Hindostan, with its vast cities, its gorgeous pagodas, its infinite
swarms of dusky population, its long-descended dynasties, its stately
etiquette, excited in a mind so capacious, so imaginative, and so
susceptible, {134}the most intense interest. The peculiarities of the
costume, of the manners, and of the laws, the very mystery which hung
over the language and origin of the people, seized his imagination. To
plead under the ancient arches of Westminster Hall, in the name of the
English people, at the bar of the English nobles, for great nations and
kings separated from him by half the world, seemed to him the height of
human glory. Again, it is not difficult to perceive that his hostility
to the French Revolution principally arose from the vexation which he
felt at having all his old political associations disturbed, at seeing
the well known landmarks of states obliterated, and the liâmes and
distinctions with which the history of Europe had been filled for ages
at once swept away. He felt like an antiquary whose shield had been
scoured, or a connoisseur who found his Titian retouched. But, however
he came by an opinion, he had no sooner got it than he did his best
to make out a legitimate title to it. His reason, like a spirit in the
service of an enchanter, though spellbound, was still mighty. It did
whatever work his passions and his imagination might impose. But it did
that work, however arduous, with marvellous dexterity and vigour. His
course was not determined by argument; but he could defend the wildest
course by arguments more plausible than those by which common men
support opinions which they have adopted after the fullest deliberation.
Reason has scarcely ever displayed, even in those well constituted minds
of which she occupies the throne, so much power and energy as in the
lowest offices of that imperial servitude.
Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either
leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to
know what an {135}argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never
troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never
occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account
of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it
is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that
there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour
does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly
foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions
cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to
settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with
something more convincing than “scoundrel” and “blockhead.”
It would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political
instruction. The utmost that can be expected from any system promulgated
by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest
sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere
day-dream, a poetical creation, like the Domdaniel cavern, the Swerga,
or Padalon; and indeed it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those
gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something of invention, grandeur,
and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant,
and perpetually violates even that conventional probability which is
essential to the effect of works of art.
The warmest admirers of Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that
his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree
in which his undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken
in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes
indeed, amoung which the {136}Vision of Judgment must be classed, are,
for the most part, worse than Pye’s and as bad as Cibber’s; nor do we
think him generally happy in short pieces. But his longer poems, though
full of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions. We
doubt greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but that, if
they are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever.
But, though in general we prefer Mr. Southey’s poetry to his prose, we
must make one exception. The Life of Nelson is, beyond all doubt, the
most perfect and the most delightful of his works. The fact is, as
his poems most abundantly prove, that he is by no means so skilful in
designing as in filling up. It was therefore an advantage to him to be
furnished with an outline of characters and events, and to have no other
task to perform than that of touching the cold sketch into life. No
writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely qualified him to
write the history of the great naval warrior. There were no fine riddles
of the human heart to read, no theories to propound, no hidden causes to
develope, no remote consequences to predict. The character of the hero
lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque. The
necessity of adhering to the real course of events saved Mr. Southey
from those faults which deform the original plan of almost every one of
his poems, and which even his innumerable beauties of detail scarcely
redeem. The subject did not require the exercise of those reasoning
powers the want of which is the blemish of his prose. It would not be
easy to find, in all literary history, an instance of a more exact hit
between wind and water. John Wesley and the Peninsular War were subjects
of a very different kind, subjects which required {137}all the qualities
of a philosophic historian. In Mr. Southey’s works on these subjects,
he has, on the whole, failed. Yet there are charming specimens of the
art of narration in both of them. The Life of Wesley will probably
live. Defective as it is, it contains the only popular account of a most
remarkable moral revolution, and of a man whose eloquence and logical
acuteness might have made him eminent in literature, whose genius for
government was not inferior to that of Richelieu, and who, whatever his
errors may-have been, devoted all his powers, in defiance of obloquy
and derision, to what he sincerely considered as the highest good of his
species. The History of the Peninsular War is already dead: indeed,
the second volume was dead-born. The glory of producing an imperishable
record of that great conflict seems to be reserved for Colonel Napier.
The Book of the Church contains some stories very prettily told. The
rest is mere rubbish. The adventure was manifestly one which could be
achieved only by a profound thinker, and one in which even a profound
thinker might have failed, unless his passions had been kept under
strict control. But in all those works in which Mr. Southey has
completely abandoned narration, and has undertaken to argue moral and
political questions, his failure has been complete and ignominious. On
such occasions his writings are rescued from utter contempt and derision
solely by the beauty and purity of the English. We find, we confess, so
great a charm in Mr. Southey’s style that, even when he writes nonsense,
we generally read it with pleasure, except indeed when he tries to be
droll. A more insufferable jester never existed. He very often attempts
to be humorous, and yet we do not remember a single {138}occasion on
which he has succeeded farther than to be quaintly and flippantly dull.
In one of his works he tells us that Bishop Spratt was very properly so
called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before
us he cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker, without a remark
on his unsavoury name. A wise man might talk folly like this by his
own fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke,
should write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer,
and correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is
enough to make us ashamed of our species.
The extraordinary bitterness of spirit which Mr. Southey manifests
towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed
to the manner in which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it
has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences
on points of science. But this is not all. A peculiar austerity marks
almost all Mr. Southey’s judgments of men and actions. We are far from
blaming him for fixing on a high standard of morals, and for applying
that standard to every case. But rigour ought to be accompanied
by discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey seems to be utterly
destitute. His mode of judging is monkish. It is exactly what we should
expect from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many
ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation. No man out of a
cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same
time so grossly. His descriptions of it are just what we should hear
from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the
confessional. Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or
like cattle. He seems to have no notion of {139}any thing between
the Platonic passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his
mistress’s leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick. In
Roderick, indeed, the two characters are united. He is first all
clay, and then all spirit. He goes forth a Tarquin, and comes back too
ethereal to be married. The only love scene, as far as we can recollect,
in Madoc, consists of the delicate attentions which a savage, who has
drunk too much of the Prince’s excellent metheglin, offers to Goervyl.
It would be the labour of a week to find, in all the vast mass of Mr.
Southey’s poetry, a single passage indicating any sympathy with those
feelings which have consecrated the shades of Vaucluse and the locks of
Meillerie.
Indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness
and filial duty, there is scarcely any thing soft or humane in Mr.
Southey’s poetry. What theologians call the spiritual sins are his
cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and the insatiable thirst of vengeance.
These passions he disguises under the name of duties; he purifies them
from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them by uniting them
with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he then
holds them up to the admiration of mankind. This is the spirit of
Thalaba, of Ladurlad, of Adosinda, of Roderick after his conversion. It
is the spirit which, in all his writings, Mr. Southey appears to affect.
“I do well to be angry,” seems to be the predominant feeling of his
mind. Almost the only mark of charity which he vouchsafes to his
opponents is to pray for their reformation; and this he does in terms
not unlike those in which we can imagine a Portuguese priest interceding
with Heaven for a Jew, delivered over to the secular arm after a
relapse. {140}We have always heard, and fully believe, that Mr. Southey
is a very amiable and humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him
personally any of the remarks which we have made on the spirit of
his writings. Such are the caprices of human nature. Even Uncle Toby
troubled himself very little about the French grenadiers who fell on the
glacis of Namur. And Mr. Southey, when he takes up his pen, changes his
nature as much as Captain Shandy, when he girt on his sword. The only
opponents to whom the Laureate gives quarter are those in whom he
finds something of his own character reflected. He seems to have an
instinctive antipathy for calm, moderate men, for men who shun extremes,
and who render reasons. He has treated Mr. Owen of Lanark, for example,
with infinitely more respect than he has shown to Mr. Hallam or to Dr.
Lingard; and this for no reason that we can discover, except that
Mr. Owen is more unreasonably and hopelessly in the wrong than any
speculator of our time.
Mr. Southey’s political system is just what we might expect from a man
who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste
and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with
themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his
preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic
Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with
vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of
the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that
theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for
libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if
necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these
are the measures which {141}he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and
gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling
the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something
of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in
the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has
no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his
system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of
religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces
the abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving
that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny
and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have
shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.
It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration
of the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed,
illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr.
Southey’s writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author,
notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to
the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure
that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and
because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected
that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr.
Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a
great practical evil. We should have expected that, the only measure
which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each
other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would
have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from {142}one
extreme of political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round
the globe, contriving constantly to “ride with darkness.” Wherever the
thickest shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is
Mr. Southey. It is not every body who could have so dexterously avoided
blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.
Mr. Southey has not been fortunate in the plan of any of his fictitious
narratives. But he has never failed so conspicuously as in the work
before us; except, indeed, in the wretched Vision of Judgment. In
November, 1817, it seems the Laureate was sitting over his newspaper,
and meditating about the death of the Princess Charlotte. An elderly
person of very dignified aspect makes his appearance, announces himself
as a stranger from a distant country, and apologizes very politely for
not having provided himself with letters of introduction. Mr. Southey
supposes his visitor to be some American gentleman who has come to see
the lakes and the lake-poets, and accordingly proceeds to perform, with
that grace, which only long practice can give, all the duties which
authors owe to starers. He assures his guest that some of the most
agreeable visits which he has received have been from Americans, and
that he knows men among them whose talents and virtues would do honour
to any country. In passing we may observe, to the honour of Mr. Southey,
that, though he evidently has no liking for the American institutions,
he never speaks of the people of the United States with that pitiful
affectation of contempt by which some members of his party have done
more than wars or tariffs can do to excite mutual enmity between two
communities formed for mutual friendship. Great as the faults of his
mind are, paltry spite {143}like this has no place in it. Indeed it is
scarcely conceivable that a man of his sensibility and his imagination
should look without pleasure and national pride on the vigorous and
splendid youth of a great people, whose veins are filled with our blood,
whose minds are nourished with our literature, and on whom is entailed
the rich inheritance of our civilisation, our freedom, and our glory.
But we must return to Mr. Southey’s study at Keswick. The visitor
informs the hospitable poet that he is not an American but a spirit. Mr.
Southey, with more frankness than civility, tells him that he is a very
queer one. The stranger holds out his hand. It has neither weight nor
substance. Mr. Southey upon this becomes more serious; his hair stands
on end; and he adjures the spectre to tell him what he is, and why
he comes. The ghost turns out to be Sir Thomas More. The traces of
martyrdom, it seems, are worn in the other world, as stars and ribands
are worn in this. Sir Thomas shows the poet a red streak round his
neck, brighter than a ruby, and informs him that Cranmer wears a suit
of flames in paradise, the right hand glove, we suppose, of peculiar
brilliancy.
Sir Thomas pays but a short visit on this occasion, but promises to
cultivate the new acquaintance which he has formed, and, after begging
that his visit may be kept secret from Mrs. Southey, vanishes into air.
The rest of the book consists of conversations between Mr. Southey and
the spirit about trade, currency, Catholic emancipation, periodical
literature, female nunneries, butchers, snuff, book-stalls, and a
hundred other subjects. Mr. Southey very hospitably takes an opportunity
to escort the ghost round the lakes, and directs his attention to the
most beautiful {144}points of view. Why a spirit was to be evoked for
the purpose of talking over such matters and seeing such sights, why the
vicar of the parish, a blue-stocking from London, or an American, such
as Mr. Southey at first supposed the aerial visitor to be, might not
have done as well, we are unable to conceive. Sir Thomas tells Mr.
Southey nothing about future events, and indeed absolutely disclaims the
gift of prescience. He has learned to talk modern English. He has read
all the new publications, and loves a jest as well as when he jested
with the executioner, though we cannot say that the quality of his wit
has materially improved in Paradise. His powers of reasoning, too, are
by no means in as great vigour as when he sate on the woolsack; and
though he boasts that he is “divested of all those passions which cloud
the intellects and warp the understandings of men,” we think him, we
must confess, far less stoical than formerly. As to revelations, he
tells Mr. Southey at the outset to expect none from him. The Laureate
expresses some doubts, which assuredly will not raise him in the
opinion of our modern millennarians, as to the divine authority of the
Apocalypse. But the ghost preserves an impenetrable silence. As far as
we remember, only one hint about the employment of disembodied spirits
escapes him. He encourages Mr. Southey to hope that there is a Paradise
Press, at which all the valuable publications of Mr. Murray and Mr.
Colburn are reprinted as regularly as at Philadelphia; and delicately
insinuates that Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama are among the number.
What a contrast does this absurd fiction present to those charming
narratives which Plato and Cicero prefixed to their dialogues! What cost
in machinery, yet what poverty of effect! A ghost brought in {145}to say
what any man might have said! The glorified spirit of a great statesman
and philosophe! dawdling, like a bilious old nabob at a watering place,
over quarterly reviews and novels, dropping in to pay long calls, making
excursions in search of the picturesque! The scene of St. George and St.
Dennis in the Pucelle is hardly more ridiculous. We know what Voltaire
meant. Nobody, however, can suppose that Mr. Southey means to make game
of the mysteries of a higher state of existence. The fact is that, in
the work before us, in the Vision of Judgement, and in some of his other
pieces, his mode of treating the most solemn subjects differs from
that of open scoffers only as the extravagant representations of sacred
persons and things in some grotesque Italian paintings differ from
the caricatures which Carlile exposes in the front of his shop. We
interpret the particular act by the general character. What in the
window of a convicted blasphemer we call blasphemous, we call only
absurd and ill judged in an altar-piece.
We now come to the conversations which pass between Mr. Southey and Sir
Thomas More, or rather between two Southeys, equally eloquent, equally
angry, equally unreasonable, and equally given to talking about what
they do not understand. (1) Perhaps we could not select a better
instance of the spirit which pervades the whole book than the passages
in which Mr. Southey gives his opinion of the manufacturing system.
There is nothing which he hates so bitterly. It is, according to him, a
system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual
servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the
(1) A passage in which some expressions used by Mr. Southey
were misrepresented, certainly without any unfair intention,
has been here omitted.
{146}minds of those who are engaged in it. He expresses a hope that the
competition of other nations may drive us out of the field; that our
foreign trade may decline; and that we may thus enjoy a restoration
of national sanity and strength. But he seems to think that the
extermination of the whole manufacturing population would be a blessing,
if the evil could be removed in no other way.
Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these
views; and, as it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very
different conclusion. In the first place, the poor-rate is very
decidedly lower in the manufacturing than in the agricultural districts.
If Mr. Southey will look over the Parliamentary returns on this subject,
he will find that the amount of parochial relief required by the
labourers in the different counties of England is almost exactly in
inverse proportion to the degree in which the manufacturing system has
been introduced into those counties. The returns for the years ending in
March 1825, and in March 1828, are now before us. In the former year we
find the poor-rate highest in Sussex, about twenty shillings to every
inhabitant. Then come Buckinghamshire, Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire,
Huntingdonshire, Kent, and Norfolk. In all these the rate is above
fifteen shillings a head. We will not go through the whole. Even in
Westmoreland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, the rate is at more than
eight shillings. In Cumberland and Monmouthshire, the most fortunate of
all the agricultural districts, it is at six shillings. But in the West
Riding of Yorkshire, it is as low as five shillings; and when we come
to Lancashire, we find it at four shillings, one fifth of what it is in
Sussex. The returns of the year ending in March 1828 {147}are a little,
and but a little, more unfavourable to the manufacturing districts.
Lancashire, even in that season of distress, required a smaller
poor-rate than any other district, and little more than one fourth of
the poor-rate raised in Sussex. Cumberland alone, of the agricultural
districts, was as well off as the West Riding of Yorkshire. These facts
seem to indicate that the manufacturer is both in a more comfortable and
in a less dependent situation than the agricultural labourer.
As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we
must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a
mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey, the proportion of births and
deaths. We know that, during the growth of this atrocious system, this
new misery, to use the phrases of Mr. Southey, this new enormity, this
birth of a portentous age, this pest which no man can approve whose
heart is not seared or whose understanding has not been darkened, there
has been a great diminution of mortality, and that this diminution has
been greater in the manufacturing towns than any where else. The
mortality still is, as it always was, greater in towns than in the
country. But the difference has diminished in an extraordinary degree.
There is the best reason to believe that the annual mortality of
Manchester, about the middle of the last century, was one in
twenty-eight. It is now reckoned at one in forty-five. In Glasgow and
Leeds a similar improvement has taken place. Nay, the rate of mortality
in those three great capitals of the manufacturing districts is now
considerably less than it was, fifty years ago, over England and Wales
taken together, open country and all. We might with some plausibility
maintain that the people {148}live longer because they are better fed,
better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and that
these improvements are owing to that increase of national wealth which
the manufacturing system has produced.
Much more might be said on the subject. But to what end? It is not from
bills of mortality and statistical tables that Mr. Southey has learned
his political creed. He cannot stoop to study the history of the system
which he abuses, to strike the balance between the good and evil which
it has produced, to compare district with district, or generation with
generation. We will give his own reason for his opinion, the only reason
which he gives for it, in his own words:--
“_We remained awhile in silence looking upon the assemblage of dwellings
below. Here, and in the adjoining hamlet of Millbeck, the effects
of manufactures and of agriculture may be seen and compared. The old
cottages are such as the poet and the painter especially delight in
beholding. Substantially built of the native stone without mortar,
dirtied with no white lime, and their long low roofs covered with slate,
if they had been raised by the magic of some indigenous Amphion’s music,
the materials could not have adjusted themselves more beautifully in
accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further harmonized
them with weather-stains, lichens, and moss, short grasses, and short
fern, and stone-plants of various kinds. The ornamented chimneys, round
or square, less adorned than those which, like little turrets, crest the
houses of the Portuguese peasantry; and yet not less happily suited to
their place, the hedge of dipt box beneath the windows, the rose-bushes
beside the door, the little patch of flower-ground, with its tall
holly-hocks in front; the garden beside, the bee-hives, and the
orchard with its bank of daffodils and snow-drops, the earliest and the
profusest in these parts, indicate in the owners some portion of ease
and leisure, some regard to neatness and comfort, some sense of
natural, and innocent, and healthful enjoyment. The new cottages of the
manufacturers are upon the manufacturing pattern--naked, and in a row._
{149}"’_How is it,’ said I, ‘that every thing which is connected with
manufactures presents such features of unqualified deformity? From
the largest of Mammon’s temples down to the poorest hovel in which his
helotry are stalled, these edifices have all one character. Time will
not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they
will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind_.”
Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be
governed. Rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and
independence. Mortality and cottages with weather-stains, rather than
health and long life with edifices which time cannot mellow. We are
told, that our age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our
fathers; that society has been brought into a state compared with which
extermination would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings of
cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular. Mr. Southey has found out a
way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture
may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at
a cottage and a factory, and to see which is the prettier. Does air.
Southey think that the body of the English peasantry live, or ever
lived, in substantial or ornamented cottages, with box-hedges,
flower-gardens, bee-hives, and orchards? If not, what is his parallel
worth? We despise those mock philosophers, who think that they serve the
cause of science by depreciating literature and the fine arts. But if
any thing could excuse their narrowness of mind it would be such a
book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the
picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to
proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.
Thus it is that Mr. Southey reasons about matters {150}with which he
thinks himself perfectly conversant. We cannot, therefore, be surprised
to find that he commits extraordinary blunders when he writes on points
of which he acknowledges himself to be ignorant. He confesses that he
is not versed in political economy, and that he has neither liking
nor aptitude for it; and he then proceeds to read the public a lecture
concerning it which fully bears out his confession.
“All wealth,” says Sir Thomas More, “in former times was tangible. It
consisted in land, money, or chattels, which were either of real or
conventional value.”
Montesinos, as Mr. Southey somewhat affectedly calls himself, answers
thus:--
“Jewels, for example, and pictures, as in Holland, where indeed at one
time tulip bulbs answered the same purpose.”
“That bubble,” says Sir Thomas, “was one of those contagious insanities
to which communities are subject. All wealth was real, till the extent
of commerce rendered a paper currency necessary; which differed from
precious stones and pictures in this important point, that there was no
limit to its production.”
“We regard it,” says Montesinos, “as the representative of real wealth;
and, therefore, limited always to the amount of what it represents.”
“Pursue that notion,” answers the ghost, “and you will be in the dark
presently. Your provincial banknotes, which constitute almost wholly the
circulating medium of certain districts, pass current to-day. Tomorrow
tidings may come that the house which issued them has stopt payment, and
what do they represent then? You will find them the shadow of a shade.”
{151}We scarcely know at which end to begin to disentangle this knot of
absurdities. We might ask, why it should be a greater proof of insanity
in men to set a high value on rare tulips than on rare stones, which are
neither more useful nor more beautiful? We might ask how it can be said
that there is no limit to the production of paper money, when a man is
hanged if he issues any in the name of another, and is forced to cash
what he issues in his own? But Mr. Southey’s error lies deeper still.
“All wealth,” says he, “was tangible and real till paper currency was
introduced.” Now, was there ever, since men emerged from a state of
utter barbarism, an age in which there were no debts? Is not a debt,
while the solvency of the debtor is undoubted, always reckoned as part
of the wealth of the creditor? Yet is it tangible and real wealth?
Does it cease to be wealth, because there is the security of a written
acknowledgment for it? And what else is paper currency? Did Mr. Southey
ever read a bank-note? If he did, he would see that it is a written
acknowledgment of a debt, and a promise to pay that debt. The promise
may be violated: the debt may remain unpaid: those to whom it was due
may suffer: but this is a risk not confined to cases of paper currency:
it is a risk inseparable from the relation of debtor and creditor.
Every man who sells goods for any thing but ready money runs the risk of
finding that what he considered as part of his wealth one day is nothing
at all the next day. Mr. Southey refers to the picture-galleries of
Holland. The pictures were undoubtedly real and tangible possessions.
But surely it might happen that a burgomaster might owe a picture-dealer
a thousand guilders for a Teniers. What in this case corresponds to our
paper money is not the {152}picture, which is tangible, but the claim
of the picture-dealer on his customer for the price of the picture; and
this claim is not tangible. Now, would not the picture-dealer consider
this claim as part of his wealth? Would not a tradesman who knew of the
claim give credit to the picture-dealer the more readily on account
of the claim? The burgomaster might be ruined. If so, would not those
consequences follow which, as Mr. Southey tells us, were never heard
of till paper money came into use? Yesterday this claim was worth a
thousand guilders. To-day what is it? The shadow of a shade.
It is true that, the more readily claims of this sort are transferred
from hand to hand, the more extensive will be the Injury produced by a
single failure. The laws of all nations sanction, in certain cases, the
transfer of rights not yet reduced into possession. Mr. Southey would
scarcely wish, we should think, that all indorsements of bills and notes
should be declared invalid. Yet even if this were done, the transfer of
claims would imperceptibly take place, to a very great extent. When
the baker trusts the butcher, for example, he is in fact, though not in
form, trusting the butcher’s customers. A man who owes large bills
to tradesmen, and fails to pay them, almost always produces distress
through a very wide circle of people with whom he never dealt.
In short, what Mr. Southey takes for a difference in kind is only a
difference of form and degree. In every society men have claims on the
property of others. In every society there is a possibility that some
debtors may not be able to fulfil their obligations. In every society,
therefore, there is wealth which is not tangible, and which may become
the shadow of a shade. {153}Mr. Southey then proceeds to a dissertation
on the national debt, which he considers in a new and most consolatory
light, as a clear addition to the income of the country.
“You can understand,” says Sir Thomas, “that it constitutes a great
part of the national wealth.”
“So large a part,” answers Montesinos, “that the interest amounted,
during the prosperous time of agriculture, to as much as the rental
of all the land in Great Britain; and at present to the rental of all
lands, all houses, and all other fixed property put together.” The Ghost
and the Laureate agree that it is very desirable that there should be
so secure and advantageous a deposit for wealth as the funds afford. Sir
Thomas then proceeds:--
“Another and far more momentous benefit must not be overlooked; the
expenditure of an annual interest, equalling, as you have stated, the
present rental of all fixed property.”
“That expenditure,” quoth Montesinos, “gives employment to half the
industry in the kingdom, and feeds half the mouths. Take, indeed, the
weight of the national debt from this great and complicated social
machine, and the wheels must stop.”
From this passage we should have been inclined to think that Mr. Southey
supposes the dividends to be a free gift periodically sent down
from heaven to the fundholders, as quails and manna were sent to
the Israelites; were it not that he has vouchsafed, in the following
question and answer, to give the public some information which, we
believe, was very little needed.
“Whence comes the interest?” says Sir Thomas.
“It is raised,” answers Montesinos, “by taxation.” Now, has Mr. Southey
ever considered what would {154}be done with this sum if it were not
paid as interest to the national creditor? If he would think over this
matter for a short time, we suspect that the “momentous benefit” of
which he talks would appear to him to shrink strangely in amount. A
fundholder, we will suppose, spends dividends amounting to five hundred
pounds a year; and his ten nearest neighbours pay fifty pounds each to
the tax-gatherer, for the purpose of discharging the interest of the
national debt. If the debt were wiped out, a measure, be it understood,
which we by no means recommend, the fundholder would cease to spend
his five hundred pounds a year. He would no longer give employment to
industry, or put food into the mouths of labourers. This Mr. Southey
thinks a fearful evil. But is there no mitigating circumstances? Each of
the ten neighbours of our fundholder has fifty pounds a year more than
formerly. Each of them will, as it seems to our feeble understandings,
employ more industry and feed more mouths than formerly. The sum is
exactly the same. It is in different, hands. But on what grounds does
Mr. Southey call upon us to believe that it is in the hands of men who
will spend it less liberally or less judiciously? He seems to think that
nobody but a fundholder can employ the poor; that, if a tax is remitted,
those who formerly used to pay it proceed immediately to dig holes in
the earth, and to bury the sum which the government had been accustomed
to take; that no money can set industry in motion till such money has
been taken by the tax-gatherer out of one man’s pocket and put into
another man’s pocket. We really wish that Mr. Southey would try to prove
this principle, which is indeed the foundation of his whole theory of
finance: for we think it right to hint {155}to him that our hard-hearted
and unimaginative generation will expect some more satisfactory
reason than the only one with which he has yet favoured it, namely, a
similitude touching evaporation and dew.
Both the theory and the illustration, indeed, are old friends of ours.
In every season of distress which we can remember, Mr. Southey has been
proclaiming that it is not from economy, but from increased taxation,
that the country must expect relief; and he still, we find, places the
undoubting faith of a political Diafoirus, in his
“Iîesaignare, repurgare, et reclysterizare."
“A people,” he tells us, “may be too rich, but a government cannot be
so.”
“A state,” says he, “cannot have more wealth at its command than may be
employed for the general good, a liberal expenditure in national works
being one of the surest means of promoting national prosperity; and
the benefit being still more obvious, of an expenditure directed to the
purposes of national improvement. But a people may be too rich.”
We fully admit that a state cannot have at its command more wealth than
may be employed for the general good. But neither can individuals, or
bodies of individuals, have at their command more wealth than may be
employed for the general good. If there be no limit to the sum which
may be usefully laid out in public works and national improvement, then
wealth, whether in the hands of private men or of the government, may
always, if the possessors choose to spend it usefully, be usefully
spent. The only ground, therefore, on which Mr. Southey can possibly
maintain that a government cannot be too rich, but that a people may be
too rich, must be this, that governments are more {156}likely to spend
their money on good objects than private individuals.
But what is useful expenditure? “A liberal expenditure in national
works,” says Mr. Southey, “is one of the surest means for promoting
national prosperity.” What does he mean by national prosperity? Does he
mean the wealth of the state? If so, his reasoning runs thus: The more
wealth a state has the better; for the more wealth a state has the more
wealth it will have. This is surely something like that fallacy, which
is ungallantly termed a lady’s reason. If by national prosperity he
means the wealth of the people, of how gross a contradiction is Mr.
Southey guilty. A people, he tells us, may be too rich: a government
cannot: for a government can employ its riches in making the people
richer. The wealth of the people is to be taken from them, because they
have too much, and laid out in works, which will yield them more.
We are really at a loss to determine whether Mr. Southey’s reason for
recommending large taxation is that it will make the people rich, or
that it will make them poor. But we are sure that, if his object is
to make them rich, he takes the wrong course. There are two or three
principles respecting public works, which, as an experience of vast
extent proves, may be trusted in almost every case.
It scarcely ever happens that any private man or body of men will invest
property in a canal, a tunnel, or a bridge, but from an expectation
that the outlay will be profitable to them. No work of this sort can be
profitable to private speculators, unless the public be willing to pay
for the use of it. The public will not pay of their own accord for what
yields no profit or convenience to them. There is thus a direct and
{157}Previous connection between the motive which induces individuals to
undertake such a work, and the utility of the work.
Can we find any such connection in the case of a public work executed by
a government? If it is useful, are the individuals who rule the
country richer? If it is useless, are they poorer? A public man may be
solicitous for his credit. But is not he likely to gain more credit by
an useless display of ostentatious architecture in a great town than
by the best road or the best canal in some remote province? The fame
of public works is a much less certain test of their utility than the
amount of toll collected at them. In a corrupt age, there will be direct
embezzlement. In the purest age, there will be abundance of jobbing.
Never were the statesmen of any country more sensitive to public
opinion, and more spotless in pecuniary transactions, than those who
have of late governed England. Yet we have only to look at the buildings
recently erected in London for a proof of our rule. In a bad age, the
fate of the public is to be robbed outright. In a good age, it is merely
to have the dearest and the worst of every thing.
Buildings for state purposes the state must erect. And here we think
that, in general, the state ought to stop. We firmly believe that five
hundred thousand pounds subscribed by individuals for rail-roads or
canals would produce more advantage to the public than five millions
voted by Parliament for the same purpose. There are certain old saws
about the master’s eye and about every body’s business, in which we
place very great faith.
There is, we have said, no consistency in Mr. Southey’s political
system. But if there be in his political {158}system any leading
principle, any one error which diverges more widely and variously than
any other, it is that of which his theory about national works is a
ramification. He conceives that the business of the magistrate is, not
merely to see that the persons and property of the people are secure
from attack, but that he ought to be a jack-of-all-trades, architect,
engineer, schoolmaster, merchant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every
parish, a Paul Pry in every house, spying, eaves-dropping, relieving,
admonishing, spending our money for us, and choosing our opinions for
us. His principle is, if we understand it rightly, that no man can do
any thing so well for himself as his rulers, be they who they may, can
do it for him, and that a government approaches nearer and nearer to
perfection, in proportion as it interferes more and more with the habits
and notions of individuals.
He seems to be fully convinced that it is in the power of government to
relieve all the distresses under which the lower orders labour. Nay,
he considers doubt on this subject as impious. We cannot refrain from
quoting his argument on this subject. It is a perfect jewel of logic.
“‘_Many thousands in your metropolis,’ says Sir Thomas More, ‘rise every
morning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day; as many
of them, where they are to lay their heads at night. All men, even the
vicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery: but many, even
among the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost as
often the cause of wickedness.’
“‘There are many,’ says Montesinos, ‘who know this, but believe that it
is not in the power of human institutions to prevent this misery. They
see the effect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition
of human nature.’
“‘As surely as God is good,’ replies Sir Thomas, ‘so surely there is no
such thing as necessary evil. For, by the religious {159}mind, sickness,
and pain I and death, are not to be accounted evils._’”
Now if sickness, pain, and death, are not evils, we cannot understand
why it should be an evil that thousands should rise without knowing how
they are to subsist. The only evil of hunger is that it produces first
pain, then sickness, and finally death. If it did not produce these, it
would be no calamity. If these are not evils, it is no calamity. We will
propose a very plain dilemma: either physical pain is an evil, or it
is not an evil. If it is an evil, then there is necessary evil in the
universe: if it is not, why should the poor be delivered from it?
Mr. Southey entertains as exaggerated a notion of the wisdom of
governments as of their power. He speaks with the greatest disgust of
the respect now paid to public opinion. That opinion is, according to
him, to be distrusted and dreaded; its usurpation ought to be vigorously
resisted; and the practice of yielding to it is likely to ruin the
country. To maintain police is, according to him, only one of the ends
of government. The duties of a ruler are patriarchal and paternal.
He ought to consider the moral discipline of the people as his first
object, to establish a religion, to train the whole community in that
religion, and to consider all dissenters as his own enemies.
“‘_Nothing,’ says Sir Thomas, ‘is more certain, than that religion is
the basis upon which civil government rests; that from religion power
derives its authority, laws their efficacy, and both their zeal and
sanction; and it is necessary that this religion be established as for
the security of the state, and for the welfare of the people, who would
otherwise be moved to and fro with every wind of doctrine. A state is
secure in proportion as the people are attached to its institutions:
it is, therefore, the first and plainest rule of sound policy, that
the people be trained up in the way {160}they should go. The state that
neglects this prepares its own destruction; and they who train them in
any other way are undermining it. Nothing in abstract science can be
more certain than these positions are.’
“1 All of which,’ answers Montesinos, ‘are nevertheless denied by our
professors of the arts Babblative and Scribblative: some in the audacity
of evil designs, and others in the glorious assurance of impenetrable
ignorance._’”
The greater part of the two volumes before us is merely an amplification
of these paragraphs. What does Mr. Southey mean by saying that religion
is demonstrably the basis of civil government? He cannot surely
mean that men have no motives except those derived from religion for
establishing and supporting-civil government, that no temporal advantage
is derived from civil government, that men would experience no temporal
inconvenience from living in a state of anarchy? If he allows, as we
think he must allow, that it is for the good of mankind in this world
to have civil government, and that the great majority of mankind have
always thought it for their good In this world to have civil government,
we then have a basis for government quite distinct from religion. It is
true that the Christian religion sanctions government, as it sanctions
every thing which promotes the happiness and virtue of our species. But
we are at a loss to conceive in what sense religion can be said to be
the basis of government, in which religion is not also the basis of
the practices of eating, drinking, and lighting fires in cold weather.
Nothing in history is more certain than that government has existed,
has received some obedience, and has given some protection, in times in
which it derived no support from religion, in times in which there was
no religion that influenced the hearts and lives of men. It was not from
dread of Tartarus, or {161}from belief in the Elysian fields, that an
Athenian wished to have some institutions which might keep Orestes from
filching his cloak, or Aliclias from breaking his head. “It is from
religion,” says Mr. Southey, “that power derives its authority, and
laws their efficacy.” From what religion does our power over the Hindoos
derive its authority, or the law in virtue of which we hang Brahmins its
efficacy? For thousands of years civil government has existed in
almost every corner of the world, in ages of priestcraft, in ages of
fanaticism, in ages of Epicurean indifference, in ages of enlightened
piety. However pure or impure the faith of the people might be, whether
they adored a beneficent or a malignant power, whether they thought
the soul mortal or immortal, they have, as soon as they ceased to
be absolute savages, found out their need of civil government, and
instituted it accordingly. It is as universal as the practice of
cookery. Yet, it is as certain, says Mr. Southey, as any thing in
abstract science, that government is founded on religion. We should like
to know what notion Mr. Southey has of the demonstrations of abstract
science. A very vague one, we suspect.
The proof proceeds. As religion is the basis of government, and as
the state is secure in proportion as the people are attached to public
institutions, it is therefore, says Mr. Southey, the first rule of
policy, that the government should train the people in the way in which
they should go; and it is plain that those who train them in any other
way are undermining the state.
Now it does not appear to us to be the first object that people should
always believe in the established religion and be attached to the
established government. A religion may be false. A government may
be oppressive. And whatever support government gives to {162}false
religions, or religion to oppressive governments, Ive consider as a
clear evil.
The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in
which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing
that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way
than the people to fall into the right way of themselves? Have there not
been governments which were blind leaders of the blind? Are there not
still such governments? Can it be laid down as a general rule that the
movement of political and religious truth is rather downwards from the
government to the people than upwards from the people to the government?
These are questions which it is of importance to have clearly resolved.
Mr. Southey declaims against public opinion, which is now, he tells us,
usurping supreme power. Formerly, according to him, the laws governed;
now public opinion governs. What are laws but expressions of the opinion
of some class which has power over the rest of the community? By
what was the world ever governed but by the opinion of some person or
persons? By what else can it ever be governed? What are all systems,
religious, political, or scientific, but opinions resting on evidence
more or less satisfactory? The question is not between human opinion
and some higher and more certain mode of arriving at truth, but between
opinion and opinion, between the opinions of one man and another, or of
one class and another, or of one generation and another. Public opinion
is not infallible; but can Mr. Southey construct any institutions
which shall secure to us the guidance of an infallible opinion? Can
Mr. Southey select any family, any profession, any class, in short,
distinguished by any plain badge from the rest of the {163}community,
whose opinion is more likely to be just than this much abused public
opinion? Would he choose the peers, for example? Or the two hundred
tallest men in the country? Or the poor Knights of Windsor? Or children
who are born with cauls? Or the seventh sons of seventh sons? We cannot
suppose that he would recommend popular election; for that is merely an
appeal to public opinion. And to say that society ought to be governed
by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose
opinion is to decide, who are the wisest and best?
Mr. Southey and many other respectable people seem to think that, when
they have once proved the moral and religious training of the people to
be a most important object, it follows, of course, that it is an object
which the government ought to pursue. They forget that we have to
consider, not merely the goodness of the end, but also the fitness of
the means. Neither in the natural nor in the political body have all
members the same office. There is surely no contradiction in saying that
a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect
the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our
opinions, or to superintend our private habits.
So strong is the interest of a ruler to protect his subjects against all
depredations and outrages except his own, so clear and simple are the
means by which this end is to be effected, that men are probably better
off under the worst governments in the world than they would be in a
state of anarchy. Even when the appointment of magistrates has been left
to chance, as in the Italian Republics, things have gone on far better
than if there had been no magistrates at all, and if every man had
done what seemed right in his own {164}eyes. But we see no reason for
thinking that the opinions of the magistrate on speculative question are
more likely to be right than those of any other man. None of the modes
by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of
the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive,
much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance
of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
Now we cannot understand how it can be laid down that it is the duty and
the right of one class to direct the opinions of another, unless it can
be proved that the former class is more likely to form just opinions
than the latter.
The duties of government would be, as Mr. Southey says that they are,
paternal, if a government were necessarily as much superior in wisdom
to a people as the most foolish father, for a time, is to the most
intelligent child, and if a government loved a people as fathers
generally love their children. But there is no reason to believe that
a government will have either the paternal warmth of affection or the
paternal superiority of intellect. Mr. Southey might as well say that
the duties of the shoemaker are paternal and that it is an usurpation in
any man not of the craft to say that his shoes are bad and to insist on
having better. The division of labour would be no blessing, if those by
whom a thing is done were to pay no attention to the opinion of
those for whom it is done. The shoemaker, in the Relapse, tells Lord
Foppington that his lordship is mistaken in supposing that his shoe
pinches. “It does not pinch; it cannot pinch; I know my business; and
I never made a better shoe.” This is the way in which Mr. Southey would
have a government treat a people who usurp the privilege of thinking.
Nay, the {165}shoemaker of Vanbrugh has the advantage in the comparison.
He contented himself with regulating his customer’s shoes, about which
he had peculiar means of information, and did not presume to dictate
about the coat and hat. But Mr. Southey would have the rulers of a
country prescribe opinions to the people, not only about politics, but
about matters concerning which a government has no peculiar sources of
information, and concerning which any man in the streets may know as
much and think as justly as the King, namely religion and morals.
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they
discuss it freely, A government can interfere in discussion only by
making it less free than it would otherwise be. Men are most likely to
form just opinions when they have no other wish than to know the truth,
and are exempt from all influence, either of hope or fear. Government,
as government, can bring nothing but the influence of hopes and fears to
support its doctrines. It carries on controversy, not with reasons,
but with threats and bribes. If it employs reasons, it does so, not in
virtue of any powers which belong to it as a government. Thus, instead
of a contest between argument and argument, we have a contest between
argument and force. Instead of a contest in which truth, from the
natural constitution of the human mind, has a decided advantage over
falsehood, we have a contest in which truth can be victorious only by
accident.
And what, after all, is the security which this training gives to
governments? Mr. Southey would scarcely propose that discussion should
be more effectually shackled, that public opinion should be more,
strictly disciplined into conformity with established {166}institutions,
than in Spain and Italy. Yet we know that the restraints which exist
in Spain and Italy have not prevented atheism from spreading among
the educated classes, and especially among those whose office it is to
minister at the altars of God. All our readers know how, at the time of
the French Revolution, priest after priest came forward to declare that
his doctrine, his ministry, his whole life, had been a lie, a mummery
during which he could scarcely compose his countenance sufficiently to
carry on the imposture. This was the case of a false, or at least of a
grossly corrupted religion. Let us take then the case of all others most
favourable to Mr. Southey’s argument. Let us take that form of religion
which he holds to be the purest, the system of the Arminian part of
the Church of England. Let us take the form of government which he most
admires and regrets, the government of England in the time of Charles
the First. Would he wish to see a closer connection between church and
state than then existed? Would he wish for more powerful ecclesiastical
tribunals? for a more zealous king? for a more active primate? Would he
wish to see a more complete monopoly of public instruction given to the
Established Church? Could any government do more to train the people
in the way in which he would have them? And in what did all this
training end? The Report of the state of the Province of Canterbury,
delivered by Laud to his master at the close of 1639, represents the
Church of England as in the highest and most palmy state. So effectually
had the government pursued that policy which Mr. Southey wishes to see
revived that there was scarcely the least appearance of dissent. Most of
the bishops stated that all was well amoung their flocks. Seven or eight
{167}persons in the diocese of Peterborough had seemed refractory to the
church, but had made ample submission. In Norfolk and Suffolk all whom
there had been reason to suspect had made profession of conformity, and
appeared to observe it strictly. It is confessed that there was a
little difficulty in bringing some of the vulgar in Suffolk to take the
sacrament at the rails in the chancel. This was the only open instance
of non-conformity which the vigilant eye of Laud could detect in all the
dioceses of his twenty-one suffragans, on the very eve of a revolution
in which primate, and church, and monarch, and monarchy were to perish
together. .
At which time would Mr. Southey pronounce the constitution more secure;
in 1639, when Laud presented this Report to Charles; or now, when
thousands of meetings openly collect millions of dissenters, when
designs against the tithes are openly avowed, when books attacking not
only the Establishment, but the first principles of Christianity, are
openly sold in the streets? The signs of discontent, he tells us, are
stronger in England now than in France when the States-General met: and
hence he would have us infer that a revolution like that of France
may be at hand. Does he not know that the danger of states is to be
estimated, not by what breaks out of the public mind, but by what stays
in it? Can he conceive any thing more terrible than the situation of a
government which rules without apprehension over a people of hypocrites,
which is flattered by the press and cursed in the inner chambers, which
exults in the attachment and obedience of its subjects, and knows not
that those subjects are leagued against it in a free-masonry of hatred,
the sign of which is every day conveyed in {168}the glance of ten
thousand eyes, the pressure of ten thousand hands, and the tone of ten
thousand voices? Profound and ingenious policy! Instead of curing the
disease, to remove those symptoms by which alone its nature can be
known! To leave the serpent his deadly sting, and deprive him only of
his warning rattle!
When the people whom Charles had so assiduously trained in the good way
had rewarded his paternal care by cutting off his head, a new kind of
training came into fashion. Another government arose which, like the
former, considered religion as its surest basis, and the religious
discipline of the people as its first duty. Sanguinary laws were enacted
against libertinism; profane pictures were burned: drapery was put on
indecorous statues; the theatres were shut up; fast-days were numerous;
and the Parliament resolved that no person should be admitted into any
public employment, unless the House should be first satisfied of his
vital godliness. We know what was the end of this training. We know
that it ended in impiety, in filthy and heartless sensuality, in the
dissolution of all ties of honour and morality. We know that at this
very day scriptural phrases, scriptural names, perhaps some scriptural
doctrines, excite disgust and ridicule, solely because they are
associated with the austerity of that period.
Thus has the experiment of training the people in established forms of
religion been twice tried in England on a large scale, once by Charles
and Laud, and once by the Puritans. The High Tories of our time still
entertain many of the feelings and opinions of Charles and Laud, though
in a mitigated form; nor is it difficult to see that the heirs of
the Puritans are still amongst us. It would be desirable that each of
{169}these parties should remember how little advantage or honour it
formerly derived from the closest alliance with power, that it fell by
the support of rulers, and rose by their opposition, that of the two
systems that in which the people were at any time drilled was always
at that time the unpopular system, that the training of the High
Church ended in the reign of the Puritans, and that the training of the
Puritans ended in the reign of the harlots.
This was quite natural. Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in
from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government,
a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink,
and wear. Our fathers could not bear it two hundred years ago; and we
are not more patient than they. Mr. Southey thinks that the yoke of the
church is dropping off because it is loose. We feel convinced that it
is borne only because it is easy, and that, in the instant in which an
attempt is made to tighten it, it will be flung away. It will be neither
the first nor the strongest yoke that has been broken asunder and
trampled under foot in the day of the vengeance of England.
How far Mr. Southey would have the government carry its measures for
training the people in the doctrines of the church, we are unable to
discover. In one passage Sir Thomas More asks with great vehemence,
“Is it possible that your laws should suffer the unbelievers to exist as
a party? Vetitum est adeo sceleris nihil?”
Montesinos answers. “They avow themselves in defiance of the laws. The
fashionable doctrine which the press at this time maintains is, that
this is a matter in which the laws ought not to interfere, every man
{170}having a right, both to form what opinion he pleases upon religious
subjects, and to promulgate that opinion.”
It is clear, therefore, that Mr. Southey would not give full and perfect
toleration to infidelity. In another passage, however, he observes with
some truth, though too sweepingly, that “any degree of intolerance short
of that full extent which the Papal Church exercises where it has the
power, acts upon the opinions which it is intended to suppress, like
pruning upon vigorous plants; they grow the stronger for it.” These two
passages, put together, would lead us to the conclusion that, in Mr.
Southey’s opinion, the utmost severity ever employed by the Roman
Catholic Church in the days of its greatest power ought to be employed
against unbelievers in England; in plain words, that Carlile and his
shopmen ought to be burned in Smith-field, and that every person
who, when called upon, should decline to make a solemn profession of
Christianity ought to suffer the same fate. We do not, however, believe
that Mr. Southey would recommend such a course, though his language
would, according to all the rules of logic, justify us in supposing this
to be his meaning. His opinions form no system at all. He never sees, at
one glance, more of a question than will furnish matter for one flowing
and well turned sentence; so that it would be the height of unfairness
to charge him personally with holding a doctrine, merely because
that doctrine is deducible, though by the closest and most accurate
reasoning, from the premises which he has laid down. We are, therefore,
left completely in the dark as to Mr. Southey’s opinions about
toleration. Immediately after censuring the government for not punishing
infidels, he proceeds to discuss {171}the question of the Catholic
disabilities, now, thank God, removed, and defends them on the ground
that the Catholic doctrines tend to persecution, and that the Catholics
persecuted when they had power.
“They must persecute,” says he, “if they believe their own creed, for
conscience-sake; and if they do not believe it, they must persecute for
policy; because it is only by intolerance that so corrupt and injurious
a system can be upheld.”
That unbelievers should not be persecuted is an instance of national
depravity at which the glorified spirits stand aghast. Yet a sect of
Christians is to be excluded from power, because those who formerly held
the same opinions were guilty of persecution. We have said that we do
not very well know what Mr. Southey’s opinion about toleration is. But,
on the whole, we take it to be this, that everybody is to tolerate him,
and that he is to tolerate nobody.
We will not be deterred by any fear of misrepresentation from
expressing our hearty approbation of the mild, wise, and eminently
Christian manner in which the Church and the Government have lately
acted with respect to blasphemous publications. We praise them for not
having thought it necessary to encircle a religion pure, merciful,
and philosophical, a religion to the evidence of which the highest
intellects have yielded, with the defences of a false and bloody
superstition. The ark of God was never taken till it was surrounded by
the arms of earthly defenders. In captivity, its sanctity was sufficient
to vindicate it from insult, and to lay the hostile fiend prostrate on
the threshold of his own temple. The real security of Christianity is to
be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the
human heart, in the {172}facility with which its scheme accommodates
itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation
which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it
brightens the great mystery of the grave. To such a system it can bring
no addition of dignity or of strength, that it is part and parcel of the
common law. It is not now for the first time left to rely on the force
of its own evidences and the attractions of its own beauty. Its sublime
theology confounded the Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason
with reason. The bravest and wisest of the Cæsars found their arms
and their policy unavailing, when opposed to the weapons that were not
carnal and the kingdom that was not of this world. The victory which
Porphyry and Diocletian failed to gain is not, to all appearance,
reserved for any of those who have, in this age, directed their attacks
against the last restraint of the powerful and the last hope of the
wretched. The whole history of Christianity shows, that she is in far
greater danger of being corrupted by the alliance of power, than of
being crushed by its opposition. Those who thrust temporal sovereignty
upon her treat her as their prototypes treated her author. They bow the
knee, and spit upon her; they cry “Hail!” and smite her on the cheek;
they put a sceptre in her hand, but it is a fragile reed; they crown
her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the wounds which
their own hands have inflicted on her; and inscribe magnificent titles
over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and
pain.
The general view which Mr. Southey takes of the prospects of society is
very gloomy; but we comfort ourselves with the consideration that Mr.
Southey is no prophet. He foretold, we remember, on the very {173}eve of
the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts, that these hateful laws
were immortal, and that pious minds would long be gratified by seeing
the most solemn religious rite of the Church profaned for the purpose of
upholding her political supremacy. In the book before us, he says that
Catholics cannot possibly be admitted into Parliament until those whom
Johnson called “the bottomless Whigs” come into power. While the book
was in the press, the prophecy was falsified: and a Tory of the Tories,
Mr. Southey’s own favourite hero, won and wore that noblest wreath, “Ob
cives servatos.”
The signs of the times, Mr. Southey tells us, are very threatening. His
fears for the country would decidedly preponderate over his hopes, but
for his firm reliance on the mercy of God. Now, as we know that God
has once suffered the civilised world to be overrun by savages, and the
Christian religion to be corrupted by doctrines which made it, for some
ages, almost as bad as Paganism, we cannot think it inconsistent with
his attributes that similar calamities should again befal mankind.
We look, however, on the state of the world, and of this kingdom in
particular, with much greater satisfaction and with better hopes. Mr.
Southey speaks with contempt of those who think the savage state happier
than the social. On this subject, he says, Rousseau never imposed on him
even in his youth. But he conceives that a community which has advanced
a little way in civilisation is happier than one which has made greater
progress. The Britons in the time of Cæsar were happier, he suspects,
than the English of the nineteenth century. On the whole, he selects
the generation which preceded the Reformation {174}as that in which the
people of this country were better off than at any time before or since.
This opinion rests on nothing, as far as we can see, except his own
individual associations. He is a man of letters; and a life destitute
of literary pleasures seems insipid to him. He abhors the spirit of the
present generation, the severity of its studies, the boldness of its
inquiries, and the disdain with which it regards some old prejudices
by which his own mind is held in bondage. He dislikes an utterly
unenlightened age: he dislikes an investigation; and reforming age. The
first twenty years of the sixteenth century would have exactly suited
him. They furnished just the quantity of intellectual excitement which
he requires. The learned few read and wrote largely. A scholar was held
in high estimation. But the rabble did not presume to think; and even
the most inquiring and independent of the educated classes paid more
reverence to authority, and less to reason, than is usual in our time.
This is a state of things in which Mr. Southey would have found himself
quite comfortable; and, accordingly, he pronounces it the happiest state
of things ever known in the world.
The savages were wretched, lays Mr. Southey: but the people in the time
of Sir Thomas More were happier than either they or we. Now we think it
quite certain that we have the advantage over the contemporaries of
Sir Thomas More, in every point in which they had any advantage over
savages.
Mr. Southey does not even pretend to maintain that the people in the
sixteenth century were better lodged or clothed than at present.
He seems to admit that in these respects there has been some little
improvement, it is indeed a matter about which scarcely any doubt
{175}can exist in the most perverse mind that the improvements of
machinery have lowered the price of manufactured articles, and have
brought within the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir
Thomas More or his master could not have obtained at any price.
The labouring classes, however, were, according to Mr. Southey, better
fed three hundred years ago than at present. We believe that he is
completely in error on this point. The condition of servants in noble
and wealthy families, and of scholars at the Universities must surely
have been better in those times than that of day-labourers; and we are
sure that it was not better than that of our workhouse paupers. From the
household book of the Northumberland family, we find that in one of the
greatest establishments of the kingdom the servants lived very much as
common sailors live now. In the reign of Edward the Sixth the state
of the students at Cambridge is described to us, on the very best
authority, as most wretched. Many of them dined on pottage made of a
farthing’s worth of beef with a little salt and oatmeal, and literally
nothing else. This account we have from a contemporary master of St.
John’s. Our parish poor now eat wheat bread. In the sixteenth century
the labourer was glad to get barley, and was often forced to content
himself with poorer fare. In Harrison’s introduction to Holinshed we
have an account of the state of our working population in the “golden
days,” as Mr. Southey calls them, “of good Queen Bess.”
“The gentilitie,” says he, “commonly provide themselves sufficiently
of wheat for their own tables, why lest their household and poore
neighbours in some shires are inforced to content themselves with rye or
barleie; yea, and in time of {176}dearth, many with bread made eyther
of beanes, peason, or otes, or of altogether, and some acornes among.
I will not say that this extremity is oft so well to be seen in time of
plentie as of dearth; but if I should I could easily bring my trial: for
albeit there be much more grounde eared nowe almost in everye place then
liathe beene of late yeares, yet such a price of corne continueth in
cache towne and markete, without any just cause, that the artificer
and poore labouring man is not able to reach unto it, but is driven to
content himself with horse-corne.” We should like to see what the
effect would be of putting any parish in England now on allowance of
“horse-corne.” The helotry of Mammon are not, in our day, so easily
enforced to content themselves as the peasantry of that happy period, as
Mr. Southey considers it, which elapsed between the fall of the feudal
and the rise of the commercial tyranny.
“The people,” says Mr. Southey, “are worse fed than when they were
fishers.” And yet in another place he complains that they will not eat
fish. “They have contracted,” says he, “I know not how, some obstinate
prejudice against a kind of food at once wholesome and delicate, and
every where to be obtained cheaply and in abundance, were the demand for
it as general as it ought to be.” It is true that the lower orders have
an obstinate prejudice against fish. But hunger has no such obstinate
prejudices. If what was formerly a common diet I now eaten only in times
of severe pressure, the inference is plain. The people must be fed with
what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors.
The advice and medicine which the poorest labourer {177}can now obtain,
in disease, or after an accident, is far superior to what Henry the
Eighth could have commanded. Scarcely any part of the country is out of
the reach of practitioners who are probably not so far inferior to Sir
Henry Halford as they are superior to Dr. Butts. That there has been a
great improvement in this respect, Mr. Southey allows. Indeed he could
not well have denied it. “But,” says he, “the evils for which these
sciences are the palliative, have increased since the time of the
Druids, in a proportion that heavily overweighs the benefit of improved
therapeutics.” We know nothing either of the diseases or the remedies of
the Druids. But we are quite sure that the improvement of medicine has
far more than kept pace with the increase of disease during the last
three centuries. This is proved by the best possible evidence. The term
of human life is decidedly longer in England than in any former age,
respecting which we possess any information on which we can Lely. All
the rants in the world about picturesque cottages and temples of Mammon
will not shake this argument. No test of the physical well-being of
society can be named so decisive as that which is furnished by bills
of mortality. That the lives of the people of this country have been
gradually lengthening during the course of several generations, is as
certain as any fact in statistics; and that the lives of men should
become longer and longer, while their bodily condition during life is
becoming worse and worse, is utterly incredible.
Let our readers think over these circumstances. Let them take into the
account the sweating sickness and the plague. Let them take into the
account that fearful disease which first made its appearance in the
{178}generation to which Mr. Southey assigns the palm of felicity, and
raged through Europe with a fury at which the physician stood aghast,
and before which the people were swept away by myriads. Let them
consider the state of the northern counties, constantly the scene of
robberies, rapes, massacres, and conflagrations. Let them add to all
this the fact that seventy-two thousand persons suffered death by the
hands of the executioner during the reign of Henry the Eighth, and judge
between the nineteenth and the sixteenth century.
We do not say that the lower orders in England do not suffer severe
hardships. But, in spite of Mr. Southey’s assertions, and in spite
of the assertions of a class of politicians, who, differing from Mr.
Southey in every other point, agree with him in this, we are inclined to
doubt whether the labouring classes here really suffer greater physical
distress than the labouring classes of the most flourishing countries of
the Continent.
It will scarcely be maintained that the lazzaroni who sleep under the
porticoes of Naples, or the beggars who besiege the convents of Spain,
are in a happier situation than the English commonalty. The distress
which has lately been experienced in the northern part of Germany, one
of the best governed and most prosperous regions of Europe, surpasses,
if we have been correctly informed, any thing which has of late years
been known among us. In Norway and Sweden the peasantry are constantly
compelled to mix bark with their bread; and even this expedient has
not always preserved whole families and neighbourhoods from perishing
together of famine. An experiment has lately been tried in the kingdom
of the Netherlands, which {179}has been cited to prove the possibility
of establishing agricultural colonies on the waste lands of England, but
which proves to our minds nothing so clearly as this, that the rate
of subsistence to which the labouring classes are reduced in the
Netherlands is miserably low, and very far inferior to that of the
English paupers. No distress which the people here have endured for
centuries approaches to that which has been felt by the French in our
own time. The beginning of the year 1817 was a time of great distress
in this island. But the state of the lowest classes here was luxury
compared with that of the people of France. We find in Magendie’s
“Journal de Physiologie Expérimentale” a paper on a point of physiology
connected with the distress of that season. It appears that the
inhabitants of six departments, Aix, Jura, Doubs, Haute Saone, Vosges,
and Saone-et-Loire, were reduced first to oatmeal and potatoes, and at
last to nettles, bean-stalks, and other kinds of herbage fit only for
cattle; that when the next harvest enabled them to eat barley-bread,
many of them died from intemperate indulgence in what they thought
an exquisite repast; and that a dropsy of a peculiar description was
produced by the hard fare of the year. Dead bodies were found on the
roads and in the fields. A single surgeon dissected six of these, and
found the stomach shrunk, and filled with the unwholesome aliments which
hunger had driven men to share with beasts. Such extremity of distress
as this is never heard of in England, or even in Ireland. We are, on
the whole, inclined to think, though we would speak with diffidence on a
point on which it would be rash to pronounce a positive judgment without
a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed upon it,
that the labouring {180}classes of this island, though they have their
grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence,
some by the errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to
physical comforts than the inhabitants of any equally extensive district
of the old world. For this very reason, suffering is more acutely felt
and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere. We must take into the
account the liberty of discussion, and the strong interest which the
opponents of a ministry always have to exaggerate the extent of the
public disasters. There are countries in which the people quietly endure
distress that here would shake the foundations of the state, countries
in which the inhabitants of a whole province turn out to eat grass
with less clamour than one Spitalfields weaver would make here, if the
overseers were to put him on barley-bread. In those new commonwealths
in which a civilised population has at its command a boundless extent of
the richest soil, the condition of the labourer is probably happier than
in any society which has lasted for many centuries. But in the old world
we must confess ourselves unable to find any satisfactory record of any
great nation, past or present, in which the working classes have been
in a more comfortable situation than in England during the last thirty
years. When this island was thinly peopled, it was barbarous: there was
little capital; and that little was insecure. It is now the richest
and the most highly civilised spot in the world; but the population is
dense. Thus we have never known that golden age which the lower orders
In the United States are now enjoying. We have never known an age of
liberty, of order, and of education, an age in which the mechanical
sciences were carried to a great height, yet in which the people were
not sufficiently {181}numerous to cultivate even the most fertile
valleys. But, ‘when we compare our own condition with that of our
ancestors, we think it clear that the advantages arising from the
progress of civilisation have far more than counterbalanced the
disadvantages arising from the progress of population. “While our
numbers have increased tenfold, our wealth has increased a hundred-fold.
Though there are so many more people to share the wealth now existing in
the country than there were in the sixteenth century, it seems certain
that a greater share falls to almost every individual than fell to the
share of any of the corresponding class in the sixteenth century. The
King keeps a more splendid court. The establishments of the nobles are
more magnificent. The esquires are richer; the merchants are richer;
the shopkeepers are richer. The serving-man, the artisan, and the
husbandman, have a more copious and palatable supply of food, better
clothing, and better furniture. This is no reason for tolerating abuses,
or for neglecting any means of ameliorating the condition of our poorer
countrymen. But it is a reason against telling them, as some of our
philosophers are constantly telling them, that they are the most
wretched people who ever existed on the face of the earth.
“We have already adverted to Mr. Southey’s amusing doctrine about
national wealth. A state, says he, cannot be too rich; but a people may
be too rich. His reason for thinking this is extremely curious.
“_A people may be too rich, because it is the tendency of the
commercial, and more especially of the manufacturing system, to collect
wealth rather than to diffuse it. Where wealth is necessarily employed
in any of the speculations of trade, its increase is in proportion to
its amount. Great capitalists become like pikes in a fish-pond, who
devour the weaker fish; and it is but too certain. {182}that the poverty
of one part of the people seems to increase in the same ratio as the
riches of another. There are examples of this in history. In Portugal,
when the high tide of wealth flowed in from the conquests in Africa and
the East, the effect of that great influx was not more visible in the
augmented splendour of the court, and the luxury of the higher ranks,
than in the distress of the people_.”
Mr. Southey’s instance is not a very fortunate one. The wealth which did
so little for the Portuguese was not the fruit either of manufactures or
of commerce carried on by private individuals. It was the wealth, not
of the people, but of the government and its creatures, of those who,
as Mr. Southey thinks, can never be too rich. The fact is that Mr.
Southey’s proposition is opposed to all history, and to the phænomena
which surround us on every side. England is the richest country
in Europe, the most commercial country, and the country in which
manufactures flourish most. Russia and Poland are the poorest countries
in Europe. They have scarcely any trade, and none but the rudest
manufactures. Is wealth more diffused in Russia and Poland than in
England? There are individuals in Russia and Poland whose incomes are
probably equal to those of our richest countrymen. It may be doubted
whether there are not, in those countries, as many fortunes of eighty
thousand a year as here. But are there as many fortunes of two thousand
a year, or of one thousand a year? There are parishes in England which
contain more people of between three hundred and three thousand pounds
a year than could be found in all the dominions of the Emperor Nicholas.
The neat and commodious houses which have been built in London and its
vicinity, for people of this class, within the last thirty years would
of themselves {183}form a city larger than the capitals of some
European kingdoms. And this is the state of society in which the great
proprietors have devoured a smaller!
The cure which Mr. Southey thinks that he has discovered is worthy of
the sagacity which he has shown in detecting the evil. The calamities
arising from the collection of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists
are to be remedied by collecting it in the hands of one great
capitalist, who has no conceivable motive to use it better than other
capitalists, the all-devouring state.
It is not strange that, differing so widely from Mr. Southey as to
the past progress of society, we should differ from him also as to its
probable destiny. He thinks, that to all outward appearance, the country
is hastening to destruction; but he relies firmly on the goodness
of God. We do not see either the piety or the rationality of thus
confidently expecting that the Supreme Being will interfere to disturb
the common succession of causes and effects. We, too, rely on
his goodness, on his goodness as manifested, not in extraordinary
interpositions, but in those general laws which it has pleased him to
establish in the physical and in the moral world. We rely on the natural
tendency of the human intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency
of society to improvement. We know no well authenticated instance of a
people which has decidedly retrograded in civilisation and prosperity,
except from the influence of violent and terrible calamities, such as
those which laid the Roman empire in ruins, or those which, about the
beginning of the sixteenth century, desolated Italy. We know of no
country which, at the end of fifty years of peace, and tolerably good
government, has been less prosperous than at the beginning of that
period. The political importance of a {184}state may decline, as the
balance of power is disturbed by the introduction of new forces. Thus
the influence of Holland and of Spain is much diminished. But are
Holland and Spain poorer than formerly? We doubt it. Other countries
have outrun them. But we suspect that they have been positively, though
not relatively, advancing. We suspect that Holland is richer than when
she sent her navies up the Thames, that Spain is richer than when a
French king was brought captive to the footstool of Charles the Fifth.
History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We
see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of
individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations,
mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates
faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can
destroy. We see the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts
of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, in spite of the
grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers.
The present moment is one of great distress. But how small will that
distress appear when we think over the history of the last forty years;
a war, compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance;
taxation, such as the most heavily taxed people of former times could
not have conceived; a debt larger than all the public debts that ever
existed in the world added together; the food of the people studiously
rendered dear; the currency imprudently debased, and imprudently
restored. Yet is the country poorer than in 1790? We firmly believe
that, in spite of all the mis-government of her rulers, she has been
almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then {185}there
has been a stoppage, now and then a short retrogression; but as to the
general tendency there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but
the tide is evidently coming in.
If we were to prophesy that in the year 1980 a population of fifty
millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time,
will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be
wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now
are, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower-garden, will be
carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn, that machines
constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that
there will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by
steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our
great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance, which might easily be paid
off in a year or two, many people would think us insane. We prophesy
nothing; but this we say: If any person had told the Parliament which
met in perplexity and terror after the crash in 1720 that in 1880 the
wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the
annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they
considered as an intolerable burden, that for one man of ten thousand
pounds then living there would be five men of fifty thousand pounds,
that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that
nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half
of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the
exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under
Charles the Second, that stage-coaches would run from London to York
in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without
wind, and would be beginning {186}to ride without horses, our ancestors
would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to
Gulliver’s Travels. Yet the prediction would have been true; and they
would have perceived that it was not altogether absurd, if they had
considered that the country was then raising every year a sum which
would have purchased the fee-simple of the revenue of the Plantagenets,
ten times what supported the government of Elizabeth, three times what,
in the time of Oliver Cromwell, had been thought intolerably oppressive.
To almost all men the state of things under which they have been used
to live seems to be the necessary state of things. We have heard it said
that five per cent, is the natural interest of money, that twelve is
the natural number of a jury, that forty shillings is the natural
qualification of a county voter. Hence it is that, though in every age
everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been
taking place, nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next
generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell
us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best
days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent
reason. “A million a year will beggar us,” said the patriots of 1640.
“Two millions a year will grind the country to powder,” was the cry in
1660, “Six millions a year, and a debt of fifty millions!” exclaimed
Swift; “the high allies have been the ruin of us.”
“A hundred and forty millions of debt!” said Junius; “well may we say
that we owe Lord Chatham more than we shall ever pay, if we owe him such
a load as this.”
“Two hundred and forty millions of debt!” cried all the statesmen of
1783 in chorus; “what abilities, or what {187}economy on the part of a
minister, can save a country so burdened?” We know that if, since 1783,
no fresh debt had been incurred, the increased resources of the country
would have enabled us to defray that debt at which Pitt, Fox, and Burke
stood aghast, nay, to defray it over and over again, and that with much
lighter taxation than what we have actually borne. On what principle is
it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect
nothing but deterioration before us?
It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey’s idol, the omniscient
and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that
England has hitherto been carried forward in civilisation; and it is to
the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and
good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by
strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving
capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price,
industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their
natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by
diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every
department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will
assuredly do the rest.