SOUTHEY’S COLLOQUIES

(Jan, 1830) _Sir Thomas More; or, colloquies on the Progress and

Prospects of Society. By ROBERT SOUTHEY Esq., LL.D., Poet Laureate. 2

vols. 8vo. London: 1829._

|IT would be scarcely possible for a man of Mr. Southey’s talents and

acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which

should be wholly destitute of information and amusement. Yet we do not

remember to have read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity

of matter, written by any man of real abilities. We have, for some time

past, observed with great regret the strange infatuation which leads

the Poet Laureate to abandon those departments of literature in which he

might excel, and to lecture the public on sciences of which he has still

the very alphabet to learn. He has now, we think, done his worst. The

subject which he has at last undertaken to treat, is one which demands

all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a philosophical

statesman, an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, a heart

at once upright and charitable. Mr. Southey brings to the task two

faculties which were never, we believe, vouchsafed in measure so copious

to any human being, the faculty of believing without a reason, and the

faculty of hating without a provocation.

It is, indeed, most extraordinary, that a mind like Mr. Southey’s, a

mind richly endowed in many respects by nature, and highly cultivated

by study, a mind which has exercised considerable influence on the most

enlightened generation of the most enlightened people that ever existed,

should be utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from

falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the

fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or

a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or

a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of

associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and

what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes.

Some of this description might perhaps apply to a much greater man,

Mr. Burke. But Mr. Burke assuredly possessed an understanding admirably

fitted for the investigation of truth, an understanding stronger than

that of any statesman, active or speculative, of the eighteenth century,

stronger than everything, except his own fierce and ungovernable

sensibility. Hence he generally chose his side like a fanatic, and

defended it like a philosopher. His conduct on the most important

occasions of his life, at the time of the impeachment of Hastings for

example, and at the time of the French Revolution, seems to have been

prompted by those feelings and motives which Mr. Coleridge has so

happily described,=

```“Stormy pity, and the cherish’d lure

```Of pomp, and proud precipitance of soul.”=

Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite

swarms of dusky population, its long-descended dynasties, its stately

etiquette, excited in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so

susceptible, the most intense interest. The peculiarities of the

costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the very mystery which hung

over the language and origin of the people, seized his imagination. To

plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name of the

English people, at the bar of the English nobles for great nations and

kings separated from him by half the world, seemed to him the height of

human glory. Again, it is not difficult to perceive that his hostility

to the French Revolution principally arose from the vexation which he

felt at having all his old political associations disturbed, at seeing

the well-known landmarks of states obliterated, and the names and

distinctions with which the history of Europe had been filled for ages

at once swept away. He felt like an antiquary whose shield had been

scoured, or a connoisseur who found his Titian retouched. But, however

he came by an opinion, he had no sooner got it than he did his best

to make out a legitimate title to it. His reason, like a spirit in the

service of an enchanter, though spell-bound, was still mighty. It did

whatever work his passions and his imagination might impose. But it did

that work, however arduous, with marvellous dexterity and vigour. His

course was not determined by argument; but he could defend the wildest

course by arguments more plausible than those by which common men

support opinions which they have adopted after the fullest deliberation.

Reason has scarcely ever displayed, even in those well-constituted minds

of which she occupies the throne, so much power and energy as in the

lowest offices of that imperial servitude.

Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either

leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to

know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never

troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never

occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account

of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it

is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that

there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour

does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly

foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions

cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to

settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with

something more convincing than “scoundrel” and “blockhead.”

It would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political

instruction. The utmost that can be expected from any system promulgated

by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest

sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere

day-dream, a poetical creation, like the Doindaniel cavern, the Swerga,

or Padalon; and indeed it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those

gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something, of invention, grandeur,

and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant,

and perpetually violates even that conventional probability which is

essential to the effect of works of art.

The warmest admirers of Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that

his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree

in which his undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken

in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes

indeed, among which the Vision of Judgement must be classed, are, for

the most part, worse than Pye’s and as bad as Cibber’s; nor do we think

him generally happy in short pieces. But his longer poems, though full

of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions. We doubt

greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but that, if they

are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever.

But, though in general we prefer Mr. Southey’s poetry to his prose, we

must make one exception. The Life of Nelson is, beyond all doubt, the

most perfect and the most delightful of his works. The fact is, as

his poems most abundantly prove, that he is by no means so skilful in

designing as in filling up. It was therefore an advantage to him to be

furnished with an outline of characters and events, and to have no other

task to perform than that of touching the cold sketch into life. No

writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely qualified him to

write the history of the great naval warrior. There were no fine riddles

of the human heart to read, no theories to propound, no hidden causes

to develop, no remote consequences to predict. The character of the hero

lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque. The

necessity of adhering to the real course of events saved Mr. Southey

from those faults which deform the original plan of almost every one of

his poems, and which even his innumerable beauties of detail scarcely

redeem. The subject did not require the exercise of those reasoning

powers the want of which is the blemish of his prose. It would not be

easy to find, in all literary history, an instance of a more exact hit

between wind and water. John Wesley and the Peninsular War were subjects

of a very different kind, subjects which required all the qualities of a

philosophic historian. In Mr. Southey’s works on these subjects, he has,

on the whole, failed. Yet there are charming specimens of the art

of narration in both of them. The Life of Wesley will probably live.

Defective as it is, it contains the only popular account of a most

remarkable moral revolution, and of a man whose eloquence and logical

acuteness might have made him eminent in literature, whose genius for

government was not inferior to that of Richelieu, and who, whatever his

errors may have been, devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy

and derision, to what he sincerely considered as the highest good of his

species. The History of the Peninsular War is already dead; indeed,

the second volume was dead-born. The glory of producing an imperishable

record of that great conflict seems to be reserved for Colonel Napier.

The Book of the Church contains some stories very prettily told. The

rest is mere rubbish. The adventure was manifestly one which could be

achieved only by a profound thinker, and one in which even a profound

thinker might have failed, unless his passions had been kept under

strict control. But in all those works in which Mr. Southey has

completely abandoned narration, and has undertaken to argue moral and

political questions, his failure has been complete and ignominious. On

such occasions his writings are rescued from utter contempt and derision

solely by the beauty and purity of the English. We find, we confess,

so great a charm in Mr. Southey’s style, that, even when he writes

nonsense, we generally read it with pleasure except indeed when he tries

to be droll. A more insufferable jester never existed. He very often

attempts to be humorous, and yet we do not remember a single occasion on

which he has succeeded further than to be quaintly and flippantly dull.

In one of his works he tells us that Bishop Sprat was very properly so

called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before

us he cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker, without a remark

on his unsavoury name. A wise man might talk folly like this by his

own fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke,

should write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer,

and correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is

enough to make us ashamed of our species.

The extraordinary bitterness of spirit which Mr. Southey manifests

towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed

to the manner in which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it

has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences

on points of science. But this is not all. A peculiar austerity marks

almost all Mr. Southey’s judgments of men and actions. We are far from

blaming him for fixing on a high standard of morals, and for applying

that standard to every case. But rigour ought to be accompanied

by discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey seems to be utterly

destitute. His mode of judging is monkish. It is exactly what we should

expect from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many

ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation. No man out of a

cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same

time me so grossly. His descriptions of it are just what we should

hear from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the

confessional. Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or

like cattle. He seems to have no notion of anything between the Platonic

passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his mistress’s

leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick. In Roderick,

indeed, the two characters are united. He is first all clay, and then

all spirit. He goes forth a Tarquin, and comes back too ethereal to

be married. The only love scene, as far as we can recollect, in Madoc,

consists of the delicate attentions which a savage, who has drunk too

much of the Prince’s excellent metheglin, offers to Goervyl. It would

be the labour of a week to find, in all the vast mass of Mr. Southey’s

poetry, a single passage indicating any sympathy with those feelings

which have consecrated the shades of Vaucluse and the rocks of

Meillerie.

Indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness

and filial duty, there is scarcely anything soft or humane in Mr.

Southey’s poetry. What theologians call the spiritual sins are his

cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and the insatiable thirst of vengeance.

These passions he disguises under the name of duties; he purifies them

from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them by uniting them

with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he then

holds them up to the admiration of mankind. This is the spirit of

Thalaba, of Ladurlad, of Adosinda, of Roderick after his conversion. It

is the spirit which, in all his writings, Mr. Southey appears to affect.

“I do well to be angry,” seems to be the predominant feeling of his

mind. Almost the only mark of charity which he vouchsafes to his

opponents is to pray for their reformation; and this he does in terms

not unlike those in which we can imagine a Portuguese priest interceding

with Heaven for a Jew, delivered over to the secular arm after a

relapse.

We have always heard, and fully believe, that Mr. Southey is a very

amiable and humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him personally any

of the remarks which we have made on the spirit of his writings. Such

are the caprices of human nature. Even Uncle Toby troubled himself very

little about the French grenadiers who fell on the glacis of Namur. And

Mr. Southey, when he takes up his pen, changes his nature as much as

Captain Shandy when he girt on his sword. The only opponents to whom the

Laureate gives quarter are those in whom he finds something of his own

character reflected. He seems to have an instinctive antipathy for calm,

moderate men, for men who shun extremes, and who render reasons. He has

treated Mr. Owen of Lanark, for example, with infinitely more respect

than he has shown to Mr. Hallam or to Dr. Lingard; and this for no

reason that we can discover, except that Mr. Owen is more unreasonably

and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time.

Mr. Southey’s political system is just what we might expect from a man

who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste

and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with

themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his

preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic

Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with

vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of

the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that

theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for

libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if

necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these

are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and

gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling

the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something

of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in

the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has

no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his

system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of

religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces

the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving

that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny

and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have

shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.

It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration

of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed,

illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr.

Southey’s writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author,

notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to

the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure

that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and

because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected

that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr.

Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a

great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure

which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each

other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would

have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of

political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe,

contriving constantly to “ride with darkness.” Wherever the thickest

shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr.

Southey. It is not everybody who could have so dexterously avoided

blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

Mr. Southey has not been fortunate in the plan of any of his fictitious

narratives. But he has never failed so conspicuously as in the work

before us; except, indeed, in the wretched Vision of Judgement. In

November 1817, it seems the Laureate was sitting over his newspaper, and

meditating about the death of the Princess Charlotte. An elderly person

of very dignified aspect makes his appearance, announces himself as a

stranger from a distant country, and apologises very politely for

not having provided himself with letters of introduction. Mr. Southey

supposes his visitor to be some American gentleman who has come to see

the lakes and the lake-poets, and accordingly proceeds to perform, with

that grace, which only long practice can give, all the duties which

authors owe to starers. He assures his guest that some of the most

agreeable visits which he has received have been from Americans, and

that he knows men among them whose talents and virtues would do honour

to any country. In passing we may observe, to the honour of Mr. Southey,

that, though he evidently has no liking for the American institutions,

he never speaks of the people of the United States with that pitiful

affectation of contempt by which some members of his party have done

more than wars or tariffs can do to excite mutual enmity between two

communities formed for mutual fellowship. Great as the faults of his

mind are, paltry spite like this has no place in it. Indeed it is

scarcely conceivable that a man of his sensibility and his imagination

should look without pleasure and national pride on the vigorous and

splendid youth of a great people, whose veins are filled with our blood,

whose minds are nourished with our literature, and on whom is entailed

the rich inheritance of our civilisation, our freedom, and our glory.

But we must return to Mr. Southey’s study at Keswick. The visitor

informs the hospitable poet that he is not an American but a spirit. Mr.

Southey, with more frankness than civility, tells him that he is a very

queer one. The stranger holds out his hand. It has neither weight nor

substance. Mr. Southey upon this becomes more serious; his hair stands

on end; and he adjures the spectre to tell him what he is, and why

he comes. The ghost turns out to be Sir Thomas More. The traces of

martyrdom, it seems, are worn in the other world, as stars and ribands

are worn in this. Sir Thomas shows the poet a red streak round his

neck, brighter than a ruby, and informs him that Cranmer wears a suit

of flames in Paradise, the right hand glove, we suppose, of peculiar

brilliancy.

Sir Thomas pays but a short visit on this occasion, but promises to

cultivate the new acquaintance which he has formed, and, after begging

that his visit may be kept secret from Mrs. Southey, vanishes into air.

The rest of the book consists of conversations between Mr. Southey and

the spirit about trade, currency, Catholic emancipation, periodical

literature, female nunneries, butchers, snuff, bookstalls, and a hundred

other subjects. Mr. Southey very hospitably takes an opportunity to

escort the ghost round the lakes, and directs his attention to the most

beautiful points of view. Why a spirit was to be evoked for the purpose

of talking over such matters and seeing such sights, why the vicar of

the parish, a blue-stocking from London, or an American, such as Mr.

Southey at first supposed the aerial visitor to be, might not have done

as well, we are unable to conceive. Sir Thomas tells Mr. Southey nothing

about future events, and indeed absolutely disclaims the gifts of

prescience. He has learned to talk modern English. He has read all the

new publications, and loves a jest as well as when he jested with

the executioner, though we cannot say that the quality of his wit has

materially improved in Paradise. His powers of reasoning, too, are by no

means in as great vigour as when he sate on the woolsack; and though

he boasts that he is “divested of all those passions which cloud the

intellects and warp the understandings of men,” we think him, we must

confess, far less stoical than formerly. As to revelations, he tells Mr.

Southey at the outset to expect none from him. The Laureate expresses

some doubts, which assuredly will not raise him in the opinion of our

modern millennarians, as to the divine authority of the Apocalypse. But

the ghost preserves an impenetrable silence. As far as we remember, only

one hint about the employment of disembodied spirits escapes him. He

encourages Mr. Southey to hope that there is a Paradise Press, at

which all the valuable publications of Mr. Murray and Mr. Colburn are

reprinted as regularly as at Philadelphia; and delicately insinuates

that Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama are among the number. What a

contrast does this absurd fiction present to those charming narratives

which Plato and Cicero prefixed to their dialogues! What cost in

machinery, yet what poverty of effect! A ghost brought in to say what

any man might have said! The glorified spirit of a great statesman and

philosopher dawdling, like a bilious old nabob at a watering-place,

over quarterly reviews and novels, dropping in to pay long calls, making

excursions in search of the picturesque! The scene of St. George and St.

Dennis in the Pucelle is hardly more ridiculous. We know what Voltaire

meant. Nobody, however, can suppose that Mr. Southey means to make game

of the mysteries of a higher state of existence. The fact is that, in

the work before us, in the Vision of Judgement, and in some of his other

pieces, his mode of treating the most solemn subjects differs from

that of open scoffers only as the extravagant representations of sacred

persons and things in some grotesque Italian paintings differ from the

caricatures which Carlile exposes in the front of his shop. We interpret

the particular act by the general character. What in the window of

a convicted blasphemer we call blasphemous, we call only absurd and

ill-judged in an altar-piece.

We now come to the conversations which pass between Mr. Southey and Sir

Thomas More, or rather between two Southeys, equally eloquent, equally

angry, equally unreasonable, and equally given to talking about what

they do not understand. [A passage in which some expressions used by Mr.

Southey were misrepresented, certainly without any unfair intention, has

been here omitted.] Perhaps we could not select a better instance of

the spirit which pervades the whole book than the passages in which Mr.

Southey gives his opinion of the manufacturing system. There is nothing

which he hates so bitterly. It is, according to him, a system more

tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual servitude, a

system which destroys the bodies and degrades the minds of those who are

engaged in it. He expresses a hope that the competition of other nations

may drive us out of the field; that our foreign trade may decline; and

that we may thus enjoy a restoration of national sanity and strength.

But he seems to think that the extermination of the whole manufacturing

population would be a blessing, if the evil could be removed in no other

way.

Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these

views; and, as it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very

different conclusion. In the first place, the poor-rate is very

decidedly lower in the manufacturing than in the agricultural districts.

If Mr. Southey will look over the Parliamentary returns on this subject,

he will find that the amount of parochial relief required by the

labourers in the different counties of England is almost exactly in

inverse proportion to the degree in which the manufacturing system has

been introduced into those counties. The returns for the years ending in

March 1825, and in March 1828, are now before us. In the former year we

find the poor-rate highest in Sussex, about twenty shillings to every

inhabitant. Then come Buckinghamshire, Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire,

Huntingdonshire, Kent, and Norfolk. In all these the rate is above

fifteen shillings a head. We will not go through the whole. Even in

Westmoreland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, the rate is at more than

eight shillings. In Cumberland and Monmouthshire, the most fortunate of

all the agricultural districts, it is at six shillings. But in the West

Riding of Yorkshire, it is as low as five shillings; and when we come

to Lancashire, we find it at four shillings, one-fifth of what it is in

Sussex. The returns of the year ending in March 1828 are a little,

and but a little, more unfavourable to the manufacturing districts.

Lancashire, even in that season of distress, required a smaller

poor-rate than any other district, and little more than one-fourth of

the poor-rate raised in Sussex. Cumberland alone, of the agricultural

districts, was as well off as the West Riding of Yorkshire. These facts

seem to indicate that the manufacturer is both in a more comfortable and

in a less dependent situation than the agricultural labourer.

As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we

must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a

mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey, the proportion of births and

deaths. We know that, during the growth of this atrocious system, this

new misery, to use the phrases of Mr. Southey, this new enormity, this

birth of a portentous age, this pest which no man can approve whose

heart is not scared or whose understanding has not been darkened, there

has been a great diminution of mortality, and that this diminution

has been greater in the manufacturing towns than anywhere else. The

mortality still is, as it always was, greater in towns than in the

country. But the difference has diminished in an extraordinary degree.

There is the best reason to believe that the annual mortality

of Manchester, about the middle of the last century, was one in

twenty-eight. It is now reckoned at one in forty-five. In Glasgow and

Leeds a similar improvement has taken place. Nay, the rate of mortality

in those three great capitals of the manufacturing districts is now

considerably less than it was, fifty years ago, over England and Wales,

taken together, open country and all. We might with some plausibility

maintain that the people live longer because they are better fed, better

lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and that these

improvements are owing to that increase of national wealth which the

manufacturing system has produced.

Much more might be said on this subject. But to what end? It is not from

bills of mortality and statistical tables that Mr. Southey has learned

his political creed. He cannot stoop to study the history of the system

which he abuses, to strike the balance between the good and evil which

it has produced, to compare district with district, or generation with

generation. We will give his own reason for his opinion, the only reason

which he gives for it, in his own words:--

“We remained a while in silence looking upon the assemblage of dwellings

below. Here, and in the adjoining hamlet of Millbeck, the effects

of manufactures and of agriculture may be seen and compared. The

old cottages are such as the poet and the painter equally delight in

beholding. Substantially built of the native stone without mortar,

dirtied with no white lime, and their long low roofs covered with slate,

if they had been raised by the magic of some indigenous Amphion’s music,

the materials could not have adjusted themselves more beautifully in

accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further harmonized

them with weather stains, lichens, and moss, short grasses, and short

fern, and stone-plants of various kinds. The ornamented chimneys, round

or square, less adorned than those which, like little turrets, crest the

houses of the Portuguese peasantry; and yet not less happily suited to

their place, the hedge of clipt box beneath the windows, the rose-bushes

beside the door, the little patch of flower-ground, with its tall

hollyhocks in front; the garden beside, the bee-hives, and the orchard

with its bank of daffodils and snow-drops, the earliest and the

profusest in these parts, indicate in the owners some portion of ease

and leisure, some regard to neatness and comfort, some sense of

natural, and innocent, and healthful enjoyment. The new cottages of the

manufacturers are upon the manufacturing pattern--naked, and in a row.

“‘How is it,’ said I, ‘that everything which is connected with

manufactures presents such features of unqualified deformity? From

the largest of Mammon’s temples down to the poorest hovel in which his

helotry are stalled, these edifices have all one character. Time will

not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they

will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind.’”

Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be

governed. Rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and

independence. Mortality and cottages with weather-stains, rather than

health and long life with edifices which time cannot mellow. We are

told, that our age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our

fathers; that society has been brought into a state compared with which

extermination would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings of

cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular. Mr. Southey has found out a

way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture

may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at

a cottage and a factory, and to see which is the prettier. Does Mr.

Southey think that the body of the English peasantry live, or ever

lived, in substantial or ornamented cottages, with box-hedges,

flower-gardens, beehives, and orchards? If not, what is his parallel

worth? We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the

cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if

anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a

book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the

picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to

proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.

Thus it is that Mr. Southey reasons about matters with which he thinks

himself perfectly conversant. We cannot, therefore, be surprised to find

that he commits extraordinary blunders when he writes on points of which

he acknowledges himself to be ignorant. He confesses that he is not

versed in political economy, and that he has neither liking nor aptitude

for it; and he then proceeds to read the public a lecture concerning it

which fully bears out his confession.

“All wealth,” says Sir Thomas More, “in former times was tangible. It

consisted in land, money, or chattels, which were either of real or

conventional value.”

Montesinos, as Mr. Southey somewhat affectedly calls himself, answers

thus:--

“Jewels, for example, and pictures, as in Holland, where indeed at one

time tulip bulbs answered the same purpose.”

“That bubble,” says Sir Thomas, “was one of those contagious insanities

to which communities are subject. All wealth was real, till the extent

of commerce rendered a paper currency necessary; which differed from

precious stones and pictures in this important point, that there was no

limit to its production.”

“We regard it,” says Montesinos, “as the representative of real wealth;

and, therefore, limited always to the amount of what it represents.”

“Pursue that notion,” answers the ghost, “and you will be in the dark

presently. Your provincial banknotes, which constitute almost wholly the

circulating medium of certain districts, pass current to-day. Tomorrow

tidings may come that the house which issued them has stopt payment, and

what do they represent then? You will find them the shadow of a shade.”

We scarcely know at which end to begin to disentangle this knot of

absurdities. We might ask, why it should be a greater proof of insanity

in men to set a high value on rare tulips than on rare stones, which are

neither more useful nor more beautiful? We might ask how it can be said

that there is no limit to the production of paper money, when a man is

hanged if he issues any in the name of another, and is forced to cash

what he issues in his own? But Mr. Southey’s error lies deeper still.

“All wealth,” says he, “was tangible and real till paper currency was

introduced.” Now, was there ever, since men emerged from a state of

utter barbarism, an age in which there were no debts? Is not a debt,

while the solvency of the debtor is undoubted, always reckoned as part

of the wealth of the creditor? Yet is it tangible and real wealth?

Does it cease to be wealth, because there is the security of a written

acknowledgment for it? And what else is paper currency? Did Mr. Southey

ever read a banknote? If he did, he would see that it is a written

acknowledgment of a debt, and a promise to pay that debt. The promise

may be violated, the debt may remain unpaid: those to whom it was due

may suffer: but this is a risk not confined to cases of paper currency:

it is a risk inseparable from the relation of debtor and creditor.

Every man who sells goods for anything but ready money runs the risk of

finding that what he considered as part of his wealth one day is nothing

at all the next day. Mr. Southey refers to the picture-galleries of

Holland. The pictures were undoubtedly real and tangible possessions.

But surely it might happen that a burgomaster might owe a picture-dealer

a thousand guilders for a Teniers. What in this case corresponds to our

paper money is not the picture, which is tangible, but the claim of the

picture-dealer on his customer for the price of the picture; and this

claim is not tangible. Now, would not the picture-dealer consider this

claim as part of his wealth? Would not a tradesman who knew of the claim

give credit to the picture-dealer the more readily on account of

the claim? The burgomaster might be ruined. If so, would not those

consequences follow which, as Mr. Southey tells us, were never heard

of till paper money came into use? Yesterday this claim was worth a

thousand guilders. To-day what is it? The shadow of a shade.

It is true that, the more readily claims of this sort are transferred

from hand to hand, the more extensive will be the injury produced by a

single failure. The laws of all nations sanction, in certain cases, the

transfer of rights not yet reduced into possession. Mr. Southey would

scarcely wish, we should think, that all indorsements of bills and notes

should be declared invalid. Yet even if this were done, the transfer of

claims would imperceptibly take place, to a very great extent. When

the baker trusts the butcher, for example, he is in fact, though not in

form, trusting the butcher’s customers. A man who owes large bills

to tradesmen, and fails to pay them, almost always produces distress

through a very wide circle of people with whom he never dealt.

In short, what Mr. Southey takes for a difference in kind is only a

difference of form and degree. In every society men have claims on the

property of others. In every society there is a possibility that some

debtors may not be able to fulfil their obligations. In every society,

therefore, there is wealth which is not tangible, and which may become

the shadow of a shade.

Mr. Southey then proceeds to a dissertation on the national debt, which

he considers in a new and most consolatory light, as a clear addition to

the income of the country.

“You can understand,” says Sir Thomas, “that it constitutes a great part

of the national wealth.”

“So large a part,” answers Montesinos, “that the interest amounted,

during the prosperous times of agriculture, to as much as the rental

of all the land in Great Britain; and at present to the rental of all

lands, all houses, and all other fixed property put together.”

The Ghost and Laureate agree that it is very desirable that there should

be so secure and advantageous a deposit for wealth as the funds afford.

Sir Thomas then proceeds:

“Another and far more momentous benefit must not be overlooked; the

expenditure of an annual interest, equalling, as you have stated, the

present rental of all fixed property.”

“That expenditure,” quoth Montesinos, “gives employment to half the

industry in the kingdom, and feeds half the mouths. Take, indeed, the

weight of the national debt from this great and complicated social

machine, and the wheels must stop.”

From this passage we should have been inclined to think that Mr. Southey

supposes the dividends to be a free gift periodically sent down

from heaven to the fundholders, as quails and manna were sent to

the Israelites; were it not that he has vouchsafed, in the following

question and answer, to give the public some information which, we

believe, was very little needed.

“Whence comes the interest?” says Sir Thomas.

“It is raised,” answers Montesinos, “by taxation.”

Now, has Mr. Southey ever considered what would be done with this sum if

it were not paid as interest to the national creditor? If he would

think over this matter for a short time, we suspect that the “momentous

benefit” of which he talks would appear to him to shrink strangely in

amount. A fundholder, we will suppose, spends dividends amounting to

five hundred pounds a year; and his ten nearest neighbours pay fifty

pounds each to the tax-gatherer, for the purpose of discharging the

interest of the national debt. If the debt were wiped out, a measure,

be it understood, which we by no means recommend, the fundholder would

cease to spend his five hundred pounds a year. He would no longer give

employment to industry, or put food into the mouths of labourers.

This Mr. Southey thinks a fearful evil. But is there no mitigating

circumstance? Each of the ten neighbours of our fundholder has fifty

pounds a year more than formerly. Each of them will, as it seems to our

feeble understandings, employ more industry and feed more mouths than

formerly. The sum is exactly the same. It is in different hands. But on

what grounds does Mr. Southey call upon us to believe that it is in the

hands of men who will spend it less liberally or less judiciously? He

seems to think that nobody but a fundholder can employ the poor;

that, if a tax is remitted, those who formerly used to pay it proceed

immediately to dig holes in the earth, and to bury the sum which the

Government had been accustomed to take; that no money can set industry

in motion till such money has been taken by the tax-gatherer out of one

man’s pocket and put into another man’s pocket. We really wish that

Mr. Southey would try to prove this principle, which is indeed the

foundation of his whole theory of finance: for we think it right to hint

to him that our hard-hearted and unimaginative generation will expect

some more satisfactory reason than the only one with which he has yet

favoured it, namely, a similitude touching evaporation and dew.

Both the theory and the illustration, indeed, are old friends of ours.

In every season of distress which we can remember, Mr. Southey has been

proclaiming that it is not from economy, but from increased taxation,

that the country must expect relief; and he still, we find, places the

undoubting faith of a political Diafoirus, in his=

```“Resaignare, repurgare, et reclysterizare.”=

“A people,” he tells us, “may be too rich, but a government cannot be

so.”

“A state,” says he, “cannot have more wealth at its command than may be

employed for the general good, a liberal expenditure in national works

being one of the surest means of promoting national prosperity; and

the benefit being still more obvious, of an expenditure directed to the

purposes of national improvement. But a people may be too rich.”

We fully admit that a state cannot have at its command more wealth than

may be employed for the general good. But neither can individuals, or

bodies of individuals, have at their command more wealth than may be

employed for the general good. If there be no limit to the sum which

may be usefully laid out in public works and national improvement, then

wealth, whether in the hands of private men or of the Government, may

always, if the possessors choose to spend it usefully, be usefully

spent. The only ground, therefore, on which Mr. Southey can possibly

maintain that a government cannot be too rich, but that a people may be

too rich, must be this, that governments are more likely to spend their

money on good objects than private individuals.

But what is useful expenditure? “A liberal expenditure in national

works,” says Mr. Southey, “is one of the surest means for promoting

national prosperity.” What does he mean by national prosperity? Does he

mean the wealth of the State? If so, his reasoning runs thus: The more

wealth a state has the better; for the more wealth a state has the more

wealth it will have. This is surely something like that fallacy, which

is ungallantly termed a lady’s reason. If by national prosperity he

means the wealth of the people, of how gross a contradiction is Mr.

Southey guilty. A people, he tells us, may be too rich: a government

cannot: for a government can employ its riches in making the people

richer. The wealth of the people is to be taken from them, because they

have too much, and laid out in works, which will yield them more.

We are really at a loss to determine whether Mr. Southey’s reason for

recommending large taxation is that it will make the people rich, or

that it will make them poor. But we are sure that, if his object is

to make them rich, he takes the wrong course. There are two or three

principles respecting public works, which, as an experience of vast

extent proves, may be trusted in almost every case.

It scarcely ever happens that any private man or body of men will invest

property in a canal, a tunnel, or a bridge, but from an expectation

that the outlay will be profitable to them. No work of this sort can be

profitable to private speculators, unless the public be willing to pay

for the use of it. The public will not pay of their own accord for what

yields no profit or convenience to them. There is thus a direct and

obvious connection between the motive which induces individuals to

undertake such a work, and the utility of the work.

Can we find any such connection in the case of a public work executed by

a government? If it is useful, are the individuals who rule the

country richer? If it is useless, are they poorer? A public man may be

solicitous for his credit. But is not he likely to gain more credit by

an useless display of ostentatious architecture in a great town than

by the best road or the best canal in some remote province? The fame

of public works is a much less certain test of their utility than the

amount of toll collected at them. In a corrupt age, there will be direct

embezzlement. In the purest age, there will be abundance of jobbing.

Never were the statesmen of any country more sensitive to public

opinion, and more spotless in pecuniary transactions, than those who

have of late governed England. Yet we have only to look at the buildings

recently erected in London for a proof of our rule. In a bad age, the

fate of the public is to be robbed outright. In a good age, it is merely

to have the dearest and the worst of everything.

Buildings for State purposes the State must erect. And here we think

that, in general, the State ought to stop. We firmly believe that five

hundred thousand pounds subscribed by individuals for rail-roads or

canals would produce more advantage to the public than five millions

voted by Parliament for the same purpose. There are certain old saws

about the master’s eye and about everybody’s business, in which we place

very great faith.

There is, we have said, no consistency in Mr. Southey’s political

system. But if there be in his political system any leading principle,

any one error which diverges more widely and variously than any other,

it is that of which his theory about national works is a ramification.

He conceives that the business of the magistrate is, not merely to see

that the persons and property of the people are secure from attack,

but that he ought to be a jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer,

schoolmaster, merchant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish,

a Paul Pry in every house, spying, eaves-dropping, relieving,

admonishing, spending our money for us, and choosing our opinions for

us. His principle is, if we understand it rightly, that no man can do

anything so well for himself as his rulers, be they who they may, can

do it for him, and that a government approaches nearer and nearer to

perfection, in proportion as it interferes more and more with the habits

and notions of individuals.

He seems to be fully convinced that it is in the power of government to

relieve all the distresses under which the lower orders labour. Nay,

he considers doubt on this subject as impious. We cannot refrain from

quoting his argument on this subject. It is a perfect jewel of logic:

“‘Many thousands in your metropolis,’ says Sir Thomas More, ‘rise every

morning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day; as many

of them, where they are to lay their heads at night. All men, even the

vicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery: but many, even

among the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost as

often the cause of wickedness.’

“‘There are many,’ says Montesinos, ‘who know this, but believe that it

is not in the power of human institutions to prevent this misery. They

see the effect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition

of human nature.’

“‘As surely as God is good,’ replies Sir Thomas, ‘so surely there is no

such thing as necessary evil. For, by the religious mind, sickness, and

pain, and death, are not to be accounted evils.’”

Now if sickness, pain, and death, are not evils, we cannot understand

why it should be an evil that thousands should rise without knowing how

they are to subsist. The only evil of hunger is that it produces first

pain, then sickness, and finally death. If it did not produce these, it

would be no calamity. If these are not evils, it is no calamity. We will

propose a very plain dilemma: either physical pain is an evil, or it

is not an evil. If it is an evil, then there is necessary evil in the

universe: if it is not, why should the poor be delivered from it?

Mr. Southey entertains as exaggerated a notion of the wisdom of

governments as of their power. He speaks with the greatest disgust of

the respect now paid to public opinion. That opinion is, according to

him, to be distrusted and dreaded; its usurpation ought to be vigorously

resisted; and the practice of yielding to it is likely to ruin the

country. To maintain police is, according to him, only one of the ends

of government. The duties of a ruler are patriarchal and paternal.

He ought to consider the moral discipline of the people as his first

object, to establish a religion, to train the whole community in that

religion, and to consider all dissenters as his own enemies.

“‘Nothing,’ says Sir Thomas, ‘is more certain, than that religion is

the basis upon which civil government rests; that from religion power

derives its authority, laws their efficacy, and both their zeal and

sanction; and it is necessary that this religion be established as for

the security of the state, and for the welfare of the people, who would

otherwise be moved to and fro with every wind of doctrine. A state is

secure in proportion as the people are attached to its institutions;

it is, therefore, the first and plainest rule of sound policy, that the

people be trained up in the way they should go. The state that neglects

this prepares its own destruction; and they who train them in any other

way are undermining it. Nothing in abstract science can be more certain

than these positions are.’

“‘All of which,’ answers Montesinos, ‘are nevertheless denied by our

professors of the arts Babblative and Scribblative: some in the audacity

of evil designs, and others in the glorious assurance of impenetrable

ignorance.’”

The greater part of the two volumes before us is merely an amplification

of these paragraphs. What does Mr. Southey mean by saying that religion

is demonstrably the basis of civil government? He cannot surely

mean that men have no motives except those derived from religion for

establishing and supporting civil government, that no temporal advantage

is derived from civil government, that men would experience no temporal

inconvenience from living in a state of anarchy? If he allows, as we

think he must allow, that it is for the good of mankind in this world

to have civil government, and that the great majority of mankind have

always thought it for their good in this world to have civil government,

we then have a basis for government quite distinct from religion. It is

true that the Christian religion sanctions government, as it sanctions

everything which promotes the happiness and virtue of our species. But

we are at a loss to conceive in what sense religion can be said to be

the basis of government, in which religion is not also the basis of

the practices of eating, drinking, and lighting fires in cold weather.

Nothing in history is more certain than that government has existed,

has received some obedience, and has given some protection, in times in

which it derived no support from religion, in times in which there was

no religion that influenced the hearts and lives of men. It was not

from dread of Tartarus, or from belief in the Elysian fields, that an

Athenian wished to have some institutions which might keep Orestes

from filching his cloak, or Midias from breaking his head. “It is from

religion,” says Mr. Southey, “that power derives its authority, and

laws their efficacy.” From what religion does our power over the Hindoos

derive its authority, or the law in virtue of which we hang Brahmins its

efficacy? For thousands of years civil government has existed in

almost every corner of the world, in ages of priestcraft, in ages of

fanaticism, in ages of Epicurean indifference, in ages of enlightened

piety. However pure or impure the faith of the people might be, whether

they adored a beneficent or a malignant power, whether they thought

the soul mortal or immortal, they have, as soon as they ceased to

be absolute savages, found out their need of civil government, and

instituted it accordingly. It is as universal as the practice of

cookery. Yet, it is as certain, says Mr. Southey, as anything in

abstract science, that government is founded on religion. We should like

to know what notion Mr. Southey has of the demonstrations of abstract

science. A very vague one, we suspect.

The proof proceeds. As religion is the basis of government, and as

the State is secure in proportion as the people are attached to public

institutions, it is therefore, says Mr. Southey, the first rule of

policy, that the government should train the people in the way in which

they should go; and it is plain that those who train them in any other

way are undermining the State.

Now it does not appear to us to be the first object that people should

always believe in the established religion and be attached to the

established government. A religion may be false. A government may be

oppressive. And whatever support government gives to false religions, or

religion to oppressive governments, we consider as a clear evil.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in

which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing

that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way

than the people to fall into the right way of themselves? Have there not

been governments which were blind leaders of the blind? Are there not

still such governments? Can it be laid down as a general rule that the

movement of political and religious truth is rather downwards from the

government to the people than upwards from the people to the government?

These are questions which it is of importance to have clearly resolved.

Mr. Southey declaims against public opinion, which is now, he tells us,

usurping supreme power. Formerly, according to him, the laws governed;

now public opinion governs. What are laws but expressions of the opinion

of some class which has power over the rest of the community? By

what was the world ever governed but by the opinion of some person or

persons? By what else can it ever be governed? What are all systems,

religious, political, or scientific, but opinions resting on evidence

more or less satisfactory? The question is not between human opinion

and some higher and more certain mode of arriving at truth, but between

opinion and opinion, between the opinions of one man and another, or of

one class and another, or of one generation and another. Public opinion

is not infallible; but can Mr. Southey construct any institutions

which shall secure to us the guidance of an infallible opinion? Can

Mr. Southey select any family, any profession, any class, in short,

distinguished by any plain badge from the rest of the community, whose

opinion is more likely to be just than this much abused public opinion?

Would he choose the peers, for example? Or the two hundred tallest men

in the country? Or the poor Knights of Windsor? Or children who are born

with cauls? Or the seventh sons of seventh sons? We cannot suppose that

he would recommend popular election; for that is merely an appeal to

public opinion. And to say that society ought to be governed by the

opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion

is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Mr. Southey and many other respectable people seem to think that, when

they have once proved the moral and religious training of the people to

be a most important object, it follows, of course, that it is an object

which the government ought to pursue. They forget that we have to

consider, not merely the goodness of the end, but also the fitness of

the means. Neither in the natural nor in the political body have all

members the same office. There is surely no contradiction in saying that

a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect

the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our

opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

So strong is the interest of a ruler to protect his subjects against all

depredations and outrages except his own, so clear and simple are the

means by which this end is to be effected, that men are probably better

off under the worst governments in the world than they would be in a

state of anarchy. Even when the appointment of magistrates has been left

to chance, as in the Italian Republics, things have gone on far better

than if there had been no magistrates at all, and if every man had done

what seemed right in his own eyes. But we see no reason for thinking

that the opinions of the magistrate on speculative questions are more

likely to be right than those of any other man. None of the modes by

which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the

lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much

security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of

his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller. Now

we cannot understand how it can be laid down that it is the duty and the

right of one class to direct the opinions of another, unless it can be

proved that the former class is more likely to form just opinions than

the latter.

The duties of government would be, as Mr. Southey says that they are,

paternal, if a government were necessarily as much superior in wisdom

to a people as the most foolish father, for a time, is to the most

intelligent child, and if a government loved a people as fathers

generally love their children. But there is no reason to believe that

a government will have either the paternal warmth of affection or the

paternal superiority of intellect. Mr. Southey might as well say that

the duties of the shoemaker are paternal, and that it is an usurpation

in any man not of the craft to say that his shoes are bad and to insist

on having better. The division of labour would be no blessing, if those

by whom a thing is done were to pay no attention to the opinion of

those for whom it is done. The shoemaker, in the Relapse, tells Lord

Foppington that his Lordship is mistaken in supposing that his shoe

pinches. “It does not pinch; it cannot pinch; I know my business; and

I never made a better shoe.” This is the way in which Mr. Southey would

have a government treat a people who usurp the privilege of thinking.

Nay, the shoemaker of Vanbrugh has the advantage in the comparison. He

contented himself with regulating his customer’s shoes, about which he

had peculiar means of information, and did not presume to dictate about

the coat and hat. But Mr. Southey would have the rulers of a country

prescribe opinions to the people, not only about politics, but about

matters concerning which a government has no peculiar sources of

information, and concerning which any man in the streets may know as

much and think as justly as the King, namely religion and morals.

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they

discuss it freely. A government can interfere in discussion only by

making it less free than it would otherwise be. Men are most likely to

form just opinions when they have no other wish than to know the truth,

and are exempt from all influence, either of hope or fear. Government,

as government, can bring nothing but the influence of hopes and fears to

support its doctrines. It carries on controversy, not with reasons,

but with threats and bribes. If it employs reasons, it does so, not in

virtue of any powers which belong to it as a government. Thus, instead

of a contest between argument and argument, we have a contest between

argument and force. Instead of a contest in which truth, from the

natural constitution of the human mind, has a decided advantage over

falsehood, we have a contest in which truth can be victorious only by

accident.

And what, after all, is the security which this training gives to

governments? Mr. Southey would scarcely propose that discussion should

be more effectually shackled, that public opinion should be more

strictly disciplined into conformity with established institutions, than

in Spain and Italy. Yet we know that the restraints which exist in Spain

and Italy have not prevented atheism from spreading among the educated

classes, and especially among those whose office it is to minister at

the altars of God. All our readers know how, at the time of the French

Revolution, priest after priest came forward to declare that his

doctrine, his ministry, his whole life, had been a lie, a mummery during

which he could scarcely compose his countenance sufficiently to carry

on the imposture. This was the case of a false, or at least of a

grossly corrupted religion. Let us take then the case of all others most

favourable to Mr. Southey’s argument. Let us take that form of religion

which he holds to be the purest, the system of the Arminian part of

the Church of England. Let us take the form of government which he most

admires and regrets, the government of England in the time of Charles

the First. Would he wish to see a closer connection between Church and

State than then existed? Would he wish for more powerful ecclesiastical

tribunals? for a more zealous King? for a more active primate? Would he

wish to see a more complete monopoly of public instruction given to the

Established Church? Could any government do more to train the people

in the way in which he would have them go? And in what did all this

training end? The Report of the state of the Province of Canterbury,

delivered by Laud to his master at the close of 1639, represents the

Church of England as in the highest and most palmy state. So effectually

had the Government pursued that policy which Mr. Southey wishes to see

revived that there was scarcely the least appearance of dissent. Most of

the bishops stated that all was well among their flocks. Seven or eight

persons in the diocese of Peterborough had seemed refractory to the

Church, but had made ample submission. In Norfolk and Suffolk all whom

there had been reason to suspect had made profession of conformity, and

appeared to observe it strictly. It is confessed that there was a

little difficulty in bringing some of the vulgar in Suffolk to take the

sacrament at the rails in the chancel. This was the only open instance

of nonconformity which the vigilant eye of Laud could detect in all the

dioceses of his twenty-one suffragans, on the very eve of a revolution

in which primate, and Church, and monarch, and monarchy were to perish

together.

At which time would Mr. Southey pronounce the constitution more secure:

in 1639, when Laud presented this Report to Charles; or now, when

thousands of meetings openly collect millions of dissenters, when

designs against the tithes are openly avowed, when books attacking not

only the Establishment, but the first principles of Christianity, are

openly sold in the streets? The signs of discontent, he tells us, are

stronger in England now than in France when the States-General met: and

hence he would have us infer that a revolution like that of France

may be at hand. Does he not know that the danger of states is to be

estimated, not by what breaks out of the public mind, but by what stays

in it? Can he conceive anything more terrible than the situation of a

government which rules without apprehension over a people of hypocrites,

which is flattered by the press and cursed in the inner chambers, which

exults in the attachment and obedience of its subjects, and knows not

that those subjects are leagued against it in a free-masonry of hatred,

the sign of which is every day conveyed in the glance of ten thousand

eyes, the pressure of ten thousand hands, and the tone of ten thousand

voices? Profound and ingenious policy! Instead of curing the disease, to

remove those symptoms by which alone its nature can be known! To leave

the serpent his deadly sting, and deprive him only of his warning

rattle!

When the people whom Charles had so assiduously trained in the good way

had rewarded his paternal care by cutting off his head, a new kind of

training came into fashion. Another government arose which, like the

former, considered religion as its surest basis, and the religious

discipline of the people as its first duty. Sanguinary laws were enacted

against libertinism; profane pictures were burned; drapery was put on

indecorous statues; the theatres were shut up; fast-days were numerous;

and the Parliament resolved that no person should be admitted into any

public employment, unless the House should be first satisfied of his

vital godliness. We know what was the end of this training. We know

that it ended in impiety in filthy and heartless sensuality, in the

dissolution of all ties of honour and morality. We know that at this

very day scriptural phrases, scriptural names, perhaps some scriptural

doctrines excite disgust and ridicule, solely because they are

associated with the austerity of that period.

Thus has the experiment of training the people in established forms of

religion been twice tried in England on a large scale, once by Charles

and Laud, and once by the Puritans. The High Tories of our time still

entertain many of the feelings and opinions of Charles and Laud, though

in a mitigated form; nor is it difficult to see that the heirs of the

Puritans are still amongst us. It would be desirable that each of these

parties should remember how little advantage or honour it formerly

derived from the closest alliance with power, that it fall by the

support of rulers and rose by their opposition, that of the two systems

that in which the people were at any time drilled was always at that

time the unpopular system, that the training of the High Church ended in

the reign of the Puritans, and that the training of the Puritans ended

in the reign of the harlots.

This was quite natural. Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in

from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government,

a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink,

and wear. Our fathers could not bear it two hundred year ago; and we

are not more patient than they. Mr. Southey thinks that the yoke of the

Church is dropping off because it is loose. We feel convinced that it

is borne only because it is easy, and that, in the instant in which an

attempt is made to tighten it, it will be flung away. It will be neither

the first nor the strongest yoke that has been broken asunder and

trampled under foot in the day of the vengeance of England.

How far Mr. Southey would have the Government carry its measures for

training the people in the doctrines of the Church, we are unable to

discover. In one passage Sir Thomas More asks with great vehemence:

“Is it possible that your laws should suffer the unbelievers to exist as

a party? Vetitum est adeo sceleris nihil?”

Montesinos answers: “They avow themselves in defiance of the laws. The

fashionable doctrine which the press at this time maintains is, that

this is a matter in which the laws ought not to interfere, every man

having a right, both to form what opinion he pleases upon religious

subjects, and to promulgate that opinion.”

It is clear, therefore, that Mr. Southey would not give full and perfect

toleration to infidelity. In another passage, however, he observes with

some truth, though too sweepingly, that “any degree of intolerance short

of that full extent which the Papal Church exercises where it has the

power, acts upon the opinions which it is intended to suppress, like

pruning upon vigorous plants; they grow the stronger for it.” These two

passages, put together, would lead us to the conclusion that, in Mr.

Southey’s opinion, the utmost severity ever employed by the Roman

Catholic Church in the days of its greatest power ought to be employed

against unbelievers in England; in plain words, that Carlile and his

shopmen ought to be burned in Smithfield, and that every person

who, when called upon, should decline to make a solemn profession of

Christianity ought to suffer the same fate. We do not, however, believe

that Mr. Southey would recommend such a course, though his language

would, according to all the rules of logic, justify us in supposing this

to be his meaning. His opinions form no system at all. He never sees, at

one glance, more of a question than will furnish matter for one flowing

and well-turned sentence; so that it would be the height of unfairness

to charge him personally with holding a doctrine merely because

that doctrine is deducible, though by the closest and most accurate

reasoning, from the premises which he has laid down. We are, therefore,

left completely in the dark as to Mr. Southey’s opinions about

toleration. Immediately after censuring the Government for not

punishing infidels, he proceeds to discuss the question of the Catholic

disabilities, now, thank God, removed, and defends them on the ground

that the Catholic doctrines tend to persecution, and that the Catholics

persecuted when they had power.

“They must persecute,” says he, “if they believe their own creed, for

conscience-sake; and if they do not believe it, they must persecute for

policy; because it is only by intolerance that so corrupt and injurious

a system can be upheld.”

That unbelievers should not be persecuted is an instance of national

depravity at which the glorified spirits stand aghast. Yet a sect of

Christians is to be excluded from power, because those who formerly held

the same opinions were guilty of persecution. We have said that we do

not very well know what Mr. Southey’s opinion about toleration is. But,

on the whole, we take it to be this, that everybody is to tolerate him,

and that he is to tolerate nobody.

We will not be deterred by any fear of misrepresentation from expressing

our hearty approbation of the mild, wise, and eminently Christian manner

in which the Church and the Government have lately acted with respect

to blasphemous publications. We praise them for not having thought it

necessary to encircle a religion pure, merciful, and philosophical, a

religion to the evidence of which the highest intellects have yielded,

with the defences of a false and bloody superstition. The ark of God was

never taken till it was surrounded by the arms of earthly defenders. In

captivity, its sanctity was sufficient to vindicate it from insult, and

to lay the hostile fiend prostrate on the threshold of his own temple.

The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent

morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the

facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of

every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of

mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of

the grave. To such a system it can bring no addition of dignity or of

strength, that it is part and parcel of the common law. It is not now

for the first time left to rely on the force of its own evidences and

the attractions of its own beauty. Its sublime theology confounded the

Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason with reason. The bravest

and wisest of the Caesars found their arms and their policy unavailing,

when opposed to the weapons that were not carnal and the kingdom that

was not of this world. The victory which Porphyry and Diocletian failed

to gain is not, to all appearance, reserved for any of those who have

in this age, directed their attacks against the last restraint of

the powerful and the last hope of the wretched. The whole history of

Christianity shows, that she is in far greater danger of being corrupted

by the alliance of power, than of being crushed by its opposition. Those

who thrust temporal sovereignty upon her treat her as their prototypes

treated her author. They bow the knee, and spit upon her; they cry

“Hail!” and smite her on the cheek; they put a sceptre in her hand, but

it is a fragile reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover

with purple the wounds which their own hands have inflicted on her; and

inscribe magnificent titles over the cross on which they have fixed her

to perish in ignominy and pain.

The general view which Mr. Southey takes of the prospects of society is

very gloomy; but we comfort ourselves with the consideration that Mr.

Southey is no prophet. He foretold, we remember, on the very eve of the

abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts, that these hateful laws were

immortal, and that pious minds would long be gratified by seeing the

most solemn religious rite of the Church profaned for the purpose of

upholding her political supremacy. In the book before us, he says that

Catholics cannot possibly be admitted into Parliament until those whom

Johnson called “the bottomless Whigs” come into power. While the book

was in the press, the prophecy was falsified; and a Tory of the Tories,

Mr. Southey’s own favourite hero, won and wore that noblest wreath, “Ob

cives servatos.”

The signs of the times, Mr. Southey tells us, are very threatening. His

fears for the country would decidedly preponderate over his hopes, but

for a firm reliance on the mercy of God. Now, as we know that God has

once suffered the civilised world to be overrun by savages, and the

Christian religion to be corrupted by doctrines which made it, for some

ages, almost as bad as Paganism, we cannot think it inconsistent with

his attributes that similar calamities should again befal mankind.

We look, however, on the state of the world, and of this kingdom in

particular, with much greater satisfaction and with better hopes. Mr.

Southey speaks with contempt of those who think the savage state happier

than the social. On this subject, he says, Rousseau never imposed on him

even in his youth. But he conceives that a community which has advanced

a little way in civilisation is happier than one which has made greater

progress. The Britons in the time of Caesar were happier, he suspects,

than the English of the nineteenth century. On the whole, he selects the

generation which preceded the Reformation as that in which the people of

this country were better off than at any time before or since.

This opinion rests on nothing, as far as we can see, except his own

individual associations. He is a man of letters; and a life destitute

of literary pleasures seems insipid to him. He abhors the spirit of the

present generation, the severity of its studies, the boldness of its

inquiries, and the disdain with which it regards some old prejudices

by which his own mind is held in bondage. He dislikes an utterly

unenlightened age; he dislikes an investigating and reforming age. The

first twenty years of the sixteenth century would have exactly suited

him. They furnished just the quantity of intellectual excitement which

he requires. The learned few read and wrote largely. A scholar was held

in high estimation. But the rabble did not presume to think; and even

the most inquiring and independent of the educated classes paid more

reverence to authority, and less to reason, than is usual in our time.

This is a state of things in which Mr. Southey would have found himself

quite comfortable; and, accordingly, he pronounces it the happiest state

of things ever known in the world.

The savages were wretched, says Mr. Southey; but the people in the time

of Sir Thomas More were happier than either they or we. Now we think it

quite certain that we have the advantage over the contemporaries of

Sir Thomas More, in every point in which they had any advantage over

savages.

Mr. Southey does not even pretend to maintain that the people in the

sixteenth century were better lodged or clothed than at present.

He seems to admit that in these respects there has been some little

improvement. It is indeed a matter about which scarcely any doubt can

exist in the most perverse mind that the improvements of machinery have

lowered the price of manufactured articles, and have brought within

the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir Thomas More or his

master could not have obtained at any price.

The labouring classes, however, were, according to Mr. Southey, better

fed three hundred years ago than at present. We believe that he is

completely in error on this point. The condition of servants in noble

and wealthy families, and of scholars at the Universities, must surely

have been better in those times than that of day-labourers; and we are

sure that it was not better than that of our workhouse paupers. From the

household book of the Northumberland family, we find that in one of the

greatest establishments of the kingdom the servants lived very much as

common sailors live now. In the reign of Edward the Sixth the state

of the students at Cambridge is described to us, on the very best

authority, as most wretched. Many of them dined on pottage made of a

farthing’s worth of beef with a little salt and oatmeal, and literally

nothing else. This account we have from a contemporary master of St.

John’s. Our parish poor now eat wheaten bread. In the sixteenth century

the labourer was glad to get barley, and was often forced to content

himself with poorer fare. In Harrison’s introduction to Holinshed we

have an account of the state of our working population in the

“golden days,” as Mr. Southey calls them, “of good Queen Bess.” “The

gentilitie,” says he, “commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat

for their own tables, whylest their household and poore neighbours in

some shires are inforced to content themselves with rye or barleie; yea,

and in time of dearth, many with bread made eyther of beanes, peason, or

otes, or of altogether, and some accrues among. I will not say that this

extremity is oft so well to be seen in time of plentie as of dearth; but

if I should I could easily bring my trial: for albeit there be much

more grounde cared nowe almost in everye place then bathe beene of late

yeares, yet such a price of corne continueth in eache towne and markete,

without any just cause, that the artificer and poore labouring man

is not able to reach unto it, but is driven to content him self with

horse-corne.” We should like to see what the effect would be of putting

any parish in England now on allowance of “horse-corne.” The helotry of

Mammon are not, in our day, so easily enforced to content themselves as

the peasantry of that happy period, as Mr. Southey considers it, which

elapsed between the fall of the feudal and the rise of the commercial

tyranny.

“The people,” says Mr. Southey, “are worse fed than when they were

fishers.” And yet in another place he complains that they will not eat

fish. “They have contracted,” says he, “I know not how, some obstinate

prejudice against a kind of food at once wholesome and delicate, and

everywhere to be obtained cheaply and in abundance, were the demand for

it as general as it ought to be.” It is true that the lower orders have

an obstinate prejudice against fish. But hunger has no such obstinate

prejudices. If what was formerly a common diet is now eaten only in

times of severe pressure, the inference is plain. The people must be fed

with what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors.

The advice and medicine which the poorest labourer can now obtain, in

disease, or after an accident, is far superior to what Henry the Eighth

could have commanded. Scarcely any part of the country is out of the

reach of practitioners, who are probably not so far inferior to Sir

Henry Halford as they are superior to Dr. Butts. That there has been a

great improvement in this respect, Mr. Southey allows. Indeed he could

not well have denied it. “But,” says he, “the evils for which these

sciences are the palliative, have increased since the time of the

Druids, in a proportion that heavily overweighs the benefit of improved

therapeutics.” We know nothing either of the diseases or the remedies of

the Druids. But we are quite sure that the improvement of medicine has

far more than kept pace with the increase of disease during the last

three centuries. This is proved by the best possible evidence. The term

of human life is decidedly longer in England than in any former age,

respecting which we possess any information on which we can rely. All

the rants in the world about picturesque cottages and temples of Mammon

will not shake this argument. No test of the physical well-being of

society can be named so decisive as that which is furnished by bills

of mortality. That the lives of the people of this country have been

gradually lengthening during the course of several generations, is as

certain as any fact in statistics; and that the lives of men should

become longer and longer, while their bodily condition during life is

becoming worse and worse, is utterly incredible.

Let our readers think over these circumstances. Let them take into the

account the sweating sickness and the plague. Let them take into the

account that fearful disease which first made its appearance in the

generation to which Mr. Southey assigns the palm of felicity, and raged

through Europe with a fury at which the physician stood aghast, and

before which the people were swept away by myriads. Let them consider

the state of the northern counties, constantly the scene of robberies,

rapes, massacres, and conflagrations. Let them add to all this the fact

that seventy-two thousand persons suffered death by the hands of the

executioner during the reign of Henry the Eighth, and judge between the

nineteenth and the sixteenth century.

We do not say that the lower orders in England do not suffer severe

hardships. But, in spite of Mr. Southey’s assertions, and in spite

of the assertions of a class of politicians, who, differing from Mr.

Southey in every other point, agree with him in this, we are inclined to

doubt whether the labouring classes here really suffer greater physical

distress than the labouring classes of the most flourishing countries of

the Continent.

It will scarcely be maintained that the lazzaroni who sleep under the

porticoes of Naples, or the beggars who besiege the convents of Spain,

are in a happier situation than the English commonalty. The distress

which has lately been experienced in the northern part of Germany, one

of the best governed and most prosperous regions of Europe, surpasses,

if we have been correctly informed, anything which has of late years

been known among us. In Norway and Sweden the peasantry are constantly

compelled to mix bark. with their bread; and even this expedient has

not always preserved whole families and neighbourhoods from perishing

together of famine. An experiment has lately been tried in the kingdom

of the Netherlands, which has been cited to prove the possibility of

establishing agricultural colonies on the waste lands of England, but

which proves to our minds nothing so clearly as this, that the rate

of subsistence to which the labouring classes are reduced in the

Netherlands is miserably low, and very far inferior to that of the

English paupers. No distress which the people here have endured for

centuries approaches to that which has been felt by the French in our

own time. The beginning of the year 1817 was a time of great distress

in this island. But the state of the lowest classes here was luxury

compared with that of the people of France. We find in Magendie’s

Journal de Physiologie Experimentale a paper on a point of physiology

connected with the distress of that season. It appears that the

inhabitants of six departments, Aix, Jura, Doubs, Haute Saone, Vosges,

and Saone-et-Loire, were reduced first to oatmeal and potatoes, and at

last to nettles, beanstalks, and other kinds of herbage fit only for

cattle; that when the next harvest enabled them to eat barley-bread,

many of them died from intemperate indulgence in what they thought

an exquisite repast; and that a dropsy of a peculiar description was

produced by the hard fare of the year. Dead bodies were found on the

roads and in the fields. A single surgeon dissected six of these, and

found the stomach shrunk, and filled with the unwholesome aliments which

hunger had driven men to share with beasts. Such extremity of distress

as this is never heard of in England, or even in Ireland. We are, on

the whole, inclined to think, though we would speak with diffidence on a

point on which it would be rash to pronounce a positive judgment without

a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed upon

it, that the labouring classes of this island, though they have their

grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence,

some by the errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to

physical comforts than the inhabitants of an equally extensive district

of the old world. For this very reason, suffering is more acutely felt

and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere. We must take into the

account the liberty of discussion, and the strong interest which the

opponents of a ministry always have, to exaggerate the extent of the

public disasters. There are countries in which the people quietly endure

distress that here would shake the foundations of the State, countries

in which the inhabitants of a whole province turn out to eat grass

with less clamour than one Spitalfields weaver would make here, if the

overseers were to put him on barley-bread. In those new commonwealths

in which a civilised population has at its command a boundless extent of

the richest soil, the condition of the labourer is probably happier than

in any society which has lasted for many centuries. But in the old world

we must confess ourselves unable to find any satisfactory record of any

great nation, past or present, in which the working classes have been

in a more comfortable situation than in England during the last thirty

years. When this island was thinly peopled, it was barbarous: there was

little capital; and that little was insecure. It is now the richest and

most highly civilised spot in the world; but the population is dense.

Thus we have never known that golden age which the lower orders in the

United States are now enjoying. We have never known an age of liberty,

of order, and of education, an age in which the mechanical sciences were

carried to a great height, yet in which the people were not sufficiently

numerous to cultivate even the most fertile valleys. But, when we

compare our own condition with that of our ancestors, we think it clear

that the advantages arising from the progress of civilisation have far

more than counterbalanced the disadvantages arising from the progress

of population. While our numbers have increased tenfold, our wealth has

increased a hundredfold. Though there are so many more people to share

the wealth now existing in the country than there were in the sixteenth

century, it seems certain that a greater share falls to almost every

individual than fell to the share of any of the corresponding class

in the sixteenth century. The King keeps a more splendid court. The

establishments of the nobles are more magnificent. The esquires are

richer; the merchants are richer; the shopkeepers are richer. The

serving-man, the artisan, and the husbandman, have a more copious and

palatable supply of food, better clothing, and better furniture. This

is no reason for tolerating abuses, or for neglecting any means of

ameliorating the condition of our poorer countrymen. But it is a reason

against telling them, as some of our philosophers are constantly telling

them, that they are the most wretched people who ever existed on the

face of the earth.

We have already adverted to Mr. Southey’s amusing doctrine about

national wealth. A state, says he, cannot be too rich; but a people may

be too rich. His reason for thinking this is extremely curious.

“A people may be too rich, because it is the tendency of the commercial,

and more especially of the manufacturing system, to collect wealth

rather than to diffuse it. Where wealth is necessarily employed in

any of the speculations of trade, its increase is in proportion to its

amount. Great capitalists become like pikes in a fish-pond who devour

the weaker fish; and it is but too certain, that the poverty of one

part of the people seems to increase in the same ratio as the riches of

another. There are examples of this in history. In Portugal, when the

high tide of wealth flowed in from the conquests in Africa and the East,

the effect of that great influx was not more visible in the augmented

splendour of the court, and the luxury of the higher ranks, than in the

distress of the people.”

Mr. Southey’s instance is not a very fortunate one. The wealth which did

so little for the Portuguese was not the fruit either of manufactures or

of commerce carried on by private individuals. It was the wealth, not

of the people, but of the Government and its creatures, of those who,

as Mr. Southey thinks, can never be too rich. The fact is, that Mr.

Southey’s proposition is opposed to all history, and to the phaenomena

which surround us on every side. England is the richest country

in Europe, the most commercial country, and the country in which

manufactures flourish most. Russia and Poland are the poorest countries

in Europe. They have scarcely any trade, and none but the rudest

manufactures. Is wealth more diffused in Russia and Poland than in

England? There are individuals in Russia and Poland whose incomes are

probably equal to those of our richest countrymen. It may be doubted

whether there are not, in those countries, as many fortunes of eighty

thousand a year as here. But are there as many fortunes of two thousand

a year, or of one thousand a year? There are parishes in England which

contain more people of between three hundred and three thousand pounds

a year than could be found in all the dominions of the Emperor Nicholas.

The neat and commodious houses which have been built in London and its

vicinity, for people of this class, within the last thirty years, would

of themselves form a city larger than the capitals of some European

kingdoms. And this is the state of society in which the great

proprietors have devoured a smaller!

The cure which Mr. Southey thinks that he has discovered is worthy of

the sagacity which he has shown in detecting the evil. The calamities

arising from the collection of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists

are to be remedied by collecting it in the hands of one great

capitalist, who has no conceivable motive to use it better than other

capitalists, the all-devouring State.

It is not strange that, differing so widely from Mr. Southey as to

the past progress of society, we should differ from him also as to its

probable destiny. He thinks, that to all outward appearance, the country

is hastening to destruction; but he relies firmly on the goodness

of God. We do not see either the piety or the rationality of thus

confidently expecting that the Supreme Being will interfere to disturb

the common succession of causes and effects. We, too, rely on

his goodness, on his goodness as manifested, not in extraordinary

interpositions, but in those general laws which it has pleased him to

establish in the physical and in the moral world. We rely on the natural

tendency of the human intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency

of society to improvement. We know no well-authenticated instance of a

people which has decidedly retrograded in civilisation and prosperity,

except from the influence of violent and terrible calamities, such as

those which laid the Roman Empire in ruins, or those which, about the

beginning of the sixteenth century, desolated Italy. We know of no

country which, at the end of fifty years of peace and tolerably good

government, has been less prosperous than at the beginning of that

period. The political importance of a state may decline, as the balance

of power is disturbed by the introduction of new forces. Thus the

influence of Holland and of Spain is much diminished. But are Holland

and Spain poorer than formerly? We doubt it. Other countries have

outrun them. But we suspect that they have been positively, though not

relatively, advancing. We suspect that Holland is richer than when she

sent her navies up the Thames, that Spain is richer than when a French

king was brought captive to the footstool of Charles the Fifth.

History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We

see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of

individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations,

mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates

faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can

destroy. We see the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts

of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, in spite of the

grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers.

The present moment is one of great distress. But how small will that

distress appear when we think over the history of the last forty years;

a war, compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance;

taxation, such as the most heavily taxed people of former times could

not have conceived; a debt larger than all the public debts that ever

existed in the world added together; the food of the people studiously

rendered dear; the currency imprudently debased, and imprudently

restored. Yet is the country poorer than in 1790? We firmly believe

that, in spite of all the misgovernment of her rulers, she has been

almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has

been a stoppage, now and then a short retrogression; but as to the

general tendency there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but

the tide is evidently coming in.

If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty

millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time,

will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be

wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now

are, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower-garden, will be

carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn, that machines

constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that

there will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by

steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our

great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance, which might easily be paid

off in a year or two, many people would think us insane. We prophesy

nothing; but this we say: If any person had told the Parliament which

met in perplexity and terror after the crash in 1720 that in 1830 the

wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the

annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they

considered as an intolerable burden, that for one man of ten thousand

pounds then living there would be five men of fifty thousand pounds,

that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that

nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one-half

of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the

exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under

Charles the Second, that stage coaches would run from London to York

in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without

wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would

have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver’s

Travels. Yet the prediction would have been true; and they would have

perceived that it was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that

the country was then raising every year a sum which would have purchased

the fee-simple of the revenue of the Plantagenets, ten times what

supported the Government of Elizabeth, three times what, in the time of

Cromwell, had been thought intolerably oppressive. To almost all men the

state of things under which they have been used to live seems to be the

necessary state of things. We have heard it said that five per cent. is

the natural interest of money, that twelve is the natural number of

a jury, that forty shillings is the natural qualification of a county

voter. Hence it is that, though in every age everybody knows that up to

his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody

seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot

absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has

reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said

all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.

“A million a year will beggar us,” said the patriots of 1640. “Two

millions a year will grind the country to powder,” was the cry in 1660.

“Six millions a year, and a debt of fifty millions!” exclaimed Swift,

“the high allies have been the ruin of us.” “A hundred and forty

millions of debt!” said Junius; “well may we say that we owe Lord

Chatham more than we shall ever pay, if we owe him such a load as this.”

“Two hundred and forty millions of debt!” cried all the statesmen

of 1783 in chorus; “what abilities, or what economy on the part of a

minister, can save a country so burdened?” We know that if, since 1783,

no fresh debt had been incurred, the increased resources of the country

would have enabled us to defray that debt at which Pitt, Fox, and Burke

stood aghast, nay, to defray it over and over again, and that with much

lighter taxation than what we have actually borne. On what principle is

it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect

nothing but deterioration before us?

It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey’s idol, the omniscient

and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that

England has hitherto been carried forward in civilisation; and it is to

the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and

good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by

strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving

capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price,

industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their

natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by

diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every

department of the State. Let the Government do this: the People will

assuredly do the rest.