whose wisdom (if they have any) is open and direct, would be ashamed, as
of a silly, deceitful trick, to profess any religion in name, which by
their proceedings they appear to contemn. If by their conduct (the only
language that rarely lies) they seemed to regard the great ruling
principle of the moral and the natural world as a mere invention to keep
the vulgar in obedience, they apprehend that by such a conduct they
would defeat the politic purpose they have in view. They would find it
difficult to make others believe in a system to which they manifestly
gave no credit themselves. The Christian statesmen of this land would,
indeed, first provide for the _multitude_, because it is the
_multitude_, and is therefore, as such, the first object in the
ecclesiastical institution, and in all institutions. They have been
taught that the circumstance of the Gospel's being preached to the poor
was one of the great tests of its true mission. They think, therefore,
that those do not believe it who do not take care it should be preached
to the poor. But as they know that charity is not confined to any one
description, but ought to apply itself to all men who have wants, they
are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation of pity to the
distresses of the miserable great. They are not repelled, through a
fastidious delicacy, at the stench of their arrogance and presumption,
from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and running sores.
They are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence to
them than to any others: from the greatness of the temptation to which
they are exposed; from the important consequences that attend their
faults; from the contagion of their ill example; from the necessity of
bowing down the stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of
moderation and virtue; from a consideration of the fat stupidity and
gross ignorance concerning what imports men most to know, which prevails
at courts, and at the head of armies, and in senates, as much as at the
loom and in the field.
The English people are satisfied, that to the great the consolations of
religion are as necessary as its instructions. They, too, are among the
unhappy. They feel personal pain and domestic sorrow. In these they have
no privilege, but are subject to pay their full contingent to the
contributions levied on mortality. They want this sovereign balm under
their gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less conversant about
the limited wants of animal life, range without limit, and are
diversified by infinite combinations in the wild and unbounded regions
of imagination. Some charitable dole is wanting to these, our often
very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds
which have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve in the
killing languor and over-labored lassitude of those who have nothing to
do; something to excite an appetite to existence in the palled satiety
which attends on all pleasures which may be bought, where Nature is not
left to her own process, where even desire is anticipated, and therefore
fruition defeated by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight, and
no interval, no obstacle, is interposed between the wish and the
accomplishment.
The people of England know how little influence the teachers of religion
are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing, and
how much less with the newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no
way assorted to those with whom they must associate, and over whom they
must even exercise, in some cases, something like an authority. What
must they think of that body of teachers, if they see it in no part
above the establishment of their domestic servants? If the poverty were
voluntary, there might be some difference. Strong instances of
self-denial operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants
has obtained great freedom and firmness, and even dignity. But as the
mass of any description of men are but men, and their poverty cannot be
voluntary, that disrespect which attends upon all lay poverty will not
depart from the ecclesiastical. Our provident Constitution has therefore
taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, those
who are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur their
contempt nor live upon their alms; nor will it tempt the rich to a
neglect of the true medicine of their minds. For these reasons, whilst
we provide first for the poor, and with a parental solicitude, we have
not relegated religion (like something we were ashamed to show) to
obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No! we will have her to exalt
her mitred front in courts and parliaments. We will have her mixed
throughout the whole mass of life, and blended with all the classes of
society. The people of England will show to the haughty potentates of
the world, and to their talking sophisters, that a free, a generous, an
informed nation honors the high magistrates of its Church; that it will
not suffer the insolence of wealth and titles, or any other species of
proud pretension, to look down with scorn upon what they look up to with
reverence, nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility
which they intend always to be, and which often is, the fruit, not the
reward, (for what can be the reward?) of learning, piety, and virtue.
They can see, without pain or grudging, an archbishop precede a duke.
They can see a bishop of Durham or a bishop of Winchester in possession
of ten thousand pounds a year, and cannot conceive why it is in worse
hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of this earl or that
squire; although it may be true that so many dogs and horses are not
kept by the former, and fed with the victuals which ought to nourish the
children of the people. It is true, the whole Church revenue is not
always employed, and to every shilling, in charity; nor perhaps ought
it; but something is generally so employed. It is better to cherish
virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss
to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments
of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a
liberty without which virtue cannot exist.
When once the commonwealth has established the estates of the Church as
property, it can consistently hear nothing of the more or the less. Too
much and too little are treason against property. What evil can arise
from the quantity in any hand, whilst the supreme authority has the
full, sovereign superintendence over this, as over any property, to
prevent every species of abuse,--and whenever it notably deviates, to
give to it a direction agreeable to the purposes of its institution?
In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity towards
those who are often the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love
of the self-denial and mortification of the ancient Church, that makes
some look askance at the distinctions and honors and revenues which,
taken from no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people
of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their
tongue betrays them. Their language is in the _patois_ of fraud, in the
cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so,
when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive
evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them,
(and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing must be
varied, when the relation of that body to the state is altered,--when
manners, when modes of life, when indeed the whole order of human
affairs, has undergone a total revolution. We shall believe those
reformers to be then honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them,
cheats and deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into
common, and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of
the early Church.
With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in
the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the
confiscation of the estates of the Church and poor. Sacrilege and
proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of
Supply. The Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes
of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury. I am
not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I assure you that there is
not _one_ public man in this kingdom, whom you wish to quote,--no, not
one, of any party or description,--who does not reprobate the dishonest,
perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has been
compelled to make of that property which it was their first duty to
protect.
It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you that
those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the
cup of their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery of your
Church has proved a security to the possessions of ours. It has roused
the people. They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless
act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and more open, their
eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of
sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and
fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine. At home we behold similar
beginnings. We are on our guard against similar conclusions.
I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties
imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon any pretest of
public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen.
Who but a tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and
degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the property of men,
unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and
thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace of humanity could
think of casting down men of exalted rank and sacred function, some of
them of an age to call at once for reverence and compassion,--of casting
them down from the highest situation in the commonwealth, wherein they
were maintained by their own landed property, to a state of indigence,
depression, and contempt?
The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from
the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been
so harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast
to the harpies of usury. But to drive men from independence to live on
alms is itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable condition
to men in one state of life, and not habituated to other things, may,
when all these circumstances are altered, be a dreadful revolution, and
one to which a virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt,
except that which would demand the life of the offender. But to many
minds this punishment of _degradation_ and _infamy_ is worse than death.
Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering, that
the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favor of religion, by
education, and by the place they held in the administration of its
functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from
the profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the
rest,--to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the
charitable contributions of the faithful, but from the insolent
tenderness of known and avowed atheism, the maintenance of religion,
measured out to them on the standard of the contempt in which it is
held, and for the purpose of rendering those who receive the allowance
vile and of no estimation in the eyes of mankind.
But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in law, and
not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of
the Palais Royal and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the
possessions which they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts,
and the accumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that
ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at
pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify in every
particular; that the goods they possess are not properly theirs, but
belong to the state which created the fiction; and we are therefore not
to trouble ourselves with what they may suffer in their natural feelings
and natural persons on account of what is done towards them in this
their constructive character. Of what import is it, under what names you
injure men, and deprive them of the just emoluments of a profession in
which they were not only permitted, but encouraged by the state to
engage, and upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had
formed the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes to
an entire dependence upon them?
You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable
distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of
tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had not your
confiscators by their early crimes obtained a power which secures
indemnity to all the crimes of which they have since been guilty, or
that they can commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the
lash of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry which
becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The sophistic tyrants of
Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed regal tyrants
who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold, because
they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters.
Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them
acting worse tragedies under our eyes? Shall we not use the same liberty
that they do, when we can use it with the same safety, when to speak
honest truth only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose
actions we abhor?
This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with
what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all
pretexts,--a regard to national faith. The enemies to property at first
pretended a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping
the king's engagements with the public creditor. These professors of the
rights of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure
to learn anything themselves; otherwise they would have known that it is
to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor
of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is
pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title,
superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by
acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of a participation in the goods
of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or
implied. They never so much as entered into his head, when he made his
bargain. He well knew that the public, whether represented by a monarch
or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can
have no public estate, except in what it derives from a just and
proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large. This was engaged,
and nothing else could be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can
mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity.
It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions, caused
by the extreme rigor and the extreme laxity of this new public faith,
which influenced in this transaction, and which influenced not according
to the nature of the obligation, but to the description of the persons
to whom it was engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of
France are held valid in the National Assembly, except its pecuniary
engagements: acts of all others of the most ambiguous legality. The rest
of the acts of that royal government are considered in so odious a light
that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of
crime. A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely
as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the
state. It is a better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that
service. We have, however, seen multitudes of people under this
description in France, who never had been deprived of their allowances
by the most arbitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times, by this
assembly of the rights of men robbed without mercy. They were told, in
answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their
services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.
This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate
persons. The Assembly, with perfect consistency, it must be owned, is
engaged in a respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the
treaties made with other nations under the former government; and their
committee is to report which of them they ought to ratify, and which
not. By this means they have put the external fidelity of this virgin
state on a par with its internal.
It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal
government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of
rewarding service and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative,
than that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state, actual and
possible. The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least
allowed to the prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative
of any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies the
sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes
far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation. The
acts, however, of that dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a
boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred. Whence arose this
preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriving
its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the exertions of
monarchical authority? Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile
inconsistency; nor can partial favor be accounted for upon equitable
principles. But the contradiction and partiality which admit no
justification are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause
I do not think it difficult to discover.
By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has insensibly grown
up, and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in
that kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the
mutual convertibility of land into money and of money into land, had
always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more
general and more strict than they are in England, the _jus retractûs_,
the great mass of landed property held by the crown, and, by a maxim of
the French law, held unalienably, the vast estates of the ecclesiastic
corporations,--all these had kept the landed and moneyed interests more
separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct
species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in
this country.
The moneyed property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the
people. They saw it connected with their distresses, and aggravating
them. It was no less envied by the old landed interests,--partly for the
same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so
as it eclipsed, by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed
pedigrees and naked titles of several among the nobility. Even when the
nobility, which represented the more permanent landed interest, united
themselves by marriage (which sometimes was the case) with the other
description, the wealth which saved the family from ruin was supposed to
contaminate and degrade it. Thus the enmities and heart burnings of
these parties were increased even by the usual means by which discord is
made to cease and quarrels are turned into friendship. In the mean time,
the pride of the wealthy men, not noble, or newly noble, increased with
its cause. They felt with resentment an inferiority the grounds of which
they did not acknowledge. There was no measure to which they were not
willing to lend themselves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of
this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth to what they considered as
its natural rank and estimation. They struck at the nobility through the
crown and the Church. They attacked them particularly on the side on
which they thought them the most vulnerable,--that is, the possessions
of the Church, which, through the patronage of the crown, generally
devolved upon the nobility. The bishoprics and the great commendatory
abbeys were, with few exceptions, held by that order.
In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare between the
noble ancient landed interest and the new moneyed interest, the
greatest, because the most applicable, strength was in the hands of the
latter. The moneyed interest is in its nature more ready for any
adventure, and its possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any
kind. Being of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any
novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to
by all who wish for change.
Along with the moneyed interest, a new description of men had grown up,
with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union: I mean the
political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing
themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the
life and greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much
cultivated either by him, or by the Regent, or the successors to the
crown; nor were they engaged to the court by favors and emoluments so
systematically as during the splendid period of that ostentatious and
not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court protection they
endeavored to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their
own; to which the two academies of France, and afterwards the vast
undertaking of the Encyclopædia, carried on by a society of these
gentlemen, did not a little contribute.
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular
plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they
pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in
the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a
spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree,--and from thence, by
an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their
means.[97] What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct
or immediate act might be wrought by a longer process through the medium
of opinion. To command that opinion, the first step is to establish a
dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves,
with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame.
Many of them, indeed, stood high in the ranks of literature and science.
The world had done them justice, and in favor of general talents forgave
the evil tendency of their peculiar principles. This was true
liberality; which they returned by endeavoring to confine the reputation
of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers. I will
venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less
prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true
philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and
they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in
some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are
called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of
literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and
discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold
to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct
it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying
the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which
would strike at property, liberty, and life.