Autobiography is commonly interesting; but there can, I suppose, be
little doubt that, as a general rule, it should be posthumous. The
close of an active career supplies an obvious exception: for this
resembles the gentle death which, according to ancient fable, was
rather imparted than inflicted by the tender arrows of Apollo and of
Artemis. I have asked myself many times, during the present year,
whether peculiar combinations of circumstance might not also afford a
warrant at times for departure from the general rule, so far as some
special passage of life is concerned; and whether I was not myself now
placed in one of those special combinations.
The motives, which incline me to answer these questions in the
affirmative, are mainly two. First, that the great and glaring
change in my course of action with respect to the Established Church
of Ireland is not the mere eccentricity, or even perversion, of an
individual mind, but connects itself with silent changes, which are
advancing in the very bed and basis of modern society. Secondly, that
the progress of a great cause, signal as it has been and is, appears
liable nevertheless to suffer in point of credit, if not of energy and
rapidity, from the real or supposed delinquencies of a person, with
whose name for the moment it happens to be specially associated.
One thing is clear: that if I am warranted in treating my own case as
an excepted case, I am bound so to treat it. It is only with a view to
the promotion of some general interest, that the public can becomingly
be invited to hear more, especially in personal history, about an
individual, of whom they already hear too much. But if it be for the
general interest to relieve 'an enterprise of pith and moment' from the
odium of baseness, and from the lighter reproach of precipitancy, I
must make the attempt; though the obtrusion of the first person, and of
all that it carries in its train, must be irksome alike to the reader
and the writer.
So far, indeed, as my observation has gone, the Liberal party of this
country have stood fire unflinchingly under the heavy vollies which
have been fired into its camp with ammunition that had been drawn
from depositories full only with matter personal to myself. And, with
the confidence they entertain in the justice and wisdom of the policy
they recommend, it would have been weak and childish to act otherwise.
Still, I should be glad to give them the means of knowing that the case
may not after all be so scandalous as they are told. In the year 1827,
if I remember right, when Mr. Canning had just become Prime Minister,
an effort was made to support him in the town of Liverpool, where the
light and music of his eloquence had not yet died away, by an Address
to the Crown. The proposal was supported by an able and cultivated
Unitarian Minister, Mr. Shepherd, who had been one of Mr. Canning's
opponents at former periods in the Liverpool elections. Vindicating
the consistency of his course, he said he was ready to support the
devil himself, if it had been necessary, in doing good. This was a
succinct and rough manner of disposing of the question in the last
resort. I hope, however, that those who sustain the Liberal policy
respecting the Established Church of Ireland, will not be driven to
so dire an extremity. It can hardly be deemed on my part an unnatural
desire, that political friends, and candid observers, should on grounds
of reason and knowledge, and not merely from friendly prepossession,
feel themselves warranted not to believe in the justice of language
such as by way of example I subjoin. I must, however, suppose that the
author of it is persuaded of its fairness and justice, since he bears
Her Majesty's Commission; and his statement is adopted and published
by a brother-officer, who is himself a candidate for Berwick in the
ministerial interest, and therefore (I presume) not particularly
squeamish on the subject of political consistency, although I entertain
no doubt that both are gallant, upright, and estimable gentlemen.
"There is obviously no need, on the present occasion
at least, to extend this catalogue of the political
delinquencies of this would-be demagogue, whom we may
accordingly leave gibbeted and swinging in the winds of
the fools' paradise! an object of derision and contempt
to those at least who maintain that integrity of purpose
and consistency ought not altogether to be discarded from
public life."[1]
It freezes the blood, in moments of retirement and reflexion, for a man
to think that he can have presented a picture so hideous to the view
of a fellow-creature!
One thing I have not done, and shall not do. I shall not attempt to
laugh off the question, or to attenuate its importance. In theory
at least, and for others, I am myself a purist with respect to what
touches the consistency of statesmen. Change of opinion, in those
to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own,
is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their
persistence in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not always
to be blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to
be challenged, and put upon its trial. The question is one of so much
interest, that it may justify a few remarks.
It can hardly escape even cursory observation, that the present century
has seen a great increase in the instances of what is called political
inconsistency. It is needless, and it would be invidious, to refer to
names. Among the living, however, who have occupied leading positions,
and among the dead of the last twenty years, numerous instances will
at once occur to the mind, of men who have been constrained to abandon
in middle and mature, or even in advanced life, convictions which they
had cherished through long years of conflict and vicissitude: and of
men, too, who have not been so fortunate as to close or continue their
career in the same political connexion as that in which they commenced
it. If we go a little farther back, to the day of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox,
or even to the day of Mr. Canning, Lord Londonderry, or Lord Liverpool,
we must be struck with the difference. A great political and social
convulsion, like the French Revolution, of necessity deranged the
ranks of party; yet not even then did any man of great name, or of a
high order of mind, permanently change his side.
If we have witnessed in the last forty years, beginning with the epoch
of Roman Catholic Emancipation, a great increase in the changes of
party, or of opinion, among prominent men, we are not at once to leap
to the conclusion that public character, as a rule, has been either
less upright, or even less vigorous. The explanation is rather to
be found in this, that the movement of the public mind has been of
a nature entirely transcending former experience; and that it has
likewise been more promptly and more effectively represented, than at
any earlier period, in the action of the Government and the Legislature.
If it is the office of law and of institutions to reflect the wants
and wishes of the country, (and its wishes must ever be a considerable
element in its wants), then, as the nation passes from a stationary
into a progressive period, it will justly require that the changes in
its own condition and views should be represented in the professions
and actions of its leading men. For they exist for its sake, not it
for theirs. It remains indeed their business, now and ever, to take
honour and duty for their guides, and not the mere demand or purpose
of the passing hour; but honour and duty themselves require their
loyal servant to take account of the state of facts in which he is to
work, and, while ever labouring to elevate the standard of opinion and
action around him, to remember that his business is not to construct,
with self-chosen materials, an Utopia or a Republic of Plato, but to
conduct the affairs of a living and working community of men, who have
self-government recognised as in the last resort the moving spring of
their political life, and of the institutions which are its outward
vesture.
The gradual transfer of political power from groups and limited classes
to the community, and the constant seething of the public mind, in
fermentation upon a vast mass of moral and social, as well as merely
political, interests, offer conditions of action, in which it is
evident that the statesman, in order to preserve the same amount of
consistency as his antecessors in other times, must be gifted with
a far larger range of foresight. But Nature has endowed him with no
such superiority. It may be true that Sir Robert Peel shewed this
relative deficiency in foresight, with reference to Roman Catholic
Emancipation, to Reform, and to the Corn Law. It does not follow that
many, who have escaped the reproach, could have stood the trial. For
them the barometer was less unsteady; the future less exacting in its
demands. But let us suppose that we could secure this enlargement of
onward view, this faculty of measuring and ascertaining to-day the
wants of a remote hereafter, in our statesmen; we should not even
then be at the end of our difficulties. For the public mind is to a
great degree unconscious of its own progression; and it would resent
and repudiate, if offered to its immature judgment, the very policy,
which after a while it will gravely consider, and after another while
enthusiastically embrace.
Yet, as it still remains true that the actual opinions and professions
of men in office, and men in authority without office, are among the
main landmarks on which the public has to rely, it may seem that, in
vindicating an apparent liberty of change, we destroy the principal
guarantees of integrity which are available for the nation at large,
and with these all its confidence in the persons who are to manage
its affairs. This would be a consequence so fatal, that it might even
drive us back upon the hopeless attempt to stereotype the minds of men,
and fasten on their manhood the swaddling clothes of their infancy.
But such is not the alternative. We may regulate the changes which we
cannot forbid, by subjecting them to the test of public scrutiny, and
by directing that scrutiny to the enforcement of the laws of moral
obligation. There are abundant signs, by which to distinguish between
those changes, which prove nothing worse than the fallibility of the
individual mind, and man[oe]uvres which destroy confidence, and entail
merited dishonour. Changes which are sudden and precipitate--changes
accompanied with a light and contemptuous repudiation of the former
self--changes which are systematically timed and tuned to the interest
of personal advancement--changes which are hooded, slurred over, or
denied--for these changes, and such as these, I have not one word to
say; and if they can be justly charged upon me, I can no longer desire
that any portion, however small, of the concerns or interests of my
countrymen should be lodged in my hands.
Let me now endeavour to state the offence of which I am held guilty.
_Ille ego qui quondam_: I, the person who have now accepted a foremost
share of the responsibility of endeavouring to put an end to the
existence of the Irish Church as an Establishment, am also the person
who, of all men in official, perhaps in public life, did, until the
year 1841, recommend, upon the highest and most imperious grounds, its
resolute maintenance.
The book entitled 'The State in its Relations with the Church' was
printed during the autumn of 1838, while I was making a tour in the
South of Europe, which the state of my eyesight had rendered it prudent
to undertake. Three editions of it were published without textual
change; and in the year 1841 a fourth, greatly enlarged, though in
other respects little altered, issued from the press. All interest in
it had, however, even at that time, long gone by, and it lived for
nearly thirty years only in the vigorous and brilliant, though not
(in my opinion) entirely faithful picture, drawn by the accomplished
hand of Lord Macaulay. During the present year, as I understand from
good authority, it has again been in demand, and in my hearing it has
received the emphatic suffrages of many, of whose approval I was never
made aware during the earlier and less noisy stages of its existence.
The distinctive principle of the book was supposed to be, that the
State had a conscience. But the controversy really lies not in the
existence of a conscience in the State, so much as in the extent of its
range. Few would deny the obligation of a State to follow the moral
law. Every Treaty, for example, proceeds upon it. The true issue was
this: whether the State, in its best condition, has such a conscience
as can take cognizance of religious truth and error, and in particular
whether the State of the United Kingdom, at a period somewhat exceeding
thirty years ago, was or was not so far in that condition as to be
under an obligation to give an active and an exclusive support to the
established religion of the country.
The work attempted to survey the actual state of the relations between
the State and the Church; to show from History the ground which had
been defined for the National Church at the Reformation; and to
inquire and determine whether the existing state of things was worth
preserving, and defending against encroachment from whatever quarter.
This question it decided emphatically in the affirmative.
An early copy of the Review containing the powerful essay of Lord
Macaulay was sent to me; and I found that to the main proposition,
sufficiently startling, of the work itself, the reviewer had added
this assumption, that it contemplated not indeed persecution, but yet
the retrogressive process of disabling and disqualifying from civil
office all those who did not adhere to the religion of the State.
Before (I think) the number of the 'Edinburgh Review' for April,
1839, could have been in the hands of the public, I had addressed to
Lord (then Mr.) Macaulay the following letter, which I shall make no
apology for inserting, inasmuch as it will introduce one more morsel of
his writing, for which the public justly shows a keen and insatiable
appetite.
6, Carlton Gardens, April 10th, 1839.