is held up to shame us. I know we are supposed to be a dull, sluggish race, made passive by finding our situation tolerable, and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining freedom in its full perfection. Your leaders in France began by professing to admire, almost to adore, the British constitution; but as they went on they came to look on it with sovereign contempt. The friends of your National Assembly among us have quite as mean an opinion of what used to be thought the glory of their country. The Revolution Society has discovered that the English nation is not free. They are convinced that the inequality in our representation is a "defect in our Constitution so gross and palpable as to make it excellent chiefly in form and theory"; that representation in the legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional liberty in it but of "all legitimate government; that without it a government is nothing but an usurpation"; that "when the representation is partial, the kingdom possesses liberty only partially; and if extremely partial, it gives only a semblance; and if not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, it becomes a nuisance." Dr Price considers this inadequacy of representation our fundamental grievance; and though as to the corruption of this semblance of representation he hopes it has not yet reached its full perfection of depravity, he fears that "nothing will be done towards gaining for us this essential blessing, until some great abuse of power again provokes our resentment, or some great calamity again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the acquisition of a pure and equal representation by other countries, whilst we are mocked with the shadow, kindles our shame." To this he adds a note in these words: "A representation chosen chiefly by the Treasury, and a few thousands of the dregs of the people, who are generally paid for their votes."
Footnote: Discourse on the Love of our Country, 3rd edition, p. 39.
You will smile here at the consistency of these democrats, who, when they are off their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, while at the same time claiming to make them the depositories of all power. It would take a long discourse to point out to you the many fallacies lurking in the general and equivocal phrase "inadequate representation". I shall only say here, in justice to that old-fashioned constitution under which we have long prospered, that our representation has been found perfectly adequate to every purpose for which a representation of the people can be wanted or devised. I defy the enemies of our constitution to show otherwise. To set out the particulars in which it is found to serve its ends so well would require a treatise on our practical constitution. I state the doctrine of the revolutionists here only so that you and others may see what opinion these gentlemen hold of the constitution of their own country, and why they seem to think that some great abuse of power, or some great calamity, would be much softened to their feelings by giving a chance for a constitution according to their ideas. You see why they are so enamoured of your fair and equal representation, which, once obtained, might produce the same effects here. You see that they regard our House of Commons as only "a semblance", "a form", "a theory", "a shadow", "a mockery", and perhaps "a nuisance".
These gentlemen pride themselves on being systematic, and not without reason. They must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of representation, this fundamental grievance as they call it, as a thing not merely vicious in itself but as making our whole government absolutely illegitimate and no better than a downright usurpation. Another revolution, to get rid of this illegitimate and usurped government, would of course be perfectly justifiable, if not absolutely necessary. Indeed their principle, if you consider it at all carefully, goes much further than altering the election of the House of Commons. For if popular representation, or choice, is necessary to the legitimacy of all government, the House of Lords is at one stroke made a bastard and corrupted in its blood. That House is no representative of the people at all, even in "semblance" or "in form". The case of the crown is quite as bad. In vain may the crown try to shelter itself from these gentlemen behind the authority of the settlement made at the Revolution. The Revolution, which is appealed to for a title, wants a title itself on their system. On their theory the Revolution rests on no more solid a basis than our present formalities, since it was made by a House of Lords representing nobody but themselves and by a House of Commons exactly like the present one — that is, as they call it, by a mere "shadow and mockery" of representation.
They must destroy something, or they seem to themselves to exist for no purpose. One set is for destroying the civil power through the ecclesiastical; another for demolishing the ecclesiastical through the civil. They are aware that the worst consequences might follow for the public from accomplishing this double ruin of Church and State; but they are so heated with their theories that they give more than hints that this ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and accompany it, and which appear quite certain to them, would not be unwelcome, or very far from their wishes. A man among them of great authority, and certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed alliance between Church and State, says: "Perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers, before this most unnatural alliance be broken. Calamitous, no doubt, will that time be. But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it be attended with so desirable an effect?" You see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to contemplate the greatest calamities that could befall their country.
It is no wonder, then, that holding these ideas of everything in their constitution and government at home, in Church and State alike, as illegitimate and usurped, or at best a hollow mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm. While they are possessed by such notions, it is useless to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, or the fixed form of a constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience and of growing public strength and national prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have worked a mine underground that will blow up, in one grand explosion, all the examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters and acts of Parliament. They have "the rights of men". Against these there can be no prescription; against these no argument is binding; these admit of no tempering and no compromise; anything withheld from their full demand is so much fraud and injustice. Against these rights of men of theirs, let no government look for security in the length of its existence or in the justice and mildness of its administration. If its forms do not square with their theories, the objections of these theorists are as valid against an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the newest usurpation. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse but on a question of competence and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtlety of their political metaphysics. Let it be their amusement in the schools.
Illa se jactet in aula Æolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.
But do not let them break out of prison to burst on us like a Levanter, sweeping the earth with their hurricane and breaking up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us.
I am far from denying in theory, and my heart is quite as far from withholding in practice — if it were in my power to give or withhold — the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure the rights that are real, and that their pretended rights would utterly destroy. If civil society is made for the advantage of man, then all the advantages it is made for become his right. It is an institution of beneficence, and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule. They have a right to justice as between themselves, whether their fellows hold political office or follow an ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to what their parents acquired, to the nourishment and improvement of their children, to instruction in life and consolation in death. Whatever each man can do separately, without trespassing on others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of everything that society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights, but not to equal things. A man with only five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as the man with five hundred pounds has to his larger share; but he has no right to an equal dividend out of the product of the joint stock. And as for the share of power, authority and direction that each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be among the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in mind the civil social man and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.
If civil society is the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify every kind of constitution formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial or executive power is its creature. They can have no existence in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights that do not even presuppose its existence — rights that are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and one that becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, which is to judge for himself and assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He gives up, largely, even the right of self-defence, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. So that he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what justice is in the points that matter most to him. So that he may secure some liberty, he surrenders the whole of it in trust.
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist entirely independently of it, and exist in much greater clarity and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they lack everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by that wisdom. Among these wants is to be counted the want, outside civil society, of a sufficient restraint on their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals be subdued, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, one that is not, in the exercise of its function, subject to the very will and the very passions it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be counted among their rights. But since liberties and restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modification, they cannot be settled by any abstract rule, and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them on that principle.
The moment you take anything away from the full right of every man to govern himself, and allow any artificial, positive limitation on those rights, from that moment the whole organisation of government becomes a matter of convenience. That is what makes the constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things that help or hinder the various ends the machinery of civil institutions is meant to pursue. The state must have recruits for its strength and remedies for its diseases. What is the use of debating a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is how to procure them and how to administer them. In that deliberation I shall always advise calling in the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is like every other experimental science: it cannot be taught a priori, in advance of the experiment. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate, and what is harmful in the first instance may be excellent in its remoter operation — its excellence may even arise from the ill effects it produces at the beginning. The reverse happens too: very plausible schemes with very pleasing beginnings have often had shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often obscure and almost hidden causes, things that appear at first sight of little importance, on which a very great part of their prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. Since the science of government is therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, and requires experience — more experience, indeed, than any one person can acquire in a whole lifetime, however shrewd and observant he may be — it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture on pulling down a building that has answered the common purposes of society in any tolerable degree for ages, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of proven usefulness in front of him.
These metaphysical rights, entering common life like rays of light passing into a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted out of their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can suit either man's nature or the quality of his affairs. When I hear simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitution, I am at no loss to decide that the builders are either grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to contemplate society from only one point of view, all these simple forms of government are infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its single end far more perfectly than the more complex kind can attain all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole should be answered imperfectly and irregularly than that, while some parts are provided for with great exactness, others should be totally neglected, or perhaps materially damaged, by excessive care for a favourite member.
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes, and in proportion as they are metaphysically true they are morally and politically false. The rights of men lie in a sort of middle, incapable of definition but not impossible to discern. The rights of men in governments are their advantages, and these are often balances between different goods, compromises sometimes between good and evil and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing morally true denominations, not metaphysically or mathematically true ones.
These theorists almost always confound the right of the people with their power by a piece of sophistry. The body of the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effective resistance; but until power and right are the same thing, the whole body of them has no right that is inconsistent with virtue, and with the first of all the virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what is unreasonable and not for their benefit. A pleasant writer did say "Liceat perire poetis" — let poets be allowed to perish — when one of them was said to have leapt in cold blood into the flames of a volcanic revolution, "ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit"; but I consider such a frolic an unjustifiable poetic licence rather than one of the franchises of Parnassus. And whether the man who chose to exercise this kind of right were poet, divine or politician, I think wiser and therefore more charitable thoughts would urge me to save him rather than to preserve his brass slippers as monuments of his folly.
The kind of anniversary sermon that a great part of what I am writing refers to will, unless men are shamed out of their present course, cheat many of them out of the principles and deprive them of the benefits of the very Revolution they are commemorating. I confess to you, Sir, that I have never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution into its daily bread. It makes the habit of society dangerously sickly; it is like taking periodic doses of corrosive sublimate, and swallowing repeated stimulants to whip up our love of liberty.
This disease of the remedy, once it becomes habitual, relaxes and wears out, by common and prostituted use, the spring of the spirit that ought to be exerted on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of Roman servitude that themes of tyrannicide were the ordinary exercise of schoolboys — cum perimit sævos classis numerosa tyrannos, when a numerous class destroys its savage tyrants. In the ordinary state of things it produces the worst effects in a country like ours, even on the cause of the very liberty it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant theory. Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after a short interval, become the most decided and thoroughgoing courtiers. They soon left the business of a tedious, moderate but practical resistance to those of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, they had dismissed as little better than Tories. Hypocrisy naturally delights in the most sublime speculations, for since it never intends to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to make them magnificent. But even where levity rather than fraud was to be suspected in these ranting theories, the outcome has been much the same. These professors, finding their extreme principles do not apply to cases that call only for a qualified — one might say a civil and legal — resistance, offer no resistance at all in such cases. With them it is a war, or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their political schemes unsuited to the state of the world they live in, they often come to think lightly of all public principle, and are ready for their part to abandon for a very trivial interest what they have decided is of very trivial value. Some, indeed, are of a steadier and more persevering nature; but these are eager politicians outside Parliament, who have little temptation to give up their favourite projects. They always have some change in the Church or the State, or both, in view. When that is the case they are always bad citizens and thoroughly unreliable connections. For, regarding their theoretical designs as of infinite value and the actual arrangement of the state as of none, they are at best indifferent to it. They see no merit in the good management of public affairs and no fault in the bad; they rather rejoice in the bad, as more favourable to a revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or any political principle, except so far as it advances or retards their design of change. So they take up one day the most violent and strained ideas of prerogative and another the wildest democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from the one to the other without any regard to cause, or person, or party.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, in transit from one form of government to another; you cannot see that kind of man in quite the same situation in which we see him in this country. With us he is militant, with you he is triumphant, and you know how he can act when his power matches his will. I would not be supposed to confine these observations to any one description of men, or to include all men of any description in them — far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremes, and who under the name of religion teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes that are sometimes needed on extreme occasions. But since those occasions may never arrive, the mind takes a taint for nothing, and the moral feelings suffer not a little when no political purpose at all is served by the corruption. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have entirely forgotten his nature. Without opening a single new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in blocking up the ones that lead to the heart. They have perverted, in themselves and in those who listen to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit through the whole of its political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, seems flat and insipid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse an imagination grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years of security and the still less stimulating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found all of it in the French Revolution. It sends a youthful warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he goes on, and by the time he reaches his peroration it is in a full blaze. Then, surveying from the Pisgah of his pulpit the free, moral, happy, flourishing and glorious state of France, as though it were a bird's-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into this rapture:
"What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it; I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. — I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error. — I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it. — I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects."
Footnote: Another of these reverend gentlemen, who witnessed some of the spectacles Paris has lately exhibited, expresses himself thus: "A king dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects is one of those appearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of human affairs, and which, during the remainder of my life, I shall think of with wonder and gratification." These gentlemen agree marvellously in their feelings.
Before I go further, I should remark that Dr Price seems rather to overrate the great acquisitions of light he has obtained and spread abroad in this age. The last century seems to me to have been quite as enlightened. It had, though in another place, a triumph as memorable as Dr Price's, and some of the great preachers of that period shared in it as eagerly as he has shared in the triumph of France. At the trial of the Reverend Hugh Peters for high treason, evidence was given that when King Charles was brought to London for trial, the Apostle of Liberty of that day conducted the triumph. "I saw," says the witness, "his Majesty in the coach with six horses, and Peters riding before the king triumphing." Dr Price, when he talks as if he had made a discovery, is only following a precedent. For after the king's trial began, this forerunner, the same Dr Peters, ended a long prayer in the royal chapel at Whitehall — he had chosen his place very triumphantly — by saying: "I have prayed and preached these twenty years; and now I may say with old Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." Peters did not get the fruits of his prayer, for he neither departed as soon as he wished nor in peace. He became — and I heartily hope none of his followers in this country may become the same — a sacrifice himself to the triumph he had led as high priest. At the Restoration they dealt with this poor good man perhaps too hard. But we owe it to his memory and his sufferings to say that he had as much illumination and as much zeal, and had as effectively undermined all the superstition and error that might impede the great business he was engaged in, as any who follow him and repeat after him in this age, which would claim for itself an exclusive title to the knowledge of the rights of men and all the glorious consequences of that knowledge.
Footnote: State Trials, Vol. II, pp. 360, 363.
After this sally by the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in place and time from the rapture of 1648 and agrees perfectly with its spirit and its letter, the Revolution Society — the fabricators of governments, the heroic band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns and leaders of kings in triumph — strutting in the proud consciousness of that diffusion of knowledge of which every member had received so large a share in the handout, were in haste to make a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had received for nothing. To make this bountiful communication they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to the London Tavern, where the same Dr Price, in whom the fumes of his oracular tripod had not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratulation, that Lord Stanhope forwarded to the National Assembly of France.
Here I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation commonly called the Nunc dimittis, uttered at the first presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to perhaps the most horrid, atrocious and afflicting spectacle ever exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph", a thing unmanly and irreligious even in its best form, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must, I believe, shock the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several Englishmen were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. Unless we have been strangely deceived, it was a spectacle far more like a procession of American savages entering Onondaga after some of their murders — called victories — and leading their captives into huts hung round with scalps, overwhelmed by the jeers and blows of women as ferocious as themselves, than it was like the triumphal pomp of a civilised martial nation. If indeed a civilised nation, or any men with a sense of generosity, could be capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and the afflicted.
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe that as a nation it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation at not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or the actors in it, and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry they may make into it must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality. Their apology lies in their situation; but when we approve of what they must bear, that is in us the degenerate choice of a corrupted mind.
With a forced appearance of deliberation, they vote under the dominion of a stern necessity. They sit, as it were, in the heart of a foreign republic. They reside in a city whose constitution has come neither from their king's charter nor from their own legislative power. There they are surrounded by an army raised neither by the authority of their crown nor by their own command, and which, if they ordered it to dissolve itself, would instantly dissolve them. There they sit, after a gang of assassins has driven away some hundreds of the members, while those who hold the same moderate principles, with more patience or better hope, remain exposed every day to outrageous insult and murderous threats. There a majority — sometimes real, sometimes pretended, and itself a captive — compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee houses. It is notorious that all their measures are decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt that under the terror of the bayonet, the lamp-post and the torch at their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs made up of a monstrous medley of every condition, tongue and nation. Among them are men in comparison with whom Catiline would be thought scrupulous and Cethegus a man of sobriety and moderation. Nor is it only in these clubs that public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo a preliminary distortion in academies set up as so many seminaries for the clubs in every place of public resort. In these meetings of every kind, every counsel is taken for the mark of superior genius in proportion as it is daring and violent and treacherous. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness towards individuals is regarded as treason against the public. Liberty is always to be reckoned perfect in proportion as property is made insecure. Amid assassination, massacre and confiscation, committed or intended, they are drawing up plans for the good order of future society. Embracing the carcasses of base criminals and promoting their relations on the strength of their crimes, they drive hundreds of virtuous people to the same end by forcing them to live either by beggary or by crime.
The Assembly, which is their instrument, plays the farce of deliberation before them with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians at a fair before a riotous audience. They act amid the tumultuous shouting of a mixed mob of ferocious men and of women lost to shame, who, as their insolent fancy takes them, direct, control, applaud and hiss them off, and sometimes mingle with them and take seats among them, domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile impudence and proud, presumptuous authority. Having inverted order in everything, they have put the gallery in the place of the House. This assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the face and appearance of a grave legislative body — nec color imperii, nec frons erat ulla senatûs: no colour of empire, no countenance of a senate.
They have been given a power like that of the Evil Principle, to subvert and destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. Who is there that admires and is attached from the heart to national representative assemblies who must not turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institution? Lovers of monarchy and lovers of republics must alike abhor it. The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under a tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction and little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who make up even the majority of that body must feel as I do, notwithstanding the applause of the Revolution Society.
Miserable king! Miserable assembly! How silently scandalised that assembly must be by the members among them who could call a day that seemed to blot the sun out of heaven "un beau jour"! How inwardly indignant at hearing others think fit to declare to them that "the vessel of the state would fly forward in her course towards regeneration with more speed than ever", driven by the stiff gale of treason and murder that preceded our preacher's triumph! What must they have felt when, with outward patience and inward indignation, they heard of the slaughter of innocent gentlemen in their own houses that "the blood spilled was not the most pure"! What must they have felt when, besieged by complaints of disorders that shook their country to its foundations, they were compelled to tell the complainants coolly that they were under the protection of the law, and that they would petition the king — the captive king — to have the laws enforced for their protection, at a time when that captive king's enslaved ministers had formally notified them that there was neither law nor authority nor power left to protect anybody! What must they have felt at being obliged, by way of new year's congratulation, to ask their captive king to forget the stormy period of the last year, on account of the great good he was likely to produce for his people — the practical demonstrations of their loyalty being adjourned until that good should be completely attained, while they assured him of their obedience for a time when he would no longer have any authority to command!
Footnote: 6th of October, 1789.
This address was made with much good nature and affection, no doubt. But among the revolutions in France we must count a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn our manners at second hand from your side of the water, and to dress our behaviour in French frippery. If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not yet conformed so far to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite the most refined strain of delicate compliment — whether of condolence or congratulation — to tell the most humiliated creature that crawls on the earth that great public benefits have been derived from the murder of his servants, the attempted assassination of himself and of his wife, and the mortification, disgrace and degradation he has personally suffered. It is a topic of consolation that our prison chaplain at Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the gallows. I should have thought the hangman of Paris, now that he is liberalised by a vote of the National Assembly and allowed his rank and his coat of arms in the Herald's College of the rights of men, would be too generous a man, too gallant, too full of a sense of his new dignity, to employ that cutting consolation on any of the persons whom the crime of lèze-nation might bring under the administration of his executive powers.
A man has fallen indeed when he is flattered like this. The soothing draught of oblivion, drugged in this way, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. To administer the opiate of amnesty powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt is to hold to his lips, instead of "the balm of hurt minds", the cup of human misery filled to the brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs.
Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those so delicately urged in the new year compliment, the king of France will probably try to forget these events, and that compliment along with them. But history, which keeps a lasting record of all our acts and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of sovereigns of every sort, will forget neither those events nor the era of this liberal refinement in the dealings of mankind. History will record that on the morning of the sixth of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay and slaughter, lay down under the pledged security of public faith to give nature a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy sleep. From that sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, crying out to her to save herself by flight — that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give — that they were upon him, and he was a dead man. He was cut down instantly. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the queen's chamber and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonet and dagger the bed from which this persecuted woman had only just had time to fly, almost naked, and had escaped by ways unknown to the murderers, to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband who was not himself secure of his life for a moment.
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children — who would once have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people — were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre and strewn with scattered limbs and mutilated bodies. From there they were conducted to the capital of their kingdom. Two men had been picked out of the unprovoked, unresisted, indiscriminate slaughter that had been made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king's bodyguard. These two gentlemen were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block, with all the parade of an execution of justice, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck on spears and led the procession, while the royal captives who followed in the train were moved slowly along amid the horrid yells, the shrilling screams, the frantic dancing, the infamous insults and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a twelve-mile journey drawn out over six hours, they were lodged, under a guard made up of the very soldiers who had conducted them through this famous triumph, in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastille for kings.
Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars, to be commemorated with grateful thanksgiving, to be offered up to the Divine Humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastic ejaculation? These Theban and Thracian orgies, acted in France and applauded only in the Old Jewry, kindle prophetic enthusiasm, I assure you, in the minds of very few people in this kingdom — although a saint and apostle who may have revelations of his own, and who has so completely vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart, may be inclined to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed in a holy temple by a venerable sage, and not long before announced no worse by the voice of angels to the quiet innocence of shepherds.
At first I was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded transport. I knew, of course, that the sufferings of monarchs are a delicious repast to certain palates. There were reflections that might have kept this appetite within some bounds of temperance. But when I took one circumstance into account, I was obliged to admit that a good deal of allowance ought to be made for the society, and that the temptation was too strong for ordinary discretion. I mean the circumstance of the victory-shout of the triumph, the animating cry calling for "all the BISHOPS to be hanged on the lamp-posts", which might well have brought on a burst of enthusiasm at the foreseen consequences of this happy day. To such enthusiasm I allow a little deviation from prudence. I allow this prophet to break out into hymns of joy and thanksgiving at an event that looks like the forerunner of the Millennium and of the projected Fifth Monarchy, in the destruction of all Church establishments. There was, however, as there is in all human affairs, something in the middle of this joy to exercise the patience of these worthy gentlemen and to try the long-suffering of their faith. The actual murder of the king and queen and their child was still wanting to the other auspicious circumstances of this "beautiful day". The actual murder of the bishops, though called for by so many holy ejaculations, was wanting too. A group of regicide and sacrilegious slaughter was indeed boldly sketched, but it was only sketched. Unhappily it was left unfinished, in this great history-piece of the massacre of the innocents. What hardy brush from the school of the rights of men will finish it remains to be seen. The age has not yet the complete benefit of that diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error; and the king of France needs another object or two to consign to oblivion, in consideration of all the good that is to come out of his own sufferings and the patriotic crimes of an enlightened age.
Footnote: "Tous les Évêques à la lanterne!"
Footnote: It is proper here to refer to a letter written on this subject by an eyewitness. That eyewitness was one of the most honest, intelligent and eloquent members of the National Assembly, and one of the most active and zealous reformers of the state. He was obliged to withdraw from the Assembly, and afterwards became a voluntary exile, on account of the horrors of this pious triumph and the dispositions of the men who, profiting by crimes if not causing them, have taken the lead in public affairs. Extract of M. de Lally Tollendal's Second Letter to a Friend. "Parlons du parti que j'ai pris; il est bien justifé dans ma conscience.—Ni cette ville coupable, ni cette assemblée plus coupable encore, ne méritoient que je me justifie; mais j'ai à cœur que vous, et les personnes qui pensent comme vous, ne me condamnent pas.—Ma santé, je vous jure, me rendoit mes fonctions impossibles; mais même en les mettant de côté il a été au-dessus de mes forces de supporter plus longtems l'horreur que me causoit ce sang,—ces têtes,—cette reine presque egorgée,—ce roi, amené esclave, entrant à Paris au milieu de ses assassins, et précédé des têtes de ses malheureux gardes,—ces perfides janissaires, ces assassins, ces femmes cannibales,—ce cri de TOUS LES ÉVÊQUES À LA LANTERNE, dans le moment où le roi entre sa capitale avec deux évêques de son conseil dans sa voiture,—un coup de fusil, que j'ai vu tirer dans un des carrosses de la reine,—M. Bailly appellant cela un beau jour,—l'assemblée ayant déclaré froidement le matin, qu'il n'étoit pas de sa dignité d'aller toute entière environner le roi,—M. Mirabeau disant impunément dans cette assemblée, que le vaisseau de l'état, loin d'être arrêté dans sa course, s'élanceroit avec plus de rapidité que jamais vers sa régénération,—M. Barnave, riant avec lui, quand des flots de sang couloient autour de nous,—le vertueux Mounier échappant par miracle à vingt assassins, qui avoient voulu faire de sa tête un trophée de plus: Voilà ce qui me fit jurer de ne plus mettre le pied dans cette caverne d'Antropophages [the National Assembly], où je n'avois plus de force d'élever la voix, où depuis six semaines je l'avois élevée en vain. Moi, Mounier, et tous les honnêtes gens, ont pensé que le dernier effort à faire pour le bien étoit d'en sortir. Aucune idée de crainte ne s'est approchée de moi. Je rougirois de m'en défendre. J'avois encore reçû sur la route de la part de ce peuple, moins coupable que ceux qui l'ont enivré de fureur, des acclamations, et des applaudissements, dont d'autres auroient été flattés, et qui m'ont fait frémir. C'est à l'indignation, c'est à l'horreur, c'est aux convulsions physiques, que le seul aspect du sang me fait éprouver que j'ai cédé. On brave une seule mort; on la brave plusieurs fois, quand elle peut être utile. Mais aucune puissance sous le ciel, mais aucune opinion publique ou privée n'ont le droit de me condamner à souffrir inutilement mille supplices par minute, et à périr de désespoir, de rage, au milieu des triomphes, du crime que je n'ai pu arrêter. Ils me proscriront, ils confisqueront mes biens. Je labourerai la terre, et je ne les verrai plus. Voilà ma justification. Vous pourrez la lire, la montrer, la laisser copier; tant pis pour ceux qui ne la comprendront pas; ce ne sera alors moi qui auroit eu tort de la leur donner." In English: "Let me speak of the course I have taken; it is fully justified in my own conscience. Neither that guilty city nor that still guiltier assembly deserved that I should justify myself; but I care that you, and those who think as you do, should not condemn me. My health, I swear to you, made my duties impossible; but even setting that aside, it was beyond my strength to endure any longer the horror that this blood caused me — those heads — that queen with her throat all but cut — that king brought in as a slave, entering Paris among his assassins and preceded by the heads of his unhappy guards — those treacherous janissaries, those assassins, those cannibal women — that cry of ALL THE BISHOPS TO THE LAMP-POST at the very moment when the king enters his capital with two bishops of his council in his carriage — a musket shot that I saw fired into one of the queen's coaches — M. Bailly calling this a beautiful day — the Assembly having coldly declared that morning that it was not consistent with its dignity to go in a body and surround the king — M. Mirabeau saying with impunity in that assembly that the ship of state, far from being checked in her course, would drive on towards her regeneration faster than ever — M. Barnave laughing along with him while floods of blood ran round about us — the virtuous Mounier escaping by a miracle from twenty assassins who wanted to make one more trophy of his head. That is what made me swear never again to set foot in that cavern of cannibals, where I no longer had the strength to raise my voice, and where for six weeks I had raised it in vain. Mounier and I, and all honest men, judged that the last effort we could make for good was to get out of it. No idea of fear came near me. I should blush to defend myself against the charge. On the road I had even received, from that people who are less guilty than the men who made them drunk with fury, acclamations and applause that would have flattered others and that made me shudder. It is to indignation, to horror, to the physical convulsions that the mere sight of blood brings on in me, that I have given way. A man faces a single death; he faces it many times over, when it can be of use. But no power under heaven, no opinion public or private, has the right to condemn me to suffer a thousand torments a minute to no purpose, and to perish of despair and rage in the middle of the triumphs of a crime I could not stop. They will proscribe me, they will confiscate my goods. I shall plough the earth, and I shall not see them again. There is my justification. You may read it, show it, let it be copied; so much the worse for those who will not understand it; it will not then be I who was in the wrong to give it to them." This military man had not such good nerves as the peaceable gentlemen of the Old Jewry. See M. Mounier's narrative of these transactions: also a man of honour and virtue and talent, and therefore a fugitive. (Note: M. Mounier was then speaker of the National Assembly. He has since been obliged to live in exile, though one of the firmest defenders of liberty.)
Although this work of our new light and knowledge did not go as far as in all probability it was meant to go, I must still think that such treatment of any human creature must be shocking to anyone not made for accomplishing revolutions. But I cannot stop there. Moved by the inborn feelings of my nature, and not illuminated by a single ray of this newly sprung modern light, I confess to you, Sir, that the exalted rank of the sufferers — and particularly the sex, the beauty and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many kings and emperors, together with the tender age of royal infants, unaware only through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages their parents were exposed to — instead of being a subject for exultation, adds not a little to what I feel about that most melancholy occasion.
I hear that the august person who was the principal object of our preacher's triumph, though he bore himself well, felt that shameful occasion deeply. As a man it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and for the faithful guards of his person who were massacred in cold blood around him. As a prince it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his civilised subjects, and to grieve more for them than to be anxious for himself. This takes little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honour of his humanity. I am very sorry to say — very sorry indeed — that such persons are in a situation in which it is not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great.
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of the triumph, bore that day as she bears all the days since — one is anxious that beings made for suffering should suffer well — and that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting flattery of formal addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race and worthy of the daughter of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that like her mother she has lofty feelings; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. Oh, what a revolution! And what a heart I must have, to contemplate that elevation and that fall without emotion! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall on her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it softened ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in appearance by the varying state of human affairs, lived on and had its influence through a long succession of generations, right down to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss, I fear, will be great. It is this that has given modern Europe its character. It is this that has distinguished Europe under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from the states that flourished in the most brilliant periods of the ancient world. It was this that, without confounding ranks, produced a noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion that softened kings into companions and raised private men to be the fellows of kings. Without force and without opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power. It obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination that vanquishes laws to be itself subdued by manners.
But now all this is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions that made power gentle and obedience liberal, that harmonised the different shades of life, and that by a bland assimilation brought into politics the feelings which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the added ideas, furnished out of the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd and antiquated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is only a man, a queen is only a woman, a woman is only an animal — and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, without any distinct view to the individual, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide and parricide and sacrilege are only fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father is only common homicide — and if the people happen in any way to be gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and one we ought not to inquire into too severely.
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by whatever concern each individual may find in them from his own private theorising, or can spare for them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every avenue, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left to engage the affections on behalf of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanical philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration or attachment. But the sort of reason that banishes the affections is incapable of taking their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are needed sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, and always as aids to law. The rule laid down by a wise man, and a great critic too, for the construction of poems, is equally true of states: "Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto" — it is not enough for poems to be beautiful; they must be sweet. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation that a well-formed mind would relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
But power of some kind or other will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish, and it will find other and worse means of supporting itself. The usurpation that has destroyed ancient principles in order to subvert ancient institutions will hold power by arts similar to those by which it acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which by freeing kings from fear freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, is extinct in men's minds, plots and assassinations will be forestalled by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and by that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which make up the political code of every power that does not rest on its own honour and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be measured. From that moment we have no compass to steer by, nor can we tell distinctly for what port we are steering. Europe taken as a whole was undoubtedly in a flourishing condition on the day your Revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be without effect, we must presume that on the whole their effect was beneficial.
We are all too apt to consider things in the state we find them in, without sufficiently attending to the causes that produced them and may be holding them up. Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things connected with manners and civilisation, have in this European world of ours depended for ages on two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession and the other by patronage, kept learning in existence even amid arms and confusion, and while governments were still in their causes rather than formed. Learning paid back what it had received to nobility and priesthood, and paid it with interest, by enlarging their ideas and furnishing their minds. Happy, if they had all gone on knowing their indissoluble union and their proper places! Happy, if learning, not corrupted by ambition, had been content to remain the instructor and had not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hooves of a swinish multitude.
Footnote: See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be particularly alluded to here. Compare the circumstances of the trial and execution of the first of them with this prediction.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to admit to ancient manners, so do other interests that we value quite as much as they are worth. Even commerce and trade and manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps only creatures, only effects, which we choose to worship as first causes. They certainly grew up in the same shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay along with the principles that naturally protect them. With you, for the present at least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where a people lacks trade and manufactures, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies their place, and not always badly; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to see how well a state can stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of thing must a nation be — gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour or manly pride, possessing nothing at present and hoping for nothing hereafter?
I hope you are not going fast, and by the shortest road, to that horrible and disgusting condition. Already a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, appears in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable traces still remain, from you, or whether you took them from us. But I think we trace them best to you. You seem to me to be gentis incunabula nostræ, the cradle of our race. France has always influenced manners in England, more or less; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long or run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, only too close and connected an interest in what is being done in France. Excuse me, then, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the sixth of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections that have risen in my mind on the occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day: I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions. As things now stand, with everything respectable destroyed outside us, and an attempt being made to destroy every principle of respect within us, one is almost forced to apologise for harbouring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr Price, and from those of his lay flock who choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse? For this plain reason: because it is natural that I should. Because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy thoughts about the unstable condition of mortal prosperity and the terrible uncertainty of human greatness. Because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons. Because in events like these our passions instruct our reason. Because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become objects of insult to the base and of pity to the good, we look on such disasters in the moral order as we should look on a miracle in the physical one. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds, as was observed long ago, are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the workings of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn from me if such a spectacle were shown on the stage. I should be truly ashamed to find in myself that superficial, theatrical sense of painted distress, while I could exult over the real thing in life. With a mind so perverted I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People would think that the tears Garrick used to extort from me, or Siddons not long since, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiment than churches where the feelings of humanity are outraged like this. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated from the school of the rights of men, and who must address themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare present such a triumph as a matter for exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not tolerate the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied to gaining monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern stage as they once did on the ancient, where an audience could not bear even the hypothetical proposal of such wickedness in the mouth of a tyrant being played, however suited it was to the character he sustained. No theatre audience in Athens would sit through what has been borne in the middle of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a leading actor weighing, as though in scales hung up in a shop of horrors, so much actual crime against so much possible advantage — and after putting weights in and taking them out, announcing that the balance came down on the side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of the new democracy posted up as in a ledger against the crimes of the old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first instinctive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, would show that this method of political accounting would justify crime to any extent whatever. They would see that on these principles, even where the very worst acts were not committed, that was owing to the luck of the conspirators rather than to any thrift on their part in spending treachery and blood. They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred. They offer a shorter road to the object than the highway of the moral virtues. Once perfidy and murder are justified for the public benefit, the public benefit soon becomes the pretext and perfidy and murder the end — until rapacity, malice, revenge and a fear more dreadful than revenge have glutted their insatiable appetites. Such must be the consequence of losing, in the splendour of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of right and wrong.
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph" because, if you please, Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch" — that is to say, in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with prerogatives that a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, had put him in possession of without any act of his own. It has indeed turned out a misfortune to him that he was born king of France. But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince whose whole reign was a series of concessions to his subjects, who was willing to relax his authority, to give up his prerogatives, to call his people to a share of freedom their ancestors had never known and perhaps never wanted — such a prince, though he may be subject to the common frailties of men and of princes, though he once thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs plainly being carried on against his person and the remains of his authority — even taking all that into account, I shall be brought only with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, at such an example set before kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity, at the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are people of that low and degenerate cast of mind who look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration at kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the wide-awake vigilance of a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches of freedom. Against such men as those they never raise their voices. Deserters from principle, enlisted with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could be made clear to me that the king and queen of France — those, I mean, who were such before the triumph — were inexorable and cruel tyrants, and that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in certain publications), I should think their captivity just. If that is true, much more ought to have been done — but done, in my opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice, and it has truly been called a consolation to the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king I should have regard to the dignity of avenging the crime. Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments seems rather to submit to a necessity than to make a choice. Had the subject been Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the Ninth — if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden after the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina after the murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, Sir, or into mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different.
If the French king, or the king of the French — or whatever name he goes by in the new vocabulary of your constitution — has really, in his own person and in his queen's, deserved these unacknowledged but unavenged attempts at murder, and those frequent indignities that are crueller than murder, then such a person would ill deserve even the subordinate executive trust that I understand is to be placed in him; nor is he fit to be called chief of a nation he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than a deposed tyrant could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him with your highest concerns as a faithful, honest and zealous servant, is not consistent in reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice. Those who could make such an appointment would be guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have committed against the people yet. Since this is the only crime in which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insinuations. I think no better of all the other calumnies.
In England we give them no credit. We are generous enemies; we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust and indignation the slanders of men who bring us their anecdotes with the fleur-de-lis branded on their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate; and neither his being a public convert to Judaism, nor his having in his zeal against Catholic priests and clergy of every sort raised a mob — excuse the term, it is still in use here — that pulled down all our prisons, has preserved him a liberty he did not make himself worthy of by any virtuous use of it. We have rebuilt Newgate and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as strong as the Bastille for those who dare to libel the queens of France. In that spiritual retreat let the noble libeller remain. Let him meditate there on his Talmud until he learns a conduct more becoming to his birth and his parts, and less disgraceful to the ancient religion he has converted to — or until some persons from your side of the water, to please your new Hebrew brethren, ransom him. He may then be able to purchase, with the old hoards of the synagogue and a very small percentage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver (Dr Price has shown us what miracles compound interest will perform in 1790 years), the lands that have lately been discovered to have been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your Popish Archbishop of Paris, and we will send you our Protestant rabbi. We shall treat the person you send us in exchange like a gentleman and an honest man, as he is; but pray let him bring the fund of his hospitality, bounty and charity with him, and depend upon it we shall never confiscate a shilling of that honourable and pious fund, nor think of enriching the Treasury with the spoils of the poor-box.
To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I think the honour of our nation is somewhat concerned in disowning the proceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern. I hold no man's proxy. I speak only for myself when I disclaim, as I do with all possible earnestness, all communion with the actors in that triumph or with its admirers. When I assert anything else about the people of England, I speak from observation and not from authority; but I speak from the experience I have had in a fairly wide and mixed acquaintance with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of every description and rank, and after a course of attentive observation begun early in life and continued for nearly forty years. Considering that we are divided from you by a slender ditch of about twenty-four miles, and that traffic between the two countries has lately been very great, I have often been astonished to find how little you seem to know of us. I suspect this is because you form your judgment of this nation from certain publications which represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in England very erroneously, if they represent them at all. The vanity, restlessness, petulance and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals, who try to hide their total unimportance in bustle and noise and puffing and quoting one another, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a general sign that we agree with their opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chirping, while thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak and chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that the ones making the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, or that they are therefore many in number, or that they are anything after all but the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
I will almost venture to say that not one in a hundred among us shares in the "triumph" of the Revolution Society. If the king and queen of France and their children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the bitterest of all hostilities — I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility — they would be treated to another sort of triumphal entry into London. We have had a king of France in that situation before now; you have read how he was treated by the victor in the field, and in what manner he was afterwards received in England. Four hundred years have passed over us, but I do not believe we are materially changed since then. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not, as I conceive, lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor have we yet refined ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvétius has made no progress among us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think none are to be made, in morality — nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born quite as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its earth on our presumption and the silent tomb has imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely gutted of our natural entrails. We still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians and active monitors of our duty and the true supporters of every liberal and manly morality. We have not been drawn and trussed so that we might be stuffed, like birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We keep the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unspoiled by pedantry and unbelief. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our breasts. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to Parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds it is natural to be affected in that way; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to make us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, licentious and abandoned insolence, to make us the cheap sport of a few holidays and perfectly fit for — and justly deserving of — slavery for the whole course of our lives.
Footnote: The English are, I think, misrepresented in a letter published in one of the papers by a gentleman thought to be a Dissenting minister. Writing to Dr Price about the spirit prevailing in Paris, he says: "The spirit of the people in this place has abolished all the proud distinctions which the king and nobles had usurped in their minds: whether they talk of the king, the noble, or the priest, their whole language is that of the most enlightened and liberal amongst the English." If this gentleman means to confine the terms enlightened and liberal to one set of men in England, it may be true. It is not generally so.
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of throwing away all our old prejudices we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices, and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to set men up to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to draw on the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding a general prejudice, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom in it. If they find what they are looking for — and they seldom fail — they think it wiser to keep the prejudice with the reason wrapped inside it than to throw away the coat of prejudice and leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, carries a motive to put that reason into action and an affection that will make it last. Prejudice is ready to hand in an emergency. It engages the mind beforehand in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave a man hesitating at the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice makes a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.
Your literary men and your politicians, and the whole clan of the enlightened among us with them, differ from us fundamentally on these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others, but they make up for it by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient reason to destroy an old scheme of things that it is an old one. As to the new, they feel no sort of fear about how long a building run up in haste will last, because duration is no object to men who think that little or nothing was done before their own time and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that everything which gives permanence is mischievous, and so they are at inexpiable war with all establishments. They think government may be varied like fashions in dress, and with as little ill effect; that no principle of attachment to any constitution of the state is needed beyond a sense of present convenience. They always speak as though they held that there is a peculiar sort of contract between them and their magistrates which binds the magistrate but has nothing reciprocal in it, and that the majesty of the people has a right to dissolve it for no reason but its own will. Their attachment even to their own country goes only so far as it agrees with some of their passing projects; it begins and ends with whatever scheme of politics happens to suit their opinion of the moment.
These doctrines, or rather these sentiments, seem to prevail with your new statesmen. But they are wholly different from those we have always acted on in this country.
I hear that it is sometimes given out in France that what is being done among you follows the example of England. Allow me to say that hardly anything done with you has originated in the practice or the prevailing opinions of this people, either in the act or in the spirit of the proceeding. Let me add that we are as unwilling to learn these lessons from France as we are sure that we never taught them to that nation. The cabals here who take a sort of share in your transactions consist as yet of only a handful of people. If, unluckily, by their intrigues and their sermons and their publications, and by a confidence drawn from an expected union with the counsels and forces of the French nation, they should draw considerable numbers into their faction, and should then seriously attempt anything here in imitation of what has been done with you, the outcome, I will venture to prophesy, will be that with some trouble to their country they will soon accomplish their own destruction. This people refused to change their law in remote ages out of respect for the infallibility of popes, and they will not alter it now out of a pious implicit faith in the dogmatism of philosophers — though the first was armed with the anathema and the crusade, and though the second should act with the libel and the lamp-post.
Formerly your affairs were your own concern only. We felt for them as men, but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of France. But when we see the model held up for ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and, feeling, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs, in spite of us, are made part of our interest — so far at least as to keep your panacea, or your plague, at a distance. If it is a panacea, we do not want it: we know the consequences of unnecessary medicine. If it is a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the strictest quarantine ought to be set up against it.
I hear on all sides that a cabal calling itself philosophic takes the glory of many of these late proceedings, and that its opinions and systems are the true animating spirit of the whole of them. I have never heard of any party in England, literary or political, known at any time by such a description. It is not composed of those men, is it, whom ordinary people in their blunt, homely style commonly call atheists and infidels? If it is, I admit that we too have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who born within the last forty years has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves freethinkers? Who reads Bolingbroke now? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what has become of all these lights of the world. In as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of "all the Capulets". But whatever they were, or are, with us they were and are wholly unconnected individuals. With us they kept the common nature of their kind and were not gregarious. They never acted in a body, nor were they known as a faction in the state, nor did they presume to influence any of our public concerns in that name or character or for the purposes of such a faction. Whether they ought to exist so, and be permitted to act so, is another question. As no such cabals have existed in England, so neither has the spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame of our constitution, or in any one of the several repairs and improvements it has undergone. The whole has been done under the auspices, and is confirmed by the sanction, of religion and piety. The whole has come out of the simplicity of our national character, and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding which for a long time marked the men who have successively held authority among us. That disposition remains still — at least in the great body of the people.
We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy of the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets should ever need further explaining, we shall not call on atheism to explain them. We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other lights. It will be perfumed with other incense than the infectious stuff imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics. If our church establishment should need revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public or private, that we shall employ to audit or receive or apply its consecrated revenue. Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, now that the heats have subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant — not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because in our judgment it has more. We are Protestants not from indifference but from zeal.
Footnote: Sit igitur hoc ab initio persuasum civibus, dominos esse omnium rerum ac moderatores deos; eaque, quæ gerantur, eorum geri vi, ditione, ac numine; eosdemque optime de genere hominum mereri; et qualis quisque sit, quid agat, quid in se admittat, qua mente, qua pietate colat religiones intueri: piorum et impiorum habere rationem. His enim rebus imbutæ mentes haud sane abhorrebunt ab utili et a vera sententia. — Cicero, On the Laws, book 2. (Let the citizens be persuaded from the first that the gods are the lords and rulers of all things, that what is done is done by their power and authority, that they are the great benefactors of the human race, and that they observe what each man is, what he does and what he takes upon himself, with what mind and with what piety he keeps the observances of religion — and that they take account of the pious and the impious. Minds steeped in these things will hardly be averse to a useful and a true opinion.)
We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against not only our reason but our instincts, and that it cannot prevail for long. But if, in a moment of riot, in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell which is now boiling so furiously in France, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off the Christian religion, which has been our boast and comfort till now and one great source of civilisation among us and among many other nations, then we are apprehensive — being well aware that the mind will not endure a vacuum — that some uncouth, pernicious and degrading superstition might take its place.
For that reason, before we take away the natural, human means of respect from our establishment and give it up to contempt, as you have done, and in doing it have incurred the penalties you richly deserve to suffer, we ask that something else be presented to us in its place. We shall then form our judgment.
On these ideas, instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do who have made a philosophy and a religion out of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them. We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy and an established democracy, each in the degree in which it exists, and in no greater. I shall show you presently how much of each of these we possess.
It has been the misfortune of this age — not, as these gentlemen think it, its glory — that everything is to be argued about, as if the constitution of our country were always to be a subject of altercation rather than of enjoyment. For that reason, and also for the satisfaction of any among you who may wish to profit by examples, I venture to trouble you with a few thoughts on each of these establishments. I do not think they were unwise in ancient Rome, who, when they wanted to remodel their laws, sent commissioners to examine the best-constituted republics within their reach.
First let me speak of our church establishment, which is the first of our prejudices — not a prejudice destitute of reason, but one with profound and far-reaching wisdom wrapped up in it. I speak of it first. It is first and last and midmost in our minds. For taking our stand on the religious system we are now in possession of, we go on acting on the sense of mankind, early received and uniformly continued. That sense has not only, like a wise architect, built up the august fabric of states; like a provident owner, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin as a sacred temple purged of all the impurities of fraud and violence and injustice and tyranny, it has solemnly and for ever consecrated the commonwealth and everyone who officiates in it. This consecration is made so that all who administer the government of men — in which they stand in the person of God Himself — should have high and worthy notions of their function and their destination; so that their hope should be full of immortality; so that they should look not to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and passing praise of ordinary people, but to a solid, permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.
Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons in exalted situations, and religious establishments provided that will continually revive and enforce them. Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of political institution that aids the rational and natural ties connecting the human understanding and affections to the divine is no more than necessary to build up that wonderful structure, Man — whose prerogative it is to be to a great degree a creature of his own making, and who, when he is made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation. But whenever a man is set over men, as the better nature ought always to preside, in that case above all he should be brought as near to his perfection as possible.
The consecration of the state by a state religious establishment is also necessary in order to work a wholesome awe upon free citizens; because to secure their freedom they must enjoy some definite portion of power. To them, therefore, a religion connected with the state and with their duty towards it becomes even more necessary than it is in societies where the people, by the terms of their subjection, are confined to private sentiments and the management of their own family concerns. Everyone possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with the idea that they act in trust, and that they must account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author and Founder of society.
This principle ought to be impressed even more strongly on the minds of those who make up the collective sovereignty than on the minds of single princes. Without instruments those princes can do nothing. Whoever uses instruments, in finding helps, finds impediments as well. Their power is therefore by no means complete, nor are they safe in extreme abuse of it. Such persons, however elevated by flattery and arrogance and self-conceit, must be aware that in one way or another, whether positive law covers them or not, they are accountable even here for abusing their trust. If they are not cut off by a rebellion of their people, they may be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their security against every other rebellion. So we have seen the king of France sold by his soldiers for an increase of pay. But where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, the people have an infinitely greater confidence in their own power, because a far better founded one. They are themselves in great measure their own instruments. They are nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less answerable to one of the greatest controlling powers on earth, the sense of fame and reputation. The share of infamy likely to fall to each individual in a public act is small indeed: the force of opinion works in inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse the power. Their own approval of their own acts has to them the appearance of a public verdict in their favour. A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world. Being the most shameless, it is also the most fearless. No man there fears that he can personally be made subject to punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought to be: for as all punishments are examples made for the preservation of the people at large, the people at large can never become the subject of punishment by any human hand. It is therefore of infinite importance that they should not be allowed to imagine that their will, any more than a king's, is the standard of right and wrong. They ought to be persuaded that they are quite as little entitled, and far less qualified, to use arbitrary power of any kind with safety to themselves; and that therefore they are not, under a false show of liberty, really to exercise an unnatural, inverted domination, tyrannically exacting from those who serve the state not an entire devotion to their interest, which is their right, but an abject submission to their momentary will — extinguishing by that means, in everyone who serves them, all moral principle, all sense of dignity, all use of judgment and all consistency of character, while by the very same process they hand themselves over as a proper, a suitable, but a most contemptible prey to the servile ambition of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers.
Footnote: Quicquid multis peccatur inultum. (Whatever is done wrong by many goes unpunished. — Lucan.)
When the people have emptied themselves of all the appetite of selfish will — which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should — and when they are conscious that they exercise, and exercise perhaps at a higher link in the chain of delegation, a power which to be legitimate must accord with that eternal, unchangeable law in which will and reason are the same thing, they will be more careful how they place power in base and incapable hands. In naming men to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function; not according to their sordid, selfish interest, nor their wanton caprice, nor their arbitrary will. They will confer that power — which any man may well tremble to give or to receive — only on those in whom they can discern that predominant proportion of active virtue and wisdom, taken together and fitted to the charge, which is to be found in the great and unavoidable mixed mass of human imperfections and infirmities.
When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable, either in the doing or the permitting, to Him whose essence is good, they will be better able to root out of the minds of all magistrates — civil, ecclesiastical or military — anything that bears the least resemblance to a proud and lawless domination.
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is this: that the temporary possessors and life-tenants in it, forgetting what they have received from their ancestors or what is owed to their posterity, should not act as if they were the outright masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance, destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, and risking leaving those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation — teaching those successors to respect their contrivances as little as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled readiness to change the state as often and as much and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken; no one generation could link with another; men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
And first of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human intellect, which with all its defects and redundancies and errors is the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns, would be studied no longer, being treated as a heap of old exploded errors. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance — the certain attendants on everyone who has never met with a wisdom greater than his own — would usurp the tribunal. Of course there would then be no settled laws establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear to keep men's actions in a certain course or direct them to a certain end. Nothing stable in the ways of holding property or exercising office could give a solid ground for any parent to calculate on in educating his children, or in choosing how they were to be established in the world later. No principles would be worked early into their habits. As soon as the ablest instructor had finished his laborious course of teaching, instead of sending out his pupil accomplished in a virtuous discipline that would win him attention and respect in his place in society, he would find everything altered, and that he had turned out a poor creature for the contempt and derision of the world, ignorant of the true grounds on which anyone is now valued. Who could guarantee that a tender and delicate sense of honour would beat almost with the first pulses of the heart, when no man could know what the test of honour would be in a nation continually varying the standard of its coinage? No part of life would keep what it had gained. Barbarism in science and literature, unskilfulness in the arts and manufactures, would infallibly follow from the want of a steady education and a settled principle; and so the commonwealth itself would in a few generations crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality, and at last be scattered to all the winds of heaven.
To avoid, then, the evils of inconstancy and changeableness, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, so that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions except with due caution; so that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; so that he should come to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling concern. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are ready to hack that aged parent rashly in pieces and put him in the magicians' kettle, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renew their father's life.
Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of merely occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest and dissolved at the whim of the parties. It is to be looked on with another sort of reverence, because it is not a partnership in things that serve only the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be reached in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is only a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower natures with the higher, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath that holds all physical and all moral natures each in its appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above them and infinitely superior to them, are bound to submit their own will to it. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure and on their speculations about some possible improvement, to separate and tear apart wholesale the bonds of their subordinate community and dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. Only the first and supreme necessity — a necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, which admits no discussion and demands no evidence — can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule, because the necessity is itself also a part of that moral and physical disposition of things which man must obey by consent or by force. But if what is only submission to necessity is made an object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebels are outlawed, cast out and exiled from this world of reason and order and peace and virtue and fruitful penitence into the opposite world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.
These, my dear Sir, are, and were, and I think long will be, the sentiments of not the least learned and reflecting part of this kingdom. Those included in that description form their opinions on such grounds as such persons ought to form them on. The less inquiring receive them from an authority which men whom Providence dooms to live on trust need not be ashamed to rely on. These two sorts of men move in the same direction, though not in the same place. They both move with the order of the universe. They all know or feel this great ancient truth: "Quod illi principi et præpotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit nihil eorum quæ quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quæ civitates appellantur" — nothing that is done on earth is more acceptable to that supreme and all-powerful God who rules this whole world than those assemblies and gatherings of men associated under law which are called states. They take this tenet of the head and heart not from the great name it immediately bears, nor from the greater name it is derived from, but from the only thing that can give true weight and sanction to any learned opinion: the common nature and common relation of men. Persuaded that all things ought to be done with reference to a point, and referring everything to the point of reference all things should be directed to, they think themselves bound to renew the memory of their high origin and lineage not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart, or gathered together in that personal capacity, but also in their corporate character, to perform their national homage to the Institutor and Author and Protector of civil society — without which civil society man could not possibly reach the perfection his nature is capable of, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He who gave us our nature to be perfected by our virtue also willed the necessary means of its perfection: He willed, therefore, the state; He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection. Those who are convinced of this His will, which is the law of laws and the sovereign of sovereigns, cannot think it blameworthy that this corporate fealty and homage of ours, this recognition of a paramount lordship — I had almost said this offering up of the state itself as a worthy oblation on the high altar of universal praise — should be performed, as all public, solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in music, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind as their nature has taught them: that is, with modest splendour, with unassuming state, with mild majesty and sober pomp. For those purposes they think some part of the wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it could be in feeding the luxury of individuals. It is the public ornament. It is the public consolation. It nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it, whereas the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune feel his inferiority, and degrades and cheapens his condition. It is for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to remind him of a state in which the privileges of wealth will cease, where he will be equal by nature and may be more than equal by virtue, that this portion of his country's general wealth is employed and sanctified.
I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I am giving you opinions that have been accepted among us from very early times to this moment, with a continued and general approval, and which are indeed so worked into my mind that I cannot distinguish what I have learned from others from the results of my own reflection.
It is on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a national religious establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one. In France you are wholly mistaken if you do not believe us attached to it above all other things and beyond all other nations; and where this people has acted unwisely and unjustifiably in its favour, as in some instances they most certainly have, you will at least discover their zeal in their very errors.
This principle runs through their whole system of politics. They do not regard their church establishment as convenient but as essential to their state — not as something foreign and separable, added on for convenience, which they may either keep up or lay aside according to their notions of the moment. They regard it as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and state are inseparable ideas in their minds, and the one is scarcely ever mentioned without the other.
Our education is so shaped as to confirm and fix this impression. Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of clergymen, at every stage from infancy to manhood. Even when our young men leave schools and universities and enter that most important period of life when experience and study begin to link together, and when with that in view they visit other countries, three quarters of those who go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are clergymen — not as austere masters, nor as mere attendants, but as friends and companions of a graver cast, and not seldom men as well born as themselves. Instead of the old family servants we have seen acting as governors to leading men from other parts of Europe, we send these; and with them, as with relations, our young men commonly keep up a close connection through life. By this connection we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church, and that we liberalise the church by its intercourse with the leading characters of the country.
We are so tenacious of the old ecclesiastical forms and fashions of instruction that very little alteration has been made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth century, adhering in this as in everything else to our old settled maxim, never to depart from antiquity entirely or all at once. We found these old institutions on the whole favourable to morality and discipline, and we thought they could be amended without altering the ground they stood on. We thought they were capable of receiving and improving, and above all of preserving, the additions of science and literature as the order of Providence should successively produce them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education — for such it is in its groundwork — we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science, in the arts and in literature that have illuminated and adorned the modern world as any other nation in Europe: and we think one main cause of that improvement was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge our forefathers left us.
It is because of our attachment to a church establishment that the English nation did not think it wise to entrust that great fundamental interest of the whole to what they entrust no part of their civil or military public service to — that is, to the unsteady and precarious contributions of individuals. They go further. They certainly never have allowed, and never will allow, the fixed estate of the church to be converted into a pension, dependent on the Treasury, to be delayed, withheld, or perhaps extinguished by fiscal difficulties — difficulties that may sometimes be pretended for political purposes, and are in fact often brought on by the extravagance, negligence and rapacity of politicians. The people of England think they have constitutional motives, as well as religious ones, against any scheme for turning their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of the state. They tremble for their liberty at the thought of the influence of a clergy dependent on the crown; they tremble for the public peace at the thought of the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were made to depend on anything other than the crown. They therefore made their church, like their king and their nobility, independent.
Out of these united considerations of religion and constitutional policy, and out of their sense of a duty to make sure provision for the consolation of the feeble and the instruction of the ignorant, they have incorporated and identified the estate of the church with the mass of private property, of which the state is not the owner, either for use or for dominion, but only the guardian and the regulator. They have provided that the endowment of this establishment should be as stable as the earth it stands on, and should not fluctuate with the tides of stocks and shares.
The men of England — I mean the men of light and leading in England, whose wisdom, if they have any, is open and direct — would be ashamed, as of a silly and deceitful trick, to profess a religion in name that by their proceedings they plainly despise. If by their conduct, the only language that rarely lies, they seemed to regard the great ruling principle of the moral and natural world as a mere invention for keeping ordinary people in obedience, they think they would defeat the political purpose they had in view by such conduct. They would find it difficult to make others believe in a system they visibly gave no credit to themselves. The Christian statesmen of this land would indeed provide first for the multitude, because it is the multitude, and is therefore as such the first object of the ecclesiastical institution and of all institutions. They have been taught that the fact of the Gospel's being preached to the poor was one of the great tests of its true mission. They think, therefore, that those who do not take care that it should be preached to the poor do not believe it. But since they know that charity is not confined to any one description of people but ought to apply itself to all who have wants, they are not deprived of a due and anxious feeling of pity for the distresses of the miserable great. They are not repelled by a fastidious delicacy, by the stench of their arrogance and presumption, from giving a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and running sores. They are aware that religious instruction is of more consequence to those people than to any others: from the greatness of the temptation they are exposed to; from the important consequences that attend their faults; from the contagion of their bad example; from the necessity of bending the stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of moderation and virtue; and from a consideration of the fat stupidity and gross ignorance about what it most concerns men to know which prevails at courts, and at the head of armies, and in senates, quite as much as at the loom and in the field.
The English people are satisfied that to the great the consolations of religion are as necessary as its instructions. They too are among the unhappy. They feel personal pain and domestic sorrow. In these they have no privilege, but must pay their full share of the levy imposed on mortality. They want this sovereign balm under their gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less taken up with the limited wants of animal life, range without limit and are varied by infinite combinations in the wild and unbounded regions of the imagination. Some charitable dole is needed by these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds with nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve the killing languor and overworked lassitude of people who have nothing to do; something to excite an appetite for existence in the jaded satiety that attends all pleasures which can be bought, where nature is not left to her own process, where even desire is anticipated and so enjoyment is defeated by studied schemes and contrivances of delight, and no interval and no obstacle is put between the wish and its accomplishment.
The people of England know how little influence the teachers of religion are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing, and how much less with the newly fortunate, if they appear in a style in no way matched to those they must associate with, and over whom they must in some cases exercise something like an authority. What are people to think of a body of teachers if they see no part of it above the level of their own household servants? If the poverty were voluntary there might be some difference. Strong instances of self-denial work powerfully on our minds, and a man who has no wants has gained great freedom and firmness and even dignity. But since the mass of any description of men are only men, and their poverty cannot be voluntary, the disrespect that attends all lay poverty will not spare the ecclesiastical kind. Our provident constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, and to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur their contempt nor live on their alms; nor will it tempt the rich to neglect the true medicine of their minds. For these reasons, while we provide first for the poor, and with a parental solicitude, we have not banished religion, like something we were ashamed to be seen with, to obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No: we will have her raise her mitred head in courts and parliaments. We will have her mixed through the whole mass of life and blended with all the classes of society. The people of England will show the haughty potentates of the world and their talking sophisters that a free, a generous, an informed nation honours the high magistrates of its church; that it will not allow the insolence of wealth and titles, or any other species of proud pretension, to look down with scorn on what they look up to with reverence, nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility which they intend always to be, and which often is, the fruit — not the reward, for what could be the reward? — of learning, piety and virtue. They can see an archbishop walk before a duke without pain or grudging. They can see a bishop of Durham or a bishop of Winchester in possession of ten thousand pounds a year, and cannot conceive why it is in worse hands than estates of the same value in the hands of this earl or that squire; although it may be true that the bishop does not keep so many dogs and horses, fed with the food that ought to nourish the children of the people. It is true that the whole church revenue is not always employed, down to the last shilling, in charity, nor perhaps ought it to be; but some of it generally is. It is better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will, even at some loss to the object, than to try to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist.
Once the commonwealth has established the estates of the church as property, it can consistently hear nothing about more or less. Too much and too little are alike treason against property. What evil can arise from the quantity in any one hand, while the supreme authority has full sovereign oversight of this, as of any property, to prevent every species of abuse — and, whenever it notably goes astray, to give it a direction agreeable to the purposes it was instituted for?
In England most of us think it is envy and malignity towards men who are often the founders of their own fortune, and not any love of the self-denial and mortification of the ancient church, that makes some people look askance at the distinctions and honours and revenues which, taken from nobody, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England can tell the difference. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is the patois of fraud, the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so when these praters pretend to carry the clergy back to that primitive evangelical poverty which in spirit ought always to exist in them — and in us too, however little we may like it — but which in the fact must vary when the relation of that body to the state is altered, when manners, when modes of life, when indeed the whole order of human affairs has undergone a total revolution. We shall believe these reformers to be honest enthusiasts, instead of thinking them, as we now do, cheats and deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into the common stock and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of the early church.
With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain will never in a national emergency look for their resource in confiscating the estates of the church and the poor. Sacrilege and proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of Supply. The Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint at their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury. I am not afraid of being disavowed when I assure you that there is not one public man in this kingdom whom you would care to quote — no, not one, of any party or description — who does not condemn the dishonest, perfidious and cruel confiscation the National Assembly has been driven to make of that property which it was their first duty to protect.
It is with the exultation of a little national pride that I tell you those among us who wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the cup of their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery of your church has proved a security to the possessions of ours. It has roused the people. They see that enormous and shameless act of proscription with horror and alarm. It has opened their eyes, and will open them more and more, to the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, who, beginning in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence and plunder. At home we see similar beginnings. We are on our guard against similar conclusions.
I hope we shall never be so utterly lost to all sense of the duties the law of social union imposes on us as to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen on any pretext of public service. Who but a tyrant — a name that expresses everything which can vitiate and degrade human nature — could think of seizing the property of men unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace of humanity could think of casting men of exalted rank and sacred function, some of them of an age to call at once for reverence and compassion, down from the highest situation in the commonwealth, where they were maintained by their own landed property, into a state of poverty, depression and contempt?
The confiscators have indeed made their victims some allowance out of the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been so harshly driven, and which have been spread so bountifully as a feast for the harpies of usury. But to drive men from independence to living on alms is itself a great cruelty. What might be a tolerable condition for men in one state of life, unaccustomed to anything else, may, when all those circumstances are altered, be a dreadful revolution — one that a virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt to, except a guilt that would demand the offender's life. But to many minds this punishment of degradation and infamy is worse than death. Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering that the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favour of religion, by their education and by the place they held in administering its functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and impious hands of the men who plundered them of all the rest — to receive, if they are to receive at all, the maintenance of religion not from the charitable contributions of the faithful but from the insolent tenderness of known and avowed atheism, measured out to them on the scale of the contempt in which religion is held, and for the purpose of rendering those who take the allowance vile and of no account in the eyes of mankind.
But this act of seizing property, it seems, is a judgment in law and not a confiscation. They have discovered, it seems, in the academies of the Palais Royal and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the possessions they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts and the accumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that clergymen are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom the state may destroy at pleasure and of course limit and modify in every particular; that the goods they possess are not properly theirs but belong to the state that created the fiction; and that we need not therefore trouble ourselves about what they may suffer in their natural feelings and their natural persons on account of what is done to them in this constructed character of theirs. What does it matter under what names you injure men and deprive them of the just earnings of a profession that the state not only permitted but encouraged them to enter, and on the supposed certainty of those earnings had made the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes into entire dependence on them?
You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had your confiscators not obtained, by their early crimes, a power that secures them indemnity for every crime they have since been guilty of or may yet commit, it is not the logician's syllogism but the executioner's lash that would have refuted a sophistry which makes itself an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistical tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the dead royal tyrants who vexed the world in former ages. They are bold in that because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters. Shall we be more tender towards the tyrants of our own time, when we see them acting worse tragedies before our eyes? Shall we not take the same liberty they take, when we can take it with the same safety, and when speaking honest truth requires nothing but a contempt for the opinions of men whose actions we abhor?
This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered by what, on their system of conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts — a regard for the national honour. The enemies of property at first pretended a most tender, delicate and scrupulous anxiety about keeping the king's engagements with the public creditor. These professors of the rights of men are so busy teaching others that they have no leisure to learn anything themselves; otherwise they would have known that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged to the property of the citizen, not to the demands of the creditor of the state. The citizen's claim is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether held by purchase or by descent or by a share in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. They never so much as entered his head when he made his bargain. He knew perfectly well that the public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate, and that it can have no public estate except what it derives from a just and proportioned levy on the citizens at large. That was pledged to the public creditor, and nothing else could be. No man can mortgage his injustice as a pledge for his good faith.
It is impossible to avoid remarking on the contradictions produced by the extreme rigour and the extreme laxity of this new public faith, which operated in this transaction not according to the nature of the obligation but according to the description of the persons it was owed to. No acts of the old government of the kings of France are held valid in the National Assembly except its money engagements — of all its acts the most doubtful in legality. The rest of that royal government's acts are regarded in so odious a light that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime. A pension given as a reward for service to the state is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the state. It is better, for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that service. Yet we have seen multitudes of people of that description in France, who had never been deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times, robbed without mercy by this assembly of the rights of men. They were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.
This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate people. The Assembly, with perfect consistency it must be owned, is engaged in a respectable deliberation as to how far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations under the former government; and its committee is to report which of them they ought to ratify and which not. By this means they have put the external good faith of this virgin state on a level with its internal.
It is not easy to conceive on what rational principle the royal government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of rewarding service and making treaties by virtue of its prerogative than the power of pledging the revenue of the state, actual and possible, to creditors. Of all things, the treasure of the nation has been the least allowed to the prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies sovereign dominion over the public purse in the fullest sense. It goes far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation. Yet the acts of that dangerous power — the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism — are the only ones held sacred. How did a democratic assembly come to give this preference to a body of property that derives its title from the most critical and objectionable of all the exertions of monarchical authority? Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile an inconsistency, nor can partial favour be accounted for on equitable principles. But a contradiction and a partiality that admit no justification are not for that reason without an adequate cause, and I do not think that cause is difficult to discover.
Through the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has imperceptibly grown up, and with it a great power. Under the ancient usages that prevailed in that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the mutual convertibility of land into money and money into land, had always been difficult. Family settlements, rather more general and more strict than they are in England; the jus retractûs; the great mass of landed property held by the crown and, by a maxim of French law, held inalienably; the vast estates of the ecclesiastical corporations — all these had kept the landed and the moneyed interests more separate in France, less mixable, and had left the owners of the two distinct kinds of property less well disposed towards one another than they are in this country.
Moneyed property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the people. They saw it connected with their distresses and aggravating them. It was no less envied by the old landed interests — partly for the same reasons that made it obnoxious to the people, but much more because it eclipsed, by the splendour of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed pedigrees and bare titles of several of the nobility. Even when the nobility, who represented the more permanent landed interest, allied themselves by marriage with the other sort, as sometimes happened, the wealth that saved the family from ruin was supposed to contaminate and degrade it. So the enmities and heartburnings of these parties were increased even by the usual means through which discord is made to cease and quarrels are turned into friendships. Meanwhile the pride of wealthy men who were not noble, or newly noble, grew along with its cause. They resented an inferiority whose grounds they did not acknowledge. There was no measure they were not willing to lend themselves to in order to be revenged for the outrages of this rival pride and to raise their wealth to what they considered its natural rank and estimation. They struck at the nobility through the crown and the church. They attacked them particularly on the side where they thought them most vulnerable — that is, the possessions of the church, which through the patronage of the crown generally fell to the nobility. The bishoprics and the great commendatory abbeys were held, with few exceptions, by that order.
In this state of real though not always perceived warfare between the old noble landed interest and the new moneyed interest, the greatest strength — because the most usable — was in the hands of the latter. The moneyed interest is by its nature readier for any adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of every kind. Being recently acquired, it falls in more naturally with novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth that everyone who wants change will turn to.
Along with the moneyed interest, a new description of men had grown up with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union: I mean the political men of letters. Men of letters, being fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and greatness of Louis the Fourteenth they had not been so much cultivated by him, or by the Regent, or by his successors on the throne; nor were they attached to the court by favours and salaries as systematically as they had been during the splendid period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court protection they tried to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own, to which the two academies of France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopédie, carried on by a society of these gentlemen, contributed not a little.
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. They pursued this object with a zeal that had until then been found only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed by a spirit of proselytism to the most fanatical degree — and from that, by an easy progress, by the spirit of persecution so far as their means allowed. What could not be done towards their great end by any direct and immediate act might be worked out by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame. Many of them did indeed stand high in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done them justice, and in favour of their general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar principles. That was true liberality — which they repaid by trying to confine the reputation for sense, learning and taste to themselves and their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has been no less damaging to literature and taste than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own, and they have learned to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit, in every way and by every means, everyone who did not belong to their faction. To anyone who has observed the spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanting but the power to carry the intolerance of the tongue and the pen into a persecution that would strike at property, liberty and life.
Footnote: This — down to the end of the first sentence in the next paragraph — and some other parts here and there were inserted, on his reading the manuscript, by my lost son.
The desultory and feeble persecution carried on against them, which came more from a compliance with form and decency than from any serious resentment, neither weakened their strength nor slackened their efforts. The upshot of the whole was that, what with opposition and what with success, a violent and malignant zeal of a kind till then unknown in the world had taken entire possession of their minds and made their whole conversation, which would otherwise have been pleasing and instructive, perfectly disgusting. A spirit of cabal, intrigue and proselytism pervaded all their thoughts, words and actions. And since controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts to force, they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence with foreign princes, in hopes that through their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring about the changes they had in view. It was all one to them whether those changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism or by the earthquake of popular commotion. The correspondence between this cabal and the late king of Prussia will throw no small light on the spirit of all their proceedings. For the same purpose for which they intrigued with princes, they cultivated the moneyed interest of France in a marked manner; and partly through the means furnished by men whose particular offices gave them the most extensive and certain channels of communication, they carefully occupied all the avenues to opinion.
Footnote: I do not choose to shock the feelings of the moral reader with any quotation of their vulgar, base and profane language.
Writers, especially when they act as a body and in one direction, have great influence on the public mind; the alliance of these writers with the moneyed interest therefore had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy that attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, while in their satires they made the faults of courts, of the nobility and of the priesthood hateful by every kind of exaggeration. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link uniting obnoxious wealth with restless and desperate poverty in favour of one object.
Footnote: Their connection with Turgot and almost all the people of the finance.
As these two sorts of men appear as the principal leaders in all the recent transactions, their junction and their politics will account — not on any principles of law or of policy, but as a cause — for the general fury with which all the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations has been attacked, and for the great care that has been taken, contrary to their professed principles, of a moneyed interest originating in the authority of the crown. All the envy against wealth and power was artificially directed against other kinds of riches. On what other principle than the one I have stated can we account for anything so extraordinary and unnatural as the ecclesiastical possessions, which had stood through so many successions of ages and shocks of civil violence, and were guarded at once by justice and by prejudice, being applied to the payment of debts that are comparatively recent, invidious, and contracted by a decried and overthrown government?
Was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public debts? Suppose it was not, and that a loss must be incurred somewhere. When the only estate lawfully possessed, and the only one the contracting parties had in view at the time the bargain was made, happens to fail, who according to the principles of natural and legal equity ought to be the sufferer? Certainly it ought to be either the party who trusted, or the party who persuaded him to trust, or both — and not third parties who had nothing to do with the transaction. In any insolvency those ought to suffer who were weak enough to lend on bad security, or those who fraudulently held out a security that was not valid. The law knows no other rules of decision. But by the new institute of the rights of men, the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be held harmless: those are to answer the debt who were neither lenders nor borrowers, neither mortgagors nor mortgagees.
What had the clergy to do with these transactions? What had they to do with any public engagement beyond the extent of their own debt? To that, to be sure, their estates were bound to the last acre. Nothing leads more directly to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than attending to their proceedings with regard to this debt of the clergy. The body of confiscators, true to that moneyed interest for which they were false to every other, have found the clergy competent to incur a legal debt. Of course by doing so they declared them legally entitled to the property which their power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate implied — recognising the rights of those persecuted citizens in the very act by which they so grossly violated them.
If, as I said, anyone besides the public at large is to make good the deficiencies to the public creditor, it must be those who managed the agreement. Why, then, are the estates of all the comptrollers-general not confiscated? Why not those of the long succession of ministers, financiers and bankers who have been enriched while the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels? Why is the estate of M. Laborde not declared forfeit, rather than that of the Archbishop of Paris, who has had nothing to do with the creation or the jobbing of the public funds? Or if you must confiscate old landed estates in favour of the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined to one description of men? I do not know whether the Duke de Choiseul's expenses have left anything of the infinite sums he drew from his master's bounty during the transactions of a reign that contributed largely, by every species of prodigality in war and peace, to the present debt of France. If any of it remains, why is that not confiscated? I remember being in Paris during the time of the old government. I was there just after the Duke d'Aiguillon had been snatched, as it was generally thought, from the block by the hand of a protecting despotism. He was a minister, and had some part in the affairs of that prodigal period. Why do I not see his estate handed over to the municipalities it lies in? The noble family of Noailles have long been servants — meritorious servants, I admit — to the crown of France, and have of course had some share in its bounties. Why do I hear nothing of applying their estates to the public debt? Why is the estate of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld more sacred than that of the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld? The former is, I do not doubt, a worthy person; and, if it were not a sort of profanity to talk of the use of property as affecting the title to it, he makes a good use of his revenues. But it is no disrespect to him to say what authentic information well warrants me in saying: that the use his brother, the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, made of a property equally valid was far more laudable and far more public-spirited. Can anyone hear of the proscription of such persons and the confiscation of their effects without indignation and horror? A man who does not feel such emotions on such occasions is not a man. He does not deserve the name of a free man who will not express them.
Footnote: All have been confiscated in their turn.
Footnote: Not his brother, nor any near relation; but this mistake does not affect the argument.
Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property. None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they set up crudelem illam hastam — that cruel spear which marked a public auction of plunder — in all their auctions of rapine, ever put up for sale the goods of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount. It must be allowed in favour of those tyrants of antiquity that what they did could hardly be said to be done in cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings confused with the spirit of revenge, with innumerable recent and reciprocal inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine. They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the fear that power would return along with property to the families they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness.
These Roman confiscators, who were still only in the elements of tyranny and had not been instructed in the rights of men so as to practise every sort of cruelty on one another without provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of colour over their injustice. They considered the vanquished party as made up of traitors who had borne arms or otherwise acted with hostility against the commonwealth. They regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property by their crimes. With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no such formality. You seized five million pounds sterling of annual rent and turned forty or fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses, because "such was your pleasure". The tyrant Henry the Eighth of England, not being better enlightened than the Roman Mariuses and Sullas, and not having studied in your new schools, did not know what an effective instrument of despotism was to be found in that grand arsenal of offensive weapons, the rights of men. When he resolved to rob the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins has robbed all the clergy, he began by setting up a commission to examine the crimes and abuses prevailing in those communities. As might be expected, his commission reported truths, exaggerations and falsehoods. But truly or falsely, it reported abuses and offences. However, since abuses might be corrected, since a crime committed by persons does not always mean a forfeiture for the community, and since in that dark age property had not yet been discovered to be a creature of prejudice, all those abuses — and there were plenty of them — were hardly thought sufficient ground for the sort of confiscation it suited his purposes to make. He therefore procured a formal surrender of these estates. All these laborious proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history as necessary preliminaries, before he could venture — by bribing the members of his two servile Houses with a share of the spoil, and holding out to them an eternal immunity from taxation — to demand a confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an act of Parliament. Had fate reserved him for our times, four technical terms would have done his business and saved him all this trouble; he would have needed nothing more than one short form of incantation: "Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men."
I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has ever yet commended under any of their false colours; and yet in those false colours despotism paid a homage to justice. The power that was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame. While shame keeps watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will moderation be utterly banished from the minds of tyrants.
I believe every honest man shares the reflections of our political poet on that occasion, and will pray to avert the omen whenever these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his view or his imagination:
"May no such storm Fall on our times, where ruin must reform! Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous, dire offence, What crime could any Christian king incense To such a rage? Was't luxury, or lust? Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just? Were these their crimes? They were his own much more: But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor."
Footnote: The rest of the passage is this: "Who, having spent the treasures of his crown, Condemns their luxury to feed his own. And yet this act, to varnish o'er the shame Of sacrilege, must bear Devotion's name. No crime so bold, but would be understood A Real, or at least a seeming good. Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name, And free from conscience, is a slave to fame. Thus he the Church at once protects and spoils: But princes' swords are sharper than their styles. And thus to th' ages past he makes amends, Their charity destroys, their faith defends. Then did Religion in a lazy cell, In empty, airy contemplations, dwell; And like the block, unmovèd lay: but ours, As much too active, like the stork devours. Is there no temperate region can be known Betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone? Could we not wake from that lethargic dream, But to be restless in a worse extreme? And for that lethargy was there no care, But to be cast into a calenture? Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance So far, to make us wish for ignorance, And rather in the dark to grope our way, Than, led by a false guide, to err by day? Who sees these dismal heaps, but would demand What barbarous invader sack'd the land? But when he hears no Goth, no Turk did bring This desolation, but a Christian king, When nothing but the name of zeal appears 'Twixt our best actions and the worst of theirs, What does he think our sacrilege would spare, When such th' effects of our devotions are?" Cooper's Hill, by Sir John Denham.
This same wealth, which is at all times treason and lèze-nation to a needy and rapacious despotism under every form of government, was your temptation to violate property, law and religion, all united in one object. But was the state of France so wretched and undone that no resource but plunder remained to preserve its existence? On this point I should like some information. When the States met, was the condition of the finances of France such that, after economising on principles of justice and mercy through every department, no fair distribution of the burdens over all the orders could possibly have restored them? If such an equal levy would have been sufficient, you know very well that it might easily have been made. M. Necker, in the budget he laid before the orders assembled at Versailles, gave a detailed account of the state of the French nation.
Footnote: Rapport de Mons. le Directeur-Général des Finances, fait par Ordre du Roi à Versailles. Mai 5, 1789. (Report of the Director-General of Finance, made by the King's order at Versailles, 5 May 1789.)
If we credit him, there was no need to resort to any new impositions at all to bring the receipts of France into balance with its expenses. He put the permanent charges of every description, including the interest on a new loan of four hundred millions, at 531,444,000 livres, and the fixed revenue at 475,294,000, making the deficiency 56,150,000, or a little under £2,200,000 sterling. But to balance it he brought forward savings and improvements of revenue, considered entirely certain, to rather more than the amount of that deficiency; and he concludes with these emphatic words, on page 39: "Quel pays, Messieurs, que celui, où, sans impôts et avec de simples objets inaperçus, on peut faire disparoître un déficit qui a fait tant de bruit en Europe!" — what a country, gentlemen, where without new taxes, and by simple items nobody had noticed, a deficit that has made so much noise in Europe can be made to disappear! As to the repayment, the sinking of the debt and the other great objects of public credit and political arrangement indicated in M. Necker's speech, there could be no doubt that a very moderate and proportioned assessment on the citizens without distinction would have provided for all of them to the fullest extent of their demand.
If this representation of M. Necker's was false, then the Assembly is culpable in the highest degree for having forced the king to accept him as his minister, and, since the king's deposition, for having employed as their minister a man capable of so notoriously abusing his master's confidence and their own — and in a matter of the highest moment, belonging directly to his particular office. But if the representation was exact, as, having always shared your high respect for M. Necker, I have no doubt it was, then what can be said for men who, instead of a moderate, reasonable and general contribution, have in cold blood and driven by no necessity resorted to a partial and cruel confiscation?
Was that contribution refused on a pretext of privilege, either by the clergy or by the nobility? Certainly not. As for the clergy, they even ran ahead of the wishes of the third order. Before the States met, they had in all their instructions expressly directed their deputies to renounce every immunity that put them on a footing distinct from their fellow subjects. The clergy were even more explicit in this renunciation than the nobility.
But let us suppose the deficiency had remained at the fifty-six millions, or £2,200,000 sterling, as first stated by M. Necker. Let us grant that all the resources he set against that deficiency were impudent and groundless fictions, and that the Assembly, or its lords of articles at the Jacobins, were thereby justified in laying the whole burden of that deficiency on the clergy. Even granting all that, a necessity of £2,200,000 sterling will not support a confiscation to the amount of five millions. Imposing £2,200,000 on the clergy would, as a partial measure, have been oppressive and unjust, but it would not have been altogether ruinous to those it was imposed on; and therefore it would not have answered the managers' real purpose.
Footnote: In the constitution of Scotland during the Stuart reigns a committee sat to prepare bills, and none could pass but those they had previously approved. This committee was called the Lords of Articles.
Perhaps people unacquainted with the state of France, on hearing that the clergy and the nobility were privileged in the matter of taxation, may imagine that before the Revolution these bodies contributed nothing to the state. That is a great mistake. They certainly did not contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the commons. Both, however, contributed largely. Neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the excise on consumable goods, from customs duties, or from any of the other numerous indirect taxes which in France, as here, make up so very large a proportion of all payments to the public. The nobility paid the poll tax. They also paid a land tax, called the twentieth penny, sometimes as high as three and sometimes four shillings in the pound — both of them direct taxes, of no light kind and no trivial yield. The clergy of the provinces annexed to France by conquest, which make about an eighth part of the whole in extent but a much larger proportion in wealth, likewise paid the poll tax and the twentieth penny at the rate the nobility paid. The clergy in the old provinces did not pay the poll tax, but they had bought themselves out of it at a cost of about twenty-four millions, a little more than a million sterling. They were exempt from the twentieths; but then they made free gifts, they contracted debts for the state, and they were subject to some other charges, the whole reckoned at about a thirteenth part of their clear income. They ought to have paid about forty thousand pounds a year more to put them on a par with the contribution of the nobility.
When the terrors of this tremendous proscription hung over the clergy, they made an offer of a contribution, through the Archbishop of Aix, which for its extravagance ought not to have been accepted. But it was evidently and obviously more advantageous to the public creditor than anything the confiscation could rationally promise. Why was it not accepted? The reason is plain. There was no desire that the church should be brought to serve the state. The service of the state was made a pretext for destroying the church. On their way to destroying the church they would not scruple to destroy their country — and they have destroyed it. One great end of the project would have been defeated if a plan of extortion had been adopted instead of the scheme of confiscation. The new landed interest connected with the new republic, and connected with it for its very existence, could not have been created. This was among the reasons why that extravagant ransom was not accepted.
The madness of the confiscation project, on the plan first pretended, soon became apparent. To bring this unwieldy mass of landed property, enlarged by the confiscation of the whole vast landed domain of the crown, onto the market all at once was obviously to defeat the profits the confiscation was meant to produce, by depreciating the value of those lands and indeed of all the landed estates throughout France. Such a sudden diversion of all the country's circulating money from trade into land must be a further mischief. What step was taken? Did the Assembly, on becoming aware of the inevitable ill effects of their projected sale, go back to the offers of the clergy? No distress could oblige them to travel by a road disgraced by any appearance of justice. Giving up all hope of a general immediate sale, another project seems to have succeeded. They proposed to take stock in exchange for the church lands. Great difficulties arose in that project over equalising the things to be exchanged. Other obstacles presented themselves too, which threw them back on some scheme of sale. The municipalities had taken alarm. They would not hear of transferring the whole plunder of the kingdom to the stockholders in Paris. Many of those municipalities had been reduced, and reduced by system, to the most deplorable poverty. Money was nowhere to be seen. They were therefore brought to the point that was so ardently desired. They panted for a currency of any kind that might revive their perishing industry. The municipalities were then to be admitted to a share of the spoil, which plainly made the first scheme, if it had ever been seriously entertained, altogether impracticable. Public needs pressed on every side. The Minister of Finance repeated his call for supply in a most urgent, anxious and foreboding voice. Pressed on all sides in this way, instead of the first plan of converting their bankers into bishops and abbots, and instead of paying the old debt, they contracted a new one at three per cent, creating a new paper currency founded on an eventual sale of the church lands. They issued this paper currency to satisfy, in the first instance, chiefly the demands made on them by the bank of discount, the great machine or paper-mill of their fictitious wealth.
The spoil of the church had now become the only resource for all their operations in finance, the vital principle of all their politics, the sole security for the existence of their power. It was necessary, by every means including the most violent, to put every individual on the same footing and to bind the nation together in one guilty interest to uphold this act and the authority of the men who did it. In order to force the most reluctant into a share of their pillage, they made their paper circulation compulsory in all payments. Anyone who considers the general tendency of their schemes towards this one object as a centre, and as a centre from which all their later measures radiate, will not think I dwell too long on this part of the National Assembly's proceedings.
To cut off all appearance of connection between the crown and public justice, and to bring the whole under implicit obedience to the dictators in Paris, the old independent judicature of the Parlements, with all its merits and all its faults, was wholly abolished. While the Parlements existed it was clear that the people might one day resort to them and rally under the standard of their ancient laws. It became a matter for consideration, however, that the magistrates and officers of the courts now abolished had purchased their places at a very high price, for which — as well as for the duty they performed — they received only a very low return of interest. Simple confiscation is a favour reserved for the clergy; towards the lawyers some appearances of equity are to be kept up, and they are to receive compensation to an immense amount. Their compensation becomes part of the national debt, for the liquidation of which there is the one inexhaustible fund. The lawyers are to have their compensation in the new church paper, which is to march in step with the new principles of judicature and legislature. The dismissed magistrates are to take their share of martyrdom with the clergy, or else to receive their own property out of such a fund and in such a manner as everyone seasoned in the ancient principles of jurisprudence, and sworn to guard property, must look on with horror. Even the clergy are to receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper, stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege and with the symbols of their own ruin — or else they must starve. So violent an outrage on credit, property and liberty as this compulsory paper currency has seldom been exhibited by the alliance of bankruptcy and tyranny in any age or any nation.
In the course of all these operations the grand arcanum at last comes out: that in reality, and in any fair sense, the lands of the church, so far as anything certain can be gathered from their proceedings, are not to be sold at all. By the late resolutions of the National Assembly they are indeed to be delivered to the highest bidder. But it is to be observed that a certain portion only of the purchase-money is to be laid down. A period of twelve years is to be allowed for paying the rest. The philosophic purchasers are therefore to be put instantly into possession of the estate on payment of a sort of fine. It becomes in some respects a kind of gift to them, to be held on the feudal tenure of zeal for the new establishment. This project is plainly meant to let in a body of purchasers who have no money. The consequence will be that these purchasers, or rather grantees, will pay not only out of the rents as they fall due, which the state might just as well receive itself, but out of the spoil of building materials, out of waste committed in the woods, and out of whatever money hands habituated to the grip of usury can wring from the miserable peasant. He is to be handed over to the mercenary and arbitrary discretion of men who will be spurred to every species of extortion by the growing demands on the growing profits of an estate held under the precarious settlement of a new political system.
When all the frauds, impostures, violences, robberies, burnings, murders, confiscations, compulsory paper currencies and every description of tyranny and cruelty used to bring about and uphold this Revolution have their natural effect — that is, to shock the moral feelings of all virtuous and sober minds — the supporters of this philosophic system immediately strain their throats declaiming against the old monarchical government of France. When they have made that deposed power sufficiently black, they then argue as though everyone who disapproves of their new abuses must of course be a partisan of the old, and as though those who condemn their crude and violent schemes of liberty ought to be treated as advocates of servitude. I admit that their necessities do compel them to this base and contemptible fraud. Nothing can reconcile men to their proceedings and projects but the supposition that there is no third option between them and some tyranny as odious as anything the records of history or the invention of poets can supply. This prattle of theirs hardly deserves the name of sophistry. It is nothing but plain impudence. Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice, of anything between the despotism of a monarch and the despotism of a multitude? Have they never heard of a monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation, and both of these controlled again by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large, acting through a suitable and permanent organ? Is it impossible, then, that a man might be found who, without criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity, prefers such a mixed and tempered government to either extreme — and who may think that nation destitute of all wisdom and all virtue which, having it in its power to obtain such a government easily, or rather to confirm it when actually possessed, chose instead to commit a thousand crimes and to subject their country to a thousand evils in order to avoid it? Is it a truth so universally acknowledged that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form human society can be cast in, that a man is not allowed to hesitate about its merits without being suspected of being a friend to tyranny — that is, an enemy of mankind?
I do not know what to call the present ruling authority in France. It professes to be a pure democracy, though I think it is in a direct line to become shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the present I will grant it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect it pretends to. I condemn no form of government on merely abstract principles. There may be situations in which the purely democratic form becomes necessary. There may be some — very few, and very particularly circumstanced — where it would be clearly desirable. I do not take this to be the case of France, or of any other great country. Until now we have seen no examples of considerable democracies. The ancients knew them better. Not being wholly unread in the authors who saw most of those constitutions and understood them best, I cannot help agreeing with their opinion that an absolute democracy, no more than an absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy of a republic than its sound constitution. If I remember rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance to a tyranny. Of this I am certain: that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the cruellest oppression on the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must — and that the oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be feared from the dominion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a far more deplorable condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of mankind to soothe the smart of their wounds, and the applause of the people to encourage their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are wronged by multitudes are deprived of all outside consolation. They seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.
Footnote: When I wrote this I quoted from memory, many years after reading the passage. A learned friend has found it, and it is as follows: τὸ ἠ̂θος τὸ αὐτό, καὶ ἄμφω δεσποτικὰ τω̂ν βελτιόνων, καὶ τὰ ψηφίσματα ὥσπερ ἐκει̂ τὰ ἐπιτάγματα, καὶ ὁ δημαγωγὸς καὶ ὁ κόλαξ οἱ αὐτοὶ καὶ ἀνάλογον. καὶ μάλιστα δ' ἑκάτεροι παρ' ἑκατέροις ἰσχύουσιν, οἱ μὲν κόλακες παρὰ τοι̂ς τυράννοις, οἱ δὲ δημαγωγοὶ παρὰ τοι̂ς δήμοις τοι̂ς τοιούτοις. "The ethical character is the same: both exercise despotism over the better class of citizens; and decrees are in the one what ordinances and arrêts are in the other. The demagogue, too, and the court favourite are not infrequently the same men, and always bear a close analogy; and these have the principal power, each in their respective forms of government — favourites with the absolute monarch, and demagogues with a people such as I have described." — Aristotle, Politics, book 4, chapter 4.
But suppose democracy does not have that inevitable tendency to party tyranny which I take it to have, and suppose it possesses as much good when unmixed as I am sure it possesses when compounded with other forms. Does monarchy, on its side, contain nothing at all to recommend it? I do not often quote Bolingbroke, nor have his works in general left any lasting impression on my mind. He is a presumptuous and a superficial writer. But he has one observation that is in my opinion not without depth and solidity. He says he prefers a monarchy to other governments because you can graft any description of republic on a monarchy better than you can graft anything of monarchy on the republican forms. I think he is perfectly right. The fact is so historically, and it agrees well with the theory.
I know how easy a subject it is to dwell on the faults of departed greatness. By a revolution in the state, yesterday's fawning sycophant is converted into the austere critic of the present hour. But steady, independent minds, when they have something of such serious concern to mankind as government under consideration, will disdain to play the satirist and the declaimer. They will judge human institutions as they judge human characters. They will sort the good from the evil, which is mixed in mortal institutions as it is in mortal men.
Your government in France, though usually and I think justly reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified monarchies, was still full of abuses. Those abuses accumulated over a length of time, as they must accumulate in every monarchy that is not under the constant inspection of a popular representative body. I am no stranger to the faults and defects of the overthrown government of France, and I do not think I am inclined either by nature or by policy to write a panegyric on anything that is a just and natural object of censure. But the question now is not about the vices of that monarchy but about its existence. Is it true, then, that the French government was such as to be incapable of reform or undeserving of it, so that it was of absolute necessity that the whole fabric should be pulled down at once and the ground cleared for putting up a theoretical, experimental building in its place? All France was of a different opinion at the beginning of the year 1789. The instructions given to the representatives at the States-General, from every district in that kingdom, were full of projects for reforming that government, without the remotest hint of any design to destroy it. Had such a design been so much as insinuated then, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice would have rejected it with scorn and horror. Men have sometimes been led by degrees, and sometimes hurried, into things they would never have allowed the remotest approach to if they could have seen the whole of them together. When those instructions were given there was no question that abuses existed and that they demanded reform, nor is there now. In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution things changed their shape; and in consequence of that change, the true question now is whether those who would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the right.
To hear some men speak of the late monarchy of France, you would imagine they were talking about Persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of Nadir Shah, or at least describing the barbarous anarchic despotism of Turkey, where the finest countries in the most genial climates in the world are wasted by peace more than any countries have been harried by war, where the arts are unknown, where manufactures languish, where science is extinguished, where agriculture decays, where the human race itself melts away and perishes under the observer's eye. Was this the case of France? I have no way of settling the question except by reference to facts, and the facts do not support the resemblance. Along with much evil there is some good in monarchy itself; and the French monarchy must have received some correction of its evil from religion, from laws, from manners and from opinion, which made it a despotism rather in appearance than in reality — though by no means a free, and therefore by no means a good, constitution.
Among the standards by which the effects of a government on any country are to be estimated, I must count the state of its population as not the least reliable. No country in which population flourishes and is progressively improving can be under a very mischievous government. About sixty years ago the intendants of the généralités of France made, among other matters, a report on the population of their several districts. I have not the books by me, which are very voluminous, nor do I know where to get them — I am obliged to speak from memory, and therefore the less positively — but I think the population of France was estimated by them, even at that period, at twenty-two million souls. At the end of the last century it had generally been reckoned at eighteen. On either of these estimates France was not ill-peopled. M. Necker, whose authority for his own time is at least equal to that of the intendants for theirs, reckons the people of France in the year 1780, and on apparently sure principles, at twenty-four million six hundred and seventy thousand. But was this the probable ultimate limit under the old establishment? Dr Price is of the opinion that the growth of population in France was by no means at its height in that year. I certainly defer to Dr Price's authority a good deal more in these calculations than I do in his general politics. This gentleman, taking his ground on M. Necker's data, is very confident that since the date of that minister's calculation the French population has increased rapidly — so rapidly that in the year 1789 he will not agree to rate the people of that kingdom at less than thirty millions. After making a large deduction from Dr Price's sanguine calculation, and I think a large one ought to be made, I have no doubt the population of France did increase considerably during this later period. But suppose it increased by no more than enough to bring the twenty-four million six hundred and seventy thousand up to twenty-five millions: still a population of twenty-five millions, and increasing, on a space of about twenty-seven thousand square leagues, is immense. It is, for instance, a good deal more than the proportional population of this island, or even than that of England, the best-peopled part of the United Kingdom.
It is not universally true that France is a fertile country. Considerable tracts of it are barren and labour under other natural disadvantages. In those parts of that territory where things are more favourable, so far as I can discover, the numbers of the people correspond to the indulgence of nature. The généralité of Lille — this, I admit, is the strongest example — about ten years ago contained seven hundred and thirty-four thousand six hundred souls on an extent of four hundred and four and a half leagues, which is one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two inhabitants to each square league. The average for the rest of France is about nine hundred inhabitants to the same measure.
Footnote: De l'Administration des Finances de la France, by M. Necker, volume 1, page 288.
I do not attribute this population to the deposed government, because I do not like to compliment the contrivances of men with what is largely due to the bounty of Providence. But that decried government cannot have obstructed, and most probably favoured, the operation of those causes — whatever they were, whether of nature in the soil or of habits of industry among the people — which have produced so large a number of the species throughout that whole kingdom, and in some particular places such prodigies of population. I will never suppose that the fabric of a state which experience shows to contain a principle favourable to the increase of mankind, however latent that principle may be, is the worst of all political institutions.
The wealth of a country is another and no contemptible standard by which we may judge whether a government is on the whole protective or destructive. France far exceeds England in the multitude of her people, but I take her comparative wealth to be much inferior to ours, less equal in its distribution and less ready in its circulation. I believe the difference in the form of the two governments to be among the causes of this advantage on England's side. I speak of England, not of the whole British dominions, which if compared with those of France would to some degree weaken the comparative rate of wealth on our side. But wealth that will not bear comparison with the riches of England may still amount to a very respectable degree of prosperity. M. Necker's book, published in 1785, contains an accurate and interesting collection of facts about public economy and political arithmetic, and his reflections on the subject are generally wise and liberal. In that work he gives an idea of the state of France very remote from the portrait of a country whose government was a perfect grievance, an absolute evil, admitting no cure but the violent and uncertain remedy of a total revolution. He states that from the year 1726 to the year 1784 there was coined at the mint of France, in gold and silver, to the amount of about one hundred million pounds sterling.
Footnote: De l'Administration des Finances de la France, by M. Necker.
Footnote: Volume 3, chapters 8 and 9.
It is impossible that M. Necker should be mistaken about the amount of bullion coined at the mint. That is a matter of official record. This able financier's reasonings about the quantity of gold and silver that remained in circulation when he wrote in 1785 — about four years before the deposition and imprisonment of the French king — are not equally certain; but they rest on grounds so apparently solid that it is not easy to refuse a considerable degree of assent to his calculation. He puts the numéraire, or what we call specie, then actually existing in France at about eighty-eight millions of the same English money. A great accumulation of wealth for one country, large as that country is! So far was M. Necker from thinking this influx of wealth likely to cease when he wrote in 1785, that he assumes a future annual increase of two per cent on the money brought into France during the periods he computed from.
Some adequate cause must originally have brought all the money coined at its mint into that kingdom, and some cause equally effective must have kept at home, or drawn back into its bosom, such a vast flood of treasure as M. Necker calculates to remain for domestic circulation. Make any reasonable deductions from M. Necker's computation, and the remainder must still amount to an immense sum. Causes powerful enough to acquire and to retain like this are not to be found in discouraged industry, insecure property and a positively destructive government. Indeed, when I consider the face of the kingdom of France, the multitude and wealth of her cities, the useful magnificence of her spacious highroads and bridges, the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations opening the conveniences of sea communication through a solid continent of such immense extent; when I turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbours and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or for trade; when I bring before my view the number of her fortifications, built with such bold and masterly skill and made and maintained at such prodigious cost, presenting an armed front and an impenetrable barrier to her enemies on every side; when I recall how very small a part of that extensive region is uncultivated, and to what complete perfection the growing of many of the best productions of the earth has been brought in France; when I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours and in some particulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I count up the men she has bled to extend her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her orators, sacred and profane — I see in all this something that awes and commands the imagination, that checks the mind on the brink of hasty and indiscriminate censure, and that demands we should examine very seriously what and how great the latent vices are that could authorise us to level so spacious a fabric with the ground all at once. I do not recognise in this view of things the despotism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the character of a government that has been on the whole so oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all reformation. I must think such a government well deserved to have its excellences heightened, its faults corrected and its capacities improved into a British constitution.
Whoever has examined the proceedings of that deposed government over several years back cannot fail to have noticed, amid the inconstancy and fluctuation natural to courts, an earnest effort towards the prosperity and improvement of the country. He must admit that it had long been employed in removing some abusive practices and usages that had prevailed in the state, and in considerably correcting many others — and that even the unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his subjects, inconsistent as it undoubtedly was with law and liberty, had been growing more moderate in its exercise every day. So far from refusing itself to reformation, that government was open, with a blameworthy degree of readiness, to all sorts of projects and projectors on the subject. Rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, which was soon turned against those who fostered it and ended in their ruin. It is only cold and no very flattering justice to that fallen monarchy to say that for many years it offended more by levity and want of judgment in several of its schemes than by any lack of diligence or public spirit. To compare the government of France over the last fifteen or sixteen years with wise and well-constituted establishments of that or any other period is not to act fairly. But if it is compared with any of the former reigns, in point of prodigality in spending money or of rigour in the exercise of power, I believe candid judges will give little credit to the good intentions of those who dwell perpetually on the gifts to favourites, or the expenses of the court, or the horrors of the Bastille, in the reign of Louis the Sixteenth.
Footnote: The world is obliged to M. de Calonne for the pains he has taken to refute the scandalous exaggerations about some of the royal expenses, and to expose the false account given of pensions, for the wicked purpose of provoking the populace to crimes of every kind.
Whether the system, if it deserves such a name, now built on the ruins of that ancient monarchy will be able to give a better account of the population and wealth of the country it has taken under its care is very doubtful. Instead of improving by the change, I expect that a long series of years must be counted before it can recover in any degree from the effects of this philosophic Revolution, and before the nation can be put back on its former footing. If Dr Price should think fit, a few years from now, to favour us with an estimate of the population of France, he will hardly be able to make up his tale of thirty million souls as computed in 1789, or the Assembly's computation of twenty-six millions for that year, or even M. Necker's twenty-five millions in 1780. I hear that there are considerable emigrations from France, and that many, quitting that voluptuous climate and that seductive Circean liberty, have taken refuge in the frozen regions and under the British despotism of Canada.
With coin disappearing as it now is, nobody would think it the same country in which the present minister of finance was able to discover eighty million pounds sterling in specie. From its general aspect one would conclude it had been for some time past under the special direction of the learned academicians of Laputa and Balnibarbi. The population of Paris has already declined so far that M. Necker stated to the National Assembly that the provision to be made for its subsistence was a fifth less than what had formerly been found necessary. It is said, and I have never heard it contradicted, that a hundred thousand people are out of work in that city, though it has become the seat of the imprisoned court and of the National Assembly. Nothing, I am credibly informed, can exceed the shocking and disgusting spectacle of beggary displayed in that capital. Indeed the votes of the National Assembly leave no doubt of the fact. They have lately appointed a standing committee on begging. They are contriving at once a vigorous police on this subject and, for the first time, the imposition of a tax to maintain the poor, for whose present relief great sums appear on the face of the public accounts for the year. Meanwhile the leaders of the legislative clubs and coffee houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability. They speak with the most sovereign contempt of the rest of the world. They tell the people, to comfort them in the rags they have clothed them in, that they are a nation of philosophers; and sometimes by all the arts of quackish parade, by show and tumult and bustle, and sometimes by alarms of plots and invasions, they try to drown the cries of poverty and to divert the observer's eyes from the ruin and wretchedness of the state. A brave people will certainly prefer liberty accompanied by a virtuous poverty to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and wealth is paid, one ought to be pretty sure that it is real liberty being purchased, and that she is to be had at no other price. I shall always, however, regard that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.
Footnote: See Gulliver's Travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers.
Footnote: M. de Calonne states the falling off of the population of Paris as far more considerable, and it may be so, since the date of M. Necker's calculation.
Footnote: The account stands as follows.
Livres £ s. d. Relief work to make up for the lack of employment, in Paris and in the provinces 3,866,920 161,121 13 4 Suppression of vagrancy and begging 1,671,417 69,642 7 6 Premiums on the importation of grain 5,671,907 236,329 9 2 Expenses relating to subsistence, less the recoveries that have been made 39,871,790 1,661,324 11 8 ---------- --------- Total 51,082,034 2,128,418 1 8
Editor's note: The source prints the third figure in the sterling column as 235,329 9s 2d. Every other row of the table converts at exactly twenty-four livres to the pound, and only with 236,329 9s 2d does the column add up to the printed total. The figure is corrected.
When I sent this book to the press I had some doubt about the nature and extent of the last item in the accounts above, which appears only under a general head with no detail. Since then I have seen M. de Calonne's work. I must count it a great loss to me that I did not have that advantage earlier. M. de Calonne thinks this item is on account of general subsistence; but as he cannot understand how a loss of more than £1,661,000 sterling could be sustained on the difference between the price and the sale of grain, he seems to attribute this enormous head of charge to secret expenses of the Revolution. I cannot say anything positive on that subject. The reader is able to judge, from the aggregate of these immense charges, of the state and condition of France and of the system of public economy adopted in that nation. These items of account produced no inquiry and no discussion in the National Assembly.
The advocates of this Revolution, not content with exaggerating the vices of their ancient government, strike at the fame of their country itself by painting almost everything that could have attracted the attention of strangers — I mean their nobility and their clergy — as objects of horror. If this were only a libel there would not be much in it. But it has practical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who formed the great body of your landed men and the whole of your military officers, resembled those of Germany at the period when the Hanseatic towns were forced to confederate against the nobles in defence of their property; had they been like the Orsini and the Vitelli in Italy, who used to sally out of their fortified dens to rob the trader and the traveller; had they been like the Mamelukes in Egypt or the Nayars on the coast of Malabar — then I do admit that too critical an inquiry into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance might not be advisable. The statues of Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds, confounded by the dreadful emergency in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in favour of its own principles, might turn aside while fraud and violence accomplished the destruction of a pretended nobility that disgraced human nature while it persecuted it. The persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and arbitrary confiscation might remain silent spectators of this civil war between the vices.
But did the privileged nobility who met at Versailles in 1789 under the king's summons, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as the Nayars or Mamelukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of former times? If I had asked the question then, I should have passed for a madman. What have they done since, that they should be driven into exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled and tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in ashes; that their order should be abolished and its very memory extinguished if possible, by ordering them to change the names they were commonly known by? Read their instructions to their representatives. They breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and recommend reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privileges in the matter of taxation were surrendered voluntarily, just as the king from the beginning surrendered all pretence of a right of taxation. On the question of a free constitution there was only one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy was at an end. It breathed its last without a groan, without a struggle, without a convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension, arose afterwards, over preferring a despotic democracy to a government of reciprocal control. The victorious party's triumph was a triumph over the principles of a British constitution.
I have noticed the affectation that has prevailed in Paris for many years past, to a degree that is perfectly childish, of idolising the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put a man out of humour with that ornament of the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of insidious panegyric. The people who have worked this engine the hardest are those who have ended their panegyrics by dethroning his successor and descendant — a man at least as good-natured as Henry the Fourth, altogether as fond of his people, and who has done infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that great monarch did, or than we can be sure he ever meant to do. It is well for his panegyrists that they do not have him to deal with. For Henry of Navarre was a resolute, active and politic prince. He did possess great humanity and mildness, but a humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his interests. He never sought to be loved without first putting himself in a position to be feared. He used soft language with determined conduct. He asserted and maintained his authority wholesale, and dealt out his acts of concession only in retail. He spent the income of his prerogative nobly, but he took care not to break into the capital — never abandoning for a moment any of the claims he made under the fundamental laws, and never sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field and sometimes on the scaffold. Because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has earned the praises of men whom, if they had lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastille and brought to punishment along with the regicides he hanged after he had starved Paris into surrender.
If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of Henry the Fourth, they must remember that they cannot think more highly of him than he thought of the nobility of France, whose virtue, honour, courage, patriotism and loyalty were his constant theme.
But the nobility of France have degenerated since the days of Henry the Fourth. This is possible, but it is more than I can believe to be true to any great degree. I do not pretend to know France as accurately as some others; but I have tried all my life to make myself acquainted with human nature, or I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind. In that study I could not pass over a vast portion of our nature as it appeared modified in a country only twenty-four miles from the shore of this island. On my best observation, compared with my best inquiries, I found your nobility for the greater part composed of men of high spirit and a delicate sense of honour, both as individuals and with regard to their whole body, over which they kept a censorial eye beyond what is common in other countries. They were tolerably well bred; very obliging, humane and hospitable; frank and open in conversation; with a good military tone, and reasonably tinctured with literature, particularly the authors in their own language. Many had claims far above this description. I speak of those one generally met with.
As to their behaviour towards the lower classes, they seemed to me to conduct themselves with good nature, and with something nearer to familiarity than is generally practised with us in the dealings between the higher and lower ranks of life. To strike anyone, even in the most abject condition, was in a manner unknown and would be highly disgraceful. Instances of other ill treatment of the humble part of the community were rare; and as to attacks on the property or personal liberty of the commons, I never heard of any at all from them — nor, while the laws were in force under the ancient government, would such tyranny in subjects have been permitted. As landowners I had no fault to find with their conduct, though I found much to blame and much I could wish changed in many of the old tenures. Where they let their land for rent, I could not discover that their agreements with their farmers were oppressive; nor, when they were in partnership with the farmer, as was often the case, have I ever heard that they took the lion's share. The proportions did not seem inequitable. There may have been exceptions, but they were certainly exceptions only. I have no reason to believe that in these respects the landed nobility of France were worse than the landed gentry of this country, and they were certainly in no respect more vexatious than the landholders of their own nation who were not noble. In the cities the nobility had no kind of power; in the country very little. You know, Sir, that much of the civil government, and the policing of the most essential parts of it, was not in the hands of the nobility that presents itself first to our thoughts. The revenue, whose system and collection were the most grievous parts of the French government, was not administered by the men of the sword, nor were they answerable for the vices of its principle, or for the vexations in its management where any such existed.
Denying, as I am well warranted in doing, that the nobility had any considerable share in the oppression of the people in the cases where real oppression existed, I am ready to admit that they were not without considerable faults and errors. A foolish imitation of the worst part of the manners of England, which damaged their natural character without putting in its place what they perhaps meant to copy, has certainly made them worse than they used to be. Habitual dissoluteness of manners, continued beyond the pardonable period of life, was more common among them than it is with us; and it reigned with less hope of remedy, though possibly with somewhat less mischief, by being covered with more outward decorum. They gave too much countenance to that licentious philosophy which has helped to bring on their ruin. There was another and more fatal error among them. Those of the commons who came up to or exceeded many of the nobility in wealth were not fully admitted to the rank and estimation that wealth, in reason and good policy, ought to confer in every country, though I do not think equally with the estimation given to other nobility. The two kinds of aristocracy were kept too punctiliously apart — less so, however, than in Germany and some other nations.
This separation, as I have already taken the liberty of suggesting to you, I take to be one principal cause of the destruction of the old nobility. The military in particular was too exclusively reserved for men of family. But after all, this was an error of opinion, which a conflicting opinion would have rectified. A permanent assembly, in which the commons had their share of power, would soon have abolished whatever was too invidious and insulting in these distinctions; and even the faults in the morals of the nobility would probably have been corrected by the greater variety of occupation and pursuit that a constitution by orders would have given rise to.
All this violent outcry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art. To be honoured and even privileged by the laws, opinions and inveterate usages of one's country, growing out of the prejudice of ages, has nothing in it to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be too tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong struggle in every individual to keep possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It works as an instinct to secure property and to keep communities in a settled state. What is there to shock anyone in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. "Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus" — all good men always favour the nobility — was the saying of a wise and good man. It is indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline towards it with some sort of partial leaning. A man feels no ennobling principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial institutions that have been adopted to give a body to opinion and permanence to fleeting esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, with no taste for the reality of virtue or for any image or representation of it, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and honour. I do not like to see anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land. It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction that my inquiries and observations failed to show me any incorrigible vices in the nobility of France, or any abuse that could not be removed by a reform well short of abolition. Your nobility did not deserve punishment; but to degrade is to punish.
It was with the same satisfaction that I found the result of my inquiry about your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my ears that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. I do not listen with much credulity to anyone speaking evil of those they are about to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are invented or exaggerated when profit is expected from punishing them. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. There were undoubtedly vices and abuses in that order, and there must be. It was an old establishment, and not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of their property, nor those cruel insults and degradations and that unnatural persecution which have been substituted for regulation that would have improved them.
If there had been any just cause for this new religious persecution, the atheistic libellers who act as trumpeters to rouse the populace to plunder do not love anybody so much as to refrain from dwelling with satisfaction on the vices of the existing clergy. They have not done so. They find themselves obliged to rake through the histories of former ages — which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry — for every instance of oppression and persecution committed by that body or in its favour, in order to justify their own persecutions and their own cruelties on very iniquitous, because very illogical, principles of retaliation. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to the guilty acts except in names and general descriptions is a refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age. The Assembly punishes men, many and perhaps most of whom abhor the violent conduct of clergymen in former times as much as their present persecutors can, and who would be as loud and as strong in saying so if they were not well aware of the purposes all this declamation is being used for.
Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of their members but not for their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations. We in England might as well think of waging inexpiable war on all Frenchmen for the evils they have brought on us in the various periods of our mutual hostilities. You might on your side think yourselves justified in falling on all Englishmen for the unparalleled calamities brought on the people of France by the unjust invasions of our Henrys and our Edwards. Indeed we should be mutually justified in this exterminating war on one another quite as much as you are in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen for the conduct of men of the same name in other times.
We do not draw the moral lessons from history that we might. On the contrary, without care it may be used to corrupt our minds and destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom out of the past errors and infirmities of mankind. Perverted, it may serve as an arsenal furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, supplying the means of keeping alive or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists for the greater part of the miseries brought on the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
"troublous storms that toss The private state, and render life unsweet."
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. Would you secure men from tyranny and sedition by rooting out of the mind the principles these fraudulent pretexts appeal to? If you did, you would root out everything valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor ministers of the Gospel — no interpreters of law, no general officers, no public councils. You might change the names; the things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands and under some name. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names — to the causes of evil, which are permanent, and not to the occasional organs by which they act and the transitory forms in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically and a fool in practice. Two ages seldom have the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive than that. While you are discussing the fashion, the fashion has gone by. The very same vice takes on a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and far from losing its principle of life by the change of appearance, it is renewed in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a youthful activity. It walks abroad, it continues its ravages, while you are gibbeting the carcass or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions while your house is the haunt of robbers. So it is with all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war on intolerance, pride and cruelty, while under colour of abhorring the bad principles of antiquated parties they are authorising and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse ones.
Your citizens of Paris formerly lent themselves as ready instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous massacre of St Bartholomew. What should we say to anyone who could think of retaliating on the Parisians of today for the abominations and horrors of that time? They are indeed brought to abhor that massacre. Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them dislike it, because the politicians and fashionable teachers have no interest in giving their passions exactly the same direction. Still, they find it in their interest to keep the same savage dispositions alive. It was only the other day that they had this very massacre acted on the stage for the amusement of the descendants of those who committed it. In this tragic farce they brought on the Cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of office, ordering general slaughter. Was this spectacle meant to make the Parisians abhor persecution and loathe the shedding of blood? No: it was to teach them to persecute their own pastors. It was to rouse them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to an eagerness for hunting down an order which, if it ought to exist at all, ought to exist not only in safety but in reverence. It was to stimulate their cannibal appetites — which one would think had been gorged sufficiently — with variety and seasoning, and to make them quick for new murders and massacres if it should suit the purpose of the Guises of the day. An Assembly in which a multitude of priests and prelates sat was obliged to endure this indignity at its door. The author was not sent to the galleys, nor the players to the house of correction. Not long after this performance those same players came before the Assembly to claim the rites of the very religion they had dared to expose, and to show their prostituted faces in the senate, while the Archbishop of Paris, whose office was known to his people only by his prayers and blessings and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house and fly from his flock as from ravening wolves, because, if you please, in the sixteenth century the Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.
Footnote: This is on a supposition of the truth of this story; but he was not in France at the time. One name serves as well as another.
Such is the effect of the perversion of history by men who for the same nefarious purposes have perverted every other part of learning. But those who will stand on that elevation of reason which places centuries under our eye and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can rise but the spirit and moral quality of human actions — those men will say to the teachers of the Palais Royal: the Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth century; you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference between you. But history in the nineteenth century, better understood and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilised posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to retaliate on the speculative and inactive atheists of future times for the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which in its quiescent state is more than punished whenever it is embraced. It will teach posterity not to make war on either religion or philosophy for the abuse the hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings conferred on us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who eminently favours and protects the race of man in all things.
If your clergy, or any clergy, should show themselves vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity, and beyond those professional faults that can hardly be separated from professional virtues, then, though their vices can never countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit they would naturally have the effect of much abating our indignation against tyrants who exceed measure and justice in punishing them. I can allow in clergymen of every division some tenaciousness of their own opinion, some overflow of zeal to propagate it, some partiality to their own state and office, some attachment to the interest of their own body, some preference for those who listen to their doctrines with docility over those who scorn and deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man who has to deal with men, and who would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the greatest intolerance of all. I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.
Undoubtedly the natural progress of the passions from frailty into vice ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand. But is it true that the body of your clergy had passed those limits of a just allowance? From the general style of your recent publications of all sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of monsters, a horrible composition of superstition, ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice and tyranny. But is this true? Is it true that the lapse of time, the ceasing of conflicting interests, and the woeful experience of the evils that come of party rage have had no sort of influence in gradually improving their minds? Is it true that they were daily making fresh invasions on the civil power, troubling the domestic quiet of their country, and making the operations of its government feeble and precarious? Is it true that the clergy of our times have pressed the laity down with an iron hand and were everywhere lighting the fires of a savage persecution? Did they try by every fraud to increase their estates? Did they habitually exceed the due demands on estates that were their own? Or, rigidly screwing right up into wrong, did they turn a legal claim into a vexatious extortion? Not possessing power, were they filled with the vices of those who envy it? Were they inflamed with a violent, litigious spirit of controversy? Goaded on by the ambition of intellectual sovereignty, were they ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches, to massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down altars, and to make their way over the ruins of overthrown governments to an empire of doctrine — sometimes flattering, sometimes forcing the consciences of men out of the jurisdiction of public institutions into submission to their personal authority, beginning with a claim of liberty and ending with an abuse of power?
These, or some of these, were the vices charged, and not wholly without foundation, against several of the churchmen of former times, who belonged to the two great parties that then divided and distracted Europe.
If in France there was, as in other countries there visibly is, a great abatement rather than any increase of these vices, then instead of loading the present clergy with the crimes of other men and the odious character of other times, in common equity they ought to be praised, encouraged and supported for departing from a spirit that disgraced their predecessors, and for taking on a temper of mind and manners more suited to their sacred function.
When my occasions took me to France towards the close of the late reign, the clergy in all their forms engaged a considerable part of my curiosity. So far from finding the complaints and discontents against that body which some publications had given me reason to expect — except from one set of men, not then very numerous though very active — I noticed little or no public or private uneasiness on their account. On further examination I found the clergy in general to be persons of moderate minds and decorous manners; and I include the seculars and the regulars of both sexes. I did not have the good fortune to know a great many of the parish clergy, but in general I received a perfectly good account of their morals and of their attention to their duties. With some of the higher clergy I had a personal acquaintance, and of the rest of that class very good means of information. They were almost all of them persons of noble birth. They resembled others of their own rank, and where there was any difference it was in their favour. They were more fully educated than the military nobility, so as by no means to disgrace their profession by ignorance or by unfitness for the exercise of their authority. They seemed to me, beyond the clerical character, liberal and open, with the hearts of gentlemen and men of honour, neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct. They seemed to me rather a superior class — a set of men among whom you would not be surprised to find a Fénelon. I saw among the clergy in Paris men of great learning and candour, many of a description not to be met with anywhere else, and I had reason to believe that this description was not confined to Paris. What I found in other places I know was accidental, and therefore to be presumed a fair sample. I spent a few days in a provincial town where, in the bishop's absence, I passed my evenings with three clergymen, his vicars-general, men who would have done honour to any church. They were all well informed; two of them of deep, general and extensive erudition, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, and particularly in their own profession. They had a wider knowledge of our English divines than I expected, and they entered into the genius of those writers with a critical accuracy. One of these gentlemen has since died: the Abbé Morangis. I pay this tribute without reluctance to the memory of that noble, reverend, learned and excellent person, and I would do the same as cheerfully to the merits of the others, who I believe are still living, if I did not fear to hurt men I am unable to help.
Some of these clergymen of rank deserve general respect on every ground. They deserve gratitude from me and from many English people. If this letter should ever come into their hands, I hope they will believe that there are people of our nation who feel for their unmerited fall, and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes, with no common feeling. What I say of them is a testimony, so far as one feeble voice can go, that I owe to truth. Wherever the question of this unnatural persecution is concerned, I will pay it. No one shall prevent me from being just and grateful. The time is fitted for the duty; and it is particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude when men who have deserved well of us and of mankind are labouring under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive power.
Before your Revolution you had about a hundred and twenty bishops. A few of them were men of eminent sanctity and charity without limit. When we talk of the heroic we are of course talking of rare virtue. I believe instances of eminent depravity may be as rare among them as instances of transcendent goodness. Examples of avarice and of licentiousness may be picked out, I do not question it, by those who delight in the sort of investigation that leads to such discoveries. A man as old as I am will not be astonished that several men in every description do not lead that perfect life of self-denial with regard to wealth or pleasure which everyone wishes for, which some expect, and which nobody exacts more rigorously than those who are most attentive to their own interests or most indulgent to their own passions. When I was in France, I am certain that the number of vicious prelates was not great. Certain individuals among them, not distinguished for the regularity of their lives, made some amends for lacking the severe virtues by possessing the liberal ones, and were endowed with qualities that made them useful in church and state. I am told that with few exceptions Louis the Sixteenth was more attentive to character in his promotions to that rank than his immediate predecessor, and I believe it may be true, since some spirit of reform has prevailed throughout the whole reign. But the present ruling power has shown a disposition only to plunder the church. It has punished all prelates, which is to favour the vicious, at least in point of reputation. It has made a degrading establishment of pensioners, to which no man of liberal ideas or liberal condition will destine his children. It must settle into the lowest classes of the people. As the lower clergy with you are not numerous enough for their duties, as those duties are beyond measure minute and toilsome, and as you have left no middle class of clergy at their ease, in future nothing of science or erudition can exist in the Gallican Church. To complete the project, without the least attention to the rights of patrons, the Assembly has provided for an elective clergy in future — an arrangement that will drive out of the clerical profession every man of sobriety and everyone who can claim independence in his function or his conduct, and that will throw the whole direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licentious, bold, crafty, factious, flattering wretches, of such a condition and such habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions, beside which an exciseman's stipend is lucrative and honourable, an object of low and illiberal intrigue. Those officers whom they still call bishops are to be elected to a comparatively mean provision, by the same arts — that is, electioneering arts — by men of every religious tenet known or inventable. The new lawgivers have settled nothing whatever about their qualifications, in doctrine or in morals, any more than they have done for the subordinate clergy; nor does anything appear to stop both the higher and the lower from practising or preaching, at their discretion, any mode of religion or irreligion they please. I do not yet see what jurisdiction the bishops are to have over their subordinates, or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at all.
In short, Sir, it seems to me that this new ecclesiastical establishment is intended only to be temporary, and preparatory to the utter abolition of the Christian religion under any of its forms, whenever men's minds have been prepared for this last stroke against it by the accomplishment of the plan for bringing its ministers into universal contempt. Anyone who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who guide these matters have long entertained such a design is utterly ignorant of their character and their proceedings. These enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion that a state can subsist better without any religion than with one, and that they are able to supply the place of any good there may be in it by a project of their own — namely, by a sort of education they have imagined, founded on a knowledge of the physical wants of men and carried progressively up to an enlightened self-interest which, when well understood, they tell us, will identify itself with a larger and public interest. The scheme of this education has long been known. Lately they distinguish it, having acquired an entirely new nomenclature of technical terms, by the name of a Civic Education.
I hope their partisans in England — to whom I attribute very inconsiderate conduct rather than the ultimate object of this detestable design — will succeed neither in plundering the clergy nor in introducing a principle of popular election to our bishoprics and parish livings. In the present condition of the world this would be the last corruption of the church, the utter ruin of the clerical character, and the most dangerous shock the state ever received through a misunderstood arrangement of religion. I know well enough that the bishoprics and livings, under royal and seigniorial patronage as they now are in England and as they lately were in France, are sometimes acquired by unworthy methods; but the other mode of ecclesiastical canvassing subjects them infinitely more surely and more generally to all the evil arts of low ambition, which, operating on and through greater numbers, will produce mischief in proportion.
Those of you who have robbed the clergy think you will easily reconcile your conduct to all Protestant nations, because the clergy you have plundered, degraded and given over to mockery and scorn are Roman Catholic — that is, of their own supposed persuasion. I have no doubt that some miserable bigots will be found here as elsewhere, who hate sects and parties different from their own more than they love the substance of religion, and who are angrier with those who differ from them over particular plans and systems than they are displeased with men who attack the foundation of our common hope. Such men will write and speak on the subject in the manner to be expected from their temper and character. Burnet says that when he was in France in the year 1683, "the method which carried over the men of the finest parts to Popery was this: they brought themselves to doubt of the whole Christian religion; when that was once done, it seemed a more indifferent thing of what side or form they continued outwardly." If that was then the ecclesiastical policy of France, they have since had far too much reason to repent of it. They preferred atheism to a form of religion that did not agree with their ideas. They succeeded in destroying that form, and atheism has succeeded in destroying them. I can readily believe Burnet's story, because I have seen too much of a similar spirit among ourselves — and a little of it is much too much. The humour, however, is not general.
The teachers who reformed our religion in England bore no sort of resemblance to your present reforming doctors in Paris. Perhaps they were, like the men they opposed, rather more under the influence of party spirit than one could wish; but they were the most sincere believers, men of the most fervent and exalted piety, ready to die — as some of them did die — like true heroes in defence of their particular ideas of Christianity, and they would have died with equal fortitude and more cheerfully for that stock of general truth whose branches they contended for with their blood. Those men would have disowned with horror the wretches who claim fellowship with them on no other ground than having pillaged the people they carried on controversies with, and having despised the common religion for whose purity the reformers exerted themselves with a zeal that unmistakably declared their highest reverence for the substance of the system they wanted to reform. Many of their descendants have kept the same zeal, but, being less engaged in conflict, with more moderation. They do not forget that justice and mercy are substantial parts of religion. Impious men do not recommend themselves to their communion by iniquity and cruelty towards any description of their fellow creatures.
We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration. That men should tolerate all opinions when they think none of any value is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence that arises out of contempt is not true charity. There are plenty of men in England who tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the dogmas of religion are all of importance, though in different degrees, and that among them there is, as among all things of value, a just ground of preference. They favour, therefore, and they tolerate. They tolerate not because they despise opinions but because they respect justice. They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they love and venerate the great principle they all agree on and the great object they are all directed to. They begin to see more and more plainly that we all have a common cause against a common enemy. They will not be so misled by the spirit of faction as to fail to distinguish what is done in favour of their own subdivision from acts of hostility which, aimed through some particular description of men, are aimed at the whole body that they themselves are included in under another name. It is impossible for me to say what the character of every description of men among us may be. But I speak for the greater part; and for them I must tell you that sacrilege is no part of their doctrine of good works; and that, so far from inviting you into their fellowship on such a title, if your professors are admitted to their communion they must carefully conceal their doctrine that it is lawful to proscribe innocent men, and they must make restitution of all stolen goods whatsoever. Until then they are none of ours.
You may suppose that we do not approve your confiscating the revenues of bishops and deans and chapters and parish clergy who possess independent estates in land, because we have the same sort of establishment in England. That objection, you will say, cannot apply to the confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns and the abolition of their orders. It is true that this particular part of your general confiscation does not touch England as a precedent in point; but the reason applies, and it goes a long way. The Long Parliament confiscated the lands of deans and chapters in England on the same ideas on which your Assembly has put the lands of the monastic orders up for sale. But the danger lies in the principle of injustice and not in the description of persons it is first exercised on. I see in a country very near us a course of policy pursued that sets justice, the common concern of mankind, at defiance. With the National Assembly of France, possession is nothing, law and usage are nothing. I see the National Assembly openly condemning the doctrine of prescription, which one of the greatest of their own lawyers tells us, with great truth, is part of the law of nature. He tells us that fixing its limits positively, and securing it from invasion, were among the reasons why civil society itself was instituted. Once prescription is shaken, no kind of property is secure as soon as it becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of needy power. I see a practice perfectly answering to their contempt for this great fundamental part of natural law. I see the confiscators beginning with bishops and chapters and monasteries, but I do not see them ending there. I see the princes of the blood, who by the oldest usages of that kingdom held large landed estates, deprived of their possessions with hardly the compliment of a debate, and reduced, in place of their stable independent property, to the hope of some precarious charitable pension at the pleasure of an Assembly which will of course pay little regard to the rights of pensioners at pleasure when it despises those of legal proprietors. Flushed with the insolence of their first inglorious victories, and pressed by the distresses their own lust of unhallowed gain has caused, disappointed but not discouraged, they have at last ventured to subvert all property of every description throughout the whole extent of a great kingdom. They have compelled all men, in all transactions of commerce, in the disposal of land, in civil dealing and through the whole intercourse of life, to accept as perfect payment and good and lawful tender the symbols of their speculations on a projected sale of their plunder. What vestiges of liberty or property have they left? The tenant right of a cabbage garden, a year's interest in a hovel, the goodwill of an alehouse or a baker's shop, the very shadow of a constructive property, are treated more ceremoniously in our Parliament than the oldest and most valuable landed possessions in the hands of the most respectable persons are with you, or than the whole body of the moneyed and commercial interest of your country. We hold the legislative authority in high regard; but we have never dreamt that Parliaments had any right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency of their own invention into the place of one that is real and recognised by the law of nations. But you, who began by refusing to submit to the most moderate restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of despotism. I find that the ground your confiscators go on is this: that their proceedings could not indeed be supported in a court of justice, but that the rules of prescription cannot bind a legislative assembly. So this legislative assembly of a free nation sits not for the security but for the destruction of property — and not of property only, but of every rule and maxim that can give it stability, and of the very instruments that alone can give it circulation.
Footnote: Domat.
Footnote: Speech of M. Camus, published by order of the National Assembly.
When the Anabaptists of Münster in the sixteenth century had filled Germany with confusion by their system of levelling and their wild opinions about property, what country in Europe did the progress of their fury not give just cause for alarm? Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified by epidemic fanaticism, because of all enemies it is the one she is least able to find any kind of resource against. We cannot be ignorant of the spirit of atheistical fanaticism inspired by a multitude of writings scattered about with incredible industry and expense, and by sermons delivered in all the streets and public places of Paris. These writings and sermons have filled the populace with a black and savage ferocity of mind that overrides in them the common feelings of nature as well as all sentiments of morality and religion — so much so that these wretches are brought to bear with sullen patience the intolerable distresses caused them by the violent convulsions and transfers that have been made in property. The spirit of proselytism attends this spirit of fanaticism. They have societies to intrigue and correspond at home and abroad for the propagation of their tenets. The republic of Berne, one of the happiest, most prosperous and best-governed countries on earth, is one of the great objects they aim at destroying. I am told they have to some extent succeeded in sowing the seeds of discontent there. They are busy throughout Germany. Spain and Italy have not been left untried. England is not left out of the comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity; and in England we find men who stretch out their arms to them, who recommend their example from more than one pulpit, and who choose, at more than one periodical meeting, to correspond publicly with them, to applaud them and to hold them up for imitation — who receive from them tokens of brotherhood, and standards consecrated in the middle of their rites and mysteries, and who propose leagues of perpetual friendship to them at the very time when the power to which our constitution has exclusively delegated the treaty-making capacity of this kingdom may find it expedient to make war on them.
Footnote: Whether the following description is strictly true I do not know; but it is what the publishers would have pass for true, in order to encourage others. In a letter from Toul, printed in one of their papers, is this passage about the people of that district: "Dans la Révolution actuelle, ils ont résisté à toutes les séductions du bigotisme, aux persécutions et aux tracasseries des ennemis de la Révolution. Oubliant leurs plus grands intérêts pour rendre hommage aux vues d'ordre général qui ont déterminé l'Assemblée Nationale, ils voient, sans se plaindre, supprimer cette foule d'établissemens ecclésiastiques par lesquels ils subsistoient; et même, en perdant leur siège épiscopal, la seule de toutes ces ressources qui pouvoit, ou plutôt qui devoit, en toute équité, leur être conservée, condamnés à la plus effrayante misère sans avoir été ni pu être entendus, ils ne murmurent point; ils restent fidèles aux principes du plus pur patriotisme; ils sont encore prêts à verser leur sang pour le maintien de la constitution, qui va réduire leur ville à la plus déplorable nullité." In English: in the present Revolution they have resisted all the seductions of bigotry, and all the persecutions and harassments of the enemies of the Revolution. Forgetting their own greatest interests in order to pay homage to the views of general order that have guided the National Assembly, they watch without complaining while that crowd of church establishments is suppressed which was what they lived by; and even in losing their bishop's seat, the one resource of them all that could have been — or rather that in all equity ought to have been — preserved to them, condemned to the most frightful poverty without having been heard, or having been able to be heard, they do not murmur. They remain faithful to the principles of the purest patriotism; they are still ready to shed their blood to maintain the constitution that is about to reduce their town to the most deplorable nothingness. These people are not supposed to have endured those sufferings and injustices in a struggle for liberty, for the same account states truly that they have always been free. Their patience under beggary and ruin, and their enduring the most flagrant and admitted injustice without remonstrance, can, if it is strictly true, be nothing but the effect of this dire fanaticism. A great multitude all over France is in the same condition and the same temper.
Footnote: See the proceedings of the confederation at Nantes.
It is not the confiscation of our church property, following this example in France, that I dread, though I think that would be no trifling evil. The great source of my anxiety is that it should ever be considered in England to be the policy of a state to look for a resource in confiscations of any kind, or that any one description of citizens should come to regard any of the others as their proper prey. Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public debts, which at first were a security to governments by giving many people an interest in the public peace, are likely in their excess to become the means of overthrowing them. If governments provide for these debts by heavy taxes, they perish by becoming odious to the people. If they do not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most dangerous of all parties: I mean an extensive, discontented moneyed interest, injured and not destroyed. The men who make up this interest look for their security first to the good faith of government and second to its power. If they find the old governments worn out and effete, their springs slack, and not vigorous enough for their purposes, they may look for new ones possessed of more energy — and this energy will be derived not from any acquisition of resources but from a contempt of justice. Revolutions are favourable to confiscation, and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorised. I am sure that the principles now predominant in France extend to a great many persons, and descriptions of persons, in every country, who think their harmless idleness is their security. This kind of innocence in proprietors can be argued into uselessness, and uselessness into an unfitness for their estates. Many parts of Europe are in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmuring underground; a confused movement is felt that threatens a general earthquake in the political world. Already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary kind are forming in several countries. In such a state of things we ought to be on our guard. In all changes, if changes there must be, the circumstance that will do most to blunt the edge of their mischief and to promote whatever good may be in them is that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of property.
Footnote: "Si plures sunt ii quibus improbe datum est, quam illi quibus injuste ademptum est, idcirco plus etiam valent? Non enim numero hæc judicantur, sed pondere. Quam autem habet æquitatem, ut agrum multis annis, aut etiam sæculis ante possessum, qui nullum habuit habeat, qui autem habuit amittat? Ac, propter hoc injuriæ genus, Lacedæmonii Lysandrum Ephorum expulerunt; Agin regem (quod nunquam antea apud eos acciderat) necaverunt; exque eo tempore tantæ discordiæ secutæ sunt, ut et tyranni exsisterent, et optimates exterminarentur, et preclarissime constituta respublica dilaberetur. Nec vero solum ipsa cecidit, sed etiam reliquam Græciam evertit contagionibus malorum, quæ a Lacedæmoniis profectæ manarunt latius." In English: if those to whom property has been wrongly given are more numerous than those from whom it was unjustly taken, does that make them weigh more? These matters are judged not by number but by weight. And what fairness is there in a man who has never owned any land taking possession of land held for many years or even for centuries, and the man who did own it losing it? It was for this kind of injustice that the Spartans expelled Lysander the ephor and put King Agis to death, a thing that had never happened among them before; and from that time such discords followed that tyrants arose, the leading men were driven out, and a state most admirably constituted fell to pieces. Nor did it merely fall itself; it overturned the rest of Greece as well by the contagion of the evils which, starting from the Spartans, spread more widely. After speaking of the conduct of Aratus of Sicyon, the model of true patriots, which was in a very different spirit, he says: "Sic par est agere cum civibus; non (ut bis jam vidimus) hastam in foro ponere et bona civium voci subjicere præconis. At ille Græcus (id quod fuit sapientis et præstantis viri) omnibus consulendum esse putavit: eaque est summa ratio et sapientia boni civis, commoda civium non divellere, sed omnes eadem æquitate continere." In English: this is the right way to deal with one's fellow citizens — not, as we have now twice seen, to set up the spear in the forum and put the goods of citizens under the auctioneer's voice. But that Greek, as became a wise and outstanding man, thought that the good of all must be consulted; and this is the highest reason and wisdom in a good citizen, not to tear the interests of the citizens apart but to hold them all together within the same equity. — Cicero, On Duties, book 2.
Footnote: See two books entitled "Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens" and "System und Folgen des Illuminatenordens". Munich, 1787.
But it will be argued that this confiscation in France ought not to alarm other nations. They say it is not made out of wanton rapacity, that it is a great measure of national policy adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief. It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society, and any notable departure from it, in any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
When men are encouraged into a certain mode of life by the existing laws and protected in it as a lawful occupation; when they have adapted all their ideas and all their habits to it; when the law has long made adherence to its rules a ground of reputation and departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty — then I am sure it is unjust for a legislature by an arbitrary act to do sudden violence to their minds and their feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character and those customs which had before been made the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this is added expulsion from their homes and confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to see how this despotic sport made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices and properties of men can be distinguished from the rankest tyranny.
If the injustice of the course pursued in France is clear, the policy of the measure — that is, the public benefit expected from it — ought to be at least as evident and at least as important. A man who acts under the influence of no passion, and who has nothing in view in his projects but the public good, will immediately be struck by a great difference between what policy would dictate at the original introduction of such institutions and what it dictates on a question of abolishing them entirely, when they have cast their roots wide and deep and when, by long habit, things more valuable than themselves have become adapted to them and in a manner interwoven with them, so that the one cannot be destroyed without notably damaging the other. He might be embarrassed if the case really were as the sophisters represent it in their paltry style of debating. But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle. There is something else besides the bare alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna — Sparta is what has fallen to you, so make the best of it. This is in my opinion a rule of profound sense, and it ought never to be out of the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to such a pitch of presumption as to regard his country as nothing but a carte blanche on which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society were constituted otherwise than he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he can make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception and perilous in the execution.
There are moments in the fortunes of states when particular men are called on to make improvements by great mental exertion. In those moments, even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and their country and to be invested with full authority, they do not always have apt instruments to hand. A politician who wants to do great things looks for a power — what our workmen call a purchase; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss how to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was to be found a great power for the machinery of political benevolence. There were revenues under a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, with no ties and no principles but public ones — men who could not possibly convert the estate of the community into a private fortune, men closed to self-interest whose avarice is on behalf of some community, men to whom personal poverty is honour and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. It is vain for a man to look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow as they please. These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance, and her pride is in the use of them. The perennial existence of corporate bodies, and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who takes long views — who meditates designs that take time to fashion and are meant to last when they are accomplished. He does not deserve to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline and the habits of the corporations you have rashly destroyed, can find no way of turning it to the great and lasting benefit of his country. On a view of this subject a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost equivalent, in the moral world, to destroying the apparently active properties of bodies in the material one. It would be like trying to destroy — if it were within our competence to destroy — the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in nature and were always discernible. Some of them seemed useless, some noxious, some no better than a plaything for children, until contemplative ability, combining with practical skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and made them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents in the service of the great views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue that was neither lazy nor superstitious, seem too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using the men except by converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to account except through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale? If you were so destitute of mental funds, the proceeding follows in its natural course. Your politicians do not understand their trade, and so they sell their tools.
But the institutions savour of superstition in their very principle, and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence. This I do not mean to dispute; but it ought not to hinder you from drawing out of superstition itself whatever resources it may furnish for the public advantage. You draw benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind that are of quite as doubtful a colour, to the moral eye, as superstition is. It was your business to correct and moderate whatever was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral subject, and of course admits of every degree and every modification. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds, and they must be tolerated in an admixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, or else you will deprive weak minds of a resource that the strongest have found necessary. The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to that great end, or it may be a help to it. Wise men, who as such are not admirers — not admirers, at least, of the munera terræ, the gifts of the earth — are not violently attached to these things, nor do they violently hate them. Wisdom is not the severest corrector of folly. It is the rival follies that wage such unrelenting war on one another, and make such cruel use of their advantages whenever they can engage the immoderate common run of people on the one side or the other in their quarrels. Prudence would stay neutral; but if, in the contest between fond attachment and fierce antipathy over things whose nature was never meant to produce such heat, a prudent man were obliged to choose which errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn and which he would bear with, perhaps he would think the superstition that builds more tolerable than the one that demolishes; the one that adorns a country than the one that deforms it; the one that endows than the one that plunders; the one that disposes men to mistaken beneficence than the one that stimulates them to real injustice; the one that leads a man to refuse himself lawful pleasures than the one that snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour.
For the present I put off all consideration of the supposed public profit of the sale, which I take to be perfectly delusive in any case. I shall consider it here only as a transfer of property, and I shall trouble you with a few thoughts on the policy of that transfer.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer. This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist. It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labour. But this idleness is itself the spring of labour, this repose the spur of industry. The state's only concern is that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned to the industry it came from, and that its spending should do the least possible damage to the morals of those who spend it and of the people it is returned to.
In every view of receipt, of expenditure and of personal employment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor he is being urged to expel with the stranger proposed to fill his place. Before we incur the inconveniences that must attend all violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated property will be to a considerable degree more industrious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the labourer's gains or to consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for one individual — or else that they will be qualified to dispense the surplus in a steadier and more equal manner, so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the old possessors, call those possessors bishops or canons or commendatory abbots or monks or what you please. The monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them employed in nothing but singing in the choir. They are as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say — as usefully, even, as those who sing on the stage. They are as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark at the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly and often most unwholesome and pestilent occupations that the social economy inevitably dooms so many wretches to. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation that is turned by the strangely directed labour of these unhappy people, I should be infinitely more inclined to rescue them by force from their miserable industry than to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quiet by violence. Humanity, and perhaps policy, might justify me better in the first than in the second. It is a subject I have often reflected on, and never reflected on without feeling. I am sure that nothing except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury and the despotism of fashion, which will distribute the surplus product of the soil in their own imperious way, can justify tolerating such trades and employments in a well-regulated state. But for the purpose of that distribution, it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay loiterers.
Where the advantages of the possession and of the project are equal, there is no motive for a change. But in the present case they are perhaps not equal, and the difference is in favour of the possession. It does not appear to me that the expenses of the men you are going to expel in fact take a course so directly and generally tending to corrupt and degrade and make miserable those they pass through as the expenses of the favourites you are intruding into their houses. Why should the spending of a great landed property, which is a dispersal of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course through the building up of vast libraries, which are the history of the strength and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient records and medals and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues that by imitating nature seem to extend the limits of creation; through grand monuments of the dead, which carry on the regards and connections of life beyond the grave; through collections of the specimens of nature, which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world, and which by their arrangement make science easier and by exciting curiosity open the way into it? If by great permanent establishments all these objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same tastes prevailed in scattered individuals? Does not the sweat of the mason and the carpenter, who toil in order to share the sweat of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as healthily in constructing and repairing the majestic buildings of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury? As honourably and as profitably in repairing the sacred works that grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of passing voluptuousness — in opera houses and brothels and gaming houses and clubhouses and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal maintenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by placing them in the service of God, than in pampering the innumerable multitude who are degraded by being made useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man? Is the decoration of temples an expenditure less worthy of a wise man than ribbons and laces and national cockades and little private houses and late suppers and all the innumerable fopperies and follies that wealth sports away the burden of its superfluity in?
We tolerate even these — not out of love for them, but for fear of worse. We tolerate them because property and liberty require that toleration up to a point. But why proscribe the other and surely, from every point of view, the more laudable use of estates? Why, through the violation of all property and an outrage on every principle of liberty, forcibly carry them from the better use to the worse?
This comparison between the new individuals and the old bodies is made on the supposition that no reform could be made in the latter. But in a question of reformation I always consider corporate bodies, whether single persons or many, to be much more susceptible than private citizens ever can be, or perhaps ought to be, of a public direction by the power of the state in the use of their property and in the regulation of their members' modes and habits of life; and this seems to me a very material consideration for anyone undertaking something that deserves the name of a political enterprise. So much for the estates of the monasteries.
As to the estates held by bishops and canons and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out any reason why some landed estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance. Can any philosophic spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a certain, and a large, portion of landed property pass in succession through persons whose title to it is, always in theory and often in fact, an eminent degree of piety, morals and learning — a property which by its destination, in their turn and on the score of merit, gives renewal and support to the noblest families and to the lowest the means of dignity and elevation; a property whose tenure is the performance of a duty, whatever value you choose to set on that duty, and whose proprietors' character demands at least an outward decorum and gravity of manners; men who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality, who are to consider part of their income as a trust for charity, and who, even when they fail in that trust, when they slide out of their character and degenerate into a mere ordinary secular nobleman or gentleman, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions? Is it better that estates should be held by men who have no duty than by men who have one? By men whose character and destination point them at virtues, than by men who have no rule and no direction in spending their estates but their own will and appetite? Nor are these estates held altogether in the character or with the evils supposed to be inherent in mortmain. They pass from hand to hand in a more rapid circulation than any other. No excess is good, and therefore too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me materially injurious to any commonwealth that there should be some estates that stand a chance of being acquired by means other than the previous acquisition of money.
This letter has grown to a great length, though it is short indeed compared with the infinite extent of the subject. Various other calls have from time to time drawn my mind away from it. I was not sorry to give myself leisure to see whether I might not find reasons in the proceedings of the National Assembly to change or qualify some of my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions. It was my original purpose to survey the principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great fundamental establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have put in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of our British constitution. But this plan is of greater extent than I first reckoned, and I find you have little wish to take advantage of any examples. For the present I must content myself with some remarks on your establishments, reserving what I meant to say about the spirit of our British monarchy, aristocracy and democracy as they exist in practice for another time.
I have surveyed what has been done by the governing power in France. I have certainly spoken of it freely. Men whose principle it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind and to set up a scheme of society on new principles must naturally expect that those of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs will regard both them and their devices as men and schemes on trial. They must take it for granted that we attend closely to their reason but not at all to their authority. They do not have one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favour. They avow their hostility to opinion. Of course, then, they must expect no support from that influence, which they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction along with every other authority.
I can never regard this Assembly as anything but a voluntary association of men who have used circumstances to seize the power of the state. They do not have the sanction and authority of the character they first met under. They have assumed another of a very different nature, and have completely altered and inverted all the relations they originally stood in. They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state. They have departed from the instructions of the people who sent them — and those instructions, since the Assembly did not act by virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority. The most considerable of their acts have not been carried by great majorities; and in this sort of near division, which carries only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider the reasons as well as the resolutions.
If they had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription, which through long usage mellows into legality governments that were violent at their beginning. Everyone whose affections lead them towards the conservation of civil order would recognise the child as legitimate even in its cradle, having been produced from those principles of compelling expediency to which all just governments owe their birth and by which they justify their continuance. But men will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power that has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, and that on the contrary has had its origin in the vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed. This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription. We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution. To make a revolution is a measure which primâ fronte, on the face of it, requires an apology. To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of one's country, and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding. The sense of mankind authorises us to inquire into the manner in which new power was acquired, and to criticise the use made of it, with less awe and reverence than is usually granted to a settled and recognised authority.
In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds on principles that are the exact opposite of those which appear to direct them in the use of it. An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct. Everything they have done, or continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is done by the most common arts. They proceed exactly as their ancestors in ambition have done before them. Trace them through all their artifices and frauds and violences, and you will find nothing at all that is new. They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader. They never depart an inch from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation. But in all the regulations that touch the public good the spirit has been the very reverse of this. There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to loose theories that none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his own private concerns to. They make this difference because in their desire to obtain and secure power they are thoroughly in earnest, and there they travel by the beaten road. The public interests, about which they have no real anxiety, they abandon wholly to chance — and I say to chance, because there is nothing in experience to prove that their schemes tend to any benefit.
We must always look with a pity not unmixed with respect on the errors of men who are timid and doubtful of themselves on points where the happiness of mankind is concerned. But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender parental anxiety that shrinks from cutting up the infant for the sake of an experiment. In the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions they far outdo all the boasting of quacks. The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to inquire into their foundation.
I am convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in the National Assembly. Some of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writings. That cannot exist without powerful and cultivated talents. But eloquence may exist without a proportionate degree of wisdom. When I speak of ability I am obliged to distinguish. What they have done to support their system speaks of no ordinary men. In the system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed to procure the prosperity and security of the citizen and to promote the strength and grandeur of the state, I confess I am unable to find anything that shows, in a single instance, the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind, or even the provisions of a common prudence. Everywhere their purpose seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty. It has been the glory of the great masters in every art to confront difficulty and overcome it, and, having overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties — so enabling themselves to extend the empire of their science and even to push forward the landmarks of the human understanding itself beyond the reach of their original thoughts. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and who loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit — the Father himself willed that the way of cultivation should not be easy. He who wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This friendly conflict with difficulty obliges us to become intimately acquainted with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not let us be superficial. It is the want of nerve in the understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricky short cuts and little deceptive facilities, that has created governments with arbitrary powers in so many parts of the world. It created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. It has created the arbitrary republic of Paris. With such men, defects in wisdom are to be supplied by fullness of force. They gain nothing by it. Beginning their labours on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men. The difficulties they had eluded rather than escaped meet them again on their way; they multiply and thicken on them; they are entangled, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction; and in the end the whole of their work turns out feeble, vicious and insecure.
It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty that has obliged the arbitrary Assembly of France to begin their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction. But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? Your mob can do that at least as well as your assemblies. The shallowest understanding and the rudest hand are more than equal to that task. Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years. The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, a single word is all it takes to abolish the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy but restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, directs these politicians when they come to the work of supplying the place of what they have destroyed. To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy. No difficulties arise in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have the whole wide field of imagination to range in with little or no opposition.
Footnote: A leading member of the Assembly, M. Rabaut de St Étienne, has expressed the principle of all their proceedings as clearly as possible; nothing could be simpler: "Tous les établissemens en France couronnent le malheur du peuple: pour le rendre heureux, il faut le renouveler, changer ses idées, changer ses loix, changer ses mœurs, ... changer les hommes, changer les choses, changer ses mots, ... tout détruire; oui, tout détruire; puisque tout est à recréer." In English: every establishment in France crowns the misery of the people; to make them happy it must be made new — change their ideas, change their laws, change their manners, change the men, change the things, change the words, destroy everything; yes, destroy everything, since everything must be created again. This gentleman was chosen president of an assembly that does not sit at the Quinze-Vingts or the Petites Maisons — the Paris hospital for the blind and the madhouse — and that is composed of persons giving themselves out to be rational beings; but neither his ideas nor his language nor his conduct differ in the smallest degree from the speeches, opinions and actions of those, inside the Assembly and outside it, who direct the machine now at work in France.
To preserve and to reform at the same time is quite another thing. When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and whatever is added has to be fitted to what is retained, then a vigorous mind, steady and persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients must all be exercised — and exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices: with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything it possesses. But you may object: "A process of this kind is slow. It is not fit for an Assembly that glories in performing the work of ages in a few months. Such a way of reforming might possibly take many years." Without question it might, and it ought. It is one of the excellences of a method that has time among its assistants that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible. If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom when we work only on inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty as well when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings, multitudes of whom may be made miserable by a sudden alteration of their state and condition and habits. But it seems to be the prevailing opinion in Paris that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the only qualifications for a perfect legislator. My ideas of that high office are very different. The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. His temperament may be allowed to catch his ultimate object at an intuitive glance, but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, being a work for social ends, can only be wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to something so much out of fashion in Paris — I mean experience — I should tell you that in my course I have known, and according to my measure have worked alongside, great men, and I have never yet seen a plan that was not improved by the observations of people much inferior in understanding to the man who took the lead in the business. By a slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the success or failure of the first gives us light for the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted safely through the whole series. We see that the parts of the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is sacrificed to another as little as possible. We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and the affairs of men. From this arises not an excellence in simplicity but one far superior, an excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted to some share in the councils that are to affect it so deeply. If justice requires this, the work itself requires the help of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this view of things that the best legislators have often been satisfied with establishing some sure, solid, ruling principle in government — a power like the one some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature — and, having fixed the principle, have afterwards left it to its own operation.
To proceed in this manner, that is, with a presiding principle and a prolific energy, is to my mind the criterion of profound wisdom. What your politicians take for the marks of a bold, hardy genius are only proofs of a deplorable want of ability. By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchemist and quack. They despair of turning anything common to account. Diet is nothing in their system of remedies. The worst of it is that this despair of curing common disorders by regular methods arises not only from a defect of comprehension but, I fear, from some malignity of disposition. Your legislators seem to have taken their opinions of all professions, ranks and offices from the declamations and buffooneries of satirists, who would themselves be astonished if they were held to the letter of their own descriptions. By listening only to these, your leaders regard everything only on the side of its vices and faults, and view those vices and faults under every colour of exaggeration. It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical, that in general those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for the work of reformation, because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and the good, but by habit they come to take no delight in contemplating such things. By hating vices too much they come to love men too little. It is therefore no wonder that they should be disinclined and unable to serve them. From this arises the constitutional disposition of some of your guides to pull everything to pieces. At this malicious game they display the whole of their quadrimanous activity. As for the rest: the paradoxes of eloquent writers, brought out purely as a sport of fancy to try their talents, rouse attention and excite surprise, are taken up by these gentlemen not in the spirit of the original authors, as a means of cultivating their taste and improving their style — these paradoxes become with them serious grounds of action on which they proceed to regulate the most important concerns of the state. Cicero describes Cato comically as trying to act in the commonwealth on the school paradoxes that exercised the wits of junior students of Stoic philosophy. If that was true of Cato, these gentlemen copy him in the manner of certain people who lived about his time — pede nudo Catonem, playing Cato by going barefoot. Mr Hume told me that he had the secret of Rousseau's principles of composition from Rousseau himself. That acute though eccentric observer had perceived that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect; that the giants, magicians, fairies and heroes of romance which succeeded it had exhausted the portion of credulity belonging to their age; and that nothing was now left to a writer but the species of the marvellous which could still be produced, and with as great an effect as ever, though in another way — that is, the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals. I believe that if Rousseau were alive and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical frenzy of his pupils, who are servile imitators in their paradoxes and reveal an implicit faith even in their unbelief.
Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us grounds for presuming ability. But the physician of the state who is not satisfied with curing disorders and undertakes to regenerate constitutions ought to display uncommon powers. Some very unusual appearances of wisdom ought to show themselves on the face of the designs of men who appeal to no practice and copy no model. Have any such appeared? I shall take a view — and for the subject it will be a very short one — of what the Assembly has done with regard, first, to the constitution of the legislature; next to that of the executive power; then to that of the judicature; afterwards to the model of the army; and I shall conclude with the system of finance: to see whether we can discover in any part of their schemes the portentous ability that might justify these bold undertakers in the superiority they assume over mankind.
It is in the model of the sovereign and presiding part of this new republic that we should expect their grand display. Here they had to prove their title to their proud demands. For the plan itself at large, and for the reasons it is grounded on, I refer to the journals of the Assembly of 29 September 1789 and to the later proceedings that have made any alterations in it. So far as I can see light in a matter that is somewhat confused, the system remains substantially as it was originally framed. My few remarks will concern its spirit, its tendency, and its fitness for framing a popular commonwealth — which is what they profess theirs to be — suited to the ends for which any commonwealth, and particularly such a commonwealth, is made. At the same time I mean to consider whether it is consistent with itself and with its own principles.
Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from which good is derived. In old establishments various correctives have been found for their departures from theory. Indeed they are the results of various necessities and expediences. They are not often constructed after any theory; theories are rather drawn out of them. In them we often see the end best obtained where the means do not seem perfectly reconcilable to what we imagine was the original scheme. The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project. They react in turn on the primitive constitution, and sometimes improve the very design they seem to have departed from. I think all this might be curiously illustrated in the British constitution. At worst, the errors and deviations of every kind in the reckoning are found and computed, and the ship proceeds on her course. That is the case with old establishments; but in a new and merely theoretical system, every contrivance is expected to show on the face of it that it answers its ends, especially when the projectors are in no way embarrassed by any effort to fit the new building to an old one, either in the walls or in the foundations.
The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish everything they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming everything into an exact level, propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of three different kinds — one geometrical, one arithmetical and the third financial. The first they call the basis of territory, the second the basis of population, and the third the basis of contribution. To accomplish the first of these purposes they divide the area of their country into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues by eighteen. These large divisions are called Departments. These they portion out, still by square measurement, into seventeen hundred and twenty districts called Communes. These again they subdivide, still by square measurement, into smaller districts called Cantons, making 6,400 in all.
At first view this geometrical basis of theirs presents nothing much to admire or to blame. It calls for no great legislative talents. Nothing more than an accurate land surveyor with his chain and sight and theodolite is needed for a plan like this. In the old divisions of the country, various accidents from time to time, and the ebb and flow of various properties and jurisdictions, settled the boundaries. Those boundaries were undoubtedly not made on any fixed system. They were subject to some inconveniences, but they were inconveniences for which use had found remedies and habit had supplied accommodation and patience. In this new pavement of square within square, and this organisation and semi-organisation made on the system of Empedocles and Buffon rather than on any political principle, it is impossible that innumerable local inconveniences, which men are not used to, should not arise. But I pass over these, because specifying them requires an accurate knowledge of the country which I do not possess.
When these state surveyors came to look over their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. They then had recourse to another basis, or rather buttress, to support the building that was tottering on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth and the largeness of their contribution made such infinite variations between square and square as to make measurement a ridiculous standard of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry the most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men. However, they could not give it up; but dividing their political and civil representation into three parts, they allotted one of those parts to square measurement, without a single fact or calculation to establish whether this territorial proportion of representation was fairly assigned, or ought on any principle really to be a third. Having given geometry this portion, a third for her dowry, out of compliment, I suppose, to that sublime science, they left the other two to be scrambled for between the other parts, population and contribution.
When they came to provide for population, they were not able to proceed quite so smoothly as they had done in the field of their geometry. Here their arithmetic came up against their juridical metaphysics. Had they stuck to their metaphysical principles, the arithmetical process would have been simple indeed. Men, with them, are strictly equal and are entitled to equal rights in their own government. On this system each head would have its vote, and every man would vote directly for the person who was to represent him in the legislature. "But softly — by regular degrees, not yet." This metaphysical principle, to which law, custom, usage, policy and reason were all to yield, is to yield itself to their pleasure. There must be many degrees, and some stages, before the representative can come into contact with his constituent. Indeed, as we shall soon see, these two persons are to have no communion with each other at all. First, the voters in the Canton, who compose what they call primary assemblies, are to have a qualification. What! A qualification on the indefeasible rights of men? Yes, but it shall be a very small qualification. Our injustice shall be very little oppressive: only the local valuation of three days' labour paid to the public. Why, this is not much, I readily admit, for anything but the utter subversion of your equalising principle. As a qualification it might as well be dropped, for it answers none of the purposes qualifications are established for; and on your own ideas it excludes from a vote the very man whose natural equality most needs protection and defence — I mean the man who has nothing but his natural equality to guard him. You order him to buy the right which you had told him nature gave him free at his birth, and of which no authority on earth could lawfully deprive him. As against the man who cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy is established at the very outset, and by you who pretend to be its sworn enemy.
The gradation goes on. These primary assemblies of the Canton elect deputies to the Commune, one for every two hundred qualified inhabitants. Here is the first medium interposed between the primary elector and the representative legislator, and here a new turnpike is set up for taxing the rights of men with a second qualification: for nobody can be elected to the Commune who does not pay the value of ten days' labour. Nor have we finished yet. There is still another gradation. These Communes, chosen by the Canton, elect to the Department; and the deputies of the Department choose their deputies to the National Assembly. Here is a third barrier of senseless qualification. Every deputy to the National Assembly must pay, in direct contribution, the value of a mark of silver. Of all these qualifying barriers we must think alike: that they are impotent to secure independence and strong only to destroy the rights of men.
Footnote: The Assembly, in carrying out their committee's plan, made some alterations. They have struck out one stage in these gradations, which removes part of the objection; but the main objection — namely, that in their scheme the first constituent voter has no connection with the representative legislator — remains in all its force. There are other alterations, some possibly for the better and some certainly for the worse; but to the author the merit or demerit of these smaller alterations seems of no moment, where the scheme itself is fundamentally vicious and absurd.
In all this process, which in its fundamental elements professes to consider only population on a principle of natural right, there is a manifest attention to property — which, however just and reasonable it may be on other schemes, is on theirs perfectly indefensible.
When they come to their third basis, that of Contribution, we find that they have lost sight of the rights of men still more completely. This last basis rests entirely on property. A principle totally different from the equality of men, and utterly irreconcilable with it, is thereby admitted; but no sooner is this principle admitted than, as usual, it is subverted — and it is not subverted, as we shall see presently, in order to bring the inequality of riches nearer to the level of nature. The additional share in the third portion of representation, a portion reserved exclusively for the higher contribution, is made to regard only the district and not the individuals in it who pay. It is easy to see, from the course of their reasonings, how much they were embarrassed by their contradictory ideas of the rights of men and the privileges of riches. The Committee of Constitution as good as admit that the two are wholly irreconcilable. "The relation with regard to the contributions is without doubt null," they say, "when the question is about the balance of political rights as between individual and individual, without which personal equality would be destroyed and an aristocracy of the rich would be established. But this inconvenience entirely disappears when the proportional relation of the contribution is considered only in the great masses and is solely between province and province; in that case it serves only to form a just reciprocal proportion between the cities, without affecting the personal rights of the citizens."
Here the principle of contribution, taken between man and man, is condemned as null and destructive of equality — and as pernicious too, because it leads to establishing an aristocracy of the rich. Yet it must not be abandoned. And the way of getting round the difficulty is to establish the inequality between department and department, leaving all the individuals in each department on an exact par. Observe that this parity between individuals had already been destroyed when the qualifications within the departments were settled; nor does it seem a matter of great importance whether the equality of men is injured in masses or individually. An individual is not of the same importance in a mass represented by a few as in a mass represented by many. It would be too much to tell a man jealous of his equality that the elector who votes for three members has the same franchise as the one who votes for ten.
Now take it from the other point of view, and let us suppose their principle of representation according to contribution — that is, according to riches — to be well imagined, and a necessary basis for their republic. In this third basis they assume that riches ought to be respected, and that justice and policy require that riches should entitle men in some way or other to a larger share in the administration of public affairs. It is now to be seen how the Assembly provides for the pre-eminence, or even the security, of the rich, by conferring on their district, in virtue of their wealth, that larger measure of power which is denied to them personally. I readily admit — indeed I should lay it down as a fundamental principle — that in a republican government with a democratic basis the rich do require an additional security beyond what they need in monarchies. They are subject to envy, and through envy to oppression. On the present scheme it is impossible to guess what advantage they get from the aristocratic preference on which the unequal representation of the masses is founded. The rich cannot feel it either as a support to their dignity or as a security to their fortune, for the aristocratic mass is generated from purely democratic principles, and the prevalence given to it in the general representation has no sort of reference to, or connection with, the persons on account of whose property this superiority of the mass is established. If the contrivers of this scheme meant any sort of favour to the rich in consequence of their contribution, they ought to have conferred the privilege either on the individual rich or on some class formed of rich persons, as historians represent Servius Tullius to have done in the early constitution of Rome; because the contest between the rich and the poor is not a struggle between corporation and corporation but a contest between men and men — a competition not between districts but between descriptions of people. The scheme would answer its purpose better if it were inverted: if the votes of the masses were made equal and the votes within each mass were proportioned to property.
Let us suppose one man in a district — it is an easy supposition — to contribute as much as a hundred of his neighbours. Against them he has only one vote. If there were only one representative for the mass, his poor neighbours would outvote him a hundred to one for that single representative. Bad enough. But amends are to be made to him. How? The district, in virtue of his wealth, is to choose, say, ten members instead of one; that is to say, by paying a very large contribution he has the happiness of being outvoted a hundred to one by the poor for ten representatives instead of being outvoted in exactly the same proportion for a single member. In truth, instead of benefiting from this larger quantity of representation, the rich man is subjected to an additional hardship. The increase of representation within his province sets up nine more persons, and as many more than nine as there may be democratic candidates, to cabal and intrigue and flatter the people at his expense and to his oppression. By this means an interest is held out to multitudes of the lower sort in obtaining a salary of eighteen livres a day — to them a vast object — besides the pleasure of living in Paris and their share in the government of the kingdom. The more the objects of ambition are multiplied and made democratic, in just that proportion the rich are endangered.
So it must go between the poor and the rich in the province deemed aristocratic, which in its internal relations is the very reverse of that character. In its external relations, that is in its relation to the other provinces, I cannot see how the unequal representation given to masses on account of wealth becomes the means of preserving the equipoise and the tranquillity of the commonwealth. For if it is one of the objects to secure the weak from being crushed by the strong, as in all society it undoubtedly is, how are the smaller and poorer of these masses to be saved from the tyranny of the wealthier? Is it by giving the wealthy further and more systematic means of oppressing them? When we come to a balance of representation between corporate bodies, provincial interests and rivalries and jealousies are quite as likely to arise among them as among individuals, and their divisions are likely to produce a much hotter spirit of dissension and something coming much nearer to a war.
I see that these aristocratic masses are formed on what is called the principle of direct contribution. Nothing could be a more unequal standard than this. Indirect contribution, which arises from duties on consumption, is in truth a better standard, and follows and discovers wealth more naturally than direct contribution does. It is difficult, indeed, to fix a standard of local preference on account of the one, or the other, or both, because some provinces may pay more of either or of both on account of causes that are not intrinsic but arise from the very districts over which they have gained a preference in consequence of their apparent contribution. If the masses were independent sovereign bodies who were to provide for a federal treasury by separate contingents, and if the revenue did not, as it does, include many impositions running through the whole, which affect men individually and not corporately and which by their nature confound all territorial limits, then something might be said for the basis of contribution founded on masses. But of all things, this representation measured by contribution is the most difficult to settle on principles of equity in a country that regards its districts as members of a whole. For a great city such as Bordeaux or Paris appears to pay a vast body of duties, almost out of all assignable proportion to other places, and its mass is reckoned accordingly. But are these cities the true contributors in that proportion? No. The consumers of the goods imported into Bordeaux, who are scattered all over France, pay the import duties of Bordeaux. The produce of the vintage in Guienne and Languedoc gives that city the means of a contribution that grows out of an export trade. The landholders who spend their estates in Paris, and are thereby the creators of that city, contribute for Paris out of the provinces their revenues arise in. Very nearly the same arguments apply to the representative share given on account of direct contribution, because direct contribution must be assessed on wealth, real or presumed, and that local wealth will itself arise from causes that are not local and which therefore in equity ought not to produce a local preference.
It is very remarkable that in this fundamental regulation, which settles the representation of the mass on direct contribution, they have not yet settled how that direct contribution is to be laid or how apportioned. Perhaps there is some hidden policy in this strange procedure, tending to keep the present Assembly in being. However, until they do settle it they can have no certain constitution. It must depend in the end on the system of taxation, and must vary with every variation in that system. As they have contrived matters, their taxation does not depend so much on their constitution as their constitution on their taxation. This must introduce great confusion among the masses, just as the variable qualification for votes within the district must, if ever real contested elections take place, cause endless internal controversy.
Comparing the three bases together, not on their political reason but on the ideas the Assembly works from, and testing its consistency with itself, we cannot help observing that the principle the committee call the basis of population does not begin to operate from the same point as the two other principles, called the bases of territory and of contribution, which are both aristocratic in nature. The consequence is that where all three begin to operate together, the working of the first on the two others produces the most absurd inequality. Every canton contains four square leagues and is reckoned to contain on average 4,000 inhabitants, or 680 voters in the primary assemblies, which vary in numbers with the population of the canton and send one deputy to the commune for every 200 voters. Nine cantons make a commune.
Now let us take a canton containing a seaport town of trade or a great manufacturing town. Let us suppose the population of this canton to be 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters, forming three primary assemblies and sending ten deputies to the commune.
Set against this one canton two others of the remaining eight in the same commune. We may suppose these to have their fair population of 4,000 inhabitants and 680 voters each, or 8,000 inhabitants and 1,360 voters between them. These will form only two primary assemblies and send only six deputies to the commune.
When the assembly of the commune comes to vote on the basis of territory, which is the first principle admitted to operate in that assembly, the single canton, which has half the territory of the other two, will have ten voices to six in electing three deputies to the assembly of the department — deputies chosen on the express ground of representing territory. Striking as this inequality is, it will be aggravated still further if we suppose, as we fairly may, that the several other cantons of the commune fall proportionally short of the average population by as much as the principal canton exceeds it.
Now for the basis of contribution, which is also a principle admitted to operate first in the assembly of the commune. Let us again take one canton such as the one described above. If the whole of the direct contributions paid by a great trading or manufacturing town is divided equally among the inhabitants, each individual will be found to pay much more than an individual living in the country on the same average. The whole paid by the inhabitants of the first will be more than the whole paid by the inhabitants of the second — we may fairly assume a third more. Then the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters, of the canton will pay as much as 19,050 inhabitants, or 3,289 voters, of the other cantons, which is nearly the estimated proportion of inhabitants and voters of five other cantons. Now the 2,193 voters will, as I said before, send only ten deputies to the assembly; the 3,289 voters will send sixteen. So for an equal share in the contribution of the whole commune there will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for deputies who are to be chosen on the principle of representing the general contribution of the whole commune.
By the same mode of computation we shall find that 15,875 inhabitants, or 2,741 voters, of the other cantons, who pay one sixth less towards the contribution of the whole commune, will have three voices more than the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters, of the one canton.
Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass in this curious apportionment of the rights of representation arising out of territory and contribution. The qualifications these confer are in truth negative qualifications, which give a right in inverse proportion to the possession of them.
In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in whatever light you please, I do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought together and held together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a cage to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction.
I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of considering the formation of a constitution. They have much metaphysics, but bad; much geometry, but bad; much proportional arithmetic, but false. Yet even if it were all as exact as metaphysics and geometry and arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, it would only make a fairer and more sightly vision. It is remarkable that in a great arrangement of mankind not one reference whatever is to be found to anything moral or anything political — nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men. Hominem non sapiunt — they have no savour of the human being.
You see that I am considering this constitution only as electoral, leading by steps to the National Assembly. I do not go into the internal government of the departments and their genealogy through the communes and cantons. In the original plan these local governments are to be composed as nearly as possible in the same manner and on the same principles as the elective assemblies. Each of them is a body perfectly compact and rounded in itself.
You cannot fail to see that this scheme has a direct and immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics and to make them totally independent of each other, with no direct constitutional means of coherence, connection or subordination except what may come from their acquiescence in the decisions of the general congress of ambassadors from each independent republic. That is what the National Assembly is in reality; and such governments, I admit, do exist in the world, though in forms infinitely better suited to the local and habitual circumstances of their people. But such associations, which are hardly bodies politic at all, have generally been the effect of necessity and not of choice; and I believe the present French power is the very first body of citizens who, having obtained full authority to do what they pleased with their country, have chosen to dismember it in this barbarous manner.
It is impossible not to observe that in the spirit of this geometrical distribution and arithmetical arrangement these pretended citizens treat France exactly like a conquered country. Acting as conquerors, they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh breed. The policy of such barbarous victors, who despise a subdued people and insult their feelings, has always been to destroy every vestige of the ancient country so far as they could — in religion, in government, in laws and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; to produce a general poverty; to put their properties up to auction; to crush their princes, nobles and pontiffs; to lay low everything that had lifted its head above the level, or that could serve to combine or rally the disbanded people in their distresses under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the way that those sincere friends of the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece and Macedon and other nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union under colour of providing for the independence of each of their cities.
When the members who compose these new bodies of cantons and communes and departments — arrangements deliberately produced through the medium of confusion — begin to act, they will find themselves in great measure strangers to one another. The electors and the elected throughout, especially in the rural cantons, will frequently be without any civil habits or connections, or any of that natural discipline which is the soul of a true republic. Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their districts, nor bishops with their dioceses, nor parish priests with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men bear a strong resemblance to the sort of military colonies Tacitus remarked on in the declining policy of Rome. In better and wiser days the Romans, whatever course they took with foreign nations, were careful to make the elements of a methodical subordination and settlement grow up together, and even to lay the foundations of discipline within the military. But when all the good arts had fallen into ruin, they proceeded, as your Assembly does, on the equality of men, and with as little judgment and as little care for the things that make a republic tolerable or durable. In this as in almost every instance your new commonwealth is born and bred and fed in the corruptions that mark degenerate and worn-out republics. Your child comes into the world with the symptoms of death on it; the facies Hippocratica forms the character of its face and the prognosis of its fate.
Footnote: "Non, ut olim, universæ legiones deducebantur, cum tribunis, et centurionibus, et sui cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et caritate rempublicam efficerent; sed ignoti inter se, diversis manipulis, sine rectore, sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium repente in unum collecti, numerus magis quam colonia." In English: whole legions were no longer settled together, as they once were, with their tribunes and centurions and the soldiers of each rank, so as to make a commonwealth by common consent and mutual affection; instead they were strangers to one another, drawn from different companies, with no leader and no mutual attachments, as though suddenly collected into one place out of some other race of men — a number rather than a colony. — Tacitus, Annals, book 14, section 27. All this will apply still better to the unconnected, rotating, biennial national assemblies in this absurd and senseless constitution.
The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to deal with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to deal with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of the habits communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were aware that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination, and that from this arose many diversities among men according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in town or country, their several ways of acquiring and settling property, and the quality of that property itself — all of which made them, as it were, so many different species of animal. From this they thought themselves obliged to sort their citizens into such classes, and to place them in such situations in the state, as their particular habits qualified them to fill, and to allot them such appropriate privileges as would secure them what their specific occasions required, and would furnish each description with the force to protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity of interests that must exist and must contend in every complex society. For the legislator would have been ashamed that the coarse husbandman should know well how to sort and use his sheep and horses and oxen, and should have common sense enough not to abstract and equalise them all into animals without providing each kind with its appropriate food and care and employment — while he, the economist and disposer and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was determined to know nothing of his flocks except as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that the great legislators of antiquity made their greatest display of power in their classification of the citizens, and even soared above themselves there. It is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series and sunk below even their own nothing. Where the first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and alchemical legislators, have taken exactly the contrary course. They have tried to confound all sorts of citizens, as far as they could, into one homogeneous mass, and then they divided this amalgam of theirs into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose counters, merely for the sake of simple counting, and not to figures, whose power is to come from their place in the table. The elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons. The roll of their own table of categories might have informed them that there was something else in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there are eight more heads in every complex deliberation which they have never thought of — though these, of all the ten, are the ones on which the skill of man can operate at all.
Footnote: Qualitas, Relatio, Actio, Passio, Ubi, Quando, Situs, Habitus. (Quality, relation, action, passion, place, time, position, state.)
So far from following that able arrangement of some of the old republican legislators, which follows the moral conditions and propensities of men with a solicitous accuracy, they have levelled and crushed together all the orders they found even under the coarse, unartificial arrangement of the monarchy — a form of government in which the classing of the citizens is not of so much importance as it is in a republic. It is true, however, that every such classification, if properly ordered, is good in all forms of government, and forms a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism as well as being the necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want of something of this kind, if the present project of a republic should fail, all securities for a moderated freedom fail along with it, and all the indirect restraints that mitigate despotism are removed — so much so that if monarchy should ever regain an entire ascendancy in France, under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth, unless it is voluntarily tempered at the outset by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince. This is to play a most desperate game.
They even declare that the confusion attending all such proceedings is one of their objects, and they hope to secure their constitution by a terror of the return of the evils that attended the making of it. "By this," they say, "its destruction will become difficult for authority, which cannot break it up without the entire disorganisation of the whole state." They presume that if this authority ever came to the same degree of power that they have acquired, it would make a more moderate and chastened use of it, and would piously tremble at entirely disorganising the state in the savage manner they have done themselves. They expect from the virtues of a returning despotism the security that is to be enjoyed by the offspring of their own popular vices.
I wish, Sir, that you and my readers would read M. de Calonne's work on this subject attentively. It is not only eloquent but an able and instructive performance. I confine myself to what he says about the constitution of the new state and the condition of the revenue. As for this minister's disputes with his rivals, I do not wish to pronounce on them. As little do I mean to hazard any opinion about his ways and means, financial or political, for taking his country out of its present disgraceful and deplorable condition of servitude, anarchy, bankruptcy and beggary. I cannot speculate quite so sanguinely as he does; but he is a Frenchman, and has a closer duty in these matters and better means of judging them than I can have. I hope that the formal avowal he refers to, made by one of the principal leaders in the Assembly, about the tendency of their scheme to bring France not only from a monarchy to a republic but from a republic to a mere confederacy, will be very particularly attended to. It adds new force to my observations; and indeed M. de Calonne's work supplies my deficiencies with many new and striking arguments on most of the subjects of this letter.
Footnote: See l'État de la France, page 363.
It is this determination to break their country into separate republics that has driven them into the greatest number of their difficulties and contradictions. If it were not for this, all the questions of exact equality, and these balances of individual rights and population and contribution that can never be settled, would be wholly useless. Representation, though drawn from the parts, would be a duty that regarded the whole equally. Each deputy to the Assembly would be the representative of France and of all its descriptions of people — of the many and the few, of the rich and the poor, of the great districts and the small. All these districts would themselves be subordinate to some standing authority existing independently of them, an authority in which their representation and everything belonging to it originated and to which it was directed. This standing, unalterable, fundamental government would make that territory truly and properly a whole, and it is the only thing that could. With us, when we elect popular representatives, we send them to a council in which each man individually is a subject, submitted to a government complete in all its ordinary functions. With you the elective Assembly is the sovereign and the sole sovereign, and all the members are therefore integral parts of that sole sovereignty. With us it is totally different. With us the representative, separated from the other parts, can have no action and no existence. The government is the point of reference for the several members and districts of our representation. This is the centre of our unity. This government of reference is a trustee for the whole and not for the parts. So is the other branch of our public council: I mean the House of Lords. With us the king and the Lords are separate and joint securities for the equality of each district, each province, each city. When did you ever hear in Great Britain of a province suffering from the inequality of its representation? Of a district that had no representation at all? Not only do our monarchy and our peerage secure the equality on which our unity depends, but so does the spirit of the House of Commons itself. The very inequality of representation that is so foolishly complained of is perhaps the very thing that prevents us from thinking or acting as members for districts. Cornwall elects as many members as all Scotland. But is Cornwall better taken care of than Scotland? Few people trouble their heads about any of your bases, outside a few giddy clubs. Most of those who wish for any change on any plausible grounds desire it on different ideas altogether.
Your new constitution is the very reverse of ours in its principle, and I am astonished that anyone could dream of holding up anything done in it as an example for Great Britain. With you there is little, or rather no, connection between the last representative and the first constituent. The member who goes to the National Assembly is not chosen by the people, nor accountable to them. There are three elections before he is chosen; two sets of magistracy come between him and the primary assembly, so as to make him, as I have said, the ambassador of a state and not the representative of the people within a state. This changes the whole spirit of the election; nor can any corrective your constitution-mongers have devised make him anything other than what he is. The very attempt to do it would inevitably introduce a confusion more horrid, if possible, than the present one. There is no way of making a connection between the original constituent and the representative except by the roundabout means that would lead the candidate to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, so that by their authoritative instructions — and perhaps something more — those primary electors might force the two succeeding bodies of electors to make a choice agreeable to their wishes. But this would plainly subvert the whole scheme. It would be to plunge them back into that tumult and confusion of popular election which their interposed gradations of election are meant to avoid, and in the end to risk the whole fortune of the state with those who have the least knowledge of it and the least interest in it. This is a perpetual dilemma into which they are thrown by the vicious, weak and contradictory principles they have chosen. Unless the people break up and level this gradation, it is plain that they do not substantially elect to the Assembly at all; indeed they elect as little in appearance as in reality.
What is it that we all look for in an election? To answer its real purposes you must first possess the means of knowing whether your man is fit, and then you must retain some hold on him by personal obligation or dependence. To what end are these primary electors complimented, or rather mocked, with a choice? They can never know anything about the qualities of the man who is to serve them, nor has he any obligation whatever to them. Of all the powers unfit to be delegated by those who have any real means of judging, the most peculiarly unfit is one that relates to a personal choice. In case of abuse, that body of primary electors can never call the representative to account for his conduct. He is too far removed from them in the chain of representation. If he behaves badly at the end of his two years' lease, it does not concern him for two years more. By the new French constitution the best and wisest representatives go into this Limbus Patrum equally with the worst. Their bottoms are presumed foul, and they must go into dock to be refitted. Every man who has served in an Assembly is ineligible for two years after. Just as these magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney sweeps, they are disqualified from exercising it. Superficial, new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken, ill recollection, are to be the destined character of all your future governors. Your constitution has too much jealousy in it to have much sense. You consider the representative's breach of trust so exclusively that you do not regard the question of his fitness to execute it at all.
This purgatorial interval is not unfavourable to a faithless representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad governor. In this time he may intrigue his way into a superiority over the wisest and most virtuous. Since in the end all the members of this elective constitution are equally fugitive and exist only for the election, the people to whom he is to be responsible when he asks for a renewal of his trust may no longer be the same people who chose him. To call all the secondary electors of the commune to account is ridiculous, impracticable and unjust: they may themselves have been deceived in their choice, as the third set of electors, those of the department, may be in theirs. In your elections responsibility cannot exist.
Finding no sort of principle of coherence with one another in the nature and constitution of the several new republics of France, I considered what cement the legislators had provided for them out of any extraneous materials. I take no notice of their confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts and their enthusiasm; they are nothing but mere tricks. But tracing their policy through their actions, I think I can make out the arrangements by which they propose to hold these republics together. The first is the confiscation, with the compulsory paper currency attached to it; the second is the supreme power of the city of Paris; the third is the general army of the state. I shall reserve what I have to say about the last until I come to consider the army as a head by itself.
As to the operation of the first, the confiscation and the paper currency, merely as a cement, I cannot deny that these two, each depending on the other, may for some time make a sort of cement — provided their madness and folly in managing it, and in tempering the parts together, does not produce a repulsion at the very outset. But allowing the scheme some coherence and some duration, it appears to me that if after a while the confiscation is not found sufficient to support the paper coinage, as I am morally certain it will not be, then instead of cementing it will add infinitely to the dissociation and distraction and confusion of these confederate republics, both in relation to each other and in the several parts within each of them. But if the confiscation should succeed so far as to sink the paper currency, the cement is gone with the circulation. Meanwhile its binding force will be very uncertain, and it will tighten or slacken with every variation in the credit of the paper.
Only one thing is certain in this scheme, an effect that is seemingly collateral but is, I have no doubt, direct in the minds of the men who conduct this business: its effect in producing an oligarchy in every one of the republics. A paper circulation not founded on any real money deposited or pledged, already amounting to forty-four millions of English money, and forcibly substituted for the coin of the kingdom, thereby becoming the substance of its revenue as well as the medium of all its commercial and civil intercourse, must put whatever power and authority and influence is left, in whatever form it may take, into the hands of the managers and conductors of that circulation.
In England we feel the influence of the Bank, though it is only the centre of a voluntary dealing. A man knows little indeed of the influence of money on mankind who does not see the force of the management of a moneyed concern so much more extensive than any of ours, and by its nature so much more dependent on its managers. But this is not merely a money concern. There is another member of the system inseparably connected with this money management. It consists in the means of drawing out portions of the confiscated lands for sale at discretion, and carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper into land and land into paper. When we follow this process in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of the force with which this system must operate. By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation that species of property becomes, as it were, volatilised; it takes on an unnatural and monstrous activity, and thereby throws into the hands of the several managers, principal and subordinate, Parisian and provincial, all the representative of money and perhaps a full tenth part of all the land in France — land which has now acquired the worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper circulation, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They have reversed Latona's kindness to the landed property of Delos. They have sent theirs to be blown about like the light fragments of a wreck, oras et littora circum, round the shores and the coasts.
The new dealers, being all habitual adventurers with no fixed habits or local attachments, will buy in order to job out again, as the market in paper or in money or in land offers an advantage. For though a holy bishop thinks agriculture will derive great advantages from the "enlightened" usurers who are to buy the church confiscations, I, who am not a good farmer but an old one, beg leave with great humility to tell his late Lordship that usury is no tutor of agriculture; and if the word "enlightened" is to be understood according to the new dictionary, as it always is in your new schools, I cannot conceive how a man's not believing in God can teach him to cultivate the earth with the least additional skill or encouragement. "Diis immortalibus sero" — I sow for the immortal gods — said an old Roman as he held one handle of the plough while Death held the other. Though you were to add all the directors of the two Academies to the directors of the Caisse d'Escompte in the commission, an old experienced peasant is worth them all. I have got more information on a curious and interesting branch of husbandry in one short conversation with an old Carthusian monk than I have derived from all the bank directors I have ever talked with. There is no cause for alarm, however, at money dealers meddling with rural economy. These gentlemen are too wise in their generation. At first, perhaps, their tender and susceptible imaginations may be captivated with the innocent and unprofitable delights of a pastoral life; but in a little while they will find that agriculture is a trade much more laborious and much less lucrative than the one they had left. After delivering its panegyric, they will turn their backs on it like their great precursor and prototype. Like him, they may begin by singing "Beatus ille" — happy the man — but what will be the end?
Hæc ubi locutus fœnerator Alphius, Jam jam futurus rusticus, Omnem relegit Idibus pecuniam, Quærit Calendis ponere.
(When Alphius the moneylender had said all this, on the very point of becoming a countryman, he called in all his money on the Ides — and on the first of the month was looking to put it out again.)
They will cultivate the Caisse d'Église, under this prelate's sacred auspices, with much more profit than its vineyards and its cornfields. They will employ their talents according to their habits and their interests. They will not follow the plough while they can direct treasuries and govern provinces.
Your legislators, new in everything, are the very first to have founded a commonwealth on gaming and infused that spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object of these politics is to metamorphose France from a great kingdom into one great gaming table; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamblers; to make speculation as extensive as life and mix it with all life's concerns; and to divert the whole of the hopes and fears of the people out of their usual channels into the impulses and passions and superstitions of men who live on chances. They loudly proclaim their opinion that this present system of a republic cannot possibly exist without this kind of gaming fund, and that the very thread of its life is spun out of the staple of these speculations. The old gaming in the funds was mischievous enough, undoubtedly, but it was mischievous only to individuals. Even at its greatest extent, in the Mississippi and the South Sea, it affected comparatively few; and where it extends further, as in lotteries, the spirit has only a single object. But where the law, which in most circumstances forbids gaming and in none countenances it, is itself debauched so as to reverse its own nature and policy and expressly to force the subject to this destructive table, by bringing the spirit and symbols of gaming into the smallest matters and engaging everybody in it and in everything — there a more dreadful epidemic disease of that kind is spread than has yet appeared in the world. With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation. What he receives in the morning will not have the same value at night. What he is compelled to take in payment of an old debt will not be received as the same when he comes to pay a debt he has contracted himself; nor will it be the same when by prompt payment he could avoid contracting any debt at all. Industry must wither away. Economy must be driven out of your country. Careful provision will have no existence. Who will labour without knowing the amount of his pay? Who will study to increase what nobody can estimate? Who will accumulate when he does not know the value of what he saves? Abstract it from its uses in gaming, and to accumulate your paper wealth would be not the providence of a man but the disordered instinct of a jackdaw.
The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamblers is this: that though all are forced to play, few can understand the game, and fewer still are in a condition to make use of that knowledge. The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations. What effect it must have on the country people is visible. The townsman can calculate from day to day; the countryman cannot. When the peasant first brings his corn to market, the magistrate in the town obliges him to take the assignat at par; when he goes to the shop with this money, he finds it seven per cent the worse for crossing the street. He will not readily come back to that market. The townspeople will be inflamed; they will force the country people to bring their corn. Resistance will begin, and the murders of Paris and St Denis may be repeated all over France.
What does the empty compliment paid to the country signify, in giving it perhaps more than its share in the theory of your representation? Where have you placed the real power over moneyed and landed circulation? Where have you placed the means of raising and lowering the value of every man's freehold? Those whose operations can take ten per cent from the possessions of every man in France, or add ten per cent to them, must be the masters of every man in France. The whole of the power obtained by this Revolution will settle in the towns, among the burghers and the moneyed directors who lead them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman and the peasant have none of them the habits or inclinations or experience that could lead them to any share in this, the sole source of power and influence now left in France. The very nature of country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations and all the pleasures they afford, make combination and arrangement — the sole way of procuring and exerting influence — in a manner impossible among country people. Combine them with all the art and all the industry you can, and they are always dissolving back into individuality. Anything in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable among them. Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the story of a day that does its business and dies — all the things that are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers — are not easily employed, or hardly at all, among scattered people. They assemble, they arm, they act with the utmost difficulty and at the greatest expense. Their efforts, if they can ever be begun, cannot be sustained. They cannot proceed systematically. If the country gentlemen attempt an influence through the mere income of their property, what is that against the influence of men who have ten times their income to sell, and who can ruin their property by bringing their plunder to meet it at market? If the landed man wants to mortgage, he lowers the value of his land and raises the value of assignats. He increases the power of his enemy by the very means he must use to contend with him. The country gentleman, therefore, and the officer by sea and land, and the man of liberal views and habits attached to no profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his country as if he had been proscribed by law. It is obvious that in the towns all the things that conspire against the country gentleman combine in favour of the money manager and director. In towns, combination is natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their amusements, their business, their idleness, continually bring them into contact with one another. Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of men who mean to form them for civil or military action.
All these considerations leave no doubt in my mind that if this monster of a constitution can last, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors in assignats and trustees for the sale of church lands, attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility and the people. Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In "the Serbonian bog" of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk and lost for ever.
Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think that some great offences in France must cry to heaven, which has thought fit to punish her with subjection to a vile and inglorious domination, in which no comfort or compensation is to be found even in the false splendours that play about other tyrannies and keep mankind from feeling themselves dishonoured while they are oppressed. I confess I am touched with a sorrow mixed with some indignation at the conduct of a few men, once of great rank and still of great character, who, deluded by specious names, have engaged in a business too deep for the line of their understanding to fathom — who have lent their fair reputation and the authority of their high-sounding names to the designs of men they could not possibly have known, and have thereby made their very virtues work towards the ruin of their country.
So much for the first cementing principle.
The second material of cement for their new republic is the superiority of the city of Paris, and this, I admit, is strongly connected with the other cementing principle of paper circulation and confiscation. It is in this part of the project that we must look for the cause of the destruction of all the old boundaries of provinces and jurisdictions, ecclesiastical and secular, and the dissolution of all ancient combinations of things, as well as the formation of so many small unconnected republics. The power of the city of Paris is plainly one great spring of all their politics. It is through the power of Paris, now become the centre and focus of jobbing, that the leaders of this faction direct, or rather command, the whole legislative and the whole executive government. Everything must therefore be done that can confirm the authority of that city over the other republics. Paris is compact; she has an enormous strength, wholly out of proportion to the force of any of the square republics, and this strength is collected and condensed within a narrow compass. Paris has a natural and easy connection between its parts, which no scheme of a geometrical constitution will affect; nor does it much matter whether its proportion of representation is greater or smaller, since it has the whole draught of fishes in its net. The other divisions of the kingdom, being hacked and torn to pieces and separated from all their habitual means and even principles of union, cannot for some time at least confederate against her. Nothing was to be left in all the subordinate members but weakness, disconnection and confusion. To confirm this part of the plan, the Assembly has lately resolved that no two of their republics shall have the same commander-in-chief.
To anyone who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, formed in this way, will appear a system of general weakness. It is boasted that the geometrical policy has been adopted so that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans, but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart and one Assembly. But instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country at all. No man was ever attached by a sense of pride, partiality or real affection to a description of square measurement. He will never glory in belonging to square number 71, or to any other badge ticket. We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country, in which the heart found something it could fill. Love of the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a sort of elementary training for those higher and larger regards by which alone men come to be affected, as with a concern of their own, in the prosperity of a kingdom as extensive as France. In that general territory itself, as in the old name of provinces, the citizens are interested by old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on account of the geometrical properties of its figure. The power and pre-eminence of Paris does certainly press down and hold these republics together as long as it lasts; but for the reasons I have already given you, I do not think it can last very long.
Passing from the civil creating and civil cementing principles of this constitution to the National Assembly, which is to appear and act as sovereign, we see a body constituted with every possible power and no possible external control. We see a body without fundamental laws, without established maxims, without respected rules of proceeding, which nothing can hold firm to any system whatever. Their idea of their own powers is always taken at the utmost stretch of legislative competence, and their precedents for common cases are taken from the exceptions of the most urgent necessity. The future Assembly is to be in most respects like the present one; but by the manner of the new elections and the tendency of the new circulations it will be purged of the small degree of internal control that exists in a minority originally chosen from various interests and preserving something of their spirit. If it is possible, the next Assembly must be worse than the present. The present one, by destroying and altering everything, will leave its successors apparently nothing popular to do. They will be roused by rivalry and example to the boldest and most absurd enterprises. To suppose such an Assembly sitting in perfect quiet is ridiculous.
Your all-sufficient legislators, in their hurry to do everything at once, have forgotten one thing that seems essential, and which I believe no projector of a republic has ever omitted before, in theory or in practice. They have forgotten to constitute a senate, or something of that nature and character. Never before this time was a body politic heard of that consisted of one legislative and active assembly and its executive officers, without such a council — without something for foreign states to connect themselves with, something the people could look up to in the ordinary detail of government, something to give a bias and a steadiness and to preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of state. Kings generally have such a body as a council. A monarchy may exist without one, but it seems to be of the very essence of a republican government. It holds a sort of middle place between the supreme power exercised by the people or immediately delegated from them, and the mere executive. There are no traces of this in your constitution; and in providing nothing of the kind your Solons and Numas have shown a sovereign incapacity, as much as in anything else.
Let us now turn our eyes to what they have done towards forming an executive power. For this they have chosen a degraded king. This first executive officer of theirs is to be a machine, without any sort of deliberative discretion in any single act of his function. At best he is only a channel for conveying to the National Assembly such matter as that body may need to know. If he had been made the exclusive channel, the power would not have been without its importance, though infinitely perilous to anyone who chose to exercise it. But public intelligence and statements of fact may reach the Assembly with equal authenticity by any other conveyance. As a means of giving direction to measures by the statement of an authorised reporter, therefore, this office of intelligence is nothing at all.
Consider the French scheme of an executive officer in its two natural divisions, civil and political. In the first it must be observed that under the new constitution the higher parts of judicature, in either of its lines, are not in the king. The king of France is not the fountain of justice. Neither the original nor the appellate judges are of his nomination. He neither proposes the candidates nor has a veto on the choice. He is not even the public prosecutor. He serves only as a notary, to authenticate the choice of judges made in the several districts. Through his officers he is to carry out their sentence. When we look into the true nature of his authority, he appears to be nothing more than a chief of bailiffs, sergeants-at-mace, catchpolls, jailers and hangmen. It is impossible to place anything called royalty in a more degrading light. It would have been a thousand times better for the dignity of this unhappy prince if he had had nothing at all to do with the administration of justice, deprived as he is of everything venerable and everything consoling in that function, with no power of originating any process and no power of suspension, mitigation or pardon. Everything in justice that is vile and odious is thrown on him. It was not for nothing that the Assembly took such pains to remove the stigma from certain offices, when they were resolved to place the man who had lately been their king in a situation only one degree above the executioner's, and in an office of nearly the same quality. It is not in nature that the king of the French, situated as he now is, can respect himself or be respected by others.
View this new executive officer on the side of his political capacity, as he acts under the orders of the National Assembly. To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, even a merely political one, is a great trust. It is a trust that has much depending on its faithful and diligent performance, both in the person presiding over it and in all his subordinates. The means of performing this duty ought to be given by regulation, and the dispositions towards it ought to be infused by the circumstances attending the trust. It ought to be surrounded with dignity, authority and consideration, and it ought to lead to glory. The office of execution is an office of exertion. It is not from impotence that we are to expect the tasks of power. What sort of person is a king to command executive service who has no means whatever of rewarding it — not with a permanent office, not with a grant of land, no, not with a pension of fifty pounds a year, not with the vainest and most trivial title? In France the king is no more the fountain of honour than he is the fountain of justice. All rewards, all distinctions, are in other hands. Those who serve the king can be moved by no natural motive but fear — fear of everything except their master. His functions of internal coercion are as odious as those he exercises in the department of justice. If relief is to be given to any municipality, the Assembly gives it. If troops are to be sent to reduce a municipality to obedience to the Assembly, the king is to execute the order; and on every occasion he is to be spattered over with the blood of his people. He has no veto, yet his name and authority are used to enforce every harsh decree. Indeed, he must join in the butchery of anyone who attempts to free him from his imprisonment, or who shows the slightest attachment to his person or to his ancient authority.
Executive magistracy ought to be constituted in such a way that those who compose it are disposed to love and venerate the people they are bound to obey. A deliberate neglect, or, what is worse, a literal but perverse and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest counsels. The law will attempt in vain to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions. To make men act zealously is not within the competence of law. Kings, even such as are truly kings, may and ought to bear with the freedom of subjects who are obnoxious to them. They may also, without derogating from themselves, bear even the authority of such persons if it promotes their service. Louis the Thirteenth mortally hated Cardinal Richelieu, but his support of that minister against his rivals was the source of all the glory of his reign and the solid foundation of his throne itself. Louis the Fourteenth, when he came to the throne, did not love Cardinal Mazarin, but he kept him in power for his own interests. When he was old he detested Louvois, but for years, while Louvois faithfully served his greatness, he endured the man. When George the Second took Mr Pitt, who certainly was not agreeable to him, into his councils, he did nothing that could humble a wise sovereign. But these ministers, who were chosen by affairs and not by affections, acted in the name of kings and in trust for them, not as their avowed constitutional and ostensible masters. I think it impossible that any king, once he has recovered from his first terrors, can cordially infuse vivacity and vigour into measures that he knows to be dictated by men whom he must be persuaded are in the highest degree ill disposed towards his person. Will any ministers who serve such a king — or whatever he is to be called — with even a decent appearance of respect cordially obey the orders of men whom only the other day they had committed to the Bastille in his name? Will they obey the orders of men whom they believed they were treating with leniency while they were exercising despotic justice on them, and for whom they thought they had provided an asylum in a prison? If you expect such obedience, then among your other innovations and regenerations you ought to make a revolution in nature and provide a new constitution for the human mind; otherwise your supreme government cannot harmonise with its executive system. There are cases in which we cannot make do with names and abstractions. You may call half a dozen leading individuals whom we have reason to fear and hate the nation. It makes no difference except to make us fear and hate them the more. If it had been thought justifiable and expedient to make such a revolution by such means and through such persons as you have made yours, it would have been wiser to have completed the business of the fifth and sixth of October. The new executive officer would then owe his position to men who were his creators as well as his masters; and he might be bound, by interest, by the fellowship of crime, and, if crimes could have virtues, by gratitude, to serve those who had promoted him to a place of great profit and great sensual indulgence — and of something more besides, for more he must have received from men who certainly would not have limited a creature they had aggrandised as they have limited a submitting antagonist.
A king in the present one's circumstances, if he is so totally stupefied by his misfortunes as to think it not the necessity but the privilege and prize of life to eat and sleep with no regard to glory, can never be fit for the office. If he feels as men commonly feel, he must be aware that an office so circumstanced is one in which he can win no fame and no reputation. He has no generous interest to rouse him to action. At best his conduct will be passive and defensive. To inferior people such an office might be a matter of honour. But to be raised to it and to descend to it are different things, and suggest different sentiments. Does he really name the ministers? Then they will have a sympathy with him. Are they forced on him? Then the whole business between them and the nominal king will be mutual counteraction. In every other country the office of minister of state is of the highest dignity. In France it is full of peril and incapable of glory. Rivals they will still have in their nothingness, as long as shallow ambition exists in the world or the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive to short-sighted avarice. Your constitution enables those competitors of the ministers to attack them in their vital parts, while the ministers have no means of repelling the charges except in the degrading character of culprits. The ministers of state in France are the only persons in that country who are incapable of a share in the national councils. What ministers! What councils! What a nation! But they are responsible. Responsibility is a poor sort of service to get. The elevation of mind derived from fear will never make a nation glorious. Responsibility prevents crimes. It makes all attempts against the laws dangerous. But as a principle of active and zealous service, none but idiots could think of it. Is the conduct of a war to be trusted to a man who may abhor its very principle — who with every step he takes to make it succeed confirms the power of those by whom he is oppressed? Will foreign states seriously treat with a man who has no prerogative of peace or war, not so much as a single vote, by himself or his ministers or anyone he can possibly influence? A state of contempt is no state for a prince: better be rid of him at once.
I know it will be said that these ill humours in the court and the executive government will last only through this generation, and that the king has been brought to declare that the dauphin shall be educated in conformity with his situation. If he is made to conform to his situation, he will have no education at all. His training must be worse even than that of an arbitrary monarch. If he reads — and whether he reads or not — some good or evil genius will tell him that his ancestors were kings. From that moment his object must be to assert himself and to avenge his parents. This, you will say, is not his duty. That may be; but it is nature; and while you pit nature against you, you are unwise to trust to duty. In this futile scheme of politics, the state nurses in its bosom for the present a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction, inefficiency and decay, and it prepares the means of its own final ruin. In short, I see nothing in the executive force — I cannot call it authority — that has even an appearance of vigour, or the smallest degree of just correspondence or symmetry or friendly relation with the supreme power, either as it now exists or as it is planned for the future government.
You have settled, by an economy as perverted as the policy, two establishments of government, one real and one fictitious, both maintained at a vast expense — but the fictitious one at the greater, I think. Such a machine as the second is not worth the grease of its wheels. The expense is exorbitant, and neither the show nor the use deserves a tenth part of the charge. Oh, but I am not doing justice to the talents of the legislators; I am not making the allowance I ought for necessity. Their scheme of executive force was not their own choice. This pageant must be kept up. The people would not consent to part with it. Right; I understand you. In spite of your grand theories, to which you would have heaven and earth bend, you do know how to conform yourselves to the nature and circumstances of things. But when you were obliged to conform this far to circumstances, you ought to have carried your submission further and made what you were obliged to take a proper instrument, useful to its end. That was in your power. For instance, among many others, it was in your power to leave your king the right of peace and war. What! Leave the executive magistrate the most dangerous of all prerogatives? I know none more dangerous, nor any that more needs to be trusted to him. I do not say that this prerogative ought to be trusted to your king unless he enjoyed other auxiliary trusts along with it, which he does not now hold. But if he did possess them, hazardous as they undoubtedly are, advantages would arise from such a constitution more than compensating the risk. There is no other way of keeping the several potentates of Europe from intriguing separately and personally with the members of your Assembly, from meddling in all your concerns, and from fomenting in the heart of your country the most pernicious of all factions — factions in the interest and under the direction of foreign powers. From that worst of evils, thank God, we are still free. Your skill, if you had any, would be well employed in finding indirect correctives and controls on this perilous trust. If you did not like the ones we have chosen in England, your leaders might have exerted their abilities in contriving better. If it were necessary to illustrate the consequences of such an executive government as yours in the management of great affairs, I should refer you to M. de Montmorin's recent reports to the National Assembly and to all the other proceedings relating to the differences between Great Britain and Spain. It would be treating your understanding with disrespect to point them out to you.
Footnote: In reality three, if we count the provincial republican establishments.
I hear that the persons who are called ministers have signified an intention of resigning their places. I am rather astonished that they did not resign long ago. Not for the universe would I have stood in the position they have occupied for the last twelvemonth. They wished well to the Revolution, I take it for granted. However that may be, placed as they were on an eminence — though an eminence of humiliation — they could not help being the first to see collectively, and to feel each in his own department, the evils that Revolution has produced. In every step they took, or refrained from taking, they must have felt the degraded situation of their country and their own utter incapacity to serve it. They are in a species of subordinate servitude in which no men before them were ever seen. Having the confidence neither of their sovereign, on whom they were forced, nor of the Assembly, which forced them on him, all the noble functions of their office are performed by committees of the Assembly, without any regard whatever to their personal or their official authority. They are to execute, without power; to be responsible, without discretion; to deliberate, without choice. In their bewildered situation under two sovereigns, over neither of whom they have any influence, they must act in such a way as, whatever they may intend, to betray sometimes the one and sometimes the other, and always to betray themselves. Such has been their situation, and such must be the situation of those who succeed them. I have much respect and many good wishes for M. Necker. I am obliged to him for attentions. When his enemies had driven him from Versailles, I thought his exile a subject for the most serious congratulation. Sed multæ urbes et publica vota vicerunt — but many cities and the public prayers prevailed. He is now sitting on the ruins of the finances and of the monarchy of France.
A great deal more might be observed on the strange constitution of the executive part of the new government; but fatigue must set bounds to the discussion of subjects which in themselves have hardly any limits.
I am able to perceive as little genius and talent in the plan of judicature formed by the National Assembly. Following their invariable course, the framers of your constitution have begun by utterly abolishing the parlements. These venerable bodies, like the rest of the old government, needed reform, even if no change had been made in the monarchy. They needed several more alterations to adapt them to the system of a free constitution. But they had particular features in their constitution, and not a few of them, that deserved the approval of wise men. They possessed one fundamental excellence: they were independent. The most doubtful circumstance attending their office, that it was purchasable, actually contributed to this independence of character. They held for life. Indeed they may be said to have held by inheritance. Appointed by the monarch, they were regarded as nearly out of his power. The most determined exertions of that authority against them only showed their radical independence. They formed permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and from most of their forms, they were well calculated to give both certainty and stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum securing those laws through all the revolutions of humour and opinion. They had saved that sacred deposit of the country through the reigns of arbitrary princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They kept alive the memory and the record of the constitution. They were the great security for private property, which might be said, at a time when personal liberty had no existence, to be in fact as well guarded in France as in any other country. Whatever is supreme in a state ought as far as possible to have its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend on it but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.
Those parlements had furnished, not the best certainly, but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy. Such an independent judicature was ten times more necessary when a democracy became the absolute power of the country. In that constitution, elective, temporary, local judges such as you have contrived, exercising their dependent functions in a narrow society, must be the worst of all tribunals. It will be vain to look in them for any appearance of justice towards strangers, towards the obnoxious rich, towards the minority of defeated parties, towards everyone who supported unsuccessful candidates at the election. It will be impossible to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction. We know by experience that all contrivances by ballot are vain and childish as a way of preventing inclinations from being discovered. Where they best answer the purposes of concealment, they answer by producing suspicion, and that is a still more mischievous cause of partiality.
If the parlements had been preserved instead of being dissolved at such ruinous cost to the nation, they might have served in this new commonwealth — not precisely the same purposes, I do not mean an exact parallel, but near the same purposes as the court and senate of the Areopagus served in Athens: that is, as one of the balances and correctives to the evils of a light and unjust democracy. Everyone knows that this tribunal was the great stay of that state; everyone knows with what care it was upheld and with what religious awe it was consecrated. The parlements were not wholly free from faction, I admit; but that evil was external and accidental, and not so much a vice of their constitution itself as it must be in your new contrivance of six-yearly elective judicatures. Several English people commend the abolition of the old tribunals, supposing that they determined everything by bribery and corruption. But they have stood the test of both monarchic and republican scrutiny. The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those bodies when they were dissolved in 1771; the men who have dissolved them again would have done the same if they could; but since both inquisitions failed, I conclude that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare among them.
It would have been prudent, along with the parlements, to preserve their ancient power of registering all the decrees of the National Assembly, and at least of remonstrating against them, as they did with the decrees passed in the time of the monarchy. It would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence. The vice of the ancient democracies, and one cause of their ruin, was that they ruled, as you do, by occasional decrees, psephismata. This practice soon broke in on the tenor and consistency of the laws; it lowered the people's respect for them, and in the end destroyed them altogether.
Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which in the time of the monarchy belonged to the Parlement of Paris, in your principal executive officer — whom, in spite of common sense, you persist in calling king — is the height of absurdity. You ought never to allow remonstrance from the man who is to execute. This is to understand neither counsel nor execution, neither authority nor obedience. The person you call king ought not to have this power, or else he ought to have more.
Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of imitating your monarchy and seating your judges on a bench of independence, your object is to reduce them to the blindest obedience. Having changed all things, you have invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges, who I suppose are to decide according to law, and then you let them know that at some time or other you intend to give them some law to decide by. Whatever studies they have made, if they have made any, are to be useless to them. But to make up for those studies, they are to be sworn to obey all the rules and orders and instructions they receive from time to time from the National Assembly. If they submit to these, they leave the subject no ground of law at all. They become complete and most dangerous instruments in the hands of the governing power, which, in the middle of a case or in prospect of one, may wholly change the rule of decision. If these orders of the National Assembly come to be contrary to the will of the people who locally choose those judges, such confusion must follow as is terrible to think of. For the judges owe their place to the local authority, and the commands they are sworn to obey come from men who have no share in appointing them. Meanwhile they have the example of the court of the Châtelet to encourage and guide them in the exercise of their functions. That court is to try criminals sent to it by the National Assembly, or brought before it by other means of accusation. They sit under a guard to save their own lives. They do not know by what law they judge, nor under what authority they act, nor by what tenure they hold. It is thought that they are sometimes obliged to condemn at the peril of their lives. This is perhaps not certain, and cannot be ascertained; but when they acquit, we know that they have seen the men they discharge hanged at the door of their court, with perfect impunity to those who did it.
The Assembly does indeed promise that they will form a body of law that shall be short, simple, clear and so forth. That is, by their short laws they will leave much to the discretion of the judge, while they have exploded the authority of all the learning that could make judicial discretion — a perilous thing at best — deserve the name of a sound discretion.
It is curious to observe that the administrative bodies are carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals. That is, the very persons who ought to be most entirely subject to the laws are exempted from their power. Those who execute public financial trusts ought of all men to be held most strictly to their duty. One would have thought that it must have been among your earliest cares, unless you meant those administrative bodies to be real, sovereign, independent states, to form an awe-inspiring tribunal, like your late parlements or like our King's Bench, where all corporate officers might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their functions and would meet with coercion if they trespassed against their legal duty. But the reason for the exemption is plain. These administrative bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through democracy to oligarchy. They must therefore be put above the law. It will be said that the legal tribunals you have made are unfit to coerce them. Undoubtedly they are. They are unfit for any rational purpose. It will be said too that the administrative bodies will be accountable to the general Assembly. This, I fear, is talking without much consideration of the nature of that Assembly or of these corporations. However, to be subject to the pleasure of that Assembly is not to be subject to law, either for protection or for constraint.
This establishment of judges still wants something to complete it. It is to be crowned by a new tribunal. This is to be a grand state judicature, and it is to judge crimes committed against the nation — that is, against the power of the Assembly. It seems as if they had something in view of the nature of the high court of justice erected in England during the great usurpation. As they have not yet finished this part of the scheme, it is impossible to form a direct judgment on it. However, unless great care is taken to form it in a spirit very different from the one that has guided them in their proceedings on state offences, this tribunal, subservient to their inquisition the Committee of Research, will extinguish the last sparks of liberty in France and settle the most dreadful and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation. If they wish to give this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not remove cases relating to their own members from it, or send such cases to it, at their pleasure. They must also move the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of Paris.
Footnote: For further explanation of all these judicatures and of the Committee of Research, see M. de Calonne's work.
Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than can be discovered in your plan of judicature? Arranging this part ably is the more difficult, and requires the greater skill and attention, not only as a great concern in itself but because it is the third cementing principle in the new body of republics that you call the French nation. Truly it is not easy to guess what that army may become in the end. You have voted a very large one, and on good pay, at least fully equal to your apparent means of paying it. But what is the principle of its discipline? Or whom is it to obey? You have got the wolf by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position you have chosen to place yourselves in, and in which you are so well circumstanced for a free deliberation about that army, or about anything else.
The minister and secretary of state for the War Department is M. de La Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his colleagues in the administration, is a most zealous supporter of the Revolution and a sanguine admirer of the new constitution that originated in it. His statement of the facts about the military of France is important, not only from his official and personal authority but because it displays very clearly the actual condition of the army in France, and because it throws light on the principles the Assembly proceeds by in administering this critical object. It may enable us to judge how far it would be expedient in this country to imitate the martial policy of France.
On the fourth of last June M. de La Tour du Pin comes to give an account of the state of his department as it exists under the auspices of the National Assembly. No man knows it so well; no man can express it better. Addressing the National Assembly, he says:
"His Majesty has sent me this day to inform you of the multiplied disorders of which every day he receives the most distressing news. The army [le corps militaire] threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy. Entire regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order established by your decrees, and to the oaths they have taken with the most awful solemnity. Compelled by my duty to inform you of these excesses, my heart bleeds when I consider who it is that has committed them. Those against whom I have no power to withhold the most grievous complaints are part of that very soldiery which until this day has been so full of honour and loyalty, and among whom I have lived for fifty years as comrade and friend.
"What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has led them astray all at once? While you are working tirelessly to establish uniformity in the empire and to mould the whole into one coherent and consistent body; while the French are being taught by you at once the respect the laws owe to the rights of man and the respect the citizens owe to the laws — the administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance and confusion. In more than one corps I see the bonds of discipline slackened or broken; the most unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise; the ordinances without force; the commanders without authority; the military chest and the colours carried off; the authority of the king himself [risum teneatis — try not to laugh] proudly defied; the officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven away, and some of them prisoners in the middle of their own corps, dragging out a precarious life in an atmosphere of disgust and humiliation. To fill up the measure of all these horrors, the commandants of garrisons have had their throats cut before the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers.
"These evils are great, but they are not the worst consequences that such military insurrections may produce. Sooner or later they may threaten the nation itself. The nature of things requires that the army should never act except as an instrument. The moment it sets itself up as a deliberative body and acts on its own resolutions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy — a species of political monster that has always ended by devouring those who produced it.
"After all this, who can fail to be alarmed at the irregular consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regiments by the common soldiers and non-commissioned officers, without the knowledge of their superiors or even in contempt of their authority? — although the presence and concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to such monstrous democratic assemblies [comices]."
There is no need to add much to this finished picture — finished so far as its canvas allows, but not, I think, taking in the whole nature and complexity of the disorders of this military democracy, which, as the war minister truly and wisely observes, must be the real constitution of the state wherever it exists, by whatever formal name it goes. For although he informs the Assembly that the greater part of the army has not thrown off its obedience but is still attached to its duty, travellers who have seen the corps whose conduct is best observe in them the absence of mutiny rather than the existence of discipline.
I cannot help pausing here a moment to reflect on the expressions of surprise this minister lets fall about the excesses he relates. To him the departure of the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and honour seems quite inconceivable. Surely the men he is addressing know the causes of it only too well. They know the doctrines they have preached, the decrees they have passed, the practices they have countenanced. The soldiers remember the sixth of October. They remember the French guards. They have not forgotten the taking of the king's castles in Paris and at Marseilles. That the governors of both places were murdered with impunity is a fact that has not slipped out of their minds. They do not abandon the principles of the equality of men, laid down so ostentatiously and so laboriously. They cannot shut their eyes to the degradation of the whole nobility of France and the suppression of the very idea of a gentleman. The total abolition of titles and distinctions is not lost on them. Yet M. du Pin is astonished at their disloyalty, when the doctors of the Assembly have taught them at the same time the respect due to the laws. It is easy to judge which of the two sorts of lesson men with arms in their hands are likely to learn. As for the authority of the king, we may gather from the minister himself, if any argument on that head were not quite superfluous, that it counts for no more with these troops than it does with everybody else. "The king," he says, "has repeated his orders over and over again to put a stop to these excesses; but in so terrible a crisis your" — the Assembly's — "concurrence has become indispensably necessary to prevent the evils that threaten the state. You unite to the force of the legislative power that of opinion, which is still more important." To be sure, the army can have no opinion of the power or authority of the king. Perhaps by this time the soldier has learned that the Assembly itself does not enjoy a much greater degree of liberty than that royal figure.
We are now to see what has been proposed in this emergency, one of the greatest that can happen in a state. The minister asks the Assembly to array itself in all its terrors and to call forth all its majesty. He wishes the grave and severe principles they have announced to give vigour to the king's proclamation. After this we should have looked for courts civil and martial, the breaking of some regiments, the decimating of others, and all the terrible means that necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress of the most terrible of all evils. In particular one might expect a serious inquiry into the murder of commandants before their soldiers' eyes. Not one word of all this, or of anything like it. After being told that the soldiery trampled on the decrees of the Assembly promulgated by the king, the Assembly passes new decrees and authorises the king to make new proclamations. After the secretary at war had stated that the regiments had paid no regard to oaths prêtés avec la plus imposante solennité, sworn with the most imposing solemnity, they propose — what? More oaths. They renew decrees and proclamations as fast as they find them insufficient, and they multiply oaths in proportion as they weaken the sanctions of religion in men's minds. I hope that handy abridgements of the excellent sermons of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot and Helvétius on the immortality of the soul, on a particular superintending providence, and on a future state of rewards and punishments are being sent down to the soldiers along with their civic oaths. Of this I have no doubt, since I understand that a certain kind of reading makes no small part of their military exercises, and that they are quite as well supplied with the ammunition of pamphlets as with cartridges.
To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular consultations, seditious committees and monstrous democratic assemblies [comitia, comices] among the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation and insubordination, I believe the most astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men, even among all the inventions of this prolific age. It is nothing less than this: the king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority and encouragement for the several corps to join the clubs and confederations in the several municipalities, and to mix with them in their feasts and civic entertainments. This jolly discipline, it seems, is to soften the ferocity of their minds, to reconcile them to their bottle companions of other descriptions, and to merge particular conspiracies in more general associations. That this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers, as M. de La Tour du Pin describes them, I can readily believe — and that, mutinous as they may be in other respects, they will dutifully submit themselves to these royal proclamations. But I should question whether all this civic swearing and clubbing and feasting would dispose them any more than they are disposed at present to obey their officers, or teach them to submit better to the austere rules of military discipline. It will make them admirable citizens in the French mode, but not quite such good soldiers in any mode. A doubt might well arise whether the conversation at these good tables would fit them a great deal better for the character of mere instruments, which this veteran officer and statesman justly observes that the nature of things always requires an army to be.
Footnote: "Comme sa Majesté a reconnu, non un système d'associations particulières, mais une réunion de volontés de tous les François pour la liberté et la prospérité communes, ainsi que pour le maintien de l'ordre publique, il a pensé qu'il convenoit que chaque régiment prît part à ces fêtes civiques pour multiplier les rapports, et resserrer les liens d'union entre les citoyens et les troupes." In English: as His Majesty has recognised in this not a system of particular associations but a union of the wills of all Frenchmen for the common liberty and prosperity, and likewise for the maintenance of public order, he has thought it fitting that each regiment should take part in these civic festivals, so as to multiply the contacts and tighten the bonds of union between the citizens and the troops. I insert the words authorising the troops to feast with the popular confederacies, in case I should not be believed.
As to how likely this improvement of discipline is, by the free conversation of the soldiers with the municipal festive societies, thus officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may judge from the state of the municipalities themselves as the war minister gives it to us in this very speech. He has good hopes of the success of his efforts to restore order for the present, from the good disposition of certain regiments; but he finds something cloudy about the future. As to preventing the return of confusion, "for that," he says, "the administration cannot answer to you, as long as they see the municipalities claiming an authority over the troops which your own institutions have reserved wholly to the monarch. You have fixed the limits of the military authority and of the municipal authority. You have confined the action you have allowed the second over the first to the right of requisition; but never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorise the commons in these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their guard, to stop them on marches ordered by the king, or, in a word, to enslave the troops to the caprice of every city or even market town they have to pass through."
Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society that is to reclaim the soldiery, bring them back to the true principles of military subordination, and render them machines in the hands of the supreme power of the country. Such are the disorders of the French troops. Such is their cure. As the army is, so is the navy. The municipalities override the orders of the Assembly, and the seamen in their turn override the orders of the municipalities. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups and to enter with a grey head into all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear among mankind. They seem rather what is to be expected from those grand compounders in politics who take the short road to their degrees in the state and have a certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination on all subjects — on the credit of which one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause and greater success, to caution the Assembly not to attend to old men, or to anyone who values himself on his experience. I suppose all the ministers of state must qualify and take this test, wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own taste; but I think that if I could not attain to the wisdom of age, I would at least preserve something of its stiff and peremptory dignity. These gentlemen deal in regeneration; but at no price would I yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them, or begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer in my second cradle the elementary sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem! — if they were to grant me the favour of becoming a child again, and squalling in their cradle, I should firmly refuse.
Footnote: This war minister has since left the school and resigned his office.
The feebleness of any part of the puerile and pedantic system they call a constitution cannot be laid open without revealing the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part it comes into contact with, or that bears the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown without displaying the debility of the Assembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities. The military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy. I wish everybody would read M. de La Tour du Pin's eloquent speech — for such it is — carefully. He attributes the salvation of the municipalities to the good behaviour of some of the troops. These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of the municipalities, which is admitted to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worst-disposed part, which is the strongest. But the municipalities claim a sovereignty and will command the troops that are necessary for their protection. Indeed they must either command them or court them. The municipalities, by the necessity of their situation and by the republican powers they have obtained, must be, in relation to the military, either masters or servants or confederates, or each of these in turn, or they must make a jumble of all of them together according to circumstances. What government is there to coerce the army but the municipality, or the municipality but the army? To preserve concord where authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the Assembly tries to cure the diseases by the diseases themselves, and hopes to preserve itself from a purely military democracy by giving that democracy a debauched interest in the municipal one.
If the soldiers once come to mix for any length of time in the municipal clubs and cabals and confederacies, an elective affinity will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part of them. Their habits and affections and sympathies will go with them. The military conspiracies that are to be remedied by civic confederacies; the rebellious municipalities that are to be made obedient by furnishing them with the means of seducing the very armies of the state that are meant to keep them in order — all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous policy must aggravate the confusion they arose from. There must be blood. The want of common judgment shown in the construction of all their descriptions of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authority, will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted at one time and in one part. They will break out in others, because the evil is radical and intrinsic. All these schemes of mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken the military connection between soldiers and their officers more and more, as well as adding a military and mutinous audacity to turbulent artisans and peasants. To secure a real army, the officer must be first and last in the eye of the soldier — first and last in his attention, his observance and his esteem. There are to be officers, it seems, whose chief qualification must be temper and patience. They are to manage their troops by electioneering arts. They must carry themselves as candidates and not as commanders. But since power may occasionally come into their hands by such means, the authority by which they are nominated becomes of high importance.
What you may do in the end does not appear, nor does it much matter, while the strange and contradictory relation between your army and all the parts of your republic, and the puzzled relation of those parts to each other and to the whole, remain as they are. You seem to have given the provisional nomination of the officers in the first instance to the king, with a reserved approval by the National Assembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. They must soon perceive that those who can veto indefinitely are the ones who really appoint. The officers must therefore look to their intrigues in the Assembly as the only certain road to promotion. Yet by your new constitution they must still begin their solicitations at court. This double negotiation for military rank seems to me a contrivance as well adapted as if it had been studied for the purpose to promote faction in the Assembly itself over this vast military patronage — and then to poison the corps of officers with factions of a kind still more dangerous to the safety of government, on whatever footing it may be placed, and destructive in the end to the efficiency of the army itself. Those officers who lose the promotions the crown intended for them must become part of a faction opposed to the Assembly that rejected their claims, and must nourish discontent against the ruling powers in the heart of the army. Those officers, on the other hand, who carry their point through an interest in the Assembly, and feel themselves at best only second in the goodwill of the crown though first in that of the Assembly, must slight an authority that could neither advance nor retard their promotion. If, to avoid these evils, you will have no rule for command or promotion but seniority, you will have an army of formality; and at the same time it will become more independent and more of a military republic. It is not they but the king who is the machine. A king is not to be deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing. What is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head of an army that is to that army no object of gratitude and no object of fear? Such a cipher is not fit to administer the most delicate of all objects, the supreme command of military men. They must be constrained — and their inclinations lead them to what their necessities require — by a real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority. The authority of the Assembly itself suffers by passing through such a debilitating channel as they have chosen. The army will not long look up to an Assembly acting through the organ of false show and palpable imposition. They will not seriously yield obedience to a prisoner. They will either despise a pageant or pity a captive king. This relation of your army to the crown will, unless I am greatly mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics.
It is also to be considered whether an Assembly like yours, even supposing it possessed a different sort of organ for its orders to pass through, is fit to promote the obedience and discipline of an army. It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority, and they will yield it least of all to an Assembly that is to last only two years. The officers must lose the characteristic disposition of military men entirely if they can see the dominion of pleaders with perfect submission and due admiration — especially when they find they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose military policy and genius for command, if they have any, must be as uncertain as their tenure is brief. In the weakness of one kind of authority and the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain mutinous and full of faction for some time, until some popular general who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery and possesses the true spirit of command draws the eyes of all men on himself. Armies will obey him on his own personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment that happens, the man who really commands the army is your master — the master of your king, which is a small thing, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.
How did the Assembly come by its present power over the army? Chiefly, to be sure, by debauching the soldiers away from their officers. They have begun with a most terrible operation. They have touched the central point about which the particles that compose armies are at rest. They have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination begins and on which the whole of that system depends. The soldier is told that he is a citizen and has the rights of man and citizen. The right of a man, he is told, is to be his own governor and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-government. It is very natural that he should think he ought most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience. In all probability, therefore, he will do systematically what he does at present occasionally: that is, he will exercise at least a veto in the choice of his officers. At present the officers are known at best to be only permitted, and to serve on good behaviour. In fact there have been many instances of their being cashiered by their own corps. Here is a second veto on the king's choice, a veto at least as effective as the Assembly's. The soldiers know already that it has been a question not ill received in the National Assembly whether they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers, or of some proportion of them. When such matters are under deliberation, it is no extravagant supposition that they will incline to the opinion most favourable to their own claims. They will not bear to be reckoned the army of an imprisoned king while another army in the same country, which they are also to feast and confederate with, is to be considered the free army of a free constitution. They will cast their eyes on the other and more permanent army: I mean the municipal one. That corps, they know very well, does actually elect its own officers. They may not be able to see the grounds of the distinction on which they are not to elect a Marquis de La Fayette — or whatever his new name is — of their own. If this election of a commander-in-chief is part of the rights of men, why not part of theirs? They see elective justices of the peace, elective judges, elective parish priests, elective bishops, elective municipalities, and an elective commander of the Parisian army. Why should they alone be excluded? Are the brave troops of France the only men in that nation who are not fit judges of military merit and of the qualifications a commander-in-chief needs? Are they paid by the state, and do they therefore lose the rights of men? They are part of that nation themselves and contribute to that pay. And is not the king paid, and the National Assembly, and all who elect the National Assembly? Instead of seeing all these forfeit their rights by receiving a salary, they see that in every one of these cases a salary is given for exercising those rights. All your resolutions, all your proceedings, all your debates, all the works of your doctors in religion and politics have been industriously put into their hands; and you expect them to apply to their own case just as much of your doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure.
Everything depends on the army in a government like yours, for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and so far as in you lay all the instincts, that support government. Therefore the moment any difference arises between your National Assembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you — or rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. You see from the report of your war minister that the distribution of the army is made largely with a view to internal coercion. You must rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by which you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which after a time must disable you from making the use of it that you intend. The king is to call out troops to act against his people, when the world has been told, and the assertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies claim an independent constitution and a free trade for themselves. They must be constrained by troops. In what chapter of your code of the rights of men can they read that it is part of the rights of men to have their commerce monopolised and restrained for the benefit of others? As the colonists rise against you, the people they hold enslaved rise against them. Troops again — massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of metaphysical declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted! It was only the other day that the farmers of land in one of your provinces refused to pay certain sorts of rent to the lord of the soil. In consequence you decree that the country people shall pay all rents and dues except those you have abolished as grievances; and if they refuse, then you order the king to march troops against them. You lay down metaphysical propositions that imply universal consequences, and then you try to limit logic by despotism. The leaders of the present system tell the people of their rights as men to take fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings without the least appearance of authority even from the Assembly, while that Assembly was sitting as the sovereign legislative body in the name of the nation; and yet these leaders presume to order out the very troops that took part in those disorders, to coerce men who judge on the principles and follow the examples their own approval has guaranteed.
Footnote: Courrier François, 30 July 1790. Assemblée Nationale, number 210.
The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feudalism as the barbarism of tyranny, and then tell them afterwards how much of that barbarous tyranny they are to bear with patience. As prodigal as they are of light about grievances, the people find them extremely sparing about redress. They know that certain quit-rents and personal duties, which you have allowed them to buy out but for which you have provided no money, are as nothing beside the burdens you have made no provision for at all. They know that almost the whole system of landed property is feudal in its origin — that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original proprietors, made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous instruments — and that the most grievous effects of the conquest are the land-rents of every kind, as beyond question they are.
The peasants are in all probability the descendants of those ancient proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if their titles fail in any degree on the principles of antiquaries and lawyers, they retreat into the citadel of the rights of men. There they find that men are equal, and that the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, ought not to be monopolised to feed the pride and luxury of men who by nature are no better than themselves, and who, if they do not labour for their bread, are worse. They find that by the laws of nature the occupier and cultivator of the soil is the true proprietor; that there is no prescription against nature; that the agreements made with the landlords during the time of slavery, where there are any, are only the effect of duress and force; and that when the people re-entered into the rights of men, those agreements were made as void as everything else that had been settled under the prevalence of the old feudal and aristocratic tyranny. They will tell you they see no difference between an idler in a hat with a national cockade and an idler in a cowl or a rochet. If you ground the title to rents on succession and prescription, they tell you, out of M. Camus's speech published by the National Assembly for their information, that things ill begun cannot avail themselves of prescription; that the title of those lords was vicious in its origin; and that force is at least as bad as fraud. As for the title by succession, they will tell you that the succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property, and not rotten parchments and silly entails; that the lords have enjoyed their usurpation too long; and that if they allow these lay monks any charitable pension, the monks ought to be thankful for the bounty of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a false claimant to his goods.
When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason on which you have stamped your own image and superscription, you cry it down as base money and tell them you will pay in future with French guards and dragoons and hussars. To chastise them you hold up the second-hand authority of a king who is only the instrument of destroying, with no power of protecting either the people or his own person. Through him, it seems, you will make yourselves obeyed. They answer: "You have taught us that there are no gentlemen; and which of your principles teaches us to bow to kings we have not elected? We know without your teaching that lands were given for the support of feudal dignities, feudal titles and feudal offices. When you took down the cause as a grievance, why should the more grievous effect remain? Since there are now no hereditary honours and no distinguished families, why are we taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have sent our old aristocratic landlords down to us in no other character and with no other title than that of collectors under your authority. Have you tried to make these rent-gatherers of yours respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us with their arms reversed, their shields broken, their devices defaced — so displumed, degraded and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do not even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physically they may be the same men, though we are not quite sure even of that on your new philosophical doctrines of personal identity. In every other respect they are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them their rents as you have to abolish all their honours and titles and distinctions. We never commissioned you to do that, and it is one instance among many of your assuming an undelegated power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their clubs and mobs and national guards, directing you at their pleasure, and laying down as law to you what is then handed down as law to us under your authority. Through you these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of us all. Why should you not attend as much to the wishes of the labouring husbandman about our rent, which affects us in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers about distinctions and titles of honour, which affect neither them nor us at all? But we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals? Before this measure of yours we might have thought we were not perfectly equal; we might have kept up some old, habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favour of those landlords. But we cannot conceive that you could have made the law that degrades them with any other view than of destroying all respect for them. You have forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect; and now you send troops to sabre and bayonet us into a submission to fear and force which you would not let us yield to the mild authority of opinion."
The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics, who have opened schools for sophistry and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid and conclusive. It is obvious that, on a mere consideration of the right, the leaders in the Assembly would not have scrupled in the least to abolish the rents along with the titles and family arms. It would only be following up the principle of their reasonings and completing the analogy of their conduct. But they had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed property by confiscation. They had this commodity on the market, and the market would have been wholly destroyed if they had allowed the husbandmen to riot in the speculations they had so freely intoxicated themselves with. The only security any one description of property enjoys comes from the interest their rapacity has in some other kind. They have left nothing but their own arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and what subverted.
Neither have they left any principle by which any of their municipalities can be bound to obedience, or even conscientiously obliged not to separate from the whole, to become independent, or to attach itself to some other state. The people of Lyons, it seems, have lately refused to pay taxes. Why should they not? What lawful authority is left to exact them? The king imposed some of them. The old States, organised by orders, settled the older ones. They may say to the Assembly: "Who are you, who are not our kings, nor the States we elected, nor sitting on the principles we elected you on? And who are we, that when we see the gabelles you ordered to be paid shaken off altogether, and see the act of disobedience afterwards ratified by yourselves — who are we, that we are not to judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay, and are not to make use of the same powers whose validity you have approved in others?" To this the answer is, "We will send troops." The last argument of kings is always the first with your Assembly. This military aid may serve for a time, while the impression of the increase of pay lasts and the vanity of being umpires in every dispute is flattered. But this weapon will snap short and prove unfaithful to the hand that uses it. The Assembly keeps a school where, systematically and with unremitting perseverance, they teach principles and make regulations destructive of all spirit of subordination, civil and military — and then they expect to hold an anarchic people in obedience by means of an anarchic army.
The municipal army, which by their new policy is to balance this national army, considered in itself alone, is of a much simpler constitution and in every respect less objectionable. It is a mere democratic body, unconnected with the crown or the kingdom, armed and trained and officered at the pleasure of the districts the several corps belong to; and the personal service of the individuals who compose it, or the fine paid instead of personal service, is directed by the same authority. Nothing could be more uniform. If, however, it is considered in any relation to the crown, to the National Assembly, to the public tribunals or to the other army, or with a view to any coherence or connection between its parts, it seems a monster, and can hardly fail to end its perplexed movements in some great national calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general constitution than the systasis of Crete, or the confederation of Poland, or any other ill-devised corrective yet imagined among the necessities produced by an ill-constructed system of government.
Footnote: I see from M. Necker's account that the national guards of Paris have received about £145,000 sterling out of the public treasure, over and above the money levied within their own city. Whether this is an actual payment for the nine months of their existence or an estimate of their yearly charge, I cannot clearly make out. It is of no great importance, since they may certainly take whatever they please.
Having finished my few remarks on the constitution of the supreme power, the executive, the judicature and the military, and on the reciprocal relation of all these establishments, I shall say something about the ability your legislators have shown with regard to the revenue.
In their proceedings on this object, if it is possible, still fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. When the States met, the great object seemed to be to improve the system of revenue, to enlarge its collection, to cleanse it of oppression and vexation, and to establish it on the most solid footing. Great expectations were entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was by this grand arrangement that France was to stand or fall; and this became, very properly in my opinion, the test by which the skill and patriotism of the men who ruled in that Assembly would be tried. The revenue of the state is the state. In effect, everything depends on it, whether for support or for reform. The dignity of every occupation depends wholly on the quantity and the kind of virtue that can be exerted in it. Since all great qualities of the mind that operate in public, and are not merely suffering and passive, require force for their display — I had almost said for their unequivocal existence — the revenue, which is the spring of all power, becomes in its administration the sphere of every active virtue. Public virtue, being magnificent and splendid in its nature, instituted for great things and occupied with great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, and cannot spread and grow under confinement in straitened, narrow and sordid circumstances. It is through the revenue alone that the body politic can act in its true genius and character; and it will therefore display just as much of its collective virtue, and as much of the virtue that characterises the men who move it and are as it were its life and guiding principle, as it possesses a just revenue. For it is from this source that not only magnanimity and liberality and beneficence and fortitude and providence and the tutelary protection of all good arts derive their food and the growth of their organs, but continence and self-denial and labour and vigilance and frugality and whatever else there is in which the mind shows itself above the appetite are nowhere more in their proper element than in the provision and distribution of the public wealth. It is therefore not without reason that the science of speculative and practical finance, which must call so many auxiliary branches of knowledge to its aid, stands high in the estimation not only of ordinary people but of the wisest and best of men. And as this science has grown along with the progress of its object, the prosperity and improvement of nations has generally increased with the increase of their revenues; and both will continue to grow and flourish as long as the balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals and what is collected for the common efforts of the state keeps a due reciprocal proportion and a close correspondence and communication. And perhaps it may be owing to the greatness of revenues, and to the urgency of state necessities, that old abuses in the constitution of finances are discovered and their true nature and rational theory comes to be more perfectly understood — so much so that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in one period than a far greater one is found to be in another, the proportionate wealth remaining the same. In this state of things the French Assembly found something in their revenues to preserve, secure and administer wisely, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud assumptions might justify the severest tests, in trying their abilities on their financial proceedings I shall only consider what is the plain, obvious duty of a common finance minister, and try them on that, and not on models of ideal perfection.
The objects of a financier, then, are to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and, when necessity obliges him to use credit, to secure its foundations in that instance and for ever by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations and the solidity of his funds. Under these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of the men in the National Assembly who have taken the management of this arduous concern on themselves.
Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find from a report by M. Vernier of the Committee of Finances, dated the second of last August, that the amount of the national revenue, compared with what it produced before the Revolution, was diminished by two hundred millions, or eight millions sterling, of the annual income — considerably more than a third of the whole.
If this is the result of great ability, surely ability was never displayed in a more distinguished manner or with a more powerful effect. No common folly, no vulgar incapacity, no ordinary official negligence, no official crime even, no corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility that we have seen in the modern world could in so short a time have made so complete an overthrow of the finances and, with them, of the strength of a great kingdom. Cedo quî vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito? — tell me, how did you lose so great a commonwealth so quickly?
As soon as the Assembly met, the sophisters and declaimers began by decrying the ancient constitution of the revenue in many of its most essential branches, such as the public monopoly of salt. They charged it, as truly as unwisely, with being ill contrived, oppressive and partial. They were not content to use this description in speeches introducing some plan of reform; they declared it in a solemn resolution or public sentence, as though judicially passed on it, and circulated this throughout the nation. At the same time as they passed the decree, they ordered with equal gravity that this same absurd, oppressive and partial tax should go on being paid until they could find a revenue to replace it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces that had always been exempt from this salt monopoly, some of them charged with other contributions perhaps equivalent to it, were wholly disinclined to bear any part of the burden that an equal distribution was to relieve the others of. As for the Assembly, occupied as it was with declaring and violating the rights of men and with its arrangements for general confusion, it had neither the leisure nor the capacity to contrive, nor the authority to enforce, any plan of any kind for replacing the tax, or equalising it, or compensating the provinces, or for leading their minds towards any scheme of accommodation with the other districts that were to be relieved. The people of the salt provinces, impatient under taxes condemned by the very authority that had ordered them to be paid, very soon found their patience exhausted. They thought themselves as skilful at demolishing as the Assembly could be. They relieved themselves by throwing off the whole burden. Encouraged by this example, each district, or part of a district, judging its own grievance by its own feeling and its own remedy by its own opinion, did as it pleased about the other taxes.
We are next to see how they have conducted themselves in contriving equal taxes, proportioned to the means of the citizens and least likely to lie heavily on the active capital employed in generating the private wealth from which the public fortune must be derived. By allowing the several districts, and several individuals within each district, to judge what part of the old revenue they might withhold, a new inequality of the most oppressive kind was introduced instead of better principles of equality. Payments were regulated by dispositions. The parts of the kingdom that were most submissive, most orderly or most affectionate towards the commonwealth bore the whole burden of the state. Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government. To fill up all the deficiencies in the old taxes, and the new deficiencies of every kind that were to be expected, what was left to a state without authority? The National Assembly called for a voluntary benevolence — for a quarter of the income of all the citizens, to be assessed on the honour of the people who were to pay it. They obtained rather more than could rationally have been calculated on, but far indeed from what answered their real necessities, and much less their fond expectations. Rational people could have hoped for little from this tax of theirs in the disguise of a benevolence — a weak, ineffective and unequal tax, a tax by which luxury and avarice and selfishness were screened and the load thrown on productive capital, on integrity, generosity and public spirit, a tax laid by regulation upon virtue. At length the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying, with little success, to exact their benevolence by force.
This benevolence, the rickety offspring of weakness, was to be supported by another resource, the twin brother of the same prolific imbecility. The patriotic donations were to make good the failure of the patriotic contribution. John Doe was to become security for Richard Roe. By this scheme they took things of great price from the giver, comparatively of small value to the receiver; they ruined several trades; they pillaged the crown of its ornaments, the churches of their plate, and the people of their personal decorations. The invention of these juvenile pretenders to liberty was really nothing but a servile imitation of one of the poorest resources of a doting despotism. They took an old, huge, full-bottomed periwig out of the wardrobe of the antiquated frippery of Louis the Fourteenth to cover the premature baldness of the National Assembly. They produced this old-fashioned formal folly, though it had been so abundantly exposed in the Memoirs of the Duke de Saint-Simon — as if reasonable men needed any argument to show its mischief and insufficiency. A device of the same kind was tried within my memory by Louis the Fifteenth, but it never answered at any time. However, the necessities of ruinous wars were some excuse for desperate projects. The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise. But here there was a season for arrangement and foresight. It was in a time of profound peace, enjoyed for five years and promising to last much longer, that they had recourse to this desperate trifling. They were bound to lose more reputation by sporting with these toys and playthings of finance in their serious situation, filling half their journals as these have done, than could possibly be made up by the poor temporary supply they yielded. It seemed as if the men who adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circumstances, or wholly unequal to their necessities. Whatever virtue there may be in these devices, it is obvious that neither the patriotic gifts nor the patriotic contribution can ever be resorted to again. The resources of public folly are soon exhausted. Indeed the whole of their scheme of revenue is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir for the hour, while at the same time they cut off the springs and living fountains of perennial supply. The account M. Necker furnished not long ago was without question meant to be favourable. He gives a flattering view of the means of getting through the year, but he expresses, as it is natural he should, some apprehension for the year to follow. On this last forecast, instead of going into the grounds of the apprehension in order to prevent the predicted evil by proper foresight, M. Necker receives a sort of friendly reprimand from the President of the Assembly.
As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to say anything about them with certainty, since they have not yet come into operation; but nobody is so sanguine as to imagine that they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide gaping breach their incapacity has made in their revenues. At present the state of their treasury sinks lower every day in cash and swells higher every day in fictitious representation. Now that so little is to be found within or without but paper — the representative not of wealth but of want, the creature not of credit but of power — they imagine that our flourishing condition in England is owing to bank paper, and not the bank paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of any idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that in England not one shilling of paper money of any description is received except by choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce because in law it is of none. It is powerful on the Exchange because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. Nor is there among us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatever, that is enforced by authority. In fact it might easily be shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, tends to increase it; that instead of being a substitute for money it only makes its entry, its exit and its circulation easier; and that it is the symbol of prosperity and not the badge of distress. A scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper was never a subject of complaint in this nation.
Well, but a lessening of prodigal expense, and the economy introduced by the virtuous and sapient Assembly, makes amends for the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue. In this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a financier. Have those who say so looked at the expenses of the National Assembly itself? Of the municipalities? Of the city of Paris? Of the increased pay of the two armies? Of the new police? Of the new judicatures? Have they even carefully compared the present pension list with the old one? These politicians have been cruel, not economical. Comparing the expenses of the former prodigal government in relation to the revenues of that time with the expenses of this new system as against the state of its new treasury, I believe the present will be found beyond all comparison more costly.
Footnote: The reader will observe that I have touched only lightly, as my plan required nothing more, on the condition of the French finances in relation to the demands on them. If I had intended to do otherwise, the materials in my hands for such a task are not altogether complete. On this subject I refer the reader to M. de Calonne's work and to the tremendous display he has made of the havoc and devastation in the public estate and in all the affairs of France, caused by the presumptuous good intentions of ignorance and incapacity. Such causes will always produce such effects. Looking over that account with a fairly strict eye, and deducting, with perhaps too much rigour, everything that may be put down to a financier out of office who might be supposed by his enemies to want to make the most of his case, I believe it will be found that mankind was never at any time furnished with a more salutary lesson of caution against the daring spirit of innovators than the one supplied at the expense of France.
It remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability furnished by the present French managers when they have to raise supplies on credit. Here I am a little at a stand, for credit, properly speaking, they have none. The credit of the ancient government was not the best, indeed; but they could always command money on some terms, not only at home but from most of the countries of Europe where a surplus capital had accumulated, and the credit of that government was improving daily. The establishment of a system of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new strength — and so it would actually have done, if a system of liberty had been established. What offers has their government of pretended liberty had from Holland, from Hamburg, from Switzerland, from Genoa, from England, to deal in their paper? Why should these nations of commerce and economy enter into any money dealings with a people who attempt to reverse the very nature of things, among whom they see the debtor prescribing at the point of the bayonet the medium of his own solvency to his creditor, discharging one of his engagements with another, turning his very penury into his resource, and paying his interest with his rags?
Their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of church plunder has led these philosophers to overlook all care of the public estate, just as the dream of the philosopher's stone leads dupes, under the more plausible delusion of the hermetic art, to neglect all rational means of improving their fortunes. With these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state. These gentlemen perhaps do not believe much in the miracles of piety, but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege. Is there a debt that presses them? Issue assignats. Are compensations to be made, or a maintenance decreed, to men they have robbed of their freehold in their office or expelled from their profession? Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out? Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats forced on the people leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever, then issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of assignats — issue eighty millions more of assignats, says another. The only difference between their financial factions is over the greater or lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance. They are all professors of assignats. Even those whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not yet obliterated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, conclude their arguments by proposing an issue of assignats. I suppose they must talk of assignats, since no other language would be understood. All experience of their inefficacy does not discourage them in the least. Are the old assignats depreciated at market? What is the remedy? Issue new assignats. Mais si maladia opiniatria non vult se garire, quid illi facere? Assignare; postea assignare; ensuita assignare — but if the obstinate disease will not be cured, what is he to do? Assignate; then assignate; and after that assignate. The word is altered by a trifle. The Latin of your present doctors may be better than that of your old comedy; their wisdom and the variety of their resources are the same. They have no more notes in their song than the cuckoo — though, far from the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty, their voice is as harsh and as ominous as the raven's.
Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could ever have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of confiscated property? If, however, an excessive zeal for the state has led a pious and venerable prelate — a father of the Church by anticipation — to pillage his own order, and, for the good of the church and the people, to take on himself the place of grand financier of confiscation and comptroller-general of sacrilege, then in my opinion he and his coadjutors were bound to show by their subsequent conduct that they knew something of the office they had assumed. Once they had resolved to appropriate a certain portion of the landed property of their conquered country to the fisc, it was their business to make their bank a real fund of credit, so far as such a bank was capable of becoming one.
Footnote: La Bruyère, of Bossuet.
To establish a current circulating credit on any land-bank, in any circumstances whatever, has so far proved difficult at the very least. The attempt has commonly ended in bankruptcy. But when the Assembly had been led, through a contempt of moral principles, into a defiance of economic ones, it might at least have been expected that nothing would be left undone on their part to lessen this difficulty and to prevent any aggravation of this bankruptcy. It might be expected that, to make your land-bank tolerable, every means would be adopted that could display openness and candour in the statement of the security, and everything that could help the recovery of the debt. To take things at their most favourable, your condition was that of a man with a large landed estate which he wished to dispose of in order to discharge a debt and supply certain services. Not being able to sell it at once, you wished to mortgage. What would a man of fair intentions and ordinary clear understanding do in such circumstances? Ought he not first to ascertain the gross value of the estate, the charges of managing and disposing of it, and the encumbrances of all kinds, perpetual and temporary, that affect it — and then, striking a net surplus, calculate the just value of the security? When that surplus, which is the creditor's only security, had been clearly ascertained and properly vested in the hands of trustees, he would then indicate the parcels to be sold and the time and conditions of sale. After that he would allow the public creditor, if he chose, to subscribe his stock into this new fund — or he might receive proposals for an assignat from people who would advance money to buy this species of security. That would be to proceed like men of business, methodically and rationally, and on the only principles of public and private credit that exist. The dealer would then know exactly what he was buying, and the only doubt that could hang on his mind would be the dread of a resumption of the spoil, which might one day be made, perhaps with the addition of punishment, from the sacrilegious grip of the execrable wretches who could become purchasers at the auction of their innocent fellow citizens.
An open and exact statement of the clear value of the property, and of the time and circumstances and place of sale, was necessary in order to efface as far as possible the stigma that has always been branded on every kind of land-bank. It became necessary on another principle too: that is, on account of a pledge of faith previously given on the subject, so that their future fidelity in a slippery business might be established by their adherence to their first engagement. When they had finally decided on a state resource from church booty, they came to a solemn resolution on the subject on the fourteenth of April 1790, and pledged themselves to their country "that, in the statement of the public charges for each year, there should be brought to account a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic religion, the support of the ministers at the altars, the relief of the poor, and the pensions of the clergy, secular and regular, of the one sex and of the other, in order that the estates and goods which are at the disposal of the nation may be disengaged of all charges, and employed by the representatives, or the legislative body, to the great and most pressing exigencies of the state." On the same day they further engaged that the sum necessary for the year 1791 should be determined forthwith.
In this resolution they admit that it is their duty to show distinctly the expense of the objects above, which by other resolutions they had already engaged should come first in the order of provision. They admit that they ought to show the estate clear and disengaged of all charges, and that they should show it immediately. Have they done this immediately, or at any time? Have they ever furnished a rent roll of the immovable estate, or given in an inventory of the movable effects, which they confiscate to their assignats? How they can fulfil their engagement to hold out to the public service "an estate disengaged of all charges" without authenticating either the value of the estate or the amount of the charges, I leave to their English admirers to explain. Instantly on this assurance, and before taking a single step towards making it good, they issue sixteen millions sterling of their paper on the credit of so handsome a declaration. This was manly. Who, after such a masterly stroke, can doubt their abilities in finance? But then, before any further emission of these financial indulgences, they took care at least to make good their original promise. If any such estimate, either of the value of the estate or of the amount of the encumbrances, has been made, it has escaped me. I have never heard of it.
At length they have spoken out, and have made a full discovery of their abominable fraud in holding out the church lands as a security for any debts or any service whatever. They rob only to enable themselves to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends of both the robbery and the fraud by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and deception. I am obliged to M. de Calonne for his reference to the document that proves this extraordinary fact; it had somehow escaped me. Indeed it was not necessary to make out my assertion about the breach of faith on the declaration of the fourteenth of April 1790. It now appears from a report of their own committee that the charge of keeping up the reduced ecclesiastical establishments, and the other expenses attending religion, and maintaining the religious of both sexes who are retained or pensioned, and the other accompanying expenses of the same nature which they have brought on themselves by this convulsion in property, exceeds the income of the estates acquired by it by the enormous sum of two millions sterling a year — besides a debt of seven millions and upwards. These are the calculating powers of imposture! This is the finance of philosophy! This is the result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable people in rebellion, murder and sacrilege, and to make them prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country! Never in any case did a state enrich itself by confiscating from its citizens. This new experiment has succeeded like all the rest. Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the highroad to riches. I add with pleasure, in a note, the able and spirited observations of M. de Calonne on this subject.
Footnote: "Ce n'est point à l'assemblée entière que je m'adresse ici; je ne parle qu'à ceux qui l'égarent, en lui cachant sous des gazes séduisantes le but où ils l'entraînent. C'est à eux que je dis: Votre objet, vous n'en disconviendrez pas, c'est d'ôter tout espoir au clergé, et de consommer sa ruine; c'est-là, en ne vous soupçonnant d'aucune combinaison de cupidité, d'aucun regard sur le jeu des effets publics, c'est-là ce qu'on doit croire que vous avez en vue dans la terrible opération que vous proposez; c'est ce qui doit en être le fruit. Mais le peuple que vous y intéressez, quel avantage peut-il y trouver? En vous servant sans cesse de lui, que faites-vous pour lui? Rien, absolument rien; et, au contraire, vous faites ce qui ne conduit qu'à l'accabler de nouvelles charges. Vous avez rejeté, à son préjudice, une offre de 400 millions, dont l'acceptation pouvoit devenir un moyen de soulagement en sa faveur; et à cette ressource, aussi profitable que légitime, vous avez substitué une injustice ruineuse, qui, de votre propre aveu, charge le trésor public, et par conséquent le peuple, d'un surcroît de dépense annuelle de 50 millions au moins, et d'un remboursement de 150 millions. Malheureux peuple! voilà ce que vous vaut en dernier résultat l'expropriation de l'Église, et la dureté des décrets taxateurs du traitement des ministres d'une religion bienfaisante; et désormais ils seront à votre charge: leurs charités soulageoient les pauvres; et vous allez être imposés pour subvenir à leur entretien!" In English: it is not the whole assembly I am addressing here; I speak only to the men who are leading it astray, hiding from it under seductive veils the goal they are dragging it towards. To them I say: your object, you will not deny it, is to take away all hope from the clergy and to complete their ruin. That — without suspecting you of any calculation of greed, or any eye to the play of the public funds — is what we must believe you have in view in the terrible operation you propose, and that is what its fruit must be. But the people you are engaging in it: what advantage can they find in it? Making constant use of them as you do, what do you do for them? Nothing, absolutely nothing; on the contrary, you do what can only end in loading them with new burdens. To their prejudice you have rejected an offer of 400 millions, the acceptance of which might have become a means of relief in their favour; and for that resource, as profitable as it was legitimate, you have substituted a ruinous injustice which, by your own admission, charges the public treasury, and consequently the people, with an additional annual expense of at least 50 millions and a repayment of 150 millions. Unhappy people! This is what the expropriation of the church comes to for you in the end, and the harshness of the decrees fixing the salaries of the ministers of a beneficent religion; and from now on they will be a charge on you. Their charity used to relieve the poor, and you are going to be taxed to keep them. — De l'État de la France, page 81. See also page 92 and the pages following.
To persuade the world of the bottomless resource of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly has proceeded to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not be done with any ordinary colour of justice without being compensated out of this grand confiscation of landed property. On this fund, which was to show a surplus disengaged of all charges, they have thrown a new charge: namely, the compensation of the whole body of the disbanded judicature and of all suppressed offices and estates — a charge I cannot ascertain, but which unquestionably amounts to many millions of French money. Another of the new charges is an annuity of four hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling, to be paid, if they choose to keep faith, by daily payments, for the interest of the first assignats. Have they ever given themselves the trouble of stating fairly the expense of managing the church lands in the hands of the municipalities, to whose care and skill and diligence, and that of their legion of unknown under-agents, they have chosen to commit the charge of the forfeited estates — the consequence of which had been so ably pointed out by the Bishop of Nancy?
But it is unnecessary to dwell on these obvious heads of encumbrance. Have they made out any clear statement of the grand encumbrance of all, by which I mean the whole of the general and municipal establishments of every sort, and compared it with the regular income from revenue? Every deficiency in these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate before the creditor can plant his cabbages on a single acre of church property. There is no other prop but this confiscation to keep the whole state from tumbling to the ground. In this situation they have deliberately covered with a thick fog everything they ought to have taken pains to clear; and then, blindfolded themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when they charge, they drive their slaves at the point of the bayonet — blindfolded, indeed, no worse than their lords — to take their fictions for currency and to swallow paper pills at thirty-four millions sterling a dose. Then they proudly lay in their claim to future credit, after the failure of all their past engagements, and at a time when it is clear, if anything in such a matter can be clear, that the surplus estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages — I mean that of the four hundred millions, or sixteen millions sterling, of assignats. In all this procedure I can discern neither the solid sense of plain dealing nor the subtle dexterity of ingenious fraud. The objections within the Assembly to pulling up the floodgates for this inundation of fraud go unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by a hundred thousand financiers in the street. These are the numbers the metaphysical arithmeticians compute by. These are the grand calculations on which a philosophical public credit is founded in France. They cannot raise supplies, but they can raise mobs. Let them rejoice in the applause of the club at Dundee for their wisdom and patriotism in applying the plunder of the citizens to the service of the state. I hear of no address on this subject from the directors of the Bank of England — though their approval would carry a little more weight in the scale of credit than the club at Dundee's. But to do the club justice, I believe the gentlemen who compose it are wiser than they appear: that they will be less liberal with their money than with their addresses, and that they would not give a dog's ear of their most rumpled and ragged Scotch paper for twenty of your fairest assignats.
Early this year the Assembly issued paper to the amount of sixteen millions sterling. What must be the state into which the Assembly has brought your affairs, when the relief afforded by so vast a supply has been hardly perceptible? This paper also suffered an almost immediate depreciation of five per cent, which in a little while came to about seven. The effect of these assignats on the receipt of revenue is remarkable. M. Necker found that the collectors of revenue, who received in coin, paid the treasury in assignats. The collectors made seven per cent by receiving in money and accounting in depreciated paper. It was not very difficult to foresee that this must be inevitable. It was no less embarrassing for that. M. Necker was obliged, for a considerable part of it in the London market I believe, to buy gold and silver for the mint, which came to about twelve thousand pounds above the value of the commodity gained. That minister was of the opinion that, whatever secret nutritive virtue assignats might have, the state could not live on them alone — that some real silver was necessary, particularly to satisfy men who, having iron in their hands, were not likely to distinguish themselves for patience when they perceived that an increase of pay held out to them in real money was to be fraudulently drawn back again in depreciated paper. In this very natural distress the minister applied to the Assembly to order the collectors to pay in specie what they had received in specie. It could not escape him that if the Treasury paid three per cent for the use of a currency that came back to it seven per cent worse than the minister issued it, such dealing could not greatly tend to enrich the public. The Assembly took no notice of his recommendation. They were in this dilemma: if they went on receiving the assignats, cash must become a stranger to their Treasury; if the Treasury refused those paper amulets, or discountenanced them in any degree, they would destroy the credit of their sole resource. They seem, then, to have made their choice, and to have given their paper some sort of credit by taking it themselves; while at the same time, in their speeches, they made a kind of swaggering declaration, something rather beyond legislative competence I think — that there is no difference in value between metallic money and their assignats. This was a good, stout, proof article of faith, pronounced under an anathema by the venerable fathers of this philosophic synod. Credat who will — certainly not Judæus Apella.
A noble indignation rises in the minds of your popular leaders on hearing the magic lantern of their financial show compared with the fraudulent exhibitions of Mr Law. They cannot bear to hear the sands of his Mississippi compared with the rock of the church on which they build their system. Pray let them suppress this glorious spirit until they show the world what piece of solid ground there is for their assignats which they have not already preoccupied with other charges. They do injustice to that great mother fraud in comparing it with their degenerate imitation. It is not true that Law built solely on a speculation about the Mississippi. He added the East India trade; he added the African trade; he added the farms of all the farmed revenue of France. All these together unquestionably could not support the structure that the public enthusiasm, not he, chose to build on those bases. But by comparison these were generous delusions. They supposed, and they aimed at, an increase of the commerce of France. They opened the whole range of the two hemispheres to it. They did not think of feeding France out of her own substance. A grand imagination found something captivating in this flight of commerce. It was enough to dazzle the eye of an eagle. It was not made to entice the nose of a mole, nuzzling and burying itself in its mother earth, as yours is. Men had not then shrunk from their natural dimensions through a degrading and sordid philosophy, fitted for low and vulgar deceptions. Above all, remember that in imposing on the imagination, the managers of that system paid a compliment to the freedom of men. In their fraud there was no admixture of force. That was reserved for our own time, to quench the little glimmerings of reason that might break in on the solid darkness of this enlightened age.
On recollection, I have said nothing of one scheme of finance that might be urged in favour of these gentlemen's abilities, and which has been introduced with great pomp though not yet finally adopted in the National Assembly. It comes with something solid in aid of the credit of the paper circulation, and much has been said of its usefulness and its elegance. I mean the project for coining the bells of the suppressed churches into money. This is their alchemy. There are some follies that baffle argument, that go beyond ridicule, and that excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more about it.
It is as little worth remarking any further on all their drawing and redrawing, on their circulation for putting off the evil day, on the play between the Treasury and the Caisse d'Escompte, and on all these old exploded contrivances of mercantile fraud now exalted into policy of state. The revenue will not be trifled with. Prattle about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment for a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder. Here, then, the metaphysicians come down from their airy speculations and faithfully follow examples. What examples? The examples of bankrupts. But defeated, baffled, disgraced, with their breath and their strength and their inventions and their fancies all deserting them, their confidence still holds its ground. In the manifest failure of their abilities they take credit for their benevolence. When the revenue disappears in their hands, they have the presumption, in some of their recent proceedings, to value themselves on the relief given to the people. They did not relieve the people. If they had any such intentions, why did they order the obnoxious taxes to be paid? The people relieved themselves, in spite of the Assembly.
But waiving all discussion about which party can claim the merit of this fallacious relief, has there in fact been any relief to the people in any form? M. Bailly, one of the grand agents of paper circulation, lets you into the nature of this relief. His speech to the National Assembly contained a high and laboured panegyric on the inhabitants of Paris for the constancy and unbroken resolution with which they have borne their distress and misery. A fine picture of public happiness! What! Great courage and unconquerable firmness of mind, to endure benefits and to sustain redress? One would think from this learned lord mayor's speech that the Parisians had spent the last twelvemonth suffering the straits of some dreadful blockade — that Henry the Fourth had been stopping up the approaches to their supply and Sully thundering with his artillery at the gates of Paris — when in reality they are besieged by no enemies but their own madness and folly, their own credulity and perverseness. But M. Bailly will sooner thaw the eternal ice of his Atlantic regions than restore the central heat to Paris while it remains "smitten with the cold, dry, petrific mace" of a false and unfeeling philosophy. Some time after this speech, on the thirteenth of last August, the same magistrate, giving an account of his administration at the bar of the same Assembly, expresses himself as follows: "In the month of July 1789" — the period of everlasting commemoration — "the finances of the city of Paris were yet in good order; the expenditure was counterbalanced by the receipts, and she had at that time a million (forty thousand pounds sterling) in the bank. The expenses she has been forced to incur subsequent to the Revolution amount to 2,500,000 livres. From these expenses, and from the great falling off in the produce of the free gifts, there has arisen not only a momentary but a total want of money." This is the Paris on whose nourishment such immense sums, drawn from the vitals of all France, have been spent in the course of the last year. As long as Paris stands in the place of ancient Rome, so long will she be maintained by the subject provinces. It is an evil inevitably attending the dominion of sovereign democratic republics. As happened at Rome, it may outlive the republican domination that gave rise to it. In that case despotism itself must submit to the vices of popularity. Rome under her emperors united the evils of both systems, and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her ruin.
To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition. Before valuing themselves on the relief given to the people by the destruction of their revenue, statesmen ought first to have attended carefully to the solution of this problem: whether it is more advantageous to the people to pay considerably and gain in proportion, or to gain little or nothing and be unburdened of all contribution. My mind is made up to decide in favour of the first. Experience is with me, and I believe the best opinions are too. To keep a balance between the subject's power of acquisition and the demands he has to answer on the part of the state is the fundamental part of a true politician's skill. The means of acquisition come first in time and in arrangement. Good order is the foundation of all good things. To be able to acquire, the people must be tractable and obedient without being servile. The magistrate must have his reverence and the laws their authority. The body of the people must not have the principles of natural subordination artificially rooted out of their minds. They must respect the property they cannot share. They must labour to obtain what labour can obtain; and when they find, as they commonly do, that the success is not proportioned to the effort, they must be taught where their consolation lies, in the final proportions of eternal justice. Whoever deprives them of that consolation deadens their industry and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. The man who does this is the cruel oppressor and the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched — at the same time as, by his wicked speculations, he exposes the fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of fortune to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed and the unprosperous.
Too many professional financiers are apt to see nothing in revenue but banks and circulations and annuities on lives and tontines and perpetual rents and all the small wares of the shop. In a settled order of the state these things are not to be slighted, nor is skill in them to be held of trivial value. They are good, but only good when they assume the effects of that settled order and are built on it. But when men think that these beggarly contrivances can supply a resource against the evils that result from breaking up the foundations of public order, and from causing or allowing the principles of property to be subverted, they will leave, in the ruin of their country, a melancholy and lasting monument to the effect of preposterous politics and presumptuous, short-sighted, narrow-minded wisdom.
The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the "all-atoning name" of liberty. In some people I do see great liberty; in many, if not in most, I see an oppressive, degrading servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly and vice and madness without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads on the strength of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. Grand, swelling sentiments of liberty I am sure I do not despise. They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberalise our minds; they animate our courage in a time of conflict. Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille with pleasure. Nor do I wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity. They make it easier to carry many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they spread an occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom. Every politician ought to sacrifice to the Graces and to join compliance with reason. But in such an undertaking as the one in France, all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices are of little use. To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is easier still. There is no need to guide; you need only let go the rein. But to form a free government — that is, to temper these opposite elements of liberty and restraint together into one consistent work — requires much thought, deep reflection, and a sagacious, powerful, combining mind. This I do not find in the men who take the lead in the National Assembly. Perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear. I rather believe they are not. It would put them below the common level of human understanding. But when leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents will be of no service in constructing the state. They will become flatterers instead of legislators, the instruments and not the guides of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited and defined with proper qualifications, he will immediately be outbid by competitors producing something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised about his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatised as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors — until, in the hope of preserving the credit that might let him temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose he might ultimately have aimed at.
But am I so unreasonable as to see nothing at all deserving praise in the tireless labours of this Assembly? I do not deny that among an infinite number of acts of violence and folly, some good may have been done. Men who destroy everything will certainly remove some grievance. Men who make everything new stand a chance of establishing something beneficial. But to give them credit for what they have done by virtue of the authority they have usurped, or to excuse them for the crimes by which that authority was acquired, it would have to appear that the same things could not have been accomplished without producing such a revolution. Most assuredly they could; because almost every one of their regulations that is not highly equivocal was contained either in the king's concession, voluntarily made at the meeting of the States, or in the concurring instructions to the orders. Some usages have been abolished on just grounds; but they were such that if they had stood exactly as they were to all eternity, they would have detracted very little from the happiness and prosperity of any state. The improvements of the National Assembly are superficial; their errors are fundamental.
Whatever they are, I would rather my countrymen recommended the example of the British constitution to our neighbours than took models from them for improving our own. In our constitution we have an invaluable treasure. We are not, I think, without some causes for apprehension and complaint; but we owe these not to our constitution but to our own conduct. I think our happy situation is owing to our constitution — but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part of it singly; owing in great measure to what we have left standing through our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have altered or added. Our people will find employment enough for a truly patriotic, free and independent spirit in guarding what they possess from violation. I would not rule out alteration either; but even when I changed, it should be in order to preserve. I should be led to my remedy by a great grievance. In whatever I did, I should follow the example of our ancestors. I would make the repair as nearly as possible in the style of the building. A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, a timidity of principle rather than of temperament, were among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct. Not being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have so abundant a share, they acted under a strong sense of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind. He who had made them fallible rewarded them for attending to their own nature in their conduct. Let us imitate their caution if we wish to deserve their fortune or to keep what they left us. Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and, standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be content to admire the aeronauts of France rather than attempt to follow them in their desperate flights.
I have told you my sentiments candidly. I do not think they are likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought to. You are young; you cannot guide the fortune of your country, but must follow it. Hereafter, though, they may be of some use to you, in some future form your commonwealth may take. In its present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, "through great varieties of untried being", and to be purified by fire and blood in all its transmigrations.
I have little to recommend my opinions but long observation and much impartiality. They come from a man who has been no tool of power and no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life. They come from a man almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others; in whose breast no anger lasting or vehement has ever been kindled except by what he considered to be tyranny; and who has snatched the hours he has spent on your affairs from his share in the efforts good men are making to discredit wealthy oppression, persuading himself as he did so that he was not departing from his usual office. They come from a man who desires honours and distinctions and salaries very little, and expects them not at all; who has no contempt for fame and no fear of obloquy; who avoids contention, though he will hazard an opinion; from a man who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve it by varying his means in order to secure the unity of his end — and who, when the balance of the vessel he sails in may be endangered by overloading on one side, is anxious to carry the small weight of his reasons over to the side that may keep it in trim.