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Part II
Part II
On a careful review, therefore, and analysis, of all the component parts
of the civil list, and on weighing them against each other, in order to make,
as much as possible, all of them a subject of estimate, (the foundation and
cornerstone of all regular provident economy,) is appeared to me evident, that
this was impracticable, whilst that part, called the pension list, was totally
discretionary in its amount. For this reason, and for this only, I proposed to
reduce it, both in its gross quantity, and in its larger individual
proportions, to a certainty; lest, if it were left without a general limit, it
might eat up the civillist service; if suffered to be granted in portions too
great for the fund, it might defeat its own end; and, by unlimited allowances
to some, it might disable the Crown in means of providing for others. The
pension list was to be kept as a sacred fund; but it could not be kept as a
constant, open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if some demands would
wholly devour it. The tenour of the act will show that it regarded the civil
list only, the reduction of which to some sort of estimate was my great
object.
No other of the Crown funds did I meddle with, because they had not the
same relations. This of the four and a half per cents. does his Grace imagine
had escaped me, or had escaped all the men of business, who acted with me in
those regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and that pensions had been
always granted on it, before his Grace was born. This fund was full in my eye.
It was full in the eyes of those who worked with me. It was left on principle.
On principle I did what was then done; and on principle what was left undone
was omitted. I did not dare to rob the nation of all funds to reward merit. If
I pressed this point too close, I acted contrary to the avowed principles on
which I went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me; but if any one thinks it
worth his while to know the rules that guided me in my plan of reform, he will
read my printed speech on that subject; at least what is contained from page
230 to page 241 in the second volume of the collection which a friend has
given himself the trouble to make of my publications. Be this as it may, these
two bills, (though achieved with the greatest labour, and management of every
sort, both within and without the House,) were only a part, and but a small
part, of a very large system, comprehending all the objects I stated in
opening my proposition, and, indeed, many more, which I just hinted at in my
speech to the electors of Bristol, when I was put out of that representation.
All these, in some state or other of forwardness, I have long had by me.
But do I justify his Majesty`s grace on these grounds? I think them the
least of my services! The time gave them an occasional value. What I have done
in the way of political economy was far from confined to this body of
measures. I did not come into parliament to con my lesson. I had earned my
pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen`s chapel. I was prepared and
disciplined to this political warfare. The first session I sat in parliament,
I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial,
constitutional, and foreign interests of Great Britain and its empire. A
great deal was then done; and more, far more, would have been done, if more
had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigour of my manhood, my
constitution sunk under my labour. Had I then died, (and I seemed to myself
very near death,) I had then earned for those who belonged to me, more than
the Duke of Bedford`s ideas of service are of power to estimate. But, in
truth, these services I am called to account for are not those on which I
value myself the most. If I were to call for a reward, (which I have never
done,) it should be for those in which for fourteen years, without
intermission, I showed the most industry, and had the least success; I mean in
the affairs of India. They are those on which I value myself the most; most
for the importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most for
constancy and perseverance in the pursuit. Others may value them most for the
intention. In that, surely, they are not mistaken.
Does his Grace think, that they, who advised the Crown to make my
retreat easy, considered me only as an economist? That, well understood,
however, is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not
have made political economy an object of my humble studies, from my very
early youth to near the end of my service in parliament, even before (at
least to any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of
speculative men in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its
infancy in England, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and
learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and designed to
communicate with me now and then on some particulars of their immortal
works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally in some of the
earliest things I published. The House has been witness to their effect, and
has profited of them more or less for above eight and twenty years.
To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his Grace of
Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator; "Nitor in
adversum" is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the
qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour
and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little
did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the
understandings, of the people. At every step of my progress in life, (for in
every step was I traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was
obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the
honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly
unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad
and at home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration, even for me. I had no arts but
manly arts. On them I have stood, and please, God, in spite of the Duke of
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand.
Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the person, whom he
has not thought it below him to reproach, he might have found that, in the
whole course of my life, I have never, on any pretence of economy, or on any
other pretence, so much as in a single instance, stood between any man and
his reward of service, or his encouragement in useful talent and pursuit,
from the highest of those services and pursuits to the lowest. On the contrary
I have, on an hundred occasions, exerted myself with singular zeal to forward
every man`s even tolerable pretensions. I have more than once had good-natured
reprehensions from my friends for carrying the matter to something bordering
on abuse. This line of conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly owing
to natural disposition; but I think full as much to reason and principle. I
looked on the consideration of public service, or public ornament, to be real
and very justice: and I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake
of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst
economy in the world. In saving money, I soon can count up all the good I do;
but when, by a cold penury, I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the
growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation.
Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have done has been general
and systematic. I have never entered into those trifling, vexatious, and
oppressive details, that have been falsely, and most ridiculously, laid to my
charge.
Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr. Dunning between the
proposition and execution of my plan? No! surely no! Those pensions were
within my principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions,
their titles - all they had; and more had they had, I should have been but
pleased the more. They were men of talents; they were men of service. I put
the profession of the law out of the question in one of them. It is a service
that rewards itself. But their public service, though, from their abilities
unquestionably of more value than mine, in its quantity and its duration was
not to be mentioned with it. But I never could drive a hard bargain in my
life, concerning any matter whatever; and least of all do I know how to haggle
and huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none; nor did I solicit
any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for everything that was withheld, and with
obloquy for everything that was given. I was thus left to support the grants
of a name ever dear to me, and ever venerable to the world, in favour of
those, who were no friends of mine or of his, against the rude attacks of
those who were at that time friends to the grantees, and their own zealous
partisans. I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale complain of these
pensions. He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me. This is impartiality, in
the true, modern, revolutionary style.
Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order and economy, is
stable and eternal; as all principles must be. A particular order of things
may be altered; order itself cannot lose its value. As to other particulars,
they are variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of regulation are not
fundamental laws. The public exigencies are the masters of all such laws. They
rule the laws, and are not to be ruled by them. They who exercise the
legislative power at the time must judge.
It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him, that mere
parsimony is not economy. It is separable in theory from it; and in fact it
may, or it may not, be a part of economy, according to circumstances. Expense,
and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were
to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is however another
and a higher economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in
saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no
powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not
an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection.
The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and
a firm, sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to
open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none but meritorious
service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, and
this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all the service it ever will
receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever will produce. No state, since
the foundation of society, has been impoverished by that species of profusion.
Had the economy of selection and proportion been at all times observed, we
should not now have had an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry
of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the
justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the Crown.
His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the far greater
part of my conduct in life. It is free for him to do so. There will always be
some difference of opinion in the value of political services. But there is
one merit of mine, which he, of all men living, ought to be the last to call
in question. I have supported with very great zeal, and I am told with some
degree of success, those opinions, or if his Grace likes another expression
better, those old prejudices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his
nobility, wealth, and titles. I have omitted no exertion to prevent him and
them from sinking to that level, to which the meretricious French faction, his
Grace at least coquets with, omit no exertion to reduce both. I have done all
I could to discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those, who hold
large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own. I have
strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation, which
alone makes him my superior. Your Lordship has been a witness of the use he
makes of that preeminence.
But be it, that this is virtue! Be it, that there is virtue in this
well-selected rigour; yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all men and
at all times. There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all
seasons of our existence, ought to put a generous antipathy in action; crimes
that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm and animated pursuit.
But all things that concern, what I may call, the preventive police of
morality, all things merely rigid, harsh, and censorial, the antiquated
moralists, at whose feet I was brought up, would not have thought these the
fittest matter to form the favourite virtues of young men of rank. What might
have been well enough, and have been received with a veneration mixed with awe
and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of
propriety in the young Scipios, the ornament of the Roman nobility, in the
flower of their life. But the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars,
have all undergone a thorough revolution. It is a vile illiberal school, this
new French academy of the sans culottes. There is nothing in it that is fit
for a gentleman to learn.
Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself, that the parents of
the growing generation will be satisfied with what is to be taught to their
children in Westminster, in Eton, or in Winchester: I still indulge the hope
that no grown gentleman or nobleman of our time will think of finishing at Mr.
Thelwall`s lecture whatever may have been left incomplete at the old
universities of his country. I would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a
motto, what was said of a Roman censor or praetor (or what was he?) who, in
virtue of a Senatus consultum, shut up certain academies,
"Cludere ludum impudentiae jussit."
Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the
breaking up for the holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long
vacation in all such schools.
The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own justification, is
my true object in what I now write; or in what I shall ever write or say. It
little signifies to the world what becomes of such things as me, or even as
the Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is nothing more than a
vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive, to convey my sentiments on
matters far more worthy of your attention. It is when I stick to my apparent
first subject that I ought to apologize, not when I depart from it. I
therefore must beg your Lordship`s pardon for again resuming it after this
very short digression; assuring you that I shall never altogether lose sight
of such matter as persons abler than I am may turn to some profit.
The Duke of Bedford conceives, that he is obliged to call the attention
of the House of Peers to his Majesty`s grant to me, which he considers as
excessive, and out of all bounds.
I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst his
Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort
of sleep. Homer nods; and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even
his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together,
his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter
from the Crown grants to his own family. This is "the stuff of which his
dreams are made." In that way of putting things together his Grace is
perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russell were so enormous,
as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of
Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles
about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal
bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating many a rood," he is still
a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles
through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me
all over with the spray, - everything of him and about him is from the throne.
Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?
I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public
merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these
services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what
his Grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all the honour
of acquaintance with the noble Duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me
nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all who
live with him. But as to public service, why truly it would not be more
ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent,
in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a
parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful to my country. It
would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say, that he has any
public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services, by which his
vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original
and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner,
that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace so
very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the
Crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said, `tis his
estate; that`s enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its
history? He would naturally have said on his side, `tis this man`s fortune. -
He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a
young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions, -
that`s all.
Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my
little merit with that which obtained from the Crown those prodigies of
profuse donation, by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and
laborious individuals? I would willingly leave him to the herald`s college,
which the philosophy of the sansculottes (prouder by far than all the Garters,
and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge Dragons, that ever pranced in a
procession of what his friends call aristocrats and despots) will abolish with
contumely and scorn. These historians, recorders, and blazoners of virtues
and arms, differ wholly from that other description of historians, who never
assign any act of politicians to a good motive. These gentle historians, on
the contrary, dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They
seek no further for merit than the preamble of a patent, or the inscription
on a tomb. With them every man created a peer is first a hero ready made.
They judge of every man`s capacity for office by the offices he has filled;
and the more offices the more ability. Every general officer with them is a
Marlborough; every statesman a Burleigh; every judge a Murray or a Yorke.
They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance, make as
good a figure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim, Edmondson, and
Collins.
To these recorders, so full of good nature to the great and prosperous, I
would willingly leave the first Baron Russell, and Earl of Bedford, and the
merits of his grants. But the aulnager, the weigher, the meter of grants will
not suffer us to acquiesce in the judgment of the prince reigning at the time
when they were made. They are never good to those who earn them. Well then;
since the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word
of the sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which
great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their
house.
The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a
Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman`s family raised by being a
minion of Henry the Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of
character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood
much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants was
not taken from the ancient demesne of the Crown, but from the recent
confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the
blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having
tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and
ravenous. This worthy favourite`s first grant was from the lay nobility. The
second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the
plunder of the church. In truth his Grace is somewhat excusable for his
dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind
so different from his own.
Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his from Henry the
Eighth.
Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious
rank,^2 or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men. His grants were
from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal,
and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors, with
the gibbet at their door.
[Footnote 2: See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of
Buckingham. Temp. Hen. 8.]
The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that of being a prompt
and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions
of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great
and noble. Mine has been, in endeavouring to screen every man, in every
class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent,
who in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief governors, or
confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy.
The merit of the original grantee of his Grace`s pensions was in giving
his hand to the work and partaking the spoil with a prince, who plundered a
part of the national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the
whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole
of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the
examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all
prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to
universal desolation.
The merit of the origin of his Grace`s fortune was in being a favourite
and chief adviser to a prince, who left no liberty to their native country.
My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was
born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support
with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege, every franchise, in
this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensive country; and not only to
preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in
every land, in every climate, language, and religion, in the vast domain that
is still under the protection, and the larger that was once under the
protection, of the British Crown.
His founder`s merits were, by arts in which he served his master and
made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on his
country. Mine were, under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce,
manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom; in which his Majesty shows
an eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of
leisure an improver of his native soil.
His founder`s merit was the merit of a gentleman raised by the arts of
a court, and the protection of a Wolsey, to the eminence of a great and
potent lord. His merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to
injustice, to provoke a people to rebellion. My merit was, to awaken the sober
part of the country, that they might put themselves on their guard against any
one potent lord, or any greater number of potent lords, or any combination of
great leading men of any sort, if ever they should attempt to proceed in the
same courses, but in the reverse order; that is, by instigating a corrupted
populace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing a tyranny
yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace`s ancestor supported, and of which
he profited in the manner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth.
The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace`s house was that
of being concerned as a counsellor of state in advising, and in his person
executing, the conditions of a dishonourable peace with France; the
surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our outguard on the continent. By
that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle in the mouth of that
power, was, not many years afterwards, finally lost. My merit has been in
resisting the power and pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in
opposing it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule appeared in
the worst form it could assume; the worst indeed which the prime cause and
principle of all evil could possibly give it. It was my endeavour by every
means to excite a spirit in the House where I had the honour of a seat, for
carrying on, with early vigour and decision, the most clearly just and
necessary war, that this or any nation ever carried on; in order to save my
country from the iron yoke of its power, and from the more dreadful contagion
of its principles; to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and
untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good nature, and good humour
of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence, which, beginning in
France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral, and in a great degree the
whole physical, world, having done both in the focus of its most intense
malignity.
The labours of his Grace`s founder merited the curses, not loud but
deep, of the Commons of England, on whom he and his master had effected a
complete parliamentary reform, by making them, in their slavery and
humiliation, the true and adequate representatives of a debased, degraded,
and undone people. My merits were, in having had an active, though not always
an ostentatious, share, in every one act, without exception, of undisputed
constitutional utility in my time, and in having supported, on all occasions,
the authority, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons of Great
Britain. I ended my services by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on
their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a vindication of their
constitutional conduct. I laboured in all things to merit their inward
approbation, and (along with the assistance of the largest, the greatest, and
best of my endeavours) I received their free, unbiassed, public, and solemn
thanks.
Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the Crown grants
which compose the Duke of Bedford`s fortune as balanced against mine. In the
name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but of
the House of Russell are entitled to the favour of the Crown? Why should he
imagine that no king of England has been capable of judging of merit but King
Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me; he is a little mistaken; all
virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford. All discernment did not lose
its vision when his Creator closed his eyes. Let him remit his rigour on the
disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no
inquiry into the origin of his fortune. They will regard with much more
satisfaction as he will contemplate with infinitely more advantage, whatever
in his pedigree has been dulcified by an exposure to the influence of heaven
in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of
the spring. It is little to be doubted, that several of his forefathers in
that long series have degenerated into honour and virtue. Let the Duke of
Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the counsels of the
lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt him,
in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous fortune from the
forfeitures of another nobility, and the plunder of another church. Let him
(and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth, and all
the resources of his wealth, to crush rebellious principles which have no
foundation in morals, and rebellious movements that have no provocation in
tyranny.
Then will be forgot the rebellions, which, by a doubtful priority, in
crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished. On such a conduct in the
noble Duke, many of his countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give
way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in the dashing style of some
of the old declaimers, cry out, that if the fates had found no other way in
which they could give a^3 Duke of Bedford and his opulence as props to a
tottering world, then the butchery of the Duke of Buckingham might be
tolerated; it might be regarded even with complacency, whilst in the heir of
confiscation they saw the sympathizing comforter of the martyrs, who suffered
under the cruel confiscation of this day; whilst they behold with admiration
his zealous protection of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his
manly support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry of his
native land. Then his Grace`s merit would be pure, and new, and sharp, as
fresh from the mint of honour. As he pleased he might reflect honour on his
predecessors, or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him. He might
be the propagator of the stock of honour, or the root of it, as he thought
proper.
[Footnote 3: At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, &c.]
Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live
in, a sort of founder of a family. I should have left a son, who, in all the
points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in
genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal
sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself
inferior to the Duke of Bedford or to any of those whom he traces in his line.
His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that
provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied
every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been
for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me,
or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and
manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the
Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a
public creature; and had no enjoyment whatever, but in the performance of some
duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily
supplied.
But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom
it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and
(whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has
gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane
has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the
roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most
unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it.
But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to
repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is
proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he
submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find
him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal
asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill to
read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone, I
have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive
myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all
that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a
few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those who are
at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to
shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and under the
direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted
order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should
have been to me a posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the
dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which
he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to show that he was not
descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.
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