There are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are
called to make improvements by great mental exertion. In those moments,
even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country,
and to be invested with full authority, they have not always apt
instruments. A politician, to do great things, looks for a POWER, what
our workmen call a PURCHASE; and if he finds that power, in politics
as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic
institutions, in my opinion, was found a great POWER for the mechanism
of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction;
there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes,
without any other than public ties and public principles; men without
the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a
private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for
some community; men to whom personal poverty is honour, and implicit
obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look to
the possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow
as they list. These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they
are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are
the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial
existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly
suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that
require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are
accomplished. He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned
in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and
direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline,
and the habits of such corporations, as those which you have rashly
destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting
benefit of his country. On the view of this subject, a thousand uses
suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power, growing
wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost
tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently
active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the
attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the
expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of
electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in
nature, and they were always discernible. They seemed, some of them
unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children;
until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their
wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most
powerful and the most tractable agents, in subservience to the great
views and designs of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and
whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a
year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too
big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of using the men but by
converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue
to account but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale?
If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its
natural course. Your politicians do not understand their trade; and
therefore they sell their tools.