imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn
special arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, I
must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at
the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when
the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with
still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some
amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace
gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff
which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up
of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork
and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when
that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of
the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed
again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the
high flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale.
Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes,
and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.
I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age
to the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and
his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to put
these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of
letters; but "the field of glory is a field for all." It is a large one,
indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the
boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before
us. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,)
whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, that
Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who
only moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in his own
native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for
himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to
libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me
or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not be
guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against
religion and human society upon his Grace's excellent speech in the
House of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neither
encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty,
safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the
decrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the
guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could
find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old
Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England.
The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects
of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free
agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government,
loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers and its beef,
its parsons and its pudding, its commons and its beer, and its dull
slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to
provoke a jockey of Norfolk,[14] who was inspired with the resolute
ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might
render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted
merit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of
the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I
say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace
I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted
solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.
His Grace, like an able orator, as he is, begins with giving me a great
deal of praise for talents which I do not possess. He does this to
entitle himself, on the credit of this gratuitous kindness, to
exaggerate my abuse of the parts which his bounty, and not that of
Nature, has bestowed upon me. In this, too, he has condescended to copy
Mr. Erskine. These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priests
of the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and their
fillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to their
knocking me on the head with their consecrated axes. I have injured, say
they, the Constitution; and I have abandoned the Whig party and the Whig
principles that I professed. I do not mean, my dear Sir, to defend
myself against his Grace. I have not much interest in what the world
shall think or say of me; as little has the world an interest in what I
shall think or say of any one in it; and I wish that his Grace had
suffered an unhappy man to enjoy, in his retreat, the melancholy
privileges of obscurity and sorrow. At any rate, I have spoken and I
have written on the subject. If I have written or spoken so poorly as to
be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lasting
impression. "I must let the tree lie as it falls." Perhaps I must take
some shame to myself. I confess that I have acted on my own principles
of government, and not on those of his Grace, which are, I dare say,
profound and wise, but which I do not pretend to understand. As to the
party to which he alludes, and which has long taken its leave of me, I
believe the principles of the book which he condemns are very
conformable to the opinions of many of the most considerable and most
grave in that description of politicians. A few, indeed, who, I admit,
are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk his
Grace's language. I am too feeble to contend with them. They have the
field to themselves. There are others, very young and very ingenious
persons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, I
believe, is pleased to consider as that party. Some of them were not
born into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered into
that connection. I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad
phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbins
and doctors in the cabala of political science. I admit that "wisdom is
as the gray hair to man, and that learning is like honorable old age."
But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked of, perhaps I might be
excused, if I caught something of the general indocility. It might not
be surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two, and, in an age of
relaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions. If
that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and
without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and
very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to
their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern liberty
is a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It
belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary
representation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no,
not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race.
Amongst those gentlemen who came to authority as soon or sooner than
they came of age I do not mean to include his Grace. With all those
native titles to empire over our minds which distinguish the others, he
has a large share of experience. He certainly ought to understand the
British Constitution better than I do. He has studied it in the
fundamental part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in
twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his
speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend
with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With
thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles
been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst
he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has
he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys has he made, and great
sums has he expended, in order to secure the purity, the independence,
and the sobriety of elections, and to give a check, if possible, to the
ruinous charges that go nearly to the destruction of the right of
election itself.
Amidst these his labors, his Grace will be pleased to forgive me, if my
zeal, less enlightened, to be sure, than his by midnight lamps and
studies, has presumed to talk too favorably of this Constitution, and
even to say something sounding like approbation of that body which has
the honor to reckon his Grace at the head of it, Those who dislike this
partiality, or, if his Grace pleases, this flattery of mine, have a
comfort at hand. I may be refuted and brought to shame by the most
convincing of all refutations, a practical refutation. Every individual
peer for himself may show that I was ridiculously wrong; the whole body
of those noble persons may refute me for the whole corps. If they
please, they are more powerful advocates against themselves than a
thousand scribblers like me can be in their favor. If I were even
possessed of those powers which his Grace, in order to heighten my
offence, is pleased to attribute to me, there would be little
difference. The eloquence of Mr. Erskine might save Mr. ***** from the
gallows, but no eloquence could save Mr. Jackson from the effects of his
own potion.
In that unfortunate book of mine, which is put in the _Index
Expurgatorius_ of the modern Whigs, I might have spoken too favorably
not only of those who wear coronets, but of those who wear crowns.
Kings, however, have not only long arms, but strong ones too. A great
Northern potentate, for instance, is able in one moment, and with one
bold stroke of his diplomatic pen, to efface all the volumes which I
could write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists of
Germany ever carried to the fair of Leipsic, as an apology for monarchs
and monarchy. Whilst I, or any other poor, puny, private sophist, was
defending the Declaration of Pilnitz, his Majesty might refute me by the
Treaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republic because it had
a king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act by
founding another republic that has cut off the head of its king. I
defended that great potentate for associating in a grand alliance for
the preservation of the old governments of Europe; but he puts me to
silence by delivering up all those governments (his own virtually
included) to the new system of France. If he is accused before the
Parisian tribunal (constituted for the trial of kings) for having
polluted the soil of liberty by the tracks of his disciplined slaves, he
clears himself by surrendering the finest parts of Germany (with a
handsome cut of his own territories) to the offended majesty of the
regicides of France. Can I resist this? Am I responsible for it, if,
with a torch in his hand, and a rope about his neck, he makes _amende
honorable_ to the _sans-culotterie_ of the Republic one and indivisible?
In that humiliating attitude, in spite of my protests, he may supplicate
pardon for his menacing proclamations, and, as an expiation to those
whom he failed to terrify with his threats, he may abandon those whom he
had seduced by his promises. He may sacrifice the royalists of France,
whom he had called to his standard, as a salutary example to those who
shall adhere to their native sovereign, or shall confide in any other
who undertakes the cause of oppressed kings and of loyal subjects.
How can I help it, if this high-minded prince will subscribe to the
invectives which the regicides have made against all kings, and
particularly against himself? How can I help it, if this royal
propagandist will preach the doctrine of the Rights of Men? Is it my
fault, if his professors of literature read lectures on that code in all
his academies, and if all the pensioned managers of the newspapers in
his dominions diffuse it throughout Europe in an hundred journals? Can
it be attributed to me, if he will initiate all his grenadiers and all
his hussars in these high mysteries? Am I responsible, if he will make
_Le Droit de l'Homme_, or _La Souverainté du Peuple_ the favorite parole
of his military orders? Now that his troops are to act with the brave
legions of freedom, no doubt he will fit them for their fraternity. He
will teach the Prussians to think, to feel, and to act like them, and to
emulate the glories of the _régiment de l'échafaud_. He will employ the
illustrious Citizen Santerre, the general of his new allies, to instruct
the dull Germans how they shall conduct themselves towards persons who,
like Louis the Sixteenth, (whose cause and person he once took into his
protection,) shall dare, without the sanction of the people, or with it,
to consider themselves as hereditary kings. Can I arrest this great
potentate in his career of glory? Am I blamable in recommending virtue
and religion as the true foundation of all monarchies, because the
protector of the three religions of the Westphalian arrangement, to
ingratiate himself with the Republic of Philosophy, shall abolish all
the three? It is not in my power to prevent the grand patron of the
Reformed Church, if he chooses it, from annulling the Calvinistic
sabbath, and establishing the _décadi_ of atheism in all his states. He
may even renounce and abjure his favorite mysticism in the Temple of
Reason. In these things, at least, he is truly despotic. He has now
shaken hands with everything which at first had inspired him with
horror. It would be curious indeed to see (what I shall not, however,
travel so far to see) the ingenious devices and the elegant
transparencies which, on the restoration of peace and the commencement
of Prussian liberty, are to decorate Potsdam and Charlottenburg
_festeggianti_. What shades of his armed ancestors of the House of
Brandenburg will the committee of _Illuminés_ raise up in the
opera-house of Berlin, to dance a grand ballet in the rejoicings for
this auspicious event? Is it a grand master of the Teutonic order, or is
it the great Elector? Is it the first king of Prussia, or the last? or
is the whole long line (long, I mean, _a parte ante_) to appear like
Banquo's royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?
How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displays
of royal magnificence? How can I prevent the successor of Frederick the
Great from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind of
glory? Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessions
in the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume the
character of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery on
philosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbs
in the sackcloth and the _hair-shirt_, and exercise on his broad
shoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the
_Sans-Culottes_? It is not in me to hinder kings from making new orders
of religious and martial knighthood. I am not Hercules enough to uphold
those orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shifting
from their weary shoulders. What can be done against the magnanimous
resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of
their own character and situation?
What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignities
and all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. If they have a
mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and
their advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It is
very true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human
wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the
powerful,--for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws,
and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived for
extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of
that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not be
inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into
which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of
their _conclusums_ should taste of the prejudices of country or of
faction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruption
should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose
that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum,
listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the
public voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post,
and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it,
should give a judgment so shameless and so prostitute, of such monstrous
and even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of human
depravity, or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possibly
match it,--if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeeling
cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent
people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of
the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,--does any one
think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying
insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on
all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from
their purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to its
disgrace in themselves? As the wisdom of men mates such institutions,
the folly of men destroys them. Whatever we may pretend, there is always
more in the soundness of the materials than in the fashion of the work.
The order of a good building is something. But if it be wholly declined
from its perpendicular, if the cement is loose and incoherent, if the
stones are scaling with every change of the weather, and the whole
toppling on our heads, what matter is it whether we are crushed by a
Corinthian or a Doric ruin? The fine form of a vessel is a matter of use
and of delight. It is pleasant to see her decorated with cost and art.
But what signifies even the mathematical truth of her form,--what
signify all the art and cost with which she can be carved, and painted,
and gilded, and covered with decorations from stem to stern,--what
signify all her rigging and sails, her flags, her pendants, and her
streamers,--what signify even her cannon, her stores, and her
provisions, if all her planks and timbers be unsound and rotten?
Quamvis Pontica pinus,
Silvæ filia nobilis,
Jactes et genus et nomen inutile.
I have been stimulated, I know not how, to give you this trouble by what
very few except myself would think worth any trouble at all. In a speech
in the House of Lords, I have been attacked for the defence of a scheme
of government in which that body inheres, and in which alone it can
exist. Peers of Great Britain may become as penitent as the sovereign of
Prussia. They may repent of what they have done in assertion of the
honor of their king, and in favor of their own safety. But never the
gloom that lowers over the fortune of the cause, nor anything which the
great may do towards hastening their own fall, can make me repent of
what I have done by pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favor of
the order of things into which I was born and in which I fondly hoped to
die.
In the long series of ages which have furnished the matter of history,
never was so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moral
eye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolution in France. I knew,
indeed, that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own
danger. In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in the
other it produced bold spirits and dark designs. A false philosophy
passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were
infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge,
which in the two last centuries either did not exist at all, or existed
solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused,
weakened, and perverted. General wealth loosened morals, relaxed
vigilance, and increased presumption. Men of talent began to compare, in
the partition of the common stock of public prosperity, the proportions
of the dividends with the merits of the claimants. As usual, they found
their portion not equal to their estimate (or perhaps to the public
estimate) of their own worth. When it was once discovered by the
Revolution in France that a struggle between establishment and rapacity
could be maintained, though but for one year and in one place, I was
sure that a practicable breach was made in the whole order of things,
and in every country. Religion, that held the materials of the fabric
together, was first systematically loosened. All other opinions, under
the name of prejudices, must fall along with it; and property, left
undefended by principles, became a repository of spoils to tempt
cupidity, and not a magazine to furnish arms for defence. I knew, that,
attacked on all sides by the infernal energies of talents set in action
by vice and disorder, authority could not stand upon authority alone. It
wanted some other support than the poise of its own gravity. Situations
formerly supported persons. It now became necessary that personal
qualities should support situations. Formerly, where authority was
found, wisdom and virtue were presumed. But now the veil was torn, and,
to keep off sacrilegious intrusion, it was necessary that in the
sanctuary of government something should be disclosed not only
venerable, but dreadful. Government was at once to show itself full of
virtue and full of force. It was to invite partisans, by making it
appear to the world that a generous cause was to be asserted, one fit
for a generous people to engage in. From passive submission was it to
expect resolute defence? No! It must have warm advocates and passionate
defenders, which an heavy, discontented acquiescence never could
produce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated body
of authority to say, or to act as if it said, "I will put my trust, not
in my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, in
indolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicious
humors, because you cannot punish me without the hazard of ruining
yourselves."
I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,--a blind
and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform. I was,
indeed, well aware that power rarely reforms itself. So it is,
undoubtedly, when all is quiet about it. But I was in hopes that
provident fear might prevent fruitless penitence. I trusted that danger
might produce at least circumspection. I flattered myself, in a moment
like this, that nothing would be added to make authority
top-heavy,--that the very moment of an earthquake would not be the time
chosen for adding a story to our houses. I hoped to see the surest of
all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform,--the ceasing to do ill. In
the mean time I wished to the people the wisdom of knowing how to
tolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render much more
than tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which everything was to
be found that could enable them to live to Nature, and, if so they
pleased, to live to virtue and to honor.
I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished well
than they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far from
repenting, I would to God that new faculties had been called up in me,
in favor not of this or that man, or this or that system, but of the
general, vital principle, that, whilst it was in its vigor, produced the
state of things transmitted to us from our fathers, but which, through
the joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish
in our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the
commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete
and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own
conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. These
analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes
illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of themselves. They are but
too often used, under the color of a specious philosophy, to find
apologies for the despair of laziness and pusillanimity, and to excuse
the want of all manly efforts, when the exigencies of our country call
for them the more loudly.