the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from it, ought
to be at least as evident, and at least as important. To a man who acts
under the influence of no passion, who has nothing in view in his
projects but the public good, a great difference will immediately strike
him, between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of
such institutions, and on a question of their total abolition, where
they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where, by long habit,
things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a
manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without
notably impairing the other. He might be embarrassed, if the case were
really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of
debating. But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle.
There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute
destruction or unreformed existence. _Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna_.
This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to
depart from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any
man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider
his country as nothing but _carte blanche_, upon which he may scribble
whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may
wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good
patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the
most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to
preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my
standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception,
perilous in the execution.
There are moments in the fortune of states, when particular men are
called to make improvements by great mental exertion. In those moments,
even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country,
and to be invested with full authority, they have not always apt
instruments. A politician, to do great things, looks for a _power_, what
our workmen call a _purchase_; and if he finds that power, in politics
as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic
institutions, in my opinion, was found a great _power_ for the mechanism
of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction;
there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes,
without any other than public ties and public principles,--men without
the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private
fortune,--men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some
community,--men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit
obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look to
the possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow
as they list. These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they
are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are
the gifts of Nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial
existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly
suited to a man who has long views,--who meditates designs that require
time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are
accomplished. He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned
in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and
direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and
the habits of such corporations as those which you have rashly
destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting
benefit of his country. On the view of this subject, a thousand uses
suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power growing
wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost
tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently
active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the
attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the
expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of
electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in Nature,
and they were always discernible. They seemed, some of them
unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to
children,--until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill,
tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once
the most powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the
great views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental
and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a
year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too
big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using the men, but by
converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue
to account, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale?
If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its
natural course. Your politicians do not understand their trade; and
therefore they sell their tools.
But the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle; and
they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence.--This I do not
mean to dispute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from
superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the
public advantage. You derive benefits from many dispositions and many
passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the
moral eye, as superstition itself. It was your business to correct and
mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the
passions. But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices? In its
possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a
moral subject, and of course admits of all degrees and all
modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they
must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some
enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a
resource found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion
consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the
world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His
perfections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the great
end,--it may be auxiliary. Wise men, who, as such, are not _admirers_,
(not admirers at least of the _munera terræ_,) are not violently
attached to these things, nor do they violently hate them. Wisdom is not
the most severe corrector of folly. They are the rival follies which
mutually wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of
their advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on
the one side or the other, in their quarrels. Prudence would be neuter;
but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy
concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a
prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of
enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the
superstition which builds to be more tolerable than that which
demolishes,--that which adorns a country, than that which deforms
it,--that which endows, than that which plunders,--that which disposes
to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real
injustice,--that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful
pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence
of their self-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the
question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the
superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour.
For the present I postpone all consideration of the supposed public
profit of the sale, which, however, I conceive to be perfectly delusive.
I shall here only consider it as a transfer of property. On the policy
of that transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to
the immediate support of the producer. This surplus forms the income of
the landed capitalist. It will be spent by a proprietor who does not
labor. But this idleness is itself the spring of labor, this repose the
spur to industry. The only concern for the state is, that the capital
taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry
from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least
possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it and to those of
the people to whom it is returned.
In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal employment, a
sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was
recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his
place. Before the inconveniences are incurred which _must_ attend all
violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought
to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated
property will be in a considerable degree more laborious, more virtuous,
more sober, less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the
gains of the laborer, or to consume on themselves a larger share than is
fit for the measure of an individual,--or that they should be qualified
to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode, so as to
answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the old possessors,
call those possessors bishops, or canons, or commendatory abbots, or
monks, or what you please. The monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them no
otherwise employed than by singing in the choir. They are as usefully
employed as those who neither sing nor say,--as usefully even as those
who sing upon the stage. They are as usefully employed as if they worked
from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly,
unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which
by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were
not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things, and to
impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by
the strangely directed labor of these unhappy people, I should be
infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable
industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic
quietude. Humanity, and perhaps policy, might better justify me in the
one than in the other. It is a subject on which I have often reflected,
and never reflected without feeling from it. I am sure that no
consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury
and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will
distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration
of such trades and employments in a well-regulated state. But for this
purpose of distribution, it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks
are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay loiterers.
When the advantages of the possession and of the project are on a par,
there is no motive for a change. But in the present case, perhaps, they
are not upon a par, and the difference is in favor of the possession. It
does not appear to me that the expenses of those whom you are going to
expel do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading to
vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through whom they pass as
the expenses of those favorites whom you are intruding into their
houses. Why should the expenditure of a great landed property, which is
a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to
you or to me, when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast
libraries, which are the history of the force and weakness of the human
mind,--through great collections of ancient records, medals, and coins,
which attest and explain laws and customs,--through paintings and
statues, that, by imitating Nature, seem to extend the limits of
creation,--through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the
regards and connections of life beyond the grave,--through collections
of the specimens of Nature, which become a representative assembly of
all the classes and families of the world, that by disposition
facilitate, and by exciting curiosity open, the avenues to science? If
by great permanent establishments all these objects of expense are
better secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and
personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same tastes prevailed
in scattered individuals? Does not the sweat of the mason and carpenter,
who toil in order to partake the sweat of the peasant, flow as
pleasantly and as salubriously in the construction and repair of the
majestic edifices of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties
of vice and luxury? as honorably and as profitably in repairing those
sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary
receptacles of transient voluptuousness,--in opera-houses, and brothels,
and gaming-houses, and club-houses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars?
Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the
frugal sustenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination
raise to dignity by construing in the service of God than in pampering
the innumerable multitude of those who are degraded by being made
useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man? Are the decorations
of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man than ribbons, and
laces, and national cockades, and petit maisons, and petit soupers, and
all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence sports away
the burden of its superfluity?
We tolerate even these,--not from love of them, but for fear of worse.
We tolerate them, because property and liberty, to a degree, require
that toleration. But why proscribe the other, and surely, in every point
of view, the more laudable use of estates? Why, through the violation of
all property, through an outrage upon every principle of liberty,
forcibly carry them from the better to the worse?
This comparison between the new individuals and the old corps is made
upon a supposition that no reform could be made in the latter. But, in a
question of reformation, I always consider corporate bodies, whether
sole or consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public
direction, by the power of the state, in the use of their property, and
in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than
private citizens ever can be, or perhaps ought to be; and this seems to
me a very material consideration for those who undertake anything which
merits the name of a politic enterprise.--So far as to the estates of
monasteries.
With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons and
commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what reason some landed
estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance. Can any
philosophic spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the
comparative evil of having a certain, and that, too, a large, portion of
landed property passing in succession through persons whose title to it
is, always in theory and often in fact, an eminent degree of piety,
morals, and learning; a property which by its destination, in their
turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the noblest families
renovation and support, to the lowest the means of dignity and
elevation; a property, the tenure of which is the performance of some
duty, (whatever value you may choose to set upon that duty,) and the
character of whose proprietors demands at least an exterior decorum and
gravity of manners,--who are to exercise a generous, but temperate
hospitality,--part of whose income they are to consider as a trust for
charity,--and who, even when they fail in their trust, when they slide
from their character, and degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman
or gentleman, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in
their forfeited possessions? Is it better that estates should be held by
those who have no duty than by those who have one? by those whose
character and destination point to virtues than by those who have no
rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own
will and appetite? Nor are these estates held altogether in the
character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain. They pass
from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other. No
excess is good, and therefore too great a proportion of landed property
may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me of material
injury to any common wealth that there should exist some estates that
have a chance of being acquired by other means than the previous
acquisition of money.
* * * * *
This letter is grown to a great length, though it is, indeed, short with
regard to the infinite extent of the subject. Various avocations have
from time to time called my mind from the subject. I was not sorry to
give myself leisure to observe whether in the proceedings of the
National Assembly I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some
of my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my
first opinions. It was my original purpose to take a view of the
principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great and
fundamental establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have
substituted in the place of what you have destroyed with the several
members of our British Constitution. But this plan is of greater extent
than at first I computed, and I find that you have little desire to take
the advantage of any examples. At present I must content myself with
some remarks upon your establishments, reserving for another time what I
proposed to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy, as practically they exist.
I have taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in
France. I have certainly spoke of it with freedom. Those whose principle
it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind, and to set up
a scheme of society on new principles, must naturally expect that such
of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than, of theirs
should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon
their trial. They must take it for granted that we attend much to their
reason, but not at all to their authority. They have not one of the
great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor. They avow their
hostility to opinion. Of course they must expect no support from that
influence, which, with every other authority, they have deposed from the
seat of its jurisdiction.
I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary
association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize
upon the power of the state. They have not the sanction and authority of
the character under which they first met. They have assumed another of a
very different nature, and have completely altered and inverted all the
relations in which they originally stood. They do not hold the authority
they exercise under any constitutional law of the state. They have
departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent;
which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient
usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority. The most
considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and
in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive
authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as
resolutions.
If they had set up this new, experimental government as a necessary
substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of
prescription, which through long usage mellows into legality governments
that were violent in their commencement. All those who have affections
which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even
in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from
those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe
their birth, and on which they justify their continuance. But they will
be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the
operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no
necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices
and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and
sometimes destroyed. This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription. We
have their own word for it that they have made a revolution. To make a
revolution is a measure which, _primâ fronte_, requires an apology. To
make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no
common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding. The
sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new
power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and
reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and
recognized authority.
In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds upon
principles the most opposite from those which appear to direct them in
the use of it. An observation on this difference will let us into the
true spirit of their conduct. Everything which they have done, or
continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most
common arts. They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have
done before them. Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and
violences, you can find nothing at all that is new. They follow
precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader.
They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and
usurpation. But in all the regulations relative to the public good the
spirit has been the very reverse of this. There they commit the whole to
the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of
the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to
trust the slightest of his private concerns. They make this difference,
because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are
thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road. The public
interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon
wholly to chance: I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in
experience to prove their tendency beneficial.
We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of
those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points
wherein the happiness of mankind is concerned. But in these gentlemen
there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up
the infant for the sake of an experiment. In the vastness of their
promises and the confidence of their predictions they far outdo all the
boasting of empirics. The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner
provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.