When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without
a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the
whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now
appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious?
a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy? a tendency in all that
is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance
of the state? Other revolutions have been conducted by persons,
who, whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth,
sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose
peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not
at the destruction, of their country. They were men of great civil and
great military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age.
They were not like Jew brokers, contending with each other who could
best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the
wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate
councils. The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old
stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favourite poet of that time,
shows what it was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he
accomplished, in the success of his ambition:--
"Still as YOU rise, the STATE exalted too,
Finds no distemper whilst 'tis changed by YOU:
Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise
The rising sun night's VULGAR lights destroys."
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting
their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and
beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by
outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the
country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it
suffered. I do not say (God forbid), I do not say, that the virtues of
such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes: but they were
some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our Cromwell.
Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis. Such the
Richelieus, who in more quite times acted in the spirit of a civil war.
Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the
Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not wholly
without some of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at, to see
how very soon France, when she had a moment to respire, recovered and
emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known
in any nation. Why? Because among all their massacres, they had not
slain the MIND in their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride,
a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished. On the
contrary, it was kindled and enflamed. The organs also of the state,
however shattered, existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all
the rewards, all the distinctions, remained. But your present confusion,
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in
your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is
disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except
in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this generation will
quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble the
artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will
be always their fellows, sometimes their masters. Believe me, Sir, those
who attempt to level, never equalise. In all societies, consisting of
various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost.
The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of
things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air
what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
associations of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris,
for instance), is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which,
by the worst of usurpations, a usurpation on the prerogatives of nature,
you attempt to force them.
The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the states, said, in a tone
of oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honourable. If he
meant only, that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have
gone beyond the truth. But in asserting that anything is honourable, we
imply some distinction in its favour. The occupation of a hair-dresser,
or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any
person--to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments.
Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state;
but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually
or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are
combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.