vices of their ancient government, strike at the fame of their country
itself, by painting almost all that could have attracted the attention
of strangers, I mean their nobility and their clergy, as objects of
horror. If this were only a libel, there had not been much in it. But it
has practical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who formed
the great body of your landed men and the whole of your military
officers, resembled those of Germany, at the period when the Hanse towns
were necessitated to confederate against the nobles in defence of their
property,--had they been like the Orsini and Vitelli in Italy, who used
to sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveller,--had
they been such as the Mamelukes in Egypt, or the Nayres on the coast of
Malabar,--I do admit that too critical an inquiry might not be advisable
into the means of freeing the world from such a nuisance. The statues of
Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The tenderest minds,
confounded with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the
suspension of its own rules in favor of its own principles, might turn
aside whilst fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruction of a
pretended nobility, which disgraced, whilst it persecuted, human nature.
The persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and arbitrary
confiscation might remain silent spectators of this civil war between
the vices.
But did the privileged nobility who met under the king's precept at
Versailles in 1789, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as
the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of
ancient times? If I had then asked the question, I should have passed
for a madman. What have they since done, that they were to be driven
into exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled, and
tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in ashes, and that
their order should be abolished, and the memory of it, if possible,
extinguished, by ordaining them to change the very names by which they
were usually known? Read their instructions to their representatives.
They breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend
reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privileges relative
to contribution were voluntarily surrendered; as the king, from the
beginning, surrendered all pretence to a right of taxation. Upon a free
constitution there was but one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy
was at an end. It breathed its last without a groan, without struggle,
without convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension, arose
afterwards, upon the preference of a despotic democracy to a government
of reciprocal control. The triumph of the victorious party was over the
principles of a British Constitution.
I have observed the affectation which for many years past has prevailed
in Paris, even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory
of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put any one out of humor
with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this overdone
style of insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this engine
the most busily are those who have ended their panegyrics in dethroning
his successor and descendant: a man as good-natured, at the least, as
Henry the Fourth; altogether as fond of his people; and who has done
infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that
great monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it is for
his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with! For Henry of
Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince. He possessed,
indeed, great humanity and mildness, but an humanity and mildness that
never stood in the way of his interests. He never sought to be loved
without putting himself first in a condition to be feared. He used soft
language with determined conduct. He asserted and maintained his
authority in the gross, and distributed his acts of concession only in
the detail. Ho spent the income of his prerogative nobly, but he took
care not to break in upon the capital,--never abandoning for a moment
any of the claims which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing
to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field,
sometimes upon the scaffold. Because he knew how to make his virtues
respected by the ungrateful, he has merited the praises of those whom,
if they had lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and
brought to punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he
had famished Paris into a surrender.
If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of Henry the
Fourth, they must remember that they cannot think more highly of him
than he did of the noblesse of France,--whose virtue, honor, courage,
patriotism, and loyalty were his constant theme.
But the nobility of France are degenerated since the days of Henry the
Fourth.--This is possible; but it is more than I can believe to be true
in any great degree. I do not pretend to know France as correctly as
some others; but I have endeavored through my whole life to make myself
acquainted with human nature,--otherwise I should be unfit to take even
my humble part in the service of mankind. In that study I could not pass
by a vast portion of our nature as it appeared modified in a country but
twenty-four miles from the shore of this island. On my best observation,
compared with my best inquiries, I found your nobility for the greater
part composed of men of a high spirit, and of a delicate sense of
honor, both with regard to themselves individually, and with regard to
their whole corps, over whom they kept, beyond what is common in other
countries, a censorial eye. They were tolerably well bred; very
officious, humane, and hospitable; in their conversation frank and open;
with a good military tone; and reasonably tinctured with literature,
particularly of the authors in their own language. Many had pretensions
far above this description. I speak of those who were generally met
with.
As to their behavior to the inferior classes, they appeared to me to
comport themselves towards them with good-nature, and with something
more nearly approaching to familiarity than is generally practised with
us in the intercourse between the higher and lower ranks of life. To
strike any person, even in the most abject condition, was a thing in a
manner unknown, and would be highly disgraceful. Instances of other
ill-treatment of the humble part of the community were rare; and as to
attacks made upon the property or the personal liberty of the commons, I
never heard of any whatsoever from _them_,--nor, whilst the laws were in
vigor under the ancient government, would such tyranny in subjects have
been permitted. As men of landed estates, I had no fault to find with
their conduct, though much to reprehend, and much to wish changed, in
many of the old tenures. Where the letting of their land was by rent, I
could not discover that their agreements with their farmers were
oppressive; nor when they were in partnership with the farmer, as often
was the case, have I heard that they had taken the lion's share. The
proportions seemed not inequitable. There might be exceptions; but
certainly they were exceptions only. I have no reason to believe that in
these respects the landed noblesse of France were worse than the landed
gentry of this country,--certainly in no respect more vexatious than the
landholders, not noble, of their own nation. In cities the nobility had
no manner of power; in the country very little. You know, Sir, that much
of the civil government, and the police in the most essential parts, was
not in the hands of that nobility which presents itself first to our
consideration. The revenue, the system and collection of which were the
most grievous parts of the French government, was not administered by
the men of the sword; nor were they answerable for the vices of its
principle, or the vexations, where any such existed, in its management.
Denying, as I am well warranted to do, that the nobility had any
considerable share in the oppression of the people, in cases in which
real oppression existed, I am ready to admit that they were not without
considerable faults and errors. A foolish imitation of the worst part of
the manners of England, which impaired their natural character, without
substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy, has certainly
rendered them worse than formerly they were. Habitual dissoluteness of
manners, continued beyond the pardonable period of life, was more common
amongst them than it is with us; and it reigned with the less hope of
remedy, though possibly with something of less mischief, by being
covered with more exterior decorum. They countenanced too much that
licentious philosophy which has helped to bring on their ruin. There was
another error amongst them more fatal. Those of the commons who
approached to or exceeded many of the nobility in point of wealth were
not fully admitted to the rank and estimation which wealth, in reason
and good policy, ought to bestow in every country,--though I think not
equally with that of other nobility. The two kinds of aristocracy were
too punctiliously kept asunder: less so, however, than in Germany and
some other nations.
This separation, as I have already taken the liberty of suggesting to
you, I conceive to be one principal cause of the destruction of the old
nobility. The military, particularly, was too exclusively reserved for
men of family. But, after all, this was an error of opinion, which a
conflicting opinion would have rectified. A permanent Assembly, in which
the commons had their share of power, would soon abolish whatever was
too invidious and insulting in these distinctions; and even the faults
in the morals of the nobility would have been probably corrected, by the
greater varieties of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by
orders would have given rise.
All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of
art. To be honored and even privileged by the laws, opinions, and
inveterate usages of our country, growing out of the prejudice of ages,
has nothing to provoke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be too
tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The strong
struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found
to belong to him, and to distinguish him, is one of the securities
against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as
an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled
state. What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament
to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
"_Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus_," was the saying of a wise and
good man. It is, indeed, one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to
incline to it with some sort of partial propensity. He feels no
ennobling principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the
artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to
opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant,
envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or
representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what
had long nourished in splendor and in honor. I do not like to see
anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face
of the land. It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction
that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any
incorrigible vices in the noblesse of France, or any abuse which could
not be removed by a reform very short of abolition. Your noblesse did
not deserve punishment; but to degrade is to punish.
It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry
concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my
ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with
much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they
are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or
exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is
a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses there were
undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It was an old establishment, and
not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that
merited confiscation of their substance, nor those cruel insults and
degradations, and that unnatural persecution, which have been
substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.
If there had been any just cause for this new religions persecution, the
atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to
plunder, do not love anybody so much as not to dwell with complacence on
the vices of the existing clergy. This they have not done. They find
themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they
have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every
instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body
or in its favor, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous because very
illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions and their
own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family
distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very
just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors; but to
take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for
punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and
general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to
the philosophy of this enlightened age. The Assembly punishes men, many,
if not most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclesiastics in
former times as much as their present persecutors can do, and who would
be as loud and as strong in the expression of that sense, if they were
not well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation is
employed.
Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, but not for
their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations. As well
might we in England think of waging inexpiable war upon all Frenchmen
for the evils which they have brought upon us in the several periods of
our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think yourselves
justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of the unparalleled
calamities brought upon the people of France by the unjust invasions of
our Henrys and our Edwards. Indeed, we should be mutually justified in
this exterminatory war upon each other, full as much as you are in the
unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen, on account of the
conduct of men of the same name in other times.
We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary,
without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our
happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction,
drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and
infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine,
furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in Church and
State, and supplying the means of keeping alive or reviving dissensions
and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for
the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride,
ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal,
and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with
the same
"troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet."
These vices are the _causes_ of those storms. Religion, morals, laws,
prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the _pretexts_.
The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real
good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition by rooting out
of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If
you did, you would root out everything that is valuable in the human
breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and
instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates,
senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You
would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more
monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the Gospel,--no interpreters of
law, no general officers, no public councils. You might change the
names: the things in some shape must remain. A certain _quantum_ of
power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some
appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to
names,--to the causes of evil, which are permanent, not to the
occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which
they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in
practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts, and
the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive.
Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same
vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing
its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated
in its new organs with the fresh vigor of a juvenile activity. It walks
abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcass
or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and
apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with
all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think
they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under
color of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are
authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and
perhaps in worse.
Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as the ready
instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous
massacre of St. Bartholomew. What should we say to those who could think
of retaliating on the Parisians of this day the abominations and horrors
of that time? They are, indeed, brought to abhor _that_ massacre.
Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them dislike it,
because the politicians and fashionable teachers have no interest in
giving their passions exactly the same direction. Still, however, they
find it their interest to keep the same savage dispositions alive. It
was but the other day that they caused this very massacre to be acted on
the stage for the diversion of the descendants of those who committed
it. In this tragic farce they produced the Cardinal of Lorraine in his
robes of function, ordering general slaughter. Was this spectacle
intended to make the Parisians abhor persecution and loathe the effusion
of blood? No: it was to teach them to persecute their own pastors; it
was to excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to
an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order which, if it ought
to exist at all, ought to exist not only in safety, but in reverence. It
was to stimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had
been gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning,--and to quicken them
to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it should suit the
purpose of the Guises of the day. An Assembly in which sat a multitude
of priests and prelates was obliged to suffer this indignity at its
door. The author was not sent to the galleys, nor the players to the
house of correction. Not long after this exhibition, those players came
forward to the Assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which
they had dared to expose, and to show their prostituted faces in the
senate, whilst the Archbishop of Paris, whose function was known to his
people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by
alms, is forced to abandon his house, and to fly from his flock, (as
from ravenous wolves,) because, truly, in the sixteenth century, the
Cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.[113]
Such is the effect of the perversion of history by those who, for the
same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning.
But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason which places
centuries under our eye and brings things to the true point of
comparison, which obscures little names and effaces the colors of little
parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral
quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais
Royal,--The Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer of the sixteenth
century; you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth;
and this is the only difference between you. But history in the
nineteenth century, better understood and better employed, will, I
trust, teach a civilized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these
barbarous ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to
retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future times
the enormities committed by the present practical zealots and furious
fanatics of that wretched error, which, in its quiescent state, is more
than punished, whenever it is embraced. It will teach posterity not to
make war upon either religion or philosophy for the abuse which the
hypocrites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings
conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, who in all
things eminently favors and protects the race of man.
If your clergy, or any clergy, should show themselves vicious beyond the
fair bounds allowed to human infirmity, and to those professional faults
which can hardly be separated from professional virtues, though their
vices never can countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit that
they would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our
indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure and justice in their
punishment. I can allow in clergymen, through all their divisions, some
tenaciousness of their own opinion, some overflowings of zeal for its
propagation, some predilection to their own state and office, some
attachment to the interest of their own corps, some preference to those
who Us ten with docility to their doctrines beyond those who scorn and
deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man who have to deal with
men, and who would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the
greatest of all intolerance. I must bear with infirmities, until they
fester into crimes.
Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from frailty to vice,
ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand. But is it true
that the body of your clergy had passed those limits of a just
allowance? Prom the general style of your late publications of all
sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a
sort of monsters: an horrible composition of superstition, ignorance,
sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true? Is it true that
the lapse of time, the cessation of conflicting interests, the woful
experience of the evils resulting from party rage, have had no sort of
influence gradually to meliorate their minds? Is it true that they were
daily renewing invasions on the civil power, troubling the domestic
quiet of their country, and rendering the operations of its government
feeble and precarious? Is it true that the clergy of our times have
pressed down the laity with an iron hand, and were in all places
lighting up the fires of a savage persecution? Did they by every fraud
endeavor to increase their estates? Did they use to exceed the due
demands on estates that were their own? Or, rigidly screwing up right
into wrong, did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious extortion?
When not possessed of power, were they filled with the vices of those
who envy it? Were they inflamed with a violent, litigious spirit of
controversy? Goaded on with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty,
were they ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches,
to massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down altars, and
to make their way over the ruins of subverted governments to an empire
of doctrine, sometimes flattering, sometimes forcing, the consciences of
men from the jurisdiction of public institutions into a submission to
their personal authority, beginning with a claim of liberty and ending
with an abuse of power?
These, or some of these, were the vices objected, and not wholly
without foundation, to several of the churchmen of former times, who
belonged to the two great parties which then divided and distracted
Europe.
If there was in France, as in other countries there visibly is, a great
abatement, rather than any increase of these vices, instead of loading
the present clergy with the crimes of other men and the odious character
of other times, in common equity they ought to be praised, encouraged,
and supported, in their departure from a spirit which disgraced their
predecessors, and for having assumed a temper of mind and manners more
suitable to their sacred function.