It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine
into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to
succeed in such an inquiry, he will be thought weak and
visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger
that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence, who
will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors than
thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should
be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be
considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power,
he will be looked on as an instrument of faction. But in
all exertions of duty something is to be hazarded. In cases
of tumult and disorder, our law has invested every man, in some
sort, with the authority of a magistrate. When the affairs
of the nation are distracted, private people are, by the spirit
of that law, justified in stepping a little out of their ordinary
sphere. They enjoy a privilege of somewhat more dignity and
effect than that of idle lamentation over the calamities of their
country. They may look into them narrowly; they may reason
upon them liberally; and if they should be so fortunate as to
discover the true source of the mischief, and to suggest any
probable method of removing it, though they may displease the
rulers for the day, they are certainly of service to the cause of
Government. Government is deeply interested in everything
which, even through the medium of some temporary uneasiness, may
tend finally to compose the minds of the subjects, and to
conciliate their affections. I have nothing to do here with
the abstract value of the voice of the people. But as long
as reputation, the most precious possession of every individual,
and as long as opinion, the great support of the State, depend
entirely upon that voice, it can never be considered as a thing
of little consequence either to individuals or to
Government. Nations are not primarily ruled by laws; less
by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed
either in force or regulation, the operation of both is, in
truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the
same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual
without authority is often able to govern those who are his
equals or his superiors, by a knowledge of their temper, and by a
judicious management of it; I mean, when public affairs are
steadily and quietly conducted: not when Government is nothing
but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude,
in which sometimes the one and sometimes the other is
uppermost—in which they alternately yield and prevail, in a
series of contemptible victories and scandalous
submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he
presides ought therefore to be the first study of a
statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no
means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in
being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.
To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present
possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant
hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greater
part of mankind—indeed, the necessary effects of the
ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and
humours have existed in all times; yet as all times have
not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself,
in distinguishing that complaint which only characterises the
general infirmity of human nature from those which are symptoms
of the particular distemperature of our own air and season.
* * * * *
Nobody, I believe, will consider it merely as the language of
spleen or disappointment, if I say that there is something
particularly alarming in the present conjuncture. There is
hardly a man, in or out of power, who holds any other
language. That Government is at once dreaded and contemned;
that the laws are despoiled of all their respected and salutary
terrors; that their inaction is a subject of ridicule, and their
exertion of abhorrence; that rank, and office, and title, and all
the solemn plausibilities of the world, have lost their reverence
and effect; that our foreign politics are as much deranged as our
domestic economy; that our dependencies are slackened in their
affection, and loosened from their obedience; that we know
neither how to yield nor how to enforce; that hardly anything
above or below, abroad or at home, is sound and entire; but that
disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in families,
in Parliament, in the nation, prevail beyond the disorders of any
former time: these are facts universally admitted and
lamented.
This state of things is the more extraordinary, because the
great parties which formerly divided and agitated the kingdom are
known to be in a manner entirely dissolved. No great
external calamity has visited the nation; no pestilence or
famine. We do not labour at present under any scheme of
taxation new or oppressive in the quantity or in the mode.
Nor are we engaged in unsuccessful war, in which our misfortunes
might easily pervert our judgment, and our minds, sore from the
loss of national glory, might feel every blow of fortune as a
crime in Government.
* * * * *
It is impossible that the cause of this strange distemper
should not sometimes become a subject of discourse. It is a
compliment due, and which I willingly pay, to those who
administer our affairs, to take notice in the first place of
their speculation. Our Ministers are of opinion that the
increase of our trade and manufactures, that our growth by
colonisation and by conquest, have concurred to accumulate
immense wealth in the hands of some individuals; and this again
being dispersed amongst the people, has rendered them universally
proud, ferocious, and ungovernable; that the insolence of some
from their enormous wealth, and the boldness of others from a
guilty poverty, have rendered them capable of the most atrocious
attempts; so that they have trampled upon all subordination, and
violently borne down the unarmed laws of a free
Government—barriers too feeble against the fury of a
populace so fierce and licentious as ours. They contend
that no adequate provocation has been given for so spreading a
discontent, our affairs having been conducted throughout with
remarkable temper and consummate wisdom. The wicked
industry of some libellers, joined to the intrigues of a few
disappointed politicians, have, in their opinion, been able to
produce this unnatural ferment in the nation.
Nothing indeed can be more unnatural than the present
convulsions of this country, if the above account be a true
one. I confess I shall assent to it with great reluctance,
and only on the compulsion of the clearest and firmest proofs;
because their account resolves itself into this short but
discouraging proposition, “That we have a very good
Ministry, but that we are a very bad people;” that we set
ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us; that with a malignant
insanity we oppose the measures, and ungratefully vilify the
persons, of those whose sole object is our own peace and
prosperity. If a few puny libellers, acting under a knot of
factious politicians, without virtue, parts, or character (such
they are constantly represented by these gentlemen), are
sufficient to excite this disturbance, very perverse must be the
disposition of that people amongst whom such a disturbance can be
excited by such means. It is besides no small aggravation
of the public misfortune that the disease, on this hypothesis,
appears to be without remedy. If the wealth of the nation
be the cause of its turbulence, I imagine it is not proposed to
introduce poverty as a constable to keep the peace. If our
dominions abroad are the roots which feed all this rank
luxuriance of sedition, it is not intended to cut them off in
order to famish the fruit. If our liberty has enfeebled the
executive power, there is no design, I hope, to call in the aid
of despotism to fill up the deficiencies of law. Whatever
may be intended, these things are not yet professed. We
seem therefore to be driven to absolute despair, for we have no
other materials to work upon but those out of which God has been
pleased to form the inhabitants of this island. If these be
radically and essentially vicious, all that can be said is that
those men are very unhappy to whose fortune or duty it falls to
administer the affairs of this untoward people. I hear it
indeed sometimes asserted that a steady perseverance in the
present measures, and a rigorous punishment of those who oppose
them, will in course of time infallibly put an end to these
disorders. But this, in my opinion, is said without much
observation of our present disposition, and without any knowledge
at all of the general nature of mankind. If the matter of
which this nation is composed be so very fermentable as these
gentlemen describe it, leaven never will be wanting to work it
up, as long as discontent, revenge, and ambition have existence
in the world. Particular punishments are the cure for
accidental distempers in the State; they inflame rather than
allay those heats which arise from the settled mismanagement of
the Government, or from a natural ill disposition in the
people. It is of the utmost moment not to make mistakes in
the use of strong measures, and firmness is then only a virtue
when it accompanies the most perfect wisdom. In truth,
inconstancy is a sort of natural corrective of folly and
ignorance.
I am not one of those who think that the people are never in
the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously,
both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in
all disputes between them and their rulers the presumption is at
least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience may
perhaps justify me in going further. When popular
discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed and
supported that there has been generally something found amiss in
the constitution or in the conduct of Government. The
people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it
is their error, and not their crime. But with the governing
part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may
act ill by design, as well as by mistake. “Les
révolutions qui arrivent dans les grands états ne
sont point un effect du hasard, ni du caprice des peuples.
Rien ne révolte les grands d’un royaume comme un
Gouvernoment foible et dérangé. Pour la
populace, ce n’est jamais par envie d’attaquer
qu’elle se soulève, mais par impatience de
souffrir.” These are the words of a great man, of a
Minister of State, and a zealous assertor of Monarchy. They
are applied to the system of favouritism which was adopted by
Henry the Third of France, and to the dreadful consequences it
produced. What he says of revolutions is equally true of
all great disturbances. If this presumption in favour of
the subjects against the trustees of power be not the more
probable, I am sure it is the more comfortable speculation,
because it is more easy to change an Administration than to
reform a people.
* * * * *
Upon a supposition, therefore, that, in the opening of the
cause, the presumptions stand equally balanced between the
parties, there seems sufficient ground to entitle any person to a
fair hearing who attempts some other scheme besides that easy one
which is fashionable in some fashionable companies, to account
for the present discontents. It is not to be argued that we
endure no grievance, because our grievances are not of the same
sort with those under which we laboured formerly—not
precisely those which we bore from the Tudors, or vindicated on
the Stuarts. A great change has taken place in the affairs
of this country. For in the silent lapse of events as
material alterations have been insensibly brought about in the
policy and character of governments and nations as those which
have been marked by the tumult of public revolutions.
It is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings
concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their
speculation upon the cause of it. I have constantly
observed that the generality of people are fifty years, at least,
behindhand in their politics. There are but very few who
are capable of comparing and digesting what passes before their
eyes at different times and occasions, so as to form the whole
into a distinct system. But in books everything is settled
for them, without the exertion of any considerable diligence or
sagacity. For which reason men are wise with but little
reflection, and good with little self-denial, in the business of
all times except their own. We are very uncorrupt and
tolerably enlightened judges of the transactions of past ages;
where no passions deceive, and where the whole train of
circumstances, from the trifling cause to the tragical event, is
set in an orderly series before us. Few are the partisans
of departed tyranny; and to be a Whig on the business of a
hundred years ago is very consistent with every advantage of
present servility. This retrospective wisdom and historical
patriotism are things of wonderful convenience, and serve
admirably to reconcile the old quarrel between speculation and
practice. Many a stern republican, after gorging himself
with a full feast of admiration of the Grecian commonwealths and
of our true Saxon constitution, and discharging all the splendid
bile of his virtuous indignation on King John and King James,
sits down perfectly satisfied to the coarsest work and homeliest
job of the day he lives in. I believe there was no
professed admirer of Henry the Eighth among the instruments of
the last King James; nor in the court of Henry the Eighth was
there, I dare say, to be found a single advocate for the
favourites of Richard the Second.
No complaisance to our Court, or to our age, can make me
believe nature to be so changed but that public liberty will be
among us, as among our ancestors, obnoxious to some person or
other, and that opportunities will be furnished for attempting,
at least, some alteration to the prejudice of our
constitution. These attempts will naturally vary in their
mode, according to times and circumstances. For ambition,
though it has ever the same general views, has not at all times
the same means, nor the same particular objects. A great
deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is worn to rags; the
rest is entirely out of fashion. Besides, there are few
statesmen so very clumsy and awkward in their business as to fall
into the identical snare which has proved fatal to their
predecessors. When an arbitrary imposition is attempted
upon the subject, undoubtedly it will not bear on its forehead
the name of Ship-money. There is no danger that an
extension of the Forest laws should be the chosen mode of
oppression in this age. And when we hear any instance of
ministerial rapacity to the prejudice of the rights of private
life, it will certainly not be the exaction of two hundred
pullets, from a woman of fashion, for leave to lie with her own
husband.
Every age has its own manners, and its politics dependent upon
them; and the same attempts will not be made against a
constitution fully formed and matured, that were used to destroy
it in the cradle, or to resist its growth during its infancy.
Against the being of Parliament, I am satisfied, no designs
have ever been entertained since the Revolution. Every one
must perceive that it is strongly the interest of the Court to
have some second cause interposed between the Ministers and the
people. The gentlemen of the House of Commons have an
interest equally strong in sustaining the part of that
intermediate cause. However they may hire out the
usufruct of their voices, they never will part with the
fee and inheritance. Accordingly those who have been
of the most known devotion to the will and pleasure of a Court,
have at the same time been most forward in asserting a high
authority in the House of Commons. When they knew who were
to use that authority, and how it was to be employed, they
thought it never could be carried too far. It must be
always the wish of an unconstitutional statesman, that a House of
Commons who are entirely dependent upon him, should have every
right of the people entirely dependent upon their pleasure.
It was soon discovered that the forms of a free, and the ends of
an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether
incompatible.
The power of the Crown, almost dead and rotten as Prerogative,
has grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium,
under the name of Influence. An influence which operated
without noise and without violence; an influence which converted
the very antagonist into the instrument of power; which contained
in itself a perpetual principle of growth and renovation; and
which the distresses and the prosperity of the country equally
tended to augment, was an admirable substitute for a prerogative
that, being only the offspring of antiquated prejudices, had
moulded in its original stamina irresistible principles of decay
and dissolution. The ignorance of the people is a bottom
but for a temporary system; the interest of active men in the
State is a foundation perpetual and infallible. However,
some circumstances, arising, it must be confessed, in a great
degree from accident, prevented the effects of this influence for
a long time from breaking out in a manner capable of exciting any
serious apprehensions. Although Government was strong and
flourished exceedingly, the Court had drawn far less
advantage than one would imagine from this great source of
power.
* * * * *
At the Revolution, the Crown, deprived, for the ends of the
Revolution itself, of many prerogatives, was found too weak to
struggle against all the difficulties which pressed so new and
unsettled a Government. The Court was obliged therefore to
delegate a part of its powers to men of such interest as could
support, and of such fidelity as would adhere to, its
establishment. Such men were able to draw in a greater
number to a concurrence in the common defence. This
connection, necessary at first, continued long after convenient;
and properly conducted might indeed, in all situations, be a
useful instrument of Government. At the same time, through
the intervention of men of popular weight and character, the
people possessed a security for their just proportion of
importance in the State. But as the title to the Crown grew
stronger by long possession, and by the constant increase of its
influence, these helps have of late seemed to certain persons no
better than incumbrances. The powerful managers for
Government were not sufficiently submissive to the pleasure of
the possessors of immediate and personal favour, sometimes from a
confidence in their own strength, natural and acquired; sometimes
from a fear of offending their friends, and weakening that lead
in the country, which gave them a consideration independent of
the Court. Men acted as if the Court could receive, as well
as confer, an obligation. The influence of Government, thus
divided in appearance between the Court and the leaders of
parties, became in many cases an accession rather to the popular
than to the royal scale; and some part of that influence, which
would otherwise have been possessed as in a sort of mortmain and
unalienable domain, returned again to the great ocean from whence
it arose, and circulated among the people. This method
therefore of governing by men of great natural interest or great
acquired consideration, was viewed in a very invidious light by
the true lovers of absolute monarchy. It is the nature of
despotism to abhor power held by any means but its own momentary
pleasure; and to annihilate all intermediate situations between
boundless strength on its own part, and total debility on the
part of the people.
To get rid of all this intermediate and independent
importance, and to secure to the Court the unlimited and
uncontrolled use of its own vast influence, under the sole
direction of its own private favour, has for some years past
been the great object of policy. If this were compassed,
the influence of the Crown must of course produce all the effects
which the most sanguine partisans of the Court could possibly
desire. Government might then be carried on without any
concurrence on the part of the people; without any attention to
the dignity of the greater, or to the affections of the lower
sorts. A new project was therefore devised by a certain set
of intriguing men, totally different from the system of
Administration which had prevailed since the accession of the
House of Brunswick. This project, I have heard, was first
conceived by some persons in the Court of Frederick, Prince of
Wales.
The earliest attempt in the execution of this design was to
set up for Minister a person, in rank indeed respectable, and
very ample in fortune; but who, to the moment of this vast and
sudden elevation, was little known or considered in the
kingdom. To him the whole nation was to yield an immediate
and implicit submission. But whether it was from want of
firmness to bear up against the first opposition, or that things
were not yet fully ripened, or that this method was not found the
most eligible, that idea was soon abandoned. The
instrumental part of the project was a little altered, to
accommodate it to the time, and to bring things more gradually
and more surely to the one great end proposed.
The first part of the reformed plan was to draw a line
which should separate the Court from the Ministry.
Hitherto these names had been looked upon as synonymous; but, for
the future, Court and Administration were to be considered as
things totally distinct. By this operation, two systems of
Administration were to be formed: one which should be in the real
secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible, to perform
the official and executory duties of Government. The latter
were alone to be responsible; whilst the real advisers, who
enjoyed all the power, were effectually removed from all the
danger.
Secondly, a party under these leaders was to be formed in
favour of the Court against the Ministry: this party was to
have a large share in the emoluments of Government, and to hold
it totally separate from, and independent of, ostensible
Administration.
The third point, and that on which the success of the whole
scheme ultimately depended, was to bring Parliament to an
acquiescence in this project. Parliament was therefore
to be taught by degrees a total indifference to the persons,
rank, influence, abilities, connections, and character of the
Ministers of the Crown. By means of a discipline, on which
I shall say more hereafter, that body was to be habituated to the
most opposite interests, and the most discordant politics.
All connections and dependencies among subjects were to be
entirely dissolved. As hitherto business had gone through
the hands of leaders of Whigs or Tories, men of talents to
conciliate the people, and to engage their confidence, now the
method was to be altered; and the lead was to be given to men of
no sort of consideration or credit in the country. This
want of natural importance was to be their very title to
delegated power. Members of parliament were to be hardened
into an insensibility to pride as well as to duty. Those
high and haughty sentiments, which are the great support of
independence, were to be let down gradually. Point of
honour and precedence were no more to be regarded in
Parliamentary decorum than in a Turkish army. It was to be
avowed, as a constitutional maxim, that the King might appoint
one of his footmen, or one of your footmen, for Minister; and
that he ought to be, and that he would be, as well followed as
the first name for rank or wisdom in the nation. Thus
Parliament was to look on, as if perfectly unconcerned while a
cabal of the closet and back-stairs was substituted in the place
of a national Administration.
With such a degree of acquiescence, any measure of any Court
might well be deemed thoroughly secure. The capital
objects, and by much the most flattering characteristics of
arbitrary power, would be obtained. Everything would be
drawn from its holdings in the country to the personal favour and
inclination of the Prince. This favour would be the sole
introduction to power, and the only tenure by which it was to be
held: so that no person looking towards another, and all looking
towards the Court, it was impossible but that the motive which
solely influenced every man’s hopes must come in time to
govern every man’s conduct; till at last the servility
became universal, in spite of the dead letter of any laws or
institutions whatsoever.
How it should happen that any man could be tempted to venture
upon such a project of Government, may at first view appear
surprising. But the fact is that opportunities very
inviting to such an attempt have offered; and the scheme itself
was not destitute of some arguments, not wholly unplausible, to
recommend it. These opportunities and these arguments, the
use that has been made of both, the plan for carrying this new
scheme of government into execution, and the effects which it has
produced, are in my opinion worthy of our serious
consideration.
His Majesty came to the throne of these kingdoms with more
advantages than any of his predecessors since the
Revolution. Fourth in descent, and third in succession of
his Royal family, even the zealots of hereditary right, in him,
saw something to flatter their favourite prejudices; and to
justify a transfer of their attachments, without a change in
their principles. The person and cause of the Pretender
were become contemptible; his title disowned throughout Europe,
his party disbanded in England. His Majesty came indeed to
the inheritance of a mighty war; but, victorious in every part of
the globe, peace was always in his power, not to negotiate, but
to dictate. No foreign habitudes or attachments withdrew
him from the cultivation of his power at home. His revenue
for the Civil establishment, fixed (as it was then thought) at a
large, but definite sum, was ample, without being invidious; his
influence, by additions from conquest, by an augmentation of
debt, by an increase of military and naval establishment, much
strengthened and extended. And coming to the throne in the
prime and full vigour of youth, as from affection there was a
strong dislike, so from dread there seemed to be a general
averseness from giving anything like offence to a monarch against
whose resentment opposition could not look for a refuge in any
sort of reversionary hope.
These singular advantages inspired his Majesty only with a
more ardent desire to preserve unimpaired the spirit of that
national freedom to which he owed a situation so full of
glory. But to others it suggested sentiments of a very
different nature. They thought they now beheld an
opportunity (by a certain sort of statesman never long
undiscovered or unemployed) of drawing to themselves, by the
aggrandisement of a Court faction, a degree of power which they
could never hope to derive from natural influence or from
honourable service; and which it was impossible they could hold
with the least security, whilst the system of Administration
rested upon its former bottom. In order to facilitate the
execution of their design, it was necessary to make many
alterations in political arrangement, and a signal change in the
opinions, habits, and connections of the greater part of those
who at that time acted in public.
In the first place, they proceeded gradually, but not slowly,
to destroy everything of strength which did not derive its
principal nourishment from the immediate pleasure of the
Court. The greatest weight of popular opinion and party
connection were then with the Duke of Newcastle and Mr.
Pitt. Neither of these held his importance by the new
tenure of the Court; they were not, therefore, thought to be
so proper as others for the services which were required by that
tenure. It happened very favourably for the new system,
that under a forced coalition there rankled an incurable
alienation and disgust between the parties which composed the
Administration. Mr. Pitt was first attacked. Not
satisfied with removing him from power, they endeavoured by
various artifices to ruin his character. The other party
seemed rather pleased to get rid of so oppressive a support; not
perceiving that their own fall was prepared by his, and involved
in it. Many other reasons prevented them from daring to
look their true situation in the face. To the great Whig
families it was extremely disagreeable, and seemed almost
unnatural, to oppose the Administration of a Prince of the House
of Brunswick. Day after day they hesitated, and doubted,
and lingered, expecting that other counsels would take place; and
were slow to be persuaded that all which had been done by the
Cabal was the effect, not of humour, but of system. It was
more strongly and evidently the interest of the new Court faction
to get rid of the great Whig connections than to destroy Mr.
Pitt. The power of that gentleman was vast indeed, and
merited; but it was in a great degree personal, and therefore
transient. Theirs was rooted in the country. For,
with a good deal less of popularity, they possessed a far more
natural and fixed influence. Long possession of Government;
vast property; obligations of favours given and received;
connection of office; ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship
(things at that time supposed of some force); the name of Whig,
dear to the majority of the people; the zeal early begun and
steadily continued to the Royal Family; all these together formed
a body of power in the nation, which was criminal and
devoted. The great ruling principle of the Cabal, and that
which animated and harmonised all their proceedings, how various
soever they may have been, was to signify to the world that the
Court would proceed upon its own proper forces only; and that the
pretence of bringing any other into its service was an affront to
it, and not a support. Therefore when the chiefs were
removed, in order to go to the root, the whole party was put
under a proscription, so general and severe as to take their
hard-earned bread from the lowest officers, in a manner which had
never been known before, even in general revolutions. But
it was thought necessary effectually to destroy all dependencies
but one, and to show an example of the firmness and rigour with
which the new system was to be supported.
Thus for the time were pulled down, in the persons of the Whig
leaders and of Mr. Pitt (in spite of the services of the one at
the accession of the Royal Family, and the recent services of the
other in the war), the two only securities for the importance
of the people: power arising from popularity, and
power arising from connection. Here and there indeed a
few individuals were left standing, who gave security for their
total estrangement from the odious principles of party connection
and personal attachment; and it must be confessed that most of
them have religiously kept their faith. Such a change could
not, however, be made without a mighty shock to Government.
To reconcile the minds of the people to all these movements,
principles correspondent to them had been preached up with great
zeal. Every one must remember that the Cabal set out with
the most astonishing prudery, both moral and political.
Those who in a few months after soused over head and ears into
the deepest and dirtiest pits of corruption, cried out violently
against the indirect practices in the electing and managing of
Parliaments, which had formerly prevailed. This marvellous
abhorrence which the Court had suddenly taken to all influence,
was not only circulated in conversation through the kingdom, but
pompously announced to the public, with many other extraordinary
things, in a pamphlet which had all the appearance of a manifesto
preparatory to some considerable enterprise. Throughout, it
was a satire, though in terms managed and decent enough, on the
politics of the former reign. It was indeed written with no
small art and address.
In this piece appeared the first dawning of the new system;
there first appeared the idea (then only in speculation) of
separating the Court from the Administration; of carrying
everything from national connection to personal regards; and of
forming a regular party for that purpose, under the name of
King’s men.
To recommend this system to the people, a perspective view of
the Court, gorgeously painted, and finely illuminated from
within, was exhibited to the gaping multitude. Party was to
be totally done away, with all its evil works. Corruption
was to be cast down from Court, as Atè was from
heaven. Power was thenceforward to be the chosen residence
of public spirit; and no one was to be supposed under any
sinister influence, except those who had the misfortune to be in
disgrace at Court, which was to stand in lieu of all vices and
all corruptions. A scheme of perfection to be realised in a
Monarchy, far beyond the visionary Republic of Plato. The
whole scenery was exactly disposed to captivate those good souls,
whose credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty
politicians. Indeed, there was wherewithal to charm
everybody, except those few who are not much pleased with
professions of supernatural virtue, who know of what stuff such
professions are made, for what purposes they are designed, and in
what they are sure constantly to end. Many innocent
gentlemen, who had been talking prose all their lives without
knowing anything of the matter, began at last to open their eyes
upon their own merits, and to attribute their not having been
Lords of the Treasury and Lords of Trade many years before merely
to the prevalence of party, and to the Ministerial power, which
had frustrated the good intentions of the Court in favour of
their abilities. Now was the time to unlock the sealed
fountain of Royal bounty, which had been infamously monopolised
and huckstered, and to let it flow at large upon the whole
people. The time was come to restore Royalty to its
original splendour. Mettre le Roy hors de page,
became a sort of watchword. And it was constantly in the
mouths of all the runners of the Court, that nothing could
preserve the balance of the constitution from being overturned by
the rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but to free the
Sovereign effectually from that Ministerial tyranny under which
the Royal dignity had been oppressed in the person of his
Majesty’s grandfather.
These were some of the many artifices used to reconcile the
people to the great change which was made in the persons who
composed the Ministry, and the still greater which was made and
avowed in its constitution. As to individuals, other
methods were employed with them, in order so thoroughly to
disunite every party, and even every family, that no
concert, order, or effect, might appear in
any future opposition. And in this manner an
Administration without connection with the people, or with one
another, was first put in possession of Government. What
good consequences followed from it, we have all seen; whether
with regard to virtue, public or private; to the ease and
happiness of the Sovereign; or to the real strength of
Government. But as so much stress was then laid on the
necessity of this new project, it will not be amiss to take a
view of the effects of this Royal servitude and vile durance,
which was so deplored in the reign of the late Monarch, and was
so carefully to be avoided in the reign of his successor.
The effects were these.
In times full of doubt and danger to his person and family,
George the Second maintained the dignity of his Crown connected
with the liberty of his people, not only unimpaired, but
improved, for the space of thirty-three years. He overcame
a dangerous rebellion, abetted by foreign force, and raging in
the heart of his kingdoms; and thereby destroyed the seeds of all
future rebellion that could arise upon the same principle.
He carried the glory, the power, the commerce of England, to a
height unknown even to this renowned nation in the times of its
greatest prosperity: and he left his succession resting on the
true and only true foundation of all national and all regal
greatness; affection at home, reputation abroad, trust in allies,
terror in rival nations. The most ardent lover of his
country cannot wish for Great Britain a happier fate than to
continue as she was then left. A people emulous as we are
in affection to our present Sovereign, know not how to form a
prayer to Heaven for a greater blessing upon his virtues, or a
higher state of felicity and glory, than that he should live, and
should reign, and, when Providence ordains it, should die,
exactly like his illustrious predecessor.
A great Prince may be obliged (though such a thing cannot
happen very often) to sacrifice his private inclination to his
public interest. A wise Prince will not think that such a
restraint implies a condition of servility; and truly, if such
was the condition of the last reign, and the effects were also
such as we have described, we ought, no less for the sake of the
Sovereign whom we love, than for our own, to hear arguments
convincing indeed, before we depart from the maxims of that
reign, or fly in the face of this great body of strong and recent
experience.
One of the principal topics which was then, and has been
since, much employed by that political school, is an effectual
terror of the growth of an aristocratic power, prejudicial to the
rights of the Crown, and the balance of the constitution.
Any new powers exercised in the House of Lords, or in the House
of Commons, or by the Crown, ought certainly to excite the
vigilant and anxious jealousy of a free people. Even a new
and unprecedented course of action in the whole Legislature,
without great and evident reason, may be a subject of just
uneasiness. I will not affirm, that there may not have
lately appeared in the House of Lords a disposition to some
attempts derogatory to the legal rights of the subject. If
any such have really appeared, they have arisen, not from a power
properly aristocratic, but from the same influence which is
charged with having excited attempts of a similar nature in the
House of Commons; which House, if it should have been betrayed
into an unfortunate quarrel with its constituents, and involved
in a charge of the very same nature, could have neither power nor
inclination to repel such attempts in others. Those
attempts in the House of Lords can no more be called aristocratic
proceedings, than the proceedings with regard to the county of
Middlesex in the House of Commons can with any sense be called
democratical.
It is true, that the Peers have a great influence in the
kingdom, and in every part of the public concerns. While
they are men of property, it is impossible to prevent it, except
by such means as must prevent all property from its natural
operation: an event not easily to be compassed, while property is
power; nor by any means to be wished, while the least notion
exists of the method by which the spirit of liberty acts, and of
the means by which it is preserved. If any particular
Peers, by their uniform, upright, constitutional conduct, by
their public and their private virtues, have acquired an
influence in the country; the people on whose favour that
influence depends, and from whom it arose, will never be duped
into an opinion, that such greatness in a Peer is the despotism
of an aristocracy, when they know and feel it to be the effect
and pledge of their own importance.
I am no friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which
that word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit
to moot cases on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should
be free to declare, that if it must perish, I would rather by far
see it resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere
and insolent domination. But, whatever my dislikes may be,
my fears are not upon that quarter. The question, on the
influence of a Court, and of a Peerage, is not, which of the two
dangers is the most eligible, but which is the most
imminent. He is but a poor observer, who has not seen, that
the generality of Peers, far from supporting themselves in a
state of independent greatness, are but too apt to fall into an
oblivion of their proper dignity, and to run headlong into an
abject servitude. Would to God it were true, that the fault
of our Peers were too much spirit! It is worthy of some
observation, that these gentlemen, so jealous of aristocracy,
make no complaints of the power of those peers (neither few nor
inconsiderable) who are always in the train of a Court, and whose
whole weight must be considered as a portion of the settled
influence of the Crown. This is all safe and right; but if
some Peers (I am very sorry they are not as many as they ought to
be) set themselves, in the great concern of Peers and Commons,
against a back-stairs influence and clandestine government, then
the alarm begins; then the constitution is in danger of being
forced into an aristocracy.
I rest a little the longer on this Court topic, because it was
much insisted upon at the time of the great change, and has been
since frequently revived by many of the agents of that party:
for, whilst they are terrifying the great and opulent with the
horrors of mob-government, they are by other managers attempting
(though hitherto with little success) to alarm the people with a
phantom of tyranny in the Nobles. All this is done upon
their favourite principle of disunion, of sowing jealousies
amongst the different orders of the State, and of disjointing the
natural strength of the kingdom; that it may be rendered
incapable of resisting the sinister designs of wicked men, who
have engrossed the Royal power.
* * * * *
Thus much of the topics chosen by the courtiers to recommend
their system; it will be necessary to open a little more at large
the nature of that party which was formed for its support.
Without this, the whole would have been no better than a
visionary amusement, like the scheme of Harrington’s
political club, and not a business in which the nation had a real
concern. As a powerful party, and a party constructed on a
new principle, it is a very inviting object of curiosity.
It must be remembered, that since the Revolution, until the
period we are speaking of, the influence of the Crown had been
always employed in supporting the Ministers of State, and in
carrying on the public business according to their
opinions. But the party now in question is formed upon a
very different idea. It is to intercept the favour,
protection, and confidence of the Crown in the passage to its
Ministers; it is to come between them and their importance in
Parliament; it is to separate them from all their natural and
acquired dependencies; it is intended as the control, not the
support, of Administration. The machinery of this system is
perplexed in its movements, and false in its principle. It
is formed on a supposition that the King is something external to
his government; and that he may be honoured and aggrandised, even
by its debility and disgrace. The plan proceeds expressly
on the idea of enfeebling the regular executory power. It
proceeds on the idea of weakening the State in order to
strengthen the Court. The scheme depending entirely on
distrust, on disconnection, on mutability by principle, on
systematic weakness in every particular member; it is impossible
that the total result should be substantial strength of any
kind.
As a foundation of their scheme, the Cabal have established a
sort of Rota in the Court. All sorts of parties, by
this means, have been brought into Administration, from whence
few have had the good fortune to escape without disgrace; none at
all without considerable losses. In the beginning of each
arrangement no professions of confidence and support are wanting,
to induce the leading men to engage. But while the
Ministers of the day appear in all the pomp and pride of power,
while they have all their canvas spread out to the wind, and
every sail filled with the fair and prosperous gale of Royal
favour, in a short time they find, they know not how, a current,
which sets directly against them; which prevents all progress,
and even drives them backwards. They grow ashamed and
mortified in a situation, which, by its vicinity to power, only
serves to remind them the more strongly of their
insignificance. They are obliged either to execute the
orders of their inferiors, or to see themselves opposed by the
natural instruments of their office. With the loss of their
dignity, they lose their temper. In their turn they grow
troublesome to that Cabal, which, whether it supports or opposes,
equally disgraces and equally betrays them. It is soon
found necessary to get rid of the heads of Administration; but it
is of the heads only. As there always are many rotten
members belonging to the best connections, it is not hard to
persuade several to continue in office without their
leaders. By this means the party goes out much thinner than
it came in; and is only reduced in strength by its temporary
possession of power. Besides, if by accident, or in course
of changes, that power should be recovered, the Junto have thrown
up a retrenchment of these carcases, which may serve to cover
themselves in a day of danger. They conclude, not unwisely,
that such rotten members will become the first objects of disgust
and resentment to their ancient connections.
They contrive to form in the outward Administration two
parties at the least; which, whilst they are tearing one another
to pieces, are both competitors for the favour and protection of
the Cabal; and, by their emulation, contribute to throw
everything more and more into the hands of the interior
managers.
A Minister of State will sometimes keep himself totally
estranged from all his colleagues; will differ from them in their
counsels, will privately traverse, and publicly oppose, their
measures. He will, however, continue in his
employment. Instead of suffering any mark of displeasure,
he will be distinguished by an unbounded profusion of Court
rewards and caresses; because he does what is expected, and all
that is expected, from men in office. He helps to keep some
form of Administration in being, and keeps it at the same time as
weak and divided as possible.
However, we must take care not to be mistaken, or to imagine
that such persons have any weight in their opposition.
When, by them, Administration is convinced of its insignificancy,
they are soon to be convinced of their own. They never are
suffered to succeed in their opposition. They and the world
are to be satisfied, that neither office, nor authority, nor
property, nor ability, eloquence, counsel, skill, or union, are
of the least importance; but that the mere influence of the
Court, naked of all support, and destitute of all management, is
abundantly sufficient for all its own purposes.
When any adverse connection is to be destroyed, the Cabal
seldom appear in the work themselves. They find out some
person of whom the party entertains a high opinion. Such a
person they endeavour to delude with various pretences.
They teach him first to distrust, and then to quarrel with his
friends; among whom, by the same arts, they excite a similar
diffidence of him; so that in this mutual fear and distrust, he
may suffer himself to be employed as the instrument in the change
which is brought about. Afterwards they are sure to destroy
him in his turn; by setting up in his place some person in whom
he had himself reposed the greatest confidence, and who serves to
carry on a considerable part of his adherents.
When such a person has broke in this manner with his
connections, he is soon compelled to commit some flagrant act of
iniquitous personal hostility against some of them (such as an
attempt to strip a particular friend of his family estate), by
which the Cabal hope to render the parties utterly
irreconcilable. In truth, they have so contrived matters,
that people have a greater hatred to the subordinate instruments
than to the principal movers.
As in destroying their enemies they make use of instruments
not immediately belonging to their corps, so in advancing their
own friends they pursue exactly the same method. To promote
any of them to considerable rank or emolument, they commonly take
care that the recommendation shall pass through the hands of the
ostensible Ministry: such a recommendation might, however, appear
to the world as some proof of the credit of Ministers, and some
means of increasing their strength. To prevent this, the
persons so advanced are directed in all companies, industriously
to declare, that they are under no obligations whatsoever to
Administration; that they have received their office from another
quarter; that they are totally free and independent.
When the Faction has any job of lucre to obtain, or of
vengeance to perpetrate, their way is, to select, for the
execution, those very persons to whose habits, friendships,
principles, and declarations, such proceedings are publicly known
to be the most adverse; at once to render the instruments the
more odious, and therefore the more dependent, and to prevent the
people from ever reposing a confidence in any appearance of
private friendship, or public principle.
If the Administration seem now and then, from remissness, or
from fear of making themselves disagreeable, to suffer any
popular excesses to go unpunished, the Cabal immediately sets up
some creature of theirs to raise a clamour against the Ministers,
as having shamefully betrayed the dignity of Government.
Then they compel the Ministry to become active in conferring
rewards and honours on the persons who have been the instruments
of their disgrace; and, after having first vilified them with the
higher orders for suffering the laws to sleep over the
licentiousness of the populace, they drive them (in order to make
amends for their former inactivity) to some act of atrocious
violence, which renders them completely abhorred by the
people. They who remember the riots which attended the
Middlesex Election; the opening of the present Parliament; and
the transactions relative to Saint George’s Fields, will
not be at a loss for an application of these remarks.
That this body may be enabled to compass all the ends of its
institution, its members are scarcely ever to aim at the high and
responsible offices of the State. They are distributed with
art and judgment through all the secondary, but efficient,
departments of office, and through the households of all the
branches of the Royal Family: so as on one hand to occupy all the
avenues to the Throne; and on the other to forward or frustrate
the execution of any measure, according to their own
interests. For with the credit and support which they are
known to have, though for the greater part in places which are
only a genteel excuse for salary, they possess all the influence
of the highest posts; and they dictate publicly in almost
everything, even with a parade of superiority. Whenever
they dissent (as it often happens) from their nominal leaders,
the trained part of the Senate, instinctively in the secret, is
sure to follow them; provided the leaders, sensible of their
situation, do not of themselves recede in time from their most
declared opinions. This latter is generally the case.
It will not be conceivable to any one who has not seen it, what
pleasure is taken by the Cabal in rendering these heads of office
thoroughly contemptible and ridiculous. And when they are
become so, they have then the best chance, for being well
supported.
The members of the Court faction are fully indemnified for not
holding places on the slippery heights of the kingdom, not only
by the lead in all affairs, but also by the perfect security in
which they enjoy less conspicuous, but very advantageous,
situations. Their places are, in express legal tenure, or
in effect, all of them for life. Whilst the first and most
respectable persons in the kingdom are tossed about like tennis
balls, the sport of a blind and insolent caprice, no Minister
dares even to cast an oblique glance at the lowest of their
body. If an attempt be made upon one of this corps,
immediately he flies to sanctuary, and pretends to the most
inviolable of all promises. No conveniency of public
arrangement is available to remove any one of them from the
specific situation he holds; and the slightest attempt upon one
of them, by the most powerful Minister, is a certain preliminary
to his own destruction.
Conscious of their independence, they bear themselves with a
lofty air to the exterior Ministers. Like Janissaries, they
derive a kind of freedom from the very condition of their
servitude. They may act just as they please; provided they
are true to the great ruling principle of their
institution. It is, therefore, not at all wonderful, that
people should be so desirous of adding themselves to that body,
in which they may possess and reconcile satisfactions the most
alluring, and seemingly the most contradictory; enjoying at once
all the spirited pleasure of independence, and all the gross
lucre and fat emoluments of servitude.
Here is a sketch, though a slight one, of the constitution,
laws, and policy, of this new Court corporation. The name
by which they choose to distinguish themselves, is that of
King’s men, or the King’s friends, by
an invidious exclusion of the rest of his Majesty’s most
loyal and affectionate subjects. The whole system,
comprehending the exterior and interior Administrations, is
commonly called, in the technical language of the Court,
Double Cabinet; in French or English, as you choose to
pronounce it.
Whether all this be a vision of a distracted brain, or the
invention of a malicious heart, or a real faction in the country,
must be judged by the appearances which things have worn for
eight years past. Thus far I am certain, that there is not
a single public man, in or out of office, who has not, at some
time or other, borne testimony to the truth of what I have now
related. In particular, no persons have been more strong in
their assertions, and louder and more indecent in their
complaints, than those who compose all the exterior part of the
present Administration; in whose time that faction has arrived at
such a height of power, and of boldness in the use of it, as may,
in the end, perhaps bring about its total destruction.
It is true, that about four years ago, during the
administration of the Marquis of Rockingham, an attempt was made
to carry on Government without their concurrence. However,
this was only a transient cloud; they were hid but for a moment;
and their constellation blazed out with greater brightness, and a
far more vigorous influence, some time after it was blown
over. An attempt was at that time made (but without any
idea of proscription) to break their corps, to discountenance
their doctrines, to revive connections of a different kind, to
restore the principles and policy of the Whigs, to reanimate the
cause of Liberty by Ministerial countenance; and then for the
first time were men seen attached in office to every principle
they had maintained in opposition. No one will doubt, that
such men were abhorred and violently opposed by the Court
faction, and that such a system could have but a short
duration.
It may appear somewhat affected, that in so much discourse
upon this extraordinary party, I should say so little of the Earl
of Bute, who is the supposed head of it. But this was
neither owing to affectation nor inadvertence. I have
carefully avoided the introduction of personal reflections of any
kind. Much the greater part of the topics which have been
used to blacken this nobleman are either unjust or
frivolous. At best, they have a tendency to give the
resentment of this bitter calamity a wrong direction, and to turn
a public grievance into a mean personal, or a dangerous national,
quarrel. Where there is a regular scheme of operations
carried on, it is the system, and not any individual person who
acts in it, that is truly dangerous. This system has not
risen solely from the ambition of Lord Bute, but from the
circumstances which favoured it, and from an indifference to the
constitution which had been for some time growing among our
gentry. We should have been tried with it, if the Earl of
Bute had never existed; and it will want neither a contriving
head nor active members, when the Earl of Bute exists no
longer. It is not, therefore, to rail at Lord Bute, but
firmly to embody against this Court party and its practices,
which can afford us any prospect of relief in our present
condition.
Another motive induces me to put the personal consideration of
Lord Bute wholly out of the question. He communicates very
little in a direct manner with the greater part of our men of
business. This has never been his custom. It is
enough for him that he surrounds them with his creatures.
Several imagine, therefore, that they have a very good excuse for
doing all the work of this faction, when they have no personal
connection with Lord Bute. But whoever becomes a party to
an Administration, composed of insulated individuals, without
faith plighted, tie, or common principle; an Administration
constitutionally impotent, because supported by no party in the
nation; he who contributes to destroy the connections of men and
their trust in one another, or in any sort to throw the
dependence of public counsels upon private will and favour,
possibly may have nothing to do with the Earl of Bute. It
matters little whether he be the friend or the enemy of that
particular person. But let him be who or what he will, he
abets a faction that is driving hard to the ruin of his
country. He is sapping the foundation of its liberty,
disturbing the sources of its domestic tranquillity, weakening
its government over its dependencies, degrading it from all its
importance in the system of Europe.
It is this unnatural infusion of a system of
Favouritism into a Government which in a great part of its
constitution is popular, that has raised the present ferment in
the nation. The people, without entering deeply into its
principles, could plainly perceive its effects, in much violence,
in a great spirit of innovation, and a general disorder in all
the functions of Government. I keep my eye solely on this
system; if I speak of those measures which have arisen from it,
it will be so far only as they illustrate the general
scheme. This is the fountain of all those bitter waters of
which, through a hundred different conducts, we have drunk until
we are ready to burst. The discretionary power of the Crown
in the formation of Ministry, abused by bad or weak men, has
given rise to a system, which, without directly violating the
letter of any law, operates against the spirit of the whole
constitution.
A plan of Favouritism for our executory Government is
essentially at variance with the plan of our Legislature.
One great end undoubtedly of a mixed Government like ours,
composed of Monarchy, and of controls, on the part of the higher
people and the lower, is that the Prince shall not be able to
violate the laws. This is useful indeed and
fundamental. But this, even at first view, is no more than
a negative advantage; an armour merely defensive. It is
therefore next in order, and equal in importance, that the
discretionary powers which are necessarily vested in the
Monarch, whether for the execution of the laws, or
for the nomination to magistracy and office, or for
conducting the affairs of peace and war, or for ordering
the revenue, should all be exercised upon public
principles and national grounds, and not on the likings or
prejudices, the intrigues or policies of a
Court. This, I said, is equal in importance to the
securing a Government according to law. The laws reach but
a very little way. Constitute Government how you please,
infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise
of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and
uprightness of Ministers of State. Even all the use and
potency of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your
Commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper; and not a
living, active, effective constitution. It is possible,
that through negligence, or ignorance, or design artfully
conducted, Ministers may suffer one part of Government to
languish, another to be perverted from its purposes: and every
valuable interest of the country to fall into ruin and decay,
without possibility of fixing any single act on which a criminal
prosecution can be justly grounded. The due arrangement of
men in the active part of the state, far from being foreign to
the purposes of a wise Government, ought to be among its very
first and dearest objects. When, therefore, the abettors of
new system tell us, that between them and their opposers there is
nothing but a struggle for power, and that therefore we are
no-ways concerned in it; we must tell those who have the
impudence to insult us in this manner, that, of all things, we
ought to be the most concerned, who and what sort of men they
are, that hold the trust of everything that is dear to us.
Nothing can render this a point of indifference to the nation,
but what must either render us totally desperate, or soothe us
into the security of idiots. We must soften into a
credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men
virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly
diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and
corrupt. Men are in public life as in private—some
good, some evil. The elevation of the one, and the
depression of the other, are the first objects of all true
policy. But that form of Government, which, neither in its
direct institutions, nor in their immediate tendency, has
contrived to throw its affairs into the most trustworthy hands,
but has left its whole executory system to be disposed of
agreeably to the uncontrolled pleasure of any one man, however
excellent or virtuous, is a plan of polity defective not only in
that member, but consequentially erroneous in every part of
it.
In arbitrary Governments, the constitution of the Ministry
follows the constitution of the Legislature. Both the Law
and the Magistrate are the creatures of Will. It must be
so. Nothing, indeed, will appear more certain, on any
tolerable consideration of this matter, than that every sort
of Government ought to have its Administration correspondent to
its Legislature. If it should be otherwise, things must
fall into a hideous disorder. The people of a free
Commonwealth, who have taken such care that their laws should be
the result of general consent, cannot be so senseless as to
suffer their executory system to be composed of persons on whom
they have no dependence, and whom no proofs of the public love
and confidence have recommended to those powers, upon the use of
which the very being of the State depends.
The popular election of magistrates, and popular disposition
of rewards and honours, is one of the first advantages of a free
State. Without it, or something equivalent to it, perhaps
the people cannot long enjoy the substance of freedom; certainly
none of the vivifying energy of good Government. The frame
of our Commonwealth did not admit of such an actual election: but
it provided as well, and (while the spirit of the constitution is
preserved) better, for all the effects of it, than by the method
of suffrage in any democratic State whatsoever. It had
always, until of late, been held the first duty of Parliament
to refuse to support Government, until power was in the
hands of persons who were acceptable to the people, or
while factions predominated in the Court in which the nation had
no confidence. Thus all the good effects of popular
election were supposed to be secured to us, without the mischiefs
attending on perpetual intrigue, and a distinct canvass for every
particular office throughout the body of the people. This
was the most noble and refined part of our constitution.
The people, by their representatives and grandees, were intrusted
with a deliberative power in making laws; the King with the
control of his negative. The King was intrusted with the
deliberative choice and the election to office; the people had
the negative in a Parliamentary refusal to support.
Formerly this power of control was what kept Ministers in awe of
Parliaments, and Parliaments in reverence with the people.
If the use of this power of control on the system and persons of
Administration is gone, everything is lost, Parliament and
all. We may assure ourselves, that if Parliament will
tamely see evil men take possession of all the strongholds of
their country, and allow them time and means to fortify
themselves, under a pretence of giving them a fair trial, and
upon a hope of discovering, whether they will not be reformed by
power, and whether their measures will not be better than their
morals; such a Parliament will give countenance to their measures
also, whatever that Parliament may pretend, and whatever those
measures may be.
Every good political institution must have a preventive
operation as well as a remedial. It ought to have a natural
tendency to exclude bad men from Government, and not to trust for
the safety of the State to subsequent punishment
alone—punishment which has ever been tardy and uncertain,
and which, when power is suffered in bad hands, may chance to
fall rather on the injured than the criminal.
Before men are put forward into the great trusts of the State,
they ought by their conduct to have obtained such a degree of
estimation in their country as may be some sort of pledge and
security to the public that they will not abuse those
trusts. It is no mean security for a proper use of power,
that a man has shown by the general tenor of his actions, that
the affection, the good opinion, the confidence of his
fellow-citizens have been among the principal objects of his
life, and that he has owed none of the gradations of his power or
fortune to a settled contempt or occasional forfeiture of their
esteem.
That man who, before he comes into power, has no friends, or
who, coming into power, is obliged to desert his friends, or who,
losing it, has no friends to sympathise with him, he who has no
sway among any part of the landed or commercial interest, but
whose whole importance has begun with his office, and is sure to
end with it, is a person who ought never to be suffered by a
controlling Parliament, to continue in any of those situations
which confer the lead and direction of all our public affairs;
because such a man has no connection with the sentiments and
opinions of the people.
Those knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly
without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct
iniquity at the higher rate, and are therefore universally
odious, ought never to be suffered to domineer in the State;
because they have no connection with the sentiments and
opinions of the people.
These are considerations which, in my opinion, enforce the
necessity of having some better reason, in a free country and a
free Parliament, for supporting the Ministers of the Crown, than
that short one, That the King has thought proper to appoint
them. There is something very courtly in this.
But it is a principle pregnant with all sorts of mischief, in a
constitution like ours, to turn the views of active men from the
country to the Court. Whatever be the road to power, that
is the road which will be trod. If the opinion of the
country be of no use as a means of power or consideration, the
qualities which usually procure that opinion will be no longer
cultivated. And whether it will be right, in a State so
popular in its constitution as ours, to leave ambition without
popular motives, and to trust all to the operation of pure virtue
in the minds of Kings and Ministers, and public men, must be
submitted to the judgment and good sense of the people of
England.
* * * * *
Cunning men are here apt to break in, and, without directly
controverting the principle, to raise objections from the
difficulty under which the Sovereign labours to distinguish the
genuine voice and sentiments of his people from the clamour of a
faction, by which it is so easily counterfeited. The
nation, they say, is generally divided into parties, with views
and passions utterly irreconcilable. If the King should put
his affairs into the hands of any one of them, he is sure to
disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them
all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who
are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body
of opposition, which, being a collection of many discontents into
one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough.
Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the
whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the
better part, will seem for awhile, as it were, annihilated by the
quiet in which their virtue and moderation incline them to enjoy
the blessings of Government. Besides that, the opinion of
the mere vulgar is a miserable rule even with regard to
themselves, on account of their violence and instability.
So that if you were to gratify them in their humour to-day, that
very gratification would be a ground of their dissatisfaction on
the next. Now as all these rules of public opinion are to
be collected with great difficulty, and to be applied with equal
uncertainty as to the effect, what better can a King of England
do than to employ such men as he finds to have views and
inclinations most conformable to his own, who are least infected
with pride and self-will, and who are least moved by such popular
humours as are perpetually traversing his designs, and disturbing
his service; trusting that when he means no ill to his people he
will be supported in his appointments, whether he chooses to keep
or to change, as his private judgment or his pleasure leads
him? He will find a sure resource in the real weight and
influence of the Crown, when it is not suffered to become an
instrument in the hands of a faction.
I will not pretend to say that there is nothing at all in this
mode of reasoning, because I will not assert that there is no
difficulty in the art of government. Undoubtedly the very
best Administration must encounter a great deal of opposition,
and the very worst will find more support than it deserves.
Sufficient appearances will never be wanting to those who have a
mind to deceive themselves. It is a fallacy in constant use
with those who would level all things, and confound right with
wrong, to insist upon the inconveniences which are attached to
every choice, without taking into consideration the different
weight and consequence of those inconveniences. The
question is not concerning absolute discontent or perfect
satisfaction in Government, neither of which can be pure and
unmixed at any time or upon any system. The controversy is
about that degree of good-humour in the people, which may
possibly be attained, and ought certainly to be looked for.
While some politicians may be waiting to know whether the sense
of every individual be against them, accurately distinguishing
the vulgar from the better sort, drawing lines between the
enterprises of a faction and the efforts of a people, they may
chance to see the Government, which they are so nicely weighing,
and dividing, and distinguishing, tumble to the ground in the
midst of their wise deliberation. Prudent men, when so
great an object as the security of Government, or even its peace,
is at stake, will not run the risk of a decision which may be
fatal to it. They who can read the political sky will seen
a hurricane in a cloud no bigger than a hand at the very edge of
the horizon, and will run into the first harbour. No lines
can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a
matter incapable of exact definition. But, though no man
can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet
light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably
distinguishable. Nor will it be impossible for a Prince to
find out such a mode of government, and such persons to
administer it, as will give a great degree of content to his
people, without any curious and anxious research for that
abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which, while he is seeking,
he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are in his
power without any research at all.
It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a Prince to
aim at giving tranquillity to his Government. If those who
advise him may have an interest in disorder and confusion.
If the opinion of the people is against them, they will naturally
wish that it should have no prevalence. Here it is that the
people must on their part show themselves sensible of their own
value. Their whole importance, in the first instance, and
afterwards their whole freedom, is at stake. Their freedom
cannot long survive their importance. Here it is that the
natural strength of the kingdom, the great peers, the leading
landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, the
substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to rescue their Prince,
themselves, and their posterity.
We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in
the great crisis of this contention, and the part which men take,
one way or other, will serve to discriminate their characters and
their principles. Until the matter is decided, the country
will remain in its present confusion. For while a system of
Administration is attempted, entirely repugnant to the genius of
the people, and not conformable to the plan of their Government,
everything must necessarily be disordered for a time, until this
system destroys the constitution, or the constitution gets the
better of this system.
There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in
this political distemper beyond any that I have heard or read
of. In former lines the projectors of arbitrary Government
attacked only the liberties of their country, a design surely
mischievous enough to have satisfied a mind of the most unruly
ambition. But a system unfavourable to freedom may be so
formed as considerably to exalt the grandeur of the State, and
men may find in the pride and splendour of that prosperity some
sort of consolation for the loss of their solid privileges.
Indeed, the increase of the power of the State has often been
urged by artful men, as a pretext for some abridgment of the
public liberty. But the scheme of the junto under
consideration not only strikes a palsy into every nerve of our
free constitution, but in the same degree benumbs and stupefies
the whole executive power, rendering Government in all its grand
operations languid, uncertain, ineffective, making Ministers
fearful of attempting, and incapable of executing, any useful
plan of domestic arrangement, or of foreign politics. It
tends to produce neither the security of a free Government, nor
the energy of a Monarchy that is absolute. Accordingly, the
Crown has dwindled away in proportion to the unnatural and turgid
growth of this excrescence on the Court.
The interior Ministry are sensible that war is a situation
which sets in its full light the value of the hearts of a people,
and they well know that the beginning of the importance of the
people must be the end of theirs. For this reason they
discover upon all occasions the utmost fear of everything which
by possibility may lead to such an event. I do not mean
that they manifest any of that pious fear which is backward to
commit the safety of the country to the dubious experiment of
war. Such a fear, being the tender sensation of virtue,
excited, as it is regulated, by reason, frequently shows itself
in a seasonable boldness, which keeps danger at a distance, by
seeming to despise it. Their fear betrays to the first
glance of the eye its true cause and its real object.
Foreign powers, confident in the knowledge of their character,
have not scrupled to violate the most solemn treaties; and, in
defiance of them, to make conquests in the midst of a general
peace, and in the heart of Europe. Such was the conquest of
Corsica, by the professed enemies of the freedom of mankind, in
defiance of those who were formerly its professed
defenders. We have had just claims upon the same
powers—rights which ought to have been sacred to them as
well as to us, as they had their origin in our lenity and
generosity towards France and Spain in the day of their great
humiliation. Such I call the ransom of Manilla, and the
demand on France for the East India prisoners. But these
powers put a just confidence in their resource of the double
Cabinet. These demands (one of them, at least) are
hastening fast towards an acquittal by prescription.
Oblivion begins to spread her cobwebs over all our spirited
remonstrances. Some of the most valuable branches of our
trade are also on the point of perishing from the same
cause. I do not mean those branches which bear without the
hand of the vine-dresser; I mean those which the policy of
treaties had formerly secured to us; I mean to mark and
distinguish the trade of Portugal, the loss of which, and the
power of the Cabal, have one and the same era.
If, by any chance, the Ministers who stand before the curtain
possess or affect any spirit, it makes little or no
impression. Foreign Courts and Ministers, who were among
the first to discover and to profit by this invention of the
double Cabinet, attended very little to their
remonstrances. They know that those shadows of Ministers
have nothing to do in the ultimate disposal of things.
Jealousies and animosities are sedulously nourished in the
outward Administration, and have been even considered as a
causa sine qua non in its constitution: thence foreign
Courts have a certainty, that nothing can be done by common
counsel in this nation. If one of those Ministers
officially takes up a business with spirit, it serves only the
better to signalise the meanness of the rest, and the discord of
them all. His colleagues in office are in haste to shake
him off, and to disclaim the whole of his proceedings. Of
this nature was that astonishing transaction, in which Lord
Rochford, our Ambassador at Paris, remonstrated against the
attempt upon Corsica, in consequence of a direct authority from
Lord Shelburne. This remonstrance the French Minister
treated with the contempt that was natural; as he was assured,
from the Ambassador of his Court to ours, that these orders of
Lord Shelburne were not supported by the rest of the (I had like
to have said British) Administration. Lord Rochford, a man
of spirit, could not endure this situation. The
consequences were, however, curious. He returns from Paris,
and comes home full of anger. Lord Shelburne, who gave the
orders, is obliged to give up the seals. Lord Rochford, who
obeyed these orders, receives them. He goes, however, into
another department of the same office, that he might not be
obliged officially to acquiesce in one situation, under what he
had officially remonstrated against in another. At Paris,
the Duke of Choiseul considered this office arrangement as a
compliment to him: here it was spoke of as an attention to the
delicacy of Lord Rochford. But whether the compliment was
to one or both, to this nation it was the same. By this
transaction the condition of our Court lay exposed in all its
nakedness. Our office correspondence has lost all pretence
to authenticity; British policy is brought into derision in those
nations, that a while ago trembled at the power of our arms,
whilst they looked up with confidence to the equity, firmness,
and candour, which shone in all our negotiations. I
represent this matter exactly in the light in which it has been
universally received.
* * * * *
Such has been the aspect of our foreign politics under the
influence of a double Cabinet. With such an
arrangement at Court, it is impossible it should have been
otherwise. Nor is it possible that this scheme should have
a better effect upon the government of our dependencies, the
first, the dearest, and most delicate objects of the interior
policy of this empire. The Colonies know that
Administration is separated from the Court, divided within
itself, and detested by the nation. The double Cabinet has,
in both the parts of it, shown the most malignant dispositions
towards them, without being able to do them the smallest
mischief.
They are convinced, by sufficient experience, that no plan,
either of lenity or rigour, can be pursued with uniformity and
perseverance. Therefore they turn their eyes entirely from
Great Britain, where they have neither dependence on friendship
nor apprehension from enmity. They look to themselves, and
their own arrangements. They grow every day into alienation
from this country; and whilst they are becoming disconnected with
our Government, we have not the consolation to find that they are
even friendly in their new independence. Nothing can equal
the futility, the weakness, the rashness, the timidity, the
perpetual contradiction, in the management of our affairs in that
part of the world. A volume might be written on this
melancholy subject; but it were better to leave it entirely to
the reflections of the reader himself, than not to treat it in
the extent it deserves.
In what manner our domestic economy is affected by this
system, it is needless to explain. It is the perpetual
subject of their own complaints.
The Court party resolve the whole into faction. Having
said something before upon this subject, I shall only observe
here, that, when they give this account of the prevalence of
faction, they present no very favourable aspect of the confidence
of the people in their own Government. They may be assured,
that however they amuse themselves with a variety of projects for
substituting something else in the place of that great and only
foundation of Government, the confidence of the people, every
attempt will but make their condition worse. When men
imagine that their food is only a cover for poison, and when they
neither love nor trust the hand that serves it, it is not the
name of the roast beef of Old England that will persuade them to
sit down to the table that is spread for them. When the
people conceive that laws, and tribunals, and even popular
assemblies, are perverted from the ends of their institution,
they find in those names of degenerated establishments only new
motives to discontent. Those bodies, which, when full of
life and beauty, lay in their arms and were their joy and
comfort; when dead and putrid, become but the more loathsome from
remembrance of former endearments. A sullen gloom, and
furious disorder, prevail by fits: the nation loses its relish
for peace and prosperity, as it did in that season of fulness
which opened our troubles in the time of Charles the First.
A species of men to whom a state of order would become a sentence
of obscurity, are nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the
heat of intestine disturbances; and it is no wonder that, by a
sort of sinister piety, they cherish, in their turn, the
disorders which are the parents of all their consequence.
Superficial observers consider such persons as the cause of the
public uneasiness, when, in truth, they are nothing more than the
effect of it. Good men look upon this distracted scene with
sorrow and indignation. Their hands are tied behind
them. They are despoiled of all the power which might
enable them to reconcile the strength of Government with the
rights of the people. They stand in a most distressing
alternative. But in the election among evils they hope
better things from temporary confusion, than from established
servitude. In the mean time, the voice of law is not to be
heard. Fierce licentiousness begets violent
restraints. The military arm is the sole reliance; and
then, call your constitution what you please, it is the sword
that governs. The civil power, like every other that calls
in the aid of an ally stronger than itself, perishes by the
assistance it receives. But the contrivers of this scheme
of Government will not trust solely to the military power,
because they are cunning men. Their restless and crooked
spirit drives them to rake in the dirt of every kind of
expedient. Unable to rule the multitude, they endeavour to
raise divisions amongst them. One mob is hired to destroy
another; a procedure which at once encourages the boldness of the
populace, and justly increases their discontent. Men become
pensioners of state on account of their abilities in the array of
riot, and the discipline of confusion. Government is put
under the disgraceful necessity of protecting from the severity
of the laws that very licentiousness, which the laws had been
before violated to repress. Everything partakes of the
original disorder. Anarchy predominates without freedom,
and servitude without submission or subordination. These
are the consequences inevitable to our public peace, from the
scheme of rendering the executory Government at once odious and
feeble; of freeing Administration from the constitutional and
salutary control of Parliament, and inventing for it a new
control, unknown to the constitution, an interior Cabinet;
which brings the whole body of Government into confusion and
contempt.
* * * * *
After having stated, as shortly as I am able, the effects of
this system on our foreign affairs, on the policy of our
Government with regard to our dependencies, and on the interior
economy of the Commonwealth; there remains only, in this part of
my design, to say something of the grand principle which first
recommended this system at Court. The pretence was to
prevent the King from being enslaved by a faction, and made a
prisoner in his closet. This scheme might have been
expected to answer at least its own end, and to indemnify the
King, in his personal capacity, for all the confusion into which
it has thrown his Government. But has it in reality
answered this purpose? I am sure, if it had, every
affectionate subject would have one motive for enduring with
patience all the evils which attend it.
In order to come at the truth in this matter, it may not be
amiss to consider it somewhat in detail. I speak here of
the King, and not of the Crown; the interests of which we have
already touched. Independent of that greatness which a King
possesses merely by being a representative of the national
dignity, the things in which he may have an individual interest
seem to be these: wealth accumulated; wealth spent in
magnificence, pleasure, or beneficence; personal respect and
attention; and above all, private ease and repose of mind.
These compose the inventory of prosperous circumstances, whether
they regard a Prince or a subject; their enjoyments differing
only in the scale upon which they are formed.
Suppose then we were to ask, whether the King has been richer
than his predecessors in accumulated wealth, since the
establishment of the plan of Favouritism? I believe it will
be found that the picture of royal indigence which our Court has
presented until this year, has been truly humiliating. Nor
has it been relieved from this unseemly distress, but by means
which have hazarded the affection of the people, and shaken their
confidence in Parliament. If the public treasures had been
exhausted in magnificence and splendour, this distress would have
been accounted for, and in some measure justified. Nothing
would be more unworthy of this nation, than with a mean and
mechanical rule, to mete out the splendour of the Crown.
Indeed, I have found very few persons disposed to so ungenerous a
procedure. But the generality of people, it must be
confessed, do feel a good deal mortified, when they compare the
wants of the Court with its expenses. They do not behold
the cause of this distress in any part of the apparatus of Royal
magnificence. In all this, they see nothing but the
operations of parsimony, attended with all the consequences of
profusion. Nothing expended, nothing saved. Their
wonder is increased by their knowledge, that besides the revenue
settled on his Majesty’s Civil List to the amount of
£800,000 a year, he has a farther aid, from a large pension
list, near £90,000 a year, in Ireland; from the produce of
the Duchy of Lancaster (which we are told has been greatly
improved); from the revenue of the Duchy of Cornwall; from the
American quit-rents; from the four and a half per cent. duty in
the Leeward Islands; this last worth to be sure considerably more
than £40,000 a year. The whole is certainly not much
short of a million annually.
These are revenues within the knowledge and cognizance of our
national Councils. We have no direct right to examine into
the receipts from his Majesty’s German Dominions, and the
Bishopric of Osnaburg. This is unquestionably true.
But that which is not within the province of Parliament, is yet
within the sphere of every man’s own reflection. If a
foreign Prince resided amongst us, the state of his revenues
could not fail of becoming the subject of our speculation.
Filled with an anxious concern for whatever regards the welfare
of our Sovereign, it is impossible, in considering the miserable
circumstances into which he has been brought, that this obvious
topic should be entirely passed over. There is an opinion
universal, that these revenues produce something not
inconsiderable, clear of all charges and establishments.
This produce the people do not believe to be hoarded, nor
perceive to be spent. It is accounted for in the only
manner it can, by supposing that it is drawn away, for the
support of that Court faction, which, whilst it distresses the
nation, impoverishes the Prince in every one of his
resources. I once more caution the reader, that I do not
urge this consideration concerning the foreign revenue, as if I
supposed we had a direct right to examine into the expenditure of
any part of it; but solely for the purpose of showing how little
this system of Favouritism has been advantageous to the Monarch
himself; which, without magnificence, has sunk him into a state
of unnatural poverty; at the same time that he possessed every
means of affluence, from ample revenues, both in this country and
in other parts of his dominions.
Has this system provided better for the treatment becoming his
high and sacred character, and secured the King from those
disgusts attached to the necessity of employing men who are not
personally agreeable? This is a topic upon which for many
reasons I could wish to be silent; but the pretence of securing
against such causes of uneasiness, is the corner-stone of the
Court party. It has however so happened, that if I were to
fix upon any one point, in which this system has been more
particularly and shamefully blameable, the effects which it has
produced would justify me in choosing for that point its tendency
to degrade the personal dignity of the Sovereign, and to expose
him to a thousand contradictions and mortifications. It is
but too evident in what manner these projectors of Royal
greatness have fulfilled all their magnificent promises.
Without recapitulating all the circumstances of the reign, every
one of which is more or less a melancholy proof of the truth of
what I have advanced, let us consider the language of the Court
but a few years ago, concerning most of the persons now in the
external Administration: let me ask, whether any enemy to the
personal feelings of the Sovereign, could possibly contrive a
keener instrument of mortification, and degradation of all
dignity, than almost every part and member of the present
arrangement? Nor, in the whole course of our history, has
any compliance with the will of the people ever been known to
extort from any Prince a greater contradiction to all his own
declared affections and dislikes, than that which is now adopted,
in direct opposition to every thing the people approve and
desire.
An opinion prevails, that greatness has been more than once
advised to submit to certain condescensions towards individuals,
which have been denied to the entreaties of a nation. For
the meanest and most dependent instrument of this system knows,
that there are hours when its existence may depend upon his
adherence to it; and he takes his advantage accordingly.
Indeed it is a law of nature, that whoever is necessary to what
we have made our object, is sure, in some way, or in some time or
other, to become our master. All this however is submitted
to, in order to avoid that monstrous evil of governing in
concurrence with the opinion of the people. For it seems to
be laid down as a maxim, that a King has some sort of interest in
giving uneasiness to his subjects: that all who are pleasing to
them, are to be of course disagreeable to him: that as soon as
the persons who are odious at Court are known to be odious to the
people, it is snatched at as a lucky occasion of showering down
upon them all kinds of emoluments and honours. None are
considered as well-wishers to the Crown, but those who advised to
some unpopular course of action; none capable of serving it, but
those who are obliged to call at every instant upon all its power
for the safety of their lives. None are supposed to be fit
priests in the temple of Government, but the persons who are
compelled to fly into it for sanctuary. Such is the effect
of this refined project; such is ever the result of all the
contrivances which are used to free men from the servitude of
their reason, and from the necessity of ordering their affairs
according to their evident interests. These contrivances
oblige them to run into a real and ruinous servitude, in order to
avoid a supposed restraint that might be attended with
advantage.
If therefore this system has so ill answered its own grand
pretence of saving the King from the necessity of employing
persons disagreeable to him, has it given more peace and
tranquillity to his Majesty’s private hours? No, most
certainly. The father of his people cannot possibly enjoy
repose, while his family is in such a state of distraction.
Then what has the Crown or the King profited by all this
fine-wrought scheme? Is he more rich, or more splendid, or
more powerful, or more at his ease, by so many labours and
contrivances? Have they not beggared his Exchequer,
tarnished the splendour of his Court, sunk his dignity, galled
his feelings, discomposed the whole order and happiness of his
private life?
It will be very hard, I believe, to state in what respect the
King has profited by that faction which presumptuously choose to
call themselves his friends.
If particular men had grown into an attachment, by the
distinguished honour of the society of their Sovereign, and, by
being the partakers of his amusements, came sometimes to prefer
the gratification of his personal inclinations to the support of
his high character, the thing would be very natural, and it would
be excusable enough. But the pleasant part of the story is,
that these King’s friends have no more ground for
usurping such a title, than a resident freeholder in Cumberland
or in Cornwall. They are only known to their Sovereign by
kissing his hand, for the offices, pensions, and grants into
which they have deceived his benignity. May no storm ever
come, which will put the firmness of their attachment to the
proof; and which, in the midst of confusions and terrors, and
sufferings, may demonstrate the eternal difference between a true
and severe friend to the Monarchy, and a slippery sycophant of
the Court; Quantum infido scurræ distabit
amicus!
* * * * *
So far I have considered the effect of the Court system,
chiefly as it operates upon the executive Government, on the
temper of the people and on the happiness of the Sovereign.
It remains that we should consider, with a little attention, its
operation upon Parliament.
Parliament was indeed the great object of all these politics,
the end at which they aimed, as well as the instrument by which
they were to operate. But, before Parliament could be made
subservient to a system, by which it was to be degraded from the
dignity of a national council, into a mere member of the Court,
it must be greatly changed from its original character.
In speaking of this body, I have my eye chiefly on the House
of Commons. I hope I shall be indulged in a few
observations on the nature and character of that assembly; not
with regard to its legal form and power, but to its
spirit, and to the purposes it is meant to answer in the
constitution.
The House of Commons was supposed originally to be no part
of the standing Government of this country. It was
considered as a control, issuing immediately from the people, and
speedily to be resolved into the mass from whence it arose.
In this respect it was in the higher part of Government what
juries are in the lower. The capacity of a magistrate being
transitory, and that of a citizen permanent, the latter capacity
it was hoped would of course preponderate in all discussions, not
only between the people and the standing authority of the Crown,
but between the people and the fleeting authority of the House of
Commons itself. It was hoped that, being of a middle nature
between subject and Government, they would feel with a more
tender and a nearer interest everything that concerned the
people, than the other remoter and more permanent parts of
Legislature.
Whatever alterations time and the necessary accommodation of
business may have introduced, this character can never be
sustained, unless the House of Commons shall be made to bear some
stamp of the actual disposition of the people at large. It
would (among public misfortunes) be an evil more natural and
tolerable, that the House of Commons should be infected with
every epidemical frenzy of the people, as this would indicate
some consanguinity, some sympathy of nature with their
constituents, than that they should in all cases be wholly
untouched by the opinions and feelings of the people out of
doors. By this want of sympathy they would cease to be a
House of Commons. For it is not the derivation of the power
of that House from the people, which makes it in a distinct sense
their representative. The King is the representative of the
people; so are the Lords; so are the Judges. They all are
trustees for the people, as well as the Commons; because no power
is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although Government
certainly is an institution of Divine authority, yet its forms,
and the persons who administer it, all originate from the
people.
A popular origin cannot therefore be the characteristical
distinction of a popular representative. This belongs
equally to all parts of Government, and in all forms. The
virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its
being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It
was not instituted to be a control upon the people, as of late it
has been taught, by a doctrine of the most pernicious
tendency. It was designed as a control for the
people. Other institutions have been formed for the purpose
of checking popular excesses; and they are, I apprehend, fully
adequate to their object. If not, they ought to be made
so. The House of Commons, as it was never intended for the
support of peace and subordination, is miserably appointed for
that service; having no stronger weapon than its Mace, and no
better officer than its Serjeant-at-Arms, which it can command of
its own proper authority. A vigilant and jealous eye over
executory and judicial magistracy; an anxious care of public
money, an openness, approaching towards facility, to public
complaint; these seem to be the true characteristics of a House
of Commons. But an addressing House of Commons, and a
petitioning nation; a House of Commons full of confidence, when
the nation is plunged in despair; in the utmost harmony with
Ministers, whom the people regard with the utmost abhorrence; who
vote thanks, when the public opinion calls upon them for
impeachments; who are eager to grant, when the general voice
demands account; who, in all disputes between the people and
Administration, presume against the people; who punish their
disorder, but refuse even to inquire into the provocations to
them; this is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in this
constitution. Such an Assembly may be a great, wise, awful
senate; but it is not, to any popular purpose, a House of
Commons. This change from an immediate state of procuration
and delegation to a course of acting as from original power, is
the way in which all the popular magistracies in the world have
been perverted from their purposes. It is indeed their
greatest and sometimes their incurable corruption. For
there is a material distinction between that corruption by which
particular points are carried against reason (this is a thing
which cannot be prevented by human wisdom, and is of less
consequence), and the corruption of the principle itself.
For then the evil is not accidental, but settled. The
distemper becomes the natural habit.
For my part, I shall be compelled to conclude the principle of
Parliament to be totally corrupted, and therefore its ends
entirely defeated, when I see two symptoms: first, a rule of
indiscriminate support to all Ministers; because this destroys
the very end of Parliament as a control, and is a general
previous sanction to misgovernment; and secondly, the setting up
any claims adverse to the right of free election; for this tends
to subvert the legal authority by which the House of Commons
sits.
I know that, since the Revolution, along with many dangerous,
many useful powers of Government have been weakened. It is
absolutely necessary to have frequent recourse to the
Legislature. Parliaments must therefore sit every year, and
for great part of the year. The dreadful disorders of
frequent elections have also necessitated a septennial instead of
a triennial duration. These circumstances, I mean the
constant habit of authority, and the infrequency of elections,
have tended very much to draw the House of Commons towards the
character of a standing Senate. It is a disorder which has
arisen from the cure of greater disorders; it has arisen from the
extreme difficulty of reconciling liberty under a monarchical
Government, with external strength and with internal
tranquillity.
It is very clear that we cannot free ourselves entirely from
this great inconvenience; but I would not increase an evil,
because I was not able to remove it; and because it was not in my
power to keep the House of Commons religiously true to its first
principles, I would not argue for carrying it to a total oblivion
of them. This has been the great scheme of power in our
time. They who will not conform their conduct to the public
good, and cannot support it by the prerogative of the Crown, have
adopted a new plan. They have totally abandoned the
shattered and old-fashioned fortress of prerogative, and made a
lodgment in the stronghold of Parliament itself. If they
have any evil design to which there is no ordinary legal power
commensurate, they bring it into Parliament. In Parliament
the whole is executed from the beginning to the end. In
Parliament the power of obtaining their object is absolute, and
the safety in the proceeding perfect: no rules to confine, no
after reckonings to terrify. Parliament cannot with any
great propriety punish others for things in which they themselves
have been accomplices. Thus the control of Parliament upon
the executory power is lost; because Parliament is made to
partake in every considerable act of Government.
Impeachment, that great guardian of the purity of the
Constitution, is in danger of being lost, even to
the idea of it.
By this plan several important ends are answered to the
Cabal. If the authority of Parliament supports itself, the
credit of every act of Government, which they contrive, is saved;
but if the act be so very odious that the whole strength of
Parliament is insufficient to recommend it, then Parliament is
itself discredited; and this discredit increases more and more
that indifference to the constitution, which it is the constant
aim of its enemies, by their abuse of Parliamentary powers, to
render general among the people. Whenever Parliament is
persuaded to assume the offices of executive Government, it will
lose all the confidence, love, and veneration which it has ever
enjoyed, whilst it was supposed the corrective and
control of the acting powers of the State. This
would be the event, though its conduct in such a perversion of
its functions should be tolerably just and moderate; but if it
should be iniquitous, violent, full of passion, and full of
faction, it would be considered as the most intolerable of all
the modes of tyranny.
For a considerable time this separation of the representatives
from their constituents went on with a silent progress; and had
those, who conducted the plan for their total separation, been
persons of temper and abilities any way equal to the magnitude of
their design, the success would have been infallible; but by
their precipitancy they have laid it open in all its nakedness;
the nation is alarmed at it; and the event may not be pleasant to
the contrivers of the scheme. In the last session, the
corps called the King’s friends made a hardy attempt
all at once, to alter the right of election itself; to put
it into the power of the House of Commons to disable any person
disagreeable to them from sitting in Parliament, without any
other rule than their own pleasure; to make incapacities, either
general for descriptions of men, or particular for individuals;
and to take into their body, persons who avowedly had never been
chosen by the majority of legal electors, nor agreeably to any
known rule of law.
The arguments upon which this claim was founded and combated,
are not my business here. Never has a subject been more
amply and more learnedly handled, nor upon one side, in my
opinion, more satisfactorily; they who are not convinced by what
is already written would not receive conviction though one
arose from the dead.
I too have thought on this subject; but my purpose here, is
only to consider it as a part of the favourite project of
Government; to observe on the motives which led to it; and to
trace its political consequences.
A violent rage for the punishment of Mr. Wilkes was the
pretence of the whole. This gentleman, by setting himself
strongly in opposition to the Court Cabal, had become at once an
object of their persecution, and of the popular favour. The
hatred of the Court party pursuing, and the countenance of the
people protecting him, it very soon became not at all a question
on the man, but a trial of strength between the two
parties. The advantage of the victory in this particular
contest was the present, but not the only, nor by any means, the
principal, object. Its operation upon the character of the
House of Commons was the great point in view. The point to
be gained by the Cabal was this: that a precedent should be
established, tending to show, That the favour of the people
was not so sure a road as the favour of the Court even to popular
honours and popular trusts. A strenuous resistance to
every appearance of lawless power; a spirit of independence
carried to some degree of enthusiasm; an inquisitive character to
discover, and a bold one to display, every corruption and every
error of Government; these are the qualities which recommend a
man to a seat in the House of Commons, in open and merely popular
elections. An indolent and submissive disposition; a
disposition to think charitably of all the actions of men in
power, and to live in a mutual intercourse of favours with them;
an inclination rather to countenance a strong use of authority,
than to bear any sort of licentiousness on the part of the
people; these are unfavourable qualities in an open election for
Members of Parliament.
The instinct which carries the people towards the choice of
the former, is justified by reason; because a man of such a
character, even in its exorbitancies, does not directly
contradict the purposes of a trust, the end of which is a control
on power. The latter character, even when it is not in its
extreme, will execute this trust but very imperfectly; and, if
deviating to the least excess, will certainly frustrate instead
of forwarding the purposes of a control on Government. But
when the House of Commons was to be new modelled, this principle
was not only to be changed, but reversed. Whist any errors
committed in support of power were left to the law, with every
advantage of favourable construction, of mitigation, and finally
of pardon; all excesses on the side of liberty, or in pursuit of
popular favour, or in defence of popular rights and privileges,
were not only to be punished by the rigour of the known law, but
by a discretionary proceeding, which brought on the
loss of the popular object itself. Popularity was to be
rendered, if not directly penal, at least highly dangerous.
The favour of the people might lead even to a disqualification of
representing them. Their odium might become, strained
through the medium of two or three constructions, the means of
sitting as the trustee of all that was dear to them. This
is punishing the offence in the offending part. Until this
time, the opinion of the people, through the power of an
Assembly, still in some sort popular, led to the greatest honours
and emoluments in the gift of the Crown. Now the principle
is reversed; and the favour of the Court is the only sure way of
obtaining and holding those honours which ought to be in the
disposal of the people.
It signifies very little how this matter may be quibbled
away. Example, the only argument of effect in civil life,
demonstrates the truth of my proposition. Nothing can alter
my opinion concerning the pernicious tendency of this example,
until I see some man for his indiscretion in the support of
power, for his violent and intemperate servility, rendered
incapable of sitting in parliament. For as it now stands,
the fault of overstraining popular qualities, and, irregularly if
you please, asserting popular privileges, has led to
disqualification; the opposite fault never has produced the
slightest punishment. Resistance to power has shut the door
of the House of Commons to one man; obsequiousness and servility,
to none.
Not that I would encourage popular disorder, or any
disorder. But I would leave such offences to the law, to be
punished in measure and proportion. The laws of this
country are for the most part constituted, and wisely so, for the
general ends of Government, rather than for the preservation of
our particular liberties. Whatever therefore is done in
support of liberty, by persons not in public trust, or not acting
merely in that trust, is liable to be more or less out of the
ordinary course of the law; and the law itself is sufficient to
animadvert upon it with great severity. Nothing indeed can
hinder that severe letter from crushing us, except the
temperaments it may receive from a trial by jury. But if
the habit prevails of going beyond the law, and
superseding this judicature, of carrying offences, real or
supposed, into the legislative bodies, who shall establish
themselves into courts of criminal equity, (so the Star
Chamber has been called by Lord Bacon,) all the evils of the
Star Chamber are revived. A large and liberal
construction in ascertaining offences, and a discretionary power
in punishing them, is the idea of criminal equity; which is in
truth a monster in Jurisprudence. It signifies nothing
whether a court for this purpose be a Committee of Council, or a
House of Commons, or a House of Lords; the liberty of the subject
will be equally subverted by it. The true end and purpose
of that House of Parliament which entertains such a jurisdiction
will be destroyed by it.
I will not believe, what no other man living believes, that
Mr. Wilkes was punished for the indecency of his publications, or
the impiety of his ransacked closet. If he had fallen in a
common slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well
believe that nothing more was meant than was pretended. But
when I see, that, for years together, full as impious, and
perhaps more dangerous writings to religion, and virtue, and
order, have not been punished, nor their authors discountenanced;
that the most audacious libels on Royal Majesty have passed
without notice; that the most treasonable invectives against the
laws, liberties, and constitution of the country, have not met
with the slightest animadversion; I must consider this as a
shocking and shameless pretence. Never did an envenomed
scurrility against everything sacred and civil, public and
private, rage through the kingdom with such a furious and
unbridled licence. All this while the peace of the nation
must be shaken, to ruin one libeller, and to tear from the
populace a single favourite.
Nor is it that vice merely skulks in an obscure and
contemptible impunity. Does not the public behold with
indignation, persons not only generally scandalous in their
lives, but the identical persons who, by their society, their
instruction, their example, their encouragement, have drawn this
man into the very faults which have furnished the Cabal with a
pretence for his persecution, loaded with every kind of favour,
honour, and distinction, which a Court can bestow? Add but
the crime of servility (the foedum crimem servitutis) to
every other crime, and the whole mass is immediately transmuted
into virtue, and becomes the just subject of reward and
honour. When therefore I reflect upon this method pursued
by the Cabal in distributing rewards and punishments, I must
conclude that Mr. Wilkes is the object of persecution, not on
account of what he has done in common with others who are the
objects of reward, but for that in which he differs from many of
them: that he is pursued for the spirited dispositions which are
blended with his vices; for his unconquerable firmness, for his
resolute, indefatigable, strenuous resistance against
oppression.
In this case, therefore, it was not the man that was to be
punished, nor his faults that were to be discountenanced.
Opposition to acts of power was to be marked by a kind of civil
proscription. The popularity which should arise from such
an opposition was to be shown unable to protect it. The
qualities by which court is made to the people, were to render
every fault inexpiable, and every error irretrievable. The
qualities by which court is made to power, were to cover and to
sanctify everything. He that will have a sure and
honourable seat, in the House of Commons, must take care how he
adventures to cultivate popular qualities; otherwise he may,
remember the old maxim, Breves et infaustos populi Romani
amores. If, therefore, a pursuit of popularity expose a
man to greater dangers than a disposition to servility, the
principle which is the life and soul of popular elections will
perish out of the Constitution.
It behoves the people of England to consider how the House of
Commons under the operation of these examples must of necessity
be constituted. On the side of the Court will be, all
honours, offices, emoluments; every sort of personal
gratification to avarice or vanity; and, what is of more moment
to most gentlemen, the means of growing, by innumerable petty
services to individuals, into a spreading interest in their
country. On the other hand, let us suppose a person
unconnected with the Court, and in opposition to its
system. For his own person, no office, or emolument, or
title; no promotion ecclesiastical, or civil, or military, or
naval, for children, or brothers, or kindred. In vain an
expiring interest in a borough calls for offices, or small
livings, for the children of mayors, and aldermen, and capital
burgesses. His court rival has them all. He can do an
infinite number of acts of generosity and kindness, and even of
public spirit. He can procure indemnity from
quarters. He can procure advantages in trade. He can
get pardons for offences. He can obtain a thousand favours,
and avert a thousand evils. He may, while he betrays every
valuable interest of the kingdom, be a benefactor, a patron, a
father, a guardian angel, to his borough. The unfortunate
independent member has nothing to offer, but harsh refusal, or
pitiful excuse, or despondent representation of a hopeless
interest. Except from his private fortune, in which he may
be equalled, perhaps exceeded, by his Court competitor, he has no
way of showing any one good quality, or of making a single
friend. In the House, he votes for ever in a dispirited
minority. If he speaks, the doors are locked. A body
of loquacious placemen go out to tell the world, that all he aims
at, is to get into office. If he has not the talent of
elocution, which is the case of many as wise and knowing men as
any in the House, he is liable to all these inconveniences,
without the eclat which attends upon any tolerably successful
exertion of eloquence. Can we conceive a more discouraging
post of duty than this? Strip it of the poor reward of
popularity; suffer even the excesses committed in defence of the
popular interest to become a ground for the majority of that
House to form a disqualification out of the line of the law, and
at their pleasure, attended not only with the loss of the
franchise, but with every kind of personal disgrace; if this
shall happen, the people of this kingdom may be assured that they
cannot be firmly or faithfully served by any man. It is out
of the nature of men and things that they should; and their
presumption will be equal to their folly, if they expect
it. The power of the people, within the laws, must show
itself sufficient to protect every representative in the animated
performance of his duty, or that duty cannot be performed.
The House of Commons can never be a control on other parts of
Government, unless they are controlled themselves by their
constituents; and unless these constituents possess some right in
the choice of that House, which it is not in the power of that
House to take away. If they suffer this power of arbitrary
incapacitation to stand, they have utterly perverted every other
power of the House of Commons. The late proceeding, I will
not say, is contrary to law; it must be so; for the
power which is claimed cannot, by any possibility, be a legal
power in any limited member of Government.
The power which they claim, of declaring incapacities, would
not be above the just claims of a final judicature, if they had
not laid it down as a leading principle, that they had no rule in
the exercise of this claim but their own discretion.
Not one of their abettors has ever undertaken to assign the
principle of unfitness, the species or degree of delinquency, on
which the House of Commons will expel, nor the mode of proceeding
upon it, nor the evidence upon which it is established. The
direct consequence of which is, that the first franchise of an
Englishman, and that on which all the rest vitally depend, is to
be forfeited for some offence which no man knows, and which is to
be proved by no known rule whatsoever of legal evidence.
This is so anomalous to our whole constitution, that I will
venture to say, the most trivial right, which the subject claims,
never was, nor can be, forfeited in such a manner.
The whole of their usurpation is established upon this method
of arguing. We do not make laws. No; we do not
contend for this power. We only declare law; and, as we are
a tribunal both competent and supreme, what we declare to be law
becomes law, although it should not have been so before.
Thus the circumstance of having no appeal from their jurisdiction
is made to imply that they have no rule in the exercise of it:
the judgment does not derive its validity from its conformity to
the law; but preposterously the law is made to attend on the
judgment; and the rule of the judgment is no other than the
occasional will of the House. An arbitrary
discretion leads, legality follows; which is just the very nature
and description of a legislative act.
This claim in their hands was no barren theory. It was
pursued into its utmost consequences; and a dangerous principle
has begot a correspondent practice. A systematic spirit has
been shown upon both sides. The electors of Middlesex chose
a person whom the House of Commons had voted incapable; and the
House of Commons has taken in a member whom the electors of
Middlesex had not chosen. By a construction on that
legislative power which had been assumed, they declared that the
true legal sense of the country was contained in the minority, on
that occasion; and might, on a resistance to a vote of
incapacity, be contained in any minority.
When any construction of law goes against the spirit of the
privilege it was meant to support, it is a vicious
construction. It is material to us to be represented really
and bona fide, and not in forms, in types, and shadows, and
fictions of law. The right of election was not established
merely as a matter of form, to satisfy some method and
rule of technical reasoning; it was not a principle which might
substitute a Titius or a Maevius, a John Doe
or Richard Roe, in the place of a man specially chosen;
not a principle which was just as well satisfied with one man as
with another. It is a right, the effect of which is to give
to the people that man, and that man only, whom by their voices,
actually, not constructively given, they declare that they know,
esteem, love, and trust. This right is a matter within
their own power of judging and feeling; not an ens
rationis and creature of law: nor can those devices, by which
anything else is substituted in the place of such an actual
choice, answer in the least degree the end of representation.
I know that the courts of law have made as strained
constructions in other cases. Such is the construction in
common recoveries. The method of construction which in that
case gives to the persons in remainder, for their security and
representative, the door-keeper, crier, or sweeper of the Court,
or some other shadowy being without substance or effect, is a
fiction of a very coarse texture. This was however
suffered, by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for ages;
because the evasion of the old Statute of Westminster, which
authorised perpetuities, had more sense and utility than the law
which was evaded. But an attempt to turn the right of
election into such a farce and mockery as a fictitious fine and
recovery, will, I hope, have another fate; because the laws which
give it are infinitely dear to us, and the evasion is infinitely
contemptible.
The people indeed have been told, that this power of
discretionary disqualification is vested in hands that they may
trust, and who will be sure not to abuse it to their
prejudice. Until I find something in this argument
differing from that on which every mode of despotism has been
defended, I shall not be inclined to pay it any great
compliment. The people are satisfied to trust themselves
with the exercise of their own privileges, and do not desire this
kind intervention of the House of Commons to free them from the
burthen. They are certainly in the right. They ought
not to trust the House of Commons with a power over their
franchises; because the constitution, which placed two other
co-ordinate powers to control it, reposed no such confidence in
that body. It were a folly well deserving servitude for its
punishment, to be full of confidence where the laws are full of
distrust; and to give to an House of Commons, arrogating to its
sole resolution the most harsh and odious part of legislative
authority, that degree of submission which is due only to the
Legislature itself.
When the House of Commons, in an endeavour to obtain new
advantages at the expense of the other orders of the State, for
the benefits of the Commons at large, have pursued strong
measures; if it were not just, it was at least natural, that the
constituents should connive at all their proceedings; because we
were ourselves ultimately to profit. But when this
submission is urged to us, in a contest between the
representatives and ourselves, and where nothing can be put into
their scale which is not taken from ours, they fancy us to be
children when they tell us they are our representatives, our own
flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they give us are for
our good. The very desire of that body to have such a trust
contrary to law reposed in them, shows that they are not worthy
of it. They certainly will abuse it; because all men
possessed of an uncontrolled discretionary power leading to the
aggrandisement and profit of their own body have always abused
it: and I see no particular sanctity in our times, that is at all
likely, by a miraculous operation, to overrule the course of
nature.
But we must purposely shut our eyes, if we consider this
matter merely as a contest between the House of Commons and the
Electors. The true contest is between the Electors of the
Kingdom and the Crown; the Crown acting by an instrumental House
of Commons. It is precisely the same, whether the Ministers
of the Crown can disqualify by a dependent House of Commons, or
by a dependent court of Star Chamber, or by a dependent
court of King’s Bench. If once Members of Parliament
can be practically convinced that they do not depend on the
affection or opinion of the people for their political being,
they will give themselves over, without even an appearance of
reserve, to the influence of the Court.
Indeed, a Parliament unconnected with the people, is essential
to a Ministry unconnected with the people; and therefore those
who saw through what mighty difficulties the interior Ministry
waded, and the exterior were dragged, in this business, will
conceive of what prodigious importance, the new corps of
King’s men held this principle of occasional and
personal incapacitation, to the whole body of their design.
When the House of Commons was thus made to consider itself as
the master of its constituents, there wanted but one thing to
secure that House against all possible future deviation towards
popularity; an unlimited fund of money to be laid out according
to the pleasure of the Court.
* * * * *
To complete the scheme of bringing our Court to a resemblance
to the neighbouring Monarchies, it was necessary, in effect, to
destroy those appropriations of revenue, which seem to limit the
property, as the other laws had done the powers, of the
Crown. An opportunity for this purpose was taken, upon an
application to Parliament for payment of the debts of the Civil
List; which in 1769 had amounted to £513,000. Such
application had been made upon former occasions; but to do it in
the former manner would by no means answer the present
purpose.
Whenever the Crown had come to the Commons to desire a supply
for the discharging of debts due on the Civil List, it was always
asked and granted with one of the three following qualifications;
sometimes with all of them. Either it was stated that the
revenue had been diverted from its purposes by Parliament; or
that those duties had fallen short of the sum for which they were
given by Parliament, and that the intention of the Legislature
had not been fulfilled; or that the money required to discharge
the Civil List debt was to be raised chargeable on the Civil List
duties. In the reign of Queen Anne, the Crown was found in
debt. The lessening and granting away some part of her
revenue by Parliament was alleged as the cause of that debt, and
pleaded as an equitable ground (such it certainly was), for
discharging it. It does not appear that the duties which
wore then applied to the ordinary Government produced clear above
£580,000 a year; because, when they were afterwards granted
to George the First, £120,000 was added, to complete the
whole to £700,000 a year. Indeed it was then
asserted, and, I have no doubt, truly, that for many years the
nett produce did not amount to above £550,000. The
Queen’s extraordinary charges were besides very
considerable; equal, at least, to any we have known in our
time. The application to Parliament was not for an absolute
grant of money, but to empower the Queen to raise it by borrowing
upon the Civil List funds.
The Civil List debt was twice paid in the reign of George the
First. The money was granted upon the same plan which had
been followed in the reign of Queen Anne. The Civil List
revenues were then mortgaged for the sum to be raised, and stood
charged with the ransom of their own deliverance.
George the Second received an addition to his Civil
List. Duties were granted for the purpose of raising
£800,000 a year. It was not until he had reigned
nineteen years, and after the last rebellion, that he called upon
Parliament for a discharge of the Civil List debt. The
extraordinary charges brought on by the rebellion, account fully
for the necessities of the Crown. However, the
extraordinary charges of Government were not thought a ground fit
to be relied on. A deficiency of the Civil List duties for
several years before was stated as the principal, if not the
sole, ground on which an application to Parliament could be
justified. About this time the produce of these duties had
fallen pretty low; and even upon an average of the whole reign
they never produced £800,000 a year clear to the
Treasury.
That Prince reigned fourteen years afterwards: not only no new
demands were made, but with so much good order were his revenues
and expenses regulated, that, although many parts of the
establishment of the Court were upon a larger and more liberal
scale than they have been since, there was a considerable sum in
hand, on his decease, amounting to about £170,000,
applicable to the service of the Civil List of his present
Majesty. So that, if this reign commenced with a greater
charge than usual, there was enough, and more than enough,
abundantly to supply all the extraordinary expense. That
the Civil List should have been exceeded in the two former
reigns, especially in the reign of George the First, was not at
all surprising. His revenue was but £700,000
annually; if it ever produced so much clear. The prodigious
and dangerous disaffection to the very being of the
establishment, and the cause of a Pretender then powerfully
abetted from abroad, produced many demands of an extraordinary
nature both abroad and at home. Much management and great
expenses were necessary. But the throne of no Prince has
stood upon more unshaken foundations than that of his present
Majesty.
To have exceeded the sum given for the Civil List, and to have
incurred a debt without special authority of Parliament, was,
prima facie, a criminal act: as such Ministers ought
naturally rather to have withdrawn it from the inspection, than
to have exposed it to the scrutiny, of Parliament.
Certainly they ought, of themselves, officially to have come
armed with every sort of argument, which, by explaining, could
excuse a matter in itself of presumptive guilt. But the
terrors of the House of Commons are no longer for Ministers.
On the other hand, the peculiar character of the House of
Commons, as trustee of the public purse, would have led them to
call with a punctilious solicitude for every public account, and
to have examined into them with the most rigorous accuracy.
The capital use of an account is, that the reality of the
charge, the reason of incurring it, and the justice and necessity
of discharging it, should all appear antecedent to the
payment. No man ever pays first, and calls for his account
afterwards; because he would thereby let out of his hands the
principal, and indeed only effectual, means of compelling a full
and fair one. But, in national business, there is an
additional reason for a previous production of every
account. It is a cheek, perhaps the only one, upon a
corrupt and prodigal use of public money. An account after
payment is to no rational purpose an account. However, the
House of Commons thought all these to be antiquated principles;
they were of opinion that the most Parliamentary way of
proceeding was, to pay first what the Court thought proper to
demand, and to take its chance for an examination into accounts
at some time of greater leisure.
The nation had settled £800,000 a year on the Crown, as
sufficient for the purpose of its dignity, upon the estimate of
its own Ministers. When Ministers came to Parliament, and
said that this allowance had not been sufficient for the purpose,
and that they had incurred a debt of £500,000, would it not
have been natural for Parliament first to have asked, how, and by
what means, their appropriated allowance came to be
insufficient? Would it not have savoured of some attention
to justice, to have seen in what periods of Administration this
debt had been originally incurred; that they might discover, and
if need were, animadvert on the persons who were found the most
culpable? To put their hands upon such articles of
expenditure as they thought improper or excessive, and to secure,
in future, against such misapplication or exceeding?
Accounts for any other purposes are but a matter of curiosity,
and no genuine Parliamentary object. All the accounts which
could answer any Parliamentary end were refused, or postponed by
previous questions. Every idea of prevention was rejected,
as conveying an improper suspicion of the Ministers of the
Crown.
When every leading account had been refused, many others were
granted with sufficient facility.
But with great candour also, the House was informed, that
hardly any of them could be ready until the next session; some of
them perhaps not so soon. But, in order firmly to establish
the precedent of payment previous to account, and to form
it into a settled rule of the House, the god in the machine was
brought down, nothing less than the wonder-working Law of
Parliament. It was alleged, that it is the law of
Parliament, when any demand comes from the Crown, that the House
must go immediately into the Committee of Supply; in which
Committee it was allowed, that the production and examination of
accounts would be quite proper and regular. It was
therefore carried that they should go into the Committee without
delay, and without accounts, in order to examine with great order
and regularity things that could not possibly come before
them. After this stroke of orderly and Parliamentary wit
and humour, they went into the Committee, and very generously
voted the payment.
There was a circumstance in that debate too remarkable to be
overlooked. This debt of the Civil List was all along
argued upon the same footing as a debt of the State, contracted
upon national authority. Its payment was urged as equally
pressing upon the public faith and honour; and when the whole
year’s account was stated, in what is called The
Budget, the Ministry valued themselves on the payment of so
much public debt, just as if they had discharged £500,000
of navy or exchequer bills. Though, in truth, their
payment, from the Sinking Fund, of debt which was never
contracted by Parliamentary authority, was, to all intents and
purposes, so much debt incurred. But such is the present
notion of public credit and payment of debt. No wonder that
it produces such effects.
Nor was the House at all more attentive to a provident
security against future, than it had been to a vindictive
retrospect to past, mismanagements. I should have thought
indeed that a Ministerial promise, during their own continuance
in office, might have been given, though this would have been but
a poor security for the public. Mr. Pelham gave such an
assurance, and he kept his word. But nothing was capable of
extorting from our Ministers anything which had the least
resemblance to a promise of confining the expenses of the Civil
List within the limits which had been settled by
Parliament. This reserve of theirs I look upon to be
equivalent to the clearest declaration that they were resolved
upon a contrary course.
However, to put the matter beyond all doubt, in the Speech
from the Throne, after thanking Parliament for the relief so
liberally granted, the Ministers inform the two Houses that they
will endeavour to confine the expenses of the Civil
Government—within what limits, think you? those which the
law had prescribed? Not in the least—“such
limits as the honour of the Crown can possibly
admit.”
Thus they established an arbitrary standard for that dignity
which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal
standard. They gave themselves, under the lax and
indeterminate idea of the honour of the Crown, a full
loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of
corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to
hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of
Parliament, estimating the dignity of the Crown at
£800,000, and confining it to that sum, adds to the number
of obsolete statutes which load the shelves of libraries without
any sort of advantage to the people.
After this proceeding, I suppose that no man can be so weak as
to think that the Crown is limited to any settled allowance
whatsoever. For if the Ministry has £800,000 a year
by the law of the land, and if by the law of Parliament all the
debts which exceed it are to be paid previous to the production
of any account, I presume that this is equivalent to an income
with no other limits than the abilities of the subject and the
moderation of the Court—that is to say, it is such in
income as is possessed by every absolute Monarch in Europe.
It amounts, as a person of great ability said in the debate, to
an unlimited power of drawing upon the Sinking Fund. Its
effect on the public credit of this kingdom must be obvious; for
in vain is the Sinking Fund the great buttress of all the rest,
if it be in the power of the Ministry to resort to it for the
payment of any debts which they may choose to incur, under the
name of the Civil List, and through the medium of a committee,
which thinks itself obliged by law to vote supplies without any
other account than that of the more existence of the debt.
Five hundred thousand pounds is a serious sum. But it is
nothing to the prolific principle upon which the sum was
voted—a principle that may be well called, the fruitful
mother of a hundred more. Neither is the damage to
public credit of very great consequence when compared with that
which results to public morals and to the safety of the
Constitution, from the exhaustless mine of corruption opened by
the precedent, and to be wrought by the principle of the late
payment of the debts of the Civil List. The power of
discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the
necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law
of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such
a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best
appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented
by the wit of man. This is felt. The quarrel is begun
between the Representatives and the People. The Court
Faction have at length committed them.
In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the
boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure
new. We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our
ancestors to guide us. At best we can only follow the
spirit of their proceeding in other cases. I know the
diligence with which my observations on our public disorders have
been made. I am very sure of the integrity of the motives
on which they are published: I cannot be equally confident in any
plan for the absolute cure of those disorders, or for their
certain future prevention. My aim is to bring this matter
into more public discussion. Let the sagacity of others
work upon it. It is not uncommon for medical writers to
describe histories of diseases, very accurately, on whose cure
they can say but very little.
The first ideas which generally suggest themselves for the
cure of Parliamentary disorders are, to shorten the duration of
Parliaments, and to disqualify all, or a great number of
placemen, from a seat in the House of Commons. Whatever
efficacy there may be in those remedies, I am sure in the present
state of things it is impossible to apply them. A
restoration of the right of free election is a preliminary
indispensable to every other reformation. What alterations
ought afterwards to be made in the constitution is a matter of
deep and difficult research.
If I wrote merely to please the popular palate, it would
indeed be as little troublesome to me as to another to extol
these remedies, so famous in speculation, but to which their
greatest admirers have never attempted seriously to resort in
practice. I confess them, that I have no sort of reliance
upon either a Triennial Parliament or a Place-bill. With
regard to the former, perhaps, it might rather serve to
counteract than to promote the ends that are proposed by
it. To say nothing of the horrible disorders among the
people attending frequent elections, I should be fearful of
committing, every three years, the independent gentlemen of the
country into a contest with the Treasury. It is easy to see
which of the contending parties would be ruined first.
Whoever has taken a careful view of public proceedings, so as to
endeavour to ground his speculations on his experience, must have
observed how prodigiously greater the power of Ministry is in the
first and last session of a Parliament, than it is in the
intermediate periods, when Members sit a little on their
seats. The persons of the greatest Parliamentary
experience, with whom I have conversed, did constantly, in
canvassing the fate of questions, allow something to the Court
side, upon account of the elections depending or imminent.
The evil complained of, if it exists in the present state of
things, would hardly be removed by a triennial Parliament: for,
unless the influence of Government in elections can be entirely
taken away, the more frequently they return, the more they will
harass private independence; the more generally men will be
compelled to fly to the settled systematic interest of
Government, and to the resources of a boundless Civil List.
Certainly something may be done, and ought to be done, towards
lessening that influence in elections; and this will be necessary
upon a plan either of longer or shorter duration of
Parliament. But nothing can so perfectly remove the evil,
as not to render such contentions, foot frequently repeated,
utterly ruinous, first to independence of fortune, and then to
independence of spirit. As I am only giving an opinion on
this point, and not at all debating it in an adverse line, I hope
I may be excused in another observation. With great truth I
may aver that I never remember to have talked on this subject
with any man much conversant with public business who considered
short Parliaments as a real improvement of the
Constitution. Gentlemen, warm in a popular cause, are ready
enough to attribute all the declarations of such persons to
corrupt motives. But the habit of affairs, if, on one hand,
it tends to corrupt the mind, furnishes it, on the other, with
the, means of better information. The authority of such
persons will always have some weight. It may stand upon a
par with the speculations of those who are less practised in
business; and who, with perhaps purer intentions, have not so
effectual means of judging. It is besides an effect of
vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every Statesman is
of course corrupt: and that his opinion, upon every
constitutional point, is solely formed upon some sinister
interest.
The next favourite remedy is a Place-bill. The same
principle guides in both: I mean the opinion which is entertained
by many of the infallibility of laws and regulations, in the cure
of public distempers. Without being as unreasonably
doubtful as many are unwisely confident, I will only say, that
this also is a matter very well worthy of serious and mature
reflection. It is not easy to foresee what the effect would
be of disconnecting with Parliament, the greatest part of those
who hold civil employments, and of such mighty and important
bodies as the military and naval establishments. It were
better, perhaps, that they should have a corrupt interest in the
forms of the constitution, than they should have none at
all. This is a question altogether different from the
disqualification of a particular description of Revenue Officers
from seats in Parliament; or, perhaps, of all the lower sorts of
them from votes in elections. In the former case, only the
few are affected; in the latter, only the inconsiderable.
But a great official, a great professional, a great military and
naval interest, all necessarily comprehending many people of the
first weight, ability, wealth, and spirit, has been gradually
formed in the kingdom. These new interests must be let into
a share of representation, else possibly they may be inclined to
destroy those institutions of which they are not permitted to
partake. This is not a thing to be trifled with: nor is it
every well-meaning man that is fit to put his hands to it.
Many other serious considerations occur. I do not open them
here, because they are not directly to my purpose; proposing only
to give the reader some taste of the difficulties that attend all
capital changes in the Constitution; just to hint the
uncertainty, to say no worse, of being able to prevent the Court,
as long as it has the means of influence abundantly in its power,
from applying that influence to Parliament; and perhaps, if the
public method were precluded, of doing it in some worse and more
dangerous method. Underhand and oblique ways would be
studied. The science of evasion, already tolerably
understood, would then be brought to the greatest
perfection. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know
how much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a
degree of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners,
instead of cutting off the subsisting ill practices, new
corruptions might be produced for the concealment and security of
the old. It were better, undoubtedly, that no influence at
all could affect the mind of a Member of Parliament. But of
all modes of influence, in my opinion, a place under the
Government is the least disgraceful to the man who holds it, and
by far the most safe to the country. I would not shut out
that sort of influence which is open and visible, which is
connected with the dignity and the service of the State, when it
is not in my power to prevent the influence of contracts, of
subscriptions, of direct bribery, and those innumerable methods
of clandestine corruption, which are abundantly in the hands of
the Court, and which will be applied as long as these means of
corruption, and the disposition to be corrupted, have existence
amongst us. Our Constitution stands on a nice equipoise,
with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it.
In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there
may be a risk of oversetting it on the other. Every project
of a material change in a Government so complicated as ours,
combined at the same time with external circumstances still more
complicated, is a matter full of difficulties; in which a
considerate man will not be too ready to decide; a prudent man
too ready to undertake; or an honest man too ready to
promise. They do not respect the public nor themselves, who
engage for more than they are sure that they ought to attempt, or
that they are able to perform. These are my sentiments,
weak perhaps, but honest and unbiassed; and submitted entirely to
the opinion of grave men, well affected to the constitution of
their country, and of experience in what may best promote or hurt
it.
Indeed, in the situation in which we stand, with an immense
revenue, an enormous debt, mighty establishments, Government
itself a great banker and a great merchant, I see no other way
for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in
the Representatives, but the interposition of the body of the
people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and
notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these
Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and
to introduce an arbitrary power. This interposition is a
most unpleasant remedy. But, if it be a legal remedy, it is
intended on some occasion to be used; to be used then only, when
it is evident that nothing else can hold the Constitution to its
true principles.
* * * * *
The distempers of Monarchy were the great subjects of
apprehension and redress, in the last century; in this, the
distempers of Parliament. It is not in Parliament alone
that the remedy for Parliamentary disorders can be completed;
hardly, indeed, can it begin there. Until a confidence in
Government is re-established, the people ought to be excited to a
more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their
Representatives. Standards, for judging more systematically
upon their conduct, ought to be settled in the meetings of
counties and corporations. Frequent and correct lists of
the voters in all important questions ought to be procured.
By such means something may be done. By such means it
may appear who those are, that, by an indiscriminate support of
all Administrations, have totally banished all integrity and
confidence out of public proceedings; have confounded the best
men with the worst; and weakened and dissolved, instead of
strengthening and compacting, the general frame of
Government. If any person is more concerned for government
and order than for the liberties of his country, even he is
equally concerned to put an end to this course of indiscriminate
support. It is this blind and undistinguishing support that
feeds the spring of those very disorders, by which he is frighted
into the arms of the faction which contains in itself the source
of all disorders, by enfeebling all the visible and regular
authority of the State. The distemper is increased by his
injudicious and preposterous endeavours, or pretences, for the
cure of it.
An exterior Administration, chosen for its impotency, or after
it is chosen purposely rendered impotent, in order to be rendered
subservient, will not be obeyed. The laws themselves will
not be respected, when those who execute them are despised: and
they will be despised, when their power is not immediate from the
Crown, or natural in the kingdom. Never were Ministers
better supported in Parliament. Parliamentary support comes
and goes with office, totally regardless of the man, or the
merit. Is Government strengthened? It grows weaker
and weaker. The popular torrent gains upon it every
hour. Let us learn from our experience. It is not
support that is wanting to Government, but reformation.
When Ministry rests upon public opinion, it is not indeed built
upon a rock of adamant; it has, however, some stability.
But when it stands upon private humour, its structure is of
stubble, and its foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it
again—He that supports every Administration, subverts all
Government. The reason is this. The whole business in
which a Court usually takes an interest goes on at present
equally well, in whatever hands, whether high or low, wise or
foolish, scandalous or reputable; there is nothing, therefore, to
hold it firm to any one body of men, or to any one consistent
scheme of politics. Nothing interposes to prevent the full
operation of all the caprices and all the passions of a Court
upon the servants of the public. The system of
Administration is open to continual shocks and changes, upon the
principles of the meanest cabal, and the most contemptible
intrigue. Nothing can be solid and permanent. All
good men at length fly with horror from such a service. Men
of rank and ability, with the spirit which ought to animate such
men in a free state, while they decline the jurisdiction of dark
cabal on their actions and their fortunes, will, for both,
cheerfully put themselves upon their country. They will
trust an inquisitive and distinguishing Parliament; because it
does inquire, and does distinguish. If they act well, they
know that, in such a Parliament, they will be supported against
any intrigue; if they act ill, they know that no intrigue can
protect them. This situation, however awful, is
honourable. But in one hour, and in the self-same Assembly,
without any assigned or assignable cause, to be precipitated from
the highest authority to the most marked neglect, possibly into
the greatest peril of life and reputation, is a situation full of
danger, and destitute of honour. It will be shunned equally
by every man of prudence, and every man of spirit.
Such are the consequences of the division of Court from the
Administration; and of the division of public men among
themselves. By the former of these, lawful Government is
undone; by the latter, all opposition to lawless power is
rendered impotent. Government may in a great measure be
restored, if any considerable bodies of men have honesty and
resolution enough never to accept Administration, unless this
garrison of King’s meat, which is stationed, as in a
citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and
disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with
the ground. The disposition of public men to keep this
corps together, and to act under it, or to co-operate with it, is
a touchstone by which every Administration ought in future to be
tried. There has not been one which has not sufficiently
experienced the utter incompatibility of that faction with the
public peace, and with all the ends of good Government; since, if
they opposed it, they soon lost every power of serving the Crown;
if they submitted to it they lost all the esteem of their
country. Until Ministers give to the public a full proof of
their entire alienation from that system, however plausible their
pretences, we may be sure they are more intent on the emoluments
than the duties of office. If they refuse to give this
proof, we know of what stuff they are made. In this
particular, it ought to be the electors’ business to look
to their Representatives. The electors ought to esteem it
no less culpable in their Member to give a single vote in
Parliament to such an Administration, than to take an office
under it; to endure it, than to act in it. The notorious
infidelity and versatility of Members of Parliament, in their
opinions of men and things, ought in a particular manner to be
considered by the electors in the inquiry which is recommended to
them. This is one of the principal holdings of that
destructive system which has endeavoured to unhinge all the
virtuous, honourable, and useful connections in the kingdom.
This cabal has, with great success, propagated a doctrine
which serves for a colour to those acts of treachery; and whilst
it receives any degree of countenance, it will be utterly
senseless to look for a vigorous opposition to the Court
Party. The doctrine is this: That all political connections
are in their nature factious, and as such ought to be dissipated
and destroyed; and that the rule for forming Administrations is
mere personal ability, rated by the judgment of this cabal upon
it, and taken by drafts from every division and denomination of
public men. This decree was solemnly promulgated by the
head of the Court corps, the Earl of Bute himself, in a speech
which he made, in the year 1766, against the then Administration,
the only Administration which, he has ever been known directly
and publicly to oppose.
It is indeed in no way wonderful, that such persons should
make such declarations. That connection and faction are
equivalent terms, is an opinion which has been carefully
inculcated at all times by unconstitutional Statesmen. The
reason is evident. Whilst men are linked together, they
easily and speedily communicate the alarm of an evil
design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel,
and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they
lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline,
communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance
impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each
other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s
talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and
dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal
confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among
them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part
with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a
connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight
of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest
talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who
is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself
that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours,
are of power to defeat, the subtle designs and united cabals of
ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must
associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice
in a contemptible struggle.
It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth,
that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in
his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted
according to his conscience, and even harangued against every
design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of
his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that
seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls
miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty
demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made
known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be
detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put
himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an
omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much
as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very
rational account of a man’s life that he has always acted
right; but has taken special care to act in such a manner that
his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any
consequence.
I do not wonder that the behaviour of many parties should have
made persons of tender and scrupulous virtue somewhat out of
humour with all sorts of connection in politics. I admit
that people frequently acquire in such confederacies a narrow,
bigoted, and proscriptive spirit; that they are apt to sink the
idea of the general good in this circumscribed and partial
interest. But, where duty renders a critical situation a
necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils
attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation
itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an
officer of the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health,
but he must not desert his station. Every profession, not
excepting the glorious one of a soldier, or the sacred one of a
priest, is liable to its own particular vices; which, however,
form no argument against those ways of life; nor are the vices
themselves inevitable to every individual in those
professions. Of such a nature are connections in politics;
essentially necessary for the full performance of our public
duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into faction.
Commonwealths are made of families, free Commonwealths of parties
also; and we may as well affirm, that our natural regards and
ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that
the bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our
country.
Some legislators went so far as to make neutrality in party a
crime against the State. I do not know whether this might
not have been rather to overstrain the principle. Certain
it is, the best patriots in the greatest commonwealths have
always commanded and promoted such connections. Idem
sentire de republica, was with them a principal ground of
friendship and attachment; nor do I know any other capable of
forming firmer, dearer, more pleasing, more honourable, and more
virtuous habitudes. The Romans carried this principle a
great way. Even the holding of offices together, the
disposition of which arose from chance, not selection, gave rise
to a relation which continued for life. It was called
necessitudo sortis; and it was looked upon with a sacred
reverence. Breaches of any of these kinds of civil relation
were considered as acts of the most distinguished
turpitude. The whole people was distributed into political
societies, in which they acted in support of such interests in
the State as they severally affected. For it was then
thought no crime, to endeavour by every honest means to advance
to superiority and power those of your own sentiments and
opinions. This wise people was far from imagining that
those connections had no tie, and obliged to no duty; but that
men might quit them without shame, upon every call of
interest. They believed private honour to be the great
foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step
towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of
life, showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came
to act in a public situation, might probably consult some other
interest than his own. Never may we become plus sages
que les sages, as the French comedian has happily expressed
it—wiser than all the wise and good men who have lived
before us. It was their wish, to see public and private
virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but
harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and
orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported.
In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this country
was governed by a connection; I mean the great connection of
Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne. They were complimented
upon the principle of this connection by a poet who was in high
esteem with them. Addison, who knew their sentiments, could
not praise them for what they considered as no proper subject of
commendation. As a poet who knew his business, he could not
applaud them for a thing which in general estimation was not
highly reputable. Addressing himself to Britain,
“Thy favourites grow not up by
fortune’s sport,
Or from the crimes or follies of a Court;
On the firm basis of desert they rise,
From long-tried faith, and friendship’s holy
ties.”
The Whigs of those days believed that the only proper method
of rising into power was through bard essays of practised
friendship and experimented fidelity. At that time it was
not imagined that patriotism was a bloody idol, which required
the sacrifice of children and parents, or dearest connections in
private life, and of all the virtues that rise from those
relations. They were not of that ingenious paradoxical
morality to imagine that a spirit of moderation was properly
shown in patiently bearing the sufferings of your friends, or
that disinterestedness was clearly manifested at the expense of
other people’s fortune. They believed that no men
could act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men
could act in concert who did not act with confidence; that no men
could act with confidence who were not bound together by common
opinions, common affections, and common interests.
These wise men, for such I must call Lord Sunderland, Lord
Godolphin, Lord Somers, and Lord Marlborough, were too well
principled in these maxims, upon which the whole fabric of public
strength is built, to be blown off their ground by the breath of
every childish talker. They were not afraid that they
should be called an ambitious Junto, or that their resolution to
stand or fall together should, by placemen, be interpreted into a
scuffle for places.
Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint
endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle
in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it
impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics,
or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the
means of having them reduced into practice. It is the
business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends
of Government. It is the business of the politician, who is
the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those
ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore, every
honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to
pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions
into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common
plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the
State. As this power is attached to certain situations, it
is their duty to contend for these situations. Without a
proscription of others, they are bound to give to their own party
the preference in all things, and by no means, for private
considerations, to accept any offers of power in which the whole
body is not included, nor to suffer themselves to be led, or to
be controlled, or to be over-balanced, in office or in council,
by those who contradict, the very fundamental principles on which
their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair
connection must stand. Such a generous contention for
power, on such manly and honourable maxims, will easily be
distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and
emolument. The very style of such persons will serve to
discriminate them from those numberless impostors who have
deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human
practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below
the level of vulgar rectitude.
It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that
their maxims have a plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear
equal to first principles. They are light and
portable. They are as current as copper coin, and about as
valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the
lowest, and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as the
best. Of this stamp is the cant of Not men, but
measures; a sort of charm, by which many people got loose
from every honourable engagement. When I see a man acting
this desultory and disconnected part, with as much detriment to
his own fortune as prejudice to the cause of any party, I am not
persuaded that he is right, but I am ready to believe he is in
earnest. I respect virtue in all its situations, even when
it is found in the unsuitable company of weakness. I lament
to see qualities, rare and valuable, squandered away without any
public utility. But when a gentleman with great visible
emoluments abandons the party in which he has long acted, and
tells you it is because he proceeds upon his own judgment that he
acts on the merits of the several measures as they arise, and
that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, and not that of
others, he gives reasons which it is impossible to controvert,
and discovers a character which it is impossible to
mistake. What shall we think of him who never differed from
a certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and
who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards?
Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather
fortunate? Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the
dice that a man’s connections should degenerate into
faction, precisely at the critical moment when they lose their
power or he accepts a place? When people desert their
connections, the desertion is a manifest fact, upon which a
direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men. Whether a
measure of Government be right or wrong is no matter of
fact, but a mere affair of opinion, on which men may, as they
do, dispute and wrangle without end. But whether the
individual thinks the measure right or wrong is a point at still
a greater distance from the reach of all human decision. It
is therefore very convenient to politicians not to put the
judgment of their conduct on overt acts, cognisable in any
ordinary court, but upon such a matter as can be triable only in
that secret tribunal, where they are sure of being heard with
favour, or where at worst the sentence will be only private
whipping.
I believe the reader would wish to find no substance in a
doctrine which has a tendency to destroy all test of character as
deduced from conduct. He will therefore excuse my adding
something more towards the further clearing up a point which the
great convenience of obscurity to dishonesty has been able to
cover with some degree of darkness and doubt.
In order to throw an odium on political connection, these
politicians suppose it a necessary incident to it that you are
blindly to follow the opinions of your party when in direct
opposition to your own clear ideas, a degree of servitude that no
worthy man could bear the thought of submitting to, and such as,
I believe, no connections (except some Court factions) ever could
be so senselessly tyrannical as to impose. Men thinking
freely will, in particular instances, think differently.
But still, as the greater Part of the measures which arise in the
course of public business are related to, or dependent on, some
great leading general principles in Government, a man must be
peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company if
he does not agree with them at least nine times in ten. If
he does not concur in these general principles upon which the
party is founded, and which necessarily draw on a concurrence in
their application, he ought from the beginning to have chosen
some other, more conformable to his opinions. When the
question is in its nature doubtful, or not very material, the
modesty which becomes an individual, and (in spite of our Court
moralists) that partiality which becomes a well-chosen
friendship, will frequently bring on an acquiescence in the
general sentiment. Thus the disagreement will naturally be
rare; it will be only enough to indulge freedom, without
violating concord or disturbing arrangement. And this is
all that ever was required for a character of the greatest
uniformity and steadiness in connection. How men can
proceed without any connection at all is to me utterly
incomprehensible. Of what sort of materials must that man
be made, how must he be tempered and put together, who can sit
whole years in Parliament, with five hundred and fifty of his
fellow-citizens, amidst the storm of such tempestuous passions,
in the sharp conflict of so many wits, and tempers, and
characters, in the agitation of such mighty questions, in the
discussion of such vast and ponderous interests, without seeing
any one sort of men, whose character, conduct, or disposition
would lead him to associate himself with them, to aid and be
aided, in any one system of public utility?
I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says that
“the man who lives wholly detached from others must be
either an angel or a devil.” When I see in any of
these detached gentlemen of our times the angelic purity, power,
and beneficence, I shall admit them to be angels. In the
meantime, we are born only to be men. We shall do enough if
we form ourselves to be good ones. It is therefore our
business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most
perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest
feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the,
dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and
conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget
we are gentlemen. To cultivate friendships, and to incur
enmities. To have both strong, but both selected: in the
one, to be placable; in the other, immovable. To model our
principles to our duties and our situation. To be fully
persuaded that all virtue which is impracticable is spurious, and
rather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which
leads us to act with effect and energy than to loiter out our
days without blame and without use. Public life is a
situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who
sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the
enemy.
There is, however, a time for all things. It is not
every conjuncture which calls with equal force upon the activity
of honest men; but critical exigences now and then arise, and I
am mistaken if this be not one of them. Men will see the
necessity of honest combination, but they may see it when it is
too late. They may embody when it will be ruinous to
themselves, and of no advantage to the country; when, for want of
such a timely union as may enable them to oppose in favour of the
laws, with the laws on their side, they may at length find
themselves under the necessity of conspiring, instead of
consulting. The law, for which they stand, may become a
weapon in the hands of its bitterest enemies; and they will be
cast, at length, into that miserable alternative, between slavery
and civil confusion, which no good man can look upon without
horror, an alternative in which it is impossible he should take
either part with a conscience perfectly at repose. To keep
that situation of guilt and remorse at the utmost distance is,
therefore, our first obligation. Early activity may prevent
late and fruitless violence. As yet we work in the
light. The scheme of the enemies of public tranquillity has
disarranged, it has not destroyed us.
If the reader believes that there really exists such a Faction
as I have described, a Faction ruling by the private inclinations
of a Court, against the general sense of the people; and that
this Faction, whilst it pursues a scheme for undermining all the
foundations of our freedom, weakens (for the present at least)
all the powers of executory Government, rendering us abroad
contemptible, and at home distracted; he will believe, also, that
nothing but a firm combination of public men against this body,
and that, too, supported by the hearty concurrence of the people
at large, can possibly get the better of it. The people
will see the necessity of restoring public men to an attention to
the public opinion, and of restoring the Constitution to its
original principles. Above all, they will endeavour to keep
the House of Commons from assuming a character which does not
belong to it. They will endeavour to keep that House, for
its existence for its powers, and its privileges, as independent
of every other, and as dependent upon themselves, as
possible. This servitude is to a House of Commons (like
obedience to the Divine law), “perfect
freedom.” For if they once quit this natural,
rational, and liberal obedience, having deserted the only proper
foundation of their power, they must seek a support in an abject
and unnatural dependence somewhere else. When, through the
medium of this just connection with their constituents, the
genuine dignity of the House of Commons is restored, it will
begin to think of casting from it, with scorn, as badges of
servility, all the false ornaments of illegal power, with which
it has been, for some time, disgraced. It will begin to
think of its old office of CONTROL. It will not suffer that
last of evils to predominate in the country; men without popular
confidence, public opinion, natural connection, or natural trust,
invested with all the powers of Government.
When they have learned this lesson themselves, they will be
willing and able to teach the Court, that it is the true interest
of the Prince to have but one Administration; and that one
composed of those who recommend themselves to their Sovereign
through the opinion of their country, and not by their
obsequiousness to a favourite. Such men will serve their
Sovereign with affection and fidelity; because his choice of
them, upon such principles, is a compliment to their
virtue. They will be able to serve him effectually; because
they will add the weight of the country to the force of the
executory power. They will be able to serve their King with
dignity; because they will never abuse his name to the
gratification of their private spleen or avarice. This,
with allowances for human frailty, may probably be the general
character of a Ministry, which thinks itself accountable to the
House of Commons, when the House of Commons thinks itself
accountable to its constituents. If other ideas should
prevail, things must remain in their present confusion, until
they are hurried into all the rage of civil violence; or until
they sink into the dead repose of despotism.