the annals of all time have not furnished an instance of a _complete_
revolution. That revolution seems to have extended even to the
constitution of the mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it
resembles what Lord Verulam says of the operations of Nature: It was
perfect, not only in its elements and principles, but in all its members
and its organs, from the very beginning. The moral scheme of France
furnishes the only pattern ever known which they who admire will
_instantly_ resemble. It is, indeed, an inexhaustible repertory of one
kind of examples. In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classed
with the living, I am not safe from them. They have tigers to fall upon
animated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The national
menagerie is collected by the first physiologists of the time; and it is
defective in no description of savage nature. They pursue even such as
me into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary
tribunals. Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of the tomb, is
sacred to them. They have so determined a hatred to all privileged
orders, that they deny even to the departed the sad immunities of the
grave. They are not wholly without an object. Their turpitude purveys to
their malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the
living. If all revolutionists were not proof against all caution, I
should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever
known in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and by
their sorceries to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event than
the prediction of their own disastrous fate.--"Leave me, oh, leave me to
repose!"
In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me and
my mortuary pension: He cannot readily comprehend the transaction he
condemns. What I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the
production of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect of no
solicitation. The first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately
or immediately, to his Majesty or any of his ministers. It was long
known that the instant my engagements would permit it, and before the
heaviest of all calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity and
sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that design. I
was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any statesman or
any party, when the ministers so generously and so nobly carried into
effect the spontaneous bounty of the crown. Both descriptions have acted
as became them. When I could no longer serve them, the ministers have
considered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them, the
revolutionists have trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is
equal to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came to me,
indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which no
circumstance of fortune could afford me any real pleasure. But this was
no fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased, in
acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the public, to assuage
the sorrows of a desolate old man.
It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would as ill become me,
thus called upon, to depreciate the value of a long life spent with
unexampled toil in the service of my country. Since the total body of my
services, on account of the industry which was shown in them, and the
fairness of my intentions, have obtained the acceptance of my sovereign,
it would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the Duke of
Bedford and the Corresponding Society, or, as far as in me lies, to
permit a dispute on the rate at which the authority appointed by _our_
Constitution to estimate such things has been pleased to set them.
Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and contempt. By me they
have been so always. I knew, that, as long as I remained in public, I
should live down the calumnies of malice and the judgments of ignorance.
If I happened to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not?) like all
other men, I must bear the consequence of my faults and my mistakes. The
libels of the present day are just of the same stuff as the libels of
the past. But they derive an importance from the rank of the persons
they come from, and the gravity of the place where they were uttered. In
some way or other I ought to take some notice of them. To assert myself
thus traduced is not vanity or arrogance. It is a demand of justice; it
is a demonstration of gratitude. If I am unworthy, the ministers are
worse than prodigal. On that hypothesis, I perfectly agree with the Duke
of Bedford.
For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put myself on my country.
I ought to be allowed a reasonable freedom, because I stand upon my
deliverance; and no culprit ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmost
latitude of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum.
Whatever it may be in the eyes of these noble persons themselves, to me
their situation calls for the most profound respect. If I should happen
to trespass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always be
supposed that a confusion of characters may produce mistakes,--that, in
the masquerades of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical adventures
happen, odd things are said and pass off. If I should fail a single
point in the high respect I owe to those illustrious persons, I cannot
be supposed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of
the House of Peers, but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale
of Palace Yard,--the Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There they are on the
pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my humble level, and,
virtually at least, to have waived their high privilege.
Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary tribunals, where
men have been put to death for no other reason than that they had
obtained favors from the crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit
of the old English law,--that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline his
Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a
juror to pass upon the value of my services. Whatever his natural parts
may be, I cannot recognize in his few and idle years the competence to
judge of my long and laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not be
on the inquest of my _quantum meruit_. Poor rich man! he can hardly know
anything of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate its
compensations when its work is done. I have no doubt of his Grace's
readiness in all the calculations of vulgar arithmetic; but I shrewdly
suspect that he is little studied in the theory of moral proportions,
and has never learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and
state.
His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that my exertions,
whatever they have been, were such as no hopes of pecuniary reward could
possibly excite; and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them.
Between money and such services, if done by abler men than I am, there
is no common principle of comparison: they are quantities
incommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal
life. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, indeed,
sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not
had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to
employ as well as he a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a more
confined application, I certainly stand in need of every kind of relief
and easement much more than he does. When I say I have not received more
than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No! Far, very
far, from it! Before that presence I claim no merit at all. Everything
towards me is favor and bounty. One style to a gracious benefactor;
another to a proud and insulting foe.
His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt by charging my acceptance of
his Majesty's grant as a departure from my ideas and the spirit of my
conduct with regard to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy wore false
and ill-founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's ideas of economy I
have contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to certain
bills brought in by me on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him
that there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either the
letter or the spirit of those acts. Does he mean the Pay-Office Act? I
take it for granted he does not. The act to which he alludes is, I
suppose, the Establishment Act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has
ever read the one or the other. The first of these systems cost me, with
every assistance which my then situation gave me, pains incredible. I
found an opinion common through all the offices, and general in the
public at large, that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize
the office of pay-master-general. I undertook it, however; and I
succeeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, or whether
the general economy of our finances have profited by that act, I leave
to those who are acquainted with the army and with the treasury to
judge.
An opinion full as general prevailed also, at the same time, that
nothing could be done for the regulation of the civil list
establishment. The very attempt to introduce method into it, and any
limitations to its services, was held absurd. I had not seen the man who
so much as suggested one economical principle or an economical expedient
upon that subject. Nothing but coarse amputation or coarser taxation
were then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or the
least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong zeal or factious fury were
the whole contribution brought by the most noisy, on that occasion,
towards the satisfaction of the public or the relief of the crown.
Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time
required something very different from what others then suggested or
what his Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of the
most critical periods in our annals.
Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, whose path
intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what)
sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course,
into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet
of the Rights of Man, (which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and
war," and "with fear of change perplexes monarchs,") had that comet
crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could
have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of
heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French
Revolution.
Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility was at a good
distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our
colonies, but we kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much
intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage
insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the
name of Reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there
was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not
count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.
Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms,
went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them,
undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very
remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this
kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had
the honor of leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution. Other
projects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very
existence of the kingdom under any Constitution. There are who remember
the blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others; here,
a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger,--there, the same
inaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-wishers to the
mischief,--there, indifferent lookers-on. At the same time, a sort of
National Convention, dubious in its nature and perilous in its example,
nosed Parliament in the very seat of its authority,--sat with a sort of
superintendence over it,--and little less than dictated to it, not only
laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself. In Ireland
things ran in a still more eccentric course. Government was unnerved,
confounded, and in a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. I
do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man of
admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding
fitted for every sort of business, of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a
delightful temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it
would be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honor
the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the
vigilance and spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, a
darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over the whole
region. For a little time the helm appeared abandoned.
Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere cœlo,
Nec meminisse viæ mediâ Palinurus in undâ.
At that time I was connected with men of high place in the community.
They loved liberty as much as the Duke of Bedford can do; and they
understood it at least as well. Perhaps their politics, as usual, took a
tincture from their character, and they cultivated what they loved. The
liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue,
from morals, and from religion,--and was neither hypocritically nor
fanatically followed. They did not wish that liberty, in itself one of
the first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest
curse which could fall upon mankind. To preserve the Constitution
entire, and practically equal to all the great ends of its formation,
not in one single part, but in all its parts, was to them the first
object. Popularity and power they regarded alike. These were with them
only different means of obtaining that object, and had no preference
over each other in their minds, but as one or the other might afford a
surer or a less certain prospect of arriving at that end. It is some
consolation to me, in the cheerless gloom which darkens the evening of
my life, that with them I commenced my political career, and never for a
moment, in reality nor in appearance, for any length of time, was
separated from their good wishes and good opinion.
By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, but just then,
and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy which ever has pursued me with
a full cry through life, I had obtained a very considerable degree of
public confidence. I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind of
popular opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no stranger to
the insecurity of its tenure. I do not boast of it. It is mentioned to
show, not how highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use I
made of it. I endeavored to turn that short-lived advantage to myself
into a permanent benefit to my country. Far am I from detracting from
the merit of some gentlemen, out of office or in it, on that occasion.
No! It is not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice to
the aids that I receive. I have through life been willing to give
everything to others,--and to reserve nothing for myself, but the inward
conscience that I had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to
discipline, to direct the abilities of the country for its service, and
to place them in the best light to improve their age, or to adorn it.
This conscience I have. I have never suppressed any man, never checked
him for a moment in his course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I was
always ready, to the height of my means, (and they wore always
infinitely below my desires,) to forward those abilities which
overpowered my own. He is an ill-furnished undertaker who has no
machinery but his own hands to work with. Poor in my own faculties, I
ever thought myself rich in theirs. In that period of difficulty and
danger, more especially, I consulted and sincerely coöperated with men
of all parties who seemed disposed to the same ends, or to any main part
of them. Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted: when it appeared,
nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I
could prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so
aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand--I
do not say I saved my country; I am sure I did my country important
service. There were few, indeed, that did not at that time acknowledge
it,--and that time was thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that no
man in the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision should be made
for him. So much for my general conduct through the whole of the
portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general sense then
entertained of that conduct by my country. But my character as a
reformer, in the particular instances which the Duke of Bedford refers
to, is so connected in principle with my opinions on the hideous changes
which have since barbarized France, and, spreading thence, threaten the
political and moral order of the whole world, that it seems to demand
something of a more detailed discussion.
My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, the suppression
of a paltry pension or employment, more or less. Economy in my plans
was, as it ought to be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental. I acted on
state principles. I found a great distemper in the commonwealth, and
according to the nature of the evil and of the object I treated it. The
malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms.
Throughout it was full of contra-indicants. On one hand, government,
daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of
strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor
was this dissolution confined to government commonly so called. It
extended to Parliament, which was losing not a little in its dignity and
estimation by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives. On the
other hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused
into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner with
regard to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment the
dreadful tampering with the body of the Constitution itself,) that, if
their petitions had literally been complied with, the state would have
been convulsed, and a gate would have been opened through which all
property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the
public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, which
would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into
discredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of the
people, who would know they had failed in the accomplishment of their
wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would impute the
blame to anything rather than to their own proceedings. But there were
then persons in the world who nourished complaint, and would have been
thoroughly disappointed, if the people were ever satisfied. I was not of
that humor. I wished that they _should_ be satisfied. It was my aim to
give to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I
thought was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been
modified for them into senseless petitions. I knew that there is a
manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak
men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,--that is, a
marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the
substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential
good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is
novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of
reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle
upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand.
Reform is not a change in the substance or in the primary modification
of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance
complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there;
and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the
very worst, is but where it was.
All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It
cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon
precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb,--_To innovate is
not to reform_. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they
refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all,
_unchanged_. The consequences are _before_ us,--not in remote history,
not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They
shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the
growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they
stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our
business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are
saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is
rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful
innovation. The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and
Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally "all
monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their
eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboring
state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what
divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of
prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse
down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or
unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.[15]
If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete innovation, or,
as some friends of his will call it, _reform_, in the whole body of its
solidity and compound mass, at which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven
glows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every
reflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought-sick, without
a thorough abhorrence of everything they say and everything they do, I
am amazed at the morbid strength or the natural infirmity of his mind.
It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced my
plan of reform. Without troubling myself with the exactness of the
logical diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite. It
was to prevent that evil, that I proposed the measures which his Grace
is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to my
recollection. I had (what I hope that noble Duke will remember in all
his operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform. I had
a people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claim
half the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from being done.
In that situation of the public mind, I did not undertake, as was then
proposed, to new-model the House of Commons or the House of Lords, or
to change the authority under which any officer of the crown acted, who
was suffered at all to exist. Crown, lords, commons, judicial system,
system of administration, existed as they had existed before, and in the
mode and manner in which they had always existed. My measures were, what
I then truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, healing
and mediatorial. A complaint was made of too much influence in the House
of Commons: I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my reasons, article
by article, for every reduction, and showed why I thought it safe for
the service of the state. I heaved the lead every inch of way I made. A
disposition to expense was complained of: to that I opposed, not mere
retrenchment, but a system of economy, which would make a random
expense, without plan or foresight, in future, not easily practicable. I
proceeded upon principles of research to put me in possession of my
matter, on principles of method to regulate it, and on principles in the
human mind and in civil affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation.
I conceived nothing arbitrarily, nor proposed anything to be done by the
will and pleasure of others or my own,--but by reason, and by reason
only. I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of my understanding to
this its obscure twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy,
inclination, and will, in the affairs of government, where only a
sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and
administration, should dictate. Government is made for the very purpose
of opposing that reason to will and to caprice, in the reformers or in
the reformed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates,
or in people.