When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us;
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as
such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume
that on the whole their operation was beneficial.
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find
them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have
been produced and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than
that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are
connected with manners and with civilization, have in this European
world of ours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the
result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit
of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the
other by patronage, kept learning in existence even in the midst of arms
and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than
formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to
priesthood; and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by
furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their
indissoluble union and their proper place! Happy if learning, not
debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor,
and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and
guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under
the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing
to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as
much as they are worth. Even commerce and trade and manufacture, the
gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but
creatures; are themselves but effects, which as first causes we choose
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning
flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles.
With you, for the present at least, they threaten to disappear together.
Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of
nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always
ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the arts should be
lost in an experiment to try how well a State may stand without these
old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of
gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid
barbarians,--destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing
nothing at present and hoping for nothing hereafter?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that
horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of
conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the
Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal.
Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and
brutal.
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand and decorous
principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from
you, or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace
them best. You seem to me to be _gentis incunabula nostrae_. France has
always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your
fountain is choked up and polluted the stream will not run long, or not
run clear, with us or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe,
in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in
France. Excuse me therefore if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious
spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to
the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most
important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day,--I mean
a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now
stand, with everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt
to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to
apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of
his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse?
For this plain reason--because it is _natural_ I should; because we are
so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments
upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous
uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we
learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct
our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the
Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult
to the base and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the
moral as we should a miracle in the physical order of things. We are
alarmed into reflection; our minds (as it has long since been observed)
are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled
under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be
drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should
be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense
of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With
such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a
tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that
Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of
hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches
where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to
deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of
men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the
heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of
exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would
not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied
to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would
reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where
they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness
in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he
sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne
in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal
actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and after putting in
and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the
advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy
posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the
book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first
intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show
that this method of political computation would justify every extent of
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the very
worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of
the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery
and blood. They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are
soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through
the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for
public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and
perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear
more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.
Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these
triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because
truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other
words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth,
and because he had the misfortune to be born King of France, with the
prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence
of the people, without any act of his, had put him in possession. A
misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was born King of
France. But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the
greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose
whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects; who was
willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his
people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not desired, by their
ancestors: such a prince, though he should be subjected to the common
frailties attached to men and to princes, though he should have once
thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs
manifestly carrying on against his person and the remnants of his
authority,--though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall
be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and
insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of
liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of
humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But
there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that
they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who
know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their
subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of
a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches of
freedom. Against such as these they never elevate their voice. Deserters
from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in
suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could have been made clear to me that the King and Queen of France
(those I mean who were such before the triumph) were inexorable and
cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring
the National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter
insinuated in certain publications), I should think their captivity
just. If this be true, much more ought to have been done; but done, in
my opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble
and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be
consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king, I
should regard the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is grave and
decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity
than to make a choice. Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or
Charles the Ninth, been the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden
after the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina after the
murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, sir, or into mine, I
am sure our conduct would have been different.
If the French King, or King of the French (or by whatever name he is
known in the new vocabulary of your constitution), has in his own
person and that of his Queen really deserved these unavowed but
unavenged murderous attempts, and those frequent indignities more cruel
than murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate
executory trust which I understand is to be placed in him; nor is he fit
to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed. A
worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a
deposed tyrant could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a
man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your
highest concerns as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not
consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice.
Those who could make such an appointment must be guilty of a more
flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet committed against the
people. As this is the only crime in which your leading politicians
could have acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no sort of
ground for these horrid insinuations. I think no better of all the other
calumnies.
In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous enemies: we are
faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust and indignation the
slanders of those who bring us their anecdotes with the attestation of
the flower-de-luce on their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in
Newgate; and neither his being a public proselyte to Judaism, nor his
having, in his zeal against Catholic priests and all sorts of
ecclesiastics, raised a mob (excuse the term, it is still in use here)
which pulled down all our prisons, have preserved to him a liberty of
which he did not render himself worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have
rebuilt Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as
strong as the Bastile for those who dare to libel the Queens of France.
In this spiritual retreat let the noble libeler remain. Let him there
meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct more becoming his
birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which
he has become a proselyte; or until some persons from your side of the
water, to please your new Hebrew brethren, shall ransom him. He may then
be enabled to purchase, with the old hoards of the synagogue, and a very
small poundage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of
silver (Dr. Price has shown us what miracles compound interest will
perform in 1790 years), the lands which are lately discovered to have
been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your Popish Archbishop of
Paris, and we will send you our Protestant Rabbin. We shall treat the
person you send us in exchange like a gentleman and an honest man, as he
is; but pray let him bring with him the fund of his hospitality, bounty,
and charity; and depend upon it, we shall never confiscate a shilling of
that honorable and pious fund, nor think of enriching the treasury with
the spoils of the poor-box.
To tell you the truth, my dear sir, I think the honor of our nation to
be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the proceedings of this
society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern. I have no man's proxy. I
speak only for myself when I disclaim, as I do with all possible
earnestness, all communion with the actors in that triumph, or with the
admirers of it. When I assert anything else, as concerning the people of
England, I speak from observation, not from authority; but I speak from
the experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication
with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and
after a course of attentive observation begun early in life, and
continued for nearly forty years. I have often been astonished,
considering that we are divided from you but by a slender dike of about
twenty-four miles, and that the mutual intercourse between the two
countries has lately been very great, to find how little you seem to
know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of
this nation from certain publications which do very erroneously, if they
do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent
in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue
of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of
consequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of
each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their
abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions. No such
thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make
the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great
cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and
are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the
only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number;
or that after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.