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Part VII.
Part VII.
Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this impression. Our
education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all
stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools and
universities, enter that most important period of life which begins to link
experience and study together, and when with that view they visit other
countries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to
principal men from other parts, three-fourths of those who go abroad with our
young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics; not as austere masters, nor as
mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver character, and not
seldom persons as well born as themselves. With them, as relations, they most
constantly keep up a close connexion through life. By this connexion we
conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and we liberalize the
church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country.
So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of
institution, that very little alteration has been made in them since the
fourteenth or fifteenth century: adhering in this particular, as in all things
else, to our old settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to depart from
antiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole, favourable to
morality and discipline; and we thought they were susceptible of amendment,
without altering the ground. We thought that they were capable of receiving
and meliorating, and above all of preserving, the accessions of science and
literature, as the order of Providence should successively produce them. And
after all, with this Gothic and monkish education (for such it is in the
ground-work) we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all
the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have
illuminated and adorned the modern world, as any other nation in Europe: we
think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony
of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.
It is from our attachment to a church establishment, that the English
nation did not think it wise to intrust that great, fundamental interest of
the whole to what they trust no part of their civil or military public
service, that is, to the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals.
They go further. They certainly never have suffered, and never will suffer,
the fixed estate of the church to be converted into a pension, to depend on
the treasury, and to be delayed, withheld, or perhaps to be extinguished, by
fiscal difficulties: which difficulties may sometimes be pretended for
political purposes, and are in fact often brought on by the extravagance,
negligence, and rapacity of politicians. The people of England think that they
have constitutional motives, as well as religious, against any project of
turning their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of state. They
tremble for their liberty, from the influence of a clergy dependent on the
crown; they tremble for the public tranquillity from the disorders of a
factious clergy,if it were made to depend upon any other than the crown. They
therefore made their church, like their king and their nobility, independent.
From the united considerations of religion and constitutional policy,
from their opinion of a duty to make sure provision for the consolation of the
feeble and the instruction of the ignorant, they have incorporated and
identified the estate of the church with the mass of private property, of
which the state is not the proprietor, either for use or dominion, but the
guardian only and the regulator. They have ordained that the provision of this
establishment might be as stable as the earth on which it stands, and should
not fluctuate with the Euripus of funds and actions.
The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England,
whose wisdom (if they have any) is open and direct, would be ashamed, as of a
silly, deceitful trick, to profess any religion in name, which by their
proceedings, they appear to contemn. If by their conduct (the only language
that rarely lies) they seemed to regard the great ruling principle of the
moral and the natural world, as a mere invention to keep the vulgar in
obedience, they apprehend that by such a conduct they would defeat the politic
purpose they have in view. They would find it difficult to make others believe
in a system to which they manifestly give no credit themselves. The Christian
statesmen of this land would indeed first provide for the multitude; because
it is the multitude; and is therefore, as such, the first object in the
ecclesiastical institution, and in all institutions. They have been taught,
that the circumstance of the gospel`s being preached to the poor, was one of
the great tests of its true mission. They think, therefore, that those do not
believe it, who do not take care it should be preached to the poor. But as
they know that charity is not confined to any one description, but ought to
apply itself to all men who have wants, they are not deprived of a due and
anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great. They are
not repelled through a fastidious delicacy, at the stench of their arrogance
and presumption, from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and
running sores. They are sensible that religious instruction is of more
consequence to them than to any others; from the greatness of the temptation
to which they are exposed; from the important consequences that attend their
faults; from the contagion of their ill example; from the necessity of bowing
down the stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of moderation
and virtue; from a consideration of the fat stupidity and gross ignorance
concerning what imports men most to know, which prevails at courts, and at the
head of armies, and in senates, as much as at the loom and in the field.
The English people are satisfied, that to the great the consolations of
religion are as necessary as its instructions. They too are among the unhappy.
They feel personal pain, and domestic sorrow. In these they have no privilege,
but are subject to pay their full contingent to the contributions levied on
mortality. They want this sovereign balm under their gnawing cares and
anxieties, which, being less conversant about the limited wants of animal
life, range without limit, and are diversified by infinite combinations, in
the wild and unbounded regions of imagination. Some charitable dole is wanting
to these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns
in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve in
the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who have nothing to
do; something to excite an appetite to existence in the palled satiety which
attends on all pleasures which may be bought, where nature is not left to her
own process, where even desire is anticipated, and therefore fruition defeated
by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight; and no interval, no
obstacle, is interposed between the wish and the accomplishment.
The people of England know how little influence the teachers of religion
are likely to have with the wealthy and powerful of long standing, and how
much less with the newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way assorted
to those with whom they must associate, and over whom they must even exercise,
in some cases, something like an authority. What must they think of that body
of teachers, if they see it in no part above the establishment of their
domestic servants? If the poverty were voluntary, there might be some
difference. Strong instances of self-denial operate powerfully on our minds;
and a man who has no wants has obtained great freedom, and firmness, and even
dignity. But as the mass of any description of men are but men, and their
poverty cannot be voluntary, that disrespect, which attends upon all lay
poverty, will not depart from the ecclesiastical. Our provident constitution
has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous
ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither
incur their contempt, nor live upon their alms; nor will it tempt the rich to
a neglect of the true medicine of their minds. For these reasons, whilst we
provide first for the poor, and with a parental solicitude, we have not
relegated religion (like something we were ashamed to show) to obscure
municipalities, or rustic villages. No! we will have her to exalt her mitred
front in courts and parliaments. We will have her mixed throughout the whole
mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society. The people of
England will show to the haughty potentates of the world, and to their talking
sophisters that a free, a generous, an informed nation honours the high
magistrates of its church; that it will not suffer the insolence of wealth and
titles, or any other species of proud pretension, to look down with scorn upon
what they look up to with reverence ; nor presume to trample on that acquired
personal nobility, which they intend always to be, and which often is, the
fruit, not the reward, (for what can be the reward?) of learning, piety, and
virtue. They can see, without pain or grudging, an archbishop precede duke.
They can see a bishop of Durham, or a bishop of Winchester, in possession of
ten thousand pounds a year; and cannot conceive why it is in worse hands than
estates to the like amount in the hands of this earl, or that squire; although
it may be true, that so many dogs and horses are not kept by the former, and
fed with the victuals which ought to nourish the children of the people. It is
true, the whole church revenue is not always employed, and to every shilling,
in charity; nor perhaps ought it; but something is generally so employed. It
is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even
with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and
instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a
liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.
When once the commonwealth has established the estates of the church as
property, it can, consistently, hear nothing of the more or the less. Too much
and too little are treason against property. What evil can arise from the
quantity in any hand, whilst the supreme authority has the full, sovereign
superintendence over this, as over all property, to prevent every species of
abuse; and, whenever it notably deviates, to give to it a direction agreeable
to the purposes of its institution.
In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malignity towards
those who are often the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love of the
self-denial and mortification of the ancient church, that makes some look
askance at the distinctions, and honours, and revenues, which, taken from no
person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are
distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them.
Their language is in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of
hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to
carry back the clergy to that primitive, evangelic poverty, which, in the
spirit, ought always to exist in them, (and in us too, however we may like
it,) but in the thing must be varied, when the relation of that body to the
state is altered; when manners, when modes of life, when indeed the whole
order of human affairs has undergone a total revolution. We shall believe
those reformers then to be honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them,
cheats and deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into common,
and submitting their own persons to the austere discipline of the early
church.
With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in
the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the confiscation
of the estates of the church and poor. Sacrilege and proscription are not
among the ways and means of our committee of supply. The Jews in Change Alley
have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging
to the see of Canterbury. I am not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I
assure you, that there is not one public man in this kingdom, whom you would
wish to quote, no not one, of any party or description, who does not reprobate
the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly
has been compelled to make of that property, which it was their first duty to
protect.
It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you, that
those amongst us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the cup
of their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery of your church has
proved a security to the possession of ours. It has roused the people. They
see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription. It
has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish
enlargement of mind, and the narrow liberality of sentiment, of insidious men,
which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence
and rapine. At home we behold similar beginnings. We are on our guard against
similar conclusions.
I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties
imposed upon us by the law of social union, as upon any pretext of public
service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen. Who but a
tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human
nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, unaccused, unheard,
untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and thousands together? Who, that
had not lost every trace of humanity, could think of casting down men of
exalted rank and sacred function, some of them of an age to call at once for
reverence and compassion, of casting them down from the highest situation in
the commonwealth, wherein they were maintained by their own landed property,
to a state of indigence, depression, and contempt?
The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from the
scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been so harshly
driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies
of usury. But to drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great
cruelty. That which might be a tolerable condition to men in one state of
life, and not habituated to other things, may, when all these circumstances
are altered, be a dreadful revolution; and one to which a virtuous mind would
feel pain in condemning any guilt, except that which would demand the life of
the offender. But to many minds this punishment of degradation and infamy is
worse than death. Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel
suffering, that the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favour of
religion, by education, and by the place they held in the administration of
its functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from the
profane and impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest; to
receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the charitable contributions
of the faithful, but from the insolent tenderness of known and avowed atheism,
the maintenance of religion, measured out to them on the standard of the
contempt in which it is held; and for the purpose of rendering those who
receive the allowance vile, and of no estimation, in the eyes of mankind.
But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in law, and
not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the
Palais Royal, and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the
possessions which they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts, and the
accumulated prescription of a thousand years. They say that ecclesiastics are
fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at pleasure they may destroy,
and of course limit and modify in every particular; that the goods they
possess are not properly theirs, but belong to the state which created the
fiction; and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves with what they may
suffer in their natural feelings and natural persons, on account of what is
done towards them in this their constructive character. Of what import is it
under what names you injure men, and deprive them of the just emoluments of a
profession, in which they were not only permitted but encouraged by the state
to engage; and upon the supposed certainty of which emoluments they had formed
the plan of their lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes to an entire
dependence upon them?
You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment this miserable
distinction of persons with any long discussion. The arguments of tyranny are
as contemptible as its force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators, by their
early crimes, obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the crimes of
which they have since been guilty, or that they can commit, it is not the
syllogism of the logician but the lash of the executioner, that would have
refuted a sophistry which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The
sophistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against the departed
regal tyrants, who in former ages have vexed the world. They are thus bold,
because they are safe from the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters.
Shall we be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see them
acting worse tragedies under our eyes? shall we not use the same liberty that
they do, when we can use it with the same safety? when we speak honest truth
only requires a contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we abhor?
This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with
what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts
- a regard to national faith. The enemies to property at first pretended a
most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king`s
engagements with the public creditor. These professors of the rights of men
are so busy in teaching others, that they have not leisure to learn anything
themselves; otherwise they would have known, that it is to the property of the
citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first
and original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is
prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of
individuals, whether possessed by acquisition, or by descent, or in virtue of
a participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor`s
security, expressed or implied. They never so much as entered into his head
when he made his bargain. He well knew that the public, whether represented by
a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can
have no public estate, except in what it derives from a just and proportioned
imposition upon the citizens at large. This was engaged, and nothing else
could be engaged, to the public creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as
a pawn for his fidelity.
It is impossible to avoid some observation on the contradictions caused
by the extreme rigour and the extreme laxity of this new public faith, which
influenced in this transaction, and which influenced not according to the
nature of the obligation, but to the description of the persons to whom it was
engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings of France are held valid
in the National Assembly, except his pecuniary engagements; acts of all others
of the most ambiguous legality. The rest of all the acts of that royal
government are considered in so odious a light, that to have a claim under its
authority is looked on as a sort of crime. A pension, given as a reward for
service to the state, is surely as good a ground of property as any security
for money advanced to the state. It is better; for money is paid, and well
paid, to obtain that service. We have, however, seen multitudes of people
under this description in France, who never had been deprived of their
allowances by the most arbitrary ministers, in the most arbitrary times, by
this assembly of the rights of men, robbed without mercy. They were told, in
answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their
services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.
This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfortunate persons.
The Assembly, with perfect consistency it must be owned, is engaged in a
respectable deliberation how far it is bound by the treaties made with other
nations under the former government, and their committees is to report which
of them they ought to ratify, and which not. By this means they have put the
external fidelity of this virgin state on a par with its internal.
It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal
government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of
rewarding service, and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative, than
that of pledging to creditors the revenue of the state, actual and possible.
The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the
prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of any king in
Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion, in the
fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes far beyond the trust even of a
temporary and occasional taxation. The acts, however, of that dangerous power
(the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred.
Whence arose this preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of
property deriving its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the
exertions of monarchical authority? Reason can furnish nothing to reconcile
tnconsistency; nor can partial favour be accounted for upon equitable
principles. But the contradiction and partiality which admit no justification,
are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause I do not think it
difficult to discover.
By the vast debt of France a great monied interest has insensibly grown
up, and with it a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in that
kingdom, the general circulation of property, and in particular the mutual
convertibility of land into money, and of money into land, had always been a
matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more general and more strict
than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of landed property
held by the crown, and, by a maxim of the French law, held inalienably, the
vast estates of the ecclesiastical corporations, - all these had kept the
landed and monied interests more separated in France, less miscible, and the
owners of the two distinct species of property not so well disposed to each
other as they are in this country.
The monied property was long looked on with rather an evil eye by the
people. The saw it connected with their distresses, and aggravating them. It
was no less envied by the old landed interests, partly for the same reasons
that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it eclipsed, by
the splendour of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed pedigrees and naked
titles of several among the nobility. Even when the nobility, which
represented the more permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage
(which sometimes was the case) with the other description, the wealth which
saved the family from ruin, was supposed to contaminate and degrade it. Thus
the enmities and heart-burnings of these parties were increased even by the
usual means by which discord is made to cease and quarrels are turned into
friendship. In the mean time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble or newly
noble, increased with its cause. They felt with resentment an inferiority, the
grounds of which they did not acknowledge. There was no measure to which they
were not willing to lend themselves, in order to be revenged of the outrages
of this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth to what they considered as its
natural rank and estimation. They struck at the nobility through the crown and
the church. They attacked them particularly on the side on which they thought
them the most vulnerable, that is, the possessions of the church, which,
through the patronage of the crown, generally devolved upon the nobility. The
bishoprics, and the great commendatory abbeys, were, with few exceptions, held
by that order.
In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare between the
noble ancient landed interest and the new monied interest, the greatest
because the most applicable strength was in the hands of the latter. The
monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure; and its
possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind. Being of a recent
acquisition, it falls in more naturally with any novelties. It is therefore
the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.
Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up,
with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the
political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves,
are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and greatness
of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much cultivated either by him, or by
the regent, or the successors to the crown; nor were they engaged to the court
by favours and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period of
that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court
protection, they endeavoured to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation
of their own; to which the two academies of France, and afterwards, the vast
undertaking of the Encyclopaedia, carried on by a society of these gentlemen,
did not a little contribute.
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular
plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued
with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the
propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of
proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy
progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their means. ^21 What
was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or immediate act,
might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command
that opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct
it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance,
of all the avenues to literary fame. Many of them indeed stood high in the
ranks of literature and science. The world had done them justice; and in
favour of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar
principles. This was true liberality; which they returned by endeavouring to
confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their
followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not
been less prejudicial to literature and to taste, than to morals and true
philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they
have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some
things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to
supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly
was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and
by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have
observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was
wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen
into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life.
[Footnote 21: This (down to the end of the first sentence in the next
paragraph) and some other parts here and there, were inserted on his reading
the manuscript, by my lost Son.]
The desultory and faint persecution carried on against them, more from
compliance with form and decency, than with serious resentment, neither
weakened their strength, nor relaxed their efforts. The issue of the whole
was, that, what with opposition, and what with success, a violent and
malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world, had taken an entire
possession of their minds, and rendered their whole conversation, which
otherwise would have been pleasing and instructive, perfectly disgusting. A
spirit of cabal, intrigue, and proselytism, pervaded all their thoughts,
words, and actions. And, as controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts on
force, they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence with foreign
princes; in hopes, through their authority, which at first they flattered,
they might bring about the changes they had in view. To them it was
indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt
of despotism, or by the earthquake of popular commotion. The correspondence
between this cabal and the late king of Prussia will throw no small light upon
the spirit of all their proceedings. ^22 For the same purpose for which they
intrigued with princes, they cultivated, in a distinguished manner, the monied
interest of France; and partly through the means furnished by those whose
peculiar offices gave them the most extensive and certain means of
communication, they carefully occupied all the avenues to opinion.
[Footnote 22: I do not choose to shock the feeling of the moral reader with
any quotation of their vulgar, base, and profane language.]
Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have
great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these writers
with the monied interest ^23 had no small effect in removing the popular odium
and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the
propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor, and the
lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every
exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood. They
became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one
object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.
[Footnote 23: Their connexion with Turgot and almost all the people of the
finance.]
As these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all the late
transactions, their junction and politics will serve to account, not upon any
principles of law or of policy, but as a cause, for the general fury with
which all the landed property of ecclesiastical corporations has been
attacked; and the great care which, contrary to their pretended principles,
has been taken, of a monied interest originating from the authority of the
crown. All the envy against wealth and power was artificially directed against
other descriptions of riches. On what other principle than that which I have
stated can we account for an appearance so extraordinary and unnatural as that
of the ecclesiastical possessions, which had stood so many successions of ages
and shocks of civil violences, and were girded at once by justice, and by
prejudice, being applied to the payment of debts, comparatively recent,
invidious, and contracted by a decried and subverted government?
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