* * * * *
Politics are a sore temptation to any writer, and of dalliance with a
Delilah so seductive it is futile to declare that I am innocent. My
principles positively are known to myself; which is a measure of
self-knowledge, in these any-thing-arian days, of that cabinet
coin-climax the "8th degree of rarity;" and that those choice
principles may not be concealed from so kind an eye as yours, friend
reader, hear me profess myself honestly--if you approve, or
shamelessly--if you _will_ so think it--"a rabid Tory!" At least, by
such a nomenclature sundry veracious journals, daily leaders of the
public opinion, would call me, were such a groundling as I prominent
enough to attract their indignation; and, from all that can be gathered
from their condemnatory clauses against others like minded, I have no
little reason to be proud of the title. For, on collation of such
clauses with their causes, I find, and therefore take (under correction
always) the rabid Tory to be--a temperate lover of order, whom his
mother has taught to "fear God," his father to "honour the king," and
his pastor to "meddle not with them who are given to change." A rabid
Tory, in matters of national expenditure, remembers to have heard an old
unexploded proverb, "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth, and
there is that withholdeth what is due, but it tendeth to poverty;" and
he is by no means sure that a certain mismanaged nation is not
immolating her prosperity to what actuaries would call economical
principles. A rabid Tory is bigoted enough to entertain a ridiculous
fear of that generation abstraction, Catholic Rome, whom further he is
sufficiently vulgar-minded to consider as a lady of easy virtue arrayed
in the colours of a cardinal: he thinks one Luther to be somewhat more
than a renegade monk; and is childish enough to venerate, when a man,
the same Liturgy which his grandmother had taught him when a boy. For
other matters, the higher born, the better bred, the more classically
educated, and the more extensively possessed of moneys and lands our
honest-spoken Tory may be, ten to one the more is he afflicted with this
rabbies: and his mad propensities become positively criminal, when, as a
magistrate or a captain of dragoons, he thinks himself bound in
honourable duty to quell the enthusiasm of some disinterested patriots,
whose innocent wishes rise no higher than to subvert the existing order
of things, to secure for themselves a reasonable share of parks,
palaces, and pocket-money, and (as the very justifiable means for so
happy an end) manfully to sacrifice in the temple of Freedom the rogues
who would object to being robbed, and the tyrants who would be bloody
enough to fight for life and liberty.
A rabid Tory--you see it is a pet name of mine--feels no little contempt
for a squeezable character; and he is well assured, from history as well
as on his own conviction, that the noble army of martyrs lived and died
upon his principles: whereas the retrograde regiment of cowards, whom
the wisdom of providing for personal safety has in battle induced to run
away, _relictis non bene parmulis_--the clamorous cohort of bullies,
whom the necessities of impending castigation have sensibly induced to
eat their words--the volunteer company of light-heeled swindlers, whom
nature instructs that they must live, and honesty has neglected to
inform how--every one, in short, whose grand maxim (_quocunque modo
rem_) is temporizing expediency, and with whom the cogent argument "you
shall" has more force than the silly conscience-whisper of "you
ought,"--contributes to swell the band which the professor of Toryism,
the abstracted follower of principles and not of men, has the honour of
beholding in the angle of his diagram, inscribed "contradictory." Not
that your true Tory believes so ill of _all_ his adversaries; there are
some few geese among the cranes; an Abdiel here and there, who has long
felt irksome in the host, but for false shame is there still; sundry
men, having ambitious or illuminated wives, and too amiable, or too
prudent, to attempt a breach of peace at home; some thronging the
opposite benches, because their fathers and grandfathers topographically
occupied those same seats--a decent reason, supposing similarity of
places and names, to insure similarity of principles and practice; and
some--I dislike them not for honesty--confessing and upholding the
republican extremes, upon a belief that all short of these are but an
unsatisfactory part of a great and glorious experiment. Now, the rabid
Tory prefers an open foe to a false friend; but your go-between, your
midway sneak, your shuttlecock, your perjured miser who will swear to
any thing for an extra per centage--all these are his detestation: and
although he will readily acknowledge some good and some wise in the
adversary's ranks, still he recognises that tri-coloured banner as the
one under which all naturally fight, who are poor in both worlds--- with
neither money nor religion. Thus much of my reasonable rabies.
One may hate principles without hating men; and for this sentiment we
have the Highest Example. Things are either right or wrong; if right,
do; if wrong, forbear: nothing can be absolutely indifferent, and to do
a little actual evil in order to compass great hypothetical good, is
false morality, and, therefore bad government. Why should not honesty
and plain-dealing be as inviolable publicly as privately? Why be guilty
of such mean self-stultification as to say one thing and do another? It
is criminal in rulers to give a helping hand to the evil which they deem
unavoidable; let them, in preference, cease to rule, and imitate the
noble threat of that king for half a century whose conscience bade him
abdicate rather than do wrong.
But to come abruptly on a title-page: often-times, in reading
deleterious leading articles in wrong-sided newspapers, have I longed to
set before the world of faction