foreign to the question of the effect of the will of the majority upon
the form or the existence of their society. I cannot too often recommend
it to the serious consideration of all men who think civil society to be
within the province of moral jurisdiction, that, if we owe to it any
duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and
will are even contradictory terms. Now, though civil society might be at
first a voluntary act, (which in many cases it undoubtedly was,) its
continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the
society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without
any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice,
arising out of the general sense of mankind. Men without their choice
derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are
subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their
choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is
actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties.
Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results
of our option. I allow, that, if no Supreme Ruler exists, wise to form,
and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any
contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power.
On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their
duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer. We have but
this one appeal against irresistible power,--
Si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis arma,
At sperate Deos memores fandi atque nefandi.
Taking it for granted that I do not write to the disciples of the
Parisian philosophy, I may assume that the awful Author of our being is
the Author of our place in the order of existence,--and that, having
disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our
will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually
subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us. We
have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of
any special voluntary pact. They arise from the relation of man to man,
and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters of
choice. On the contrary, the force of all the pacts which we enter into
with any particular person or number of persons amongst mankind depends
upon those prior obligations. In some cases the subordinate relations
are voluntary, in others they are necessary,--but the duties are all
compulsive. When we marry, the choice is voluntary, but the duties are
not matter of choice: they are dictated by the nature of the situation.
Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The
instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not
of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps
unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to
comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be
consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are
bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they
have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to
their relation; but their relation, without their actual consent, binds
them to its duties,--or rather it implies their consent, because the
presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the
predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community
with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits,
loaded with all the duties of their situation. If the social ties and
ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements
of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue,
independently of our will, so, without any stipulation on our own part,
are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as
it has been well said) "all the charities of all."[21] Nor are we left
without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us
as it is awful and coercive. Our country is not a thing of mere physical
locality. It consists, in a great measure, in the ancient order into
which we are born. We may have the same geographical situation, but
another country; as we may have the same country in another soil. The
place that determines our duty to our country is a social, civil
relation.
These are the opinions of the author whose cause I defend. I lay them
down, not to enforce them upon others by disputation, but as an account
of his proceedings. On them he acts; and from them he is convinced that
neither he, nor any man, or number of men, have a right (except what
necessity, which is out of and above all rule, rather imposes than
bestows) to free themselves from that primary engagement into which
every man born into a community as much contracts by his being born into
it as he contracts an obligation to certain parents by his having been
derived from their bodies. The place of every man determines his duty.
If you ask, _Quem te Deus esse jussit_? you will be answered when you
resolve this other question, _Humana qua parte locatus es in re_?[22]
I admit, indeed, that in morals, as in all things else, difficulties
will sometimes occur. Duties will sometimes cross one another. Then
questions will arise, which of them is to be placed in subordination?
which of them may be entirely superseded? These doubts give rise to that
part of moral science called _casuistry_, which though necessary to be
well studied by those who would become expert in that learning, who aim
at becoming what I think Cicero somewhere calls _artifices officiorum_,
it requires a very solid and discriminating judgment, great modesty and
caution, and much sobriety of mind in the handling; else there is a
danger that it may totally subvert those offices which it is its object
only to methodize and reconcile. Duties, at their extreme bounds, are
drawn very fine, so as to become almost evanescent. In that state some
shade of doubt will always rest on these questions, when they are
pursued with great subtilty. But the very habit of stating these extreme
cases is not very laudable or safe; because, in general, it is not right
to turn our duties into doubts. They are imposed to govern our conduct,
not to exercise our ingenuity; and therefore our opinions about them
ought not to be in a state of fluctuation, but steady, sure, and
resolved.
Amongst these nice, and therefore dangerous points of casuistry, may be
reckoned the question so much agitated in the present hour,--Whether,
after the people have discharged themselves of their original power by
an habitual delegation, no occasion can possibly occur which may
justify the resumption of it? This question, in this latitude, is very
hard to affirm or deny: but I am satisfied that no occasion can justify
such a resumption, which would not equally authorize a dispensation with
any other moral duty, perhaps with all of them together. However, if in
general it be not easy to determine concerning the lawfulness of such
devious proceedings, which must be ever on the edge of crimes, it is far
from difficult to foresee the perilous consequences of the resuscitation
of such a power in the people. The practical consequences of any
political tenet go a great way in deciding upon its value. Political
problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to
good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil is
politically false; that which is productive of good, politically true.
Believing it, therefore, a question at least arduous in the theory, and
in the practice very critical, it would become us to ascertain as well
as we can what form it is that our incantations are about to call up
from darkness and the sleep of ages. When the supreme authority of the
people is in question, before we attempt to extend or to confine it, we
ought to fix in our minds, with some degree of distinctness, an idea of
what it is we mean, when we say, the PEOPLE.
In a state of _rude_ Nature there is no such thing as a people. A number
of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people
is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial, and made, like
all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular
nature of that agreement was is collected from the form into which the
particular society has been cast. Any other is not _their_ covenant.
When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which
gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a
people,--they have no longer a corporate existence,--they have no longer
a legal coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized
abroad. They are a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more.
With them all is to begin again. Alas! they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which
has a true politic personality.
We hear much, from men who have not acquired their hardiness of
assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence
of a _majority_, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath
taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such
thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind
another. The power of acting by a majority, which the gentlemen
theorists seem to assume so readily, after they have violated the
contract out of which it has arisen, (if at all it existed,) must be
grounded on two assumptions: first, that of an incorporation produced by
unanimity; and secondly, an unanimous agreement that the act of a mere
majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of
the whole.
We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider
this idea of the decision of a _majority_ as if it were a law of our
original nature. But such constructive whole, residing in a part only,
is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been
or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out of
civil society Nature knows nothing of it; nor are men, even when
arranged according to civil order, otherwise than by very long training,
brought at all to submit to it. The mind is brought far more easily to
acquiesce in the proceedings of one man, or a few, who act under a
general procuration for the state, than in the vote of a victorious
majority in councils in which every man has his share in the
deliberation. For there the beaten party are exasperated and soured by
the previous contention, and mortified by the conclusive defeat. This
mode of decision, where wills may be so nearly equal, where, according
to circumstances, the smaller number may be the stronger force, and
where apparent reason may be all upon one side, and on the other little
else than impetuous appetite,--all this must be the result of a very
particular and special convention, confirmed afterwards by long habits
of obedience, by a sort of discipline in society, and by a strong hand,
vested with stationary, permanent power to enforce this sort of
constructive general will. What organ it is that shall declare the
corporate mind is so much a matter of positive arrangement, that several
states, for the validity of several of their acts, have required a
proportion of voices much greater than that of a mere majority. These
proportions are so entirely governed by convention that in some cases
the minority decides. The laws in many countries to _condemn_ require
more than a mere majority; less than an equal number to _acquit_. In our
judicial trials we require unanimity either to condemn or to absolve. In
some incorporations one man speaks for the whole; in others, a few.
Until the other day, in the Constitution of Poland unanimity was
required to give validity to any act of their great national council or
diet. This approaches much more nearly to rude Nature than the
institutions of any other country. Such, indeed, every commonwealth must
be, without a positive law to recognize in a certain number the will of
the entire body.
If men dissolve their ancient incorporation in order to regenerate their
community, in that state of things each man has a right, if he pleases,
to remain an individual. Any number of individuals, who can agree upon
it, have an undoubted right to form themselves into a state apart and
wholly independent. If any of these is forced into the fellowship of
another, this is conquest and not compact. On every principle which
supposes society to be in virtue of a free covenant, this compulsive
incorporation must be null and void.
As a people can have no right to a corporate capacity without universal
consent, so neither have they a right to hold exclusively any lands in
the name and title of a corporation. On the scheme of the present rulers
in our neighboring country, regenerated as they are, they have no more
right to the territory called France than I have. I have a right to
pitch my tent in any unoccupied place I can find for it; and I may apply
to my own maintenance any part of their unoccupied soil. I may purchase
the house or vineyard of any individual proprietor who refuses his
consent (and most proprietors have, as far as they dared, refused it) to
the new incorporation. I stand in his independent place. Who are these
insolent men, calling themselves the French nation, that would
monopolize this fair domain of Nature? Is it because they speak a
certain jargon? Is it their mode of chattering, to me unintelligible,
that forms their title to my land? Who are they who claim by
prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks,
and Burgundians, and Visigoths, of whom I may have never heard, and
ninety-nine out of an hundred of themselves certainly never have heard,
whilst at the very time they tell me that prescription and long
possession form no title to property? Who are they that presume to
assert that the land which I purchased of the individual, a natural
person, and not a fiction of state, belongs to them, who in the very
capacity in which they make their claim can exist only as an imaginary
being, and in virtue of the very prescription which they reject and
disown? This mode of arguing might be pushed into all the detail, so as
to leave no sort of doubt, that, on their principles, and on the sort of
footing on which they have thought proper to place themselves, the crowd
of men, on the other side of the Channel, who have the impudence to call
themselves a people, can never be the lawful, exclusive possessors of
the soil. By what they call reasoning without prejudice, they leave not
one stone upon another in the fabric of human society. They subvert all
the authority which they hold, as well as all that which they have
destroyed.
As in the abstract it is perfectly clear, that, out of a state of civil
society, majority and minority are relations which can have no
existence, and that, in civil society, its own specific conventions in
each corporation determine what it is that constitutes the people, so as
to make their act the signification of the general will,--to come to
particulars, it is equally clear that neither in France nor in England
has the original or any subsequent compact of the state, expressed or
implied, constituted _a majority of men, told by the head_, to be the
acting people of their several communities. And I see as little of
policy or utility as there is of right, in laying down a principle that
a majority of men told by the head are to be considered as the people,
and that as such their will is to be law. What policy can there be found
in arrangements made in defiance of every political principle? To enable
men to act with the weight and character of a people, and to answer the
ends for which they are incorporated into that capacity, we must suppose
them (by means immediate or consequential) to be in that state of
habitual social discipline in which the wiser, the more expert, and the
more opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect, the
weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of
fortune. When the multitude are not under this discipline, they can
scarcely be said to be in civil society. Give once a certain
constitution of things which produces a variety of conditions and
circumstances in a state, and there is in Nature and reason a principle
which, for their own benefit, postpones, not the interest, but the
judgment, of those who are _numero plures_, to those who are _virtute et
honore majores_. Numbers in a state (supposing, which is not the case in
France, that a state does exist) are always of consideration,--but they
are not the whole consideration. It is in things more serious than a
play, that it may be truly said, _Satis est equitem mihi plaudere_.
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or
separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body
rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate
presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual
truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and
sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be
habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early
to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled
to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified
combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to
read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and
attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be
habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise
danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest
degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things
in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes
draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and
regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor
of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a
reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of
law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to
mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous
art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to
have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of
diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an
habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of
men that form what I should call a _natural_ aristocracy, without which
there is no nation.
The state of civil society which necessarily generates this aristocracy
is a state of Nature,--and much more truly so than a savage and
incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is
never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason
may be best cultivated and most predominates. Art is man's nature. We
are as much, at least, in a state of Nature in formed manhood as in
immature and helpless infancy. Men, qualified in the manner I have just
described, form in Nature, as she operates in the common modification of
society, the leading, guiding, and governing part. It is the soul to the
body, without which the man does not exist. To give, therefore, no more
importance, in the social order, to such descriptions of men than that
of so many units is a horrible usurpation.
When great multitudes act together, under that discipline of Nature, I
recognize the PEOPLE. I acknowledge something that perhaps equals, and
ought always to guide, the sovereignty of convention. In all things the
voice of this grand chorus of national harmony ought to have a mighty
and decisive influence. But when you disturb this harmony,--when you
break up this beautiful order, this array of truth and Nature, as well
as of habit and prejudice,--when you separate the common sort of men
from their proper chieftains, so as to form them into an adverse
army,--I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such
a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds. For a while they may be
terrible, indeed,--but in such a manner as wild beasts are terrible. The
mind owes to them no sort of submission. They are, as they have always
been reputed, rebels. They may lawfully be fought with, and brought
under, whenever an advantage offers. Those who attempt by outrage and
violence to deprive men of any advantage which they hold under the
laws, and to destroy the natural order of life, proclaim war against
them.
We have read in history of that furious insurrection of the common
people in France called the _Jacquerie_: for this is not the first time
that the people have been enlightened into treason, murder, and rapine.
Its object was to extirpate the gentry. The Captal de Buch, a famous
soldier of those days, dishonored the name of a gentleman and of a man
by taking, for their cruelties, a cruel vengeance on these deluded
wretches: it was, however, his right and his duty to make war upon them,
and afterwards, in moderation, to bring them to punishment for their
rebellion; though in the sense of the French Revolution, and of some of
our clubs, they were the _people_,--and were truly so, if you will call
by that appellation _any majority of men told by the head_.
At a time not very remote from the same period (for these humors never
have affected one of the nations without some influence on the other)
happened several risings of the lower commons in England. These
insurgents were certainly the majority of the inhabitants of the
counties in which they resided; and Cade, Ket, and Straw, at the head of
their national guards, and fomented by certain traitors of high rank,
did no more than exert, according to the doctrines of ours and the
Parisian societies, the sovereign power inherent in the majority.
We call the time of those events a dark age. Indeed, we are too
indulgent to our own proficiency. The Abbé John Ball understood the
rights of man as well as the Abbé Grégoire. That reverend patriarch of
sedition, and prototype of our modern preachers, was of opinion, with
the National Assembly, that all the evils which have fallen upon men had
been caused by an ignorance of their "having been born and continued
equal as to their rights." Had the populace been able to repeat that
profound maxim, all would have gone perfectly well with them. No
tyranny, no vexation, no oppression, no care, no sorrow, could have
existed in the world. This would have cured them like a charm for the
tooth-ache. But the lowest wretches, in their most ignorant state, were
able at all times to talk such stuff; and yet at all times have they
suffered many evils and many oppressions, both before and since the
republication by the National Assembly of this spell of healing potency
and virtue. The enlightened Dr. Ball, when he wished to rekindle the
lights and fires of his audience on this point, chose for the test the
following couplet:--
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Of this sapient maxim, however, I do not give him for the inventor. It
seems to have been handed down by tradition, and had certainly become
proverbial; but whether then composed or only applied, thus much must be
admitted, that in learning, sense, energy, and comprehensiveness, it is
fully equal to all the modern dissertations on the equality of mankind:
and it has one advantage over them,--that it is in rhyme.[23]
There is no doubt but that this great teacher of the rights of man
decorated his discourse on this valuable text with lemmas, theorems,
scholia, corollaries, and all the apparatus of science, which was
furnished in as great plenty and perfection out of the dogmatic and
polemic magazines, the old horse-armory of the Schoolmen, among whom the
Rev. Dr. Ball was bred, as they can be supplied from the new arsenal at
Hackney. It was, no doubt, disposed with all the adjutancy of
definition and division, in which (I speak it with submission) the old
marshals were as able as the modern martinets. Neither can we deny that
the philosophic auditory, when they had once obtained this knowledge,
could never return to their former ignorance, or after so instructive a
lecture be in the same state of mind as if they had never heard it.[24]
But these poor people, who were not to be envied for their knowledge,
but pitied for their delusion, were not reasoned, (that was impossible,)
but beaten, out of their lights. With their teacher they were delivered
over to the lawyers, who wrote in their blood the statutes of the land,
as harshly, and in the same sort of ink, as they and their teachers had
written the rights of man.