of being concerned as a counsellor of state in advising, and in his
person executing, the conditions of a dishonorable peace with
France,--the surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our outguard on
the Continent. By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the
bridle in the mouth of that power, was not many years afterwards finally
lost. My merit has been in resisting the power and pride of France,
under any form of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal
and earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it could
assume,--the worst, indeed, which the prime cause and principle of all
evil could possibly give it. It was my endeavor by every means to excite
a spirit in the House, where I had the honor of a seat, for carrying on
with early vigor and decision the most clearly just and necessary war
that this or any nation ever carried on, in order to save my country
from the iron yoke of its power, and from the more dreadful contagion of
its principles,--to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and
untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and
good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which,
beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a
great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of
its most intense malignity.
The labors of his Grace's founder merited the "curses, not loud, but
deep," of the Commons of England, on whom _he_ and his master had
effected a _complete Parliamentary Reform_, by making them, in their
slavery and humiliation, the true and adequate representatives of a
debased, degraded, and undone people. My merits were in having had an
active, though not always an ostentatious share, in every one act,
without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in my time, and
in having supported, on all occasions, the authority, the efficiency,
and the privileges of the Commons of Great Britain. I ended my services
by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on their own journals of
their constitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional
conduct. I labored in all things to merit their inward approbation, and
(along with the assistants of the largest, the greatest, and best of my
endeavors) I received their free, unbiased, public, and solemn thanks.
Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the crown grants
which compose the Duke of Bedford's fortune as balanced against mine. In
the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that none
but of the House of Russell are entitled to the favor of the crown? Why
should he imagine that no king of England has been capable of judging of
merit but King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me, he is a
little mistaken: all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford;
all discernment did not lose its vision when his creator closed his
eyes. Let him remit his rigor on the disproportion between merit and
reward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of his
fortune. They will regard with much more satisfaction, as he will
contemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever in his pedigree has
been dulcified by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow
of generations from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the
spring. It is little to be doubted that several of his forefathers in
that long series have degenerated into honor and virtue. Let the Duke of
Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the counsels of
the lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would
tempt him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous
fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility and the plunder of
another Church. Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the
energy of his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crush
rebellious principles which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious
movements that have no provocation in tyranny.
Then will be forgot the rebellions which, by a doubtful priority in
crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished. On such a conduct in
the noble Duke, many of his countrymen might, and with some excuse
might, give way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in the
dashing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that, if the Fates
had found no other way in which they could give a[18] Duke of Bedford
and his opulence as props to a tottering world, then the butchery of
the Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated; it might be regarded even
with complacency, whilst in the heir of confiscation they saw the
sympathizing comforter of the martyrs who suffer under the cruel
confiscation of this day, whilst they beheld with admiration his zealous
protection of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manly
support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry of his
native land. Then his Grace's merit would be pure and new and sharp, as
fresh from the mint of honor. As he pleased, he might reflect honor on
his predecessors, or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him.
He might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the root of it, as
he thought proper.
Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age I
live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who,
in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in
erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in
every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have
shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom
he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all
plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to
mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and
symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that
successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit in me,
or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of
generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased
the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had
received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever
but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss of
a finished man is not easily supplied.
But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose
wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another
manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better.
The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which
the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my
honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth.
There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine
justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself
before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of
unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After
some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted
himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him
blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal
asperity, those ill-natured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to
read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am
alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I
greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of
refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. This is
the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an
indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to
shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and
disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct
is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to
have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as
posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation
(which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would
have performed to me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended,
as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.
The crown has considered me after long service: the crown has paid the
Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any service
which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure,
in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him
take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures
his own utility or his own insignificance, or how he discourages those
who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like the
sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants
are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar
of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of
prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which
the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has by degrees been
enriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very full
share) in bringing to its perfection.[19] The Duke of Bedford will stand
as long as prescriptive law endures,--as long as the great, stable laws
of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their
integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims,
principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They are secure
against all changes but one. The whole Revolutionary system, institutes,
digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same,
but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the
laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governments
of the world. The learned professors of the Rights of Man regard
prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against old
possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the
possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no
more than a long continued and therefore an aggravated injustice.
Such are _their_ ideas, such _their_ religion, and such _their_ law. But
as to _our_ country and _our_ race, as long as the well-compacted
structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of
that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress
at once and a temple,[20] shall stand inviolate on the brow of the
British Sion,--as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than
fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of
Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double
belt of its kindred and coëval towers, as long as this awful structure
shall oversee and guard the subjected land,--so long the mounds and
dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all
the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign
lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this
realm,--the triple cord which no man can break,--the solemn, sworn,
constitutional frank-pledge of this nation,--the firm guaranties of
each other's being and each other's rights,--the joint and several
securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every
quality of property and of dignity,--as long as these ensure, so long
the Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together,--the high
from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity, the low from
the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen!
and so be it! and so it will be,--
Dum domus Æneæ Capitolî immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.
But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its sophistical rights of
man to falsify the account, and its sword as a make-weight to throw into
the scale, shall be introduced into our city by a misguided populace,
set on by proud great men, themselves blinded and intoxicated by a
frantic ambition, we shall all of us perish and be overwhelmed in a
common ruin. If a great storm blow on our coast, it will cast the whales
on the strand, as well as the periwinkles. His Grace will not survive
the poor grantee he despises,--no, not for a twelvemonth. If the great
look for safety in the services they render to this Gallic cause, it is
to be foolish even above the weight of privilege allowed to wealth. If
his Grace be one of these whom they endeavor to proselytize, he ought to
be aware of the character of the sect whose doctrines he is invited to
embrace. With them insurrection is the most sacred of revolutionary
duties to the state. Ingratitude to benefactors is the first of
revolutionary virtues. Ingratitude is, indeed, their four cardinal
virtues compacted and amalgamated into one; and he will find it in
everything that has happened since the commencement of the philosophic
Revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of having performed the
duty of insurrection against the order he lives in, (God forbid he ever
should!) the merit of others will be to perform the duty of insurrection
against him. If he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do not
suspect he will) his ingratitude to the crown for its creation of his
family, others will plead their right and duty to pay him in kind. They
will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. His
deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of his
evidence-room, and burnt to the tune of _Ça, ira_ in the courts of
Bedford (then Equality) House.
Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile reproaches to me
with a friendly admonition to himself? Can I be blamed for pointing out
to him in what manner he is like to be affected, if the sect of the
cannibal philosophers of France should proselytize any considerable part
of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should conquer
that government to which his Grace does not seem to me to give all the
support his own security demands? Surely it is proper that he, and that
others like him, should know the true genius of this sect,--what their
opinions are,--what they have done, and to whom,--and what (if a
prognostic is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of men) it
is certain they will do hereafter. He ought to know that they have sworn
assistance, the only engagement they ever will keep, to all in this
country who bear a resemblance to themselves, and who think, as such,
that _the whole duty of man_ consists in destruction. They are a
misallied and disparaged branch of the House of Nimrod. They are the
Duke of Bedford's natural hunters; and he is their natural game. Because
he is not very profoundly reflecting, he sleeps in profound security:
they, on the contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and,
though far removed from any knowledge which makes men estimable or
useful, in all the instruments and resources of evil their leaders are
not meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished. In the French
Revolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation to meet so
unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. Never before this time
was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and
assassins; never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the
garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.
Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, monstrous as it
seems, is not made for producing despicable enemies. But if they are
formidable as foes, as friends they are dreadful indeed. The men of
property in France, confiding in a force which seemed to be irresistible
because it had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflict
with their enemies at their own weapons. They were found in such a
situation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, the
cavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of an handful of bearded men, whom
they did not know to exist in Nature. This is a comparison that some, I
think, have made; and it is just. In France they had their enemies
within their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of them. But
they had not sagacity to discern their savage character. They seemed
tame, and even caressing. They had nothing but _douce humanité_ in their
mouth. They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on the
greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made their flesh
creep. The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed their
repose. Military glory was no more, with them, than a splendid infamy.
Hardly would they hear of self-defence, which they reduced within such
bounds as to leave it no defence at all. All this while they meditated
the confiscations and massacres we have seen. Had any one told these
unfortunate noblemen and gentlemen how and by whom the grand fabric of
the French monarchy under which they flourished would be subverted, they
would not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have turned from him
as what they call a _mauvais plaisant_. Yet we have seen what has
happened. The persons who have suffered from the cannibal philosophy of
France are so like the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace's
probably not speaking quite so good French could enable us to find out
any difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles as he, and
were of full as illustrious a race; some few of them had fortunes as
ample; several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to the
Duke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as
well educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of honor, as
he is; and to all this they had added the powerful outguard of a
military profession, which, in its nature, renders men somewhat more
cautious than those who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment
of undisturbed possessions. But security was their ruin. They are
dashed to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the
wrecks. If they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such a
thing never could have happened.
I assure his Grace, that, if I state to him the designs of his enemies
in a manner which may appear to him ludicrous and impossible, I tell him
nothing that has not exactly happened, point by point, but twenty-four
miles from our own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified faction,
more encouraged than others are warned by what has happened in France,
look at him and his landed possessions as an object at once of curiosity
and rapacity. He is made for them in every part of their double
character. As robbers, to them he is a noble booty; as speculatists, he
is a glorious subject for their experimental philosophy. He affords
matter for an extensive analysis in all the branches of their science,
geometrical, physical, civil, and political. These philosophers are
fanatics: independent of any interest, which, if it operated alone,
would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such an
headlong rage towards every desperate trial that they would sacrifice
the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments. I am better
able to enter into the character of this description of men than the
noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the world. Without
any considerable pretensions to literature in myself, I have aspired to
the love of letters. I have lived for a great many years in habitudes
with those who professed them. I can form a tolerable estimate of what
is likely to happen from a character chiefly dependent for fame and
fortune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and perverted
state as in that which is sound and natural. Naturally, men so formed
and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But when
they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages too
often the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in
that state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps, a
more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind.
Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred
metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit
than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the
Principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated,
defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the
human breast. What Shakspeare calls the "compunctious visitings of
Nature" will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their
murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their
nature. Their humanity is not dissolved; they only give it a long
prorogation. They are ready to declare that they do not think two
thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is
remarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but by
the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the
contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries
added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their
horizon,--and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The
geometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones of
their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces,
dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings
and habitudes which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is
come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has
rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to
others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their
experiments no more than they do mice in an air-pump or in a recipient
of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon
him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they
do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been
long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed,
velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or
upon four.
His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian
experiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They are
more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; and
they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are
now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do not
possess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope for
seven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments upon
Harrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of this
one Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to
speculation,--fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce
grain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English understanding.
Abbé Sieyès has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions
ready-made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every season and
every fancy: some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some
with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some
distinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity; some of
blood color, some of _boue de Paris_; some with directories, others
without a direction; some with councils of elders and councils of
youngsters, some without any council at all; some where the electors
choose the representatives, others where the representatives choose the
electors; some in long coats, and some in short cloaks; some with
pantaloons, some without breeches; some with five-shilling
qualifications, some totally unqualified. So that no
constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a
pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation,
exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any
shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progress
of experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly!
Such are their sentiments, I assure him; such is their language, when
they dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have the
means to act.