SECTION I. SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON ASSOCIATIONS IN A STATE.

IN these Remarks will be considered, the cause and end of Associations, their organization, the compact entered into, and its limits and object.

THE Associations to be considered are such as are in a stricter sense popular; where the individuals associate as equals—not as heads of parties—or effective rulers of small districts of a kingdom.

IN Society at large, we may observe three degrees of union, distinctly differing in effect and appearance: the middle or average, which is the very health of public spirit; the weaker, which is its corruption, mostly pre­ceding some fatal catastrophe; and the stronger, which is its fever: sometimes the struggle of a vigorous habit, to expel whatis deleterious in the constitution; and some­times terminating fatally.

A SOCIETY, or a part thereof, may be brought into this stronger degree of union by different means. Com­mon principles will effect it, by the force of an increased [Page 2]reciprocal attraction of the individuals who compose it. The union is greater or less, as these are stronger or more remiss. A party may likewise be condensed into greater union, by external pressure. These two causes are gene­rally seen acting in conjunction.

AT the commencement of such a union, its object may be defined by a formal contract, either in writing or by parole. Its numbers may be increased by the accession of others, who thus become virtually parties in the formal contract. Every society or party is here said to be asso­ciated, when a very strong and unusual degree of union takes place among them, from whichever of these sources it may have originated, and by whatever contract, tacit ^* or express, it may to combined.

THE object of an Association is to unite the action of the Associators in some mode: that of a ‘General As­sociation of the People,’ or Mr. Fox's Association, is to bring a whole people into action, including the popu­lace ^†.

A SINGLE association of the people is the most per­fect union they can be brought into, but its force will be highly concentrated if it give obedience to a Directory at its head, which "the General Association of the People" possesses in the remainder, or rump, of the Whig Club, who have already assumed, over its future members, [Page 3]something superior to legislative power, in giving to the Association a constitution. If an individual of the Direc­tory sway all the rest, for the present he is the effective Dictator of the Association. It is easy to name one whose political character and ability seem to secure him that ascendancy. The founders of this Association profess to attempt to make it universal; if they succeed, they will at first concentrate the greatest possible force, under the greatest possible union.

BUT no single power in a State should operate without a counterpoise (at hand at least) to check it. The ‘General Association,’ by the very definition of the term, is a power which can have no such counterpoise.

IT perhaps might be more accurate to say, that when any power puts a nation in motion in any direction, ano­ther should be always ready capable of deflecting its course upon occasion; for it never, in fact, will continue long in a right track, except by the composition of mo­tion, from two powers at least acting in different direc­tions. Now the whole State must obey the impulse of an Association really general: it is a ship with every inch of canvas out, without a rudder, moved by the single im­pulse of the wind. Again, in all cases where such Asso­ciations exist, and have only great influence, the ship will not answer the helm, or its working will be hindered greatly by it; and the sea, in which she is going at such times, is always full of rocks and quicksands.

WE have had in these latter Centuries only one species of despotism to fear, that of Kings; we have now two, that of Kings and Demagogues. The usurpations of the latter are the more sanguinary and ferocious. When our [Page 4]forefathers saw the former mustering round them powers which might hereafter be abused, they lost no time to impose salutary limits upon them. As much as the ty­ranny of the latter is more dreadful, with so much the more jealousy, its gathering forces together ought to be guarded against. We are not to shut our eyes upon the one, but we are intensely to watch the other. Great is the danger of popularity on certain principles to the in­dividual who possesses it. The man who is become a Dema­gogue, the lowest fall from wisdom, has often lost his free­dom of will to abstain from crimes before he knows it: while he is the apparent conductor of his faction, he is already become their passive instrument; and in such a State the misery of those who are about to fall the victims of the atrocities called his, may be next to his own; they will not be of that magnitude which entitles them to be rated as second to it.

THERE are other modes in which a people or a party scattered over the face of a country may associate. That embraced by the upper and middle classes in 1792 is an example of one of them, and the only one there is any present occasion to consider. They formed themselves into local Associations: the obligations they subscribed varied according to the opinion of every meeting. No single form was followed, to consolidate these numerous and perfectly insulated bodies into one they all seemed to have a like object; but there was nothing more in their constitutions to give them unity of action, unless we may suppose such union could result from the cor­respondence most of them maintained with the commit­tee of the original Association, of which Mr. REEVES was the Chairman. The members of that Committee were the acknowledged heads of no party in the State—in this they [Page 5]are far less formidable than the Whig Club; and Mr. REEVES himself, with no pretensions to the higher or se­condary posts of Government, and holding not even a seat in the House, to attach the members of these several bodies to him, by the dependencies of expectation, certainly has not the dangerous weight of their Leader. This Committee then had no power to draw the other Associa­tions into an union of any kind, and no step to this end was taken by them among themselves.

THESE independent Associations, it is said, exceeded two thousand in number: they had all the union of two thousand individuals, inhabiting a district, in the state of equality; without an elective assembly, a senate of no­bles, or single person to govern them: or of a cluster of two thousand independent republics, without an assembly of the States at their head, to give them that imperfect unity, of which such confederacies have, at certain periods, been seen for a time to keep up the external appearance.

IN these Associations, the principle of union was not at all provided for in their original formation; in that which I shall denominate "the Association of Mr. Fox," because he is certainly its effective Head, we have seen the leading feature to be, the closest concentration of force, and that of the whole people. In this respect, therefore, the first measure is no precedent for the second.

IT has been said in substance above, that the object of all Associations is to combine the subscribers for imme­diate action, or to be in readiness to act on occasion. By immediate action I understand acting in person, and not mediately or by deputy. Mr. REEVES and Mr. Fox have each addressed themselves to the people to form Asso­ciations. [Page 6]To compare their several plans in a second point of view, let the qualities of the immediate action of the people be now considered.

SECTION II. ON THE ACTION OF THE PEOPLE.

WHEN the whole of the people, or a great part of them, are associated, it is for some one purpose; but let that purpose be what it may, they will be bad agents therein. There is not a maxim in Montesquieu which has more truth or brilliancy in it than the following: ‘The people (collectively) have always too much action, or too little. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms the multitude overthrows every thing; sometimes with a hundred thousand feet it creeps only like an in­sect ^*’

THIS difference of the effect of the action of the peo­ple must arise from the difference of the spirit by which they are actuated at such times; and this, again, must depend much upon the object which excited it. Now the object of these Associations is either the continuance of the present state of the members, or the acquisition of a better by their united force: and from this consideration we derive another division of Associations into Defensive and Offensive, and both conjointly.

[Page 7]HENCE, as all Associations to gain what the members do not possess are Offensive, an Association to regain what they cease to possess is Offensive also. Its spirit, at least will be equal in strength to that with which an acquisi­tion of an object never possessed before, is pursued, and possibly more, as some degree of resentment may warm it. If the associators have been deprived of it by law, they contend for an illegal possession, or a legal right they pos­sess not.

LET us now compare these two classes of Associations as to their effects, from the known qualities of human nature; and afterwards, from what History has given us upon the subject.

THE fear of losing what we already enjoy occupies the mind but very little. Hence Associations of parties formed upon a Defensive principle, are very different in the spirit which pervades them, and in their effects, from those formed on principles of acquisition, or Offensive Associa­tions. The efforts men exert to continue as they are, par­take greatly of the moderation of that frame of mind which gives birth to them—content in their present state: a sentiment which has not habitually all that force on our minds which it ought to have. On the other hand, there is no emotion which we indulge ourselves in with so little restraint, as the hope of a change of our state for the better; and the constancy of that indul­gence is such, that men habituate themselves to it; until that passion has, in most minds, acquired a very distem­pered magnitude and force. This is the reason that when men form combinations in Civil Society to defend the good they enjoy, there is too much inertness in all their movements: but if the object of their formal union is [Page 8]something they wish to acquire, they are heated to a fervor which carries them far beyond the bounds of sobriety and expedience; and when a State is divided into two parties, the majority acting upon the first, and the minority upon the second principle, the latter has been too frequently able to overpower the former, with the better cause, and the apparent weight of influence on its side. Hence Mr. Hume, considering the collision of two such parties, says with great truth, ‘One furious enthusiast is able, by his active industry, to surmount the indolent efforts of many sober and reasonable antagonists ^*’.

THEREFORE, these two kinds of Popular Associations, the Defensive and Offensive, fall under the two cases de­scribed by Montesquieu: in the first of which, the action of the people has too little energy; and in the last, over­whelms every thing in ruin. The original Association of Mr. REEVES, and all those afterwards formed upon the same plan, were Defensive, being to guard the Constitu­tion against Republicans and Levellers; Mr. Fox's Asso­ciation is Offensive, being against existing laws formed for that purpose ^†.

I SHALL now consider more particularly the nature of these two species of Associations, chiefly deducing my conclusions from History, beginning with that which is here termed Defensive.

SECTION III. ON THE SPIRIT OF DEFENSIVE ASSOCIATIONS OF THE PEOPLE TO MAINTAIN THE PREROGATIVES OF THE CROWN.

THE spirit by which we may, in future, expect to see defensive Associations actuated, will be clearly seen in the conduct of those which have preceded them. The object of such an Association may be the defence of the authority of one or more of the constituent parts of the Legislature, of particular laws, or of the whole system.

THE Royalists who followed the fortunes of Charles the First, formed an Association in defence of the Crown. The formal nature of this compact I shall presently come to the exposition of. Before the adjournment of the Houses in September 1641, many excellent constitutional and municipal laws had been passed: and if Parliament had suffered some violences to take place, there seemed no danger of their being drawn into precedent. To pass over the two outrages which took place immediately after that assembly met again, the one on the part of the Com­mons, the other on the part of the Crown; the first of which seemed calculated principally to draw after it some­thing of the nature of the second ^*; I go to the further part of the conduct of that assembly. They attempted to possess themselves of a great part of the executive power, by originating commissions by bill, for the highest offi­cers [Page 10]civil and military, the Lords Lieutenants and Depu­ties; they refused to define the extent of their demands for the settlement of the nation ^*; and they seized the King's magazines into their own hands. The catalogue of their attempts of this kind might be enlarged.

THE King was at last supported, not only by a vir­tual, but what is entitled to be called a formal Associa­tion; according to the definition of such a compact gi­ven above. It was purely in its nature Defensive; its ob­ject was to maintain the Constitution and existing laws, including those passed in the Parliament then sitting. The articles of that of the Peers, who first joined him at York, were in writing. The King made a Declaration, ‘That he expected from them no obedience to any com­mands which were not warranted by the laws of the land.’ They ‘answered this Declaration by a Protest, in which they declared their resolution to obey no commands not so warranted. Deliberate engagements,’ (says the Historian) ‘worthy of an English Prince, and an English nobility ^†.’ Again, when the King was on his march to Shrewsbury, in a solemn Protestation at the head of his army, he recognized the conditions on which he was to receive "aid and relief" from his subjects in general. We have here his own testimony to the terms of the As­sociation, the preservation of the established laws; a­mong which, those of the existing Parliament were then first expressly named ^‡. This compact, not reduced into writing by the parties like the first, was a defensive Asso­ciation of the People on terms recited to them; very [Page 11]nearly approaching to the form, and fully equal to the precision of an Association by parole; and to this, those of the Royal Party who were absent, are to be understood as acceding.

THESE transactions are too solemn for us to suppose, without something of proof, that they were intended for the purposes of mere deception. It must be admitted, in­deed, that the Declarations of the Heads of Parties some­times hold forth only specious pretensions to gather strength, not their ultimate objects. While they seem to rest only on the first, their agents, by their intrigues and writings, are preparing the way for the second; but when the primary and secondary partisans of a cause both de­cidedly look one way, we may presume with confidence that the ostensible and real views of the party are the same. "During the war," says Coke ^*, ‘it is observable, that the writers for the King chiefly maintained his cause out of Sir Edward Coke's Pleas of the Crown.’ But this appeal to his authority goes somewhat farther; it amounts to a full, though tacit dereliction of the princi­ples held at Court about seven years before the commence­ment of the war; when Sir Edward Coke's MS. of the Pleas of the Crown, his Comment upon Magna Charta, and on the Jurisdiction of Courts, had been seized by order of the Privy Council, as dangerous and seditious. They had been lately printed by order of the House of Commons, and the originals restored to Sir Edward's heir, on their petition to the King.

THE Parliament at that time, without doubt, declar­ed with equal warmth for the Laws and the Constitution, in general terms; but their literary advocates looked ano­ther [Page 12]way. It suited neither the measures nor the ultimate object of their principals, to fix the attention of the na­tion upon these repositories of constitutional knowledge "I do not find," says Coke, ‘any who wrote for the Parliament ever used any one topic out of the Pleas of the Crown ^*, although that assembly had ordered them to be printed:’ They probably repented of this order.

HENCE it appears, that the principles the Royalists set out upon, and continued to hold, were those of a de­fensive Association.

IT is a question which comes in here, not directly in­deed, but collaterally, Had the popular part of the Con­stitution obtained a due degree of strength when this As­sociation to maintain it in its existing state took place? I have lately held the affirmative side of this question, but the examination of it is of such a length, that it is given in an article of the Appendix ^†. It may however be established very briefly à fortiori, upon the authority of Blackstone, in his History of the Progress and Spirit of the Laws of England, with which he concludes his Commentaries. Speaking of this period, ‘The King had now,’ says this learned Expositor, ‘consented to reduce the prerogative to a lower ebb than was con­sistent with monarchical government ^‡.’ It is a fact, that the Bill of Rights left to the Crown more legal prerogatives than Charles then possessed ‖, or the Royalists fought to continue to him; and that he would have been very glad, after he had been peaceably readmit­ted to reign upon the terms of his Protestation, to have [Page 13]exchanged the whole mass of the prerogatives, which would have been so left him, to be a limited King on the footing of that instrument: and the place of all those Whigs, who, at the Revolution, thought the liberties of the kingdom sufficiently defined and provided for, would, in Charles's time, have been in the royal camp.

IT is remarked in the last Section, that a Defensive As­sociation does not act up to the whole spirit of its princi­ples. It might be expected, if this general observation were frequently false, it would be found so here. The severities the Parliament exercised, in their own quarters, against the Royalists, under the name of Malignants and Delinquents, must have thoroughly taught those about the King what they were to expect, who had actually borne arms against the Parliamentarians, if they were finally conquerors. Beside, the engagements of the King, and the power they held in their own hands to enforce them, might have seemed to them a sufficient security to the Constitution, if that Party were vanquished; but they were determined not to suffer him to make peace as a con­queror. Coke lived and acted in those unhappy times: his father was a member of the Long Parliament, ‘and one of the first rate ^*.’ He tells us, ‘I have often heard several of those who followed the King in the war, say, they as much dreaded the King's overcoming the Parliament, as they feared to be overcome by them ^†.’ This is confirmed in some extracts of James's Papers, which I saw about six years ago. The Parliamentarians he states to have been in such a situa­tion, that the King was able to have put an end to the [Page 14]war at once, the metropolis lying at his mercy for some time: the leading men about him put a negative upon his march to London. The superiority of the Royalists over the Parliamentarians, until the junction of the latter with the Scotch, was incontestible. They acted with the humanity of an able swordsman, who, feeling his advantage over his antagonist, whom he is desirous to spare, waits to disarm him, till he receives a mortal thrust himself. We see here, that Associations in defence of the constitutional power of the Sovereign are not in their spirit inimical to the Constitution; and even that when great danger urges them to secure the full object for which they come forward, and it is placed completely in their power, they will not at up to the full spirit of their original compact.

BUT it may be said, that after such a Party is exasperated by resistance, and the sufferings they must have undergone in the previous struggle, they may be inflamed by victories to forget the moderation which restrained them in their doubtful fortunes, and push their vindictive triumphs to extremes. They will go further than the limits pre­scribed in their defensive compacts, when every thing is in their power. Before we had seen what the extreme of calamity is, in the cruelties inflicted upon the French no­bility and gentry, we should have affirmed, that the Royalists of England had been irritated as much as the utmost severity of persecution could effect in a christian country and in an enlightened age. It may be still said their oppressions and sufferings were great, and they felt their with all the violence of indignation. ‘No social intercourse was then maintained between the two par­ties, no marriages or alliances contracted ^*.’ When [Page 15]the crimes of the usurpers still further alienated the peo­ple, and their divisions annihilated their power, the Royalists suddenly saw themselves masters of the king­dom almost without an effort of their own. As they had all along ‘affected a greater superiority over their mas­ters, the more they were reduced to subjection ^*;’ their ‘implacability,’ their ‘fulness of rancour and revenge against all who were engaged in the late war against them ^†,’ was the object of dread to the latter. Yet, in the first moment of their return to power, they pub­lished Declarations in all the counties of England, which completely bound up their hands from vindictive mea­sures: engagements which they fulfilled with fidelity equal to the conciliatory prudence with which they formed them ^‡. I copy the conclusion of one of them, that of the nobility and gentry in and about the City of London. ‘It is our hope and prayer, that when the building come to be raised, it may not, like Rome, have the begin­ning in the blood of brethren, nor like Babel, be inter­rupted by confusion of tongues: but that we may all speak one language and be of one name; that all mention of parties and factions, and all rancour and animo­sities, may be thrown in and buried like rubbish under the foundation.’ This Declaration was signed by twenty peers, and fifty knights and esquires.

THE Royalists in the Convention Parliament of Charles the Second have been censured for restoring him without [Page 16]conditions; and the misconduct of his reign, and the subsequent misfortunes of his family, have been attributed to this misplaced loyalty. Nothing can be less grounded than this censure: the Royal prerogative, before the breaking out of the Civil Wars, had been reduced ‘to a lower ebb than was consistent with Monarchical Government ^*,’ and any new limitations upon the So­vereign would have been founding a second Republic in the very act of destroying the first. The censure implies like­wise that the authors of the Bill of Rights, in the preroga­tives they left to the Crown, laid the foundations of a future tyranny.

AFTER the Restoration, the Royalists were still united in one compact body. In the second Parliament, their ma­jority over their opponents was decisive; and beside, the whole tide of popular enthusiasm was by this time turned in favour of their principles. Now, to argue in the spi­rit of that jealousy with which a certain Party, now, ver­bally pretends to consider the multitude of insulated As­sociations of the gentry, and the greater part of the middle class of the people, in defence of the Constitution, and the constitutional power of the Sovereign, ‘from such a Parliament, whose principles were supported by the zeal and ardour of a whole people, we might expect all the bad measures which could spring from the con­fidence of strength and the insolence of victory; goaded on by the recent memory of the sternest and severest oppressions, the effects of which, from the heavy mort­gages by which compositions, sequestrations, and dila­pidations, had involved their estates ^†, they must still have continued to feel. We might expect to see the [Page 17]statute-books, almost in every page, polluted by some violation of the Constitution.’—Instead of that, what do we find? Did they not clear that Constitution of every­thing which can be shown to be a relic of Norman ty­ranny, and (one Act excepted) carry it to what Black­stone has called its theoretical perfection ^*? Compare the effects of their victory upon the Constitution with that of Republicans, real and virtual, which preceded it.

THE system of Government, before the sitting of the Long Parliament, stood in the greatest need of a reform: the nation felt something beyond the violation of sophis­tical parities begetting ideal grievances: it laboured under great practical oppressions, and justly dreaded they would be perpetuated and increased. The past conduct of the King could not find a reputable defender in the Com­mons when they first assembled: this assembly contained many excellent men, intent on real reformation, who were soon able to effect whatever they had intended. On his return from Scotland, the King had at least an equa­lity in the Lower House; the best men were disposed to stop at the point they had attained: the other party, backed by the populace of London, rendered it impossi­ble. An instructive lesson to those who directly or in­directly appeal to the populace to effect the best re­forms;—always to be sure to have an effective restraining force in hand, to put an immediate stop to the conti­nuance [Page 18]of their movements when their purpose is at­tained ^*.

I AM approached so near to the Abdication of James, that I shall continue the history of the transactions of this Party to that great epoch. There we shall find some deviations from the rectitude of their former conduct, and a splendid return to it; exhibiting a balance much in their favour After the fiction of the Popish Plot had obtained too extensive belief, the danger of a civil war appeared as threatening at least as in the year 1640. Coke, who saw the ferment of the nation in both pe­riods, affirms, that at that time ‘the nation was more fiercely rent in divisions, under the names of Whig and Tory, than it was before the wars ^†.’ In 1680 the Popular and Republican Party had recourse to the same means of inflaming the Nation which had been practised with so much success in 1640—tumultuous Pe­titioning. The end this leads to is always the same, be its object what it will; namely, the constraint of some power which the Constitution leaves free. It was now employed to obtain an immediate session of Parlia­ment. The Royalists endeavoured to counteract the effect of this measure, by Addresses to the Throne, declaring their ‘abhorrence of those, who endeavoured to en­croach upon the prerogative, by prescribing to the King any time for assembling the Parliament.’ Tumul­tuous Petitioning is at all times a tacit menace, and meant to be so understood. At this juncture it was be­lieved to be the signal of civil war. Yet the abhorrers, influenced by their recollection of the past and their [Page 19]fear for the future, certainly expressed themselves in words not favorable to the right of orderly Petitioning, though they cannot be directly applied against it. It may very well be also affirmed, that the most zealous friends of the popular branch of the Legislature ought at that instant to have been the most determined opposers of the Peti­tioners. For the King, without doubt, had at that time fallen upon the plan which, with an address fatal to his family, he was afterward able to carry into execution;— that of disgusting the nation with the violence of suc­cessive Parliaments, that he might at last rule without them. After the dissolution of his second Parliament, it was his constant practice to issue writs for a new House of Commons, at a season when the most intemperate of his opponents had the best chance to obtain seats in the Lower House. With the same policy, when it was assembled, he so adjusted his concessions to their violent Motions, that the friends of the Laws and Constitution of the kingdom thought them to be so great as to be inconsistent with the internal balance of their system; yet they were so limited that he perfectly knew before­hand they would be rejected contemptuously by Oppo­sition. Besides, this apparent facility in making conces­sions they never could have expected, elevated them with the strongest expectations of a final victory over him; and led them on from extravagance to extravagance, until the Nation, warm in the praises of his conciliating moderation, became united against them, and was not solicitous to see such assemblies meeting again very soon. He hardly made a secret of this policy, previous to the meeting of his last Parliament ^*. The tumultuous Peti­tions [Page 20]of the times increased the violence of the Commons by the assurance of popular support; thus assisting the lures and irritations of the Court to hurry them into the snare. They ought to have been opposed with the most determinate measures: but the zeal of the Addres­sers pointed out to the King, with what rapidity the credit of Parliaments began to fall.

IT is thus we see, that in the middle of the ferment about the Popish Plot, in 1679, he dissolved one Parlia­ment, and issued writs for the election of another next day ^*. This could serve only to irritate his opponents; sure, in the present temper of the lower voters, of their re-election, and even to increase their number. And, that he might farther aggravate the factious violence of the new House of Commons, by repeated proclamations he hindered their assembling for more than a year after the time originally appointed. This gave birth to the Petitions for a session mentioned above. That his con­cessions were constructed with the art I have described, in order to discredit Parliament with the sober part of the people, will appear from the following account from Hume, where we shall see him making a previous expe­riment, upon a large scale, of their aptitude for this very purpose, before he brings them actually forwards into practice. Temple and Shaftesbury were of the Privy Council in 1679, when Charles proposed to the Board a scheme of limitations on a Popish successor, to defeat the Exclusion Bill. From what Temple said on them, he was confirmed in his judgment of the sentiments the true supporters of the National Constitution would form [Page 21]of this sacrifice. It was the opinion of that great States­man, ‘that the restraints were so rigorous as even to subvert the Constitution; and that shackles put upon a Popish successor would not afterwards be easily cast off by a Protestant ^*.’ By this authority Charles was confirmed in his expectation, that, when three successive Parliaments should have rejected such concessions, and the fear of a civil war was hanging over their heads, he should have led the sentiments of a misguided and, at length, confiding people to the point to which he wished to bring them. By the opposite declarations of Shaftes­bury he was likewise assured what powerful assistance he should receive from his faction toward the success of his scheme, when the President of his Privy Council told him at the Board, "that the restraints" (which Temple thought excessive) ‘were insufficient; and that nothing but the total exclusion of the Duke could give a proper security to the kingdom ^†.’ In this he foresaw the contemptuous rejection of his propositions, and his ulti­mate miserable triumph. If I understand what Mr. She­ridan is stated to have said, he thinks he has discovered some similitude between the Associators for the defence of the National Constitution in 1792, and the Royalists at the period here treated of. To discriminate exactly how much of truth and how much of error may enter into that conception, would draw me too far; but of two points I am confident: No system so insidious will be now used to lead us into ruin; and that, enlightened as we are by the example of the past, if such an attempt were made, it would not be successful.

[Page 22]THERE is also a farther charge which may be brought against the party of the Royalists in Charles the Second's time Shaftesbury, to forward his attack upon the Royal power, forged the Popish Plot. Thus he took away the lives of many innocent men with, and some almost with­out, the forms of law. The Royalists, in the latter end of Charles the Second's reign, abused a seeming victory for a short time; giving countenance to something too much like an imitation of those shameful hostilities com­menced by their adversaries, but not on so terrible a scale. But when a general danger, augmented perhaps somewhat by their former intemperance, threatened the liberties of the kingdom, they stood forth the foremost in their defence: the great majority of the Dissenters and Exclusionists had inlisted as the satellites of Ty­ranny.

THE fear of a second Civil War, when they had hardly emerged, half ruined, a very few years before, from the first; the terrors of legal assassination suspended over their heads; and the profound art of Charles the Second, led this defensive party, at the beginning of this latter period, into some bad measures; and though we may say of those of their opponents, which caused them, that they were much worse, they detract somewhat from their political merit, in being the chief instruments in placing William on the Throne, and maintaining him there, but not the greater part of it.

I BUILD nothing upon a few extravagant declarations of either Party. Both of them are to be judged by their practical principles; that is, those which they display in action, or which are displayed in the actions of men [Page 23]whom they hold out as examples. The characters of Parties are also to be estimated like those of individuals— from the general tenor of their actions; not from acci­dental errors, which are an exception to it: and so esti­mating the Defensive Association to preserve the limited Royal power, from the Civil Wars to the Revolution, we have seen that it was friendly to the limitations of the Monarchy, as well as to the Monarchy itself; and twice, in fact, preserved them at its own proper hazard.

I CONCLUDE my remarks on the interesting history of their conduct with the following observation:—If this Association had been able, not only to preserve the legal power of the King when it was attacked, but even to extend it afterwards, and had so done, it by no means follows, that if it had been divided into any great num­ber of sections, as, for instance, two thousand, acting independently of each other, without a Council or single person at their head, that it would have been able to effect both these purposes; or even the first, against a con­centrated Opposition of any degree of power. It appears therefore, that a Republic of small Defensive Associations, such as that which started up in 1792, is by no means dangerous. But a people so associated is much sooner formed into order to oppose any violence upon their Laws and Constitutions, than if the danger comes upon them when totally unprepared.

SECTION IV. ON THE SPIRIT OF DEFENSIVE ASSOCIATIONS TO MAIN­TAIN THE LIBERTIES OF THE SUBJECT.

FOR the support of the Offensive Association now set on foot, examples of others, Defensive in their nature, and whose transactions are intitled to the veneration of all succeeding ages, will certainly at this time be pro­duced, and said to be of the former kind. Of these there are three eminent instances in our History: The Association of the Barons at Merton; that in the time of John; and the Coalition of the Whigs and Tories in 1688, to invite the Prince of Orange into the kingdom. Two of these at feast we might have passed by, as not being Popular Associations, if it had not been foreseen that it would be necessary to show that all of them were Defensive only; and to take care, that in all discussions on this subject, a Defensive Association of the Nobles should not be brought as an instance of an Offensive Associ­ation of the People.

FROM the definition of the term, it appears that the noble and unanimous resistance of the Barons against the intro­duction of the Civil Law into England, in the Parliament at Merton, said to have been designed by the Clergy, was a Defensive Association, not Popular.

THE Association of the Barons against John was likewise Defensive. At his coronation he had sworn [Page 25]to maintain the Laws of Edward the Confessor, the particulars of which were fallen almost into oblivion. A Charter of Henry the First recited and confirmed them. Of the contents of this little was known, until a copy of it fell into the hands of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. Favored by opportunity, he determined to make use of this fortunate discovery. In this he pro­ceeded step by step, with great address. One condition imposed by the Archbishop, before he gave John an absolution from his excommunication, was, his renew­ing his oath to the Saxon Laws; he afterward induced him to confirm the Charter of Henry the First. At the breaking up of the following Parliament in London, the Archbishop called a private meeting of some of the chief of the Barons. They were easily induced to promise to take the first convenient opportunity to have this Charter validly established, and they retained it in their own hands ^* John now departed on an unsuccessful expe­dition to his foreign dominions. A little time pre­vious to his return, the confederacy having spread wider, and comprehending almost all the Barons of England, a meeting was summoned by the Archbishop at St. Ed­mundsbury, under pretence of devotion. It was there agreed, that they should prefer their petition for the ac­tual observance of the Charter in a body; and in the mean time take arms to enforce their demands. These [Page 26]particulars being settled, going up to the high altar in the church there, they swore in their order to ad­here to each other, and not to lay down their arms until they had obtained their demands; which, after some in­effectual resistance, John was obliged to grant at Runny­mede. This Association, sanctified by the forms of reli­gion, was strictly Defensive. The Charter had before been admitted by John to be the Law of the Land, and even some articles of that instrument, which would have increased the value of their baronies, but greatly affected the Crown revenues ^*, the Barons had the moderation to give up, when John could not have succeeded in maintaining them. But the faithless character of that Prince induced them to demand the nomination of twenty-five members of their own body, as conservators of the articles of the amended Charter ^†. We find here, and during the whole of the following reign, when the House of Com­mons first became a constituent part of the Legislature, the English Clergy taking part with the majority of the Barons against the Pope and the King, who always acted in conjunction.

IT must be admitted, that this and the former Associ­ation were purely Defensive. They also resembled in nothing a Popular Association: they are no more intitled [Page 27]to be called so, than a league of the numerous Princes, Dukes, and Counts of Germany against the Emperor, or the Ecclesiastical Electors would be; or the opposition of an hereditary Senate of Nobles against a Prince or the Prelates of a State.

AT the Revolution there were two Associations; for we may call the invitation of the Prince of Orange an act proving an antecedent compact of that kind; and after his landing, there was an instrument bearing that name, drawn up by Burnet, on the requisition of Sir Edward Seymour. He is the best reporter of the object of his own paper. It contained, in few words, ‘an engagement of the subscribers to stick together, in pursuing the ends of the Prince's Declaration ^*,’ and in defence of his person. That Declaration was confined to past violations of law, and a requisition of redress by Parliament. ‘And the Prince thereby assured the world, that his expedition was intended for no other design but to procure a free Parliament, to heal the breaches between the King and his subjects ^†.’ Nothing is to be discerned here but measures of defence and concili­ation. ‘It was signed by all who were with the Prince, even by many who refused afterwards to take the oaths to the Prince when seated on the Throne ^‡’

THE Abdication of James annihilated the greater part of the conditions of the Association, by rendering the execution of them impossible; but while it subsisted, no act [Page 28]took place which went beyond its primary object; and when the members found themselves in circumstances absolutely unprovided for, because they could not have possibly been foreseen, they acted on the defensive spirit of that engagement which survived the letter. At the Revolution ‘no one part of the Constitution was altered or suffered the least damage; but, on the con­trary, the whole received new life and vigour.’ This was the doctrine held by Sir Joseph Jekyl at the Trial of Dr. Sacheverel ^*.

THIS compact likewise was very different from a Gene­ral Association of the People: it was an Association of Heads of Parties, or rather of persons holding a power over their followers; somewhat between Heads of Parties and Feudal Chiefs. For, in the confusion of the Civil Wars, the tenants and dependants of the greater landed Gentry had been accustomed again to follow them as their mili­tary leaders. The habits and ideas of the military subordi­nation of a tenant to his chieftain, thus revived, were not worn out again. Much of it was superadded to the in­fluence of landlord over tenant, as we now see it exist. This yeomanry therefore did not, by the act of follow­ing their landlords, accede to the Association as equal parties therein, or as invested with an equal power of deliberation and resolution in claims or measures. That great majority of People, the Populace, did indeed, while the event of the Revolution remained in suspense, de­clare their wills twice; or at least the only part of the lower orders of the kingdom who were enabled by cir­cumstances to declare it; that is, the populace of Lon­don. [Page 29]When James, after the failure of his attempt to go over to France, returned thither, ‘never Prince re­turning after victory to his capital, was received with louder acclamations of joy ^*’ by the "populace." On the 16th of December they rejoiced at the appearance of his resumption of the Royal power; and on the 4th of the following February they expressed their second will upon the subject; tumultuously assembling in crowds at the doors of the Houses of Parliament, loading with imprecations those who adhered to their will of the 16th of December, and its opponents with blessings. The Prince of Orange issued a Proclamation to stop these disorderly proceedings, although in his favour ^†.

THE manner in which the attack upon our Constitu­tion of Government will be on this occasion made, in writing or speaking, is so evident, that it is not difficult to guard against it. It may be very well foreseen, that every Association recorded in our History, which has been followed by a happy event, will be cited as a precedent in defence of Mr. Fox's. To prevent such irrelevant instances being brought into [Page 30]the argument, it has been shown that none of these have been General Associations of the People, or to which the populace were a party; and that none of them have been Associations of acquisition, or Offensive.

SECTION V. ON THE SPIRIT OF OFFENSIVE ASSOCIATIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

1. ON PRETENCES OF RELIGION.

I REPEAT what has been laid down in a former Section: Those Associations are here termed Offensive, the objects of which are, some change of the existing Laws; whether relating to the governors or the govern­ed:—and Popular, in which the populace become, or are invited to become, contracting parties.

THE objects of suck Associations may be very laxly declared, or they may be very accurately limited, in the original contract. After having given examples of some of the indefinite kind, it will be in like manner shown what confidence may be placed in the fidelity of the en­gagements of limitation held out by others.

THE instances of Associations, the objects of which have been very laxly defined, are so many, that it will be expedient to arrange them in some order. Those which [Page 31]have been formed under Religious Pretences, and those on the principles of the Rights of Men, will form two Sections: in the latter no particular account of the late French Revolutions will be entered upon; they will be referred to incidentally, and by way of illustration only. Offensive Associations, strictly limited, will then become the subject of a separate Section.

POPULAR Offensive Associations, under religious pre­tences, are first to be here considered. I shall begin with the Catholic League in France, which was formed in 1575. Its nominal object was to annul the famous Edict of Pacification, granted by the King to the Protestants in May the same year: hence it was an Offensive Associa­tion. It was not until the death of the Duke of Alençon, nine years after, that it was converted into an instrument to further an attempt to change the succession of the Crown. This was the fatal precedent of the Scottish Covenant for the abolition of Episcopacy; afterwards adopted in England with some variations. By the opera­tions of these General Associations, Great-Britain and France were each divided, as it were, into two hostile nations, shut up in one territory, and each of them in­volved in civil wars, in usurpation, and anarchy, about twenty years. This is not the first instance in which the contagious example of a French insurrection has given rise to another in this country, threatening to annihilate us as a nation: but I hope our remotest posterity will continue to be able to say,—It is the last.

THE only remaining compact falling under this divi­sion, here to be noticed, is the Protestant Association under Lord George Gordon. This likewise was Offen­sive, [Page 32]as its object was the repeal of certain Acts made in favour of the Romanists ^*. The plan of his Association also, though nominally of a part of the people, was effectively general; for the proportion of the followers of the Roman Church in Britain in this age, to the number of Protestants, does not exceed that which took place in King William's time; or the hundred and seventy-ninth part of the people ^†. The spirit of persecution had long been dormant, and it might have been hoped was ex­tinct: for the passions of the populace had not for years been roused against the objects to which they were now turned. Yet the direction was given to them with so little preparation, as hardly to be the subject of alarm: they unexpectedly broke out into insurrection, and we saw them masters of the metropolis some days, the pri­sons broken down, and their vilest inhabitants turned loose again upon Society, or set at their head to plan and lead them on to more dangerous and enormous crimes; fires in every quarter of the City; and the Bank, the depository of the wealth and the column of the credit of the Nation, which cannot be shaken without extreme hazard, or overthrown without crushing everything, be­neath it in its ponderous ruin, hardly saved from their attack; when abroad we were at war with four nations, without an ally, the rest of Europe looking upon our danger with a lowering and inimical neutrality, and at home we were almost torn in pieces by our intestine divi­sions.

AS it is not pretended that any amelioration of the spirit and manners of the English populace has taken [Page 33]place since this dangerous period; we may legitimately, from this event; deduce some conclusions on the state of their dispositions at this juncture, directly applicable to our main subject. The inveterate spirit of persecuting the Romanists, and the principles of Levelling, were the distinguishing marks of the Republicans of the last age. Little art or endeavour, however, has been exerted to keep the former alive, ever since it began apparently to die away. Yet we have seen this spirit, as it were, start up, and threaten the ruin of the State. But the embers of Republicanism and Levelling have, during all that period, been carefully raked up; and, for fear they should become extinct, there were hands which were seen from time to time supplying them with a suf­ficient quantity of fuel to keep them alive. These prin­ciples have been never suffered to die; but lately they have been diffused with the most systematic and malig­nant diligence, and they have been embraced with all the fervor of a new fanaticism by a great number of the populace. Where Lord George Gordon made one real enthusiast, the Agitators have made fifty. And is there no danger to be apprehended from the new Association, to which they will all throng to subscribe, when that of Lord George Gordon, constructed with so much less art and preparation, formed of so much feebler materials, brought us to the brink of ruin? 'It was not,' it will be said, ‘the real fanatics that did the mischief, but a multitude of miscreants under the mask of the fanaticism of religion.’ But are the morals of the populace improv­ed since that time? Are not such miscreants mixed among them at least in an equal proportion? And if any mask be provided for them, will they not make use of it, whether it be that of religious or political fanaticism? If we urge to you the example of France, you will say, ‘No [Page 34]such violences are to be dreaded from the populace of England: they are more enlightened than the French were at the commencement of the Revolutions; that the oppressions of the commonalty of France was greatly more than that class of people experience here.’ As for the lights which they may possess, those which have been given them since the Riots of 1780 are not of a kind to make them less forward in insurrec­tion; and as for oppression, the poor man suffers none here: he has been taught, indeed, to give that name to the whole amount of the taxes; as well of those which do not, as those which do affect him: this total is his re­puted measure thereof; and it has been increased in these last fifteen years. Popular tumults are therefore to all appearance more probable, more big with the prospect of national ruin now, than they were on the day preceding the insurrection of the Protestant Association. And when you call upon us to rely upon the good sense of the populace to make a just comparison of their own state with that of the lower classes of other nations; by exaggerating the increase of the taxes, and declaiming ^* perpetually and with extrava­gance upon it, you endeavour to make the result of that com­parison false, on which you call upon us to depend. With their minds thus prepared, whether the fanaticism infused into them for that purpose be either of the kind called religious or political, or both conjointly, they generally effect all the destruction in their power: and if their association now become general throughout the kingdom, their power will have no limit. It may be asked now, what will become of that position so much insisted on, that ‘nothing but real grievances will drive the popu­lace [Page 35]into insurrection and violence; that their wrath, though often dreadful in its consequences, is always just in its cause and commencement; that though they may reason ill, the effect of the errors of their judgement always passes off in harmless and empty noise; and that they never begin to act but from their feelings only, which cannot deceive them.’ In this insurrection we see a strong instance of the falsity of this opinion, which many have endeavoured to sup­port from different motives, in order to impress upon us a belief of the infallibility of the people, when they come into political action. The humane indulgence ex­tended to a respectable but persecuted sect in 1780, was no grievance which the populace felt anything from. It even attacked no prejudice which had any active opera­tion in their minds the day before this Association was planned: and the event clearly shows, that false abstract principles may be infused into them; prejudices long dor­mant may be re-excited as it were in a moment, and in­stantaneously produce an insurrection which may hazard or destroy the existence of Civil Government.

SECTION VI. ON THE SPIRIT OF POPULAR OFFENSIVE ASSOCIATIONS, ON THE PRINCIPLE OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN (SO CALLED).

EVERY instance in History of the fatal effects of re­ligious fanaticism has, in this age, been studiously and invidiously collected, and brought forward to public view; but those of combinations and associations to ob­tain Political Equality, and to vindicate what are now [Page 36]called the Rights of Men, have been little enquired after; and France is very generally supposed recently to have exhibited the first example of the calamities they have produced. I have often wondered at the prevalence of this opinion, and it would have been fortunate for human kind, and for that fine country in particular, if it had been true. But her fate has resembled too much that of the beautiful and cultivated tracts which lie round the base and ascend part of the sides of Mount Vesuvius: the volcano seems extinct for ages; the harvest, the vine­yard, the farm, the villa, the palace, and every mark of fertility, cultivation, and splendor, seem to have made it their selected spot: but the periodical eruption returns, and a conflagration sweeps all these beauties from the earth.

WHEN the populace is brought into action, they will ultimately be governed in their conduct by the most vio­lent set of principles which has infected any large sec­tion of them. This point is laid down simply now; I shall return to the consideration of it. But the princi­ple of the Equality of Right, and that understood in its most fatal sense, has been long fermenting among, and at length infected no small part of the lower classes of Society in Europe. While, therefore, we look upon the late calamities of France as a political phenomenon, sin­gle and unprecedented in its kind, when it is only one instance among many, we estimate the greatness of our hazard much beneath its magnitude, which increases in proportion to the number of such events that have taken place during the period of authentic history, and like­wise with the relaxation of our watchfulness caused by this error; which is more singular, as our own History [Page 37]points out to us the danger of England being a second time desolated by the contagion of these principles, by an express example. This Section I shall divide into Parts; each containing the history of one insurrection of this kind, with observations.

I. ON THE INSURRECTION OF THE JEWS, BEGUN IN THE REIGN OF NERO, AND TERMINATED IN THAT OF VESPASIAN.

THE first country which the supposed modern metaphy­sical philosophy of politics deluged with the blood of its inhabitants, was Judea. Judas and Sadoc (says Jose­phus) were the founders of a school of philosophy new to mankind ^*. Their followers were distinguished from the three pre-established sects, by teaching the doctrines of Liberty in the abstract (THE, FREE): their attach­ment to these nothing could move. Those who dressed out their panegyrical orations on Liberty with the am­bitious ornaments of tragical declamation ^†, were sure of an admiring audience. Thus we see the orators of the Palais Royal and Copenhagen House had their predeces­sors in Judea. These men consecrated the doctrines of Civil Equality, by considering it as a point of religion to acknowledge no lawful superior or King but God ^‡; and [Page 38]then (perhaps) mankind were first taught the sacred duties of insurrection; and Ananus, the high priest, is repre­sented to have been so much attached to the principle of Equality, that he delighted to make it evident in his con­duct to the most abject. His enthusiasm for Liberty ex­ceeded all measure, and he was an ardent lover of Demo­cracy ^*. The professors of this new philosophy, by an insurrection, got all the powers of the State into their hands. I shall not describe here the crimes of a fero­cious populace, whom they let loose against the upper orders, or excited against each other. Every successful commotion, upon these principles, has the same termi­nation;—the massacre or emigration of the Nobles and people of property. That of Judea ended finally by the Jews ceasing to exist as a Nation.

II. INSURRECTION OF THE BAGAUDAE, IN THE REIGN OF DIOCLESIAN.

BUT France has suffered oftener from the spreading of these principles than any other nation. When that country has been greatly exhausted by foreign wars, they have repeatedly burst, as it were, from a latent state, into action, and added this extreme of calamity to what it suffered before. A long series of troubles agitated Gaul from the reign of Gallienus to that of Dioclesian; the peasants, oppressed with the joint weight of public dis­tress and feudal services ^†, took arms against their lords; [Page 39] ‘an event (says Gibbon) which, though it is mentioned in a few words by our imperfect writers, deserves, from its singularity, to be recorded in the history of human man­ners.’ The insurgents were called the Bagaudae; a name derived from the Celtic word Bagad, which signifies a tumultuous assembly. ‘ They asserted (continues the historian) THE NATURAL RIGHTS OF MEN, but they asserted those rights with the most savage cruelty. The Gallic Nobles, justly dreading their revenge, either took refuge in the fortified cities, or fled from the wild scene of anarchy. The peasants reigned without controul ^*.’ As this account was published in 1776, it will not be said that the historian has tortured some obscure and brief notices into a parallel with the late Revolutions in the same country. The reduction of the Bagaudae was the first exploit of Maximian, after his nomination to the Empire by Dioclesian.

III. INSURRECTION OF THE JACQUERIE, IN THE REIGN OF JOHN OF FRANCE.

THE next irruption of this kind, which laid waste France, took place in 1358. It resembled that of 1789 so much, not only in its general character, but in par­ticular circumstances, that we seem almost to be read­ing the same history under different names. It was the insurrection of the Jacquerie, to whom the modern Jaco­bins [Page 40]have succeeded, not only in spirit, but in title ^*, after the interval of 440 years.

THE war with England had exhausted the resources of France; King John was a prisoner in London; the Dauphin, then of the age of eighteen, assumed the exer­cise of the Government, and having obtained a truce of two years of the English, he called an Assembly of the States to procure supplies. Here he found every Order negligent of the public distress, and desirous only to aug­ment its own power: he therefore hastened their separa­tion. At that juncture, Charles the Bad, King of Na­varre, who had great possessions in France, aspired to the Throne. We have seen him and his crimes re­vived in one of his descendants, the late Duke of Or­leans.

[Page 41]CHARLES of Navarre had been able to gain to his party the seditious Prevôt des Marchands, or Mayor of Paris, Marcel, and that factious populace. The latter sent an assassin to murder the Treasurer of France, who after­wards took sanctuary: the Regent sent two mareschals to apprehend and execute him: the Mayor, Marcel, upon this raised the populace, broke into the apartment of the Prince, murdered the mareschals before his face, and, when he saw him apprehensive of his own fate, as a mark of his protection, snatched the Prince's hat off, and clapped the cap (the badge of the faction of Navarre) upon his head. I must candidly remark here, that the colour of this cap was blue ^*, and not red. The Dau­phin-Regent was forced to dissemble his resentment, and to take all in good part.

AFTER this insult, he was detained in a kind of capti­vity; in which state a poison was administered to him, by which he lost his hair and his nails. This was sus­pected to have been done by the direction of the King of Navarre.

IN the meantime the faction at Paris, though seem­ingly inclined to Charles, was more disposed to change France into an effective Republic than to pull down one [Page 42]King in order to set up another. The plan of the leaders of the insurgents of Paris of that time was precisely copied in the first of the new French Constitutions; it was ‘to change the form of the Government, to vest the supreme power in the Third Estate, and to leave the King his title with little or no authority.’ This was the Constitution proposed by that metropolis to the other cities, but then rejected by them. It was not until some little time after that their minds were elevated to the height of such a Revolution ^*. But the Regent, who had been obliged to temporize and dissemble, having been so fortu­nate as to escape out of Paris, and not to be intercepted in his flight, that capital and the other cities of the kingdom shook off the Royal authority, took the Government into their own hands, and spread disorder into every Province; and the troops, left without pay, no longer regarded their Officers, or were restrained by any discipline from indis­criminate plunder.

YET this devoted country was to be afflicted with the addition of another calamity, in weight and magnitude ex­ceeding the total of what it then suffered: this was the in­surrection of the Jacquerie or peasantry. The populace of the cities had found employment for the exercise of the new lights they had obtained in the school of the meta­physical politicians, in the establishing of their new muni­cipalities or little independent republics; destined, perhaps, if their progress to the perfection of civil society had not received a check, to have become the insulated and repul­sive elements of a prior French Republic, one and indivi­sible. The principles of this Association, as it has been [Page 43]already remarked, have been assigned by Gibbon, who par­ticularly professes to have examined the original accounts of them himself, for the purpose of acquiring light to fix the character of a similar event. These insurgents, he says, "asserted the natural Rights of Man." It has been proved, that he ought not to be accused of having sur­veyed the occurrences of this period with an eye tinctured with the prejudices of the present; of having corrupted the faith of history to inflame what is called liberticidal prejudice.

THE Members of the Jacquerie did not repel the vio­lence of the citizens and soldiers as an injury to them­selves; they followed it as an example. The object of their fury was the Gentry; whom, while they were recovering their own rights, they upbraided with cowar­dice for deserting their Sovereign at the battle of Poictiers. From this precedent, perhaps, has arisen the constant sub­sequent practice of those who are endeavouring to convert a Monarchy into a Republic, to mask their first measures under great professions of zeal for the honour, happiness, and dignity of the Prince.

‘THE castles of the gentry were consumed by fire, and levelled to the ground; and they were hunted like wild beasts, and put to the sword without mercy. The sa­vages proceeded so far as to impale some gentlemen and roast them alive before a slow fire. Their wives and daughters were first ravished, and then murdered: a body of 9000 of them broke into Meaux, where the wife of the Dauphin, with above 300 Ladies, had taken shel­ter: the most brutal treatment and most atrocious cru­elty were justly dreaded by this helpless company: but [Page 44]the Captal de Buche, though in the service of Edward, yet moved by generosity and the gallantry of a true knight, flew to their relief, and beat off the peasants with great slaughter ^*.’

[Page 45]ONE observation must be here made on the proximate cause of both these sanguinary insurrections, adverting more particularly to the latter.

FROM the very nature of the feudal system, it is not to be supposed that either of these calamitous periods was dis­tinguished by any extraordinary oppression of the lower orders by the Nobility or Gentry. Previous to the latter, the arms of Edward, and the intrigues of the King of Navarre, had long kept France in a most unsettled state; and the Nobility must have felt, for a considerable term of time, an increasing want of the attachment of their vassals, and, consequently, been obliged to treat them with more than ordinary regard. Beside, it is by no means certain, that in the semi-barbarous state in which France was then plunged, the burthen of the feudal services exceeded the value of the protection the tenant then received from his lord: the latter at that time might be esteemed fully equal to the former. As it was a well-known practice for those who possessed allodial lands, or such as were free from feudal [Page 46]services, as our freeholds, to convey them over to some neighbouring baron, who engaged to grant them back again to the former owner, liable to the feudal services of his barony; that thus the former independent proprietor, by becoming a vassal, might acquire a right to the protec­tion of his new lord. Those services he therefore volun­tarily, engaged in, because what he gave was not of the same value to him as what he acquired: and they were undoubtedly of the kind called privileged or definite: he certainly did not thereby submit himself to a state of villenage in gross.

IV. INSURRECTION UNDER WAT TYLER IN ENGLAND, IN THE REIGN OF RICHARD THE SECOND.

THESE events in France must in all probability have pro­duced the first party of Alarmists, who then held out the danger of these principles getting footing here; and it is also probable, that there were many English in that age, some from that levity which derides all troublesome foresight; some not favouring their ultimate success, but desirous to promote their own oblique purposes by their temporary extension and prevalence; and others who desired to see them adopted in practice to their utmost extent; who treated the melancholy declamations of the Alarmists of the Four­teenth Century, on the calamities to be apprehended at home, from the effect of the insurrection of the antient Jacobins or Jacquerie upon the minds of the populace, with the ridicule the same apprehensions meet in our days: the verification their predictions received from the event, the politicians described above do their utmost to give to those of their successors; and they may succeed. In the time of the Jacquerie, Edward the Third sat upon the [Page 47]Throne; and the vigour of his administration, and the po­pularity of his brilliant reign, must have been a great re­straint upon those principles from bursting forth into pre­sent action: but the distemper of the minds of the popu­lace, though latent, was probably spreading during its lowering decline. It broke out in the minority of Richard. Seditious orators were not then wanted to propagate the sacred duty of insurrection; the name of one of them is handed down to us: John Ball, a priest, went about the country, inculcating on his audience ‘the equal right to liberty, and to all the goods of nature; the tyranny of artificial distinctions; and the idea of primitive equali­ty ^*.’ To borrow a metaphor from a modern writer of great eminence, it was thus a mine was dug to blow up civil society; a poll tax had been granted by parliament, and an insult offered by an abandoned collector to the daughter of a blacksmith, set fire to the train which led to it. The populace of Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Sussex, Surrey, Suffolk, Norfolk, and the counties of Cambridge and Lincoln, immediately flew to arms: and before the Government had the least warning of the danger, the disor­der had risen beyond controul or opposition: the most audacious and criminal of their leaders assumed the feigned names of Tyler, Straw, Carter, or Miller, ‘by which they were fond of denoting their mean origin.’ Thus those who borrow their principles from France now bor­row from the same country the gross name of Sans Culottes. In all insurrections of this character the populace are con­stantly actuated by one motive, "the purpose of levelling all mankind:" the means too by which its end is pursued are always the same: ‘the insurgents committed the most [Page 48]outrageous violences on such of the Nobility or Gentry as had the misfortune to fall into their hands;’ and ‘favoured by the city rabble they broke into London; ****murdered the Primate, the Chancellor, and the Treasurer; ****cut off the heads of all the Gentry whom they laid hold of; expressed a particular animosity against the lawyers; and pillaged the warehouses of the rich merchants:’ even the Widow of that revered hero the Black Prince could not escape from their insolence and outrage; ‘some of them, to shew their purpose of levelling all mankind, forced kisses from her ^*:’ ‘whose head they also broke in a tyrannizing frolick ^†.’

This event being recorded in our own History, I shall be more particular in my observations upon it.

THE construction and mode of working that machinery, which is to disorganise Society we see was not then totally unknown: and the means to diffuse constitutional infor­mation employed in that period were the same as are now in practice, if we except the press, that most powerful en­gine to promote the best and the worst ends; and on the balance, for a certain period after the commencement of the attack, a formidable addition to dangers of this kind. The minds of the populace were regularly prepared for insurrection in the manner described; and the principle of equalizing, then copied from the French, was the pre­disposing cause of this unhappy and sanguinary commo­tion. The criminal insolence of a tax-gatherer, repelled [Page 49]by an immediate murder, was the occasion or premature signal only, which brought this spirit into action, not the primary origin of the series of events which then com­menced.

THE principles of sedition preached by John Ball have a singular similitude to those now solicitously propagated. We are able to trace in them the great outline of those laid down in the advice of Mr. Barlow to the Privileged Orders. This is evident in the account given of the former from Hume. It is worth the while only to instance particularly one of these points of resemblance, which is curious and striking. Mr. Ball, in his Homilies on the Rights of Man, preached on "their equal title to all the goods of nature;" and Mr. Barlow, that ‘every man is born with an impre­scriptible claim to a portion of the elements, which por­tion is termed his birthright ^*.’ We see both of them lay down the same doctrine in the same guarded manner; half holding forth to the populace, and half keeping back, an expectation of an equal division of lands. This Century had not the honour of first discovering this fine principle of tribunitial morality, in the classical records, or of the re­invention of it.

THERE seems to me little reason to ascribe the miseries in which this insurrection involved England, at that parti­cular point of time, to any other cause than the contagion of the principles which had prevailed in France some time before. I shall, however, state and consider what may be said against this.

[Page 50]MR. HUME joins another with it, on the authority of Froissart, ‘that personal slavery was then more general in England, than in any other country in Europe.’ He himself, in some places, has censured that Writer, as falling into many errors in point of fact; but there is one circumstance which shews, that the number of slaves (by which I suppose villeins in gross ^* to be meant) must, in that age, have been very greatly reduced. The influence of the clergy over the minds of the people had, at that time, suffered a shock which it never recovered. On this something more particular will be said hereafter ^†. Hence the greater part of every Revolution they were to bring about, in the relative state of the different classes of Society, had been already effected. Now the total abo­lition of this species of slavery was completed in Eng­land, and that by the exertions of the clergy, before the Reformation; for Sir Thomas Smith, who was Secre­tary to Edward the Sixth, says, that in all his time he never knew any villein in gross throughout the realm: ‘for he tells us, that the holy fathers, monks, and friars, had, in their confessions, and especially in their extreme and deadly sickness, convinced the Laity how dangerous a practice it was for one christian man to hold another in bondage; so that temporal men, by little and little, by reason of that terror of their con­sciences, were glad to manumit all their villeins ^‡.’ It seems, therefore, reasonable to suppose, the effect of [Page 51]their exhortations being at all times proportioned to their ascendancy over men's minds in general, that they made the most rapid progress in this work, and had performed the greatest part of it before their influence was much de­clined, or before the accession of Richard the Second: nor are we to ascribe those great insurrections to perso­nal slavery, at a time in which it was greatly dimi­nished, which are not to be found in the time it was most prevalent.

FURTHER, to shew that nothing is contained in this instance, tending to demonstrate that a calamity of the like nature is probable at present, it will be said, that ‘these were the excesses of a barbarous age, but that the diffusion of light in Society has humanized the manners of every class of mankind, and that this is particularly the case of England at this period; and although in the Fourteenth Century, the populace both here and in France were equally involved in darkness, and led with the fame facility into atrocious crimes; that the lower orders in this kingdom have, in the former of these respects, and consequently in the latter, in this age, a relative superiority over their neighbours, which they were by no means entitled to boast of in the age of Edward the Third. The conclusion of this is obvious: that a danger so probable then as justly to have been the subject of alarm, must be totally visionary now.’

BUT it cannot be admitted that the populace of Eng­land were then so totally involved in ignorance as this objection supposes; for whenever a certain portion of knowledge on any one subject becomes generally diffused [Page 52]among the upper classes of a State, their inferiors will soon become possessed of that part thereof, which their relative situation permits them to acquire. The increase of the information of the former becomes disseminated among the latter, by the middle class, conversing ordina­rily with both. And the feudal system tended to insure this, in the age which is under consideration; not only by the frequent attendance of the vassals in the courts of their Lords, but by the multitudes of retainers which their hospitality, their ostentation, or their love of war, induced them to live surrounded by. These originally taken from, occasionally mixing with, and ultimately returning to the body of the common people, diffused among them the outline of every new opinion, as soon as it was esta­blished. The propagation of new ideas throughout the whole of Society, was not much less rapid then than it is now; much of the effect of the discovery of printing be­ing counterbalanced by the change of customs in this par­ticular; and thus perhaps the feudal system contained within itself the seeds of its own decline.

NOW from a detail of numerous circumstances pre­served to us is history, it appears, that the upper classes in the reigns of Edward the Third and his successor, were far advanced in general knowledge, and particularly in that of political, commercial, and constitutional prin­ciples: insomuch that it seems that the nation was, in these respects, in a retrograde state, from the age of Edward the Third to the accession of the Tudors, and that it did not re-acquire its former point of advance upon the whole, until the reigns of the first Scottish Princes ^*.

[Page 53]In the history of France for the same period, I recol­lect none of these circumstances, and I think it would be in vain to search for them: for the greater part of these improvements were most probably so early called forth in England, by the institution of a House of Commons re­latively new, and then beginning to produce its effects on the spirit and ideas of the nation.

OF this knowledge, according to what is observed above, every class of the nation must have imbibed its share, according to its powers of absorption: the genius of the age prevented its being confined. If, therefore, we compare the English populace of that period with that of France, as great a superiority at least must then be al­lowed to them in useful knowledge as can be admitted now: but the event shewed, that the difference in that age was not enough to protect this nation from the expe­rience of many, and the hazard of all the miseries which had recently overwhelmed France. And as that diffe­rence is not increased, it is a folly which tends to the last extremity of national ruin, to rely upon it more firmly now.

THERE is another point of view likewise, in which the insurrection of the Fourteenth Century requires conside­ration. The late subversions of the Governments of Hol­land and of France shew us, that there is almost as much to fear as to hope from regular troops: and if we look to a force on which we can place unlimited confidence, in opposition to such an insurrection, at this juncture; from the revolution which has taken place in the state and manners of Society, we shall see that force greatly weak­ened. In the feudal ages, the upper and opulent classes [Page 54]were chiefly military men. Hence, though the encoun­ter was terrible, they finally prevailed, by the advantage of discipline and military habits. On a late occasion, from the decay of them, we have seen the gentry and no­bility of France unable to make a stand, and swept away almost without resistance: a country where the educa­tion of a camp was much more general among the supe­rior orders than in Britain. Admit now the chance of insurrection to be less than here stated, the danger to be apprehended is from the chance of attack, and the weak­ness of the means of defence jointly: if that chance de­crease, and the strength of defence decrease in the same proportion, the danger of the State remains still the same

5. OTHER INSURRECTIONS TO ASSERT THE RIGHTS OF MANT.

SOME other insurrections will be here mentioned, that a general conclusion may he drawn from the whole of them; but with little detail of their particular inci­dents.

IN the feeble reign of Henry the Sixth, Cade raised a formidable commotion, under a pretence of a Reduction of taxes, and a Reform in the State; but no trace of the Levelling principle is to be found in his Declarations or his conduct: an article in his Manifesto in favour of the old against the new nobility, seems even in the most dia­metrical opposition to it, and he is generally esteemed to have been an instrument of the Duke of York. This is noticed, as the only instance I recollect in the History of this country of the more dangerous insurrections of the populace, which was not founded on the doctrine of the Equality of the Rights of Man.

[Page 55]AFTER the death of Isabella of Castile, in 1503, the Regency of that kingdom was disputed between her hus­band Ferdinand of Arragon and the Austrian Princes. During the following sixteen years, a kind of turbulent Interregnum prevailed in Spain, with intervals of regu­lar government. The Royal power being by these vicissi­tudes weakened, a democratic faction arose, considerated under the title of the Germania, the Brotherhood, or Association of the People. It involved Spain in discord and bloodshed for nearly two years. The Progress of Civil Society toward anarchy in that time in the king­doms of Spain, was nearly the same as what we recently saw it in France in the same period: it was advanced so far, that two clothworkers and a tanner ruled the debates of their Third Estates ^*.

TO the stern government of Henry the Eighth in England, succeeded the feeble minority of Edward the Sixth, and the feeble Protectorate of his uncle the Duke of Somerset, continually traversed by his factious bro­ther, and his intriguing successor. Popular commotions arose in several parts of the kingdom: some insurgents took arms on account of religion, others were what Ba­ker calls "Commonwealth Mutineers." The object of the three greater bodies was to form a junction: one of them declared for no King, the destruction of the nobi­lity and gentry, and holding a Parliament in commotion, which should begin at the South and North Seas of England. Another for no Gentry, no Lawyers, no [Page 56]Judges, no Justices, no Inclosures ^*. It was with diffi­culty and great exertion that two of these bodies were se­parately conquered, on which the third dispersed. If the projected junction had taken place, it would most pro­bably have involved the whole kingdom in a desolation equal to that in which the Jacquerie involved France.

ONE consequence is plainly deducible, from a view of all these accounts conjointly, that the executive power of the Sovereign can never be both suddenly and greatly weakened or relaxed below its accustomed tone, without exposing Society to the hazard of that most dreadful of calamities, the tyranny of Levelling principles, or those of Equality: for the latter term bears no other sense in the conception of the multitude, and is intended to convey this to them, by the great majority of those who affectedly dwell upon it. This spirit is ready to break out on all such occasions: and this we have seen it do when John of France was a prisoner to a foreign ene­my; when Charles the First and Louis the Sixteenth were prisoners to their own subjects; during the feeble and distracted minorities of Richard the Second and Ed­ward the Sixth, and in the effective Interregnum follow­ing the death of Isabella of Castile.

ALTHOUGH this is the most permanent and gene­ral of the irregular passions acting upon the minds of the populace, it sometimes gives place to others; which, if they happen to be predominant at a time when the Royal power is suddenly diminished, the former will not appear in action, but the latter will [Page 57]produce the same effect. Thus in Ireland, when the vigo­rous, and in some instances perhaps the arbitrary, admini­stration of Lord Strafford was removed, and it be­came evident that Charles the First was a King in came only, and that his government had very little effective power; the long suppressed resentments of the Irish against the English, and their ferocious bi­gotry, broke out in the Irish Rebellion and Massacre. This seeming exception gives an indirect but strong support, to one of the propositions on which the pre­ceding conclusion is founded. But to confine ourselves to the principles of the ?Commonwealth Mutineers."

HENCE it may be laid down as a general fact, that when the power which keeps the lower people in subordi­nation, be it equal to, or more than the degree every good man would wish to have permanently established in a State, be of a sudden greatly diminished, in­surrections of this kind will be the consequence of it; for if it be justly said, that Governors are always endeavouring to increase their coercive power, yet when we see it for a considerable term of years stationary, notwithstanding that perpetual effort, we know that the spirit of resistance of the People in that generation is precisely equal to the whole of that power. Diminish the latter greatly, and the elasticity of the former will cast the remaining weight entirely off. Such diminutions must be made by degrees, and an at­tentive and accurate administration of the powers left, will supply the place of the ruder compression that is removed, until the people become accustomed to enjoy their new degree of liberty with temperance: then it becomes capa­ble of a second further extension, and not before. In the [Page 58]progressive growth of the British Constitution, we see an illustration of this: we may describe it in the same terms in which Tacitus describes that of the Roman Empire from its origin to its highest point of grandeur, Octingentorum annorum fortunâ & disciplinâ compages haec coaluit — This noble edifice was erected by the fortune and virtue of eight hundred years. Every course of masonry was suffered to settle and consolidate as it was carried up. The period, indeed, was long: but in ages of barbarism and semibarbarism, this work will, and perhaps ought to proceed, very tardily.

IT follows from all the instances given in this Sec­tion, that offensive popular Associations, on principles called those of the Rights of Men, have always been at­tended with the most tragical consequences; and it must be added, that this has not arisen solely from accident, or the circumstances of the times in which the experi­ment has been made, but from the principle itself, which is contrary to the legitimate consequences of the laws of human nature. It rests to be shewn, that on whatever ground a strong Offensive Association shall at this time begin to act, it will be presently lost sight of, and this substituted in its place.

SECTION VII. ON OFFENSIVE ASSOCIATIONS, THE OBJECTS OF WHICH ARE LIMITED.

THE objects of these Associations,' it will be said, ‘were extreme and mostly indefinite. Had their Leaders, at the beginning, laid down certain ends or limits, the cala­mities [Page 59]above described would never have happened; or, at least, the greater part of them would have been avoided: their operations would have ceased as soon as these fixed points had been attained: and, to reason of the present time—Suppose the worst: suppose even that there should exist a Party in Great Britain, with whom the tie of al­legiance is of no force, and that they might be looked upon in the same light as a body of foreign enemies within the realm; yet from foreign enemies we should entertain a full expectation of peace, or cessation of ho­stilities, on our performance of such conditions as they propose and we accede to. And shall we entertain of Englishmen, doubts that would be injurious to a fo­reign enemy? Can we think so ill of our country­men? Have they rejected every principle analogous to the Law which binds hostile nations, which can preserve the good faith of hostile parties to each other?’

IT may be the belief of the majority of the original Leaders of an Offensive Association, that they ought, and it may be their determination that they will act up to their engagements; but if they be at the head of a Party, combined on the principles taught as the Rights of Man, such Leaders may bona fide make the attempt to act up to their original Manifesto; but the probability runs very strongly against their being able to effect their purpose: for whatever principles they may set out with, the ex­treme and most violent that their lower adherents shall have imbibed, prior to their Association, or that they shall pick up in the course of the struggle, will most pro­bably be those ultimately acted upon.

[Page 60]I SHALL here show the reality and magnitude of this danger, from the examples of the most enlightened na­tions, and in their most enlightened periods. It must be on this occasion supposed that it will not be disputed, that when the heads of a Party declare that they will preserve any one part of a Constitution, in its existing state, they thereby impose limits upon their own operations; and that as much reliance may be placed on those they im­pose upon themselves in the course of action, as if they had laid them down immediately before they began to act. To attempt to distinguish between the validity of the two securities, would be to make a distinction without a dif­ference, unless it be contended, that when the Leaders of such a Party have begun their series of measures, they lose entirely the power or the with to observe their en­gagements; but an opponent who shall rest upon this concedes the whole argument.

THE object of Mr. Fox's Association is clearly limited. It is to continue in force until two Acts of Parliament named therein be repealed; and the subscribers, as Asso­ciators, are to pursue no other point. But we have had the calamity to see a very recent and terrible example of the failure of an engagement, defined with as much pre­cision as that now held out to us, and which was con­tracted with a more awful solemnity. It was on the 7th of July 1792, that M. Lamourette, Bishop of Lyons, moved in the National Assembly, ‘That all those who hold, in equal detestation a Republic and two Chambers, and who wish to maintain the Constitution as it is— Rise’ The words were scarcely pronounced, when ‘the whole Assembly, by an instantaneous impulse, rose from their scats. The two parties advanced and em­braced [Page 61]each other, and solemnly protested their adhe­rence to the Constitution ^*.’ It is of consequence to add, that this motion was made ‘at the moment M. Brissot ascended the tribune to pronounce a discourse on the means of securing the State against all its enemies.’ It was at the very crisis of the Revolution: the army of the Prussians and Austrians were advancing in France: no adequate force was prepared to oppose them; and when such a man brought forward such a discussion at such a time, no doubt can be entertained that the Leaders and the body of his Party were present; and all present con­curred in this solemn Protest. It was on the 10th of the following month the Tuilleries were attacked, and the King deposed. Brissot, Louvet, and Barbaroux, in their public speeches and writings, asserted that this Revolu­tion was effected by them, and their associates, to esta­blish a Republic: and that the day originally fixed on to carry it into execution was the 29th of July ^†, twenty-two days only after this public declaration. Now if twenty-two days was a space of time long enough for arranging the plan of the insurrection, and making the necessary preparation for it, the Brissotine Party must almost instantly have gone from the making this Protest to the direct violation of it. If the period were so short that they cannot be supposed at first to have expected to be able to bring about so great an event, in so little a time after the first conception of it (which seems almost certain), then the conspiracy existed at the time this solemn en­gagement was entered into; and the only object of the Republican Conspirators, in taking the Protestation, was to cast a necessary veil for a few days over those measures [Page 62]they were pursuing, which brought such dreadful cala­mities upon themselves and their country.

THUS the Declaration against Republicanism was vio­lated: the remaining half of the Protestation continued uninfringed some little time longer. The National Con­vention, containing many of the members who had taken this Protestation, sat for a short and sanguinary period as one Assembly; the members whereof were chiefly occu­pied in mutual proscriptions. It then dissolved one third part of itself, filled up the vacancy, and divided into two Chambers. Such is the lesson recent experience holds forth to us, on the faith that is to he put in the engagements of this kind, solemnly entered into by the Leaders of a People, enlightened by the torch of Philoso­phy, kindled at the sacred and eternal fire, on the altar of Liberty and Equality. These men, these means, this act have been defended—Defended did I say? The enthusiasm of the Republicans of England has applauded them be­yond every example the annals of public virtue present us with, in ancient or in modern ages. They will be ad­mitted parties to Mr. Fox's Association; and become, by their subscriptions, the guarantees of its limitations. And will not these idolizers of the violation, and the viola­tors of one of the most solemn compact on record, emu­lously; follow the example they adore? At the commence­ment of this year, a second solemn farce, the same in form, but opposite in its engagements, was exhibited at the com­memoration of the beheading of the King; the members of the two assemblies swore detestation to Royalty. This oath certainly cannot be supposed to have any tendency to accelerate or retard its restoration.

[Page 63]WE now come to the examples of the insufficiency of these limiting clauses contained in our own History: but to this the following observation must be premised, on the nature of limitations in general. The object of an Offensive Association may be to effect alterations in the State, or in Religion, severally or in both conjointly; and, in the two first cases, the Associators may pledge themselves to the entire conservation of the one, but fix no limits to the extent of the alterations they propose in the other. Thus an Association may refuse to lay down any limits to the alterations they wish to effect in the State, but by express declaration engage to make none in the national religion. This was the state of obligation in which the Leaders of the Long Parliament and their ad­herents placed themselves before the Civil Wars com­menced; for it has been seen before, that they refused to define the extent of their proposed alterations in the State, on the King's requisition; and that, in the justification of their conduct and views, they never referred to that repository of law and constitutional knowledge, the works of Sir Edward Coke: their object in the State was there­fore indefinite, and as such has been before considered: but this Association was strictly limited with respect to changes in religion; the fidelity with which they adhered to those limitations will presently be examined.

THOSE who at that time endeavoured to bring about alterations in the existing Laws, inimical to the constitution of its government ^*, drew large [Page 64]parts of the nation to associate with then; having previously defined, in express terms, certain points thereof, which they would maintain and defend in their existing state. The conditions of such Associations shall be here produced, and the entire breach of them shewn; and, from a comparison of the manners and morals of the nation at that time and the present juncture, it will be likewise proved, that before the events to be related took place, the apparent danger of a flagrant violation of these limits, in the former period, was much less than that of a like breach of the restraints the Associators of the present day have imposed upon themselves.

IT was between the 2d and 5th of May 1641, that the House of Commons entered into a vow and Protesta­tion, ‘in the presence of God, to maintain the true Protestant Religion, expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England ^*.’ The Lords concurred with them in taking this Protestation: but in opposition to that House, the Commons, by their single authority, or­dered it to be subscribed by the whole nation, under the penalty, to such as should refuse, of being declared unfit for any office in Church or Commonwealth, and being deemed malignants and disaffected ^‡. The opposition of the Peers to the general subscription, shews it to have been brought forward by the most active opponents of the Court.

[Page 65]THIS engagement became at length an obstacle to the Parliamentarians, when they wanted to obtain the assistance of the Scotch, in the depressed situation to which they were reduced. In September 1643, or in little more than two years, they subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant, whereby they engaged to establish Presbyte­rianism in England. Vane had, indeed, the address to have the Article on this subject drawn so, that it did not absolutely bear the sense the Scots put upon it: but the Parliament executed it in that sense, and the concurrence of both the contracting parties thereto, establishes what is to be received as the meaning of the ambiguous phrase he inserted.

THIS engagement the Parliament subscribed them­selves, and they ordered it to be received by all who liv­ed under their authority. It may be pretended, that this change was justified by a change of religion in the body of the people; but this is a position which cannot be supported. It is not digressing from my purpose to shew this, for it proves that a cabal of leading men may draw a great part of the nation into an Association with them; one condition of which shall be, to preserve inviolate some institutions for which the people entertain the highest reverence; and obtaining political power by this means, the Junto, or a part of them, shall convert that very power to effect the abolition of what they originally engaged to defend.

AT the meeting of the Long Parliament, the Puritans were by no means the majority of the nation ^*. There [Page 66]was not a less proportion of the Sectaries in the House of Commons than in the kingdom at large: and the Prote­station in 1641 could not have been voted by an Assem­bly where the majority, or even a numerous and active Party were of that description. The doctrine of the Pu­ritans had taken root before, and its followers were in­creasing; but when it attained its utmost growth, under the shelter of that Party who began as reformers, and ended as subverters of the legal Constitution, they still continued to be a minority in the nation; and the Cove­nant was imposed by force, or the fear of force, upon the majority of the people. Of this we have the best cotemporary evidence, that of the Dissenters themselves. Before the commencement of the Civil War, it was one of their leading tenets, that the individuals of every con­gregation had, jure divino, a right to elect their own mini­ster; but after they had begun the operation of ejecting the episcopal Clergy, the Assembly of Divines found it necessary to give up the ?divine right of election:" at which time, Emanuel Knutton expresses his fervent gra­titude to our blessed Parliament and reverend Synod," who took ‘the care to send zealous and godly ministers to’ vacant parishes. The necessity of the concessions of the Assembly, and the joint care of that body and of the Parliament, is clearly shewn by Needham, who tells us, that if the people had then been permitted to chuse their own pastors, ‘the godly and well-affected would have the least stroak in the choice.’ And he adds, that ‘if there be no other supplies made for parishes but such as the parishioners cordially reverence and affect, the man to be chosen in most parishes would be, a man in a surptice, with a common-prayer book, &c. ^*.’ Hence [Page 67]we see that the Presbyterian discipline was imposed upon the majority of a reluctant people, by a Party who had drawn them in to associate with them, by taking a solemn ‘Protestation, in the presence of God, to maintain the religion expressed in the doctrine of the Church of so England.’

THE Protestation, as we have mentioned above, was superseded by the Solemn League and Covenant, the preamble of which professes all regard to the honour and happiness of the King's Majesty and his posterity, and the true public liberty, safety, and peace of the kingdoms. And in the body of it it is declared, that the parties thereto. had ‘no thoughts or intentions to diminish his Majesty's just power or greatness.’ Thus the former limits to the projected reforms securing the national reli­gion were removed, but new ones were entered into re­lating to the civil state, to preserve the just power of the King undiminished.

THESE were no more adhered to than the former; every Party to bring about an alteration in the Law by their personal interposition ^*, contains men of three de­scriptions; its moderate members, its warm members, and its fanatics. In the period of our Civil Wars, the power had early shifted, from those of the first to those of the second description of the Parliamentarians, and was [Page 68]ultimately seized by those of the third. We have seen the same progress of the devolution of power take place in the French Revolutions: and such transitions are not to be looked upon as singular incidents attending these two turbulent periods, but as general consequences occurring in every such crisis of a State: and in both these cases, those Leaders into whose hands the power successively fell, never persevered any longer in the preservation of the limits they had themselves laid down to their enter­prize, than until it became their interest to pay no regard to them. The only use such stipulations seem to have served is this: they enabled their projectors to acquire or retain the immediate possession of power; and by that power they compelled a reluctant people to follow, or to submit to them in their successive violations of their Compacts.

As the terms of the first Association ‘to maintain the true Protestant religion as expressed in the doctrines of the Church of England,’ were fulfilled by abolishing them by law, and by the introduction of the doctrines of the Church of Scotland, instead of them; so the Solemn League and Covenant next entered into, professing in its preamble all regard to the honour and, happiness of the King's Majesty and his posterity, was fulfilled by those, into se hands the military and civil power of the League bad now fallen, by murdering him, and expelling his family out of the kingdom. Europe then first beheld the fatal example of regicide, committed with the moc­kery of the forms of law, and by the establishment of an ex posit facto jurisdiction. The first example of a Revo­lutionary Tribunal is discovered also in the High Court of Justice which sentenced the King. Cromwell continued [Page 69]the practice in cases he called Treason, superseding the trial by jury, to the preservation of which the parties to the latter Association or Covenant must be conceived to have sworn, as a leading part of the ‘true public liber­ty.’

THERE is but one step further to go in this account. A Party may begin with limits, to be violated the first moment an iniquitous interest prompts them so to do, and end with proscriptions. Mr. Hume has observed, that had the Restoration been postponed a little longer, ‘there was just reason to dread all the horrors of the ancient massacres and proscriptions ^*.’ Coke has informed us, that an accusation was brought against the Royalists, which cannot be supposed calculated for any other pur­pose, than to prepare the way for such an execrable mea­sure, and to shelter it under a verbal justification after it was executed. When the degradation of Richard Crom­well had taken place, the Council of Officers at Wal­lingford House published a Remonstrance, in which they charged the Malignants or Royalists, ‘that they had printed lists, and marked for destruction the godly, especially the King's judges ^†.’ and in an historian of that time, we find that it had been debated in a Council of War ‘to massacre and put to the sword all the King's party. The question was carried in the negative but by two votes ^‡.’ In Oliver's Parliament, which met [Page 70]in 1656, a Bill had been brought in to decimate the Royalists ^*.

WHEN the history of the successive French Revolu­tions shall come to be carefully examined, it will be sup­posed very probable, that many of the wounds which, have been inflicted upon France, were made by daggers forged in this country. In the following case some doubts may be entertained. The project to establish a fingle National Assembly, instead of two Houses, was attempted by the Commons before the Civil Wars, but they did not succeed in it. Foulis informs us, that the Commons ‘had another mode to drive on their designs of altering the Government of England. They put several agitators to draw up a Petition, that the Peers who were agreeable to them would sit and vote with the Commons, to the intent to have but one [Page 71]House ^*.’ This Petition was accordingly framed, and by the Commons it was presented to the House of Lords. This might be the remote origin of the National Assem­bly, or both the English Commons and the Tiers Etat in France might have poached for a precedent in the Memoirs of the Jacquerie.

THERE are desperate diseases, certainly, in the politi­cal as well as the natural constitution, which require and may justify very hazardous applications: but these are to be attempted only when it is evident that the case will terminate fatally, before a course of ameliorating alteratives can produce their effect. A vigorous remedy may also at one time be applied with little hazard; at another that hazard will be much increased. We must always endeavour to form a true estimate of the alue in use of our object, stripped carefully of those gay ac­coutrements and tinsel with which imagination dresses out all its favourites. This value we are then to com­bine, with the probability of attaining our object, assign­ed as truly as we can. This result is, what a disciple of Simpson or De Moivre would call, the expectation of gain from the experiment. We are then to view the real magnitude of the evils this object may draw after it; examining them with a mind equally clear from all pre­vention. This amount also is to be combined with the chance of their happening, to find the expectation of loss; the two expectations are to be balanced against each other, and we are to determine in favour of the greater, unless any evil may follow from the failure of the first attempt. In that case, having estimated its mag­nitude [Page 72]and chance, or what is above called its expectation, that expectation will be also a legitimate deduction from the former balance of gain, if any had been found.

To give an example of this process:—In a Society like our own, let the success of an assigned alteration in the State be extremely probable; the advantage very great: let there be a small chance that the progress of alteration will not stop at the acquisition intended, but that it may go on until a state of anarchy takes place; and let it be proposed to determine, whether this alter­ation is to be attempted. Here we mull reason thus: Anarchy is the arbitrary power of all over each indivi­dual; or the tyranny of all but one over every one. It is an evil in Society, like annihilation to the individual, infinite; and the chance of coming into this state being finite, though small, the expectation thereof, or the quantity of evil to be set against the good, exceeds in magnitude any finite good which can be assigned ^*.

[Page 73]But to return to the history which led to this train of general reflection. These temperate men, who saw the necessity of a great amelioration of the system of existing Government in 1640, in order to restore to the Legisla­tive Estates the actual exercise of their legal functions, though they had perhaps the most efficient influence in impressing the first movement toward that end, found themselves, from a concurrence of various causes, actu­ally not able to stop it, when it was gotten even beyond that point at which they wished things to become station­ary. When the inclination of a plane exceeds a very small degree, a heavy body, to which the slightest revo­lutionary movement is given, is urged along continually, as it moves, by an accelerating force, which soon becomes indefinitely greater than that which was applied at first to put it into motion; and nothing will stop it at the limit originally determined for its progress, but some firm obstacle placed before-hand, at that point of the line of its direction. And, in any tolerable system of Govern­ment, men ought to be absolutely certain that they shall be able to stop at such an assigned point, before any alteration be attempted. If mo e than a little be required to be done, the work should be subdivided, and under­taken at intervals; the first step in the progress may be so taken as to ensure some little facilities to the second, but not to precipitate it. To use for a moment out pre­sent political neologism, the Parliament in 1640 accele­rated that revolutionary movement which they ought to have restrained; the ferment of the people, which ori­ginally perhaps required tempering, was increased by eve­ry art. They greedily acquired a power too great for the weight to be removed; and they were not masters of its effects. When a quantity of masonry wants to be [Page 74]picked out of the fabric of any Constitution, in order to have the place supplied with better materials, a batter­ing ram is rather too potent an instrument to be used to effect the removal: it will shake the edifice, and may reduce it to a heap of formless ruin. The old materials must be removed with care, and the parts left unsupport­ed must be carefully propped until the vacancy be filled up.

THE Members of the Commons who sat at Oxford, and who voted under compulsion at Westminster, may be looked upon, when contradistinguished to the remainder, as one party in sentiment, and as forming an undoubted majority of the original Assembly. Hence even if every one of them had voted freely in the places where they sat and upon the same question, that majority had lost the possibility of expressing a legal will. But the Legi­slative Assembly in France, in the last period of its exis­tence, had been, by their own fanaticism, and the crimes it gave birth to, forced to work in chains to demolish that edifice, that glory of philosophy! that pride of en­lightened Europe! the first Constitution.

THE ruin brought upon Britain by the Leaders of these Associations paying no regard to their limits, was almost extreme. The observations on the hazards this country has run from Offensive Associations, in other instances, have, in this Tract, always been followed by an inquiry, whe­ther there was anything in the manners and character of the people, previous to those several calamities, which had a more alarming appearance of danger than can be ob­served at present: and I shall close this Section with an inquiry, whether, before the Civil Wars, from the cir­cumstances [Page 75]of the times and the moral character of the people, any more threatening appearances might have been discerned, of a Revolution destroying the Consti­tution, and terminating almost in the despotism of Anar­chy, than have been of late years and are at present, plainly seen among us.

IN both periods we see Revolutions destructive to the Constitution, attempted under the pretence of a reform, (the necessity of which exists not in one case, and had ceased in the other by exciting fanaticism, religious or political. We have seen either species, separately, capa­ble of producing the same effects upon the populace; that is, to bring all their ferocious passions into action: consequently, if they be stimulated by a mixture of both, as was the case in the last Century, it cannot produce a greater effect than either of them simply; as, for instance, political fanaticism; as each, separately, will occupy the active powers of the whole mind, and both together can do no more.

To consider next the real or supposed grievances of the two periods.—Such grievances must be, either violations of right, or privations of gratification by State charges, or mixed. By the Agitators of the last Century, it was im­pressed on the minds of the populace, that many of their legal rights were violated: and, as it always happens in such times, they equally believed what was truly and what was falsely alledged on this subject. Stronger representa­tions are now made, and a more extensive circulation given them. The great majority of the populace are taught that they are, defrauded, not only of many of their legal rights [Page 76]as subjects, but of a great mass of their natural rights as men; and they give the same implicit belief to their de­magogues now, as their ancestors did in the last Century; and the great amount of the taxes at present, is as favour­able a subject for inflammatory declamation, as the ille­gality of their imposition was then.

LET us now enter into a comparison of the qualifica­tions of the Agitators of the two periods for their re­spective tasks. The operations of those of the last age resembled the attacks of an undisciplined multitude, com­paratively without order or concert. Their mode of ac­tion is now reduced into a science; and they are can­toned over the whole country, the chiefs of a hostile State within a State, formed into the exactest discipline, under an active Directory, which knows how to distri­bute its force, and apply its operations to every point of attack and defence where they shall become necessary. They are an army actuated by a single will and a single intelligence, which has discovered a new and profound system of tactics.

HAVING thus balanced their abilities for action, we may pass to the review of the materials one of these Catilinarian bands of conspirators had, and the other has now, to act upon. It will be said, that ‘men have at this day before them the dreadful example of the infringement of the engagements of limitation, by which the Parliament of Charles bound themselves and the people.’ But to this it will be replied, that there never was a time in which the crime that followed them, had so many and such determined advocates, at least in the lower classes of the demagogues, nor in which [Page 77]they were heard by the multitude with such partial atten­tion. Nor, though we call this an enlightened age, are men enlightened by simply exchanging one set of prin­ciples for another; the mind is not enlightened with respect to any object, which it formerly considered ex­clusively in one point of view, if it now comes to survey it exclusively in a second.

BUT let it be admitted, that the populace may possess a more exercised keenness of mind on political points now, than in the middle of the last Century; unless it can be shown that their morals are not worse, that they are not more addicted to rapine, that they have not less reve­rence for laws, as such, or if the contrary of all this ap­pears a melancholy truth, with what advantage can an increase of such knowledge be pleaded, when the ques­tion is, Can we put more faith in articles contained in their Covenants or Associations at this juncture, than were due to the stipulations of their ancestors?—which repeated experiments proved to be intitled to none. It is an acknowledged fact, with respect to every individual, that if as his reason grows more acute, his principles grow worse, his fidelity will not be improved: his cha­racter will even become more dangerous, and that in a degree determined by the sum of those two changes: and the same must be true of a multitude composed of such individuals.

IF some increase of their knowledge be to be admitted, the degeneracy of the morals of the populace is capable of fuller proof. Will any one contend that the annual number of convictions of criminals does not increase [Page 78]with much greater celerity than our population? Are not criminal connections of the sexes, the source of mi­sery and profligacy, more frequent among the lower or­ders ^*? But this question may be rested on the autho­rity of Mr. Hume; certainly not a writer who had taken up the idea of a progressive degeneracy of the morals of mankind, as the generations succeed each other, and who was thence induced, by his system, to make a fine declama­tion on the purity of a former age. The account he has given us of the national character of the English at the commencement of that sanguinary period the Civil Wars, may be esteemed a faithful portrait of what his extensive researches showed them to have been; aid it demon­strates, that both the National Protestation, and the Na­tional Covenant which supplanted it, were, in that age, experiments greatly safer than a General Association of the People now is. ‘Never (says that Writer) was there a people less corrupted by vice and more actuated by principle than the English during that period; never were there individuals who possessed more capa­city, more courage, more public spirit, more disinte­rested [Page 79]zeal ^*!’ Can this be said, or is this believed, of the character of the mass of the people at this day? Are all these qualities admitted in all the leading Members of Opposition?

SECTION VIII. CONCLUSION. FURTHER REMARKS ON MR. FOX'S ASSOCIATION.

THE first part of this Tract begins with a comparison of the nature of the Associations of 1792, and the Gene­ral Association of the People under Mr. Fox. There remained many particular observations to make on the latter; but the principles on which I intended to found some of them, are such as will be received with greater authority when demonstrated by induction from History, than if they had been simply proved by abstract reason­ing. [Page 80]A further use also appeared to me to arise from this way of managing the subject: it has enabled me to point out the similarity of the spirit of all commotions, excited by Offensive Associations against an existing Government, not despotic; and more particularly of those where a Sec­tion of the Associators originally sets out with democratic principles, or takes them up in the course of their pro­gress. In this manner of treating the remainder of the subject, there will he some recapitulations; but they will be given with as much brevity as it will permit.

THE Associations of 1792 may be compared to a cluster of about two thousand Republics, independent, or at most slightly connected by the laxest principle of fede­ralism: their object was Defensive. From the history of such Associations in this country, it appears that they alone have been useful in the support of the constitution of Government ^*.

[Page 81]THE Association of Mr. Fox is in its object l Offensive; and it has been seen that all such of which a survey has been taken above, have been attended with very fatal consequences: and if the plan of this can be carried into execution completely or nearly so, it will become a ma­chine capable of destroying any Government: the general body of the people being invited to become par­ties thereto, and generally so becoming, its force will be effectively the greatest possible: to this it adds the strongest degree of union, while it has a Directory at its head, the Whig Club, which is to be regarded as under the con­duct of an effective Dictator ^*.

[Page 82]Now let it be supposed that a man of great ambition, yet that ambition purified from all meanness, whole plain manners are consummately attaching yet manly, as if his object were power over all men collectively, not in­dividually, and possessing an eloquence masculine, pure, and commanding, is set at the head of such an omni­potent Association: admit him also to be a man of dex­trous and profound ability, fertile in expedients, rapid in the execution of his plans; and that the citadel of Government in his native country has a considerable strength for resistance, but is by no means an impregna­ble fortress; generally surrendering (but by capitulation) after a longer or a shorter siege: and that, in the chec­quered fortunes of his political life, he has twice made his way into it by something like a coup de main; and that he has been said, the last time, to have begun to strengthen this fortress, as soon as he was possessed of it, with additional works, constructed on a new system of fortification, so far improved as to bid defiance to any regular mode of attack yet discovered:—in dange­rous times, if such a man mis-allied himself he must be highly dangerous.

THE qualities by which he has attained power have been indicated; and, mixing in his councils, when in place, somewhat too much of the qualities by which he obtained it, let him be supposed, each time, suddenly to have fallen; and now well past the meridian of life▪ but again entertaining some fair hopes, by the aid of the band of friends whom he saw about him, eminent in ability, and with high national respect attached to their names, at last to obtain what had been the object of the labours of his youth and of his manhood to the verge of age: [Page 83]to see this removed out of his reach by any common means, by the secession of the great body of his party, with every name of higher ornament to it at their head, from the danger they ultimately discern in the course he has been of late years pursuing, as having been unduly qualified to the nature of a mixed Government; we might well dread, from the pall experience of his poli­tical enterprize, that if he openly put himself at the head of such an Association as I have been describing (thereby pointing out his despair of success by every other resource) that he might not be unwilling to re­acquire possession of his object by uncommon means.

AND if, at such a time, there exist a Republican Fac­tion in the State, or a Party that should contend for a mixed Government, with a pageant of a King and a single Elective Chamber (which, infallibly terminating in the former, is for the present to be regarded as the same thing ^*), and the most eminent man, as to ability, ranging under either of those two titles of the same thing, having brought forward a Declaration of the motives to entering into such a political compact, which motives must be consistent with the principles he has publicly maintained; if the effective Head of the Directory, with the whole body, should unanimously approve of that Declaration, the only visible end of his conduct can be, to invite such Party or Parties to a close junction with him, by thus holding out to. them an idea, not obscurely conveyed, of a certain degree of concurrence with them [Page 84]in their systems; and the apprehension of it to the sup­porters of the present form of Government. Must not this man, by this junction, flinging himself at a greater distance from his former supporters, seem openly to re­nounce all ideas of reunion with them; the only regu­lar means left to him to obtain that pre-eminence, which he cannot be imagined ever to have intermitted his pur­suit of? And must he not appear, at the head of such an Association, dangerous in the extreme?

I NOW take leave of this hypothetical personage and come to a real one. But I must here premise an abridged account of the original plan and object of the Jacobin Club from Dr. Moore; as it will be expedient to enter into a comparison between these and a principle laid down in the House of Commons in 1781.

IN 1789 a small number of Deputies sent from Brittany to the States General of France, associated under the name of the Committee of that province. Being afterwards joined by some other members of that Assembly, and per­sons attached to liberty, they assumed new titles, copying the style of some English Societies; taking first the name of The Revolution Club, and ultimately that of Friends of the Constitution. From the place of their assembling, they received from the Public the name of JACOBINS; under which they have since become so fatally distin­guished. In this Society, at first, there were many persons celebrated for their talents and character. Clubs of the same nature were multiplied over all France, who regularly cor­responded with them; and who, finding a central body ready formed, through which they might transmit their opinions and wishes to the National Assembly, they ap­pointed [Page 85]them their agents for this purpose; and as the Club had, at the beginning, assumed the functions of the Delegates of those in whose behalf they held themselves forth as acting, they were by other Provincial Clubs ac­knowledged in that capacity: and the irregularity of the assumption was thus to appearance done away. It is to be observed, that when this system was completely organized, and their extra-constitutional functions thus confirmed, the Club differed from the Meeting of the Delegates of the County Associations, who sat in Lon­don in 1781, in one circumstance only. The objects the latter were to treat on were specified; consequently their delegation would have terminated when these ends were obtained: those of the former were unlimited, the continuance of their functions not being dependent on their obtaining any specific object or objects.

"THE avowed business of the Society" (of Jacobins) ‘was to deliberate and debate on subjects of Govern­ment, and watch over the general interests of Liber­ty ^*.’ Now in a Government where everything de­pends in effect on the decisions of the Representative, this amounts to watching over its conduct without limitation of time ^†, and to no more: and if the object of the [Page 86]Delegates in 1781 had been so extensive in that meeting, England would have exhibited the first example of a Jaco­bin Society.

BUT it is to the full; extent of that object that the principle goes, which is laid down in the following ex­tract of a speech attributed to Mr. Fox. It is to be found in the History of our Parliamentary Transactions, printed in The New Annual Register in 1781, the wri­ter of which appears strongly attached to his interests. ‘By what law or what act (that Statesman is made to say) was it declared to be unconstitutional for the people of this country to appoint Delegates to reside in the metropolis, and to watch the conduct of their Represen­tatives ^*?’ Such interrogations carry the full force of affirmations.

IF those who gave to the original Breton Committee its last Constitution, whereby it was transformed into a Jacobin Club, did not look for its avowed principle in the doctrine here laid down, yet, if they had, they must have found it. In defining the functions of that Club, the Legislators who gave to it its most finished code, have almost copied the expressions here attributed to Mr. Fox; for if there be any difference between ‘watching over the general interests of liberty,’ and ‘watching over the conduct of our Representatives,’ as the latter in­cludes their whole conduct in all its branches, it seems the more comprehensive, if we do not take the words [Page 87]preceding the first citation (as formerly quoted) in aid thereof: and it would be very difficult to show the fatal Institution of the Jacobins not to have been derived from the principle laid down in this History.

IF the above declaration ascribed to Mr. Fox contain his real present sentiments, and we combine this with his putting himself at the head of an Association of the Re­publicans, real and virtual, the qualities of which will be neither mitigated or modified by some misguided men of better principles and little foresight joining in it, it is a step big with danger to the existing Constitution.

BUT I have done with the subject in this point of view, and make no doubt that there are many, even among his old opponents, who regret that he did not join the illus­trious body of his late political friends in their secession from the remnant which continues to call itself The Whig Club; who think there is a part remaining for him to act at least equal in dignity and splendor to any that he has yet acted in; whose wishes continue to be, that, forgetting some of those extremes of opinion which made "him push his better Angel from his side," he would in part follow those seceders: they would rejoice to see him (without that appearance of intire transition which, sometimes rightly sometimes wrongly, has de­stroyed the reputation of great rulers of Parties), for a time avowedly unconnected and alone, a Party by him­self, assuming that function within, which can belong to no exclusive and organised body of men without the [Page 88]walls of the House; ‘to watch over the conduct of our Representatives.’

LET us now examine the mode by which the object of this Association is to be obtained; thereby ‘the sub­scribers pledge themselves only to prosecute a sole ob­ject by every legal and peaceable means.’ This implies the absence of all force, apparent or latent, in the prose­cution of it.

AND suppose, on this occasion, the authors of this plan to be able to carry it into effect, or procure a Ge­neral Association of the People, is not the union of the People irresistible? As such, Will it excite no appre­hension in the Legislature? The terror of an irresistible petitioner is not among the means to obtain a repeal of a law which are to be called peaceable. It is not the Legislation of the land, but the law of the stronger, the jus fortioris, which decides, in effect, upon the merits of such a petition. But it is only what takes place by the will of the Legislature, acting in total freedom, which is either legally or peaceably obtained. The act of appeal to the jus fortioris, formally made, or sufficiently indi­cated by preparation, though denied in words, sets aside the Law and Legislation of the Land; and what is ob­tained thereby never can be, according to that, legal; for the Law sanctions nothing while it is in a state of non­existence.

WE know that a Society has the right of self-preserva­tion as well as an individual; and that there are cases of extreme necessity, when the action of the whole peo­ple [Page 89]may be called forth. But it is to be observed, that it never can be brought forward peaceably; it must operate by force or by terror: such a measure is in effect resist­ance at least; it even amounts to compulsion, whether avowed as such or not, which is something more.

I TAKE it for granted the necessity must be as great and as obvious when the whole People are to he united against the three constituent parts of the Legislature, as when that union is directed only against one; against an act or acts of the King. Lords, and Commons, as against an act or acts of the King alone. The circumstan­ces under which the latter measure is constitutional have been laid down by Sir Joseph Jekyl; ‘the very standard of Whig principles of his age;’ and on the occasion when they were to be defined with the utmost accuracy, in order that the maxims on which the great preservers of the Constitution in 1688 acted, should be left upon record to all posterity. This he did at the Trial of Dr. Sacheverel, when, speaking in the name of the Managers for the Commons, he defines two great conditions, under which resistance to the Crown becomes justifiable. These shall be compared with the present case:—1st. ‘We have insisted, that in no case can resistance be lawful ^* but in case of extreme necessity, and where the Constitu­tion cannot otherwise be preserved:’ 2d. ‘And such necessty ought to be plain and obvious to the sense and [Page 90]judgement of the whole Nation:’ and this every good subject who knows the history of the times, believes with him to have been "the case at the Revolution." The act of the whole Legislature ought not to be opposed by the union of the whole People upon slighter grounds. I would therefore ask the promoters of this Association, How they can prove the extreme necessity that men should continue liable to be tried and condemned for trea­son, on proceedings analogous to the principles ‘of an ex post facto law ^*?’ that the beacons which now more plainly point out legal danger to the factious should be removed? and they should be left, at their own extreme hazard and with some danger to the Public, to the chance of running upon a rock, not less fatal for being sunk almost out of sight? For the object of the Associa­tion is to restore them to this situation, out of which the two Bills have taken them.

BUT let it be granted, that the proof of the extreme necessity of this restoration is by them made out in full form; still that necessity wants the second essential pro­perty, for them to be intitled to act upon it: it is not, as it ‘ought to be, plain and obvious to the sense and judgement of the whole Nation.’ It is certain that the great majority of that class, who by their situation are able to acquire, and who actually do possess, by far the greater portion of political and constitutional science, the greater weight of the whole mass of the political knowledge of the State, deny the existence of the neces­sity; they even affirm the necessity of the existence of the Acts thus opposed, as appears by their Addresses [Page 91]to the Throne, and their Petitions to the late Parlia­ment.

IN this relative unanimity of the whole Legislature in support of the two Acts, supported itself by almost the bo­norum omnium consensus, the consent of all good Englishmen, notwithstanding all the professions that can be made of using none but legal and peaceable means to obtain the repeal of them, what confidence can the Associations en­tertain of success, except from power, or the apprehen­sion of power? The very act of association adds no argument to the repeal; and I am certain the names of the Club which brought it forward, in its present state does not add to that authority. The measure is a tacit menace to the Legislature, by no means a peaceable mode to carry through a petition; and, if not contrary to the letter of the Laws of England, contrary to the univer­sal spirit of Law. Bacon, in his Historical Discourses, says, that ‘when the written law maketh it treason to compass the destruction of the King's person, it leav­eth it obvious to common; sense that it is a higher de­gree of treason to compass the destruction of the Re­presentative ^*’ And by the same mode of argument it may be shown, that the coercion of the King by effect­ive menace in the exercise of his Royal functions, being a high crime and misdemeanor; the coercion of the Legi­slature, by similar means, is of the same criminality; and surely such a coercion of the Commons, according to the principles of these men, is a wound of the majesty of the People, which resides in them; and ‘all men do [Page 92]agree (says Bacon) that treason is a wound of ma­jesty ^*’.

THE Heads of such an Association would not commit themselves in such a measure without strong hopes of success, against the almost unanimous opposition of the informed classes of Society at large, and the union of all the constituent parts of the Legislature. On what can they found that hope? They must expect aid from some other quarter; external aid, but which they can cause to operate in the very walls of both Houses, to awe them and the supporters of the Bills into submission. The horizon at least must be involved in darkness, the sullen sound of distant thunders must be heard from many quarters, it the spirit that raised the storm do not roll its strength over their heads, and let all its rage descend upon them. If these leaders of the people do not em­ploy actual tumults and commotions to force a reluctant Parliament into their measures, they must suffer them to be inforced by the fear of their near approach, or they are embarked in the most ridiculous of all undertakings, as it must he the most fatal to every future rational view of coming [...]nto power, which they may be supposed to entertain.

LET us grant now that the Heads of the Association are most strictly determined to confine themselves to the respectful conduct of real petitioners; that they will submit to repulse after repulse without exceeding its bounds the certain fate of their application to Parliament [Page 93]without the apprehension of latent or appare [...] force: I say their best intentions, realised in irreproach­able conduct, will probably add very little to the pro­tection of the State, from the extreme of danger hang­ing over it from this Association, if the project take place.

FOR their repeated efforts alone will generate a ferment in the minds of the populace; and can they answer that the lower classes of the associators will not take up ei­ther their object or some other, re-involve the metropolis in the disorders of: 1780, and expose the whole kingdom to them? In that year, when the multitude had seen the counties holding meetings to censure the internal ad­ministration of the kingdom; forming Committees of Correspondence, sending Delegates to sit in Congress or Convention, in the metropolis: at that period, as it had been said above, an individual of a doubtful description, between an enthusiast and a madman, availed himself of the agitated state of their minds to direct them to an end with a new name; and they, mixing ferocity and the de­sire of plunder, with certainly a very weak degree of re­ligious fanaticism, had nearly effected the ruin of the capital. Yet at this instant there is a greater real fer­ment in the minds of the lower classes, than Lord George Gordon was able to excite; nor, if the Chiefs of the Asso­ciation be now as averse to lead then into similar excesses as it is here supposed, will they want many really for­midable enthusiastic leaders to hurry them forward.

NOR can the seat of Government at this juncture, nor the kingdom in general, expect less misery from such a [Page 94]commotion, if not instantly suppressed, than the afflicted territory of France has recently suffered. In an insur­rection of the English populace, political fanaticism and the eagerness of plunder will jointly stimulate them, even at first; but the devastations of France, for a long time, were caused by that fanaticism alone: the spirit of plun­der was not mixed with it. Even so late as the time when he palace of the [...]uilleries was stormed, the very assa [...]sins killed on the spot several men ‘who on that day at­tempted to steal the plate.’ ‘It must appear (says Dr. Moore) in a peculiar manner strange to persons ac­customed to live in a country where there are fre­quent robberies and burglaries, in spite of the Govern­ment being undisturbed and the Laws in full force, to find none, where all the hinges and supports of Law and Government are loose and shaking from a recent convulsion ^*.’ And great as the sufferings of that kingdom are and have been, if a similar insurrection were to take place here, the disposition of the populace to robbery and plunder being added to the fanaticism of liberty already highly excited in them, greater would our calamities he. This conclusion is, fully confirmed by an authority which will be very unexpected to many, that of Mr. Barlow, in his Advice to the Privileged Orders; who informs us, that ‘the Mobs in France were by no means to be compared with English Mobs in point of indiscriminate ferocity and private plunder ^†.’

UNITE the populace by an Association, exhibit to them an object to acquire, and, if there be the least delay [Page 95]in its acquisition, they will rush forward upon the scene of action. Little is the distance with them, between the point of time when they shall be thus combined and sti­mulated, and when they break forth in outrage; for sooner than stand still, they will make rapid vibrations in the most contrary directions; moving with impetuosity to­ward one point, and returning with the same impetuosity to that from which they sat out. In the shortest space of time before James fled to Feversham, the sovereign po­pulace of London had, without doubt, pronounced his decheance: but although by that flight he had attempted to annihilate civil government in this country, upon his return, he was received by them with every mark of, the most zealous affection. ‘This great turn in the minds of the city ^*’ continued during his residence at Ro­chester, or until the 23d of December. Having proceeded to the extreme in that direction of movement, and un­able to continue stationary, we have seen, that so early as the 4th of the month of February, they announced a se­cond change of their will by an insurrection, to compel the Convention to declare his throne vacant.

HENCE it may be reasonably predicted, that if the pro­jectors of this Association be able to embody the popu­lace nominally under them, the latter will not wait for orders to come into action. The desire to copy the ex­ample of the populace of France prevails among many; and by their being drawn more together by this dangerous measure, it will be more generally diffused. And History informs us, that the spirit of insurrection has mostly mi­grated from France to England. The religious Associa­tion or League under the Guises, was the precedent of [Page 96]the Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant; and the Association of the Jacquerie, on the principle of the equal Rights of Men, was copied in England by Wat Tyler and his associates. The eruption of both these evils was kept back here for a considerable period; and if either of these events excited any alarm in England when they first took place, the passing of five or six, or even ten or twelve years, without their producing any effect, was no proof that such alarm was not founded on real danger; and it will be happy for this country, this generation, and posterity, if the system of the Jacobins, (the way of which seems now preparing by Associations tendered to the populace) be kept permanently at a distance from us.

BUT let us pass from this investigation of the probabi­lity of the peaceable legality of the intended good conduct of this Association; which, if it be not meant to over­awe Parliament, is a great movement without a motive, and a prodigal waste of the last chance of the man who guides it, of standing again at the head of a great and regular Party; let us pass from this to the declaration of the limitation of its object, and consider the security arising from the engagement, that the Association will confine its operations to the single object announced. This security must be determined, from the description of the parties to the contract, and the matter thereof con­jointly.

THE whole Party of the avowed Republicans will be included among the subscribers; all of them the defen­ders, and almost all of them the admirers of the viola­tors and violation of the solemn engagement to the sup­port of Monarchy, taken by the French Assembly in July [Page 97]1792, and broken the 10th of the following August. What they defend, and what they admire, they will not be very backward in copying. Together with these, the party will consist of men of some other descriptions: of those nominally professing to wish for a King, and a single Assembly of Representatives, in order to introduce a Republic by stealth, and those who wish for such a system in reality; the latter of which coming to act in a closer union with the two former sections of the As­sociation, will be easily won over to their party; for the most decided opinions have always the loudest advocates: and, indeed, we can hardly discover on what ground they can hold out against the arguments with which these allies of theirs will be able to assail them; on the folly of a system whose only consequence must apparently be, to prolong, during a sad and bloody interval, the last con­vulsions and dying struggle of Monarchy. The remain­der of the Association will be composed of those who wish for what they call a Reform of the Commons, or some other Reform, and at every hazard of the State; for the more temperate advocates of these measures will not join the Association. Those who were content with our system of laws before the passing of the two Acts, who will join in this compact, will be very few indeed: al­most the whole of them having concurred in declar­ing their opinion, that the temporary regulations in­troduced by these laws, is at this time necessary for the preservation of the Constitution of Government. Hence it follows, that the obtaining the repeal of them, will satisfy the wishes of this last division of the Asso­ciators only, a very small minority of the whole body: and every one must concur in admitting, that the proba­bility that they will stop, when they have obtained those [Page 98]points which they have fixed as the limits of their claim, is much diminished, as the wishes of the great majority, and their principles, extend indefinitely further.

I COME now to speak of the matter or nature of this engagement, and shall show it in one case to be to­tally useless, and in all others totally nugatory, as imposing no obligation on the greater part of the sub­scribers, according to their political principles.

FOR, in the first place, if the Association do not be­come general, or at least obtain strength enough to over­awe Parliament, the promise will be useless: the security of the State from all the effects of their proceeding be­yond their assigned limits, being as firm in their simple want of power, as in their want of power and their respective obligation (the promise not to make the at­tempt) conjointly.

FURTHER, if it do not become useless, as above, it will then be nugatory: for the sovereign power, as the sup­porters of this Association hold, resides in the people, whenever they chuse to act; and consequently the legi­slative power, which is a branch thereof. The people may, if they please, make, and consequently repeal laws: may they not, therefore, when associated, repeal that clause of the compact, limiting to one object the exertion of their universal and illimitable sovereignty? for if they can repeal a law made to bind themselves, they can annul an article of any obligation, if not founded in moral right.

[Page 99]AND to whom do the subscribers give this obligation? To the people: and the party to whom it is given is in full power to remit it When, therefore, the subscription becomes general, the subscribers will be the people, and it will be an obligation entered into by the people individually, to the people collectively: a compact entered into by them­selves to themselves, which is absolutely nugatory.

AND if any collection of persons, signing such en­gagement, shall call themselves the People, although their numbers be not such as to entitle them to assume that name, by their assumption they claim as their own right all the rights of the people; in which is included, ac­cording to their principles, the right of declaring the li­mitation of action, to which they have, or shall pledge themselves, to be void.

THERE are other grounds to show that such a pro­mise can be of no validity, or not be the foundation of any obligation on the givers of it. When two parties exist in a State, the validity of their promises stands much upon the same ground as those given by independent na­tions to each other. The authors who have treated on the reciprocal rights of nations, have described those pro­mises from which no obligation arises; and in defining them, I follow Grotius ‘To give validity to a pro­mise, the subject-matter must be such, that the per­son giving it has a full right to perform it; wherefore the promise to do an illicit act is not valid, because no one has, or can acquire, a right to perform it ^*.’ And by parity of reason, a promise to omit an act of moral [Page 100]obligation so given, is void and null in itself. Now I say, to remove any great grievance, under which we strongly believe our country to suffer, when it is in our power, is an act of moral obligation. The parties to the Asso­ciation are known to declare, that this country labours under many removeable grievances, beside the two Acts for the repeal of which they combine: hence their pro­mise to stop at that repeal, if it be in their power to pro­ceed any farther, is an engagement not to perform an act of moral obligation, and therefore null and void.

BUT let it now be admitted, for a moment, that in their specification of limits, beyond which they would not go, they have contracted an obligation to their op­ponents, or to the State. The melancholy experience of our Civil Wars in the last age, points out to us what lit­tle reliance can be placed on all such assurances. From the manners of the nation in that period, it has been shewn, that the utmost fidelity might have been expected in the performance of all their engagements: from its prevalent and general character of piety, men might with confidence have believed, that the national Protestation, consecrated as it were by one of the most solemn forms of religion, would be sacredly and inviolably adhered to. Religion was considered by them as a more immutable thing than a form of government is by us. There was no visible party among them who conceived that its obligation was founded on the assent of the nation; that it might be believed experimentally for a month, or a quarter, or a year, and then be abolished by ordinance of the two Houses, and another enacted in its stead, by their own authority, or on the requisition of the sovereign people. They held, when [Page 101]they took the Protestation, that no power could absolve them from it, except that in whose presence they profes­sed to have made it. And when we see by the event, that even in such times no effectual confidence could be placed in that solemn declaration, what reliance can we afford to the promises contained in the instrument now brought forward? especially if we take into the account, that if it be generally signed, the parties thereto will, according to their own ideas, be, of right, able to absolve themselves from the obligation thereof. I do not tax the body of the promoters of this Association with intending to im­pose upon their countrymen with false coin; but when they shall ultimately come to discover, that according to their principles they have obliged themselves to nothing in the limits they have laid down, I shall not sanguine­ly expect that their performances will extend a whit be­yond their obligation. Those of our ancestors in more moral times, and on a similar occasion, fell far short of theirs.

A FEW remarks must be added on the conduct of the populace when excited into action, and its consequences. When embodied, they are always found to be actuated by the most extravagant opinions afloat: those which most flatter their deceitful hopes, their envy of their su­periors, and their ferocity and spirit of depredation; and that day, when the populace, calling itself the People, shall carry its first great point against a reluctant majo­rity, influenced by the apprehension of tumults out of doors, will be effectively the last day of the power of the three constituent parts of Parliament; for they are brought forward, by expectations diffused generally among them, of a change of their situation in life for the bet­ter, [Page 102]of a multiplication of the objects of common use and enjoyment, and a diminution of the number of the privations their state condemns them to: their first vic­tory will make no difference in their situation; disap­pointment will inflame them more, and they will be caught to form new expectations from the effect of going further; and thus they will be rendered eager for a se­cond interposition of their strength, which will be dou­bled by an appearance of success, although it has been to them fruitless. But their Leaders in this country, it will be said, will have a limited object in view▪ and will know how to stop them. The fallacy of relying upon this, which is matter of universal experience has been recently confirmed. In France, there were some great and well-meaning men among those who put the whole body of the people into motion. When they thought they had gone far enough, they chose to stop. A set of subaltern Leaders, at that juncture, urged the populace on further, whose irresistible weight and impulse bore them down, and they were trampled to death under their feet. Their new conductors, when they had carried them the lengths they desired, that is, when they thought themselves se­curely placed at their head, wished likewise in their turn that they should come to a halt. They tried to effect it, and shared the same fate as their predecessors. The mul­titude were still excited to continue their march by Leaders of a viler class. The place they were gotten to, it was truly argued, was little better than a rocky or sandy des [...]rt; and they were assured, that a single day's journey more would lead them to the promised land of per­fect freedom and abundance, where their whole future lives would be spent in feasting and revelry. Their migration [Page 103]under these last Leaders, brought them into the land of famine and bloody ferocious anarchy.

IT will become, at this time, the original institutors of all such Associations as have no remote tendency to promote popular insurrections, to reflect, that when the lower class of people begin to act in matters of Govern­ment, there is no ability, no vigour, which can restrain them within the limits of their original plan. To carry some points, Cromwell brought the Levelling Agitators into action: when they had served his purpose, he wanted to reduce them into their former inefficiency. They re­sisted: by one of the greatest exertions of personal and political courage, of which History furnishes an example, he obtained the delusive appearance of a triumph over them; but the realities of the victory all remained to the spirit of agitating. Even Cromwell himself gave way: he was compelled to relinquish his former plans of per­sonal greatness, and seek for new ones, in the act of yielding to that impulse, he could not resist ^*. There may be men in this Association whose political dexterity and vigour deserve to be thought highly of; but I do not think that man lives, whose arm is so well sinewed that he can shape his way against a torrent which Cromwell could only breast for a short time, and then was hurried away by its rapidity. For, to me, in this part of his life, he seems like one of the mightiest of men, struggling for a few minutes against the stream in some branch of the In­dus, when the periodical rains have augmented its force to the utmost, and then compelled almost to resign him­self entirely to it, and to make his way obliquely, with incredible effort, to an island of jungle in the middle of [Page 104]the channel, the thickets of which are filled with tigers and serpents, its only inhabitants; where he is inclosed from all escape to the safe shore he has left, which lies in full prospect before him, while deaths without resistance, the most terrible to nature, and which alone could be the object of terror to him, press on him, or watch in am­bush around him on every other side.

AS accurately as the object of the Association is, in words, limited, if we suppose a majority of the Leaders of name faithfully to intend to disembody it as soon as its sole avowed end is obtained, shall we believe the same of all of them? For it has been shewn, upon the prin­ciples some receive as the foundation of Civil Govern­ment, that the promise this instrument holds out is a nullity; but if it were otherwise, and were that engagement in its nature binding; and all the ostensible Heads of the Association should be determinately faithful to it, they are not the men who are the direct and proximate Lea­ders of the populace: it is a certain set of intermediate agents who act in that capacity, who directly hold this terrible power in their hands; and the greater Leaders must, like Cromwell, give way to their intermediate in­struments, to those who can inflame the Multitude into madness. They must become the instruments of their instruments in new crimes they may detest, or fall the second set of victims to irresistible ignorance, inflamed into immitigable ferocity.

I SHALL add here a little, and but at little, on the mode of reasoning generally pursued in this Tract. There are men who object to a constant reference to the tragedies [Page 105]now acting, and acted in France, during the last seven years; of which some direct mention, and to which more allusion has been made, in the preceding Tract. ‘We are not,’ they tell us, ‘to point out the pretences and means by which that, and, by parity of reason, any other nation has been ensnared into all the miseries of Anar­chy, in order to keep alive a jealous circumspection with respect to every measure which may introduce it into this kingdom.’ Hence the argument from historical in­duction chiefly used here, which impresses the principles of experience, and those only, upon the mind, with the very decision and warmth of feeling with which Nature meant them to be embraced, is proscribed by those who lean to the doctrines of the Republican School. They will have men addressed as beings formed of pure and im­passive intellect only: or, if they graciously permit us to continue to see, they prohibit to us the exercise of the faculty of feeling.

YET they might as well bid us blot out, from the re­cords of universal history, the errors or crimes which have led so many and great nations into ruin; say that it is useless to make any observations on the causes which brought it on, or the miseries by which it was followed. Must we extract no useful lessons for our own nation from the great register of the experience of all ages? It is not in nature, and therefore I am sure it is not in wisdom, to turn away our eyes from the series of French revolutions, so re­cent, and almost unprecedented in the sum of their calamities; while we are in the very neighbourhood of the contagion, when such multitudes are desirous of introducing it among us. Who that had just seen a noble vessel striking upon [Page 106]a sand bank near our very coast, which had not been be­fore discovered, and totally wrecked, would say that a buoy, or a floating light, should not, if possible, be im­mediately moored upon it? and if the position of the whole of the sand were not accurately known, that we ought not to keep the sounding line in our hand, when we have the least suspicion that our vessel may be getting upon it?

WHEN Mr. Burke foresaw so many of its ensuing ca­lamities in the first movements of the French Revolution, his probable train of reason from cause to effect was de­rided. Dr. Priestley fairly told him, ‘he would not call in question his gift of prophecy; his peculiar talent to see all events, past, present, and to come, in their most concealed causes.’ Experience has nevertheless proved the error of those who disbelieved and those who doubted these predictions; however, we might have been able, with safety to ourselves, to con­tinue to doubt whose opinions were the best founded, until the event shew it clearly. Our existence as a na­tion under an orderly government, might not have been hazarded even by disbelief; but that these evils were in reality then impending over France, the followers of Dr. Priestley now admit: yet from the continuance of the same propensions, they will dis­pute the probability of the conclusions here drawn from historical induction, that a General Association of the People is a measure threatening this kingdom with great danger. I conclude with observing, that this is a case in which we cannot with equal safety postpone coming to a decided opinion, until a second and equal series of ca­lamities to those we have been recently witnesses to shall convict them of a second error.