supposing that it was in possession of another sort of organ, through
which its orders were to pass, is fit for promoting the obedience and
discipline of an army. It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a
very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular
authority; and they will least of all yield it to an Assembly which is
to have only a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose
the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect
submission and due admiration the dominion of pleaders,--especially when
they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of
those pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose command,
(if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is
transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the
fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time
mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who
understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the
true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself.
Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of
securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in
which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army
is your master,--the master (that is little) of your king, the master of
your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.
How came the Assembly by their present power over the army? Chiefly, to
be sure, by debauching the soldiers from their officers. They have begun
by a most terrible operation. They have touched the central point about
which the particles that compose armies are at repose. They have
destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, critical
link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of
military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system,
depends. The soldier is told he is a citizen, and has the rights of man
and citizen. The right of a man, he is told, is, to be his own governor,
and to be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-government.
It is very natural he should think that he ought most of all to have his
choice where he is to yield the greatest degree of obedience. He will
therefore, in all probability, systematically do what he does at present
occasionally: that is, he will exercise at least a negative in the
choice of his officers. At present the officers are known at best to be
only permissive, and on their good behavior. In fact, there have been
many instances in which they have been cashiered by their corps. Here is
a second negative on the choice of the king: a negative as effectual, at
least, as the other of the Assembly. The soldiers know already that it
has been a question, not ill received in the National Assembly, whether
they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers, or some
proportion of them. When such matters are in deliberation, it is no
extravagant supposition that they will incline to the opinion most
favorable to their pretensions. They will not bear to be deemed the army
of an imprisoned king, whilst another army in the same country, with
whom too they are to feast and confederate, is to be considered as the
free army of a free Constitution. They will cast their eyes on the other
and more permanent army: I mean the municipal. That corps, they well
know, does actually elect its own officers. They may not be able to
discern the grounds of distinction on which they are not to elect a
Marquis de La Fayette (or what is his new name?) of their own. If this
election of a commander-in-chief be a part of the rights of men, why not
of theirs? They see elective justices of peace, elective judges,
elective curates, elective bishops, elective municipalities, and
elective commanders of the Parisian army. Why should they alone be
excluded? Are the brave troops of France the only men in that nation who
are not the fit judges of military merit, and of the qualifications
necessary for a commander-in-chief? Are they paid by the state, and do
they therefore lose the rights of men? They are a part of that nation
themselves, and contribute to that pay. And is not the king, is not the
National Assembly, and are not all who elect the National Assembly,
likewise paid? Instead of seeing all these forfeit their rights by their
receiving a salary, they perceive that in all these cases a salary is
given for the exercise of those rights. All your resolutions, all your
proceedings, all your debates, all the works of your doctors in religion
and politics, have industriously been put into their hands; and you
expect that they will apply to their own case just as much of your
doctrines and examples as suits your pleasure.
Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you
have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as
far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore
the moment any difference arises between your National Assembly and any
part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is
left to you,--or rather, you have left nothing else to yourselves. You
see, by the report of your war minister, that the distribution of the
army is in a great measure made with a view of internal coercion.[129]
You must rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by which
you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which
after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make of it. The
king is to call out troops to act against his people, when the world has
been told, and the assertion is still ringing in our ears, that troops
ought not to fire on citizens. The colonies assert to themselves an
independent constitution and a free trade. They must be constrained by
troops. In what chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able
to read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their commerce
monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others? As the colonists
rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again,--massacre, torture,
hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of
metaphysic declarations wantonly made and shamefully retracted! It was
but the other day that the farmers of land in one of your provinces
refused to pay some sorts of rents to the lord of the soil. In
consequence of this, you decree that the country-people shall pay all
rents and dues, except those which as grievances you have abolished; and
if they refuse, then you order the king to march troops against them.
You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences,
and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. The leaders of the
present system tell them of their rights, as men, to take fortresses, to
murder guards, to seize on kings without the least appearance of
authority even from the Assembly, whilst, as the sovereign legislative
body, that Assembly was sitting in the name of the nation; and yet these
leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in these very
disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the principles and follow
the examples which have been guarantied by their own approbation.
The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feodality as the
barbarism of tyranny; and they tell them afterwards how much of that
barbarous tyranny they are to bear with patience. As they are prodigal
of light with regard to grievances, so the people find them sparing in
the extreme with regard to redress. They know that not only certain
quit-rents and personal duties, which you have permitted them to redeem,
(but have furnished no money for the redemption,) are as nothing to
those burdens for which you have made no provision at all; they know
that almost the whole system of landed property in its origin is
feudal,--that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original
proprietors made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous
instruments,--and that the most grievous effects of the conquest axe the
land-rents of every kind, as without question they are.
The peasants, in all probability, are the descendants of these ancient
proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if they fail, in any degree, in the
titles which they make on the principles of antiquaries and lawyers,
they retreat into the citadel of the rights of men. There they find that
men are equal; and the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, ought
not to be monopolized to foster the pride and luxury of any men, who by
nature are no better than themselves, and who, if they do not labor for
their bread, are worse. They find, that, by the laws of Nature, the
occupant and subduer of the soil is the true proprietor,--that there is
no prescription against Nature,--and that the agreements (where any
there are) which have been made with the landlords during the time of
slavery are only the effect of duresse and force,--and that, when the
people reëntered into the rights of men, those agreements were made as
void as everything else which had been settled under the prevalence of
the old feudal and aristocratic tyranny. They will tell you that they
see no difference between an idler with a hat and a national cockade and
an idler in a cowl or in a rochet. If you ground the title to rents on
succession and prescription, they tell you from the speech of M. Camus,
published by the National Assembly for their information, that things
ill begun cannot avail themselves of prescription,--that the title of
those lords was vicious in its origin,--and that force is at least as
bad as fraud. As to the title by succession, they will tell you that the
succession of those who have cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of
property, and not rotten parchments and silly substitutions,--that the
lords have enjoyed their usurpation too long,--and that, if they allow
to these lay monks any charitable pension, they ought to be thankful to
the bounty of the true proprietor, who is so generous towards a false
claimant to his goods.
When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic reason on which
you have set your image and superscription, you cry it down as base
money, and tell them you will pay for the future with French guards and
dragoons and hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand
authority of a king, who is only the instrument of destroying, without
any power of protecting either the people or his own person. Through
him, it seems, you will make yourselves obeyed. They answer,--"You have
taught us that there are no gentlemen; and which of your principles
teach us to bow to kings whom we have not elected? We know, without your
teaching, that lands were given for the support of feudal dignities,
feudal titles, and feudal offices. When you took down the cause as a
grievance, why should the more grievous effect remain? As there are now
no hereditary honors and no distinguished families, why are we taxed to
maintain what you tell us ought not to exist? You have sent down our old
aristocratic landlords in no other character and with no other title but
that of exactors under your authority. Have you endeavored to make these
your rent-gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent them to us with
their arms reversed, their shields broken, their impresses defaced,--and
so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged
things, that we no longer know them. They are strangers to us. They do
not even go by the names of our ancient lords. Physically they may be
the same men,--though we are not quite sure of that, on your new
philosophic doctrines of personal identity. In all other respects they
are totally changed. We do not see why we have not as good a right to
refuse them their rents as you have to abrogate all their honors,
titles, and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to do; and
it is one instance among many, indeed, of your assumption of undelegated
power. We see the burghers of Paris, through their clubs, their mobs,
and their national guards, directing you at their pleasure, and giving
that as law to you, which, under your authority, is transmitted as law
to us. Through you, these burghers dispose of the lives and fortunes of
us all. Why should not you attend as much to the desires of the
laborious husbandman with regard to our rent, by which we are affected
in the most serious manner, as you do to the demands of these insolent
burghers relative to distinctions and titles of honor, by which neither
they nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay more regard to
their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among the rights of man to
pay tribute to his equals? Before this measure of yours we might have
thought we were not perfectly equal; we might have entertained some old,
habitual, unmeaning prepossession in favor of those landlords; but we
cannot conceive with what other view than that of destroying all respect
to them you could have made the law that degrades them. You have
forbidden us to treat them with any of the old formalities of respect;
and now you send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to
fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild
authority of opinion."
The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and ridiculous to all
rational ears; but to the politicians of metaphysics, who have opened
schools for sophistry, and made establishments for anarchy, it is solid
and conclusive. It is obvious, that, on a mere consideration of the
right, the leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled
to abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns. It would
be only to follow up the principle of their reasonings, and to complete
the analogy of their conduct. But they had newly possessed themselves of
a great body of landed property by confiscation. They had this commodity
at market; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, if they were
to permit the husbandmen to riot in the speculations with which they so
freely intoxicated themselves. The only security which property enjoys
in any one of its descriptions is from the interests of their rapacity
with regard to some other. They have left nothing but their own
arbitrary pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and
what subverted.
Neither have they left any principle by which any of their
municipalities can be bound to obedience,--or even conscientiously
obliged not to separate from the whole, to become independent, or to
connect itself with some other state. The people of Lyons, it seems,
have refused lately to pay taxes. Why should they not? What lawful
authority is there left to exact them? The king imposed some of them.
The old States, methodized by orders, settled the more ancient. They may
say to the Assembly,--"Who are you, that are not our kings, nor the
States we have elected, nor sit on the principles on which we have
elected you? And who are we, that, when we see the _gabelles_ which you
have ordered to be paid wholly shaken off, when we see the act of
disobedience afterwards ratified by yourselves, who are we, that we are
not to judge what taxes we ought or ought not to pay, and are not to
avail ourselves of the same powers the validity of which you have
approved in others?" To this the answer is, "We will send troops." The
last reason of kings is always the first with your Assembly. This
military aid may serve for a time, whilst the impression of the increase
of pay remains, and the vanity of being umpires in all disputes is
flattered. But this weapon will snap short, unfaithful to the hand that
employs it. The Assembly keep a school, where, systematically, and with
unremitting perseverance, they teach principles and form regulations
destructive to all spirit of subordination, civil and military,--and
then they expect that they shall hold in obedience an anarchic people by
an anarchic army.
The municipal army, which, according to their new policy, is to balance
this national army, if considered in itself only, is of a constitution
much more simple, and in every respect less exceptionable. It is a mere
democratic body, unconnected with the crown or the kingdom, armed and
trained and officered at the pleasure of the districts to which the
corps severally belong; and the personal service of the individuals who
compose, or the fine in lieu of personal service, are directed by the
same authority.[130] Nothing is more uniform. If, however, considered in
any relation to the crown, to the National Assembly, to the public
tribunals, or to the other army, or considered in a view to any
coherence or connection between its parts, it seems a monster, and can
hardly fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great national
calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general constitution than the
systasis of Crete, or the confederation of Poland, or any other
ill-devised corrective which has yet been imagined, in the necessities
produced by an ill-constructed system of government.
* * * * *
Having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of the supreme
power, the executive, the judicature, the military, and on the
reciprocal relation of all these establishments, I shall say something
of the ability showed by your legislators with regard to the revenue.
In their proceedings relative to this object, if possible, still fewer
traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. When the
States met, it seemed to be the great object to improve the system of
revenue, to enlarge its collection, to cleanse it of oppression and
vexation, and to establish it on the most solid footing. Great were the
expectations entertained on that head throughout Europe. It was by this
grand arrangement that France was to stand or fall; and this became, in
my opinion very properly, the test by which the skill and patriotism of
those who ruled in that Assembly would be tried. The revenue of the
state is the state. In effect, all depends upon it, whether for support
or for reformation. The dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon
the quantity and the kind of virtue that may be exerted in it. As all
great qualities of the mind which operate in public, and are not merely
suffering and passive, require force for their display, I had almost
said for their unequivocal existence, the revenue, which is the spring
of all power, becomes in its administration the sphere of every active
virtue. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid,
instituted for great things, and conversant about great concerns,
requires abundant scope and room, and cannot spread and grow under
confinement, and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid.
Through the revenue alone the body politic can act in its true genius
and character; and therefore it will display just as much of its
collective virtue, and as much of that virtue which may characterize
those who move it, and are, as it were, its life and guiding principle,
as it is possessed of a just revenue. For from hence not only
magnanimity, and liberality, and beneficence, and fortitude, and
providence, and the tutelary protection of all good arts derive their
food, and the growth of their organs, but continence, and self-denial,
and labor, and vigilance, and frugality, and whatever else there is in
which the mind shows itself above the appetite, are nowhere more in
their proper element than in the provision and distribution of the
public wealth. It is therefore not without reason that the science of
speculative and practical finance, which must take to its aid so many
auxiliary branches of knowledge, stands high in the estimation not only
of the ordinary sort, but of the wisest and best men; and as this
science has grown with the progress of its object, the prosperity and
improvement of nations has generally increased with the increase of
their revenues; and they will both continue to grow and flourish as long
as the balance between what is left to strengthen the efforts of
individuals and what is collected for the common efforts of the state
bear to each other a due reciprocal proportion, and are kept in a close
correspondence and communication. And perhaps it may be owing to the
greatness of revenues, and to the urgency of state necessities, that old
abuses in the constitution of finances are discovered, and their true
nature and rational theory comes to be more perfectly understood;
insomuch that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in one
period than a far greater is found to be in another, the proportionate
wealth even remaining the same. In this state of things, the French
Assembly found something in their revenues to preserve, to secure, and
wisely to administer, as well as to abrogate and alter. Though their
proud assumption might justify the severest tests, yet, in trying their
abilities on their financial proceedings, I would only consider what is
the plain, obvious duty of a common finance minister, and try them upon
that, and not upon models of ideal perfection.
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to
impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it economically; and
when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its
foundations in that instance, and forever, by the clearness and candor
of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity
of his funds. On these heads we may take a short and distinct view of
the merits and abilities of those in the National Assembly who have
taken to themselves the management of this arduous concern.
Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by a report of
M. Vernier, from the Committee of Finances, of the second of August
last, that the amount of the national revenue, as compared with its
produce before the Revolution, was diminished by the sum of two hundred
millions, or _eight millions sterling_, of the annual
income,--considerably more than one third of the whole.
If this be the result of great ability, never surely was ability
displayed in a more distinguished manner or with so powerful an effect.
No common folly, no vulgar incapacity, no ordinary official negligence,
even no official crime, no corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct
hostility, which we have seen in the modern world, could in so short a
time have made so complete an overthrow of the finances, and, with them,
of the strength of a great kingdom.--_Cedo quî vestram rempublicam
tantam amisistis tam cito?_
The sophisters and declaimers, as soon as the Assembly met, began with
decrying the ancient constitution of the revenue in many of its most
essential branches, such as the public monopoly of salt. They charged
it, as truly as unwisely, with being ill-contrived, oppressive, and
partial. This representation they were not satisfied to make use of in
speeches preliminary to some plan of reform; they declared it in a
solemn resolution or public sentence, as it were judicially passed upon
it; and this they dispersed throughout the nation. At the time they
passed the decree, with the same gravity they ordered the same absurd,
oppressive, and partial tax to be paid, until they could find a revenue
to replace it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces which had
been always exempted from this salt monopoly, some of whom were charged
with other contributions, perhaps equivalent, were totally disinclined
to bear any part of the burden, which by an equal distribution was to
redeem the others. As to the Assembly, occupied as it was with the
declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with their
arrangements for general confusion, it had neither leisure nor capacity
to contrive, nor authority to enforce, any plan of any kind relative to
the replacing the tax, or equalizing it, or compensating the provinces,
or for conducting their minds to any scheme of accommodation with the
other districts which were to be relieved. The people of the salt
provinces, impatient under taxes damned by the authority which had
directed their payment, very soon found their patience exhausted. They
thought themselves as skilful in demolishing as the Assembly could be.
They relieved themselves by throwing off the whole burden. Animated by
this example, each district, or part of a district, judging of its own
grievance by its own feeling, and of its remedy by its own opinion, did
as it pleased with other taxes.