followers was able to keep up, and in a very few minutes had ascended an
eminence commanding a distant view of the road from Puebla de los Angeles
to the capital, while in the still remoter distance, beyond the lake of
Chalco, lay the city of Mexico itself.
From that point a strange sight presented itself. The whole of the
wretched class of people called Leperos, the Lazzaroni of New Spain, had
evacuated the city and suburbs, and with their wives and children had
taken up their station upon the Ajotla road, their legions extending as
far as the chain of volcanic hills which on that side of the great Mexican
valley, serve as outposts to the Tenochtitlan range.
"Madre de Dios!" cried Guerero to his officers, as they came up. "Now for
three thousand muskets, instead of five hundred, and Mexico would be
ours."
"_No se_," replied an old brigadier-general, "I do not know that."
"_Io lo se_," said Vicente Guerero, "_I_ know it; but as things now are,
it certainly is impossible. They have two regiments of infantry, only
Spanish infantry to be sure, but with the best colonel in the service; and
five militia regiments. Yet, give me three thousand muskets and Mexico
should be ours. The Leperos are waiting for us."
He paused for a moment and seemed to reflect.
"Pshaw!" added he to his officers, "it cannot be done, Senores! But
_paciencia!_ before we are ten years older, Mexico shall be free."
And without vouchsafing another glance either to the city or the Leperos,
this remarkable man turned away in the direction of the Hacienda.
BRITISH HISTORY DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.[39]
No effort of genius, or industry, can make the history of England, during
the eighteenth century, equal in interest to that of either the
seventeenth or nineteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century is meant
the period of it ending in 1792: the subsequent eight years begin a new
era--the era of Revolutions--which properly belongs to the nineteenth. It
was essentially a period of repose. Placed midway between the great
religious effort which, commencing in the middle of the sixteenth, was not
closed in the British Islands till the end of the seventeenth century, and
the not less vehement political struggle which began in the world with the
French, or perhaps the American Revolution, and is still in uninterrupted
activity, it exhibits a resting-place between the two great schisms which
have distracted and distinguished modern times. It wants the ardent zeal,
intrepid spirit, and enthusiastic devotion, of the former epoch, not less
than the warm aspirations, fierce contests, and extravagant expectations
of the latter. Passion had exhausted itself; energy was worn out by
exertion; enthusiasm damped by disappointment. We no longer see men nobly
sacrificing themselves for what they deemed the public good; the generous
had ceased to obliterate the selfish passions; good sense was the
characteristic of the period; a desire for repose its leading principle;
selfishness its ruling motive. It is ever so with men, when vehement
passions are not awakened, and the ardour of visionary pursuit has not
obliterated the desire for immediate gratification.
But if the eighteenth century can never rival the eras of the Reformation
and the French Revolution in heart-stirring events, animated narrative,
picturesque description, generous devotion, and sanguinary ambition, it
is, perhaps, superior to either in the lessons of political wisdom with
which it is fraught. It is so because it exhibits on a great scale, and
for a long period, the _results_ of those changes which had been the
subject of that vehement struggle in the two preceding centuries, and
enables us to appreciate, by actual experience, the benefits and evils of
those great alterations in civil and religious institutions, which, after
so long and severe a contest, had at length come to be thoroughly
established. The survey is, in some respects, disheartening, but it is
instructive; if it dispels many theories and blights much anticipation, it
confirms many truths, and has established some principles which will
probably never again be questioned. We are not aware that the history of
the eighteenth century has ever yet been written in this spirit. It is
understood now to be in the hands of learning and genius; let us hope that
equanimity and impartial judgment will preside as much as these brilliant
qualities in the completion of the great undertaking.
The great passion of the sixteenth century was for religious emancipation.
The real evil which it was the object of the Reformation to shake off was
the despotism of the Romish priesthood: the freedom for which the
Reformers contended was the freedom of the human soul. The immediate
object, the exciting cause, indeed, of Luther's movements, was the
overthrow of the corrupt sale of indulgences, which, in the time of Leo
X., had brought such scandal on the Church of Rome; but religious freedom
was the general and durable passion of the Reformation. It was the
constrained uniformity of worship, the compulsory unity of belief, the
slavish submission to authority, in the dearest concerns of existence,
which was the real evil that was complained of. This want, so natural to
an age of mental activity, so indispensable to one of advancing freedom,
the satisfaction of which is as necessary as vital air to one of general
intelligence, distinctly appeared in the forms of worship which the
Reformers generally established when they had thrown off the authority of
the Roman pontiff. The Romish liturgies, touching, admirable, and
catholic, as great part of them are, were in general abolished; and, in
their stead, extempore prayers, often of portentous length, were used, to
give each individual minister an opportunity of introducing, in every part
of the sacred proceeding, his peculiar tenets. The sermon, for a similar
reason, became the longest and most important part of the service. Every
one knows how strongly the same lines of distinction still characterize
the ultra-Reformers, who contend for the Calvinistic tenets and
Presbyterian form of worship, and those more moderate partizans of the
Reformation who have embraced the less violent schism of the Church of
England.
Political equality was, and still is, the grand aspiration of the
nineteenth century. What the ardent multitudes who embraced the principles
of the French Revolution desired, was equality of privilege, and universal
participation in power. They saw the injustice and cruelty of their former
oppressors, they felt how galling their chains had been, and they
flattered themselves that, if they could once get possession of the reins
of power, they had suffered too severely from their abuse to be in any
danger of being led astray in the use they made of them. Abolition of rank
and privilege, the opening of all careers to all, and the admission of all
into the equal enjoyment of power, by means of a government resting on
universal suffrage, was the general object of ambition, and has been
established for a brief period in France, Spain, Portugal, and Piedmont;
more durably in North and South America. What the results of this system
of government are to be, is the great problem which is in the course of
solution in the nineteenth century; but be these results fortunate or
unfortunate, it is this which constitutes the characteristic of the
period, and will form the object of close and anxious attention to
historians in future times. It was a principle and basis of government
wholly new in human affairs. No previous republic, either in ancient or
modern times, had exhibited any approach to it. The seclusion of the great
body of the working class, in all the states of antiquity, from any share
either in municipal or social powers, by reason of the generality of
slavery--the arrangement of men in trades and crafts, through whose heads
all their powers were exercised, in the free cities of Italy and Flanders,
in modern times, and in general in all the European burghs, necessarily
rendered the basis of government in all former commonwealths essentially
different. A democratic valley may have existed in Uri or Underwalden,
where all the citizens were equally rich in fortune, and nearly equally
poor in intelligence; but the example of a great community resting on
universal suffrage, and a simple majority of votes, began with the year
1789.
Although the proper democratic spirit existed in great strength in many of
the leaders of the Great Rebellion, and its extravagances generally
affected the army, and some of the powerful leaders of that convulsion,
yet extension of political power was not the object of the _national_
will. This is decisively proved by the fact, that when they gained the
power, the people made no attempt, in any material respect, to alter the
public institutions. Cromwell, doubtless, was a military usurper; but a
military usurper is only the head of a warlike republic, and he is
constrained to obey the wishes of the soldiers who have elevated him to
power. Neither he nor the Long Parliament made any important alterations
on the lasting structure of government, though, for the time, they totally
altered its practice. The law was administered on the old precedents
during the whole Protectorate. The estates of the malignants were put
under sequestration, and many of the church lands were confiscated, but no
great alteration in the foundations of government took place. Power, when
the military oppression was removed, immediately returned to its former
seats. The parliaments summoned by Cromwell proved so refractory, that
they were in general dissolved after having sat a few days; juries,
throughout his reign, were so hostile to his government that they
acquitted nearly all the state offenders brought before them; and legal
prosecutions fell into disuse. Every thing was done by military force; but
it never occurred to him to turn up the soil, so as to bring up fresh
elements into action:--he never thought of summoning a parliament resting
on universal suffrage, or establishing a revolutionary tribunal, the
jurors of which were nominated by that democratic assembly. So as the
victorious party were allowed to chant hymns as they pleased, and hear
long sermons replete with any absurdity, and indulge in the freedom of the
pulpit, they cared nothing for that of the press, or altering the
structure of government. When Charles II. was recalled by Monk, he had
only to issue writs to the counties and boroughs which had returned the
Long Parliament, to obtain the most thoroughly loyal commons which ever
sat in England.
Although the change of government in 1688 is usually called "the
Revolution," and although it certainly was a most decisive overthrow so
far as the reigning family was concerned, yet it was by no means a
revolution in the sense in which we now understand the word. It made no
change in the basis of power in the state, though it altered the dynasty
which sat on the throne, and for seventy years fixed the reign of power in
the hands of the Whig party, who had been most instrumental in placing
William and Mary on it. But the structure of Government remained
unchanged; or rather, it was changed only to be rendered more stable and
powerful. We owe to the Revolution many of our greatest blessings; but not
the least of these has been the removal of the causes of weakness which
had so often before, in English history, proved fatal to the throne. It
gave us a national debt, a standing army, and a stable foreign policy. The
sum annually raised by William in taxes, within five years after he
obtained the throne, was triple what had been so much the subject of
complaint in the time of Charles I.; but the effect of this was to give us
a firm government and steady policy. De Witt had said, in the disgraceful
days of the alliance of Charles II. with France, that the changes of
English policy had now become so frequent, that no man could rely on any
system being continued steadily for two years together. The continental
interests and connexions of William, and subsequently of the Hanover
family, gave us a durable system of foreign policy, and imprinted, for an
hundred and forty years, that steadiness in our councils, without which
neither individuals nor nations ever attained either lasting fame or
greatness. Nor was it the least blessing consequent upon such a change of
external policy, and of the wars which it necessarily induced, that it
gave Government the lasting support of a standing army, and thus prevented
that ruinous prostration of the executive before the burst of popular
passion, which had so often induced the most dreadful disorders in English
history. After 1688, the standing army, though inconsiderable compared
with what it has since become, was always respectable, and adequate, as
the result of the rebellions in 1715 and 1745 demonstrated, to the defence
of Government against the most serious domestic dangers. That of itself
was an incalculable blessing, and cheaply purchased by the national debt
and all the bloodshed of our foreign wars. Had Charles I. possessed five
thousand guards, he would at once have crushed the great Rebellion; and
the woful oppression of the Long Parliament, which, during the eleven
years that it sat, extorted eighty millions, equal to two hundred millions
at this time, from an impoverished and bleeding nation, would have been
prevented.
Englishmen are not accustomed to pride themselves upon the external
successes and military triumphs of the eighteenth century; and they have
been so eclipsed by those of the Revolutionary war, that they are now in a
great measure thrown into the shade. Yet nothing is more certain than that
it is in external success and warlike glory, that, during the seventy
years which immediately succeeded the Revolution, we must look for the
chief rewards and best vindication of that convulsion. England then took
its appropriate place as the head of the Protestant faith, the bulwark of
the liberties of Europe. The ambition of the House of Bourbon, which so
nearly proved fatal to them in the person of Louis XIV., became the
lasting object of their apprehension and resistance. The heroic steadiness
of William, the consummate genius of Marlborough, the ardent spirit of
Chatham, won for us the glories of the War of the Succession and of the
Seven Years. Though deeply checkered, especially in the American war, with
disaster, the eighteenth century was, upon the whole, one of external
glory and national advancement. To their honour be it spoken, the Whigs at
that period were the party who had the national glory and success at
heart, and made the greatest efforts, both on the theatre of arms and of
diplomacy, to promote it. The Tories were lukewarm or indifferent to
national glory, averse to foreign alliances, and often willing to purchase
peace by the abandonment of the chief advantages which war had purchased.
During the Revolutionary war the case was just the reverse--the parties
mutually changed places. The Tories were the national and patriotic, the
Whigs the grumbling and discontented party. Both parties, in both periods,
were in reality actuated, perhaps unconsciously, by their party
interests--the Whigs were patriotic and national, the Tories backward and
lukewarm when the Whigs were in power, and derived lustre from foreign
success; the Tories were patriotic and national when they held the reins
of government, and the opposite vices had passed over to their
antagonists.
But if from the external policy and foreign triumphs of the Whigs during
the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, we turn to the domestic
government which they established, and the social ameliorations which they
introduced, we shall see much less reason to congratulate ourselves on the
benefits gained by the Revolution. It is here that the great moral and
political lesson of the eighteenth century is to be found; this it is
which it behoves our historians to tell; this it is which they have left
untold. The long possession of power, after the accession of William and
Mary, by the Whig party, which continued uninterrupted for seventy years,
and the want of any philosophical history of the period since they were
dispossessed of office, have prevented the truth from being boldly told,
or even generally known in this country. It is much more generally
appreciated, however, by continental writers, and we may rest assured the
eyes of future generations will be steadily fixed on it. The danger is,
that it will throw discredit on the cause, both of civil and religious
freedom, in the eyes of future generations in the world. Let us, in the
first instance, boldly, and without seeking to disguise the truth, examine
what are the religious and civil evils which have attracted the attention
of mankind in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, and then
enquire whether they are the necessary result of the Reformation and the
Revolution, or have arisen from causes foreign to that of religious and
civil freedom--in a word, from the usual intermixture of human selfishness
and iniquity with those great convulsions.
The two great evils which have disfigured the reformed church in the
British islands, since its final establishment at the Revolution, have
been the endless multiplication and unceasing rancour of sects, and the
palpable outgrowth of the population beyond the possibility of their
gratuitous instruction in religious truth by means of the national church.
The three great evils which have been felt in the political and social
world in England during the eighteenth century, are the prodigious, and in
general irresistible, power of an oligarchy; the unbounded parliamentary
and official corruption by which their influence has been upheld; and the
unprecedented spread of pauperism through the working classes of society.
In these days the reality of those evils will probably not be disputed in
any quarter; when we have seen the latter lead to the Reform Bill, and the
great organic change of 1832, as well as keep the nation, and all serious
thinkers in it, in a state of constant anxiety; and the former rend the
national church in Scotland asunder; threaten the most serious religious
divisions in England, and in both countries permit the growth of a huge
body of practical heathens in the midst of a Christian land.
Were these evils the necessary and inevitable result of the Reformation
and the Revolution; or have they arisen from causes foreign to these
changes, and which, in future times, may be detached from them? The Roman
Catholic writers on the Continent all maintain the former opinion, and
consider them as the necessary effect and just punishment of the great
schism from the church; which, by a natural consequence, ended in civil
convulsion, public immorality, and social distress. The English writers
have, hitherto, rather avoided than grappled with the subject; they have
rather denied the existence of the evils, than sought to account for them.
Let us consider to what cause these unquestionable evils of the eighteenth
century are really to be ascribed.
They know little of the human heart who expect that, in an age and country
where religion _is at all thought of_, sects and religious differences
will not prevail. As well might you expect that, in a free community,
political parties are to be unknown. Truth, indeed, is one and the same in
all ages; but so also is the light of the sun; yet, in how many different
hues, and under how many different appearances, does it manifest itself in
the world? In the smoky city, and on the clear mountain; on the sandy
desert, and in the stagnant marsh; radiant with the warmth of July, or
faintly piercing the gloom of December. So various are the capacities,
feelings, emotions, and dispositions of men, that, on any subject which
really interests them, diversity of opinion is as inevitable as difference
in their countenances, stature, character, fortune, and state in the
world. Hence it was that our Saviour said he came to bring not peace on
earth, but a sword--to divide the father from the son, to array the mother
against the daughter. It will be so to the end of the world. Unity of
opinion on political subjects seems to prevail under Asiatic despotism; in
religious, under the European papacy--but nowhere else. The conclusion to
be drawn from the absence of all theological disputes in a community, is,
not that all think alike on religion, but that none think at all.
But although no rational man who knows the human heart will ever express a
wish to see entire religious unity prevail in a state, yet there can be no
question, that the prodigious multiplication of sects in Britain, which
strikes foreigners with such astonishment, is mainly to be ascribed, as
well as the immense mass of civilized heathenism which, through the whole
of the eighteenth century, was growing up in the island, to the iniquitous
confiscation of the property of the church which took place at the
Reformation. It is well known that the proportion of the tithes of England
which belongs to lay impropriators, is more considerable than that which
is still in the hands of the church; and if to them is added the abbey and
monastery lands, they would by this time have amounted to a very large
annual sum, probably not less than six or seven millions a-year. In
Scotland, it is well known, the church lands at the Reformation were about
a third of the whole landed property. They would now, therefore, have
produced L1,700,000 a-year, as the entire rental is somewhat above five
millions. What a noble fund here existed, formed and set apart by the
piety and charity of former ages, for the service of the altar and of the
poor--two causes which God hath joined, and no man should put asunder!
What incalculable good would it have done, if it had been preserved sacred
for its proper destination--sacred from the corruptions, mummery, and
despotism of the Romish church, but preserved inviolate for the support of
religion, the relief of suffering, the spread of education! What is it
which blights and paralyses all the efforts now made, whether by
individuals, voluntary associations, or the state, for the attainment of
those truly godlike objects? Is it not ever one thing--the practical
impossibility of finding the requisite funds to support the institutions
necessary to grapple with the evils, on a scale at all commensurate to
their magnitude? The Established Church could not spread for want of funds
to erect and endow churches; meanwhile the population in the manufacturing
districts and great towns was rapidly increasing, and, in consequence,
part of the people took refuge in the divisions of dissent, part in the
oblivion of practical heathenism. Thence the multiplication of sects, the
spread of pauperism, the growth of civilized heathenism in the state. The
poor-laws dated from the dissolution of the monasteries; the forty-second
of Elizabeth stands a durable record of the real origin of that burdensome
tax. It was the appropriation of the funds of religion and charity to the
gratification of secular rapacity, which has been the cause of the chief
religious and social evils under which Great Britain has ever since
laboured; and it is it which still presents an invincible obstacle to all
the efforts which are made for their removal.