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 humour. 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
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 neighbouring
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.