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Part XI.
Part XI.
If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, the policy of
the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from it, ought to be
at least as evident, and at least as important. To a man who acts under the
influence of no passion, who has nothing in view in his projects but the
public good, a great difference will immediately strike him between what
policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions, and on
a question of their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and
deep, and where, by long habit, things more valuable than themselves are so
adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be
destroyed without notably impairing the other. He might be embarrassed if the
case were really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of
debating. But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle. There
is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction, or
unreformed existence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna. This is, in my opinion,
a rule of profound sense, and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest
reformer. I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch
of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon
which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative
benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a
good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the
most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and
an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
There are moments in the fortune of states, when particular men are
called to make improvements, by great mental exertion. In those moments, even
when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country, and to be
invested with full authority, they have not always apt instruments. A
politician, to do great things, looks for a power, what our workmen call a
purchase; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot
be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was
found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were
revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and
dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public
principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the
community into a private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice
is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honour, and implicit
obedience stands in the place of freedom. In vain shall a man look to the
possibility of making such things when he wants them. The winds blow as they
list. These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the
instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of
nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial existence of
bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man
who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and
which propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not deserving to rank
high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having
obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth,
the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you have
rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and
lasting benefit of his country. On the view of this subject, a thousand uses
suggest themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power, growing wild
from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the
moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies
in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our
competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power
of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in
nature, and they were always discernible. They seemed, some of them
unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children; until
contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature,
subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most
tractable agents, in subservience to the great views and designs of men. Did
fifty thousand persons, whose mental and whose bodily labour you might direct,
and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor
superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield? Had you no way of
using them but by converting monks into pensioners? Had you no way of turning
the revenue to account, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift
sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its
natural course. Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore
they sell their tools.
But the institutions savour of superstition in their very principle; and
th y nourish it by a permanent and standing influence. This I do not mean to
dispute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition
itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage.
You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human
mind, which are of as doubtful a colour, in the moral eye, as superstition
itself. It was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was
noxious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is superstition the
greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess I think it becomes a
very great evil. It is, however, a moral subject; and of course admits of all
degrees and all modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds;
and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some
enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource
found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion consists, to
be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world; in a
confidence in his declarations; and in imitation of his perfections. The rest
is our own. It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be auxiliary. Wise
men, who as such are not admirers, (not admirers at least of the Munera
Terrae,) are not violently attached to these things, nor do they violently
hate them. Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly. They are the
rival follies, which mutually wage so unrelenting a war; and which make so
cruel a use of their advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate
vulgar, on the one side, or the other, in their quarrels. Prudence would be
neuter; but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy
concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a prudent
man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he
would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the superstition which builds,
to be more tolerable than that which demolishes - that which adorns a country,
than that which deforms it - that which endows, than that which plunders -
that which disposes to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to
real justice - that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures,
than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their
self-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between
the ancient founders of monkish superstition, and the superstition of the
pretended philosophers of the hour.
For the present I post pone all consideration of the supposed public
profit of the sale, which however I conceive to be perfectly delusive. I shall
here only consider it as a transfer of property. On the policy of that
transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the
immediate support of the producer. This surplus forms the income of the landed
capitalist. It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labour. But this
idleness is itself the spring of labour; this repose the spur to industry. The
only concern of the state is, that the capital taken in rent from the land,
should be returned again to the industry from whence it came; and that its
expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those
who expend it, and to those of the people to whom it is returned.
In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal employment, a
sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was recommended
to expel, with the stranger who was proposed to fill his place. Before the
inconveniencies are incurred which must attend all violent revolutions in
property through extensive confiscation, we ought to have some rational
assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated property will be in a
considerable degree more laborious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed
to extort an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the labourer, or to
consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for the measure of an
individual; or that they should be qualified to dispense the surplus in a more
steady and equal mode, so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure,
than the old possessors, call those possessors bishops, or canons, or
commendatory abbots, or monks, or what you please. The monks are lazy. Be it
so. Suppose them no otherwise employed than by singing in the choir. They are
as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say. As usefully even as
those who sing upon the stage. They are as usefully employed as if they worked
from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly,
and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations, to which by the social
economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were not generally
pernicious to disturb the natural course of things, and to impede in any
degree, the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the
strangely-directed labour of these unhappy people, I should be infinitely more
inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry, than violently
to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quietude. Humanity, and perhaps
policy, might better justify me in the one than in the other. It is a subject
on which I have often reflected, and never reflected without feeling from it.
I am sure that no consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the
yoke of luxury, and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way
will distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration of
such trades and employments in a well-regulated state. But for this purpose of
distribution, it seems to me, that the idle expenses of monks are quite as
well directed as the idle expenses of us lay-loiterers.
When the advantages of the possession and of the project are on a par,
there is no motive for a change. But in the present case, perhaps, they are
not upon a par, and the difference is in favour of the possession. It does not
appear to me, that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel, do in
fact take a course so directly and so generally leading to vitiate and degrade
and render miserable those through whom they pass, as the expenses of those
favourites whom you are intruding into their houses. Why should the
expenditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus
product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me, when it takes its
course through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of
the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient
records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through
paintings and statues, that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of
creation; through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the regards and
connexions of life beyond the grave; through collections of the specimens of
nature which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families
of the world, that by disposition facilitate, and, by exciting curiosity, open
the avenues to science? If by great permanent establishments, all these
objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of personal
caprice and personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same tastes
prevailed in scattered individuals? Does not the sweat of the mason and
carpenter, who toil in order to partake of the sweat of the peasant, flow as
pleasantly and as salubriously, in the construction and repair of the majestic
edifices of religion, as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and
luxury; as honourably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works, which
grow hoary with innumerable years, as on the momentary receptacles of
transient voluptuousness; in opera-houses, and brothels, and gaming-houses,
and club houses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus product of
the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons,
whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by construing in the
service of God, than in pampering the innumerable multitude of those who are
degraded by being made useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man? Are
the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man, than
ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petit maisons, and petit
soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies and follies, in which opulence
sports away the burthen of its superfluity?
We tolerate even these; not from love of them, but for fear of worse. We
tolerate them, because property and liberty, to a degree, require that
toleration. But why proscribe the other, and surely, in every point of view,
the more laudable use of estates? Why, through the violation of all property,
through an outrage upon every principle of liberty, forcibly carry them from
the better to the worse?
This comparison between the new individuals and the old corps is made
upon a supposition that no reform could be made in the latter. But in a
question of reformation, I always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or
consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the
power of the state, in the use of their property, and in the regulation of
modes and habits of life in their members, than private citizens ever can be,
or perhaps ought to be: and this seems to me a very material consideration for
those who undertake anything which merits the name of a politic enterprise. -
So far as to the estates of monasteries.
With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons, and
commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what reason some landed estates may
not be held otherwise than by inheritance. Can any philosophic spoiler
undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a
certain, and that too a large, portion of landed property, passing in
succession through persons whose title to it is, always in theory, and often
in fact, an eminent degree of piety, morals, and learning; a property, which,
by its destination, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the
noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the means of dignity
and elevation; a property, the tenure of which is the performance of some
duty, (whatever value you may choose to set upon that duty,) and the character
of whose proprietors demands, at least, an exterior decorum, and gravity of
manners; who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality; part of
whose income they are to consider as a trust for charity; and who, even when
they fail in their trust, when they slide from their character, and degenerate
into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman, are in no respect worse than
those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions? It is better that
estates should be held by those who have no duty, than by those who have one?
-by those whose character and destination point to virtues, than by those who
have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own
will and appetite? Nor are these estates held altogether in the character or
with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain. They pass from hand to hand with
a more rapid circulation than any other. No excess is good; and therefore too
great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life: but it
does not seem to me of material injury to any commonwealth, that there should
exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired by other means than
the previous acquisition of money.
This letter has grown to a great length, though it is indeed short with
regard to the infinite extent of the subject. Various avocations have from
time to time called my mind from the subject. I was not sorry to give myself
leisure to observe whether, in the proceedings of the National Assembly, I
might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of my first sentiments.
Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions. It was my
original purpose to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly
with regard to the great and fundamental establishments; and to compare the
whole of what you have substituted in the place of what you have destroyed,
with the several members of our British constitution. But this plan is of a
greater extent than at first I computed, and I find that you have little
desire to take the advantage of any examples. At present I must content myself
with some remarks upon your establishments; reserving for another time what I
proposed to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy, as practically they exist.
I have taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in
France. I have certainly spoke of it with freedom. Those whose principle it is
to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind, and to set up a scheme of
society on new principles, must naturally expect that such of us, who think
better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs, should consider both
them and their devices, as men and schemes upon their trial. They must take it
for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their
authority. They have not one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in
their favor. They avow their hostility to opinion. Of course they must expect
no support from that influence, which, with every other authority, they have
deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction.
I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary
association of men, who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon
the power of the state. They have not the sanction and authority of the
character under which they first met. They have assumed another of a very
different nature; and have completely altered and inverted all the relations
in which they originally stood. They do not hold the authority they exercise
under any constitutional law of the state. They have departed from the
instructions, of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions, as the
Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the
sole source of their authority. The most considerable of their acts have not
been done by great majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry
only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons
as well as resolutions.
If they had set up this new experimental government, as a necessary
substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of
prescription, which, through long usage, mellows into legality governments
that were violent in their commencement. All those who have affections which
lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its
cradle, the child as legitimate, which has been produced from those principles
of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth, and on
which they justify their continuance. But they will be late and reluctant in
giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power, which has derived
its birth from no law and no necessity; but which on the contrary has had its
origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is
often disturbed and sometimes destroyed. This Assembly has hardly a year`s
prescription. We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution.
To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. To
make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no
common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding. The sense of
mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to
criticise on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that
which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.
In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds upon
principles the most opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use
of it. An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of
their conduct. Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in order to
obtain and keep their power, is by the most common arts. They proceed exactly
as their ancestors of ambition have done before them. - Trace them through all
their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is
new. They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a
pleader. They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and
usurpation. But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the spirit
has been the very reverse of this. There they commit the whole to the mercy of
untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to
those loose theories, to which none of them would choose to trust the
slightest of his private concerns. They make this difference, because in their
desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there
they travel in the beaten road. The public interests, because about them they
have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance: I say to chance,
because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency
beneficial.
We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect, the errors of
those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein
the happiness of mankind is concerned. But in these gentlemen there is nothing
of the tender, parental solicitude, which fears to cut up the infant for the
sake of an experiment. In the vastness of their promises, and the confidence
of their predictions, they far outdo all the boasting of empirics. The
arrogance of their pretensions, in a manner provokes and challenges us to an
inquiry into their foundation.
I am convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular
leaders in the National Assembly. Some of them display eloquence in their
speeches and their writings. This cannot be without powerful and cultivated
talents. But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom.
When I speak of ability, I am obliged to distinguish. What they have done
towards the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men. In the system
itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring the
prosperity and security of the citizen, and for promoting the strength and
grandeur of the state, I confess myself unable to find out anything which
displays, in a single instance the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind,
or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence. Their purpose everywhere seems to
have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory
of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and when
they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new
conquests over new difficulties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of
their science; and even to push forward, beyond the reach of their original
thoughts, the land-marks of the human understanding itself. Difficulty is a
severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian
and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us
better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles
with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our
helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate
acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its
relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of nerves
of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking
short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the
world created governments with arbitrary powers. They have created the late
arbitrary monarchy of France. They have created the arbitrary republic of
Paris. With them defects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plentitude of
force. They get nothing by it. Commencing their labours on a principle of
sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men. The difficulties, which
they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they
multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of
confused detail, in an industry without limit, and without direction; and, in
conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure.
It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the
arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with
abolition and total destruction. ^44 But is it in destroying and pulling down
that skill is displayed? Your mob can do this as well at least as your
assemblies. The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal
to that task. Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an hour, than
prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. The
errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It calls
for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it
requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together.
The same lazy but restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet,
directs the politicians, when they come to work for supplying the place of
what they have destroyed. To make everything the reverse of what they have
seen is quite as easy as to destroy. No difficulties occur in what has never
been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has
not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of
imagination, in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.
[Footnote 44: A leading member of the Assembly, M. Rabaud de St. Etienne, has
expressed the principle of all their proceedings as clearly as possible. -
Nothing can be more simple: - "Tous les etablissemens en France couronnent le
malheur du peuple: pour le rendre heureux il faut le renouveler; changer ses
idees; changer ses loix; changer ses moeurs; . . . changer les hommes; changer
les choses; changer les mots . . . tout detruire; oui, tout detruire; puisque
tout est a recreer." This gentleman was chosen president in an assembly not
sitting at the Quinze-vingt, or the Petits Maisons; and composed of persons
giving themselves out to be rational beings; but neither his ideas, language,
or conduct, differ in the smallest degree from the discourses, opinions, and
actions of those within and without the Assembly, who direct the operations of
the machine now at work in France.]
At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing. When the useful
parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted
to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various
powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding
fruitful in expedients, are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a
continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the
obstinacy that rejects all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and
disgusted with everything of which it is in possession. But you may object -
"A process of this kind is slow. It is not fit for an assembly, which glories
in performing in a few months the work of ages. Such a mode of reforming,
possibly, might take up many years." Without question it might; and it ought.
It is one of the excellencies of a method in which time is amongst the
assistants, that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost
imperceptible. If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we
work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when
the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, by
sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and
habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the
prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting
confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator. Far
different are my ideas of that high office. The true lawgiver ought to have a
heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear
himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object
with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate.
Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought
by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to
produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.
Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to
what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell
you, that in my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have
co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not
been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in
understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. By a slow but
well-sustained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill
success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to
light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series. We see that the
parts or the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising
contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is as little as
possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We
are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and
contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From
hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an
excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are concerned
through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted
into some share in the councils, which are so deeply to affect them. If
justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one
age can furnish. It is from this view of things that the best legislators have
been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling
principle in government; a power like that which some of the philosophers have
called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it
afterwards to its own operation.
To proceed in this manner, that is, to proceed with a presiding
principle, and a prolific energy, is with me the criterion of profound wisdom.
What your politicians think the marks of a bold, hardy genius, are only proofs
of a deplorable want of ability. By their violent haste and their defiance of
the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and
adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric. They despair of turning to account
anything that is common. Diet is nothing in their system of remedy. The worst
of it is, that this their despair of curing common distempers by regular
methods, arises not only from defect of comprehension, but, I fear, from some
malignity of disposition. Your legislators seem to have taken their opinions
of all professions, ranks, and offices, from the declamations and buffooneries
of satirists; who would themselves be astonished if they were held to the
letter of their own descriptions. By listening only to these, your leaders
regard all things only on the side of their vices and faults, and view those
vices and faults under every colour of exaggeration. It is undoubtedly true,
though it may seem paradoxical; but in general, those who are habitually
employed in finding and displaying faults, are unqualified for the work of
reformation: because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the
fair and good, but by habit they come to take no delight in the contemplation
of those things. By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
It is therefore not wonderful, that they should be indisposed and unable to
serve them. From hence arises the complexional disposition of some of your
guides to pull everything in pieces. At this malicious game they display the
whole of their quadrimanous activity. As to the rest, the paradoxes of
eloquent writers, brought forth purely as a sport of fancy, to try their
talents, to rouse attention and excite surprise, are taken up by these
gentlemen, not in the spirit of the original authors, as means of cultivating
their taste and improving their style. These paradoxes become with them
serious grounds of action, upon which they proceed in regulating the most
important concerns of the state. Cicero ludicrously describes Cato as
endeavouring to act, in the commonwealth, upon the school paradoxes, which
exercised the wits of the junior students in the Stoic philosophy. If this was
true of Cato, t ese gentlemen copy after him in the manner of some persons who
lived about his time - pede nudo Catonem. Mr. Hume told me that he had from
Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute
though eccentric observer had perceived, that to strike and interest the
public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen
mythology had long since lost its effect; that giants, magicians, fairies, and
heroes of romance which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity
which belonged to their age; that now nothing was left to the writer but that
species of the marvellous which might still be produced, and with as great an
effect as ever, though in another way; that is, the marvellous in life, in
manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new
and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals. I believe, that were Rousseau
alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical
phrensy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes are servile imitators, and
even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith.
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