1720–1723 2026
This is an AI modernization of Cato's Letters into contemporary English. The original is available from Wikisource. Also available as an epub.
In 1720 the South Sea Company collapsed. It had taken on much of the British national debt in exchange for a monopoly on trade to South America, its shares had been talked up to roughly ten times their value, and when the price broke, thousands of investors were ruined and several ministers and directors turned out to have been paid in stock. That autumn a weekly letter began appearing in the London Journal, signed Cato, demanding that the directors be punished and asking who had protected them. It ran, later in the British Journal as well, until July 1723: one hundred and thirty-eight letters.
Cato was two men, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Trenchard was a wealthy country gentleman with a long record of writing against standing armies; Gordon was a Scot who did much of the actual writing and outlived him. Each letter is signed with a single initial, G for Gordon or T for Trenchard, and that is how they divided the credit. Trenchard died a few months after the series ended.
The name was the argument. Cato the Younger killed himself at Utica rather than accept a pardon from Julius Caesar, and for eighteenth-century readers he was the standing figure for a republic refusing one man's power. Plutarch's life of him is in this collection, in Roman Lives.
What began as a financial scandal turned into a general theory, and that is what the letters became famous for. Power always encroaches and must be watched by people who assume the worst. Freedom of speech is not one liberty among others but the thing that protects all the rest, so that where a man cannot call his tongue his own he can scarcely call anything else his own. Government is made by men, for men, and holds nothing except what was handed to it. Trenchard and Gordon were arguing about British politics, and the men who used them hardest were American: colonial printers reprinted them for fifty years, and a sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin lifted the argument of Letter 15 into his brother's Boston newspaper in 1722. His Autobiography and The Way to Wealth are in this collection.
These are newspaper columns, written weekly and on deadline, and they read like it. Each is addressed to the printer of the paper, opens with Sir, and closes with the initial. The tone is an angry columnist's: long sentences, heavy irony, Roman examples, and a flat refusal to be polite about anyone in office.
This volume is a selection of eighteen of the hundred and thirty-eight, chosen as the ones the revolutionary generation actually read and quoted: the letters on free speech and arbitrary power, the run from 59 to 63 on natural rights and how a free government might be built to last, two on property, the letter on colonies, the letter on the encroaching nature of power, and Cato's farewell.
Letter 15: Of Freedom of Speech
Letter 25: The Destructive Spirit of Arbitrary Power
Letter 31: The Weakness and Inconsistencies of Human Nature
Letter 33: Cautions Against the Encroachments of Power
Letter 38: The Right of the People to Judge of Government
Letter 42: Considerations on the Nature of Laws
Letter 45: Of the Equality and Inequality of Men
Letter 59: Liberty Proved to Be the Unalienable Right of All Mankind
Letter 60: All Government Instituted by Men, for the Good of Men
Letter 61: How Free Governments Are to Be Framed So As to Last
Letter 62: The Nature and Extent of Liberty
Letter 63: Civil Liberty Produces All Civil Blessings
Letter 68: Property and Commerce Secure in a Free Government Only
Letter 84: Property the First Principle of Power
Letter 106: Of Plantations and Colonies
Letter 115: The Encroaching Nature of Power
Sir,
Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. Speech is the right of every man, so far as he does not use it to hurt or control the right of another; and that is the only check it ought to suffer, the only boundary it ought to know.
This sacred privilege is so essential to free government that the security of property and the freedom of speech always go together. In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarcely call anything else his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech — a thing terrible to public traitors.
This secret was well understood at the court of King Charles I. His wicked ministers procured a proclamation forbidding the people even to talk of Parliaments — the very Parliaments those traitors had set aside. To assert the undoubted rights of the subject, and to defend the king's own legal prerogative, was branded disaffection and punished as sedition. People were even forbidden to talk of religion in their own families, for the priests had combined with the ministers to cook up tyranny and to smother truth and law. While the late King James, then Duke of York, went openly to mass, men were fined, imprisoned, and ruined for saying that he was a papist. And so that King Charles II might live the more securely as a papist himself, Parliament passed an act declaring it treason to say that he was one.
That men ought to speak well of their governors is true — while their governors deserve to be well spoken of. But to do public mischief without ever hearing about it is a privilege and a comfort that belong only to tyranny. A free people will show that they are free by their freedom of speech.
The administration of government is nothing more than this: the trustees of the people attending to the interests and affairs of the people. All public business is done, or ought to be done, for the people's sake alone; so it is the people's part and business to see whether it is done well or badly. And it is the interest, and ought to be the ambition, of every honest magistrate to have his deeds openly examined and publicly scrutinized. Only the wicked governors of men dread what is said of them. Tiberius heard the reproaches that tore at him, and he was shaken. The public's censure was true — otherwise he would never have felt its sting.
Freedom of speech is always the symptom, as well as the effect, of good government. In old Rome, everything was left to the judgment and pleasure of the people, who examined public proceedings with such discretion, and censured those who administered them with such fairness and mildness, that in the space of three hundred years not five public ministers suffered unjustly. Indeed, whenever the common people did resort to violence, it was the great men who had been the aggressors.
Guilt alone dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its hiding holes and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight. Horatius, Valerius, Cincinnatus, and the other honest, unscheming magistrates of the Roman commonwealth had nothing to fear from liberty of speech. The more their virtuous administration was examined, the brighter it shone; it gained by every inquiry. When Valerius in particular — the first minister of Rome — was accused on flimsy grounds of angling for a crown, he did not attack the people for examining his conduct. He proved his innocence in a speech to them, and gave them such satisfaction, and won such popularity for himself, that they gave him a new name: Publicola, to mark that he was their favorite and their friend. Then good laws followed — above all, the law granting every citizen an appeal to the people against the magistrates.
But things afterward took another turn. Rome, when it lost its liberty, lost its freedom of speech along with it. Then men's words began to be feared and watched; then first began the poisonous race of informers — banished, it is true, under the righteous administrations of Titus, Nerva, Trajan, and Aurelius, but encouraged and enriched under the vile ministries of Sejanus, Tigellinus, Pallas, and Cleander. "We may well complain," says Pliny to Trajan, "that the only rulers who pry into our secrets are the ones we hate."
The best princes have always encouraged and promoted freedom of speech. They knew that upright measures would defend themselves, and that all upright men would defend them. Tacitus, describing the reigns of some of the princes just mentioned, writes with something like ecstasy of the rare happiness of times when you may think what you please, and say what you think. A blessed time indeed, when you might think what you would and speak what you thought!
The wise and virtuous Timoleon, the deliverer of the great city of Syracuse from slavery, held the same opinion and practiced it. When Demaenetus, a popular orator, accused him before a full assembly of the people of various misdeeds committed while he was general, Timoleon gave no other answer than this: he was deeply obliged to the gods for granting a request he had often made to them — that he might live to see the Syracusans enjoy the liberty of speech they now seemed to be masters of.
And the great commander Marcellus, who won more battles than any Roman captain of his age, was accused by the Syracusans — while he was consul for the fourth time — of having done them indignities and hostile wrongs contrary to their treaty. The moment the charge against him was opened, he rose from his seat in the Senate, stepped down as a private man into the place where the accused customarily made their defense, and gave the Syracusans full liberty to impeach him. When they had done so, he and his accusers walked out of the court together to await the verdict. He showed not the least ill will or resentment toward them; and when he was acquitted, he received their city into his protection. Had he been guilty, he would have shown neither such temper nor such courage.
I have no doubt that old Spencer and his son, the chief ministers and betrayers of Edward II, would have been very glad to stop the mouths of every honest man in England. They dreaded being called traitors because they were traitors. And I dare say Queen Elizabeth's Walsingham, who deserved no reproaches, feared none. Misrepresentation of public measures is easily overthrown by representing public measures truly. When they are honest, they ought to be publicly known, so that they may be publicly commended; but if they are knavish or destructive, they ought to be publicly exposed, so that they may be publicly detested.
To say that King James was a papist and a tyrant hurt him only so far as it was true of him; and if the Earl of Strafford had not deserved to be impeached, he need not have feared a bill of attainder. If our directors and their confederates are not the knaves the whole world thinks them, let them prove to all the world that the world thinks wrong — that they are guilty of none of the villainies the whole world lays at their door. And others, who would like to be thought clear of that guilt, must first show that they did everything in their power to prevent it and to check those proceedings — before anyone thinks them innocent.
Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together. It is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers and encourages men of fine genius. Tacitus tells us that the Roman commonwealth bred great and numerous authors who wrote with equal boldness and eloquence; but once Rome was enslaved, those great minds were no more. After the battle of Actium, when the interests of peace required that all power be handed to one man, the great geniuses ceased their work. Tyranny had usurped the place of equality — which is the soul of liberty — and destroyed public courage. The minds of men, terrified by unjust power, degenerated into all the vileness and habits of servitude. Abject flattery and blind submission became the only road to advancement, and indeed to safety; men dared not open their mouths except to flatter.
Pliny the Younger observes that this dread of tyranny worked so deeply that the Senate — the great Roman Senate — became at last stupid and dumb, bound by a mute and settled necessity of agreeing to everything. Hence, he says, our spirit and genius are stunned, broken, and sunk forever. And in one of his letters, discussing his uncle's works, he apologizes for eight of them as lacking the vigor found in the rest: those eight were written in the reign of Nero, when the spirit of writing was cramped by fear — when tyranny had made every kind of study that was a little too free and upright a dangerous thing.
All ministers, therefore, who were oppressors, or intended to be oppressors, have been loud in their complaints against freedom of speech and the license of the press, and have always restrained both, or tried to. In consequence, they have browbeaten writers, punished them violently and against law, and burned their works. By all of which they showed how much truth alarmed them, and how much they were at war with truth.
There is a famous instance of this in Tacitus. He tells us that Cremutius Cordus, having praised Brutus and Cassius in his Annals, gave offense to Sejanus, the first minister, and to some lesser sycophants at the court of Tiberius, who — knowing their own characters all too well — took the praise bestowed on every worthy Roman as so many reproaches aimed at themselves. They therefore complained of the book to the Senate, which, being by then only the machine of tyranny, condemned it to be burned. But that did not stop it from spreading. The senators ordered the books burned; but copies survived in hiding and were afterward published. Being censored, it was only the more sought after. "From this," says Tacitus, "we may wonder at the stupidity of those statesmen who hope to extinguish, by the terror of their power, the memory of their own actions; for it works quite the other way: the punishment of good writers gives authority to their writings." Nor did any government that practiced such short-sighted severity ever get anything by it but infamy for themselves and renown for those who suffered under it. This too is an observation of Tacitus: foreign kings, and all who have copied their cruelty, have gained nothing but disgrace for themselves and glory for their victims.
Freedom of speech, then, being of such infinite importance to the preservation of liberty, everyone who loves liberty ought to encourage freedom of speech. And so I, living in a country of liberty and under the best prince on earth, will take this very favorable opportunity of serving mankind by warning them of the hideous mischiefs they will suffer if ever corrupt and wicked men get possession of any state, and with it the power of betraying their master. To do this, I will show by what steps such men will probably proceed to accomplish their traitorous ends. That may be the subject of my next letter.
Valerius Maximus tells us that when Lentulus Marcellinus, the Roman consul, complained in a popular assembly of the overgrown power of Pompey, the whole people answered him with a shout of approval. At which the consul told them: "Shout on, gentlemen, shout on. Use those bold signs of liberty while you may, for I do not know how long they will be allowed you."
God be thanked, we Englishmen have neither lost our liberties nor stand in danger of losing them. Let us always cherish this matchless blessing, almost peculiar to ourselves, so that our posterity, many ages from now, may credit their freedom to our zeal. The defense of liberty is a noble, a heavenly office — one that can be performed only where liberty exists. For, as the same Valerius Maximus observes: what is liberty without Cato? No more than Cato without liberty.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The only purpose of government is the good of the governed. It follows that the greatest and best rulers are those who make their people great and happy, and the worst are those who make their people small, wicked, and miserable. In a free state, power is a trust, committed by all to one man or a few, to watch over everyone's security and pursue everyone's interest. When that security is not sought and that interest not served, we know what opinion the people will form of their governors.
It is the hard fate of the world that governors and governed should have different views and interests at all — and yet in most countries they do. Men who receive a trust freely bestowed on them by the people too often betray it: they become conspirators against their benefactors and turn the sword on the very hands that gave it. Over the greater part of the earth, people count themselves lucky if they can defend themselves against their defenders.
Look around this great world and see what an immense majority of the human race crouches under the yoke of a few tyrants — men by nature as low as the meanest of their subjects, and, by being tyrants, worse than the worst of them. As Mr. Sidney observes, they use their subjects like donkeys and mastiffs: to work and to fight, to be oppressed and killed for them. Even the good qualities and courage of such subjects become their misfortune, since they only strengthen the wicked hands of their brutal masters — and their own chains. Tyrants regard their people as their cattle, and use them worse the more they fear them. Thus most of mankind have become the wretched slaves of men who are, or ought to be, their own creatures. They maintain their haughty masters like gods, and their haughty masters often use them like dogs. A fine specimen of gratitude and duty!
Yet this cruel spirit in tyrants does not always come from the men themselves, for by nature they are like other men. It comes from the nature of the dominion they exercise. Good laws make a good prince, if he has a good understanding; but the best men grow mischievous when they are set above the laws. Claudius was a perfectly harmless man while he was a private man; when he came to be a tyrant, he proved a bloody one — almost as bloody as his nephew and predecessor Caligula, who had likewise been a very good subject, and who, once he became emperor of Rome, turned professed executioner of the human race.
There is something so wanton and monstrous in lawless power that scarcely any human spirit has ever been able to bear it; and the mind of man, which is weak and limited, ought never to be trusted with a power that is boundless. Tyranny is a state of war. Where it prevails, instead of the confidence and affection that flow between a lawful prince and his subjects, nothing is to be seen but jealousy, mistrust, fear, and hatred. An arbitrary prince and his slaves routinely destroy one another to be safe: they are forever plotting against his life, and he is forever shedding their blood and plundering them of their property.
He strikes at everything, because he fears everything.
I think it was the Emperor Justinian who said, "Though we are above the law, yet we live according to the law." With all respect to his Majesty, there was more polish than truth in the saying; for princes who think themselves above the law act almost constantly against all law — and Justinian himself is a famous case in point. Good princes never think themselves above it.
It is a heartbreaking observation that the power given for the protection of the world has, in so many places, been turned to its destruction.
"As if the law were in force for their destruction and not for their preservation — as if it had power to kill them but not to protect them: a thing no less horrid than if the sun should burn us without lighting us, or the earth serve only to bury us, and not to feed and nourish us,"
says Mr. Waller in one of his speeches in Parliament.
Despotic power has defaced creation and laid the world waste. In the finest countries of Asia, once full of people, you are now forced to travel by compass: there are no roads, no houses, no inhabitants. The sun is left to scorch up the grass and fruit it has raised, or the rain to rot them. The gifts of God are left to perish, for none of his creatures — neither man nor beast — remain to use and consume them. The Grand Seignior, the Ottoman sultan — who, if we may believe certain sanctified mouths not at all addicted to lying, is the vicegerent of heaven — frustrates the bounty of heaven; and, being the father of his people, has butchered nearly all of them. The comparatively few who have survived the miserable fate of their brethren are reserved as sacrifices to his cruelty, as occasion offers and his appetite prompts him. They live as the starving, wretched property of ravenous and bloody bashaws — his provincial governors — whose duty to their master, along with their own greed, obliges them to keep the people under them poor and miserable.
But neither bashaws nor armies could keep a people in such abject slavery if their priests and doctors had not made passive obedience a principle of their religion. The holy name of God is profaned, and his authority falsified, to fasten wretchedness upon his creatures and to protect the tyrant who does it. The most complete of all wickedness and the highest of all evils are sanctified by the teachers of religion, and made a part of it. Yes — Turkish slavery is confirmed, and Turkish tyranny defended, by religion!
Sir Paul Ricaut tells us that the Turks maintain "that the Grand Seignior can never be deposed or made accountable for his crimes, so long as he destroys fewer than a hundred of his subjects a day." It is counted martyrdom to die submissively by the hand of the tyrant, and some of his highest slaves have declared that they wanted only that honor to complete their happiness. They hold it their duty to submit even if their tyrant should "command a whole army of them to throw themselves from a rock, or to build a bridge with piles of their bodies for him to pass a river, or to kill one another to afford him pastime and pleasure."
Merciful God! Is this government? And do such governors govern by authority from thee?
What Monsieur de L'Estoille tells us is scarcely credible. He says he traveled in the Indies for more than twenty days together through lanes of people hanged upon trees by command of the king — who had ordered above a hundred thousand of them to be murdered and gibbeted this way, merely because two or three robberies had been committed among them.
It is one of the great evils of servitude that however severe the tyranny is, it is always flattered — and the more severe it is, the more it is flattered. The oppressors of mankind are flattered beyond all other men, because fear and servitude naturally produce flattery, and resort to it, as the best means of self-preservation; while liberty, having no need of it, scorns it. Sir Paul Ricaut ascribes the decay of the Ottoman Empire to the force of flattery, and calls the Turkish court a prison and a slave-pen.
Old Muley, the Lord's anointed of Morocco — who, it seems, is still alive — is thought to have butchered forty thousand of his subjects with his own hands. What a father of his people! And yet, his right to shed human blood being a genuine doctrine of the church of Morocco as by law established, the people are greedy to die by his hand, which, they are taught to imagine, dispatches them straight to paradise. Indeed — though I am told that every time he mounts his horse he slices off the head of the slave holding his stirrup, to show that he is as good an executioner as he is a horseman — there is a standing competition among his slaves over who shall be the happy martyr of the occasion; so that when several of them crowd to his stirrup at once for the gracious favor, his Majesty sometimes has the honor of cutting off two heads, and making two saints, with a single blow.
The exercise of despotic power is the unrelenting war of an armed tyrant upon his unarmed subjects. It is a war of one side only, and in it there is neither peace nor truce. Tacitus describes it: cruel and bloody orders, continual accusations, faithless friendships, and the destruction of innocents. In another place he says that
"Italy was one continual slaughterhouse, and most of its fair cities were defaced or overthrown. Rome itself was in many places laid in ashes, with the greatest part of its magnificent buildings. Virtue was despised, and barefaced debauchery prevailed. The solitary islands were filled with illustrious exiles, and the very rocks were stained with slaughter. But in the city itself cruelty raged still more fiercely: it was dangerous to be noble, a crime to be rich, capital to have held honors, and high treason to have refused them; and for virtue and merit there was sure and sudden destruction."
These were some of the ravages of absolute dominion! And as to the common people, the same author says they were debauched and dispirited, given up to idleness and to watching shows.
Oh, abject state of those who tamely groan Under a blind dependency on one!
This is a sort of government too great and heavy a curse to wish even upon those who are foolish enough, or wicked enough, to argue for its lawfulness — or, what is the same thing, for submission to it. But surely, if ever any man deserved to feel the merciless grip of tyranny, it is the man who advocates for it. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, acted justly when he broke in his brazen bull with the wretch who invented it.
Arbitrary power in a single person has made greater havoc in human nature, and thinned mankind more, than all the beasts of prey and all the plagues and earthquakes that ever were. Let those men consider what they have to answer for, who would countenance so monstrous an evil in the world, or would oppose those who oppose it. A bear, a lion, or a tiger may now and then pick off single men in a wood or a desert; an earthquake may sometimes bury a thousand or two inhabitants in the ruins of a town; and the pestilence may, once in many years, carry off a much greater number. But a tyrant will, out of a wanton personal passion, carry fire and sword through a whole continent, and deliver up a hundred thousand of his fellow creatures to the slaughter in one day — without remorse, and without further notice than that they died for his glory. I say nothing of the moral effects of tyranny, though it is certain that ignorance, vice, poverty, and vileness always attend it.
Whoever compares the world as it is now with what it once was — how populous then, how thin now — and considers the cause of this doleful alteration, will find just reason to fear that spiritual and temporal tyranny, if they go on much longer, will utterly extinguish the human race. Of Turkey I have spoken already. The great continent of America is almost unpeopled, the Spaniards having destroyed, it is thought, some forty million of its natives; and as for some kingdoms of Europe, especially toward the north, I do not believe they have half the inhabitants now that they had as recently as a hundred years ago.
Blessed be God, there are still some free countries in Europe that abound with people and with plenty — and England is the foremost. This demonstrates the inestimable blessing of liberty. Can we ever overrate it, or be too jealous of a treasure that includes in it almost every human happiness? Can we give too much encouragement to those who contend for it, and those who promote it? Liberty is the parent of virtue, pleasure, plenty, and security; and it is innocent as well as lovely. In every contest between liberty and power, power has almost always been the aggressor. Liberty, if it ever produces any evils, also cures them. Its worst effect, licentiousness, never does and never can last long. Anarchy cannot be of much duration; and where it is, it is the child and companion of tyranny — which is not government but the dissolution of it, as tyrants are the enemies of mankind.
Power is like fire: it warms, scorches, or destroys, according as it is watched, provoked, or increased. It is as dangerous as it is useful. Its only rule is the good of the people. But because it is apt to break its bounds, in all good governments nothing — or as little as possible — ought to be left to chance, or to the moods of men in authority. Everything should proceed by fixed and settled rules, and in any emergency new rules should be made. This is the constitution, and this the happiness, of Englishmen, as has been shown at large before in these letters.
We have a constitution that abhors absolute power; we have a king who does not desire it; and we are a people who will never suffer it. No free people will ever submit to it, unless it steals upon them by treachery or they are driven into it by violence. But a state can never be too secure against this terrible thing, this last of all human evils, which may be brought upon a people by many causes — even by some that at first sight seem to threaten nothing of the kind. And of all those causes, none is more ominous than a general distress, which certainly produces general discontent, the parent of revolutions; and where such a state of affairs may end, no man can ever foresee. Few revolutions are brought about without armies — a remedy almost always worse than the disease. What is got by soldiers must be maintained by soldiers; and we have already seen, in this paper, the frightful image of a military government — a government which, at its best, is violent and bloody, and eternally inconsistent with law and property.
It is therefore a dreadful wickedness to have any share in giving occasion for those discontents which are so apt to burst into rage and confusion. A state sometimes recovers from a convulsion and gains new vigor by it; but far more often it expires in it. Heaven preserve me from ever beholding contending armies in England! Armies are different things now from what they once were. Our armies were formerly nothing more than a number of the people, armed for the occasion; and armies of the people are the only armies that are not formidable to the people. That is why, in the many revolutions occasioned by the strife between the two royal houses of York and Lancaster, there was never any danger of slavery from an armed force. A single battle decided the contest; and the next day those popular soldiers went home and took up their ordinary arms — the tools of husbandry. But since that time, armies have not been so easily parted with. After the danger they were raised to meet was over, they have often been obstinately kept up, and by that means have created dangers just as great.
Some quacks in politics may venture public disturbances, in the belief that they will be able to prevent them by cunning or suppress them by force. But this shows their capacity as much as their wickedness. Not to mention the malignity of hearts that would risk public ruin to gratify a private appetite — how can any event be foreseen with certainty, when the measure of its cause cannot be certainly known? They can never gauge the degree of opposition; they cannot foreknow what circumstances may arise, or into whose hands things may fall. Cicero never dreamed, when he employed Octavius for the commonwealth, that his young champion of liberty would end as the tyrant of his country. Who could foresee that Cromwell would enslave the very people he was employed to defend? There is no trusting liberty in the hands of men who are obeyed by great armies.
From all this we may see what a fatal and crying crime it would be, in any free country, to break the confidence between the prince and his people. When loyalty is once turned into indifference, indifference will soon be turned into hatred; hatred will be repaid with hatred; resentment may produce tyranny, and rage may produce rebellion. There is no mischief that this mutual mistrust and aversion may not bring forth. The blackest traitors, therefore, are those who are the first authors of so terrible an evil — and so are those who would endeavor to protect them.
Henry III of Castile said that he feared the curses of his people more than he did the arms of his enemies. In that saying he showed as much wisdom as humanity: for while he was loved at home, he had nothing to fear from abroad, and the curses of his subjects were the likeliest means of bringing the arms of his enemies upon him.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The study of human nature has been a principal pleasure and occupation of mine ever since I was capable of studying anything — a study as useful as its discoveries are, for the most part, melancholy. It cannot help but gall a good-natured man to find that there is nothing so terrible or destructive that human nature is not capable of it. And yet a man who knows little of human nature will never know much about the affairs of the world, which everywhere take their motion and their direction from the moods and passions of men.
It shows how violently human nature bends toward evil that even the Christian religion has not been able to tame the restless appetites of men — appetites forever pushing them into outrages and violence, in direct opposition to the spirit and plain declarations of the gospel, which commands us to do unto all men what we would have all men do unto us. The general practice of the world is an open contradiction of this excellent, this divine rule, and an open contempt for it — a rule which alone, if it were only observed, would restore honesty and happiness to mankind. Instead, in their present state of corruption, men are forever dealing treacherously or brutally with one another, out of a badly judged fondness for themselves.
Worse still: the peaceable, the generous, the forgiving Christian religion is made the cause of perpetual hatred, feuding, quarrels, violence, devastation, and oppression. The apostles — for all their poverty, their selflessness, their love of mankind — are made to justify their pretended successors in the Church of Rome, in grabbing for themselves the wealth and power of the earth, and in bringing mankind under a yoke of servitude more terrible, more expensive, and more severe than anything all the arts and delusions of paganism could ever impose. So much more force do the destructive villainies and forgeries of men carry with a corrupt world than the benevolent and heavenly precepts of Jesus Christ.
The truth — and it is a melancholy truth — is that where human laws do not tie men's hands from wickedness, religion too seldom does; and the most certain security we have against violence is the security of the laws. That is why the making of laws presumes all men to be naturally wicked; and the surest mark of virtue is obedience to laws that are virtuous. If we want to find virtue in a nation, then, we must look for it in the nature of its government. The name and model of its religion is no sure symptom of its virtue, and no sure cause of it either. The Italians profess the Christian religion, and the Turks are all infidels: are the Italians therefore more virtuous than the Turks? Nobody, I think, will say that they are — at least not those Italians who live under absolute princes. On the contrary, it is certain that the subjects of the Great Turk are no more miserable than the subjects of the Pope; and they are no more wicked either.
Of all the passions belonging to human nature, self-love is the strongest, and the root of all the rest — or rather, the different passions are only different names for the several operations of self-love. Self-love, says the Duke de La Rochefoucauld — the great French maxim-maker — is the love of one's self, and of everything else for one's own sake. It makes a man the idolater of himself and the tyrant of others. Man, he observes, is a mixture of contradictions: imperious and pliant, sincere and false, fearful and bold, merciful and cruel. He can sacrifice every pleasure to the getting of riches, and all his riches to a single pleasure. He is devoted to his own preservation, yet sometimes eager for his own destruction. He can flatter the men he hates, and destroy the men he loves.
This is a picture of mankind; and those who call it a false one ought to show that they deserve a better. I have sometimes thought it scarcely possible to assert anything about mankind — however good, or however evil — that will not prove true. They are naturally innocent, yet fall naturally into the practice of vice. The greatest instances of virtue and villainy are found in one and the same person; and perhaps one and the same motive produces both. The keeping or breaking of a few frivolous customs will unite men in strict friendship and alliance, or set them cutting one another's throats.
Men never regard one another simply as men and rational beings, on the footing of their common humanity; they are bonded or divided by the force of words and habits. Considerations that are a disgrace to reason! Not being born in the same climate, or on this side of a certain river or a certain mountain; not wearing the same kind of clothes, or making the same sounds, or holding the same thoughts and tastes — these are all so many causes of intense hatred, and sometimes of mortal war. Whatever men think or do, especially once they have found a good name for it, is wisest and best in their own eyes, however foolish or bad it may be. Nor is that all: we insist on plaguing our neighbors if they will not give up, on our bare authority, their own thoughts and practices in favor of ours.
It fills me with concern to consider how men use one another, and how wretchedly their passions are employed. They hardly ever find proper objects for their passions. They will hate a man for what he cannot help and what does them no harm, yet bless and pray for villains who kill and oppress them. There never was so dreadful a tribunal under the sun as the Inquisition — a tribunal against which the most innocent man is not safe, and to which the most virtuous men are the most exposed; a tribunal where all the malice, all the calculating cruelty, all the bitterness, and all the fury and falsehood of devils are exercised, and all the tortures of hell are imitated and practiced. Yet this very tribunal is so dear to the people — though it terrifies them, enslaves them, and destroys them — that rather than part with it, they would part with everything else they have left. When Barcelona surrendered in the last war, the inhabitants made it a condition of their capitulation that the Inquisition should not be taken from them. And even here in England, we can remember a time when men were knocked down for saying that they had a right to defend their property by force when a tyrant tried to rob them of it against law. To such a pitch of stupidity and derangement can people be brought by those who lie about Almighty God, and falsify his word to feed worldly pride; such dupes, and such furies, are men to one another!
Everything is so perverted and abused — and the best things most of all — that a very wise man had only too much reason to say that truth does not do as much good in the world as the appearance and pretense of it does evil. Thus the saving of men's souls is so universally understood to be a great and glorious blessing that, for the sake of it, men have suffered, and still suffer, the deepest misery and bondage from the impostors who pretend to bestow it — in the dark parts of the world, which are by far the greatest parts of the world. Thus civil government is the defense and security of human society; yet Dr. Prideaux makes it a real question whether the benefit the world receives from government is enough to make amends for the calamities it suffers from the follies, mistakes, and misgovernment of those who manage it. And thus, to come home to ourselves: a scheme to pay off the nation's debts was so tempting, so popular, and so plausible, that almost everybody came into it — and the consequences speak for themselves.
The Roman senate could flatter and adore a Nero and a Caligula; the Roman soldiers could butcher a Piso and a Pertinax, virtuous men both. It is hard to say which was the guiltier: the senate while it worshipped tyranny, or the army while it destroyed virtue. So ready are men to spread public destruction for personal advantage and security! I can never think without horror and trembling of that dismal, that bloody maxim of Philip II of Spain: that he would rather be master of a kingdom ruined, miserable, and quiet, than of a kingdom rich, powerful, and turbulent. In pursuit of this maxim he made his kingdom a desert, by destroying and expelling the most industrious of its inhabitants, the Moors. But Philip was very devout, and would frequently wash a pilgrim's feet — that is, he was very civil and charitable to an idle religious drifter, and a cruel enemy to the general happiness of mankind.
This puts me in mind of the history of John Basilovitz — Ivan the Terrible — Grand Duke of Muscovy:
"No history of his time fails to speak of the unheard-of cruelties he exercised on all sorts of persons through his whole reign. They are so horrid that no tyrant ever did the like; and yet Bishop Paulus Jovius gives him the character of a good and devout Christian, though he does not deserve to be numbered even among men. It is true, he would often go to church, say the service himself, sing, attend the ceremonies of the church, and perform the functions of the monks; but he abused both God and man, and had no sentiments of humanity." — The Travels of the Ambassadors, pp. 73–74.
What a medley is here — devotion and cruelty in the same men! Nor are these examples unusual. Louis XI of France was a false, a wicked, and an oppressive prince, and one of the greatest bigots that ever lived; and some of the greatest saints in the Roman calendar were pernicious villains and bloody monsters. No sect of bigots, once they are on top, is willing to tolerate another; and all of them ground their ungodly severity on their zeal for religion — though their lack of charity is proof positive that they have no religion. It is certain that without universal charity and forbearance, a man cannot be a Christian.
It is astonishing, and affecting, to see how thoroughly the ideas of good and evil are confounded! The Turks place great devotion in releasing captive birds from their cages, in feeding hungry and mangy dogs and building hospitals for them, and in paying a religious reverence to camels. But at the same time that they treat birds and beasts like men and Christians, they treat men and Christians worse than they treat beasts. With them it is a lighter offense to deny bread to a poor Christian starving in his chains than to the dogs of the street, which are fit for nothing but breeding infection. They will load a poor Christian with irons and cover him with lashes, and think they do well and religiously in it — yet make it a matter of conscience not to overload a beast of burden.
In popish countries, wherever nature is left to itself, as much compassion is shown for the distressed as anywhere else. Even thieves, robbers, and murderers are accompanied to the gallows or the wheel with sighs and tears, especially from the tender sex. But when some unhappy innocent is going to be burned — cruelly and slowly burned — for his sincerity and piety, for speaking truth and reading the Bible himself or teaching it to others, nothing is to be seen but general joy, and nothing to be heard but loud cries of approval and consent; and all piety, all sympathy, is refused in the one case that calls for it most. Tell a Spanish lady of a popish priest hanged in England for sedition or murder, and she instantly falls into tears and agonies. Tell her of a kinsman of hers burned for denying transubstantiation, and she gives glory to God and feels a sensible joy.
And in Protestant countries, how many men are there who cheat, starve, and oppress others their whole lives long, in order to leave an estate at their death to religious uses — as if men were to be rogues for God's sake! I have heard of a man who, having given half his estate to mend highways for the good of his country, said he would gladly give the other half if England had never a ship, nor a merchant, nor a dissenter from the Church belonging to it. Strange inconsistency! By one act of his, two or three miles of causeway were kept in good repair — which was only a kindness to horses' hoofs. By another act of his, he would have made all England miserable and desolate.
The hardships and distresses of this year show all too plainly the rogueries and depredations of the last. Villainy was let loose among us, and every man tried to entrap and ruin his neighbor in order to enrich himself. Honesty was browbeaten and driven into corners; humanity was extinguished; all friendship was abolished; even the distinction of kindred and the ties of blood were thrown aside. A raging passion for immoderate gain had made men universally and intensely hard-hearted; they were everywhere devouring one another. And yet the directors and their accomplices, the acting instruments of all this outrageous madness and mischief, set up for wonderfully pious persons even while they were defying Almighty God and plundering men — and they set apart a fund of subscriptions for charitable uses. That is to say: they mercilessly made a whole people beggars, and charitably supported a few needy and worthless favorites. I do not doubt that if the villainy had gone on with success, their names would have been handed down to posterity with praise, as the names of other public robbers have been. We have historians and ode-makers now living who are very fit for such a task. It is certain that most people did, at one time, believe the directors to be great and worthy persons; and an honest country clergyman told me last summer, on the road, that Sir John was an excellent public-spirited person — for he had beautified his chancel.
On the whole, we must not judge one another by our fair pretensions and our best actions, since the worst men do some good, and all men make fine professions. We must judge men by the whole of their conduct, and by its effects. Thorough honesty requires great and long proof, since many a man long thought honest has at length proved a knave. And it is from judging without proof — or on too little proof, or on false proof — that mankind continues unhappy.
I am, etc.
Sir,
Considering what sort of creature man is, it is scarcely possible to put him under too many restraints when he holds great power. He may possibly use it well; but the wise course is taken by those who assume he will use it badly — who fence him within fixed bounds, and make it terrible to him to step beyond them.
Men who are above all fear soon grow above all shame. Tacitus says of Tiberius that once shame and fear were gone, he simply followed his own nature — straight down into crime and dishonor. Even Nero lived a long while inoffensively, and reigned virtuously. But when he found at last that he could do whatever he pleased, he let loose his appetite for blood, and committed slaughters so mighty, so monstrous, so unnatural, that only a heart devoted to the study of cruelty could have devised them. The good counsels of Seneca and Burrhus were, for a time, checks on his wolfish nature; and no doubt he suspected that if he made direct, outright war on his own people, they would resist and strike back. But discovering, degree by degree, that they would bear anything, and that his soldiers would execute everything, he moved into open defiance of mankind, and daily, wantonly, wallowed in their blood. Having no other rival left, he seemed to rival himself: every day's wickedness was blacker than the last.
Yet Nero was not the worst of all men. There have been thousands as bad as he, who only lacked the same opportunity to show it. And there have actually been many princes in the world who shed more blood, and did more damage to mankind, than Nero ever did. I could name a recent one who destroyed more lives than Nero destroyed — perhaps a hundred to one. It makes no difference that Nero committed his butcheries out of cruelty, and the other only for his glory. The world may be deceived by the change of names into abhorring the one and admiring the other; but to a nation about to be slaughtered it is all one whether it is slaughtered by the hangman or by dragoons, in prison or in the field. Ambition is no better than cruelty when it breeds mischief just as great.
It is nothing strange that men who think themselves unaccountable should act unaccountably — or that all men would be unaccountable if they could. Even those who have done nothing to displease their master do not know but that some day they may; and no man cares to be entirely at another's mercy. That is why, if every man had his will, every man would exercise dominion, and no man would submit to it. So it is owing far more to men's necessities than to their inclinations that they have put themselves under the restraint of laws, and appointed certain persons — called magistrates — to enforce them. Otherwise the laws would never be enforced at all; scarcely any man has virtue enough to enforce the laws against himself. On the contrary, most men think the law a grievance the moment it comes meddling with themselves and their property. "The author and the breaker of his own laws" was the character given of Pompey: he made laws when they suited his purposes, and broke them when they crossed his will. And it is the character of almost every man possessed of Pompey's kind of power. Such men intend the laws as a security for themselves, and a terror for everyone else. This shows the distrust that men have of men; and this is what made a great philosopher — Hobbes — call the state of nature a state of war. In a limited sense the definition is true, since human societies and human laws are the product of necessity and experience. For if all men were left to the boundless liberty they claim from nature, every man would be interfering and quarreling with another; every man would be plundering what another had acquired; the labor of one man would become the property of another; weakness would be the prey of force; and one man's industry would be the cause of another man's idleness.
Hence grew the necessity of government: a mutual contract among a number of men, agreeing on certain terms of union and society, and binding themselves under penalties — called laws — if they violated those terms, with one or more men appointed to enforce them. And so men gave up part of their natural liberty to acquire civil security. But the remedy has frequently proved worse than the disease; and human society has often had no enemies so great as its own magistrates — for all history affords but few instances of men trusted with great power without abusing it, and growing dangerous to the very people who made them what they were. Rome, while she was free — that is, while she kept her magistrates within due bounds — could defend herself against all the world, and conquer it. But once enslaved — that is, once her magistrates had broken their bounds — she could not defend herself against her own single tyrants, nor could they defend her against her foreign foes and invaders; for by their madness and cruelties they had destroyed her virtue and spirit, and exhausted her strength. This shows that magistrates who stand in absolute defiance of a nation either cannot last long themselves, or will not let the nation last long; and that mighty traitors, rather than fall alone, will pull their country down with them.
What a dreadful spirit that man must possess, who can weigh a private appetite against the universal good of his country and of mankind — and choose the appetite! Alexander and Caesar were that sort of men: they would set the world on fire and spill its blood rather than not govern it. Caligula knew that he was hated, and knew that he deserved to be hated; it did not mend him. Oderint dum metuant — "let them hate, so long as they fear" — was his byword. All that the monster aimed at was to be great and terrible. Most of these tyrants died as they deserved, and as they had reigned: by violence. But that did not mend their successors, who generally earned the fate of the men who went before them almost before they were warm in their place. "Even wickedness that fails finds imitators," runs the old line; "what then, when it flourishes and prospers?" If unlucky villainy finds rivals, what shall we say when it lifts up its head and wins?
There is no evil under the sun that is not to be dreaded from men who may do what they please with impunity. Such men seldom or never stop at some fixed degree of mischief when they have the power to go farther; they hurry on from wickedness to wickedness, as far and as fast as human malice can drive human power. "Once a man strays from the right path," says a Roman historian, "he plunges headlong — from propriety to depravity, from depravity to crime, from crime to the abyss." He speaks the truth here, though in other places he tells many lies — I mean that base flatterer of power, Velleius Paterculus. So when we see any great mischief committed with safety, we may justly expect mischiefs greater still.
The world is governed by men, and men by their passions; and passions, being boundless and insatiable, are always terrible when they are not controlled. Who was ever satisfied with riches, or stuffed full of power, or tired of honors? There is a tradition about Alexander: that having pushed through to the Eastern Ocean, and ravaged as much of this world as he knew of, he wept that there was not another world for him to conquer. True or not, it shows the spirit of the man — and indeed of human nature, whose appetites are infinite.
People are ruined by their ignorance of human nature; and that ignorance leads them to credulity, and to too much confidence in particular men. They fondly imagine that a man who possesses a great deal by their favor, and owes them great gratitude and every good office in return, will therefore repay their kindness. But alas — how often are they mistaken in their favorites and trustees, who, the more they have been given, are often the more incited to take everything, and to return destruction for generous usage. The common people generally think that great men have great minds, and scorn base actions. That judgment is so false that the basest and worst of all actions have been done by great men. Perhaps they have not picked private pockets, but they have done worse: they have disturbed, deceived, and pillaged the world. And he who is capable of the highest mischief is capable of the meanest. The man who plunders a country of a million would, in suitable circumstances, steal a silver spoon; and the conqueror who steals and pillages a kingdom would, in humbler fortune, rifle a traveler's bag, or rob an orchard.
Political jealousy in the people, therefore, is a necessary and praiseworthy passion. But in a chief magistrate, jealousy of his people is not so easy to justify — their only ambition is to preserve themselves, while it is natural for power to keep striving to enlarge itself, and to encroach on those who have none. The most praiseworthy jealousy in a magistrate is to be jealous for his people: that shows he loves them, and has used them well. To be jealous of them would show that he has evil designs against them, and has used them ill. The people's jealousy tends to preserve liberty; the prince's, to destroy it. Venice is a glorious example of the former, and so is England; and all the nations that have lost their liberty are melancholy proofs of the latter.
Power is naturally active, vigilant, and distrustful. These qualities push it toward every means and expedient of fortifying itself, toward destroying all opposition and even all seeds of opposition, and they keep it restless as long as anything stands in its way. Power would do what it pleases, and suffer no check. And because liberty chastises power and cuts it short, power would extinguish liberty; so liberty has every cause to be exceedingly jealous, and always on her guard. Power holds many advantages over her: it generally has numerous guards, many creatures, and much treasure — besides more craft and experience, and less honesty and innocence. And whereas power can subsist, and for the most part does, where liberty is not, liberty cannot subsist without power; so that she has the enemy, as it were, always at her gates.
Some have said that magistrates, being accountable to none but God, ought to know no other restraint. But this reasoning is as frivolous as it is wicked. No good man cares how many punishments and penalties stand in the way of an offense he never intends to commit: a man who does not mean to commit murder is not sorry that murder is punished with death. And as for wicked men, their being accountable to a God whom they do not fear is no security to us against their folly and malice; and to say that we ought to have no security against them is to insult common sense, and to give the lie to the first law of nature — the law of self-preservation. Human reason says that no obedience and no regard are due to rulers who govern by no rule but their appetite. Such men are not rulers; they are outlaws, who, being at defiance with God and man, are protected by no law of God or of reason. By what precept, moral or divine, are we forbidden to kill a wolf, or burn an infected ship? Is it unlawful to prevent wickedness and misery, and to resist the authors of them? Are crimes sanctified by their size? Is the man who robs a country and murders ten thousand less a criminal than the man who steals single guineas and takes single lives? Is there any sin in preventing, restraining, or resisting the greatest sin that can be committed — the oppression and destruction of mankind wholesale? Surely there never were such open, such shameless, such self-serving impostors as the advocates for lawless power! It is a damnable sin to oppress them; yet it is a damnable sin to oppose them when they oppress others, or grow rich by the oppression! Let them be hurt ever so little themselves — let them merely imagine they have been hurt — and they are the loudest of all men in their complaints, and the most outrageous in their behavior. But when others are plundered, oppressed, and butchered, complaints become sedition, and seeking redress becomes damnation. Is this not to be the authors of all wickedness and all falsehood?
To conclude: power without control belongs to God alone, and no man ought to be trusted with what no man is equal to. In truth, there are so many passions, so many inconsistencies, and so much selfishness in human nature that we can scarcely be too much on our guard against each other. The only security we can have that men will be honest is to make it their interest to be honest; and the best defense we can have against their being knaves is to make it terrible to them to be knaves. And since there are many men who are wicked in some stations who would be innocent in others, the best way is to make wickedness unsafe in any station.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The love of one's country — public spirit, as we call it — is a phrase in everybody's mouth, but it rarely goes any deeper. It is talked about without being felt. Some people mention it without attaching any idea to it at all, except that it is a fine thing which everybody likes, and a good quality one would not want to seem to be without.
Others, when they name it, mean nothing but some poor, selfish gratification of their own. With great men it means wealth and empire — doing whatever they please and getting whatever they can. That is plain faction: promoting, under cover of the public, schemes that are inconsistent with it. With the trader and the craftsman it means encouraging only the particular trade or product he himself deals in; and that is monopoly and market-cornering, always harmful to the public.
In popish countries, it is public spirit to build and beautify a great many churches at the expense of the poor — who must then pay, at further expense, to maintain a long train of luxurious clergymen to perform tricks in them; or, in plainer words, to keep the heads and the pockets of their deluded hearers as empty as possible. It is likewise great public spirit there to deck an old skull with pearls and diamonds, and to enrich one venerable rotten tooth with gold and emeralds worth enough to maintain a city and all its inhabitants — who are perhaps starving to pay for it. It is very public-spirited there for a man to starve his family and his descendants in order to endow a monastery, and to feed — or rather gorge — a brotherhood of reverend gluttons, professed enemies of truth, of peace, and of the prosperity of the world; idlers maintained to stuff themselves and deceive. This, if you please, is public spirit: to rob a country of its working hands, to raise up a pernicious and turbulent mob of drones schooled in principles destructive of liberty, and to breed up a nation's enemies at the nation's own expense.
In arbitrary countries, it is public spirit to be a blind slave to the blind will of the prince, and to slaughter or be slaughtered for him at his pleasure. But in Protestant free countries, public spirit is another thing entirely. It is to fight force and delusion; it is to reconcile the true interests of the governed and the governors; it is to expose impostors and to resist oppressors; it is to keep the people in liberty, plenty, ease, and security.
This is public spirit. It contains every praiseworthy passion, and it takes in parents, family, friends, neighbors, and everything dear to mankind. It is the highest virtue, and holds almost all the others within it: steadiness to good purposes, faithfulness to one's trust, resolution in difficulties, defiance of danger, contempt of death, and impartial goodwill toward all mankind. It is a passion to promote the universal good at personal pain, loss, and peril. It is one man's care for many, and the concern of every man for all.
Look at this picture, you great patriots and guardians of the earth, and see whether you resemble it! Whom have you raised up for his own merit? Whom have you pulled down for your country's sake? What advantages have you won for your nation at a loss to yourselves? And have your people's losses never been your gains?
Outside England, these questions cannot easily be answered. Nor, in former days, could they be answered in England.
If my portrait of public spirit is thought too heroic — at least for the living generation, who are frankly babes in that virtue — I will readily grant that every man has a right, and a call, to provide for himself, to attend to his own affairs, and to pursue his own happiness. All I insist on is that a man's duty to himself come after the general welfare, and stay consistent with it. The business of all should be minded before the business of any one — as every man is quick to admit the moment his own stake is embarked with the whole; and every man's stake will prove to be embarked with the whole sooner or later. Some may thrive for a while on the public ruins; but their fate seldom fails to find them in the end — them, or their children.
It is a favorable sign of public spirit, though not a certain one, when a man's interest and his reputation rise together; and there is policy and wisdom in that. He who piles up money at the cost of his good name pays dearly for his avarice: it returns him hatred and curses along with the gold; and to be rich and detested is, to my mind, no pleasant character. The same holds for ambition, and for every other passion that breaks its bounds and makes a captive of its owner. It is scarcely possible to be a rogue and be beloved. And when men have grown numb to public censure — indifferent to what the community thinks of their honesty or dishonesty — it is a sign that they are at open defiance with the society they live in, and that everyone else ought to be on guard against them. They have, in effect, cut themselves off from society, and taught the people what to call them.
It is true that great bad men never lack for court paid to their fortunes — court which their self-love always construes as paid to their persons. But there is a way to undeceive them, and it often happens: let them once sink into meanness, and they will soon find themselves sunk into contempt; which is what hatred becomes when the thing hated shrinks.
There is a sort of man found almost everywhere who, having got hold of a set of profitable pet theories, is always ready to spread and enforce them, and calls the doing of it public spirit — though it often turns the world upside down. He is like the mad monk of Heidelberg, who wanted to knock every man on the head who did not care for Rhenish wine, which it seems was his beloved drink. Perhaps he thought it as reasonable to make all the world swallow Rhenish as to make them swallow transubstantiation.
Opinions — bare opinions — signify no more to the world than men's differing tastes; and all mankind would have to be made of one complexion, one size, and one age before they could all be made of one mind. Those patrons of dry dreams, who do harm to the world in order to improve it, are the pests and tormentors of mankind, and shut themselves out of any claim to the love of their country. Strange men! They would force everyone into absolute certainty about absolute uncertainties and contradictions; they would settle ambiguities without removing them; and they would plague and punish men for having only five senses.
I will assert another proposition, as true as the last, though it may sound stranger: that taking a thousand or ten thousand pounds a year for the merit of helping to drain a hundred times as much from the people is not public spirit, whatever custom may call it; and that grasping at everything, and stuffing a whole country into two or three pockets, is a sort of public spirit which I hope to God never to see — though there have been nations that sorrowfully felt it.
Liberty can never survive without equality, and equality cannot long be preserved without an agrarian law — a cap on landholdings — or something like it. So when men's riches grow immeasurably or startlingly great, a people who care about their own security ought to inquire strictly into how they got them, and oblige them to come back down to size, for fear of their terrifying the community — or mastering it. In every country, and under every government, particular men may be too rich.
If the Romans had kept their agrarian law well observed — the law fixing the extent of every citizen's estate — some citizens could never have risen so high above the others as they did; and consequently no one man could ever have been set above the rest, and established, as Caesar finally did, a tyranny in that great and glorious state. I have always thought that an inquiry into men's fortunes — especially monstrous fortunes raised out of the public, like Milton's infernal palace, as it were in an instant — matters more to a nation than certain other inquiries I have heard of.
But, some will say, is it a crime to be rich? Yes, certainly — at the public expense, or to the public danger. A man may be too rich for a subject; even the revenues of kings may be too large. It is one of the effects of arbitrary power that the prince has too much and the people too little; and that same inequality can, in its turn, be the cause of arbitrary power. It is as astonishing as it is melancholy to travel through a whole country — as one may through many in Europe — gasping under endless taxes, groaning under soldiers and poverty, and all of it to keep up a wanton and luxurious court filled, for the most part, with the worst and vilest of men. Good God! What hard-heartedness, what barbarity, to starve half a province to make a pretty garden! And yet even this gross wickedness is sometimes called public spirit, because — if you please — a few workmen and laborers are maintained out of the bread and the blood of half a million.
In those countries, if the judgment of the people were consulted, things would go better. But the people are despised, and their governors count them happy enough so long as they do not eat grass; and having no representatives and no share in the government, they have no remedy. Their misery, indeed, is such that their condition would be greatly improved if they could trade places with the beasts of the field: for then, being destined to be eaten, they would be better fed. What a misfortune for them that their governors are not cannibals! O happy Britain — may you remain so forever!
For a conclusion: since the preservation of property is the source of national happiness, whoever violates property, or lessens or endangers it, is — common sense says — an enemy to his country; and public spirit says that he should feel its vengeance. As yet in England, we can speak such bold truths; and we never dread to see the day when it will be safer for one man to be a traitor than for another man, or for a whole people, to call him one. Wherever public spirit is found dangerous, she will soon be seen dead.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The world has been marched, age after age, through a long maze of errors — led there by men who made their living from the deceiving. So anyone who wants to teach humanity anything must start by clearing away the lies. If people everywhere were honestly told the truth and restored to their senses, there would not remain one nation of bigots or slaves under the sun. A happy outcome — always to be wished for, never to be expected.
In most of the world there is neither light nor liberty; and even in the best parts of it, both get faint encouragement and cold support, because in every place there are many people whose interests enlist them in a permanent conspiracy against both. Light and liberty are the two greatest civil blessings we have. Their interests are inseparable; each is the other's support; and whoever would destroy one must destroy both. That is why, everywhere you look, tyranny and fraud go together, ignorance and slavery go together, and oppressors and deceivers work hand in hand, forever paying court to each other. Wherever truth is dangerous, liberty is precarious.
Of all the sciences in the world, the science of government concerns us most, is the easiest to learn — and is the least understood. Most of the men who run governments would have the rest of us believe there is some deep difficulty and mystery in it, far above ordinary understanding. That claim is plain craft and imposture. Every plowman knows a good government from a bad one by its effects: he knows whether the fruits of his labor are his own, and whether he enjoys them in peace and security. If he does not know the principles of government, it is only for lack of thinking and inquiry, because those principles lie open to common sense. But people are generally taught not to think about them at all — or to think about them wrongly.
What is government but a trust, committed by all or most of the people to one or a few, who are to look after the affairs of everyone so that each person can look after his own with greater security? A great and honorable trust — but too seldom honorably executed. The men who hold it too often care more about increasing their power than about making it useful; more about being feared than about doing good. It is therefore a trust that ought to be bound with many strong restraints, because power makes men reckless, insolent to others, and in love with themselves. Every serious violation of this trust ought to meet with punishment in proportion; and even the smallest violation ought to meet with some, because indulging the least faults of officials can be cruelty to a whole people.
Honesty, diligence, and plain sense are the only talents needed to execute this trust, and the public good is its only purpose. As for refinements and finesse — those are usually just the false glitter of wisdom and talent, and more often tricks to hide guilt and emptiness; and they are generally mean and dishonest. They are the arts of political operators who play their own game under public cover and live on cheap shifts and expedients: starved politicians who scrape along hand to mouth, day to day, chasing the small aims of ambition, greed, revenge, and the other personal passions — too ashamed to admit them, too small-souled to give them up. Petty, wicked statesmen, who make a private market of the public, and deceive it in order to sell it.
These are the shabby parts that great and good governors scorn to play, and could not play if they tried. Their designs, like their offices, are purely public: open and undisguised. They do not treat their people as prey. They do not lie in ambush for their own citizens, or dread them, or handle them and spring on them like enemies — which is exactly what all bad officials do. Bad officials are not governors at all; they are jailers and sponges. They chain the people and squeeze them, and then take great offense if the people so much as murmur — which is far less than a people so abused ought to do. There have been times and countries in which "public minister" and "public enemy" were names for the same men. What a dismal thought, that a nation's most terrible and destructive foes should be its own officials! Yet in every enslaved country — which is almost every country — that is exactly the people's miserable condition.
Honesty and plainness always travel together; and the makers and multipliers of political mysteries deserve to be sharply suspected of dark designs. Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer-general, was taken from his plow to save and defend the Roman state — an office he executed honestly and successfully, without a statesman's posturing or a statesman's profits. Nor did he cling stubbornly to power afterward to build a faction, raise a fortune, and settle himself at the top. He came into office with universal consent, and he resigned it with universal applause.
Government, it seems, had not yet become a trade in those days — at least not a profitable one. Honest Cincinnatus was only a farmer. And it would have been a happy thing for the Romans if, once they were enslaved, they could have taken the administration out of the hands of the emperors and their refined politicians and handed it to such farmers — or to any farmers. It is certain that many of their imperial governors acted more ridiculously than a board of plowmen would have done, and more barbarously than a club of butchers could have done.
But some have said: it is not the business of private men to meddle with government. A bold, false, and dishonest saying. Whoever repeats it either does not know what he is saying, or does not care, or is slavishly mouthing the opinions of others. It is a piece of cant now almost forgotten in England — a slogan that never caught on except when liberty and the constitution were under attack, and never can catch on except on the same occasion.
It is a vexation to have to answer nonsense and refute absurdities. But since the great design of this paper is, and has always been, to maintain and explain the glorious principles of liberty, and to expose the arts of those who would darken or destroy them, I will show here, in particular, the wickedness and the stupidity of that saying — a saying fit for no mouth but a tyrant's or a slave's, and one that no man with an honest and free soul can hear without horror and indignation. It is, in short, a saying that ought to make the man who utters it forever unfit for office or trust in a free country. It exposes the malignity of his heart and the baseness of his nature, and it pronounces a doom upon our constitution. A crime — or rather a bundle of crimes — for which lasting infamy ought to be only part of the punishment.
Now to the falsehood of the thing itself. Public truths should never be kept secret; those who hide them are guilty of a contradiction in terms. Every man ought to know what it concerns all men to know. And nothing on earth is more universal in its nature than government. Every private man on earth has a stake in it, because his virtue, his property, and the safety of his person are bound up in it — nearly and immediately bound up in it. Where those things are best preserved and advanced, the government is best administered; and where they are not, the government is impotent, wicked, or unlucky. And as the government goes, so go the people; for there is always and everywhere a certain sympathy between the nature of a government and the nature of its people. This holds in every case. Public men set the pattern for private ones, and the virtues and vices of the governors quickly become the virtues and vices of the governed.
As the old Latin line puts it: the whole world arranges itself after the example of its king.
Nor is example the only mechanism. Bad governments, living by vice and plunder, are jealous of private virtue and enemies of private property. As Tacitus said of such a reign: wealth was treated as a crime, and virtue brought certain destruction. Such governments must be wicked and destructive to be what they are; and they are never secure while anything good or valuable is secure. That is why draining, harassing, and debauching their subjects are the standing maxims of their politics — their favorite arts of ruling. In that wretched situation the people, to be safe, must be poor and degraded. There will be little industry where property is precarious, and small honesty where virtue is dangerous.
Extravagance or frugality, and the other virtues and vices that touch the public, will be practiced in the city if they are practiced at court, and in the country if they are practiced in the city. Even Nero — that royal monster in a man's shape — was adored by the common crowd at Rome as much as he was flattered by the great; and little and great alike admired his manners, or pretended to admire them, and many imitated them. Tacitus tells us that those sorts of people mourned him for a long time, and rejoiced when the succession fell to a man who resembled him — the dissolute Otho.
Good government, by contrast, produces great virtue, much happiness, and many people. Greece and Italy, while they remained free, were each so thickly populated that they seemed one continuous city; and for virtue, knowledge, and great men, they set the standard for the world. Ever since, whatever age and country could come nearest them has been counted the happiest. Their government — their free government — was the root of all these advantages, all this happiness and renown. In those great and fortunate states the people were the principals in the government: laws were made by their judgment and authority, and by their voice and command magistrates were created and condemned. The city of Rome could conquer the world; and the great Persian monarch, the greatest ruler then on earth, could not stand before the face of one Greek city.
And what are Greece and Italy now? Rome holds a herd of pampered monks and a few starving lay inhabitants. The Campagna of Rome, the finest stretch of ground in Europe, is a desert. As for the modern Greeks, they are a few abject, contemptible slaves, held down in ignorance, chains, and squalor by the Turkish monarch, who keeps a great part of the globe intensely miserable so that he may seem great without being great.
Such is the difference between one government and another; and of such enormous consequence to a people is the nature and administration of its government. To say that private men have nothing to do with government is to say that private men have nothing to do with their own happiness and misery.
What is the public, after all, but the collective body of private men, just as every private man is a member of the public? And as the whole ought to be concerned for the preservation of every private individual, so it is the duty of every individual to be concerned for the whole — in which he himself is included.
One man, or a few men, have often invoked "the public" while meaning themselves, and pursued their own personal interest in matters essential to the public's well-being. But the whole people, by consulting their own interest, consult the public's; they act for the public by acting for themselves. That is precisely the spirit of our constitution, in which the whole nation is represented; and our records show instances in which the House of Commons declined to take up an important question until they had gone home to the country and consulted their principals — the people. So far were they from thinking that private men had no right to meddle with government. In truth, our whole worldly happiness and misery — setting aside accidents and disease — comes from the good order or the mismanagement of government. So the man who says that private men have no concern with government is wisely and modestly telling us that men have no concern in the thing that concerns them most. He is saying that people ought not to care whether they are naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, protected or destroyed. What nonsense — and what servility — in a free and wise nation!
For my own part, having thought a good deal about these matters, I am of the opinion that a whole nation is at least as likely to stay attached to its own interest as one man or a few men are — men who can be detached from the nation's interest by any number of means. It is certain that one man, or several men, can be bribed into an interest opposite to the public's. But it is just as certain that a whole country can never find an equivalent for itself, and consequently a whole country can never be bribed. It is the eternal interest of every nation that its government should be good; but the men who run it frequently reason the other way, and find their private account in plunder and oppression; and while the public voice is pretended — declared by one man or a few, for vile and private ends — the public itself knows nothing of what is done until it feels the terrible effects.
By the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, at the Revolution, a right is asserted to the people: the right of applying to the King and to Parliament, by petition and address, for the redress of public grievances and mismanagements — when such there are, and of that the people are left to judge. Here, principally, lies the difference between free countries and enslaved ones: in the free, the magistrates must consult the voice and interest of the people; in the enslaved, the private will, interest, and pleasure of the governors are the sole ends and motives of their administration.
Such is the difference between England and Turkey — a difference that the men who say private citizens have no right to concern themselves with government would flatly abolish. They would convert magistrates into pashas, and bring the spirit of popery into politics. The late Revolution stands upon the very opposite maxim; and that any man dares contradict that maxim since the Revolution would be astonishing, did we not know that in every country there are hirelings who would betray it for a sop.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The harm done in the world every day, and the evils suffered in it every day, are sad proof of how far human malice outruns human wisdom. Law can only guard against the evils it knows about or sees coming; and when laws fail us, we have to fall back on reason and nature, which are the only guides for making laws in the first place. The root of law, says Cicero, was found in nature itself. There would never have been a law against any crime if that crime could have been committed safely without one: every law assumes some evil already at work, and can only punish or restrain evils that already exist.
But written laws, however complete and however clear, can never entirely stop crafty men from slipping around them or powerful men from trampling them. So new laws are made every day, and new occasions for more arise every day. The most that wisdom, virtue, and law can ever do is to lessen and soften vice and outrage — never to abolish them. Law, in other words, is a sign of the corruption of man; and many laws are a sign of the corruption of a state.
Written laws draw their whole force from the law of nature, which directs us to make rules for the occasion — the things we call laws — to fit the demands of times, places, and persons. So they grow obsolete, or simply stop being laws, the moment they stop being necessary. And it is just as much against the law of nature to enforce a law after its original cause has disappeared as it is to make a law for which there is no cause, or a bad cause. That would be to put reason under the boot of force, and to hang a penalty where there is no crime. Law is right reason: it commands what is good and forbids what is bad; it marks out and declares what is just and what is unjust, and attaches the penalties or the advantages that belong to each.
Breaking a law, therefore, is no crime where the law itself is bad; but breaking what ought to be law is a crime even where no law exists. The essence of right and wrong does not depend on the words and clauses written into a code or a statute book — much less on the conclusions and fine explanations of lawyers — but on reason and the nature of things, which come before all laws. In every country, reason is consulted, or ought to be, before laws are passed; and where it is not consulted, the laws are always worse than none. Reason is given in some degree to all men; and Cicero says that whoever has reason has right reason; that virtue is nothing but reason perfected; and that since all nations have reason for their guide, all nations are capable of arriving at virtue.
From this reasoning of his it follows that every people is capable of making laws, and good ones; and that where laws are bad, they were gotten by corruption, faction, fear, or surprise — a people's misfortune rather than the fruit of their folly. The acts of Caesar were confirmed by the Senate and the people; but the Senate was terrified, and the tribunes and the people were bribed. Arms and money bought him a law that declared him lawless. But since the grandest power on earth can no more move the everlasting landmarks between good and evil than it can move the ones between pleasure and pain, Caesar remained a rebel to his country all the same, and his acts remained wicked and tyrannical.
Let that stand as proof that laws are not always the measure of right and wrong. And just as written laws often speak where the law of nature is silent, the law of nature sometimes speaks where written laws say nothing: law is founded not on opinion, but on nature. That brave Roman, Horatius Cocles, was bound by no written law to hold the wooden bridge over the Tiber against an entire Tuscan army; nor was there any law in Rome, so far as I know, against adultery when the younger Tarquin raped Lucretia. Yet the Romans justly rewarded the virtue of Horatius, and justly punished the vileness of Tarquin.
It is impossible to design laws enough to regulate and manage every occurrence and circumstance of life, because life is produced and complicated by causes no one can see coming; and in every condition of life men must have — and will have — generous allowance made for their own natural liberty and judgment. But every man who consents to the necessary terms of society will also consent to this proposition: that every man should do all the good, and prevent all the evil, that he can. That is the voice of the law of nature; and all men would be happy under it, if only all men would practice it. And this law lets us see that the establishment of falsehood and tyranny — by which I mean the privilege of one man, or a few, to mislead and oppress everyone else — cannot justly be called law at all. Law is the impartial rule of good and evil; it can never be the seal of approval on evil alone.
It has often been said that virtue is its own reward; and it is very true — not only for the pleasure that comes with the consciousness of doing well, and the good name that follows it, but in a larger sense, for the happiness that would flow to every man if all men pursued virtue. But that truth is too general to tempt and hold particular men, who will always care most about their own single selves, set apart from everyone else. So in the making of laws, the pleasures and fears of particular men — the great engines by which men are governed — have to be put to work. Vice must be made detestable and dangerous; virtue must be made attractive and rewarding. Men's shame and their ambition must be stirred; their private profit and glory, their peril and disgrace, must be laid out in front of them. This is what Cicero means when he says that law ought to be a reformer of vice and a champion of virtue.
Rewards and punishments, then, are the whole strength of laws; and the public proclamation of laws — without which they are no laws at all — is an appeal to the sense and the self-interest of men: which of the two will you choose?
The two great laws of human society, from which all the rest take their course and their binding force, are the laws of equity and self-preservation. By the first, all men alike are bound not to hurt one another; by the second, all men alike have the right to defend themselves. As the civil law puts it: it is a maxim of the law that whatever we do in the way of self-defence, and for the ends of self-defence, we do lawfully. All the laws of society are entirely reciprocal, and no man ought to stand exempt from their force; and whoever violates this primary law of nature ought, by the law of nature, to be destroyed. He who observes no law forfeits every claim to the protection of law. It is wickedness not to destroy a destroyer; and all the ugly consequences of self-defence are chargeable to the man who made it necessary.
Many evils are prevented by destroying one man who shows a settled disposition to commit many. To grant any man a license to do evil with impunity is to let vice triumph over virtue, and to make innocence the prey of the guilty. If men are obliged to endure great public evils even when they could oppose and remove them on better terms, then by the same logic they are obliged to endure the total destruction of mankind. If any man may destroy whomever he pleases without resistance, he may wipe out the human race without resistance. For if you set bounds to resistance, you have allowed it; and if you refuse to set bounds at all, you leave property at the mercy of plunder, and life in the hands of cruelty.
It is said that the doctrine of resistance would destroy the peace of the world. It would be truer to say that the contrary doctrine would destroy the world itself — as it has already destroyed some of the best countries in it. Though I must admit: if one man may destroy everyone, there would indeed be a great and lasting peace, once nobody was left to break it.
The law of nature does not merely allow us to defend ourselves; it obliges us to. It is our duty not only to ourselves but to society. As Seneca says, deny life to yourself, and you deny it to many. If we tamely submit to a lawless attack on our property and our fortunes, we encourage the next one, and drag others down into our doom. And Cicero says: "He who does not resist mischief when he may, is guilty of the same crime as if he had deserted his parents, his friends, and his country."
So when ill-treated men reach for words rather than arms, and practice submission rather than resistance, the reason is prudence — there is hazard in quarrels and in war, and a cause can be made worse by the attempt to mend it — and not any confession that the men wronging them have right on their side. When men begin to be wicked, we cannot tell where their wickedness will stop; we have reason to fear the worst, and to provide against it.
Such is the provision that laws make. They are checks on the unruly and self-serving appetites of men, intended for terror and for protection. But since there are already laws enough everywhere to keep the peace between private citizens, the great difficulty has always been to find proper checks for the men whose job is to check and administer the laws. To establish thorough impartiality in the laws — in their aim and in their execution alike — is a task worthy of human wisdom, for it would be the cause and the standard of civil happiness. In theory, nothing is easier. Yet who will ever perform it, if the men who can, will not?
No man in society ought to hold any privilege above the rest without giving society something equivalent in return. So legislators who frame good laws, and good magistrates who execute them, earn the privileges and the pay the public allows them by their honest attendance upon the public's business; place and power are the wages paid by the people to their own deputies and agents. Hence the old saying that a chief magistrate is major singulis, omnibus minor: greater than any single citizen, less than the whole. He stands above the private members of the community; but the community itself stands above him.
Wherever, therefore, the laws are honestly intended and equally executed — so that their penalties and their operation reach the great as surely and as fully as the small, and hold the magistrate in awe as much as the subject — that government is good, and that people are happy.
Sir,
Men are naturally equal, and no one ever rose above the rest except by force or by consent. No man was ever born above all the rest, and none below them all; and so there has never been a man in the world so good or so bad, so high or so low, that he had no equal somewhere. Nature is a kind and generous parent. She plays no favorites; she hands out no special endowments or privileges to a chosen few. She sends nearly all her children into the world equipped with the basic tools of understanding and strength, and tells them to provide for themselves. She gives them heads to plan their own security and hands to carry out their own plans; and depending on how they use those faculties, and what opportunities they find, degrees of power and titles of distinction grow up among them — and their natural equality is lost.
That is how nature, their parent, deals with men. But fortune, their nurse, is not so kind or so even-handed. She acts on whim and caprice, and often cruelly; and working against justice as well as against nature, she regularly sets the fool above the wise man, and the best people below the worst.
This is why most of the world gets the whole subject wrong. People pay far more attention to fortune's noisy conduct and flashy results than to nature's quiet, regular workings; they confuse fortune with nature, and credit to natural merit and excellence what is really the work of scheming or of chance. Even that mistake, though, shows that reason and fairness are running in our heads: we are trying to find a just cause for things that are not just. And this is the source of the reverence we pay to men whom fortune has lifted high, though nature placed them low. The public rarely watches anyone rise without finding a reason for it in his talents — when the true reason will probably be found in his own baseness, or in another man's folly.
The same reasoning explains why whoever happens to lead a party is always praised by that party as superior to the rest of mankind, and why whoever happens to be the first man in his country will never lack flatterers calling him the first of his species. But events, and their own behavior, prove over and over that the highest are on a level with the rest, and often with the lowest. Men in high places are almost always seen in a false light. Most people view them from a great distance, and through a magnifying lens; some are dazzled by their splendor, many are cowed by their power. Whatever looks shining or terrifying looks great, and the eye and the imagination enlarge it further.
That nature has made men equal, we know and we feel; and once people start believing otherwise, there is no excess of folly and superstition they cannot be led into. This is how men have turned dead men into gods, and paid divine honors to others while they were still alive: they could see they were only men, and they worshipped them as gods anyway. And even those who never went quite that far have done just as much damage with their wild notions of inequality. They have made men — often wicked men — into deputy gods; and then they made this so-called power of God as irresistible in human hands as in his own, and far more frightening.
It is evident to common sense that there ought to be no inequality in society except for the sake of society. But these men have made one man's power and will the cause of every man's misery. They gave him, as far as they could, the power of God, without obliging him to practice the mercy and goodness of God.
Those who think themselves furthest above the rest are generally, thanks to their upbringing, below them all. They are ruined by their own conceit of greatness. They trust to their blood — which, naturally speaking, gives them no advantage at all — and neglect their minds, which alone, properly improved, set one man above another. It is not blood or nature but skill or accident that makes one man excel others. So Aristotle must either have been joking when he said that the man who naturally excels all others ought to govern them all, or he said it to flatter his pupil and prince, Alexander the Great. One thing is certain: no such man has ever yet been found in the world, and none will be found before the end of it. Alexander himself, for all the greatness of his spirit and his conquests, had men in his own army — perhaps among the common soldiers — naturally as great and as brave as he was, and many far wiser.
Whoever claims to be naturally superior to other men is claiming from nature what she never gave to any man. He is setting up as something more than a man — a role nature has nothing to do with. She has thrown her gifts into the common pool; and just as nature's highest functions fall to the humble as well as the great, her lowest functions are performed by the great as well as the humble. Death and disease are the portion of kings as much as of peasants; and the corpse of a monarch is no more exempt from stench and rot than the corpse of a slave.
Death knocks with the same foot at every door, as Horace says.
All the arts and contrivances men use to gain pre-eminence and advantage over one another are so many proofs — confessions, really — that they do not have that pre-eminence and advantage from nature. All their pomp, titles, and wealth are devices to make the world believe that the people who possess them are superior in merit to the people who lack them. But it is no great glory to the upper ranks of mankind that their boasted superior merit is so often the work of heralds, craftsmen, and money; or that many of them draw their entire stock of fame from ancestors who lived an age, or many ages, ago.
The founders of great families were not always men of virtue or ability; and even where they were, those who came after them, trusting to their blood, have frequently — almost invariably — disgraced the name. Such is the folly of the world, and the defect of society, that we let men be great by proxy: an evil that can scarcely ever be cured. The line of French kings their own historians contemptuously call les rois fainéants, the do-nothing kings, and the succession of the Roman Caesars — in both of which, for every one good prince, there were ten who were intolerable for folly or cruelty, and often for both — stand as familiar proofs of this truth; and every reader will find plenty more in his own memory.
I have been told of a prince who, while still a boy, whenever his tutor scolded him for doing something wrong or indecent, used to answer: Je suis roy — "I am King" — as if his rank had changed the nature of things, and he himself had become better than other men while behaving worse than they did. But he was only speaking from the spirit that had been poured into him from the cradle. I am King! What of it, Sir? The office of a king is not to do evil, but to prevent it. You have royal blood in your veins — but the blood of your page, without being royal, is every bit as good as yours. If you doubt it, have both drawn into a couple of bowls next time you are ill, and try to tell the difference; and learn from that little experiment that by nature you are no better than your people, though your fortune makes you liable to be worse, as many of your ancestors were.
If my father won an estate and a title by law or by the sword, then by his will or his patent I may enjoy what he acquired. But if I understand neither law nor the sword, I can derive no honor from either. My honor, in the reason of things, is purely nominal; and I am still by nature a plebeian, as all men are.
There is nothing moral in blood, or in title, or in position. Actions alone, and the causes that produce them, are moral. He is best, therefore, who does best. Noble blood prevents neither folly, nor lunacy, nor crime — in fact it frequently breeds or encourages them; and noblemen who act infamously derive no honor from the virtuous ancestors they dishonor. A man who does base things is not noble, nor great if he does small ones. A sober villager is a better man than a debauched lord; an honest mechanic is a better man than a crooked courtier.
Virtue is the one and only nobility, says Juvenal. Do you want to be counted upright, and to hold fast to justice in deed and word? Then first show me the goodness of your mind.
We cannot bring more natural advantages into the world than other men do; but we can acquire more virtue in it than we generally bother to acquire. To be great is not in every man's power; but to be good is in the power of all. In this, every man can stand on a level with every other, the lowest with the highest — and men might thus come to be morally, as well as naturally, equal.
I am, etc.
Sir,
I intend to entertain my readers with a series of essays on liberty in some of my coming letters; and as a preface to that project, I will try to prove in this one that liberty is the unalienable right of all mankind.
All governments, under whatever form they are administered, ought to be administered for the good of the society; when they are administered otherwise, they cease to be government and become usurpation. Since this is the purpose of all government, even the most despotic has this limit on its authority. In this respect, the only difference between the most absolute prince and a limited magistrate is this: in free governments, the checks and restraints are appointed and spelled out in the constitution itself; in despotic governments, the people submit themselves to the prudence and discretion of the prince alone. But even there, a tacit condition is attached to his power: he must act by the unwritten laws of discretion and prudence, and use his power for the sole interest of the people — the people who gave it to him, or who allow him to enjoy it, and who do so only for their own sakes.
Even in the freest governments, single men are often trusted with discretionary power; but they must answer for that discretion to those who trust them. Generals of armies and admirals of fleets often carry unlimited commissions — and are they not answerable for executing those commissions prudently? The Council of Ten in Venice holds absolute power over the liberty and life of every man in that state. But suppose they used that power to slaughter, abolish, or enslave the senate, and to set themselves up in its place, as the Decemviri — Rome's ten commissioners turned tyrants — once did. Would it not be lawful for those who gave them that authority for other ends to put those ten unlimited traitors to death, any way they could? The crown of England has generally been trusted with the sole disposal of the money voted for the civil list, and often with the spending of great sums raised for other public uses. Yet if the lord treasurer had applied that money to the dishonor of the king and the ruin of the people — even on the private direction of the crown itself — will any man say that he should not have paid for his crime with his head and his estate?
I have said all this to show that no government can be absolute in the sense — or rather the nonsense — of our modern dogmatizers, and indeed in the sense too commonly practiced. No barbarous conquest; no consent extorted from miserable people submitting to the chain to escape the sword; no repeated and inherited acts of cruelty, however dignified with the name of succession; no continuation of violence, however dressed up as prescription — none of these can alter, much less abolish, the fundamental principles of government itself. None of them can turn the means of preservation into the means of destruction, or make the condition of mankind infinitely more miserable than that of the beasts of the field — and all through the sole privilege of that reason which sets men above the brutes.
Force can give no title but to revenge, and to the use of force again. Nor could it ever enter the heart of any man to give another power over him for any end but to have that power exercised for his own advantage. If there are men mad or foolish enough to claim they have done otherwise, they ought to be treated as idiots or lunatics, and the reason for their conduct traced to their folly and frenzy.
All men are born free. Liberty is a gift they receive from God himself; and they cannot alienate it by consent, though they may possibly forfeit it by crimes. No man has power over his own life, or the right to dispose of his own religion; and so he cannot transfer the power over either to anyone else. Much less can he give away the lives and liberties, the religion or the earned property, of his posterity — who will be born as free as he himself was born, and can never be bound by his wicked and ridiculous bargain.
The right of the magistrate arises only from the right of private men to defend themselves, to repel injuries, and to punish those who commit them. That right is conveyed by the society to its public representative, and he can exercise it no further than the benefit and security of that society requires. When he exceeds his commission, his acts are as void as those of any private officer usurping an unlawful authority; and he is answerable, like every other man, for the wrong that he does. A power to do good can never become a warrant for doing evil.
But here arises a grand question, one that has perplexed and puzzled the greatest part of mankind — though I think the answer to it is easy and obvious. The question is this: who shall judge whether the magistrate acts justly and keeps to his trust? To this it is fairly answered that if those who complain of him are to judge him, then there is a settled authority above the chief magistrate, and that authority must itself be the chief magistrate — which contradicts the premise; and the same question and the same difficulty will simply recur with this new magistracy. All this I grant is absurd. But I insist that it is at least as absurd to say that the person accused is to be the final judge of his own actions, when it is certain that he will always decide in his own favor — and thus the whole race of mankind will be left helpless under the heaviest injustice, oppression, and misery that can afflict human nature.
But if neither magistrates, nor the people who complain of magistrates and are wronged by them, have a right to decide finally, the one for the other; and if there is no common established power to which both are subject; then every man with a stake in the outcome must act by the light and dictates of his own conscience, and inform it as well as he can. Where no judge exists, and none can be appointed, every man must be his own. That is: when there is no settled judge upon earth, we must have recourse to heaven, and obey the will of heaven by declaring ourselves on the side we think the juster.
If the senate and people of Rome had quarreled beyond reconciliation, there could have been no common judge in the world between them, and consequently no remedy but the last one. Their government consisted in the union of the nobles and the people; when those two differed, no man could decide between them; and so every man must have been at liberty to provide for his own security, and for the general good, in the best manner he was able. With the common judge gone, every man became his own. The government, unable to act, suffered a political death. The constitution was dissolved; and there being no government in existence, the people were back in the state of nature.
The same must be true where two absolute princes governing one country come to quarrel — as the partnered Caesars sometimes did, especially toward the end of the Roman empire — or where a sovereign council governs a country and its votes split exactly down the middle. In such a circumstance every man must take the side he thinks best for the public good, or choose whatever measures he judges proper for his own security. For if I owe my allegiance to two princes agreeing, or to the majority of a council, then when there is no longer any union between those princes, and no longer any majority in that council, no submission can be due to a thing that does not exist; and the laws of nature and self-preservation must take over where there are no other laws.
The case is still the same when there is a dispute about the titles of absolute princes who govern without the estates — the representative assemblies — of a country, and never call them. Here too every man must judge for himself which party he will take and which of the titles he will adhere to; and the same private judgment must guide him whenever the question arises whether the prince is an idiot or a lunatic, and consequently whether he is capable or incapable of governing. Where there are no estates, there can be no other way of judging: the capacity of the prince must be judged by the judgment of private men, and his fate determined by it. Lunacy and idiocy are, I think, admitted by everyone to be certain disqualifications for government — as much so as if the prince were deaf, blind, and dumb, or even dead. A man who can neither execute an office nor appoint a deputy is not fit to hold one.
Now I would dearly like to know why private men may not use their judgment just as well in a matter that concerns them far more — I mean a tyrannical government, whose sad effects and sorrowful proofs they feel every hour of the day — when they have nowhere near equal means of reaching certainty about their governor's natural incapacity. The persons of great princes are known to only a few of their subjects, and their abilities to far fewer; and several princes have, through the management of their wives, or their ministers, or their murderers, gone on reigning a good while after they were dead. In truth, I think it is as much the business and the right of the people to judge whether their prince is good or bad, whether he is a father or an enemy, as to judge whether he is dead or alive. Unless we are to say — as many equally wise things have been said — that they may judge whether he can govern them, but not whether he does; that it is their duty to put the administration into wiser hands if he is a harmless fool, but impious to do it if he is only a destructive tyrant; that lack of speech is a disqualification, but lack of humanity none at all.
That subjects were not to judge of their governors — or rather, judge for themselves in the business of government, which of all human things concerns them most — was an absurdity that never entered the imagination of the wise and honest ancients. Following as their guide that everlasting reason which is the best and only guide in human affairs, they carried liberty, and human happiness — the legitimate offspring and work of liberty — to the highest pitch they were capable of reaching. No: that absurdity, along with many others as monstrous and mischievous, was reserved for the discovery of a few wretched, dreaming Muslim and Christian monks, who, ignorant of all things, were made — or made themselves — the directors of all things; who bewitched the world with holy lies and unaccountable ravings dressed up in barbarous words and uncouth phrases; who bent all their fairy force against common sense and common liberty and truth; and who founded a pernicious, absurd, and visionary empire upon their ruins. Systems without sense, propositions without truth, religion without reason, a rampant church without charity, severity without justice, and government without liberty or mercy — these were the blessed handiworks of these religious madmen and godly pedants, who by pretending to know the other world cheated and confounded this one. Their enmity to common sense, and their want of it, became their warrant for governing the sense of all mankind. By lying, they were thought the champions of truth; and by their fooleries, impieties, and cruelty, they were esteemed the favorites and confidants of the God of wisdom, mercy, and peace.
These were the men who, having demolished all sense and human judgment, first made it a principle that people were not to judge of their governor and government, nor meddle with it, nor preserve themselves from public destroyers falsely calling themselves governors. Yet these same men, who set up as the supporters and defenders of government — without the common honesty of distinguishing good government from bad, or protection from murder and plunder — were all the while themselves the constant and open troublers of every government they could not direct and command. Every government, however excellent, that did not make their reveries its own rules and make them alone its special care, has been honored with their professed hatred; while tyrants and public butchers who flattered them have been deified. This was the poor state of Christendom before the Reformation; and I wish I could say of no parts of it since.
This barbarous anarchy in reasoning and politics has made it necessary to prove propositions that the light of nature had already demonstrated. And as the apostles were forced to prove to the misled gentiles that idols made with hands were no gods, so I am put to proving that the people have a right to judge whether their governors were made for them, or they for their governors; whether their governors have the necessary and natural qualifications; whether they have any governors at all; and whether, when they have none, every man must not be his own. I therefore return to instances and illustrations drawn from facts that cannot be denied — though propositions as true as facts may be denied, especially by those who are lacking in modesty or discernment.
In Poland, we are told, the constitution requires that in their diets the consent of every single member present must be had before a resolution can take effect. And so, to prevent the cutting of throats, they have no remedy but to cut one another's throats: they must pull out their sabres and force the refusing members — who are always the minority — to submit. And among us in England, where a jury cannot agree, there can be no verdict; so the jurors must fast until they do agree, or until one of them is dead — and then the jury is dissolved.
This, from the nature of things themselves, must always be the case in disputes between dominion and property. Where the interest of the governors and the interest of the governed clash, there can be no settled judge between them. To appeal to a foreign power is to give up the sovereignty; for either side to submit is to give up the question. And therefore, if they do not settle the dispute amicably between themselves, heaven alone must settle it. In such a case, we must go back to the first principles of government itself. Government is a departure from the state of nature — a union of many families forming themselves into a political machine for mutual protection and defense. It is evident that this relation can last no longer than the machine itself subsists and can act; and when it cannot, the individuals must return to their former state again. No constitution can provide against what will happen when that constitution is dissolved. Government is only an appointment of one or more persons to do certain things for the good and benefit of the society; and if the persons so trusted will not act at all, or act contrary to their trust, their power must of course return to those who gave it.
Suppose, for example, that the Grand Monarch — Louis XIV of France — had bought a neighboring kingdom, and all the lands in it, from the courtiers and the majority of the people's deputies, with the church lands thrown into the bargain by consent of their convocation or synod or whatever that assembly was called. Would the people and clergy have thought themselves obliged to make good this bargain, if they could have helped it? I dare say neither would. On the contrary, the people would have had the blessing of these reverend patriots in telling their representatives, in round terms, that they were chosen to act for the interest of those who sent them, and not for their own; that their power was given them to protect and defend their country, not to sell and enslave it.
This supposition, wild as it seems, is not absolutely and universally impossible. King John actually sold the kingdom of England to the Pope. And there are people in every nation ready to sell their country at home; and such people can never have any principles to keep them from selling it abroad.
It is foolish to say that this doctrine can be mischievous to society — at least in any proportion to the wild ruin and fatal calamities that must befall, and do befall, the world where the contrary doctrine is maintained. For all bodies of men who live on their own substance, or on the profits of their trade and industry, find their advantage so much in ease and peace, and have such justly terrible apprehensions of civil disorders, which destroy everything they enjoy, that they always bear a thousand injuries before they return one, and stand under their burdens as long as they can bear them — as I have observed in another letter.
Consider the force of education, and the reverence which people are taught, and have always been used, to pay to princes. Consider the perpetual harangues of flatterers; the gaudy pageantry and outward show of power, its gilded ensigns always glittering in the people's eyes. Consider that the execution of the laws rests in the sole power of the prince; that all the regular magistrates, the pompous guards and standing troops, the fortified towns, the artillery, and all the magazines of war are at his disposal — besides large revenues, and multitudes of followers and dependents to support and abet everything he does. Obedience to authority is so well secured by all this that it is wild to imagine that any number of men formidable enough to disturb a settled state could unite together and hope to overturn it — until the public grievances are so enormous, the oppression so great, and the disaffection so universal, that no question can remain whether their calamities are real or imaginary, and whether the magistrate has protected his people or tried to destroy them.
This was the case with Richard II, Edward II, and James II; and it will ever be the case under the same circumstances. No society of men will groan under oppressions any longer than they know how to throw them off — whatever unnatural whimsies and fairy notions idle, sedentary babblers may utter from colleges and cloisters, teaching others, for vile self-serving ends, doctrines which they themselves are famous for not practicing.
Upon this principle — the people judging for themselves and resisting lawless force — stands our late happy Revolution, and with it the just and rightful title of our most excellent sovereign King George to the scepter of these realms: a scepter which he has swayed, and I do not doubt will ever sway, to his own honor, and to the honor, protection, and prosperity of us his people.
I am, etc.
Sir,
There is no government on earth today that owes its founding to the direct revelation of God, or that can trace its existence to any such revelation. On the contrary, it is certain that the rise of governments, their founding and their endless reshuffling, all happened within the memory of living men or of written history; and every government we know of anywhere in the world was set up by the wisdom and force of ordinary human beings, through means and causes that are obviously human. It follows that government can have no power except what men can give it — and what they actually did give it, or allowed it to take, for their own sakes. Nor can any government in fact be formed except by consent: if not the consent of every subject, then of enough of them to compel the rest. For no man, and no council of men, has enough personal strength to govern multitudes by force, or can claim for himself and his family any superiority or natural sovereignty over fellow creatures who are, by nature, every bit as good as he is. Wherever such strength exists, it is civil strength, accumulated strength — drawn from the laws and constitutions of the society, of which the governors themselves are merely members.
So if we want to know the jurisdiction of governors, and its limits, we must go back to the founding of government itself, and measure those limits by the power that men in the state of nature have over themselves and one another. No man can take from the many, who are stronger than he is, what they have no mind to give him; whoever lacks consent must use force, and force is simply the consent of the stronger. And by the same logic, no man can give to another what is not his own, or what is by its very nature inseparable from himself — as his religion, above all, is.
Every man's religion is his own. No man's religion, whatever its nature or shape, can be another man's religion unless that other man also chooses it — and choosing is an act that shuts out all force, all power, all government. Religion can never come without conviction, and conviction can never come from civil authority. Religion, which is the fear of God, cannot be made subject to power, which is the fear of man. It is a relationship between God and our own souls, and nothing else: a disposition of the mind to obey the will of our great Creator in the manner we ourselves think most acceptable to him. It stands independent of all human direction, and above it — and so it cannot be controlled by external force, which cannot reach the free faculties of the mind, cannot inform the understanding, much less convince it. Religion, then, which can never fall under another's jurisdiction, can never be alienated to another, or put in his power. It is unalienable.
Nor does any man in the state of nature have power over his own life, or the right to take away the life of another — except to defend his own life, or what is just as much his own: his property. And a power that no man has, no man can transfer to another.
Nor could any man in the state of nature have a right to violate the property of another — that is, whatever another man had acquired by his skill or his labor — or to interfere with his industry and his enjoyments, so long as that industry and those enjoyments did him no injury. So no man could transfer to the magistrate a right he never had himself.
No man in his senses was ever so wild as to hand another man unlimited power to take away his life, or his means of living, at that other man's whim, temper, and unreasonable pleasure. If a man ever held back from some part of his pleasures, or parted with some portion of what he had earned, he did it for the honest purpose of enjoying the rest in greater security — always in the service of his own happiness, which no man will or can willingly and deliberately give away to anyone else whatsoever.
And if anyone, through his own carelessness, or through the fraud or violence of another, can be lured into so foolish a contract, the eternal laws of God and reason relieve him of it. No engagement that is wicked and unjust can be enforced without injustice and wickedness. This is so true that I doubt there is a constitution in the world that does not provide — or pretend to provide — some remedy for rescuing ignorant, distressed, and unwary men who have been trapped into such bargains by cunning knaves, or bullied into them by imperious ones. Here the laws of nature and of general reason override the local and man-made laws of nations — and nowhere more often than in England. What else was the purpose, and what else ought to be the business, of our courts of equity? And I trust that whole countries and societies are no more shut out from the privileges and protection of reason and equity than private individuals are.
Here, then, is the natural limit of the magistrate's authority: he ought not to take what no man ought to give, nor demand what no man ought to perform. Everything he has was given to him, and those who gave it must judge how it is used. In government there is no such relation as lord and slave, lawless will and blind submission — nor ought there to be among men. The only relation is that of father and children, patron and client, protection and allegiance, benefit and gratitude, mutual affection and mutual assistance.
So the nature of government does not alter men's natural right to liberty, which in every political society is equally their due. But some governments provide better than others for securing that right and distributing it impartially. There has always been such a constant, reliable fund of corruption and malice in human nature that it has been rare to find a man whose ambitions and happiness did not center on gratifying his appetites — and his worst appetites at that: his luxury, his pride, his greed, and his lust for power — and who looked on any public trust placed in him as anything but the means of feeding those unruly and dangerous desires. And this has been most spectacularly true of great men, and of those who aspired to dominion. They were first made great for the sake of the public, and afterwards at its expense. If they had been content to be moderate traitors, mankind might have remained moderately happy; but since their ambition and their treason observed no limits, there was no depth of vileness and misery that the poor people were not made to feel.
The appetites of men, therefore — and of great men especially — must be carefully watched and restrained, or they will never restrain themselves. The experience of every age convinces us that we must judge men not by what they ought to do, but by what they will do; and all history affords but few instances of men trusted with great power without abusing it, whenever they could do so safely. The servants of society — that is to say, its magistrates — have almost universally served it by seizing it, selling it, or plundering it, especially when society left their duties and their wages unlimited. In that case these faithful stewards generally took everything; and, being servants, made slaves of their masters.
For these reasons, and taught by long and painful experience, societies found it necessary to lay restraints upon their magistrates — their public servants — and to put checks upon those who would otherwise put chains upon them. And so these societies set about designing national constitutions with enough wisdom and craft that the public interest would be consulted and carried forward at the very same time that the men entrusted with administering it were consulting and pursuing their own.
Hence grew the distinction between arbitrary governments and free ones. The difference is not that more or less power is vested in the one than in the other; nor that either lies under lesser or greater obligations, in justice, to protect its subjects and to watch over their ease, prosperity, and security. The difference is that in free countries the power and sovereignty of magistrates is so qualified, so divided into different channels, and committed to the direction of so many different men with different interests and different views, that the majority of them can seldom or never profit by betraying their trust in any fundamental way. Their rivalry, their envy, their fear, or their interest makes them perpetual spies and checks upon one another. And by all these means the people have often gotten at the heads of those who forfeited their heads by betraying the people.
In despotic governments things went very differently, those governments having been framed very differently — if you can even call them governments, where the rules of public power were dictated by private and lawless lust; where folly and madness often swayed the scepter, and blind rage wielded the sword. With the whole wealth of the state, and all its civil and military power, lodged in the prince, the people had no remedy but death and patience while he oppressed them wholesale and butchered them by the thousands — unless perhaps the ambition or personal grudges of some instrument of his tyranny happened to produce a revolt, which rarely improved their condition.
The only secret, therefore, in forming a free government is to make the interests of the governors and of the governed the same, as far as human policy can contrive it. Liberty cannot be preserved any other way. Men have long since learned, from their own weakness and depravity and everyone else's, that most men will act for interest against duty as often as they dare. So to bind them to their duty, interest must be linked to keeping it, and danger to breaking it. Personal advantage and security must be the rewards of duty and obedience; and disgrace, torture, and death the punishment of treachery and corruption.
Human wisdom has so far discovered only one sure expedient for accomplishing this: to have the concerns of all directed by all, as far as that can possibly be done. And where the people concerned are too numerous, or live too far apart, to meet together on every emergency, they must temper necessity with prudence and act by deputies — deputies whose interest is the same as their own, and whose property is so intermingled with theirs, so embarked on the same bottom, that principals and deputies must stand or fall together. When the deputies serve their own interest by serving the interest of their principals; when they can make no law that they themselves, and their posterity, will not be subject to; when they can grant no money that they will not pay their share of; when they can do no mischief that will not fall on their own heads along with their countrymen's — then their principals may expect good laws, little mischief, and much frugality.
Here, then, lies the great point of delicacy and care in framing the constitution: that the persons entrusted and representing shall either never have any interest detached from the persons entrusting and represented, or never have the means to pursue it. And to secure this great point effectively, only two ways are left — or rather both together: make the deputies so numerous that there is no possibility of corrupting a majority; or change them so often that there is never time enough to corrupt them and to cash in on the corruption. The people may be quite sure that if the greater part of their deputies are honest, they will keep the rest honest; and that they will all be honest when they have no temptations to be knaves.
We have a rough sketch of this policy in the constitutions of our several great trading companies, where the general court — the assembly of all the members — makes up the legislature, and that court's consent is what gives their bylaws force; and where the management of their affairs is placed in the hands of a certain number chosen by the whole body. Every man concerned saw the necessity of securing at least part of his property by putting the persons entrusted under proper regulations — however careless he may have been about securing the whole. And if provision had been made that, just as a third of the directors must go out every year, so none should stay in above three years (as I am told was originally promised), then all the juggling with courtiers, and all the building of great fortunes by confederacy at the company's expense, would in great measure have been prevented — though other limitations were still wanting, which might have effectively headed off all those evils.
This was the ancient constitution of England. Our kings had neither revenues large enough, nor offices profitable and numerous enough at their disposal, to corrupt any considerable number of members — nor any force to frighten them with. Besides, the same Parliament seldom or never met twice. Serving in it was found to be a burden, not a source of profit; so it was thought reasonable that all qualified men should take their turns leaving their families and their private affairs to serve the public, and their boroughs paid their expenses. The only grievance then was that Parliaments were not called together often enough to redress the wrongs the people suffered from the court in the intervals; and so a law was made in Edward III's time that Parliaments should be held once a year.
But this law, like the late Queen's Peace, did not execute itself. The court seldom convened Parliaments except when it wanted money, or had other purposes of its own to serve — and sometimes it raised money without them. That arbitrary proceeding brought numberless miseries upon the public, and, in the reign of King Charles I, a long and bloody civil war. In that reign an act was passed providing that Parliaments should assemble of their own accord if they were not summoned as the law directed — an act worthily repealed at the restoration of King Charles II. And in the same generous fit, a great revenue was granted him for life, and continued to his brother. By these means those princes were enabled to keep standing troops, to corrupt Parliaments or to live without them, and to commit such acts of power as brought on — indeed forced the people into — the late happy Revolution. Soon afterward a new act was passed requiring Parliaments to be freshly chosen once every three years; and that law too was repealed, upon his Majesty's accession to the throne, so that the present Parliament might have time to rectify the abuses we labor under, and to make regulations fit to prevent them all in the future. All of which, we are told, has since been happily accomplished; and, I bless God, we are told that the people will have the opportunity, at another election, to thank them for their great services to their country. I shall always be ready, for my part, to do them honor, and to pay them my acknowledgments in the most effective manner in my power. But more of this in the papers to come.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The most sensible reading of the old saying that virtue is its own reward is that it rarely gets any other. God himself, who made us and therefore knows our nature best, does not trust to the sheer inner excellence and native beauty of holiness to win us over; he recommends it to us by the stronger and more affecting motives of rewards and punishments. No wise man, then, will stake anything that matters on another man's bare integrity. The experience of every age can convince us that men who get above fear generally get above honesty and shame as well. And this is particularly and certainly true of men in groups, once they are numerous enough to keep one another in countenance; for when the weight of infamy is divided among many, no one sinks under his own share of the burden.
Great bodies of men have seldom judged what they ought to do by any other rule than what they could do. Name a nation that has not oppressed another whenever it could do so with profit and safety. Name a party that has ever honored the principles it professed, or reformed the abuses it condemned. Name a company or association of merchants that ever acted for the interest of trade in general, however constantly that phrase filled their mouths in private conversation.
And yet men so formed and so qualified are the raw materials of government. Government is instituted for the sake of men, and it must be conducted by the prudence of men; and the art of political mechanics is to raise a solid building out of such cracked and corrupt materials. The strongest cables are twisted out of loose hemp and flax; the world itself, with the right machinery, could be moved by the force of a single hair — and so can the government of the world, as well as the world itself. But whatever I may write later on this great and useful subject, in this letter I will confine myself to free monarchies alone, and to applying some of the principles laid down in my last.
I said there that when a society grows too numerous, or its members live too far apart, to meet together and manage their own affairs, they can preserve their liberties in no other way than by choosing deputies to represent them and act for them; and that these deputies must be either so numerous that there is no means of corrupting a majority of them, or so often changed that there is no time to corrupt them to any purpose. Without one of these safeguards, or both, I lay it down as a certain maxim of politics that no free government can be preserved for long.
I think I can say, with all modesty, that in former reigns the people of England found no sufficient security in the mere number of their representatives. Consider the crowd of offices in the gift of the crown, held by men with no other merit, and on no other tenure, than a capacity to get into the House of Commons and do their country damage there. Consider the promises and expectations dangled before others, who won their elections by court influence and often by court money. Consider the artful flattery, the intimate and deceitful attentions of great men to weak men; the lavish dinners, and the rivers of Burgundy, Champagne, and Tokay poured down the throats of gluttons; the pensions and other personal favors, handed out wherever wind and smoke would not pass for hard currency. Consider the party watchwords and imaginary terrors spread among the drunken squires and the deluded, fanatical bigots — dreadful designs hatching to blow up the Church and the Protestant interest, and now and then the dread of mighty invasions about to break in upon us from the man in the moon. By all these corrupt arts, I say, the representatives of the English people in former reigns were brought to betray the people and join with their oppressors. So thoroughly are men governed by artful appeals to their private passions and private interest. And it is evident to me that if we ever get a weak or ambitious prince, with a ministry to match, we must find some other resources or resign ourselves to the loss of our liberties. The course and impermanence of human affairs will not let us live forever under the present righteous administration.
So I can see no means in human policy of preserving public liberty and a monarchical form of government together, except by frequent fresh elections of the people's deputies — what the political writers call the rotation of magistracy, a regular turnover in office. When men first enter office, they often have their former condition still before their eyes. They remember what they themselves suffered, alongside their fellow subjects, from the abuse of power, and how bitterly they blamed it; and so their first resolutions are to be humble, modest, and just — and probably, for a while, they keep them. But the possession of power soon alters and corrupts the heart, which at the same moment is being leavened and puffed up to an unnatural size by the deceitful incense of false friends and the groveling submission of parasites. First they grow indifferent to their good intentions; then they drop them. Next they lose their moderation; then they renounce all common ground with their old friends and old principles; and seeing themselves in magnifying glasses, they come to fancy themselves a different species from their fellow subjects — and so, by degrees too swift to track, they become insolent, grasping, and tyrannical, ready to snatch at any means, often the vilest and most oppressive, to raise their fortunes as high as their imaginary greatness. The only way to remind such men of their former condition — and so of the condition of everyone else — is often to return them to it, and to let others of equal ability take their turn at power. This is also the only way to season men properly, and make them equally fit to rule and to be ruled.
Rotation in power and office, therefore, is essential to a free government. It is, in truth, the thing itself: it constitutes, animates, and informs a free government as much as the soul constitutes the man. It is sacred and inviolable wherever liberty is held sacred; nor can it ever be surrendered to the disposal of those who are entrusted with preserving the nation's constitution. They may have power to shape it for the public advantage and for the better security of that right; they can have none to give it up — or, what amounts to the same thing, to make it useless.
The constitution of a limited monarchy is the joint concurrence of the crown, of the nobles (without whom it cannot subsist), and of the body of the people, to make laws for the common benefit of the subject. And where the people, by their numbers or their distance, cannot meet, they must send deputies to speak in their names and attend to their interest. These deputies therefore act by, under, and in subservience to the constitution; they do not hold a power above it and over it.
In Holland, and in some other free countries, the deputies of the states are often obliged to consult the people who sent them; and in some instances our own Parliaments have declined to take up questions of importance until members had gone into the country and learned the sentiments of their constituents — as in all cases they ought to consult their inclinations as well as their interest. Who will say that the Rump — the fag-end of the Long Parliament of forty-one — had any right to expel the members it did not like? Or to watch for their absence, so that it might seize for itself, or hand over to anyone else, the rights of the very people from whose confidence and credulity it derived all the authority it acted by?
With thanks to God, I freely own that we have a prince so sensible of this right, and who owes his crown so entirely to the principles laid down — and, I think, fully proved — in these letters, that it is impossible to suspect, from his inclinations, his interest, or his well-known justice, that he would ever fall into any measures to destroy the people who gave him his crown and have supported him in it with such generosity and at such expense; or that he would undermine, by such means, the very ground he stands on. I therefore pay the less regard to the idle suspicions and slanders of disaffected men, who would insinuate that a design is still on foot to continue this present Parliament beyond its term — a reflection as impudent and invidious as any that could be thrown on his Majesty, his ministers, or his two houses, and one that can come from none but professed, or at least concealed, Jacobites.
It amounts to nothing less than an insinuation that our most excellent sovereign King George distrusts his faithful subjects; that he would refuse them the means of their own preservation, and of preserving the very constitution they chose him to preserve; that he would shut his ears against their modest, just, and dutiful complaints; and that he dreads meeting them in a new and freely chosen Parliament. This is contrary to the whole tenor of his life and actions — a prince who, having received three crowns from their gift, lies under every tie of generosity, gratitude, and duty to cherish and protect them, and to make them always great, free, and happy.
It is a most scandalous slander on his faithful servants to suggest that any of them, conscious of guilt and crimes, could fear the strictest and most rigorous inspection of their proceedings. Some of them have already stood the fiery trial and come off triumphant, to general applause. They have, besides, the advantage of his Majesty's most gracious pardon — which they did not need, and which was not passed for their sakes. Who, then, can suspect that patriots so uncorrupt, so prudent, and so popular would dishonor their master, give up the constitution, ruin their country, and make themselves objects of universal scorn, detestation, and cursing, by advising the most odious, dangerous, and destructive measures that counselors ever gave a prince?
And it is a most ungrateful return to our illustrious representatives to suggest such a thing of men who left their domestic concerns to serve their country at their own expense, and without any personal advantage; who have bestowed their labors on the public for a good deal longer than the people who sent them had at first any right to expect; who have spent all that time correcting the abuses that had crept into our constitution; who have assisted his Majesty through two very useful and necessary wars; who have regulated our finances and the expense of our guards and garrisons, and corrected many abuses in the fleet and the civil administration; and who have taken effectual vengeance on everyone concerned in promoting, procuring, aiding, or assisting the late dreadful South Sea project. After so many things done by them for the public honor and prosperity, I say, it is the basest ingratitude to surmise that any of them would give up the very constitution they were chosen — and have taken such pains — to preserve.
I do confess that if an invasion were to be feared from Muscovy, Mecklenburg, Spain, or Civitavecchia; if new provinces were to be acquired abroad, new armies raised, or new fleets fitted out for warlike expeditions; if new provision were wanted for the Civil List, new taxes to be levied, or new companies to be erected to pay off the public debts; if the universities needed further regulating, or any inspection were called for into the swelling fees and exactions of civil officers; if there were the least ground to suspect bribery or corruption in any place where it ought not to be; or if there were any new project on foot to banish tyrannical and popish principles far out of the land — in such a scene of affairs, I say, I dare not be quite so positive in asserting that we ought to gamble, and leave to pure chance, what we already have in hand. But as matters stand, we are in a happy state of indolence and security, at peace with all the world and with our own consciences. Little more money can be squeezed from the people, most of it being already in certain hands — which, by the rules of good policy, unites dominion with property. Our benefactors, moreover, are generous and honorable; our boroughs are neither insensible nor ungrateful; nor are the counties themselves inexorable to shining merit. So it is much to be hoped that another Parliament may be chosen every bit as deserving as this one, and as zealous for the public interest — or, at worst, there are honest and well-tried measures at hand which will undoubtedly make it so. And I offer this as a conclusive, and I think a most convincing, argument that the kingdom will be obliged with a new election.
Sir,
In a recent paper I showed what separates free governments from arbitrary ones in their frame and constitution. In this letter and the next, I will show how they differ in spirit and in effects. But first I need to establish what liberty itself actually is.
By liberty, I mean the power every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, skill, and industry — so far as he does not harm society or any member of it, either by taking what belongs to another or by blocking another man from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The fruits of a man's honest work are the just rewards of that work, secured to him by natural and eternal equity, and so is his title to use them however he thinks best. Within those limits, every man is the sole lord and judge of his own private actions and his own property. That is a standing no man alive can strip from him — except by usurpation, or by his own consent.
Entering into political society is so far from being a surrender of a man's natural rights that preserving those rights was the only reason men ever did it. Mutual protection and mutual help are the only reasonable purposes of any reasonable society. To make that protection real, the office of the magistrate was created, with power to defend the innocent from violence and to punish those who commit it — and there is no other justification for magistracy anywhere in the world. Toward that good end, the magistrate is entrusted with directing the united force of the community, and with collecting from every man the share of his property needed to preserve the whole and to defend every man and his property against injuries foreign and domestic. Those are the boundaries of the magistrate's power, and he abandons his office the moment he crosses them. By the laws of society, he is more limited and restrained than any man in it. Private citizens are absolutely free in every action that concerns only themselves; but every action of his, as a public person, is done for the sake of society, and must refer to society, and answer society's ends.
It is a mistaken idea of government that only the interest of the majority needs consulting. In society, every man has a right to every man's help in enjoying and defending his own private property. Otherwise the greater number could simply sell the smaller number and divide their estates among themselves — and then, instead of a society where all peaceable men are protected, you would have a conspiracy of the many against the minority. By the same logic one man might wantonly dispose of everything and everyone, and violence would be sanctified by mere power.
It is just as foolish to say that government has any business meddling with the private thoughts and actions of men, so long as they injure neither society nor any of its members. Every man is, by nature and by reason, the judge and manager of his own domestic affairs; and by the rules of religion and equity, every man must carry his own conscience. So the magistrate has no right to direct men's private behavior; and neither the magistrate nor anybody else has any power whatsoever to shape people's speculations — any more than their dreams. Government exists to protect men from injuring one another, not to direct them in their own affairs, which concern no one but themselves. Plainly, then, men's thoughts and domestic concerns are entirely outside its jurisdiction. In truth, men's thoughts are not even subject to their own jurisdiction.
Those who genuinely cannot take care of themselves must, of course, be taken care of by others. But while men have their five senses, I cannot see what the magistrate has to do with actions that cannot affect society; and where he meddles with such actions, he meddles either impertinently or tyrannically. Must the magistrate tie up every man's legs because some men fall into ditches? Must he put out men's eyes because eyes sometimes look at lying vanities? Would it suit the wisdom and care of our governors to establish an official escort service to keep people, by proper confinement, from throwing themselves into wells or over cliffs? Or to endow a national brotherhood of physicians and surgeons to manage their subjects' health without being consulted — free to vomit, bleed, purge, and scarify them at pleasure, willing or not, exactly as these established judges of health think fit? If that were the arrangement, what an uproar we would soon see over the established potions and lancets! Every man, woman, and child, however healthy, must be a patient — or else. The best diet and the best medicine would instantly become poison from any other hand; and their pills alone, however ridiculous, useless, or foul, would come with a blessing attached.
Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best. And if they do not, a sufficient punishment follows their neglect on its own, without the magistrate's interference and penalties. It is plain that this busy care, this officious intrusion into the personal affairs, private actions, thoughts, and imaginations of men, has more craft in it than kindness. It is only a device to mislead people and pick their pockets, under the false pretense of the public good and their own. To quarrel with a man over his opinions, his moods, or the fashion of his clothes is an offense taken, not given. What is it to a magistrate how I wash my hands or cut my corns; what fashions or colors I wear; what notions I entertain, what gestures I use, what words I pronounce — when they please me, and do him and my neighbor no harm? He might as well determine the color of my hair and regulate my shape and features.
True and impartial liberty, then, is the right of every man to follow the natural, reasonable, and religious dictates of his own mind; to think what he will, and act as he thinks, provided he does not act to the injury of another; to spend his own money himself, and lay out the product of his labor his own way; and to work for his own pleasure and profit — not for the idle, who would live and riot by plundering and oppressing him and everyone like him.
So civil government is only a partial restraint, placed by the laws of agreement and society upon natural and absolute liberty, which might otherwise run wild. Tyranny is an unlimited restraint placed upon natural liberty by the will of one man or a few. Magistracy, among a free people, is the exercise of power for the sake of the people; tyrants abuse the people for the sake of power. Free government is the protection of the people in their liberties by fixed rules; tyranny is a brutish scramble for unlimited liberty for one man or a few — men who would rob everyone else of liberty, and act by no rule but lawless appetite.
So much for an idea of civil liberty. Now a word or two to show how much liberty is the delight and passion of mankind; and then I will show its advantages.
The love of liberty is an appetite planted so deep in the nature of all living creatures that even the appetite for self-preservation — allowed to be the strongest of all — seems to be contained inside it; for it is by means of liberty that creatures secure the means of preserving themselves, and of satisfying their desires in the way they themselves choose and like best. Many animals can never be tamed. They feel the bitterness of restraint even in the midst of the kindest treatment, and rather than bear it, they grieve and starve themselves to death; some beat out their brains against their prisons.
Where liberty is lost, life grows precarious — always miserable, often intolerable. Liberty is, to live upon one's own terms; slavery is, to live at the mere mercy of another. And a life of slavery is, to those who can bear it, a continual state of uncertainty and wretchedness: often the apprehension of violence, often the lingering dread of a violent death. Others, when no other remedy is left, reckon death itself a good one. And so, to many men — and to many other creatures besides men — the love of liberty runs beyond the love of life.
This passion for liberty, and the possession of it, is of such force and consequence that it seems to be the parent of all the virtues. That is why free countries seem to contain another species of mankind than what is found under tyrants. Small armies of Greeks and Romans held the vastest hosts of slaves in contempt; a million slaves have sometimes been beaten and conquered by a few thousand free men — so that the difference seemed greater between them than between men and sheep. Lucullus put it well. About to engage the army of the great King Tigranes, he was told by some of his officers how enormous that army was — somewhere between three and four hundred thousand men. "No matter," said that brave Roman, drawing up his own little army of fourteen thousand — but fourteen thousand Romans. "No matter; the lion never inquires into the number of the sheep." And these royal troops proved no better than sheep; the Romans had little to do but kill and pursue, and could barely manage even that for laughing — so much more were they entertained than challenged by the ridiculous panic and instant flight of these imperial slaves and royal cowards.
Men perpetually cowed and crushed by haughty, insolent governors are made base by the baseness of that kind of government; they become slaves by ruling over slaves; and they lack the spirit and the soul to meet, on the battlefield, free men — men who scorn oppressors, who are their own governors, or who at least measure and direct the power of the governors they have.
Habit alters nature, and becomes stronger than nature. Slavery, while it lasts, is a perpetual dread pressing on the spirit; it depresses the spirit and sinks natural courage; and want and fear, the constant companions of bondage, always produce despondency and baseness. Men in chains will never fight bravely — except to be free. And what else should they fight for? Every victory they win for a tyrant makes them poorer and fewer; and by feeding his pride it feeds his cruelty, along with their own misery and their own chains.
Those who, through terror and delusion — the frequent causes and the certain effects of servitude — come to think their governors greater than men, even as they find them worse than men, will be just as ready to think themselves less than men. And when the head and the heart are both gone, the hands will not count for much. Men who are used like beasts will tend to degenerate into beasts. But those who, by the freedom of their government and their upbringing, are taught and accustomed to think freely about men and things, discover by comparing one man with another that all men are naturally alike. They see that their governors have the same faces, constitutions, and shapes as themselves; that they are subject to the same sickness, the same accidents, and the same death as the lowest of their people; and that they possess the same passions and faculties of mind as their subjects — and no better. Such men scorn to degrade and prostrate themselves in worship of members of their own species, however loaded with titles and disguised by power. They regard their governors as their own creatures, the work of their own hands as far as they rise above other men, and merely the chief servants of the state — with no more right to do evil than any one of themselves, and holding no privilege and no superiority except that of serving them and the state. They know it is a contradiction in religion and reason for any man to have a right to do evil; that failing to resist a man's wickedness is encouraging it; and that they have the least reason of all to bear evil and oppression from their governors — the men most obliged, of all men, to do them good. So they detest slavery, and despise or pity slaves; and adoring liberty alone, as everyone who sees its beauty and feels its advantages always will, it is no wonder they are brave in its defense.
Indeed, liberty is the divine source of all human happiness. To possess, in security, the fruits of our industry is the most powerful and reasonable incentive to be industrious; and to be able to provide for our children, and leave them everything we have, is the best motive for having them. But where property is precarious, labor will languish. The privileges of thinking, saying, and doing what we please, and of growing as rich as we can — with no restriction beyond hurting neither the public nor one another — are the glorious privileges of liberty; and its effects are to live in freedom, plenty, and safety.
These are privileges that multiply mankind, and multiply the happiness of mankind. Countries are generally peopled in proportion as they are free, and are certainly happy in that proportion; and on the same tract of land that would maintain a hundred thousand free men in plenty, five thousand slaves would starve. In Italy — fertile Italy — men sometimes die of hunger among the sheaves, in the middle of a plentiful harvest; for what they sow and reap is none of their own, and their cruel, greedy governors, who live off the labor of their wretched vassals, will not allow them to eat the bread they have earned, or to sustain their lives with their own hands.
Liberty naturally draws new people to it, even as it increases the old stock; and men just as naturally run from slavery and wretchedness whenever they dare, wherever they can better themselves. That is why great cities that lose their liberty become deserts, while little towns grow into great cities by liberty — as I will fully prove before I am through with this argument. I will not deny that there are some great cities of slaves; but these are only imperial cities, the seats of great princes, who drain the wealth of a continent into their capital, the center of their treasure and their luxury. Babylon, Antioch, Seleucia, and Alexandria were great cities peopled by tyrants — but peopled partly by force, partly for the reason above, and partly by grants and indulgences. Their power, vast and boundless as it was, could not by itself people their cities. They were forced to soften authority with kindness; and having herded the inhabitants together by force, driving them captive like cattle, they could not keep them together without granting them many privileges — to persuade the first inhabitants to stay, and to invite more to come.
This was a confession by those tyrants that their own power was destructive and unjust: they could not build one great city and make it flourish without renouncing, in large measure, their power over it — which, by granting those privileges, is exactly what they did. The privileges were fixed laws, under which the trade and industry of the citizens were encouraged, and their lives and properties secured and protected, no longer subject to the law of mere will and pleasure. And so, while these free cities flourished under their own liberties and laws, the provinces were miserably harassed, pillaged, depopulated, and impoverished, and their inhabitants exhausted, starved, butchered, and carried away captive.
This shows that all civil happiness and prosperity is inseparable from liberty, and that tyranny cannot make men, or societies of men, happy without departing from its own nature and granting privileges inconsistent with tyranny. And here — among a thousand others — is an unanswerable argument against absolute power in a single man. There is no way in the world to give happiness to communities except by sheltering them under certain and express laws, revocable at no man's pleasure.
There is not, and cannot be, any security for a people who trust to the mere will of one man — a man who, while his will is law, could not protect them even if he wanted to. The crowd of sycophants and wicked counselors he will always and necessarily have around him will defeat every good intention he has: representing things falsely and persons maliciously; conjuring danger where there is none and urging necessity where none exists; filling their own coffers under color of filling his; raising money for themselves while pleading the public needs of the state; sacrificing particular men to their private revenge under the pretense of public security; dragging him and his people into dangerous, destructive wars for their own profit or fame; throwing public affairs into perpetual confusion to prevent any inquiry into their own conduct; and making him jealous of his people, and his people jealous of him, on purpose — the better to manage and mislead both sides.
By all these arts, and many more just as wicked, they will steadily lead him into cruel and oppressive measures — destructive to his people, scandalous and dangerous to himself, and entirely agreeable to their own spirit and designs. Thus they will commit every wickedness by their master's authority, against his inclinations, and grow rich on the people's poverty without his knowledge; and the royal authority will serve first as a warrant for oppression, and afterwards as protection from the punishment due for it. In short, the power of princes is often little more than a stalking-horse for the intrigues and ambition of their ministers.
But if such a prince's own disposition is evil, what must be the forlorn condition of his people, and what door of hope can remain for common protection? The best princes often have evil counselors; the bad will have no other. And in that case, what bounds can be set to their fury, and to the havoc they will make? The instruments and advisers of tyranny and plunder always thrive best, and come nearest their goals, when plunder and tyranny run highest: the more that is stripped from the people, the greater their share. We may therefore expect every evil to befall such a people, without expecting extravagantly. No happiness, no security — only certain misery, and a vile and precarious life: these are the blessed terms of such a government. A government of this kind necessarily introduces every evil, and by the same necessity neither must nor can redress any of them.
The nature of such a prince's education — bred up, as he always is, in perpetual flattery — makes him haughty and ignorant; and the nature of his government, which subsists by brutish severity and oppression, makes him cruel. He is inaccessible except through his ministers, whose study and interest is to keep him from knowing, or helping, the condition of his miserable people. Their master's knowledge of his own affairs would break in upon their scheme and their power. They are not likely to lay before him accounts of grievances they themselves have caused; and if the grievances are the effects of his own barbarity and his own commands, he will not hear them.
Even where absolute princes are not tyrants, their ministers will be tyrants. But in truth it is impossible for an arbitrary prince to be anything else, since oppression is absolutely necessary to his remaining arbitrary. Without giving his people liberty, he cannot make them happy; and by giving them liberty, he gives up his own power. So, to be and remain arbitrary, he is doomed to be a tyrant in his own defense. The oppression of the people; corruption, wicked counselors, and pernicious maxims in the court; and everywhere baseness, ignorance, and chains — these must support tyranny, or it cannot be supported. In such governments, therefore, there are inevitable grievances without possible redress, and misery without mitigation or remedy. Whatever is good for the people is bad for their governors; and what is good for the governors is destructive to the people.
Sir,
I continue my reflections on liberty, to show that every civil virtue and every civil happiness — all moral excellence, all refinement, all the good arts and sciences — are the products of liberty; and that all wickedness, baseness, and misery are the immediate and necessary products of tyranny. Tyranny is founded on the destruction of everything valuable, desirable, and noble; so it must live by means that suit its nature, and remain at everlasting war with all goodness and every human blessing.
Establish liberty, and you establish and secure a fair distribution of property and an equal distribution of justice. As plunder is the child of oppression, justice is the offspring of liberty, and her handmaid: the guardian of innocence and the terror of vice. When fame, honor, and advantage are the rewards of virtue, virtue will be courted for the dowry she brings. Otherwise, like beauty without wealth, she may be praised, but will more probably be slandered, envied, and very often persecuted; while vice, when it pays, will be admired and pursued, like rich deformity and prosperous folly. Where virtue is all its own reward, she will rarely be thought any reward at all; few will pay a great price for what sells for nothing. So virtue, to be followed, must be endowed, and her credit is best secured by her interest — she must be strengthened and recommended by the public laws, and dressed in public encouragements, or she will be slighted and shunned.
Now the laws that encourage and increase virtue are the fixed laws of general and impartial liberty — laws which, being the rule of every man's actions and the measure of every man's power, make honesty and fairness everyone's interest. Where liberty is thoroughly established and its laws equally enforced, every man will find his profit in doing as he would be done by, and no man will take from another what he would not give up himself. Honor and advantage will follow the upright; punishment will overtake the oppressor. The property of the poor will be as sacred as the privileges of the prince, and the law will be the only bulwark of both. Every man's honest industry and useful talents, while they are employed for the public, will be employed for himself; and while he serves himself, he will serve the public. Public and private interest will secure each other; all will cheerfully give up a part to secure the whole, and be brave in defending it.
These certain laws, then, are the only certain beginnings and causes of honesty and virtue among men. There may be other motives, I admit; but they sway only particular men — few enough, God knows — and universal experience has shown us that they do not generally prevail, and can never be depended on. These laws can be produced by liberty alone, and only by such laws can liberty be secured and increased. And to make laws certainly good, they must be made by mutual agreement, and aim at the general interest.
But tyranny must stand on force; and since the laws of tyranny are nothing but the fickle will and unsteady appetite of one man — which may change by the hour — there can be no settled rule of right and wrong in the shifting moods and sudden passions of a tyrant. He may sometimes punish crimes, though more out of rage than justice; but he is far more likely to persecute and oppress the innocent, and to destroy thousands cruelly for every one he protects justly. History shows us princes who, falling out with a favorite, put to death everyone who spoke well of him — and afterwards everyone who did not. Princes who executed some of their ministers for mistreating one or two of their barbers and buffoons, and executed others of their ministers for treating a whole country well. Princes who destroyed a whole people for the crimes or the virtues of one man; who, having killed a favorite in a fit of passion, then — to revenge themselves on people who had never provoked them — destroyed in the same senseless fury a hundred servants who had no hand in it, along with all who did; and these last would themselves have been destroyed had they refused. Princes who destroyed millions in a single mad project or expedition. Princes who handed over cities and provinces to the revenge or greed of some vile mistress or eunuch, to be plundered, massacred, or burned as he or she saw fit to direct. Princes who, to gratify the ambition and plunder of a few sorry servants, lost the hearts of their whole people, and cut themselves off from their good subjects in order to protect those men in their crimes — men whose only service to them had been destroying their reputation and shaking their throne.
Such are arbitrary princes, whose laws are nothing but sudden fury, or lasting folly and wickedness in ever-changing shapes. Fine rules these, for governing mankind and making them happy! Rules that are no rules, since they cannot be depended on for a moment, and generally change for the worse — if worse is possible. A subject worth twenty thousand pounds today may, by a sudden edict issued from the dark counsel of a traitor, be a beggar tomorrow, and lose his life without ever having forfeited it. The property of a whole kingdom shall be great, or small, or nothing, at the mercy of a secretary's pen — a pen guided by a child, or a dotard, or a foolish woman, or a favorite buffoon, or a gambler, or whoever happens to be on top that day. The next day will overturn yesterday's whole scheme, though not for the better; and the same men, in different moods, will be the authors of both. So in arbitrary countries, a law two days old is an old law; and no law is allowed to stand except those found by long experience to be so thoroughly bad, so completely destructive, that human malice and all the arts of a tyrant's court cannot make them worse — a court that never stops squeezing, killing, and oppressing until it has wound human misery up so high that it can go no higher. This is such plain fact that I appeal to all history and all travel writing, and to everyone who reads them: in arbitrary countries, in Europe and out of it, do the people not grow thinner every day, and their misery greater? And are countries not peopled and rich in exact proportion to the liberty they enjoy and allow?
It has long been my opinion, and grows on me more and more, that in enslaved countries the people must either throw off their cruel and destroying government and set up another in its place, or within a few ages the human race there will be extinct. Indeed, if free states had not repaired and prevented, in many places, the havoc done by tyrants, the earth would long since have been a desert — as the finest countries in it are at this day, by exactly that means. The gardens of the world, the fruitful and lovely countries of lower Asia, once filled by liberty with people, refinement, and plenty, are now gloriously peopled with owls and grasshoppers — and perhaps, here and there at vast distances, with inhabitants no more valuable and even less happy: a few dirty huts of slaves groaning, starving, and perishing under the fatherly protection of the Sultan, a prince of the most orthodox stamp.
The laws of tyrants, therefore, are not laws at all, but wild acts of will, counseled by rage or folly and executed by dragoons. And since these laws are evil, every sort of evil must combine to support them. While the people have any common sense left, they will easily see whether they are justly governed and well or ill used; whether they are protected or plundered. They will know that no man ought to direct the affairs of all without their consent; that no consent can give him unlimited power over their bodies and minds; and that the laws of nature can never be entirely repealed by man-made laws — that, on the contrary, entering society and submitting to government means parting with natural liberty in some instances only in order to be protected in the enjoyment of it in others.
So for any man to hold arbitrary power, he must hold it without consent; or if it was rashly given at first, those who gave it soon repent when they feel its effects. In truth, every prince who holds such power, by keeping up great armies in time of peace, effectively confesses that he rules without consent and dreads his own people — whose worst enemy he undoubtedly is. An arbitrary prince, then, must preserve and exercise his power by force and terror; and even that will not do without calling in the auxiliary aids and faithful allies of tyranny: imposture and constant oppression. Let his people be ever so low and miserable — if they are not also blind, he is not safe. He must keep established deceivers to mislead them with lies, and to terrify them with the wrath of God if they stir hand or foot — or so much as a thought — to mend their miserable condition; as if the good God were the sanctifier of every villainy, the patron of the worst of all villains! He must keep a band of standing cut-throats to murder every man who would sacrilegiously defend what is his own. And both his cut-throats and his deceivers must go shares with him in his tyranny.
Men will naturally see their interest and feel their condition. They will quickly find that the sword, the rack, and the sponge are not government, but the height of cruelty and robbery; and they will never submit to them except under the united powers of violence and delusion. Their bodies must be chained and their minds enchanted and deceived; the sword must hang constantly over their heads, and their spirits be kept low with poverty, before they can be brought to serve the wanton and brutish pleasure of the most dignified and lofty oppressor. So God must be slandered, his creatures must be fettered, frightened, deceived, and starved, and mankind made base and ruined — all so that one of the worst of them may live riotously and safely among his whores, butchers, and buffoons.
Men, therefore, must cease to be men, and sink by stupidity and tameness into cattle, before they can become quiet subjects to such a government — a government which is a compound of all the villainy, falsehood, oppression, cruelty, and plunder on the face of the earth. And there cannot be a more provoking, impudent, shocking, and blasphemous claim than to assert that this whole assembly of horrors, or the author of them, is of God's appointment.
If such kings are by God appointed, Satan may be the Lord's anointed.
And whoever spreads such doctrine ought, by all the laws of God, reason, and self-preservation, to be put to death as a general poisoner and an advocate for public destruction.
All men admit that it is a prince's duty to protect his people; and some have said that it is the people's duty to obey him while he butchers them. An admirable conclusion, full of sweet consolation! His whole business and office is to defend them and do them good — therefore they are bound to let him destroy them. Was there ever such impudence in an enlightened country? It suits perfectly the doctrines and followers of Mahomet: but shall Englishmen, who make their own laws, be told that they have no right to the common air, to the life and fortune God has given them, except by permission of an officer of their own making — an officer who is what he is only for their sake and security, and who has no more right to these blessings, or to do evil, than any one of them? And shall we be told this by men who are eternally the first to violate their own doctrines? Shall such men, after this, have the face to teach us any doctrine, or to recommend to us any single virtue, when they have thus given up all virtue and truth, and every blessing that life affords? For there is no evil, misery, or wickedness that arbitrary monarchies do not produce, and must produce; nor do they, nor can they, produce any certain, general, or widespread good.
I showed in my last letter that an arbitrary prince cannot protect his people even if he wants to; I add here that he dares not. It would disgust the instruments of his power and the sharers in his oppression, who consider the people's property the perquisites of their office, and who claim the privilege of being little tyrants as payment for making him a great one. Every kindness to his subjects becomes a grievance to his servants; and he must push his tyranny to its full height for their sakes, or they will do it for him. The instances are rare, if there are any at all, of an absolute monarch protecting his people in earnest against the depredations of his ministers and soldiers without its costing him his life — Roman history supplies many examples. For this the emperor Pertinax was murdered; so was Galba.
Machiavelli has told us that it is impossible for such a prince to please both the people and his soldiers: the one will not be satisfied without protection, nor the other without plunder. To satisfy the people, he must give up his power; to satisfy his soldiers, he must give up his people. So to remain what he is, and to protect himself from the violence of his own followers, he must countenance all their villainies and oppressions, and be himself no more than an imperial thief at the head of a band of thieves — a character for which he is generally well qualified by the base and cruel maxims of that kind of power, and by the vile education almost always given to such a prince by the worst and most infamous of all men, his supple and lying sycophants.
Even the Christian religion can do little or no good in lands of tyranny, now that miracles have ceased; instead it is made to do infinite harm, corrupted and perverted into a deadly engine in the hands of a tyrant and his impostors, used to rivet his subjects' chains and to confirm them as thorough wretches, slaves, and ignorants. Indeed, I cannot say that such countries have the Christian religion among them at all; they only use its lovely name to countenance abominable falsehoods, nonsense, and heavy oppression, and to defend a furious and implacable bigotry — which is the direct character and spirit of Mahometanism, and destroys the very genius and first principles of Christianity. All this will be shown further hereafter. I shall conclude with observing that arbitrary monarchy is a constant war upon heaven and earth — against the souls, as well as the bodies and properties, of men.
Sir,
Here is the rest of what I have to say about arts, industry, and population. The whole point of liberty — its end and its effect — is to live securely, happily, and independently. Every man's ambition is to live according to his own tastes and his own judgment. No man who could live well without a master ever wanted one; only necessity, real or imagined, makes men into the servants, followers, and creatures of other men. That is why the passion for acquiring and defending property runs through all of us: property is the best foundation of the independence that everyone so passionately wants. Even the most dependent men carry it constantly in their heads and their hopes — the plan to become independent someday. The property they are earning, or intend to earn, through their dependence is meant to buy them out of it, and to purchase a comfortable independence in its place. And follow the chain to its source: happiness is the effect of independence, independence the effect of property, and secure property the effect of liberty alone. Property can be protected only by the laws of liberty — laws made by consent, which cannot be repealed without it.
All these blessings, then, are the gifts and consequences of liberty, and they are found only in free countries: where power is fixed on one side and property secured on the other; where power cannot break its bounds without check, penalty, or forfeiture, and property cannot be diminished without redress; where the people have no masters but the laws, and the officers the laws appoint; where laws and magistrates alike are made by the people or their representatives; where no demands are made on anyone except by law, so that a man knows to the penny what he owes before anyone asks; where whoever squeezes more from the people than the law allows is punishable by that law; and where the lawmakers are bound by their own acts and share equally in their consequences.
There can be no good where none of the causes of good exist. It follows that all the advantages of liberty are lost when liberty is lost, and all the evils of tyranny travel with tyranny. In my last letter I surveyed the eastern monarchies and the miserable decay of their people and arts; in this one I will confine my examples to Europe, and begin with Muscovy — by far the largest empire, in territory, in all of Christendom. The best short account I have seen of that government comes from Giles Fletcher, who was there near the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and I will repeat part of it here.
Describing the many wicked and barbarous tricks the late czars of Russia used to drain and oppress their people, he says:
"They let their people give freely to the monasteries — as many do, especially in their wills — and they allow it because it keeps the money of the realm conveniently gathered in one place, ready to be taken whenever they please. And taken it often is; the friars part freely with some rather than lose it all.
"Ivan Vasilyevich pretended to resign the crown to the Prince of Kazan and to retire to a monastery for the rest of his life. He then had this new king call in all the church charters and cancel them. Next, pretending to be shocked by the act and by the new king's misrule, he took back the scepter — now in possession of all the church lands, of which he kept what he liked and issued new charters for the rest. By this maneuver he wrung a vast fortune out of the clergy, and hoped, on top of that, to soften the bad opinion of his own government by displaying a worse one.
"When they want to levy a new tax, they stage a show of poverty. Duke Theodore did this: though his father left him very rich, he sold most of his plate and melted down the rest into coin, so that he would appear to be in need. And promptly out came a new tax upon his people.
"They would sometimes send their agents into the provinces to buy up and corner the commodities of the country, taking whatever they pleased at trifling prices and selling it back at extortionate ones to their own merchants or to foreigners. If the merchants refuse to buy, they are forced to. The same happens when any commodity so cornered, foreign or native — cloth of gold, broadcloth, and the like — starts to spoil from sitting unsold: it is forced on the merchants at the emperor's price, whether they want it or not.
"Besides cornering foreign goods and forcing them on the merchants, they declare a seasonal monopoly on every commodity paid to the prince as rent or customs, purely to drive up the price. So they monopolize furs, grain, timber, and the rest; and while the monopoly lasts, no one may sell the same commodity until every bit of the emperor's is sold.
"The same Ivan Vasilyevich sent to Permia — a country of the poor Samoyeds — for certain loads of cedar, knowing perfectly well that none grew there. The inhabitants answered that they could find none. So he fined the country twelve thousand rubles. Another time he ordered the city of Moscow to supply him with a full measure of fleas, for medicine. They answered that the thing was impossible — and even if they could catch them, they could not measure them, because of their leaping out. For this he fined the city seven thousand rubles.
"Add to these the seizures and confiscations that fall on anyone out of favor; and the winking at the oppressions and extortions of the provincial governors until their terms expire — at which point all their wicked plunder is turned over to the emperor's treasury, and never a penny finds its way back to the rightful owner, however great or obvious the injury.
"As for the common people, they are of no rank or account, and are treated no better than serfs. They sign themselves as such in everything they write to any of the nobility, just as the nobility sign themselves to the emperor. Indeed, no bond-slaves are kept in deeper awe and subjection than the common people are by the nobility, the officers, and the soldiers. When a poor muzhik — one of the commoners — meets any of them on the highway, he must turn away, not daring to look them in the face, and bow down with his head to the very ground.
"And as for the lands and goods of these miserable people, they lie so exposed to the plunder of the nobility and the soldiers — on top of the taxes, customs, seizures, and other public exactions laid on them by the emperor — that the people are utterly discouraged from following their trades and professions. The more a man has, the more danger he is in, and not only his goods but his very life. If they do come by anything, they smuggle it into the monasteries, or hide it in the woods or underground, the way men do when they fear a foreign invasion. As a result, many villages and towns stand entirely empty. On the road toward Moscow, between Vologda and Yaroslavl, over a stretch of about a hundred English miles, there are at least fifty villages — some half a mile long, some a full mile — that stand wholly desolate, without a single inhabitant. The same desolation is seen everywhere else in the realm, as travelers through the country have told me.
"In every large town the emperor keeps a drinking-house, which he rents out. Here the laborer and the craftsman often drink away everything that belongs to his wife and children. Some drink away the very clothes on their backs, down to their shirts, and walk out naked — all for the honor of the emperor. And while they are drinking themselves naked and starving their families, no one may call them away, for any reason whatever, because that would cut into the emperor's revenue.
"Capital punishments on the common people are very cruel. But if theft or murder is committed against them by one of the nobility, he is seldom punished, or even called to account, because the people are the slaves of the nobility. If the crime is committed by a gentleman soldier, he may perhaps be imprisoned at the emperor's pleasure, or perhaps fined — and that is all."
I quote this mostly from memory, having jotted down only a few notes when I read it; but I can vouch that it is accurate, and almost entirely in the doctor's own words.
I know a great deal has been said about the improvements made by the present Czar, and about his many projects to promote arts and trade. It is quite true that he is a prince of an active and inquisitive mind. But though he has made himself more powerful than any of his predecessors, I do not find that the number of his people has increased, or that their general wretchedness has much mended. He keeps a vast standing army; he keeps vast numbers of his poor subjects perpetually digging harbors and canals; heavy taxes are raised; his people are used up daily and wastefully, and are ground down besides by his boyars, to whom he still leaves the raising of money and the direction of trade. So the general oppression remains. Trade is deadened and harassed; the people are burdened past bearing; sudden and arbitrary duties are slapped on imports; the old game of monopolies goes on; the exchange rate, and the debased and uncertain value of the coin, are as bad as they can be; arts and ingenuity are actively discouraged, and anyone with skill in a craft must hide it, or find himself working for nothing. Grievances are without number and likely to stay that way — for whoever complains is certainly ruined, and petitions are answered with the whip, sometimes with death itself. In short, the condition of the Russian people stands much where it stood in Dr. Fletcher's time; and whoever doubts it will find full proof in Captain Perry's account of Russia under the present Czar.
In Poland, nothing could be more miserable than the condition of the peasants, who are subject to the sheer mercy of the great lords in life, death, and property; who must labor five days a week for those lords, sometimes six; and who, if they cannot feed themselves and their families on one day's labor in seven, must starve. The other northern kingdoms are, as far as the people are concerned, as wretched as any yet named: plenty of soldiers, endless taxes, dreadful poverty, few people, and glittering courts. It is said of some arbitrary princes in parts of Europe that they are merciful to their subjects and do not treat them barbarously — meaning, they do not deliberately butcher them; they merely take everything the people have and leave them to starve in peace on the remainder. All the riches of the country are on display at court, and the people are wretchedly poor. Cantabit vacuus — the man with empty pockets sings in front of the robber. A countryman once complained to General Kirk that his soldiers had plundered him of everything he owned in the world. "Then you are a happy man," said the General, "for they will never plunder you again."
The woeful decay of people and plenty in many of the states of Italy is so astonishing that if it were not plain to every eye that sees it, and so well attested to those who have not seen it by those who have, it would seem past all belief.
"When I came into the Pope's territories at Ponte Centino," says Dr. Burnet, "there was a rich valley bottom lying wholly uncultivated, not even stocked with cattle. But as I passed from Montefiascone to Viterbo, it grew more amazing still: a vast open country lay almost entirely deserted, and that sprawling town, for all its great circumference, has few inhabitants, and those looked poor and miserable. When I was within a day's journey of Rome, I assumed the neighborhood of so great a city must improve matters; I was badly disappointed. A soil so rich, and so sweetly situated, that it surpassed anything I ever saw outside Italy, had neither inhabitants on it nor cattle grazing it to a tenth of what it could support. My surprise only grew as I left Rome on the far side — nearly the whole way to Naples, and on the road to Civitavecchia. That vast, rich open country running all the way to Terracina — a hundred miles long from Civitavecchia, and in many places twelve or twenty miles broad — is abandoned to such a degree that often, as far as the eye can reach, there is not so much as a house to be seen. The severity of the government has driven away the inhabitants; and their being driven away has reduced the land to such a state that it is hardly possible to people it again."
He adds that in Rome itself "it is not possible for the people to live and pay taxes; which is believed to have driven almost a fourth of the people out of Rome during this pontificate."
Elsewhere he tells us that the Pope buys up all the grain of St. Peter's patrimony:
"He buys it at five crowns the measure, and even that is paid slowly and badly — so that eight hundred thousand crowns were owing on that account when I was in Rome. In selling it out again, the measure is shrunk by a fifth and the price of the whole is doubled, so that what was bought at five crowns is sold at twelve. And if the bankers — who are obliged to take a fixed quantity of grain from the papal treasury — cannot retail all that is forced on them, and have to return some part of it, the treasury credits them only the original price of five crowns."
Another noble author of our own country observes that Mario Chigi, brother of Pope Alexander the Seventh, by one sordid cheat on the sale of grain, is said to have destroyed above a third of the people of the ecclesiastical state within eight years — and that the country which was the strength of the Romans in the wars against Carthage suffered more from the greed and fraud of that one villain than from all the defeats inflicted by Hannibal.
The country around Ferrara was once very populous, and its fertile lands were well farmed; but since the Pope took possession of it, it is nearly depopulated. The land lies close to desolate, and for want of people it has become, like the rest of the ecclesiastical state, unhealthy to live in. His Holiness has reduced the inhabitants from above a hundred thousand to about twelve thousand. In the city itself, grass grows in the streets, and most of the houses stand empty.
The Great Duke's dominions lie in much the same dismal solitude. When Siena and Pisa were free states, they swarmed with people and were rich in trade and territory. Siena alone was reckoned to have had above half a million subjects; but in a matter of a hundred and eighty years under his Highness of Tuscany, they have sunk below twenty thousand, and those miserably poor. The same abject condition holds in Pisa, Pistoia, Arezzo, Cortona, and many other great towns. Florence, his capital, which in the days of liberty could, by the ringing of a bell, assemble a hundred and thirty-five thousand well-armed men from its own citizens and the inhabitants of the Arno valley in a few hours, is now so poor and so low that it could not raise three tolerable regiments in thirteen months.
The city of Pisa alone, when it was free, was reckoned to hold a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, all happy in liberty and commerce; now they are about ten thousand, without liberty, without commerce, and without bread. Once, a hundred of its citizens could fit out a hundred galleys and maintain them through a war at their own expense; now the whole city could not fit out or maintain one. Their stately palaces stand desolate like their territory, or are let out as stables, or for any other shabby use, at three or four pounds a year. Their streets are carpeted with grass; their land, lying waste, has turned unwholesome; and the few people who remain are starving. That great state, which the Great Duke could not subdue without the armies of Spain, cannot now stand up to his infamous crew of tax-gatherers. The people are famished slaves; their houses are ruins; their trade is gone; their land goes unworked — and yet their taxes are not lowered. If there is any plenty among them, it is only a plenty of beggars.
The same is the condition of the Milanese, and of the other countries under the same sort of government: the people starve on the best soils. Meanwhile in Switzerland, and in the territories of Genoa, Lucca, and the Grisons, they are numerous, and live happily on the worst. "The people in France," says the author of the supplement to Dr. Burnet's travels, "especially the peasants, are very poor, most of them reduced to great want and misery — and yet France is an extraordinarily good country. The people of Switzerland, which is a country of mountains, cannot be called rich; but very few even of the peasants are miserably poor. Most of them have enough to live on. Everywhere in France, even in the best cities, there are swarms of beggars; in all of Switzerland there is scarcely one to be seen. The houses of the French country people are extremely mean, and hold no furniture but poor filthy beds, straw chairs, and plates and dishes of wood and clay. In Switzerland the peasants have their houses furnished with good featherbeds, good chairs, and other comfortable household goods; their windows are all glazed, and always kept mended and whole; and their linen, for their beds and their tables alike, is neat and white."
That was written more than thirty years ago, when France was in far better condition than it has been since. The glory of their late Grand Monarch cost them much misery and many myriads of people. And yet even thirty years ago their miseries were great and affecting! "As I came from Paris to Lyons," says Dr. Burnet, "I was amazed to see so much misery — not only in the villages but even in the large towns, where every mark of extreme poverty showed itself in the buildings, in the clothes, almost in the very faces of the inhabitants. And a general depopulation in all the towns was a very visible effect of the hardships under which they lay."
What blessed circumstances that great kingdom enjoys now, Mr. Law — John Law of the Mississippi scheme, currently among us — can best tell; though we all know well enough. It is genuinely a science, and no easy one, to learn the names, numbers, and nature of their taxes, which are so many, so various, and so heavy that one of their own writers calls them inventions fit to impoverish the people and enrich the dictionaries. Bullion, treasurer to Louis XIII, told his master that his subjects were too happy — they had not yet been reduced to eating grass. And the cruel spirit and politics of that minister were afterwards so faithfully improved upon, that I am inclined to think the present felicity of the French is no small part of their misfortunes.
Such examples show what promising methods these governors take to multiply people, trade, and riches.
As for the politer arts, I grant that several of them have flourished under some of the Popes themselves, and under other arbitrary princes — painting, architecture, sculpture, and music. But these arts, and their refinements, owed nothing to that sort of government. It was by liberty alone, and by the privileges granted to their practitioners, that men came to excel in them; they never would have excelled on the common footing of the princes' other subjects. To make them excellent, the princes had to make them free. And so even tyrants, the enemies of liberty, were forced to come begging to liberty for their furniture, their luxury, their pomp, their pleasure, and their entertainment; and for those particular purposes they granted it to particular men. The rest of their subjects they left in the condition of brutes, in livelihood and in knowledge alike. For it is liberty, more than shape, that makes the difference between a man and a beast; reason without liberty proves little better than none, and sometimes worse. Servitude mars all genius; neither a pen nor a paintbrush is of any use in a hand that is manacled.
I am, etc.
Sir,
The subjects men understand least are the ones they talk about most, and none more than government. Nearly every man believes he has the talent to run a state — like Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire, he is sure he would make an excellent viceroy. He thinks nothing is required but to get his hands on the helm; then his business is to command, everyone else's is to obey, and, like Sancho playing viceroy, he asks, "Who but I?" But governing a state well is the hardest science in the world. Few men who have ever held power have known what to do with it, or ever understood the principles on which all power is founded; and their blunders have made endless havoc among mankind.
Government is a piece of political machinery, just as the human body is a piece of natural machinery. Both have their proper springs and wheels, an organization peculiar to them that fits them for certain motions and no others; and when those springs are destroyed by accident or violence, or simply worn out by time, the body must suffer its death — natural or political — and be buried, or else rot above ground. Neither ought to be murdered; but once they are dead, they ought to be interred.
Now it is quite certain that the first principle of all power is property; and every man will have his share of power in proportion to the property he enjoys and puts to use, wherever violence does not interfere. Men will always govern or influence the people they employ, feed, and clothe — people who cannot get the same necessities of life on terms as good anywhere else. This is natural power, and it will shape and constitute the political kind, and will certainly drag the political after it, so long as force stays out of the picture. And force cannot last long without altering property; so the two must come together sooner or later: either property will get the power, or power will seize the property in its own defense. For it is foolish to imagine that men of fortune will be governed by men who have none, and let themselves be plundered to make rich and insolent the very people they despise, and find fresh reasons to hate every day. On the other hand, men will submit contentedly to be governed by those who hold large possessions and give them protection and support in return — though they will always compete with their equals. The people of Rome wrung a law from the Senate admitting commoners to the chief offices of the state alongside the nobles; yet for a long time all the skill and power of the tribunes could not get them to actually elect one of their own into those offices — not until commoners had built estates equal to the nobility's. Then the balance of property tipped toward the people, and they carried everything before them.
The only truly despotic governments in the world today are those where the whole property belongs to the prince — the eastern monarchies, Morocco, and the like. There, every man holds what he has by the bounty of his sovereign, so he has neither motive nor means to contend with him; he looks on him as his benefactor. And men who have no property do not think themselves robbed. But once men possess anything they call their own, and believe they have a right to enjoy it, they will contend for it whenever they have the means, and will seize on every crisis in their prince's affairs to make that right good. Other princes, who want to be just as arbitrary as the first sort but lack the capacity or the power to acquire that natural dominion, seize by violence the estates of their subjects and the products of their industry — a standing state of force on one side and oppression on the other. It provokes the people perpetually, yet often leaves them the means of avenging the injustice done to them; and it must end either in restoring the old government or in setting up some new form on the ruins of the present usurpation. Whereas in states that are truly despotic, though the monarchs are often destroyed, the monarchy itself is preserved whole, because no interest in the state is capable of shaking it.
But both these sovereignties share one mischief, and it is inseparable from them: since they live by standing armies, they must forever be subject to the whims and grudges of military men, who often depose and murder their sovereigns — and much more often in the second sort than in the first. For while the people keep the name of property, and believe they have a right to it, they will always have some power, and will expect their princes to take account of them; and the soldiers will expect leave to oppress them. That makes for continual struggle; and the prince, finding himself forced to take one side or the other, often falls in the contest. That was the fate of the Roman emperors, most of whom were slaughtered either by the people or by their own soldiers. In a naturally absolute government, the only danger is from the soldiers; if the prince can please them, all is well, and he is safe.
But neither of these deserves the name of government. Both are simply violence and plunder — the subjection of many millions of miserable wretches to the wild and wanton will of what is often the worst man among them. They deface human nature, and make the bountiful gifts of an indulgent providence useless to the world. The best that can be said of them is that they make the grand tyrant and his under-oppressors as miserable and unsafe as the poor wretches they oppress. I would not have mentioned them as governments at all, except to make what I have still to say better understood.
All other dominions are limited monarchies, simple aristocracies, democracies, or mixtures of these; and the workings of those governments — indeed their very survival — depend on the distribution and shifting of the balance of property. Failing to watch the variations and frequent changes of this prime mover is what causes all the explosions we see and feel in states. Men who fancy their situation unchanged, because everything looks the same on the outside, stare about them and wonder what became of the power their predecessors enjoyed, unable to see that it drained away with the drifting of property. They think they have a right to enjoy it still; and so, in spite of nature, they use fraud and violence to grasp at what they could not hold even if they got it. But they will struggle for it; and that struggle produces contentions and civil wars, which most commonly end in the destruction of one of the parties, and sometimes of both.
Now the great secret in politics, it seems to me, is to watch this fluctuation and change of natural power closely, and to adjust the political power to it with prudent precautions and timely remedies — not to put nature to the expense of throes and convulsions to do her own work. I do not mean by altering the form of government, which can rarely be done without violence and danger, and therefore ought never to be attempted while anything else will serve; I mean by gentle and imperceptible methods. Take, for example, a limited monarchy, which cannot survive without a nobility. If the nobles lack the power to balance the great weight of the people and to support the crown and themselves, then some of the richest commoners must be raised into their order. If they have more power than is consistent with their dependence on the monarch, then create no new ones, and let those already created expire and waste away by degrees until they become a proper balance. And if the people, through trade and industry, grow so fast that neither crown nor nobles nor both together can keep pace with them, then there is only one choice left: either use violence, and hazard in an unequal contest what crown and nobles already possess; or use moderation and a generous conduct — let the people enjoy everything they could hope to win by a struggle, and voluntarily give up every odious power of doing mischief, however it may be miscalled prerogative. For prerogative must always be understood as a power of doing good when the ordinary provisions fail and are insufficient.
Henry VII, dreading the strength of the nobles — who had always plagued his predecessors, and sometimes destroyed them — found means to make them sell off a great part of their estates, which threw a proportionate power into the Commons. His son, by seizing the revenues of the churchmen (who usually intrigued alongside the nobles) and scattering those estates among the people, made that scale heavier still. Queen Elizabeth wisely observed all this; and though she loved power as well as any ruler before her, she courted the people with such dexterity that she not only kept the crown on her head but wore it in its full luster — and by encouraging trade and letting nature take its course, she went on increasing the people's wealth and power. Her successor saw this early and lamented it often; but lacking her moderation, her abilities, and her experience, he did not know how to temporize with an evil he could not help, and took a preposterous way to cure it. With the help of the governing clergy — who hoped through him to recover what they had lost by the Reformation — he tried to regain by pulpit harangues and fine distinctions a power he dared not contend for with the sword. And so his reign was one perpetual struggle between himself and his Parliaments. When they were quiet, he blustered; when he had thoroughly provoked them, he drew back and gave good words again. By such conduct he sowed the seeds of that fatal and bloody Civil War which sprang up in the reign of his son, and ended in the dissolution of the monarchy — and, soon after, of all liberty. For the general of the conquering army set up himself, as every man in his circumstances always will. But property remained where it had been; so this new tyranny was violent, against nature, and could not last. All parties united against it, and the nation was restored to its ancient form of government.
King Charles II came in with every outward advantage needed to enslave a people. The nation had grown weary of the very sound of liberty, having suffered so much in the struggle for it and lost everything it struggled for. The clergy were provoked by the loss of their dignities and revenues. The nobility and gentry were universally soured and alienated — their estates sequestered, and they themselves long shut out of the offices and distinctions they claimed by birth. And the body of the people had been harassed and exhausted by a long Civil War, and were sick of being tossed and tumbled out of one government into another once a month. All of them stood ready to fall in with any measures that would sate their revenge on those who had oppressed them, and to root out the very principles of liberty, whose abuse had brought such mischiefs down on their heads.
That prince got himself a Parliament to his mind — as all princes will after a revolution, when parties run high and men will do anything to mortify their opponents — and he kept it on a standing pension. But property remained with the people; it gained ground imperceptibly, and prevailed at last. The people grew universally disaffected; they came to look on that Parliament as a cabal of perjured hirelings, and no longer their representatives; and the nation worked itself into such a ferment that its betrayers would not or dared not serve the court any longer, nor would the court keep them. That prince had wit enough to push things no further than they would go, and knew when it was time to give ground. But his brother — with less understanding, and openly professing a much worse religion — hoped to accomplish what his predecessor had only attempted, or despaired of bringing about; and how he succeeded, we all know. I gladly throw a veil over what has happened since, and hope I shall have no reason hereafter to repent it.
Before I conclude this letter, I will observe only this: some of the greatest events in human affairs need no caballing of different interests, no joint councils, no concerted and regular measures to bring them about. And so, in great public emergencies, oppressors will find no safety in the apparent opposition of parties — for parties are like a pair of shears, which cut only what comes between them, precisely when they seem most to threaten each other. When nature has prepared the way, everything tends toward its proper center; and though men will dally for a while and play with their lesser interests, at last they fall mechanically into their great ones, often without intending it or knowing it. Men will always feel their strength when they cannot reason about it, or are afraid to. I could name a party that for above thirty years has acted in the interests of liberty, and for most of that time could not bear the sound of the word — until at last great numbers of them were caught by the very principles they most detested. I intend this as a seasonable caution to all who have the honor to sit at the helm of states, or to advise princes who may someday need such a reminder.
In my next letter I shall try to show, on the principles laid down here, that England at present is capable of no other form of government than the one it enjoys, and has a right to enjoy; and that a certain neighboring state will preserve the constitution it now possesses only with very great difficulty.
I am, etc.
Sir,
In this letter I want to give my opinion about colonies — a subject that few people seem to understand, and that even fewer put to good use where it is understood. This much is certain: the wealth of a nation consists in the number of its people, provided those people are usefully employed, and no more of them live off the labor of others (like drones in a hive) than are needed to keep the whole machine running. As for the rest — gamblers, cheats, thieves, con men, and idle hangers-on, along with some of their social superiors — they waste and destroy the public wealth without adding a penny to it. So if a nation drives any of its subjects out of the country, whether by violence or by mistreatment and hardship, or ships them off to foolish wars and useless expeditions, or loses them for any other reason that does not return more than it costs, that nation weakens itself exactly that much. It is letting out its own best blood.
Now, in many cases a man adds more to the public stock by being out of his country than in it. Ambassadors and public ministers, with their staffs, conduct the nation's business abroad. Merchants and tradesmen carry on its commerce. Soldiers fight its necessary wars. Travelers, sometimes, bring home the customs, manners, and policies of distant countries, which we can use to correct and improve our own. All or most of these come back to us with a profit. But in other cases a man leaves his country never to return, or almost never; and then the state takes a loss — unless the man is employed abroad in such work, raising such goods, or performing such services as will return more benefit to his native country than it loses in losing a useful member.
This is often accomplished by planting colonies, of which there are two kinds. The first kind exists to hold conquered countries in subjection, and to spare the conqueror the need for permanent standing armies. The Romans practiced this policy until their conquests grew too numerous, the conquered countries too distant, and their empire too unwieldy to be managed by native Roman strength alone — and then they became the slaves of the people they had conquered. We ourselves used this policy in Ireland for many centuries, until the fashion of our neighbors and the wisdom of modern times taught us the use of armies; and I hope those who come after us never learn all the uses armies can be put to. I confess I am not wise enough to see into all the policy formerly used in governing that country, and in due time I will lay out my doubts about it, in hopes of being better informed. In the meantime, I cannot help believing that when our superiors have a free moment from greater affairs, someone might offer them a proposal more honorable to the crown, more advantageous to both kingdoms and to the individual people in them, and vastly more conducive to the power of the whole British empire, than the doubtful condition they now stand in. But since that is not the business of this letter, I will go on to consider the other kind of colony.
The other kind of colony exists for trade, and is intended to increase the wealth and power of the home country — which it will do abundantly, if it is managed prudently and kept under proper regulation. No nation has, or ever had, all the materials of commerce within itself. No climate produces every commodity; and yet it is the interest, the pleasure, or the convenience of every people to use or trade in most or all of them — and to raise them themselves rather than buy them from others, except in cases where they can trade their own goods for them and keep as many people or more employed at home by the exchange as would lose their jobs by buying from abroad. Colonies planted in the right climates and kept to their proper business do exactly this. Many of our own colonies in the West Indies, in particular, employ ten times their own number back in Old England: we send them provisions, manufactures, and tools for themselves and their slaves; we carry the trade in our ships; we work up the commodities they send us, keep what we need, and export the rest; and they return to us silver and gold and raw materials for new manufactures. And our northern colonies do supply us — or could, if encouraged — with timber, hemp, iron and other metals, and indeed most or all of the materials of shipbuilding, and could supply our neighbors too, through our hands. That would settle a solid naval power in Great Britain — not a precarious one, hostage to disappointments and the whims of our neighbors — and such management would soon make us masters of most of the trade of the world.
I would not suggest anything so remote as the thought that any of our colonies, once they grow stronger, might ever attempt to wean themselves from us; but I do think we cannot take too much care to prevent it, and to preserve their dependence on their mother country. In the corrupt state of human nature, it cannot be hoped that any nation will stay subject to another one moment longer than it finds its own advantage in it and cannot help itself. Every man's first thought will be for himself and his own interest, and he will not search long for arguments to justify it once he knows how to get what he wants. Men will think it hard to work, toil, and run risks for the benefit of others any longer than they find their own interest in doing so — especially for others who treat them badly. All of nature points the same way. No creature sucks at its mother's teats any longer than it can draw milk from them, or until it can find better food elsewhere; and no country will continue in subjection to another merely because their great-grandmothers were acquainted.
This is the course of human affairs, and every wise state will keep it always in view. It will consider carefully how to preserve the advantages that come from colonies and avoid the evils. And as I see it, there are only two ways in nature to keep colonies from throwing off their dependence: one is to keep it out of their power, and the other is to keep it out of their will. The first must be done by force; the second by treating them well, and keeping them employed in such production and such manufactures as will support themselves and their families comfortably — and bring them wealth too, or at least do no harm to their mother country.
Force can never do the job effectively without destroying the colonies themselves. Liberty and encouragement are what carry people to a colony in the first place, and what hold them together once they are there; violence prevents both. Any body of troops large enough to overawe them and hold them in subjection — commanded, no doubt, by some needy governor sent out to make his fortune, and at such a distance that no appeal for redress can reach home — would soon put an end to all settlement and leave the country to the soldiers alone; and even if it did not, it would eat up all the profit of the colony. This is why arbitrary countries have never been as successful at planting colonies as free ones. What they have accomplished in that line they have done either by force, at enormous expense, or by departing from the nature of their own government and granting settlers privileges denied to their other subjects. And I dare say that a few prudent laws and a little prudent conduct would soon give us by far the greatest share of the riches of all America — and perhaps drive many other nations out of it, or into our colonies for shelter.
If violence, or measures tending toward violence, are not used to prevent it, our northern colonies must constantly increase in people, wealth, and power. Men living in healthy climates, paying light taxes or none, untroubled by wars, must multiply enormously by natural increase — and on top of that, vast numbers stream there every day from our own dominions and from other parts of Europe, because there is ready employment there and land given out for the tilling. I am told they have doubled their population since the Revolution of 1688, and in less than a century they must become powerful states; and the more powerful they grow, the more people will flock there. And there are so many emergencies in all states, so many foreign wars and domestic disturbances, that these colonies can never lack opportunities, if they watch for them, to do whatever they find it in their interest to do. We ought therefore to take every precaution in our power to see that it is never in their interest to act against the interest of their native country — an evil that can be averted in no other way than by keeping them fully employed in trades that increase their wealth as well as ours. For it is much to be feared that if we do not find employment for them, they may find it for us.
No two nations, no two bodies of men, scarcely even two individual men, can long continue in friendship without some cement to their union; and where family ties, acquaintance, or mutual pleasures are missing, mutual interest alone can bind it. But when those interests come apart, each side will assuredly pursue its own. The interest of colonies is often to gain independence — and it is always their interest once they no longer need protection, and once they can employ themselves more profitably than in supplying raw materials of trade to others. The interest of the mother country is always to keep them dependent, and employed in just that way; and it takes all her skill to do it. And it is certainly done more easily and more effectually by gentle and imperceptible methods than by power alone.
Men will always believe they have a right to air, earth, and water; a right to employ themselves for their own support, to live by their own labor, and to turn the gifts of God to their own benefit — and, to that end, to make the best of their soil and to work up their own product. When this cannot be done without harm to the mother country, there is only one fair, honest, and truly effective way to prevent it: divert them into other employments equally advantageous to themselves and more advantageous to their employers — that is, into raising such crops and making such manufactures as will not undercut our own, or at least not in any degree equal to the advantage they bring. And when those commodities are raised or made, we ought to take them off their hands; the people must not be forced to hunt out other markets by smuggling, or to throw themselves on the mercy of new protectors. While people have full employment and can support themselves comfortably in the way they are used to, they will never go looking for a new one — especially when they meet encouragement in the one and discouragement in the other.
Without this conduct, colonies must be a curse to their mother country, for the reasons already given; with it, the greatest part of the wealth they acquire ends up centered here. Everything they produce is a fresh addition to our power and riches — returns on the people's labor, rewards to our merchants, growth of our shipping. Without that, everyone we send abroad is a dead loss to the country, as useless as if they were actually dead — and worse than dead if they become our enemies. For we can send them no goods unless they have goods to exchange for them, and goods we find it in our interest to take.
As for our southern plantations, we are already on a tolerable footing there. Their products are so different in kind from our own that they can never compete with us; and the climates are so unhealthy that no more people will go or stay there than are needed to raise the commodities we want. They can never be dangerous to us. But our northern colonies are healthy climates, and can raise all or most of the commodities our own country produces. They increase constantly in people, and will go on increasing; and without the precautions I have described, they must, by the natural course of human affairs, come to compete with most branches of our trade, work up our best manufactures themselves, and at last grow too powerful and unruly to be governed for our interest alone. Since the way lies open to us to prevent so much mischief, to do so much good, and to add so much wealth and power to Great Britain by making those countries the storehouses of our naval supplies, I hope we will not throw all these advantages away as a favor to the interests of a few private gentlemen, or even of a few counties.
We have had a sample of this sort of wisdom already, in the law prohibiting Irish cattle. The cattle used to be brought to England lean, in exchange for our goods, and fattened here; now they are slaughtered and shipped abroad directly from Ireland, and we lose the whole carrying trade, the merchants' profit, and the market for the goods we once sent to buy them. And lately we have passed another such prudent law, to block the import of Irish woolens — which has driven the Irish to wear none of ours, to make all or most of their own cloth themselves, to export great quantities of every sort by smuggling, and to send the greater part of their raw wool to rival nations. It is only thanks to the plague in France, to their Mississippi Company, and to the total collapse of their credit that we have not lost a great part of that manufacture altogether. True, we have made some notable provision to fence in the cuckoo — to make the whole people of that kingdom enforce a law which it is every man's interest there not to enforce; and it is enforced accordingly.
Sometime hereafter I will consider that kingdom in relation to the interest of Great Britain. For now I will say only this: Ireland is too powerful to be treated as a mere colony; and if we mean to keep the Irish our friends, the best way to do it is to imitate the example of merchants and shopkeepers — when their apprentices have learned the trade and know the customers, and their time is up, take them into partnership rather than let them set up for themselves next door.
Sir,
The only thing that makes a nation free is the checks it puts on its magistrates; the only thing that makes a nation a nation of slaves is the lack of them. A people is free where its officials are held within limits the people set, and act by rules the people prescribe. A people is enslaved where its officials pick their own rules and follow their own appetites and moods — and no more dreadful curse can fall on any people than that. No magistrate ever did whatever he pleased without the people being ruined by his pleasure. That is why most nations in the world are ruined, and why only the nations that bridle their governors do not wear chains.
Unlimited power is so wild and monstrous a thing that, however natural it is to want it, it is just as natural to resist it. It should never be trusted to any mortal man, no matter how upright his intentions. For one thing, he will never want to give it up; for another, he will rarely dare to. Whether he likes it or not, he will make enemies, and his power will be his only protection against them — or at least he will believe it is. The constant, unforeseen emergencies of his position, the constant difficulties and opposition, will drive him — for his own survival, or for his power's survival — to try desperate expedients, to run risks, and to do things he never foresaw, never intended, and perhaps, at the start, genuinely abhorred.
We know from endless examples and endless experience that men who hold power will do anything rather than let go of it — anything, including the worst and blackest things — to keep it. Hardly any man on earth ever walked away from power while he could still get his own way inside it; when he could not, he resigned. I doubt there is a single exception to this rule anywhere in the world. Diocletian, Charles V, even Sulla — they laid down their power out of pique and discontent, out of opposition and disappointment. One thing seems certain: the good of the world, or of their own people, was not among their motives, either for staying in power or for quitting it.
It is the nature of power to be forever encroaching — to convert every extraordinary power, granted at a particular time for a particular occasion, into an ordinary power, to be used at all times and when there is no occasion at all. Power never willingly gives back an inch of ground. This is the spirit that has sometimes turned temporary commissions into permanent ones; that has stretched three years into seven, and one year into twenty; and that ensures that when the people are done with their magistrates, their magistrates are not done with the people.
The Romans knew this evil, having suffered from it, and built wise remedies against it. When one ordinary power grew too great, they checked it with another. So the office of the tribunes — the people's elected protectors — was set up to balance the power of the consuls, and to defend ordinary citizens against the arrogance, pride, and land-grabbing of the nobility. And when the tribunes' own authority grew too formidable, a good device was found to restrain it: in any turbulent or factious scheme of the tribunes, the protest or dissent of any single one of them voided the plans and proceedings of all the rest. And both consuls and tribunes were elected for one year only.
This is how the Romans preserved their liberty: by limiting the time and the power of their magistrates, and by making them answerable afterwards for how they had behaved in office. On top of all this, there lay an appeal from the magistrates to the people — a power which, great as it was, the people generally used with remarkable restraint and mercy. Like the people of other nations, they sinned far less often than their governors did. In fact, in any public disorder or disaster, the people are almost never the ones at fault. Far more often they suffer, with a patience that is itself almost criminal, the terrible evils brought down on them — wantonly or foolishly — by others, others whom they pay handsomely to prevent exactly those evils.
This sacred right of appealing to the people was secured by a very good and very severe law, which Livy records in these words:
Aliam deinde consularem legem de provocatione, unicum praesidium libertatis, decemvirali potestate eversam, non restituunt modo, sed etiam muniunt, sanciendo novam legem, ne quis ullum magistratum sine provocatione crearet: Qui creasset, eum jus fasque esset occidi: Neve caedes capitalis noxae haberetur.
The old consular law of appeal to the people — the first and only great safeguard of liberty — having been overturned by the usurping Decemviri, was now not merely restored but fortified with a new law: no magistrate could be created from whom there was no appeal, and it was lawful to kill any man who created one, without the killer facing a capital charge.
The Romans had all too good a reason for these laws; for the Decemviri — the ten men from whom there was no appeal — had enslaved them.
And because being chosen into power too often could be as dangerous as holding it too long, Cicero tells us in his book De Legibus that there was an express law — Eundem magistratum, ni interfuerint decem anni, ne quis capito — "that no man should hold the same magistracy he had held before, except after an interval of ten years." This law was later reinforced with severe penalties. So Rutilius Censorius publicly scolded the people for electing him censor twice. And Fabius Maximus tried to stop them from electing his own son consul — a man with every virtue the office required — because the chief magistracies had been held too long and too often by the Fabian family. Roman history is full of instances of magistrates, even chief magistrates, being stripped of office for pride, greed, and misgovernment; and those so degraded were barred by law, like our own late South Sea directors, from ever holding any post or power again. Nor were the Romans any less careful to make their magistrates, the moment they came out of their offices and governorships, open their books and give a strict account of their conduct. For a bad account they were often condemned and their estates confiscated. Beyond all this, to be a senator or a magistrate a man had to meet a property qualification; and those who had run through their fortunes were stripped of senatorial rank. A reasonable precaution: the men entrusted with their country's interest should have some interest of their own in it.
This is how the Roman people checked power and the men who held it; and when any power had grown completely ungovernable, they abolished it. So they expelled Tarquin, and monarchy with him, having first suffered a great deal under it; and they prospered spectacularly without it. Even that royal government had been tightly limited. The first Roman kings were little more than generals for life. They had no veto in the senate; they could make neither war nor peace; and even in the administration of justice an appeal lay from them to the people — as is clear in the case of the surviving Horatius, who killed his own sister. Servius Tullius made laws, Tacitus tells us, which even the kings had to obey. By confining the power of the crown within proper bounds, he gained power without bounds in the affections of the people. But the insolent Tarquin smashed through every bound, and acted so openly against the law and against the people of Rome that they had no remedy left but to expel him and his whole line — which they did, with glorious success.
Afterwards the power of a dictator was granted from time to time, and proved very useful; but it was always limited to a fixed number of months, and there are cases where even the dictator could not do as he pleased, but was overruled by the judgment of the people. And when Rome came to have great and distant territories, and great armies, the Romans decided the dictatorial power was too great and too dangerous to trust to any subject, and set it aside entirely. It was never used again — until it was violently usurped, first by Sulla, then by Caesar. And then Rome lost its liberty.
I am, etc.
Sir,
For nearly four years, under this title and one other, I have carried on a weekly paper with a success no writer has yet matched — if the number of my readers and the sale of these pages are any measure. And in doing it I could have had no possible object but the good of my country and of mankind. I set out to show them the advantage and the beauty of civil and religious liberty, and the ugly deformity of priestcraft and tyranny. I have defended Almighty God, and the religion he taught us, against the superstition, folly, and wickedness of men who would prostitute that religion to their own ambition and greed, and build a visionary empire on the plain and simple precepts of Christianity. I have tried to clear away all the rubbish, grimace, and pageantry under which religion has so long been smothered and oppressed, by showing the world — and, I think, proving — that true piety consists in nothing but honoring God and doing good to men; not in postures, bowings, and cant, and not in barren and useless speculation. And I think I have shown, beyond any answer yet given, that civil governments were instituted by men, and for the sake of men, and not for the pride and lust of governors; that men therefore have a right to expect protection and liberty from their governments, and a right to oppose robbery and tyranny wherever they are practiced; and in showing this I have vindicated our present establishment, which can pretend to no other title.
I have done all this in the open, in the face of the world. I have defied the merciless and detestable advocates of superstition and slavery, and called on them to show that I have broken any rule of morality or religion, or harmed the peace and happiness of society in any respect; and not one of them has yet dared to enter the lists against me. From this I may reasonably hope that I have cleared away many of the prejudices planted by education and custom, and set many of my countrymen free from the wild, wicked, and servile notions that craft and delusion had worked deep into their minds. And so I now lay down this paper with cheerfulness. I am reliably informed it will be carried on by an able hand, under another name and on various subjects; and it is likely enough that I will join in the undertaking so far as to lend my help now and then, when the occasion calls for it. At the least, I have not resolved not to.
Some of these papers — especially those signed Diogenes — have given unintended offence to men whose persons I honor and whose opinions I revere. I care nothing for the persons or the narrow notions of bigots, who will renounce any opinion the moment it turns out to be rational, and would rather make nonsense of a thing than fail to make a mystery of it. It has become a constitutional principle with me that God gave us our understandings in order to use them, and that we cannot offend him by carrying them as far as they will carry us. But the main question handled in those papers is a matter of pure speculation, understood by few and capable of being understood only by few. Believing it or disbelieving it cannot touch human society one way or the other. True or false, the actions of men will be the same: they will be moved by the motives that work upon them, and will pursue whatever they take to be their advantage on the whole, at the time and in the circumstances they are then in — whether they are compelled to that choice, or make it freely without being compelled.
What led me into that line of thought was an observation that runs through almost the whole world: that the bulk of mankind, in every age and every country, cling violently to the opinions, customs, and even the habits they have been used to; that sounds, shows, prejudices, vain and idle terrors, phantoms, delusions — sometimes even diet and medicine — sway them more, and work harder on them, than true and strong reasons ever do; and that all animals of the same species act in the same manner, and have the same passions, sensations, and affections, with very little variation. I could account for none of this except by supposing these operations to be mechanical: the results of each creature's constitution, as habit alters and shapes it, and as different occasions and motives set it to work.
For the rest, I saw with real concern the mischief that the leaders and deceivers of religious parties and factions do to the world — hurling God's judgments at one another; impiously fencing off his providence and his mercies for themselves alone; claiming the common events of nature as favors to their own side, and reading the very same events as declarations of his wrath against their enemies. By that unholy presumption they have raised and inflamed implacable hatred, animosity, and uncharitableness among men of the same nation, who are all brothers. I have therefore shown that the Almighty dispenses his favors to all his creatures; that his sun shines on the just and the unjust alike; and that it is the highest and most daring insolence for any sort of men to pry into the secret dispensations of his providence and pretend to unriddle them — to know his mind before he unfolds it, to throw such firebrands of contention and wrath about the world, and to make the condition of men, already miserable enough by the lot of nature, more miserable still.
I saw the evils and the barbarous consequences that flow from the idle, foolish stories of witches, spirits, and apparitions — first poured into our tender minds by nurses, chambermaids, and old women, and afterwards continued and improved upon by tutors and priests. The wisest and bravest men often carry those impressions with them to their graves, and are never easy until they get there. Whole numbers of people dare not be alone, or go about their necessary business after dark, but live in constant dread of phantoms and non-entities; and multitudes of innocents have been murdered, under the appearance of justice, as Satan's confederates. I have therefore shown that these fairy tales have no foundation in nature, in reason, or in religion; that they are inconsistent with the mercies, and even with the very being, of the great and good God; and that to tell or believe them is to hand the Devil an empire at the Almighty's expense.
It is certain that the capacities of men would carry them much further than they are allowed to go, if they were not cramped by custom, by narrow education, and by narrow principles taken from the very men who design and draw advantage from their ignorance. I have grieved to see men of large and extensive genius — men who seemed made by nature to carry human knowledge many degrees beyond where it has yet gone, and to free their country and mankind from the servile, wicked notions drilled into them by prating pedants and babbling impostors — I say, I have grieved to see such capacities spent entirely on whims, idle speculations, empty notions, fairy-dreams, and party distinctions; all of it tending to shrink and embitter the mind, to stifle and oppress the faculties, and to turn men into the dupes and machines of ambitious, proud, and greedy churchmen, or of corrupt statesmen. Nor can I see how this great evil will ever be cured until we change the education of our youth: let gentlemen be bred by gentlemen, and not by monks and pedants. Let the pedants dream on, by all means, with their bellies full of college ale and their heads full of college distinctions; but they ought not to be trusted with the education of our nobility and gentry until they have some of their own.
And now let me repeat, once more, that I could not possibly have taken up this undertaking — so troublesome to myself, and, I hope, of some benefit to my countrymen — with any view to my own personal advantage. I hope no one thinks so meanly of my understanding as to believe I meant to win favor with any of the powers of this world by attacking vice, corruption, and folly wherever and in whomever I found them. I knew what I was walking into. I knew I would have to walk over burning ploughshares; that I must provoke numerous and powerful societies and parties; that I must disturb nests of hornets, and sometimes venture too near the lion's den — sometimes within reach of Jove's own thunder. I knew that men in possession of reverence would not bear being told they did not deserve it; that those who rioted in power, and fattened on the public's misfortune, would hear very unwillingly that their power was a trust held for the public's advantage and not their own; that every motive of honor, virtue, and religion obliged them to serve and protect the people out of whose industry and wealth they were so richly rewarded; and that they deserved the severest punishment if they did otherwise. I had all this before my eyes. But armed with innocence, and animated by love of God and mankind, I resolved to brave the danger, in defiance of the worst that could happen to me, in the service of my country — and I have braved it. I now have the pleasure of seeing great numbers of my fellow subjects approve my endeavors and embrace my opinions. And so I here lay down this paper, and with it the most virtuous and noble subject that can employ the human soul: the subject of religion and government.
I am, etc.