ancient sage as they are of imitating his conduct: first, because it
might appear that they are not as great inventors as they would be
thought; and next, because, unfortunately for his fame, he was not
successful. It is a remark liable to as few exceptions as any generality
can be, that they who applaud prosperous folly and adore triumphant
guilt have never been known to succor or even to pity human weakness or
offence, when they become subject to human vicissitude, and meet with
punishment instead of obtaining power. Abating for their want of
sensibility to the sufferings of their associates, they are not so much
in the wrong; for madness and wickedness are things foul and deformed in
themselves, and stand in need of all the coverings and trappings of
fortune to recommend them to the multitude. Nothing can be more
loathsome in their naked nature.
Aberrations like these, whether ancient or modern, unsuccessful or
prosperous, are things of passage. They furnish no argument for
supposing _a multitude told by the head to be the people_. Such a
multitude can have no sort of title to alter the seat of power in the
society, in which it ever ought to be the obedient, and not the ruling
or presiding part. What power may belong to the whole mass, in which
mass the natural _aristocracy_, or what by convention is appointed to
represent and strengthen it, acts in its proper place, with its proper
weight, and without being subjected to violence, is a deeper question.
But in that case, and with that concurrence, I should have much doubt
whether any rash or desperate changes in the state, such as we have seen
in France, could ever be effected.
I have said that in all political questions the consequences of any
assumed rights are of great moment in deciding upon their validity. In
this point of view let us a little scrutinize the effects of a right in
the mere majority of the inhabitants of any country of superseding and
altering their government _at pleasure_.
The sum total of every people is composed of its units. Every individual
must have a right to originate what afterwards is to become the act of
the majority. Whatever he may lawfully originate he may lawfully
endeavor to accomplish. He has a right, therefore, in his own
particular, to break the ties and engagements which bind him to the
country in which he lives; and he has a right to make as many converts
to his opinions, and to obtain as many associates in his designs, as he
can procure: for how can you know the dispositions of the majority to
destroy their government, but by tampering with some part of the body?
You must begin by a secret conspiracy, that you may end with a national
confederation. The mere pleasure of the beginner must be the sole guide;
since the mere pleasure of others must be the sole ultimate sanction, as
well as the sole actuating principle in every part of the progress.
Thus, arbitrary will (the last corruption of ruling power) step by step
poisons the heart of every citizen. If the undertaker fails, he has the
misfortune of a rebel, but not the guilt. By such doctrines, all love to
our country, all pious veneration and attachment to its laws and
customs, are obliterated from our minds; and nothing can result from
this opinion, when grown into a principle, and animated by discontent,
ambition, or enthusiasm, but a series of conspiracies and seditions,
sometimes ruinous to their authors, always noxious to the state. No
sense of duty can prevent any man from being a leader or a follower in
such enterprises. Nothing restrains the tempter; nothing guards the
tempted. Nor is the new state, fabricated by such arts, safer than the
old. What can prevent the mere will of any person, who hopes to unite
the wills of others to his own, from an attempt wholly to overturn it?
It wants nothing but a disposition to trouble the established order, to
give a title to the enterprise.
When you combine this principle of the right to change a fixed and
tolerable constitution of things at pleasure with the theory and
practice of the French Assembly, the political, civil, and moral
irregularity are, if possible, aggravated. The Assembly have found
another road, and a far more commodious, to the destruction of an old
government, and the legitimate formation of a new one, than through the
previous will of the majority of what they call the people. Get, say
they, the possession of power by any means you can into your hands; and
then, a subsequent consent (what they call an _address of adhesion_)
makes your authority as much the act of the people as if they had
conferred upon you originally that kind and degree of power which
without their permission you had seized upon. This is to give a direct
sanction to fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, and the breach of the most sacred
trusts that can exist between man and man. What can sound with such
horrid discordance in the moral ear as this position,--that a delegate
with limited powers may break his sworn engagements to his constituent,
assume an authority, never committed to him, to alter all things at his
pleasure, and then, if he can persuade a large number of men to flatter
him in the power he has usurped, that he is absolved in his own
conscience, and ought to stand acquitted in the eyes of mankind? On this
scheme, the maker of the experiment must begin with a determined
perjury. That point is certain. He must take his chance for the
expiatory addresses. This is to make the success of villany the
standard of innocence.
Without drawing on, therefore, very shocking consequences, neither by
previous consent, nor by subsequent ratification of a _mere reckoned
majority_, can any set of men attempt to dissolve the state at their
pleasure. To apply this to our present subject. When the several orders,
in their several bailliages, had met in the year 1789, (such of them, I
mean, as had met peaceably and constitutionally,) to choose and to
instruct their representatives, so organized and so acting, (because
they were organized and were acting according to the conventions which
made them a people,) they were the _people_ of France. They had a legal
and a natural capacity to be considered as that people. But observe,
whilst they were in this state, that is, whilst they were a people, in
no one of their instructions did they charge or even hint at any of
those things which have drawn upon the usurping Assembly and their
adherents the detestation of the rational and thinking part of mankind.
I will venture to affirm, without the least apprehension of being
contradicted by any person who knows the then state of France, that, if
any one of the changes were proposed, which form the fundamental parts
of their Revolution, and compose its most distinguishing acts, it would
not have had one vote in twenty thousand in any order. Their
instructions purported the direct contrary to all those famous
proceedings which are defended as the acts of the people. Had such
proceedings been expected, the great probability is, that the people
would then have risen, as to a man, to prevent them. The whole
organization of the Assembly was altered, the whole frame of the
kingdom was changed, before these things could be done. It is long to
tell, by what evil arts of the conspirators, and by what extreme
weakness and want of steadiness in the lawful government, this equal
usurpation on the rights of the prince and people, having first cheated,
and then offered violence to both, has been able to triumph, and to
employ with success the forged signature of an imprisoned sovereign, and
the spurious voice of dictated addresses, to a subsequent ratification
of things that had never received any previous sanction, general or
particular, expressed or implied, from the nation, (in whatever sense
that word is taken,) or from any part of it.
After the weighty and respectable part of the people had been murdered,
or driven by the menaces of murder from their houses, or were dispersed
in exile into every country in Europe,--after the soldiery had been
debauched from their officers,--after property had lost its weight and
consideration, along with its security,--after voluntary clubs and
associations of factious and unprincipled men were substituted in the
place of all the legal corporations of the kingdom arbitrarily
dissolved,--after freedom had been banished from those popular
meetings[25] whose sole recommendation is freedom,--after it had come to
that pass that no dissent dared to appear in any of them, but at the
certain price of life,--after even dissent had been anticipated, and
assassination became as quick as suspicion,--such pretended ratification
by addresses could be no act of what any lover of the people would
choose to call by their name. It is that voice which every successful
usurpation, as well as this before us, may easily procure, even without
making (as these tyrants have made) donatives from the spoil of one part
of the citizens to corrupt the other.
The pretended _rights of man_, which have made this havoc, cannot be the
rights of the people. For to be a people, and to have these rights, are
things incompatible. The one supposes the presence, the other the
absence, of a state of civil society. The very foundation of the French
commonwealth is false and self-destructive; nor can its principles be
adopted in any country, without the certainty of bringing it to the very
same condition in which France is found. Attempts are made to introduce
them into every nation in Europe. This nation, as possessing the
greatest influence, they wish most to corrupt, as by that means they are
assured the contagion must become general. I hope, therefore, I shall be
excused, if I endeavor to show, as shortly as the matter will admit, the
danger of giving to them, either avowedly or tacitly, the smallest
countenance.
There are times and circumstances in which not to speak out is at least
to connive. Many think it enough for them, that the principles
propagated by these clubs and societies, enemies to their country and
its Constitution, are not owned by the _modern Whigs in Parliament_, who
are so warm in condemnation of Mr. Burke and his book, and of course of
all the principles of the ancient, constitutional Whigs of this kingdom.
Certainly they are not owned. But are they condemned with the same zeal
as Mr. Burke and his book are condemned? Are they condemned at all? Are
they rejected or discountenanced in any way whatsoever? Is any man who
would fairly examine into the demeanor and principles of those
societies, and that too very moderately, and in the way rather of
admonition than of punishment, is such a man even decently treated? Is
he not reproached as if in condemning such principles he had belied the
conduct of his whole life, suggesting that his life had been governed by
principles similar to those which he now reprobates? The French system
is in the mean time, by many active agents out of doors, rapturously
praised; the British Constitution is coldly tolerated. But these
Constitutions are different both in the foundation and in the whole
superstructure; and it is plain that you cannot build up the one but on
the ruins of the other. After all, if the French be a superior system of
liberty, why should we not adopt it? To what end are our praises? Is
excellence held out to us only that we should not copy after it? And
what is there in the manners of the people, or in the climate of France,
which renders that species of republic fitted for them, and unsuitable
to us? A strong and marked difference between the two nations ought to
be shown, before we can admit a constant, affected panegyric, a
standing, annual commemoration, to be without any tendency to an
example.
But the leaders of party will not go the length of the doctrines taught
by the seditious clubs. I am sure they do not mean to do so. God forbid!
Perhaps even those who are directly carrying on the work of this
pernicious foreign faction do not all of them intend to produce all the
mischiefs which must inevitably follow from their having any success in
their proceedings. As to leaders in parties, nothing is more common than
to see them blindly led. The world is governed by go-betweens. These
go-betweens influence the persons with whom they carry on the
intercourse, by stating their own sense to each of them as the sense of
the other; and thus they reciprocally master both sides. It is first
buzzed about the ears of leaders, "that their friends without doors are
very eager for some measure, or very warm about some opinion,--that you
must not be too rigid with them. They are useful persons, and zealous in
the cause. They may be a little wrong, but the spirit of liberty must
not be damped; and by the influence you obtain from some degree of
concurrence with them at present, you may be enabled to set them right
hereafter."
Thus the leaders are at first drawn to a connivance with sentiments and
proceedings often totally different from their serious and deliberate
notions. But their acquiescence answers every purpose.
With no better than such powers, the go-betweens assume a new
representative character. What at best was but an acquiescence is
magnified into an authority, and thence into a desire on the part of the
leaders; and it is carried down as such to the subordinate members of
parties. By this artifice they in their turn are led into measures which
at first, perhaps, few of them wished at all, or at least did not desire
vehemently or systematically.
There is in all parties, between the principal leaders in Parliament and
the lowest followers out of doors, a middle sort of men, a sort of
equestrian order, who, by the spirit of that middle situation, are the
fittest for preventing things from running to excess. But indecision,
though a vice of a totally different character, is the natural
accomplice of violence. The irresolution and timidity of those who
compose this middle order often prevents the effect of their
controlling situation. The fear of differing with the authority of
leaders on the one hand, and of contradicting the desires of the
multitude on the other, induces them to give a careless and passive
assent to measures in which they never were consulted; and thus things
proceed, by a sort of activity of inertness, until whole bodies,
leaders, middle-men, and followers, are all hurried, with every
appearance and with many of the effects of unanimity, into schemes of
politics, in the substance of which no two of them were ever fully
agreed, and the origin and authors of which, in this circular mode of
communication, none of them find it possible to trace. In my experience,
I have seen much of this in affairs which, though trifling in comparison
to the present, were yet of some importance to parties; and I have known
them suffer by it. The sober part give their sanction, at first through
inattention and levity; at last they give it through necessity. A
violent spirit is raised, which the presiding minds after a time find it
impracticable to stop at their pleasure, to control, to regulate, or
even to direct.
This shows, in my opinion, how very quick and awakened all men ought to
be, who are looked up to by the public, and who deserve that confidence,
to prevent a surprise on their opinions, when dogmas are spread and
projects pursued by which the foundations of society may be affected.
Before they listen even to moderate alterations in the government of
their country, they ought to take care that principles are not
propagated for that purpose which are too big for their object.
Doctrines limited in their present application, and wide in their
general principles, are never meant to be confined to what they at
first pretend. If I were to form a prognostic of the effect of the
present machinations on the people from their sense of any grievance
they suffer under this Constitution, my mind would be at ease. But there
is a wide difference between the multitude, when they act against their
government from a sense of grievance or from zeal for some opinions.
When men are thoroughly possessed with that zeal, it is difficult to
calculate its force. It is certain that its power is by no means in
exact proportion to its reasonableness. It must always have been
discoverable by persons of reflection, but it is now obvious to the
world, that a theory concerning government may become as much a cause of
fanaticism as a dogma in religion. There is a boundary to men's
passions, when they act from feeling; none when they are under the
influence of imagination. Remove a grievance, and, when men act from
feeling, you go a great way towards quieting a commotion. But the good
or bad conduct of a government, the protection men have enjoyed or the
oppression they have suffered under it, are of no sort of moment, when a
faction, proceeding upon speculative grounds, is thoroughly heated
against its form. When a man is from system furious against monarchy or
episcopacy, the good conduct of the monarch or the bishop has no other
effect than further to irritate the adversary. He is provoked at it as
furnishing a plea for preserving the thing which he wishes to destroy.
His mind will be heated as much by the sight of a sceptre, a mace, or a
verge, as if he had been daily bruised and wounded by these symbols of
authority. Mere spectacles, mere names, will become sufficient causes to
stimulate the people to war and tumult.
Some gentlemen are not terrified by the facility with which government
has been overturned in France. "The people of France," they say, "had
nothing to lose in the destruction of a bad Constitution; but, though
not the best possible, we have still a good stake in ours, which will
hinder us from desperate risks." Is this any security at all against
those who seem to persuade themselves, and who labor to persuade others,
that our Constitution is an usurpation in its origin, unwise in its
contrivance, mischievous in its effects, contrary to the rights of man,
and in all its parts a perfect nuisance? What motive has any rational
man, who thinks in that manner, to spill his blood, or even to risk a
shilling of his fortune, or to waste a moment of his leisure, to
preserve it? If he has any duty relative to it, his duty is to destroy
it. A Constitution on sufferance is a Constitution condemned. Sentence
is already passed upon it. The execution is only delayed. On the
principles of these gentlemen, it neither has nor ought to have any
security. So far as regards them, it is left naked, without friends,
partisans, assertors, or protectors.
Let us examine into the value of this security upon the principles of
those who are more sober,--of those who think, indeed, the French
Constitution better, or at least as good as the British, without going
to all the lengths of the warmer politicians in reprobating their own.
Their security amounts in reality to nothing more than this,--that the
difference between their republican system and the British limited
monarchy is not worth a civil war. This opinion, I admit, will prevent
people not very enterprising in their nature from an active undertaking
against the British Constitution. But it is the poorest defensive
principle that ever was infused into the mind of man against the
attempts of those who will enterprise. It will tend totally to remove
from their minds that very terror of a civil war which is held out as
our sole security. They who think so well of the French Constitution
certainly will not be the persons to carry on a war to prevent their
obtaining a great benefit, or at worst a fair exchange. They will not go
to battle in favor of a cause in which their defeat might be more
advantageous to the public than their victory. They must at least
tacitly abet those who endeavor to make converts to a sound opinion;
they must discountenance those who would oppose its propagation. In
proportion as by these means the enterprising party is strengthened, the
dread of a struggle is lessened. See what an encouragement this is to
the enemies of the Constitution! A few assassinations and a very great
destruction of property we know they consider as no real obstacles in
the way of a grand political change. And they will hope, that here, if
antimonarchical opinions gain ground as they have done in France, they
may, as in France, accomplish a revolution without a war.
They who think so well of the French Constitution cannot be seriously
alarmed by any progress made by its partisans. Provisions for security
are not to be received from those who think that there is no danger. No!
there is no plan of security to be listened to but from those who
entertain the same fears with ourselves,--from those who think that the
thing to be secured is a great blessing, and the thing against which we
would secure it a great mischief. Every person of a different opinion
must be careless about security.
I believe the author of the Reflections, whether he fears the designs of
that set of people with reason or not, cannot prevail on himself to
despise them. He cannot despise them for their numbers, which, though
small, compared with the sound part of the community, are not
inconsiderable: he cannot look with contempt on their influence, their
activity, or the kind of talents and tempers which they possess, exactly
calculated for the work they have in hand and the minds they chiefly
apply to. Do we not see their most considerable and accredited
ministers, and several of their party of weight and importance, active
in spreading mischievous opinions, in giving sanction to seditious
writings, in promoting seditious anniversaries? and what part of their
description has disowned them or their proceedings? When men,
circumstanced as these are, publicly declare such admiration of a
foreign Constitution, and such contempt of our own, it would be, in the
author of the Reflections, thinking as he does of the French
Constitution, infamously to cheat the rest of the nation to their ruin
to say there is no danger.