[We rarely have two articles upon one subject in the same Number of the
Magazine, but we have no hesitation in publishing the two following
short papers upon the unhappy and singularly ill-timed attempt to
destroy the hereditary character of one branch of the Legislature. The
first paper is by an English, and the second by a Scotch lawyer.]
It is not, we hope, from any party feeling (though party feelings are,
as our readers know, entitled, in our view of things, to grave and deep
consideration), that we enter our protest against the measure of
creating peers for life,—a measure which its authors, unless they are
the most shortsighted men that ever presumed to meddle with great
questions, must know will end by changing the character of the House of
Lords, and which we really believe to be an attempt as rash as it is
uncalled for, and as little likely to conciliate the favour of any but
those who dislike a government by King, Lords, and Commons, as it is to
produce any one solid or permanent advantage. To those who think that
the English constitution—a constitution which has floated like an ark
over the waves which have swallowed up so many of those baseless fabrics
that were hailed by sciolists as the proudest efforts of
legislation—should be, we do not say repaired, and improved, and
fortified, but _overthrown_, to make room for “some gay creature of the
element” to people the sunbeam for a moment and then to disappear—we do
not address ourselves; for we could not hope to produce any effect by
reasoning upon those on whom the evidence of their senses is thrown
away. But we would ask such of our readers as do not belong to the class
we have just mentioned, calmly and dispassionately to examine with us
this important question—premising only that the Reform Bill was by no
means so serious and menacing a change in the constitution of the Lower,
as the creation of peers for life (if that disastrous measure is really
to be accomplished), will produce in the Upper House of Parliament. The
Reform Bill shuffled the cards; this measure will change the pack. It is
at once exotic and obsolete.
The question may be considered in two ways. First, Has the Crown the
power to make such a creation? Secondly, Supposing it to possess the
power, is such an exercise of it constitutional? With regard to the
first question, it is, even on the showing of its supporters, an
extremely doubtful one. “Rectissime illud receptum est, ut leges non
solum suffragio legislatoris sed etiam tacito consensu omnium per
desuetudinem abrogantur,” is a maxim embodied in the works of those
masters of jurisprudence, to whom alone, to use the words of one of
their most illustrious scholars, reason seems to have unveiled her
mysteries. Nor is the principle unknown to our municipal jurisprudence.
It was a law that every member of a city or borough should be chosen
from among the inhabitants of the place which he was selected to
represent. This law was abrogated by desuetude only. Many similar
instances might probably be found by any one who would examine our
ancient statutes. That custom is the best interpreter of written law is
an axiom of jurisprudence; and how much more forcibly does the argument
apply to unwritten law, to an obsolete prerogative raked from the dust
and cobwebs of feudal barbarity, and dragged forth “in luce asiæ” into
the meridian blaze of civilisation, to act upon the destinies of living
men. The revival of obsolete prerogatives was one great and just
complaint against the Government of Charles I. Lord Clarendon, his
ablest advocate, bewails the injudicious and violent measures that
unhappy monarch took in reviving the Forest Laws, and obliging gentlemen
of certain incomes to compound for knighthood. Had he attempted to strip
the peerage of its hereditary character, the outcry would have been
louder and more reasonable; for of course our argument applies only to
the case of conferring, by a peerage for life, a voice or seat in
Parliament. “The common law of England,” says a great lawyer and a great
thinker, “is nothing else but the common custom of the realm, and a
custom which has obtained the force of a law is always said to be ‘Jus
non scriptum.’ ... Being only matter of fact, and consisting in use and
practice, it can be RECORDED AND REGISTERED NOWHERE BUT IN THE MEMORY OF
THE PEOPLE.” Again the same eloquent writer says:—“A custom takes
beginning, and grows to perfection in this manner: When a reasonable act
once done is found to be good and beneficial to the people, and
agreeable to their nature and disposition, then do they use and practise
it again and again—and so, by often iteration and multiplication of the
act it becomes a custom; and being continued without interruption time
out of mind, it obtains the force of a law.” This is exactly the basis
on which the “rerum perpetuo similiter judicatarum auctoritas” must
rest, and exactly the reverse of that prerogative, by the sudden
exertion of which, after a lapse of four centuries, it is proposed to
give to any minister the power of swamping the House of Peers. What
would be said now if any one were to attempt to put on “the statute of
uses” the meaning which those by whom it was enacted undoubtedly meant
that it should have, and which was frustrated by the narrow decision, as
Mr Hallam calls it, of the Judges? If any man were insane enough to
attempt such an argument, would he not be silenced at once, and forfeit,
for the remainder of his life, all claim to the character of a rational
being? Would he not be told that, after the current of precedent had run
for centuries in one direction, after all the Estates in England had
been settled and disposed of on the faith of those precedents, it was
mere mischievous pedantry to question the validity of the original
interpretation? Now, the last time when the Crown gave the right of
voting in the House of Lords to any one who would not transmit the same
right to his children, to any one whose blood was not ennobled, was long
before the period when the statute of uses passed into a law. The four
or five cases cited to justify such a stretch of authority are taken
from times when the boundaries of the constitution fluctuated
incessantly,—when sometimes the king oppressed the barons, and sometimes
the barons destroyed the king,—when one encroached upon the other, as he
or they were uppermost in a series of victories and defeats equally
oppressive to the people, and equally inconsistent with all regular
government,—when the soil of England was drenched with the blood of the
yeoman, and the axe of the executioner was red with the blood of the
noble,—“in stormy and tempestuous times,” to use the language of a great
and upright magistrate, Chief-Justice Crew, “when the government was
unsettled, and the kingdom in competition,”—when Bohun, and Mowbray, and
Mortimer passed away—nay, when Plantagenet himself became a shadow and a
dream. Will any man say that this was a period when our constitution was
understood? that this is the time when its parts were adjusted to each
other?—when, though the noble outline of it might be discernible, its
lineaments were complete? At that time the Crown granted or withheld
writs to boroughs at its pleasure, and so moulded the House of Commons.
It summoned a man to take his seat in one Parliament and not in another,
and so modelled the House of Lords. But even of these cases, drawn from
those times of turbulence and confusion, while the elements of our
constitution were at war with each other, predominating or subsiding
with every capricious turn of fortune, one only has any bearing on the
question. For, as has been said before, the question is not one of
compliment or precedence; it does not relate to the power of the
sovereign to gratify a morbid and spurious appetite for vulgar notoriety
by a mongrel title, or to reward vice by flattering the abject vanity of
some frivolous prostitute; it relates to his power of giving a share in
the legislation of England without that guarantee for independence
which, during four hundred years, has been thought essential to its
exercise. Now, in the case of Sir John Cornewall, who was created Lord
Fauchope for life, the prerogative was exercised with the assent of the
House of Lords. There remains, therefore, the solitary case of Lord
Berners, in the reign of Henry VI.—a case that is extremely doubtful—to
justify this exercise of the prerogative in the year of grace 1856. If,
then, law is to be controlled or modified by usage—if the “lex et
consuetudo Parliamenti” are not to be put aside—it must be admitted
that, even in the absence of any negative argument, the right of the
Crown is extremely questionable, in spite of the dictum of Lord Coke,
and of the writers by whom he has been copied. Lord Coke, it may be
remembered, has fallen into acknowledged errors. He was wrong in
asserting that a justice of peace had no power of holding a person
accused of felony to bail. He was wrong in asserting that common law
ought to prevail against the express words of an Act of Parliament. But
there _are_ strong negative arguments. In Lord Purbeck’s case, which was
argued before the celebrated Lord Shaftesbury, who was certainly not
ignorant of the principles of the constitution, it was stated by the
Attorney-general that the king could create a peer for life. This
doctrine was at once questioned by Lord Shaftesbury; and in that opinion
Lord Nottingham, the creator of equity, though differing with him as to
the case immediately before him, acquiesced.
It is difficult for any one who weighs these arguments to resist the
conclusion at which Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Campbell, Lord St Leonard’s
and Lord Brougham—laying by on an occasion of such vast importance all
party differences and political hostility—have arrived, that an
instrument made four hundred years ago, before the constitution had been
made, before the disposition, occasions, circumstances, the moral,
civil, and social habits to which that noble fabric owes its existence
had disclosed themselves, cannot in the eye of reason justify a violent
change in the long-established, the peculiar, and the distinguishing
character of the House of Lords.
There is (_Parl. Hist._, vol. i. page 890) a remarkable case which has
never been cited, we believe, and which shows that the House of Lords
exercised the right of excluding an unworthy member from its
deliberations. It is the case of Lord De la Ware in the reign of Edward
VI. “He had attempted to poison his uncle, and was by an _order of
Parliament_ excluded from any estate or honour that might come to him
after his uncle’s death.” The precedent in favour of the Crown dates
from a period far more remote than this. If the Crown quote the
fifteenth century, why may not the House of Lords quote the sixteenth?
And it should be remarked that this is a prerogative which there must
have been constant motives for using, and the non-exertion of which,
therefore, furnishes a very cogent argument against its existence.
Harrington, in his _Oceana_, particularly censures Richard II. under the
name of Adoxus, for creating peers “who had hands to dip in the royal
purse, but no shoulders to support the throne.” We know what became of
that prince and his newly-made Caryatides. Our peers are not to perform
the functions Virgil assigned to our fathers—
“Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa Britanni.”
They are not to be courtiers, or geologists, or engineers, or builders
of crystal palaces, or presidents of councils of art, or even judges,
but _legislators_, mediators between the Crown and the people—an office
that may dignify the greatest abilities, and satisfy the most generous
ambition.
We come now to the second branch of the question, how far such a measure
can be considered constitutional,—meaning by that, how far it is in
conformity with the spirit and genius of that form of government to
which we owe, during so many ages, and during so many vicissitudes, the
tranquil possession of political freedom. Certainly the time chosen to
cut one of the strands of the cable of our anchor is a singular one.
Freedom, with the exception of the countries governed by the King of
Sardinia, has been overthrown or undermined in every part of the
continent of Europe. Nobody can doubt that a main cause to which the
present condition of France is to be attributed, is the want of a body
of hereditary legislators; the want, that is, of a powerful
aristocracy,—in other words, of a House of Lords. Nobody can doubt that
the forlorn troop of servile beggars distinguished throughout Germany by
the titles of Earl, and Baron, and Freihern, is a main reason why all
attempts to establish constitutional freedom in that country have only
served to illustrate the most ludicrous ignorance of human affairs,
coupled with the most abject tergiversation, and to drag to light
projects, compared with which the principles by which the Caffres are
governed may be considered luminous, and the whims of the politicians of
Laputa may pass for reasonable. We object to any scheme for Germanising
England. We should be sorry to see the influence of the Court, where we
now see other hopes and objects. We should be sorry to see the varied
elements of our social state crushed into one undistinguished mass of
servitude. Our universities have been tampered with; the next attempt is
on the House of Lords. It is the fashion to speak lightly of
representative government. “A weak man doth not well consider this, and
a fool doth not understand it.” The disgust and contempt felt throughout
France for the corruption and time-serving of the mongrel House of
Peers, consisting of misplaced men of letters, venal courtiers, affected
artists, hireling writers in the daily press, shallow coxcombs, and a
few besides of illustrious names—the last scattered like the nails in a
wall over a wide blank surface—account for the sympathy with which all
reasonable men hailed its annihilation. Such an institution as our House
of Lords may be destroyed, but cannot be created; and with these
examples staring us in the face, and loudly forbidding the attempt, in
defiance of reason and of experience, in contradiction to the sound
feelings of the nation, an old prerogative that has, “like unscoured
armour, hung by the wall so long,” that the announcement of its
existence may furnish a question perhaps for the amusement of
antiquaries of much leisure and little thought, but which, to all real
purposes, has become as obsolete as writing pure English—is made the
instrument of changing, at the will of the Sovereign, a fundamental part
of our constitution. This is done, too, during a war, when great
political alterations are usually suspended, as if it were the merest
trifle, not worth attention or debate, amounting to nothing more than,
and quite as much of course as, the appointment of some commission to
recommend the maintenance of all the wretched chicane by which the
course of justice in England has been so long impeded. Some knowledge of
the constitution which he proposes so presumptuously to violate, some
little acquaintance with the great writers who have dwelt upon its
excellences, and held them up to the gratitude of posterity, would be a
useful ingredient in the composition of a Chancellor. Some knowledge of
history (we mean of course English history) might, on the eve of so
perilous an undertaking, be found serviceable to the lawyer who
(whatever be the mysterious influence under which he acts, and no doubt
in perfect unconsciousness) sets himself to work to pull down in cold
blood, and with the blandest countenance, one of the safeguards of our
liberties. For, with deference to such authority, we look upon the
privileges of the Peers as conferred upon them for the public good. To
suppose them given or kept for any other purpose, would be a narrow and
unworthy view. If they are inconsistent with that object, they cannot be
swept away too soon. If they contribute to it, they cannot be too
religiously preserved. For four hundred years, during which the parts of
our balanced government have been made to harmonise with and give mutual
aid to each other, the deliberate opinion of ages and generations in
this country has been in favour of their existence. It is a fair
inference that all these writers, historians, and statesmen, have not
been wholly destitute of political sagacity, or in a conspiracy to
promote abuse. It is a fair inference that a measure which Lord Grey
repudiated, which Mr Pitt would not hear of, which Mr Fox would have
scouted with every expression of scorn that his vehement nature could
have found in his copious vocabulary, is a rash and unconstitutional
experiment. But we know what the class (unfortunately it is a numerous
one) is who “rush in where angels fear to tread;” we know, too, that the
gloom which enveloped these great statesmen has been dissipated by the
light which has flashed with such marvellous lustre upon my Lord
Cranworth. It is hard upon this land that admitted mediocrity should be
no safeguard against reckless extravagance. If, in the days when the
wild hurricane of Reform was sweeping over us, some man of an irregular
but powerful intellect had, in a moment of irritation and
disappointment, suggested such a measure, we should have consoled
ourselves by reflecting that inundations atone for the mischief they
inflict by the fertility they occasion. We should have accepted the
benefit, and been on our guard against the evil. But when a grave
commonplace sober gentleman, decent to a fault, by no means of an ardent
or romantic disposition, misled by no passions, carried astray by no
impetuosity, not intoxicated by learning, carefully and effectually
guarded by provident nature against the dangers to which genius is
exposed when such a person reverses the famous line, and in a paroxysm
of impotence, raging without strength, and overflowing without
fulness—“precipitately dull” and dispassionately mischievous—mimics the
freaks and caprices for which inspiration only can atone, Heraclitus
might laugh at his distempered activity, and Democritus weep for the
fate of the country in which he legislates. The line—
“Ut lethargicus hic, cum fit pugil et medicum urget,”
describes him. There is no hope, says an acute writer, for the lover of
an ugly woman. There is as little for those who suffer by the
absurdities of a commonplace man. “Whenever you commit an error, Mr
Foresight,” says the wit in _Love for Love_, “you do it with a great
deal of prudence and discretion, and consideration.”
It should be recollected that there are many prerogatives of the Crown
which, if exercised injudiciously—that is, unconstitutionally—would soon
become intolerable. The Crown has the undoubted power of making peace or
war; but if Ministers were to agree that York should be occupied by a
Russian garrison for ten years, or that we should pay a tribute to
Russia for that time, would it be any argument in favour of such clauses
that the Crown had only exercised its undoubted prerogative? The Crown
has the power of pardoning offenders; would that justify the pardon of
every offender as soon as he is convicted? Many persons think that the
Crown has never lost the power which it once most unquestionably
possessed, of raising the denomination of the coin; is there any maniac,
even among the worshippers of Ruskin, who would counsel such an
experiment? The prerogatives of the Crown, even when most
unquestionable, must be exercised in conformity with the spirit of the
constitution. It is the peculiar character of our constitution that it
contains within it the three great principles of monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy, blended together so intimately, yet perhaps so
inexplicably, that the Crown has no strength, except in connection with
the aristocracy and the people: the aristocracy is nothing when opposed
to the Crown and the people; and the people have little power, if
abandoned by the aristocracy and the Crown. Fortunate indeed have been
the circumstances which enabled our fathers to complete this mysterious
union. The strength of our system is its harmony. Take away the beauty
of its proportions, and its energies are at an end. That amazing system,
the work not of giddy choice and tumultuous violence, but of the “author
of authors,” Time, with enough military vigour for war, with enough
civil influence to make military power in time of peace impracticable,
with the checks apparently so hostile, in reality so much in unison, as
to make it the most perfect moral machine that ever was contrived to
perpetuate freedom among a people—would be violated and destroyed by any
such organic innovation.
What promises can exceed its performance? And it is this which, for the
sake of putting a special pleader among the Law Lords, or of satisfying
the vulgar ambition of a few discontented men, ignorant of their proper
sphere, we are about to put in jeopardy. Does any man think that the
power of the Crown is too little in the House of Lords? Is not the
reverse notoriously the truth? Is not the influence of the Crown over
the Bishops, who are not Peers but Lords of Parliament, matter of just
complaint? Would not the power of the Crown be increased by creating
Peers for life? Would it not, especially in a country where a vulgar
appetite for technical rank is but too conspicuous, increase the number
of those who would gain by subserviency to the Crown in that assembly?
If you suddenly shift the ballast, your vessel will soon be under water—
“Quamvis pontica pinus
Sylvæ, filia nobilis
Jactes et genus et nomen inutile.”
On the other hand, if the creation of life-peers would give too much
influence to the Crown, beyond all doubt it would give a most invidious
distinction to those already ennobled families, among whom the son of
the mechanic may now hope to take his place. It would tend to make them
a separate caste, cut off (we speak of what must happen in less than a
century) from the sympathies of their fellow-citizens. Such a state of
things could not long continue.
It is but too deeply rooted in the nature of man to press social
distinctions too far, and insist on them too much. And could anything be
devised to swell the pride of a hereditary Peer more effectually than
the sight of upstart counterfeits, bearing the same title with himself,
but distinguished, nevertheless, by an everlasting badge of inferiority?
The classes and professions from which such peers were taken would share
in their degradation, and in the hostility which it would inspire—
“Touch them with several fortunes,
The greater scorns the lesser....
Raise me this beggar, and deny’t that lord—
The senator shall bear _contempt hereditary_.”
Much, no doubt, may be said about the dangers and evils of unworthy
successors to great names. Taken separately, such arguments are
powerful; taken with reference to a collective body, they are weak. The
question is—on which side does the balance of good preponderate? Along
with many evils, and great tendencies to abuse, there are many
advantages in hereditary honour. A true natural aristocracy is an
essential part of any large body rightly constituted. “It is formed out
of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities,
must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation;
to see nothing low or sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect
one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public
eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground
as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely
diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have
leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the
court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be
found; to be habituated in armies to command and obey; to be taught to
despise danger in pursuit of honour and of duty; to be formed to the
greater degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection in a state of
things where no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest
mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded
and regulated conduct from a sense that you are considered an instructor
of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns; to be employed as an
administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby among the first
benefactors, to mankind;”—such is Mr Burke’s argument in favour of a
hereditary aristocracy. As a sole or even a predominating element, it
degenerates into an insolent domination; as an ingredient, tempered,
controlled, and subdued by others, it has, in our opinion, a dignified
and refining influence. And here we may remark, that almost the sole
barrier to despotic power in France for many years was the firmness and
integrity of its parliaments, which were in fact, though not in name, an
hereditary aristocracy. Let any one compare the proceedings of that body
with those of Louis Philippe’s peers, and then say on which side the
balance of good predominates. The cautious and traditional wisdom of
those great bodies interposed often between the people and their
oppressors. Machiavelli speaks of them with admiration and respect; and
their functions were well expressed by a First President of the
parliament of Provence, when he said to the king, whom he
resisted—“Souffrez, sire, qu’ avec peine, haine, et envie nous
défendions votre autorité.” One of the worst acts of a bad reign was to
substitute for this great aristocracy, which, with all its faults, had
done great services to its country—holding the mean “inter abruptam
contumaciam et deforme obsequium” with singular judgment—a set of
political adventurers, called the Parliament Maupeou, many of them the
mere creatures of the court and Madame Dubarri, and nevertheless
welcomed to their new office by the approbation of the shallow conceited
writers of the day. The pretext was a better administration of
justice—“Le préambule s’exprimait dans un langage que n’eussent pas
désavoué les philosophes sur la nécessité de _réformer les abus dans
l’administration de la justice_.” “Absit omen!” Then purity of justice
was the pretext of a tyrant; now it is that of a few sottish and
purblind democrats. The result in France is known to every one who has
read Beaumarchais, who in his celebrated Mémoires branded the turpitude
and gross corruption of this newly constituted body with ineffaceable
infamy. Then France began to see the difference between the minions of a
court and a hereditary assembly, between the d’Aguesseaus, and the
Goezmans, who were in their place; and in spite of Voltaire, they agreed
with Mabli, that the old parliament was better than the “Parlement
Postiche.” To this fact we will add the prophetic remark of Montesquieu,
“Le pouvoir intermédiaire subordonné le plus naturel est celui de la
noblesse; elle entre en quelque façon dans l’essence de la monarchie,
dont la maxime fondamentale est, Point de monarque, point de
noblesse—point de noblesse, point de monarque—_mais on a un despote_!”
Is there no danger that, if the House of Lords is lowered, the House of
Commons may ruin itself by its own excessive power?
The question, however, now is, not whether you will establish a
hereditary peerage, but whether you will take away from it its
stability?—it is not, whether you will abolish the House of Lords, but
whether you will run the risk of polluting it by time-servers? Have
there been no times in our history when the exercise of such a
prerogative as is now claimed for the Crown would have been most
dangerous? If James II. had imagined that such authority belonged to
him, can any man doubt that he would have filled the House of Lords, as
he did the bench of justice, with his Roman Catholic dependants? Is
there not reason to believe that, as each party predominates, it will
flood the House of Lords with these creatures of a day, to confirm its
own ascendancy? Would the minister who created at once twelve peers to
ratify the Peace of Utrecht have been satisfied with so limited a
number, if so convenient a method as has now been discovered had
presented itself to him? If peerage for life had been created, or even
if the Lords had been menaced with such a measure, the motion for taking
the Address into consideration, on the 23d Nov. 1685, would never have
been carried without a division; nor would the dignified and manly
language held in that House have offered so striking a contrast to the
pitiful and abject tone and demeanour of the subservient House of
Commons. As it was, Lord Sunderland is reported to have said that, to
carry the measures of the Court, he would make Lord Churchill’s troop of
guards peers. But he recoiled, base as he was, from such an attempt; and
are we to legislate on the conviction that we shall never again have a
bad king and an unscrupulous ministry, and that the firmness and
independence of the House of Lords can never again be of any service to
the constitution? Can we foretell that there may not be other battles to
be fought, and other victories to be won? The attempt to make the
hereditary peers a caste by another Lord Sunderland, was baffled in the
reign of George the First; we trust that an attempt, which must have the
same effect if it succeeds, and which must, moreover, strengthen the
influence of the Crown, among a body where it needs no strengthening,
will not prosper in the reign of Queen Victoria. To change the relations
of the several parts of the constitution to each other, is to make the
lessons of history, purchased as they have been with the best blood of
our fathers, unavailing. The character of the House of Lords is, that
the honours of those who sit and vote in it are hereditary. It is so
described by Whigs and Tories, by lawyers and historians. It is in
consequence of that character that it has filled a wide space in
history, and that it is supported by a thousand time-hallowed
associations. Fill it with the nominees of a minister, it will no longer
serve to interpose any obstacle to the inconsiderate legislation which
an impetuous democracy is sometimes rash enough to insist upon. It may
serve to gratify the vanity of women, or of men as little fitted as
women to control the destinies of nations; it may provoke hostility by
distinctions, invidious when they are manifestly useless; it may even
register the edicts which it will be unable to dispute: but its genuine
functions will be gone for ever; and if ever the time should come when
its energies are required to serve either Crown or people, they will be
of as little account as those of the French Chamber of Peers in the hour
of trial, and of as little benefit to themselves and to their country.
Why, then, should we unhinge the state, ruin the House of Lords, and
pursue confusion, to guard against an evil which, if it exists at all,
may be encountered by a far more specific and appropriate remedy? Wise,
indeed, should he be who should endeavour to recast a constitution which
has defended us alike from the unjust aggression of power, and the
capricious tyranny of the multitude. But if our rulers are weak, and our
councils infatuated, in the words of an old writer, we can only pray
that the Lord will enable us to suffer, what He by miracle only can
prevent.