The present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things
preeminently wicked, _sensu politico_, in their conduct upon this Reform
Bill. First, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the
material and mode of action of the government of the country by so
exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the
numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of
discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded.
In doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which
may he applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any
measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive
in its consequences. They have appealed directly to the argument of the
greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or
sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their
power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of
interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation
of individuals. And they have done all this without one word of
thankfulness to God for the manifold blessings of which the constitution
as settled at the Revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source
or vehicle or condition to this great nation,--without one honest
statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or
any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which
those anomalies have met. With no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like
Ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar
mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become
them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to
have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon
his destitution!
Secondly, they have made the _king_ the prime mover in all this political
wickedness: they have made the _king_ tell his people that they were
deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that
they and their ancestors for a century past had been slaves: they have made
the king vilify the memory of his own brother and father. Rights! There are
no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the
growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon
any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an
abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our
parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man. No!
they were too wise for that. They took good care to refer their claims to
custom and prescription, and boldly--sometimes very impudently--asserted
them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. The Bill is bad enough,
God knows; but the arguments of its advocates, and the manner of their
advocacy, are a thousand times worse than the Bill itself; and you will
live to think so.
I am far, very far, from wishing to indulge in any vulgar abuse of the
vulgar. I believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in most cases, be
in favour of something good; but this it is which I perceive, that they are
always under the domination of some one feeling or view;--whereas truth,
and, above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide
comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counter-
balance.
_December_ 3. 1831.