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Part IV.
Part IV.
It is said, that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred
thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.
This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for its second: to
men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the many, and their
interest, must very often differ; and great will be the difference when they
make an evil choice. A government of five hundred country attornies and
obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were
chosen by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a
dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain
that power. At present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high
road of nature. The property of France does not govern it. Of course property
is destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence. All you have got for the
present is a paper circulation, and a stock-jobbing constitution: and, as to
the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, upon the
republican system of eighty-three independent municipalities, (to say nothing
of the parts that compose them) can ever be governed as one body, or can ever
be set in motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National Assembly has
completed its work, it will have accomplished its ruin. These commonwealths
will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris. They will
not bear that this one body should monopolize the captivity of the king, and
the dominion over the assembly calling itself National. Each will keep its own
portion of the spoil of the church to itself; and it will not suffer either
that spoil, or the more just fruits of their industry, or the natural produce
of their soil, to be sent to swell the insolence, or pamper the luxury, of the
mechanics of Paris. In this they will see none of the equality, under the
pretence of which they have been tempted to throw off their allegiance to
their sovereign, as well as the ancient constitution of their country. There
can be no capital city in such a constitution as they have lately made. They
have forgot, that when they framed democratic governments, they had virtually
dismembered their country. The person, whom they persevere in calling king,
has not power left to him by the hundredth part sufficient to hold together
this collection of republics. The republic of Paris will endeavour indeed to
complete the debauchery of the army, and illegally to perpetuate the assembly,
without resort to its constituents, as the means of continuing its despotism.
It will make efforts, by becoming the heart of a boundless paper circulation,
to draw everything to itself; but in vain. All this policy in the end will
appear as feeble as it is now violent.
If this be your actual situation, compared to the situation to which you
were called, as it were by the voice of God and man, I cannot find it in my
heart to congratulate you on the choice you have made, or the success which
has attended your endeavours. I can as little recommend to any other nation a
conduct grounded on such principles, and productive of such effects. That I
must leave to those who can see farther into your affairs than I am able to
do, and who best know how far your actions are favourable to their designs.
The gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were so early in their
congratulations, appear to be strongly of opinion that there is some scheme of
politics relative to this country in which your proceedings may, in some way,
be useful. For your Dr. Price, who seems to have speculated himself into no
small degree of fervour upon this subject, addresses his auditory in the
following very remarkable words: "I cannot conclude without recalling
particularly to your recollection a consideration which I have more than once
alluded to, and which probably your thoughts have been all along anticipating;
a consideration with which my mind is impressed more than I can express. I
mean the consideration of the favourableness of the present times to all
exertions in the cause of liberty."
It is plain that the mind of this political Preacher was at the time big
with some extraordinary design; and it is very probable that the thoughts of
his audience, who understood him better than I do, did all along run before
him in his reflection, and in the whole train of consequences to which it led.
Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in a free
country; and it was an error I cherished, because it gave me a greater liking
to the country I lived in. I was indeed, aware, that a jealous, ever-waking
vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but
from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom, and our first duty. However, I
considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured, than as a prize
to be contended for. I did not discern how the present time came to be so very
favourable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The present time differs
from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in France. If the
example of that nation is to have an influence on this, I can easily conceive
why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant aspect, and are not
quite reconcilable to humanity, generosity, good faith, and justice, are
palliated with so much milky goodnature towards the actors, and borne with so
much heroic fortitude towards the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent to
discredit the authority of an example we mean to follow. But allowing this, we
are led to a very natural question; - What is that cause of liberty, and what
are those exertions in its favour, to which the example of France is so
singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws,
all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom? Is every
land-mark of the country to be done away in favour of a geometrical and
arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to be voted useless? Is
episcopacy to be abolished? Are the church lands to be sold to Jews and
jobbers; or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a
participation in sacrilege? Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and the
revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution, or patriotic presents? Are silver
shoe-buckles to be substituted in the place of the land tax and the malt tax,
for the support of the naval strength of this kingdom? Are all orders, ranks,
and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal anarchy, joined to
national bankruptcy, three or four thousand democracies should be formed into
eighty-three, and that they may all, by some sort of unknown attractive power,
be organized into one? For this great end is the army to be seduced from its
discipline and its fidelity, first by every kind of debauchery, and then by
the terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the curates
to be seduced from their bishops, by holding out to them the delusive hope of
a dole out of the spoils of their own order? Are the citizens of London to be
drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their
fellow-subjects? Is a compulsory paper currency to be substituted in the place
of the legal coin of this kingdom? Is what remains of the plundered stock of
public revenue to be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to
watch over and to fight with each other? If these are the ends and means of
the Revolution Society, I admit that they are well assorted; and France may
furnish them for both with precedents in point.
I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know that we are
supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive by finding our situation
tolerable, and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its
full perfection. Your leaders in France began by affecting to admire, almost
to adore, the British constitution; but as they advanced, they came to look
upon it with a sovereign contempt. The friends of your National Assembly
amongst us have full as mean an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory
of their country. The Revolution Society has discovered that the English
nation is not free. They are convinced that the inequality in our
representation is a "defect in our constitution so gross and palpable, as to
make it excellent chiefly in form and theory. ^11" That a representation in
the legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional
liberty in it, but of "all legitimate government; that without it a government
is nothing but an usurpation;" - that "when the representation is partial, the
kingdom possesses liberty only partially; and if extremely partial, it gives
only a semblance; and if not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, it
becomes a nuisance." Dr. Price considers this inadequacy of representation as
our fundamental grievance; and though, as to the corruption of this semblance
of representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its full perfection of
depravity, he fears that "nothing will be done towards gaining for us this
essential blessing, until some great abuse of power again provokes our
resentment, or some great calamity again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the
acquisition of a pure and equal representation by other countries, whilst we
are mocked with the shadow, kindles our shame." To this he subjoins a note in
these words: "A representation chosen chiefly by the Treasury, and a few
thousands of the dregs of the people, who are generally paid for their votes."
[Footnote 11: "Discourse on the Love of our Country", 3rd edit. p.39.]
You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists, who, when
they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the
greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the
depositories of all power. It would require a long discourse to point out to
you the many fallacies that lurk in the generality and equivocal nature of the
terms "inadequate representation." I shall only say here, in justice to that
old-fashioned constitution, under which we have long prospered, that our
representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which
a representation of the people can be desired or devised. I defy the enemies
of our constitution to show the contrary. To detail the particulars in which
it is found so well to promote its ends, would demand a treatise on our
practical constitution. I state here the doctrine of the Revolutionists, only
that you and others may see what an opinion these gentlemen entertain of the
constitution of their country, and why they seem to think that some great
abuse of power, or some great calamity, as giving a chance for the blessing of
a constitution according to their ideas, would be much palliated to their
feelings; you see why they are so much enamoured of your fair and equal
representation, which being once obtained, the same effects might follow. You
see they consider our House of Commons as only "a semblance," "a form" "a
theory," "a shadow," "a mockery," perhaps "a nuisance."
These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic; and not without
reason. They must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of
representation, this fundamental grievance, (so they call it,) as a thing not
only vicious in itself, but as rendering our whole government absolutely
illegitimate, and not at all better than a downright usurpation. Another
revolution, to get rid of this illegitimate and usurped government, would of
course be perfectly justifiable, if not absolutely necessary. Indeed their
principle, if you observe it with any attention, goes much further than to an
alteration in the election of the House of Commons; for, if popular
representation, or choice, is necessary to the legitimacy of all government,
the House of Lords is, at one stroke, bastardized and corrupted in blood. That
House is no representative of the people at all, even in "semblance or in
form." The case of the crown is altogether as bad. In vain the crown may
endeavour to screen itself against these gentlemen by the authority of the
establishment made on the Revolution. The Revolution which is resorted to for
a title, on their system, wants a title itself. The Revolution is built,
according to their theory, upon a basis not more solid than our present
formalities, as it was made by a House of Lords, not representing any one but
themselves; and by a House of Commons exactly such as the present, that is, as
they term it, by a mere "shadow and mockery" of representation.
Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves to exist for no
purpose. One set is for destroying the civil power through the ecclesiastical;
another, for demolishing the ecclesiastic through the civil. They are aware
that the worst consequences might happen to the public in accomplishing this
double ruin of church and state; but they are so heated with their theories,
that they give more than hints, that this ruin, with all the mischiefs that
must lead to it and attend it, and which to themselves appear quite certain,
would not be unacceptable to them, or very remote from their wishes. A man
amongst them of great authority, and certainly of great talents, speaking of a
supposed alliance between church and state says, "perhaps we must wait for the
fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance be broken.
Calamitous no doubt will that time be. But what convulsion in the political
world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it be attended with so
desirable an effect?" You see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are
prepared to view the greatest calamities which can befall their country.
It is no wonder therefore, that with these ideas of everything in their
constitution and government at home, either in church or state, as
illegitimate and usurped, or at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad with
an eager and passionate enthusiasm. Whilst they are possessed by these
notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the
fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution, whose
merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience, and an increasing
public strength and national prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom
of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought under-ground a mine
that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all
precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have "the rights of men."
Against these there can be no prescription; against these no agreement is
binding: these admit no temperament, and no compromise: anything withheld from
their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their
rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its
continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. The
objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with their
theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government, as
against the most violent tyranny, or the greenest usurpation. They are always
at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of
competency, and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the clumsy
subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be their amusement in the
schools. - "Illa se jactat in aula - Aeolus, et clauso ventorum carcere
regnet." - But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep
the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great
deep to overwhelm us.
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding
in practice, (if I were of power to give or to withhold,) the real rights of
men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those
which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy.
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for
which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and
law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by
that rule; they have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether
their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They have a
right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their
industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to
the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life,
and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without
trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right
to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and
force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights;
but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership,
has as good a right to it, as he that has five hundred pounds has to his
larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product
of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction
which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I
must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society;
for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a
thing to be settled by convention.
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be
its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of
constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial,
or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other
state of things; and how can any man claim under the conventions of civil
society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence? rights which
are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and
which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should be judge in
his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first
fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to
assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He
inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first
law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining
what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some
liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do
exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in
a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is
their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want everything.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men
have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among
these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient
restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of
individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well
as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can
only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its
function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to
bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the
restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite
modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is
so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern
himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights,
from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration
of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a state, and the
due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated
skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and
of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends, which are to be
pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits
to its strength, and remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing
a man`s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of
procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise
to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor
of metaphysics.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or
reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a
priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical
science: because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate;
but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its
remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it
produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible
schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable
conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes,
things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part
of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of
government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such
practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more
experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and
observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture
upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for
ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without
having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light
which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from
their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human
passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of
refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk to them as if they
continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is
intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and
therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either
to man`s nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity
of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I
am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their
trade, or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are
fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to contemplate
society in but one point of view, all these simple modes of polity are
infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its single end much more
perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes.
But it is better that the whole should be imperfectly and anomalously
answered, than that, while some parts are provided for with great exactness,
others might be totally neglected, or perhaps materially injured, by the
overcare of a favourite member.
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in
proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically
false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but
not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their
advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in
compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and
evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically, or mathematically,
true moral denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically
confounded with their power. The body of the community, whenever it can come
to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right are
the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and
the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what is not
reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer
said, Liceat perire poetis, when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have
leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, Ardentem frigidus AEtnam
insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic license,
than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he was a poet, or
divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that
more wise, because more charitable, thoughts would urge me rather to save the
man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly.
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I write
refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course, in commemorating
the fact, will cheat many out of the principles, and deprive them of the
benefits, of the revolution they commemorate, I confess to you, Sir, I never
liked this continual talk of resistance, and revolution, or the practice of
making the extreme med cine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders
the habit of society dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses
of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides
to our love of liberty.
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and wears out, by a
vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to be exerted
on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of Roman servitude that
themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at school - cum
perimit saevos classis numerosa tyrannos. In the ordinary state of things, it
produces in a country like ours the worst effects, even on the cause of that
liberty which it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation.
Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after a short space,
become the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left the business
of a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance, to those of us whom, in the
pride and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted as not much
better than Tories. Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime
speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing
to have it magnificent. But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was
to be suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been much the
same. These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to
cases which call only for a qualified, or, as I may say, civil and legal
resistance, in such cases employ no resistance at all. It is with them a war
or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their schemes of politics not
adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they often come to think
lightly of all public principle; and are ready, on their part, to abandon for
a very trivial interest what they find of very trivial value. Some indeed are
of more steady and persevering natures; but these are eager politicians out of
parliament, who have little to tempt them to abandon their favourite projects.
They have some change in the church or state, or both, constantly in their
view. When that is the case, they are always bad citizens, and perfectly
unsure connexions. For, considering their speculative designs as of infinite
value, and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation, they are
at best indifferent about it. They see no merit in the good, and no fault in
the vicious, management of public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter,
as more propitious to revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or
any action, or any political principle, any further than as they may forward
or retard their design of change; they therefore take up, one day, the most
violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest democratic
ideas of freedom, and pass from one to the other without any sort or regard to
cause, to person, or to party.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit
from one form of government to another - you cannot see that character of men
exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it
is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its
power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those
observations to any description of men, or to comprehend all men of any
description within them - No! far from it. I am as incapable of that
injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of
extremities; and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild
and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this:
they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate
strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions
may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral
sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the
depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the
rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening
one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those
that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that
attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing but this spirit
through all the political part. Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some
people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. Cheap, bloodless
reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There
must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect;
there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with
the lazy enjoyment of sixty years` security and the still unanimating repose
of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French Revolution.
This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm
kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at this peroration it is in a full
blaze. Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy,
flourishing and glorious state of France, as in a bird`s-eye landscape of a
promised land, he breaks out into the following rapture:
"What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it;
I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for
mine eyes have seen thy salvation. - I have lived to see a diffusion of
knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error. - I have lived to see
the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty
which seemed to have lost the idea of it. - I have lived to see Thirty
Millions of People, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding
liberty with an irresistible voice. Their king led in triumph and an arbitrary
monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. ^12"
[Footnote 12: Another of these reverend gentlemen, who was witness to some of
the spectacles which Paris has lately exhibited, expresses himself thus: - "A
king dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects, is one of those
appearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of human affairs,
and which, during the remainder of my life, I shall think of with wonder and
gratification." These gentlemen agree marvellously in their feelings.]
Before I proceed further, I have to remark, that Dr. Price seems rather
to overvalue the great acquisitions of light which he has obtained and
diffused in this age. The last century appears to me to have been quite as
much enlightened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as memorable
as that Dr. Price; and some of the great preachers of that period partook of
it as eagerly as he has done in the triumph of France. On the trial of the
Rev. Hugh Peters for high treason, it was deposed, that when King Charles was
brought to London for his trial, the Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted
the triumph. "I saw," says the witness, "his Majesty in the coach with six
horses, and Peters riding before the king, triumphing." Dr. Price, when he
talks as if he had made a discovery, only follows a precedent; for, after the
commencement of the king`s trial, this precursor, the same Dr. Peters,
concluding a long prayer at the Royal Chapel at Whitehall, (he had very
triumphantly chosen his place), said, "I have prayed and preached these twenty
years; and now I may say with old Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant
depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. ^13" Peters had not
the fruits of his prayer; for he neither departed so soon as he wished, nor in
peace. He became (what I heartily hope none of his followers may be in this
country) himself a sacrifice to the triumph which he led as pontiff.
[Footnote 13: State Trials, vol. ii. p. 360, p. 363.]
They dealt at the Restoration, perhaps, too hardly with this poor good
man. But we owe it to his memory and his sufferings, that he had as much
illumination, and as much zeal, and had as effectually undermined all the
superstition and error which might impede the great business he was engaged
in, as any who follow and repeat after him, in this age, which would assume to
itself an exclusive title to the knowledge of the rights of men, and all the
glorious consequences of that knowledge.
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which differs only in
place and time, but agrees perfectly with the spirit and letter of the rapture
of 1648, the Revolution Society, the fabricators of governments, the heroic
band of cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and leaders of kings
in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of the diffusion of
knowledge, of which every member had obtained so large a share in the
donative, were in haste to make a general diffusion of the knowledge they had
thus gratuitously received. To make this bountiful communication, they
adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to the London Tavern; where the
same Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely
evaporated, moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratulation
transmitted by Lord Stanhope to the National Assembly of France.
I find a preacher of the gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic
ejaculation, commonly called "nunc dimittis," made on the first presentation
of our Saviour in the Temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural
rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps
ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in
triumph," a thing in its best from unmanly and irreligious, which fills our
preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral
taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and
indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely
deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages,
entering into Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and
leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with
the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it
resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized, martial nation - if a civilized
nation, or any men who had a sense of generosity, were capable of a personal
triumph over the fallen and afflicted.
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe that, as
a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe that the
National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in
not being able to punish the authors of this triumph, or the actors in it; and
that they are in a situation in which any inquiry they may make upon the
subject must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality.
The apology of that assembly is found in their situation; but when we approve
what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind.
With a compelled appearance of deliberation, they vote under the dominion
of a stern necessity. They sit in the heart, as it were, of a foreign
republic: they have their residence in a city whose constitution has emanated
neither from the charter of their king, nor from their legislative power.
There they are surrounded by an army not raised either by the authority of
their crown, or by their command; and which, if they should order to dissolve
itself, would instantly dissolve them. There they sit, after a gang of
assassins had driven away some hundreds of the members; whilst those who held
the same moderate principles, with more patience or better hope, continued
every day exposed to outrageous insults and murderous threats. There a
majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a
captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of
their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses. It is notorious, that all their
measures are decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt, that under
the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses,
they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by
clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations.
Among these are found persons, in comparison of whom Catiline would be thought
scrupulous, and Cethegus a man of sobriety and moderation. Nor is it in these
clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo
a previous distortion in academies, intended as so many seminaries for these
clubs, which are set up in all the places of public resort. In these meetings
of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring, and violent, and
perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion
are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to
individuals is considered as treason to the public. Liberty is always to be
estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure. Amidst assassination,
massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans
for the good order of future society. Embracing in their arms the carcases of
base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences,
they drive hundreds of virtuour persons to the same end, by forcing them to
subsist by beggary or by crime.
The assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation
with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair
before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob
of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent
fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take
their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of
servile petulance and proud, presumptuous authority. As they have inverted
order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This assembly,
which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect
of a grave legislative body - nec color imperii, nec frons ulla senatus. They
have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and
destroy; but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for
further subversion and further destruction.
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