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Part III.
Part III.
You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act
as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to
begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that
belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last
generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you
might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of
ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations
would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar
practice of the hour; and you would have risen with the example to whose
imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught
to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a
people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the
emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expense of your honour,
an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you would
not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly
broke loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your
abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed, and ill fitted. Would
it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you thought, what I, for
one, always thought you, a generous and gallant nation, long misled to your
disadvantage by your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honour, and
loyalty; that events had been unfavourable to you, but that you were not
enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition; that in your most
devoted submission, you were actuated by a principle of public spirit, and
that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you
made it to be understood, that in the delusion of this amiable error you had
gone further than your wise ancestors; that you were resolved to resume your
ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your
recent loyalty and honour; or if, diffident of yourselves, and not clearly
discerning the almost obliterated constitution of your ancestors, you had
looked to your neighbours in this land, who had kept alive the ancient
principles and models of the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted
to its present state-by following wise examples you would have given new
examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty
venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have
shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only
reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would
have had an unoppressive but a productive revenue. You would have had a
flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution; a
potent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a
mitigated but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you
would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that
nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient
people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by
virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of
mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas
and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of
laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality,
which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as
much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those
whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. You
had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond
anything recorded in the history of the world; but you have shown that
difficulty is good for man.
Compute your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous
speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors,
and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment
in which they became truly despicable. By following those false lights, France
has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has
purchased the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime!
France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned
her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have
begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by
establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or
other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom
in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and masculine morality.
France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license
of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in
opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she
were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all
the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power.
This is one of the new principles of equality in France.
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of
lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent
topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust;
and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive
plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will consider those, who
advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as subverters of
their thrones; as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy
good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and
faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were
nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that
your parliament of Paris told your king, that, in calling the states together,
he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for
the support of the throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads.
It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel
has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such sanguine declarations
tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous
adventures of untried policy; to neglect those provisions, preparations, and
precautions, which distinguish benevolence from imbecility; and without which
no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government
or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state
corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and
lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has
been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary
tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from
protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and
immunities.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their
punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry
without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people
impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military
anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine
sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the
consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious,
tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and
beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu
of the two great recognised species that represent the lasting, conventional
credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from
whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and
representatives they are, was systematically subverted.
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable
results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade
through blood and tumult, to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous
liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our
feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war;
they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in
time of profound peace. They are the display of inconsiderate and
presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible, authority. The persons who
have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the persons
who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils, (the last stake
reserved for the ultimate ransom of the state,) have met in their progress
with little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more
like a triumphal procession, than the progress of a war. Their pioneers have
gone before them, and demolished and laid everything level at their feet. Not
one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have
ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence
than their shoe-buckles, whilst they were imprisoning their king, murdering
their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and
distress, thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not
even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of
perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations,
slaughters, and burnings, throughout their harassed land. But the cause of all
was plain from the beginning.
This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly
unaccountable, if we did not consider the composition of the National
Assembly: I do not mean its formal constitution, which, as it now stands, is
exceptionable enough, but the materials of which, in a great measure, it is
composed, which is of ten thousand times greater consequence than all the
formalities in the world. If we were to know nothing of this assembly but by
its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything
more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an
awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into
a focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst
aspect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only mysterious. But no name,
no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men
of whom any system of authority is composed any other than God, and nature,
and education, and their habits of life have made them. Capacities beyond
these the people have not to give. Virtue and wisdom may be the objects of
their choice; but their choice confers neither the one nor the other on those
upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the engagement of
nature, they have not the promise of revelation, for any such powers.
After I had read over the list of the persons and descriptions elected
into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could appear
astonishing. Among them, indeed, I saw some of known rank; some of shining
talents; but of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be
found. The best were only men of theory. But whatever the distinguished few
may have been, it is the substance and mass of the body which constitutes its
charactere and must finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those who
will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform
their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they
wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in
a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very
rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into
calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from
becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects! If, what is the more
likely event, instead of that unusual degree of virtue, they should be
actuated by sinister ambition, and a lust of meretricious glory, then the
feeble part of the assembly, to whom at first they conform, becomes in its
turn the dupe and instrument of their designs. In this political traffic, the
leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the
followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.
To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders
in any public assembly, they ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear,
those whom they conduct. To be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers
must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be
judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing can secure a steady and
moderate conduct in such assemblies, but that the body of them should be
respectably composed, in point of condition in life, or permanent property, of
education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the understanding.
In the calling of the states-general of France, the first thing that
struck me, was a great departure from the ancient course. I found the
representation for the third estate composed of six hundred persons. They were
equal in number to the representatives of both the other orders. If the orders
were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the consideration of the
expense, be of much moment. But when it became apparent that the three orders
were to be melted down into one, the policy and necessary effect of this
numerous representation became obvious. A very small desertion from either of
the other two orders must throw the power of both into the hands of the third.
In fact, the whole power of the state was soon resolved into that body. Its
due composition became therefore of infinitely the greater importance.
Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of
the assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed
of practitioners in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished
magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science,
prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not
of renowned professors in universities; - but for the far greater part, as it
must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely
instrumental members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions;
but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards
of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train
of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the
petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list, I saw
distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow.
The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the
standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves. Whatever
the personal merits of many individual lawyers might have been, and in many it
was undoubtedly very considerable, in that military kingdom no part of the
profession had been much regarded, except the highest of all, who often united
to their professional offices great family splendour, and were invested with
great power and authority. These certainly were highly respected, and even
with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not much esteemed; the
mechanical part was in a very low degree of repute.
Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed, it must
evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands of
men not taught habitually to respect themselves; who had no previous fortune
in character at stake; who could not be expected to bear with moderation, or
to conduct with discretion, a power, which they themselves, more than any
others, must be surprised to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself
that these men, suddenly, and, as it were, by enchantment, snatched from the
humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared
greatness? Who could conceive that men, who are habitually meddling, daring,
subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall
back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and
unprofitable chicane? Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state,
of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests
which they understood but too well? It was not an event depending on chance,
or contingency. It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the
nature of things. They must join (if their capacity did not permit them to
lead) in any project which could procure to them a litigious constitution;
which could lay open to them those innumerable lucrative jobs, which follow in
the train of all great convulsions and revolutions in the state, and
particularly in all great and violent permutations of property. Was it to be
expected that they would attend to the stability of property, whose existence
had always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous,
and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation, but their
disposition and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs, must remain
the same.
Well! but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other
descriptions, of more sober and more enlarged understandings. Were they then
to be awed by the super-eminent authority and awful dignity of a handful of
country clowns, who have seats in that assembly, some of whom are said not to
be able to read and write? and by not a greater number of traders, who, though
somewhat more instructed, and more conspicuous in the order of society, had
never known anything beyond their counting-house. No! both these descriptions
were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of
lawyers, than to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous
disproportion, the whole must needs be governed by them. To the faculty of law
was joined a pretty considerable proportion of the faculty of medicine. This
faculty had not, any more than that of the law, possessed in France its just
estimation. Its professors, therefore, must have the qualities of men not
habituated to sentiments of dignity. But supposing they had ranked as they
ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick beds are not
the academies for forming statesmen and legislators. Then came the dealers in
stocks and funds, who must be eager, at any expense, to change their ideal
paper wealth for the more solid substance of land. To these were joined men of
other descriptions, from whom as little knowledge of, or attention to, the
interests of a great state was to be expected, and as little regard to the
stability of any institution; men formed to be instruments, not controls. Such
in general was the composition of the Tiers Etat in the National Assembly; in
which was scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of what we call the
natural landed interest of the country.
We know that the British House of Commons, without shutting its doors to
any merit in any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled
with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired
opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic
distinction, that the country can afford. But supposing, what hardly can be
supposed as a case, that the House of Commons should be composed in the same
manner with the Tiers Etat in France, would this dominion of chicane be borne
with patience, or even conceived without horror? God forbid I should insinuate
anything derogatory to that profession, which is another priesthood,
administrating the rights of sacred justice. But whist I revere men in the
functions which belong to them, and would do as much as one man can do to
prevent their exclusion from any, I cannot, to flatter them, give the lie to
nature. They are good and useful in the composition; they must be mischievous
if they preponderate so as virtually to become the whole. Their very
excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a qualification for
others. It cannot escape observation, that when men are too much confined to
professional and faculty habits, and as it were inveterate in the recurrent
employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for
whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs,
on a comprehensive, connected view of the various, complicated, external and
internal interests, which go to the formation of that multifarious thing
called a state.
After all, if the House of Commons were to have a wholly professional and
faculty composition, what is the power of the House of Commons, circumscribed
and shut in by the immovable barriers of laws, usages, positive rules of
doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of Lords, and every moment
of its existence at the discretion of the crown to continue, prorogue, or
dissolve us? The power of the House of Commons, direct or indirect, is indeed
great; and long may it be able to preserve its greatness, and the spirit
belonging to true greatness, at the full; and it will do so, as long as it can
keep the breakers of law in India from becoming the makers of law for England.
The power, however, of the House of Commons, when least diminished, is as a
drop of water in the ocean, compared to that residing in a settled majority of
your National Assembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the orders,
has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain
it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution,
they have a power to make a constitution which shall conform to their designs.
Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on them. What ought to
be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare,
not only to make laws under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike
out a totally new constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it,
from the monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But - "fools rush in
where angels fear to tread." In such a state of unbounded power for undefined
and undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude
of the man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in
the management of human affairs.
Having considered the composition of the third estate as it stood in its
original frame, I took a view of the representatives of the clergy. There too
it appeared, that full as little regard was had to the general security of
property, or to the aptitude of the deputies for the public purposes, in the
principles of their election. That election was so contrived, as to send a
very large proportion of mere country curates to the great and arduous work of
new-modelling a state; men who never had seen the state so much as in a
picture; men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure
village; who, immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all property, whether
secular or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of envy; among whom
must be many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder,
would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth, in which they could
hardly look to have any share, except in a general scramble. Instead of
balancing the power of the active chicaners in the other assembly, these
curates must necessarily become the active coadjutors, or at best the passive
instruments, of those by whom they had been habitually guided in their petty
village concerns. They too could hardly be the most conscientious of their
kind, who presuming upon their incompetent understanding, could intrigue for a
trust which led them from their natural relation to their flocks, and their
natural spheres of action, to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This
preponderating weight, being added to the force of the body of chicane in the
Tiers Etat, completed that momentum of ignorance, rashness, presumption, and
lust of plunder, which nothing has been able to resist.
To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning, that the
majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction with such a deputation from the
clergy as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility,
would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in
that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order these individuals
would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers. To squander away
the objects which made the happiness of their fellows, would be to them no
sacrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as
they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their
own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and
mischievous ambition, is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they
partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little
platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were)
of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed
towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of
social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as
none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it
away for their own personal advantage.
There were in the time of our civil troubles in England (I do not know
whether you have any such in your assembly in France) several persons, like
the then Earl of Holland, who by themselves or their families had brought an
odium on the throne, by the prodigal dispensation of its bounties towards
them, who afterwards joined in the rebellions arising from the discontents of
which they were themselves the cause; men who helped to subvert that throne to
which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power which
they employed to ruin their benefactor. If any bounds are set to the rapacious
demands of that sort of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the
objects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void
that is left in their avarice. Confounded by the complication of distempered
passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and perplexed; to
others inexplicable; to themselves uncertain. They find, on all sides, bounds
to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. Both in the fog
and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit.
When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a
distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole
composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now appear in
France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious? a kind of
meanness in all the prevalent policy? a tendency in all that is done to lower
along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state? Other
revolutions have been conducted by persons, who, whilst they attempted or
affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing
the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They
aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their country. They were men of
great civil, and great military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of
their age. They were not like Jew brokers, contending with each other who
could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the
wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.
The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by
his kinsman, a favourite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed, and
what indeed to a great degree he accomplished, in the success of his ambition:
"Still as you rise, the state, exalted too,
Finds no distemper whilst `tis changed by you;
Changed like the world`s great scene, when without noise
The rising sun night`s vulgar lights destroys."
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting
their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify
the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. The
hand that, like destroying angel, smote the country, communicated to it the
force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say, (God forbid) - I do
not say, that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their
crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said,
our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis. Such
the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war.
Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the Fourth
and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not wholly without some
of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at, to see how very soon France,
when she had a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and
most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation. Why? Because among
all their massacres, they had not slain the mind in their country. A conscious
dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not
extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and inflamed. The organs also of
the state, however shattered, existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue,
all the rewards, all the distinctions remained. But your present confusion,
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your
country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is disgraced
and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified
and humiliated indignation. But this generation will quickly pass away. The
next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and
money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes
their masters.
Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalise. In all
societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description
must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural
order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air
what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for
instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation, into which, by the
worst of usurpations, an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature, you attempt
to force them.
The Chancellor of France at the opening of the states, said, in a tone of
oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honourable. If he meant only,
that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the
truth. But in asserting that anything is honourable, we imply some distinction
in its favour. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working
tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person - to say nothing
of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought
not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if
such as they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule. In
this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.
^10
[Footnote 10: Ecclesiasticus, chap. xxxviii. verses 24, 25. "The wisdom of a
learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business
shall become wise." - "How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that
glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen; and is occupied in their labours; and
whose talk is of bullocks?"
Ver. 27. "So every carpenter and work-master that laboureth night and day,"
&c.
Ver. 33. "They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor sit high in the
congregation: They shall not sit on the judge`s seat, nor understand the
sentence of judgment; they cannot declare justice and judgment, and they shall
not be found where parables are spoken."
Ver. 34. "But they will maintain the state of the world." I do not determine
whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican church (till lately) has
considered it, or apocryphal, as here it is taken. I am sure it contains a
great deal of sense and truth.]
I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious
spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for every general
observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and
exceptions, which reason will presume to be included in all the general
propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine, that I wish
to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, and names, and titles.
No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom,
actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they have, in
whatever state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven to
human place and honour. Woe to the country which would madly and impiously
reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious,
that are given to grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity
everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory around a state! Woe to that
country too, that, passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low
education, a mean contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation,
as a preferable title to command! Everything ought to be open; but not
indifferently to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode of
election operating in the spirit of sortition, or rotation, can be generally
good in a government conversant in extensive objects. Because they have no
tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to
accommodate the one to the other. I do not hesitate to say, that the road to
eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor
a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it
ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honour ought to be
seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered
too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not
represent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous
and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never
can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all
proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented too in
great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The
characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of
its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses therefore
which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of
danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all
their gradations. The same quantity of property, which is by the natural
course of things divided among many, has not the same operation. Its defensive
power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion each man`s portion is
less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to
obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder of the few
would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the
many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who
lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most
valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends
the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness
subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The
possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary
possession, (as most concerned in it) are the natural securities for this
transmission. With us the House of Peers is formed upon this principle. It is
wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction; and made
therefore the third of the legislature; and, in the last event, the sole judge
of all property in all its subdivisions. The House of Commons too, though not
necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part. Let
those large proprietors be what they will, and they have their chance of being
amongst the best, they are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of
the commonwealth. For though hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with
it, are too much idolized by creeping sycophants, and the blind, abject
admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the
petulant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent,
regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to
birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.
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