purpose. One set is for destroying the civil power through the
ecclesiastical; another for demolishing the ecclesiastic through the
civil. They are aware that the worst consequences might happen to the
public in accomplishing this double ruin of Church and State; but they
are so heated with their theories, that they give more than hints that
this ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and attend it,
and which to themselves appear quite certain, would not be unacceptable
to them, or very remote from their wishes. A man amongst them of great
authority, and certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed
alliance between Church and State, says, "Perhaps _we must wait for the
fall of the civil powers_, before this most unnatural alliance be
broken. Calamitous, no doubt, will that time be. But what convulsion in
the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it be
attended with so desirable an effect?" You see with what a steady eye
these gentlemen are prepared to view the greatest calamities which can
befall their country!
It is no wonder, therefore, that, with these ideas of everything in
their Constitution and government at home, either in Church or State, as
illegitimate and usurped, or at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad
with an eager and passionate enthusiasm. Whilst they are possessed by
these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their
ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a
Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long
experience and an increasing public strength and national prosperity.
They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the
rest, they have wrought under ground a mine that will blow up, at one
grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters,
and acts of Parliament. They have "the rights of men." Against these
there can be no prescription; against these no argument is binding:
these admit no temperament and no compromise: anything withheld from
their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their
rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its
continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. The
objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with
their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent
government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest
usurpation. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question
of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title. I have
nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics.
Let them be their amusement in the schools.
_Illa_ se jactet in aula
Æolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.
But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the
earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great
deep to overwhelm us!
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from
withholding in practice, (if I were of power to give or to withhold,)
the _real_ rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do
not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended
rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage
of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is
an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting
by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to
justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic
function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of
their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful.
They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the
nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life
and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do,
without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and
he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its
combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this
partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that
has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as
he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion; but he has
not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock. And
as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual
ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be
amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have
in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to
be settled by convention.
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be
its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of
constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative,
judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being
in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the
conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its
existence,--rights which are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the
first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental
rules, is, _that no man should be judge in his own cause_. By this each
person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of
uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own
cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in
a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first law of
Nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of
determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may
secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do
exist in total independence of it,--and exist in much greater clearness,
and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract
perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything
they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human _wants_. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in
the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This
can only be done _by a power out of themselves_, and not, in the
exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions
which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the
restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among
their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss
them upon that principle.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern
himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those
rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a
consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of
a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most
delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human
nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or
obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of
civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength and
remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's
abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of
procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always
advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than
the professor of metaphysics.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or
reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be
taught _a priori_. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in
that practical science; because the real effects of moral causes are not
always immediate, but that which in the first instance is prejudicial
may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise
even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also
happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements,
have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are
often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at
first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its
prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of
government being, therefore, so practical in itself, and intended for
such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even
more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however
sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any
man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in
any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on
building it up again without having models and patterns of approved
utility before his eyes.
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light
which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of Nature, refracted
from their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of
human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a
variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of
them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.
The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the
greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or
direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the
quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed
at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to
decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or
totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are
fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to
contemplate society in but one point of view, all these simple modes of
polity are infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its
single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain
all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole, should be
imperfectly and anomalously answered than that while some parts are
provided for with great exactness, others might be totally neglected, or
perhaps materially injured, by the over-care of a favorite member.
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in
proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and
politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of _middle_,
incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights
of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in
balances between differences of good,--in compromises sometimes between
good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is
a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing,
morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral
denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the community,
whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but
till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right
inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men
have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their
benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, "_Liceat perire poetis_,"
when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the flames
of a volcanic revolution, "_ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit_," I
consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic license than
as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were poet, or
divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I
think that more wise, because more charitable, thoughts would urge me
rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the
monuments of his folly.
* * * * *
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I write
refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course, in
commemorating the fact, will cheat many out of the principles and
deprive them of the benefits of the Revolution they commemorate. I
confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance and
revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the
Constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society
dangerously valetudinary; it is taking periodical doses of mercury
sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to
our love of liberty.
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and wears out, by a
vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to be
exerted on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of Roman
servitude that themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys
at school,--_cum perimit sævos classis numerosa tyrannos_. In the
ordinary state of things, it produces in a country like ours the worst
effects, even on the cause of that liberty which it abuses with the
dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation. Almost all the high-bred
republicans of my time have, after a short space, become the most
decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left the business of a
tedious, moderate, but practical resistance, to those of us whom, in
the pride and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted as not
much better than Tories. Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most
sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it
costs nothing to have it magnificent. But even in cases where rather
levity than fraud was to be suspected in these ranting speculations, the
issue has been much the same. These professors, finding their extreme
principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified, or,
as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such cases employ no
resistance at all. It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is
nothing. Finding their schemes of politics not adapted to the state of
the world in which they live, they often come to think lightly of all
public principle, and are ready, on their part, to abandon for a very
trivial interest what they find of very trivial value. Some, indeed, are
of more steady and persevering natures; but these are eager politicians
out of Parliament, who have little to tempt them to abandon their
favorite projects. They have some change in the Church or State, or
both, constantly in their view. When that is the case, they are always
bad citizens, and perfectly unsure connections. For, considering their
speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement of
the state as of no estimation, they are, at best, indifferent about it.
They see no merit in the good, and no fault in the vicious management of
public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to
revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or
any political principle, any further than as they may forward or retard
their design of change; they therefore take up, one day, the most
violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest
democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from the one to the other without
any sort of regard to cause, to person, or to party.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit
from one form of government to another: you cannot see that character of
men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country.
With us it is militant, with you it is triumphant; and you know how it
can act, when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be
supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to
comprehend all men of any description within them,--no, far from it! I
am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those
who profess principles of extremes, and who, under the name of religion,
teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these
politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in
order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used
in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind
receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a
little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This
sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of
man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new
avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those
that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those
that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit
through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem
to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap,
bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to
their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a
magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the
imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years'
security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The
preacher found them all in the French Revolution. This inspires a
juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he
advances; and when he arrives at his peroration, it is in a full blaze.
Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy,
flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of
a promised land, he breaks out into the following rapture:--
"What an eventful period is this! I am _thankful_ that I have lived to
it; I could almost say, _Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation_.--I have lived to see a
_diffusion_ of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error.--I
have lived to see _the rights of men_ better understood than ever, and
nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it.--I
have lived to see _thirty millions of people_, indignant and resolute,
spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice;
_their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering
himself to his subjects_."[88]
Before I proceed further, I have to remark that Dr. Price seems rather
to overvalue the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and
diffused in this age. The last century appears to me to have been quite
as much enlightened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as
memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great preachers of that
period partook of it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of France.
On the trial of the Reverend Hugh Peters for high treason, it was
deposed, that, when King Charles was brought to London for his trial,
the Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted the _triumph_. "I saw,"
says the witness, "his Majesty in the coach with six horses, and Peters
riding before the king _triumphing_." Dr. Price, when he talks as if he
had made a discovery, only follows a precedent; for, after the
commencement of the king's trial, this precursor, the same Dr. Peters,
concluding a long prayer at the royal chapel at Whitehall, (he had very
triumphantly chosen his place,) said, "I have prayed and preached these
twenty years; and now I may say with old Simeon, _Lord, now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation_."[89] Peters had not the fruits of his prayer; for he neither
departed so soon as he wished, nor in peace. He became (what I heartily
hope none of his followers may be in this country) himself a sacrifice
to the triumph which he led as pontiff. They dealt at the Restoration,
perhaps, too hardly with this poor good man. But we owe it to his memory
and his sufferings, that he had as much illumination and as much zeal,
and had as effectually undermined all _the superstition and error_ which
might impede the great business he was engaged in, as any who follow and
repeat after him in this age, which would assume to itself an exclusive
title to the knowledge of the rights of men, and all the glorious
consequences of that knowledge.
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in
place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the
rapture of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators of governments,
the heroic band of _cashierers_ of _monarchs_, electors of sovereigns,
and leaders of kings in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of
the diffusion of knowledge, of which every member had obtained so large
a share in the donative, were in haste to make a generous diffusion of
the knowledge they had thus gratuitously received. To make this
bountiful communication, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry
to the London Tavern, where the same Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his
oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the
resolution, or address of congratulation, transmitted by Lord Stanhope
to the National Assembly of France.
I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic
ejaculation, commonly called "_Nunc dimittis_," made on the first
presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an
inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and
afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and
indignation of mankind. This "_leading in triumph_," a thing in its best
form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such
unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every
well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant
spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely
deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages
entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called victories, and
leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives overpowered
with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much
more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial
nation;--if a civilized nation, or any men who had a sense of
generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and
afflicted.
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe, that,
as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe
that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest
humiliation in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or
the actors in it, and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry
they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of the appearance
of liberty or impartiality. The apology of that assembly is found in
their situation; but when we approve what they _must_ bear, it is in us
the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind.