of the civil list, and on weighing them against each other, in order to
make as much as possible all of them a subject of estimate, (the
foundation and corner-stone of all regular, provident economy,) it
appeared to me evident that this was impracticable, whilst that part
called the pension list was totally discretionary in its amount. For
this reason, and for this only, I proposed to reduce it, both in its
gross quantity and in its larger individual proportions, to a certainty;
lest, if it were left without a _general_ limit, it might eat up the
civil list service,--if suffered to be granted in portions too great for
the fund, it might defeat its own end, and, by unlimited allowances to
some, it might disable the crown in means of providing for others. The
pension list was to be kept as a sacred fund; but it could not be kept
as a constant, open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if some
demands would wholly devour it. The tenor of the act will show that it
regarded the civil list _only_, the reduction of which to some sort of
estimate was my great object.
No other of the crown funds did I meddle with, because they had not the
same relations. This of the four and a half per cents does his Grace
imagine had escaped me, or had escaped all the men of business who acted
with me in those regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and that
pensions had been always granted on it, before his Grace was born. This
fund was full in my eye. It was full in the eyes of those who worked
with me. It was left on principle. On principle I did what was then
done; and on principle what was left undone was omitted. I did not dare
to rob the nation of all funds to reward merit. If I pressed this point
too close, I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which I went.
Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me; but if any one thinks it worth
his while to know the rules that guided me in my plan of reform, he will
read my printed speech on that subject, at least what is contained from
page 230 to page 241 in the second volume of the collection[16] which a
friend has given himself the trouble to make of my publications. Be this
as it may, these two bills (though achieved with the greatest labor, and
management of every sort, both within and without the House) were only a
part, and but a small part, of a very large system, comprehending all
the objects I stated in opening my proposition, and, indeed, many more,
which I just hinted at in my speech to the electors of Bristol, when I
was put out of that representation. All these, in some state or other of
forwardness, I have long had by me.
But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds? I think them the
least of my services. The time gave them an occasional value. What I
have done in the way of political economy was far from confined to this
body of measures. I did not come into Parliament to con my lesson. I had
earned my pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen's Chapel. I was
prepared and disciplined to this political warfare. The first session I
sat in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial,
financial, constitutional, and foreign interests of Great Britain and
its empire. A great deal was then done; and more, far more, would have
been done, if more had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigor of
my manhood, my constitution sunk under my labor. Had I then died, (and
I seemed to myself very near death,) I had then earned for those who
belonged to me more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are of
power to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am called to account
for are not those on which I value myself the most. If I were to call
for a reward, (which I have never done,) it should be for those in which
for fourteen years without intermission I showed the most industry and
had the least success: I mean in the affairs of India. They are those on
which I value myself the most: most for the importance, most for the
labor, most for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance in the
pursuit. Others may value them most for the _intention_. In that,
surely, they are not mistaken.
Does his Grace think that they who advised the crown to make my retreat
easy considered me only as an economist? That, well understood, however,
is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have
made political economy an object of my humble studies from my very early
youth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even before (at least
to any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of speculative
men in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its infancy
in England, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and
learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and deigned
to communicate with me now and then on some particulars of their
immortal works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally in
some of the earliest things I published. The House has been witness to
their effect, and has profited of them, more or less, for above
eight-and-twenty years.
To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his Grace of
Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator: "_Nitor in
adversum_" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the
qualities nor cultivated one of the arts that recommend men to the favor
and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As
little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the
understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life, (for
in every step was I traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met,
I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole
title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was
not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its
interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration
even, for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and,
please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale,
to the last gasp will I stand.
Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the person whom he has
not thought it below him to reproach, he might have found, that, in the
whole course of my life, I have never, on any pretence of economy, or on
any other pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between any
man and his reward of service or his encouragement in useful talent and
pursuit, from the highest of those services and pursuits to the lowest.
On the contrary, I have on an hundred occasions exerted myself with
singular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable pretensions. I have
more than once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends for
carrying the matter to something bordering on abuse. This line of
conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly owing to natural
disposition, but I think full as much to reason and principle. I looked
on the consideration of public service or public ornament to be real and
very justice; and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake
of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the
worst economy in the world. In saving money I soon can count up all the
good I do; but when by a cold penury I blast the abilities of a nation,
and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond
all calculation. Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have
done has been general and systematic. I have never entered into those
trifling vexations and oppressive details that have been falsely and
most ridiculously laid to my charge.
Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barré and Mr. Dunning between the
proposition and execution of my plan? No! surely, no! Those pensions
were within my principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their
pensions, their titles,--all they had; and if more they had, I should
have been but pleased the more. They were men of talents; they were men
of service. I put the profession of the law out of the question in one
of them. It is a service that rewards itself. But their _public
service_, though from their abilities unquestionably of more value than
mine, in its quantity and in its duration was not to be mentioned with
it. But I never could drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any
matter whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle and huckster
with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none; nor did I solicit any.
Yet I was loaded with hatred for everything that was withheld, and with
obloquy for everything that was given. I was thus left to support the
grants of a name ever dear to me and ever venerable to the world in
favor of those who were no friends of mine or of his, against the rude
attacks of those who were at that time friends to the grantees and their
own zealous partisans. I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale
complain of these pensions. He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me.
This is impartiality, in the true, modern, revolutionary style.
Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order and economy, is
stable and eternal, as all principles must be. A particular order of
things may be altered: order itself cannot lose its value. As to other
particulars, they are variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of
regulation are not fundamental laws. The public exigencies are the
masters of all such laws. They rule the laws, and are not to be ruled by
them. They who exercise the legislative power at the time must judge.
It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him that mere
parsimony is not economy. It is separable in theory from it; and in fact
it may or it may not be a _part_ of economy, according to circumstances.
Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If
parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue,
there is, however, another and an higher economy. Economy is a
distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but in selection.
Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination,
no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of
the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The
other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment,
and a firm, sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent importunity,
only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none but
meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has
not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all
the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever
will produce. No state, since the foundation of society, has been
impoverished by that species of profusion. Had the economy of selection
and proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had an
overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and to
limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty,
or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.
His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the far
greater part of my conduct in life. It is free for him to do so. There
will always be some difference of opinion in the value of political
services. But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men living,
ought to be the last to call in question. I have supported with very
great zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opinions,
or, if his Grace likes another expression better, those old prejudices,
which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and titles. I
have omitted no exertion to prevent him and them from sinking to that
level to which the meretricious French faction his Grace at least
coquets with omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could to
discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold large
portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own. I have
strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation
which alone makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a witness of
the use he makes of that preëminence.
But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in this
well-selected rigor: yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all men
and at all times. There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which
in all seasons of our existence ought to put a generous antipathy in
action,--crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm
and animated pursuit. But all things that concern what I may call the
preventive police of morality, all things merely rigid, harsh, and
censorial, the antiquated moralists at whose feet I was brought up would
not have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite virtues
of young men of rank. What might have been well enough, and have been
received with a veneration mixed with awe and terror, from an old,
severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of propriety in the
young Scipios, the ornament of the Roman nobility, in the flower of
their life. But the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars, have
all undergone a thorough revolution. It is a vile, illiberal school,
this new French academy of the _sans-culottes_. There is nothing in it
that is fit for a gentleman to learn.
Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself that the parents of
the growing generation will be satisfied with what is to be taught to
their children in Westminster, in Eton, or in Winchester; I still
indulge the hope that no _grown_ gentleman or nobleman of our time will
think of finishing at Mr. Thelwall's lecture whatever may have been left
incomplete at the old universities of his country. I would give to Lord
Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto what was said of a Roman censor or
prætor (or what was he?) who in virtue of a _Senatusconsultum_ shut up
certain academies,--"_Cludere ludum impudentiæ jussit_." Every honest
father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the breaking-up for
the holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long vacation, in
all such schools.
The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own justification, is
my true object in what I now write, or in what I shall ever write or
say. It little signifies to the world what becomes of such things as me,
or even as the Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is nothing
more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive, to convey my
sentiments on matters far more worthy of your attention. It is when I
stick to my apparent first subject that I ought to apologize, not when I
depart from it. I therefore must beg your Lordship's pardon for again
resuming it after this very short digression,--assuring you that I shall
never altogether lose sight of such matter as persons abler than I am
may turn to some profit.
The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to call the attention
of the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant to me, which he considers
as excessive and out of all bounds.
I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst his
Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a
sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as
dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and
incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to
_me_, but took the subject-matter from the crown grants _to his own
family_. This is "the stuff of which his dreams are made." In that way
of putting things together his Grace is perfectly in the right. The
grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage
economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the
leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his
unwieldy bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty.
Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating many a rood," he is still a
creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very
spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin,
and covers me all over with the spray, everything of him and about him
is from the throne. Is it for _him_ to question the dispensation of the
royal favor?
I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public
merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and
these services of mine, on the favorable construction of which I have
obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life I have not
at all the honor of acquaintance with the noble Duke; but I ought to
presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves
the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service,
why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself, in
rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure,
with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services
and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross
adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his
own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed
pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and
personal: his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original
pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit which makes
his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other
grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should
have said, "'Tis his estate: that's enough. It is his by law: what have
I to do with it or its history?" He would naturally have said, on his
side, "'Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two
hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; he
is an old man with very young pensions: that's all."
Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my
little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of
profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and
laborious individuals? I would willingly leave him to the Herald's
College, which the philosophy of the _sans-culottes_ (prouder by far
than all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge-Dragons
that ever pranced in a procession of what his friends call aristocrats
and despots) will abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians,
recorders, and blazoners of virtues and arms differ wholly from that
other description of historians who never assign any act of politicians
to a good motive. These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip their
pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They seek no further for
merit than the preamble of a patent or the inscription on a tomb. With
them every man created a peer is first an hero ready-made. They judge of
every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and the
more offices, the more ability. Every general officer with them is a
Marlborough, every statesman a Burleigh, every judge a Murray or a
Yorke. They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their
acquaintance make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages of
Guillim, Edmondson, and Collins.
To these recorders, so full of good-nature to the great and prosperous,
I would willingly leave the first Baron Russell and Earl of Bedford, and
the merits of his grants. But the aulnager, the weigher, the meter of
grants will not suffer us to acquiesce in the judgment of the prince
reigning at the time when they were made. They are never good to those
who earn them. Well, then, since the new grantees have war made on them
by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let
us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure
in contemplating the heroic origin of their house.
The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr.
Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a
minion of Henry the Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of
character to create these relations, the favorite was in all likelihood
much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants
was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recent
confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion, having
sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in
waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favorites
became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favorite's first grant was from
the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of
the first, was from the plunder of the Church. In truth, his Grace is
somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its
quantity, but in its kind, so different from his own.
Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign: his from Henry the
Eighth.
Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of
illustrious rank,[17] or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men.
His grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments
iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the
lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.
The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that of being a prompt
and greedy instrument of a _levelling_ tyrant, who oppressed all
descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on
everything that was _great and noble_. Mine has been in endeavoring to
screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in
defending the high and eminent, who, in the bad times of confiscating
princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating demagogues, are
the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy.
The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in giving
his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil, with a prince who
plundered a part of the national Church of his time and country. Mine
was in defending the whole of the national Church of my own time and my
own country, and the whole of the national Churches of all countries,
from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical
pillage, thence to a contempt of _all_ prescriptive titles, thence to
the pillage of _all_ property, and thence to universal desolation.
The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favorite
and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to their native
country. My endeavor was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in
which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine
was to support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege,
every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensive
country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of
empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language,
and religion, in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and
the larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown.
His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served his master and
made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on
his country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the
commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom,--in which his
Majesty shows an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a
patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil.
His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman raised by the arts of a
court and the protection of a Wolsey to the eminence of a great and
potent lord. His merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to
injustice, to provoke a people to rebellion. My merit was, to awaken the
sober part of the country, that they might put themselves on their
guard against any one potent lord, or any greater number of potent
lords, or any combination of great leading men of any sort, if ever they
should attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the reverse
order,--that is, by instigating a corrupted populace to rebellion, and,
through that rebellion, introducing a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny
which his Grace's ancestor supported, and of which he profited in the
manner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth.