I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of
his age; and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my
heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was at his
trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and
anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory, what
part my son took in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and
the pious passion with which he attached himself to all my connections,
with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in courting almost
every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should
have felt such friendship on such an occasion. I partook indeed of this
honour with several of the first, and best, and ablest in the kingdom,
but I was behindhand with none of them; and I am sure, that if to the
eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total annihilation of every
trace of honour and virtue in it, things had taken a different turn from
what they did, I should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no
less good-will and more pride, though with far other feelings, than I
partook of the general flow of national joy that attended the justice
that was done to his virtue.
Pardon, my lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuse
itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in
retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life,
we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship in
those only whom we have lost for ever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel
at all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when
I was attacked in the House of Lords.
Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and,
with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew the duke of Bedford,
he would have told him that the favour of that gracious prince, who had
honoured his virtues with the government of the navy of Great Britain,
and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not
undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and
his faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would
have told him, that to whomever else these reproaches might be becoming,
they were not decorous in his near kindred. He would have told him that
when men in that rank lose decorum they lose everything. On that day
I had a loss in Lord Keppel; but the public loss of him in this awful
crisis--! I speak from much knowledge of the person, he never would have
listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this sans-culotterie
of France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his public
duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have repelled him for ever
from all connection with that horrid medley of madness, vice, impiety,
and crime.
Lord Keppel had two countries; one of descent, and one of birth. Their
interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of
both. His family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was the oldest
and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned above
all others for love of their native land. Though it was never shown in
insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild
stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the
milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disinclined
to augment it with new honours. He valued the old nobility and the new,
not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous
activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a
narrow mind; conceiving that a man born in an elevated place in himself
was nothing, but everything in what went before, and what was to
come after him. Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct
of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated,
natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by
any possibility long subsist without a body of some kind or other
of nobility, decorated with honour, and fortified by privilege. This
nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation, which
otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation
can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made
without some such order of things as might, through a series of time,
afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and
stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can protect it against
the levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. That
to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary
reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, fit only for
those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves," who began to forge in
1789 the false money of the French constitution.--That it is one fatal
objection to all NEW fancied and NEW FABRICATED republics (among
a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and
insolently rejected it), that the PREJUDICE of an old nobility is a
thing that CANNOT be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it
may be replenished: men may be taken from it or aggregated to it, but
the THING ITSELF is matter of INVETERATE opinion, and therefore CANNOT
be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this nobility in
fact does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them,
and for them.
"LABOURING POOR."
Let government protect and encourage industry, secure property, repress
violence, and discountenance fraud, it is all that they have to do. In
other respects, the less they meddle in these affairs the better; the
rest is in the hands of our Master and theirs. We are in a constitution
of things wherein--"Modo sol nimius, modo corripit imber." But I will
push this matter no further. As I have said a good deal upon it
at various times during my public service, and have lately written
something on it which may yet see the light, I shall content myself now
with observing, that the vigorous and laborious class of life has lately
got, from the bon ton of the humanity of this day, the name of the
"labouring poor." We have heard many plans for the relief of the
"labouring poor." This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is
foolish. In meddling with great affairs, weakness is never innoxious.
Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite
compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who
cannot, labour--for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for
languishing and decrepit age: but when we affect to pity, as poor, those
who must labour, or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the
condition of mankind. It is the common doom of man that he must eat his
bread by the sweat of his brow, that is, by the sweat of his body, or
the sweat of his mind. If this toil was inflicted as a curse, it is, as
might be expected from the curses of the Father of all blessings--it
is tempered with many alleviations, many comforts. Every attempt to fly
from it, and to refuse the very terms of our existence, becomes much
more truly a curse; and heavier pains and penalties fall upon those
who would elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great
Master Workman of the world, who, in his dealings with his creatures,
sympathizes with their weakness, and speaking of a creation wrought by
mere will out of nothing, speaks of six days of LABOUR and one of REST.
I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind, and vigorous
in his arms, I cannot call such a man POOR; I cannot pity my kind as
a kind, merely because they are men. This affected pity only tends
to dissatisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seek
resources where no resources are to be found, in something else than
their own industry, and frugality, and sobriety. Whatever may be the
intention (which, because I do not know, I cannot dispute) of those who
would discontent mankind by this strange pity, they act towards us, in
the consequences, as if they were our worst enemies.