I NEVER relished Acts of Grace, nor ever sub­mitted to them but from despair of better. They are a dishonourable invention, by which, not from humanity, not from policy, but merely because we have not room enough to hold these victims of the absurdity of our laws, we turn loose upon the public three or four thousand naked wretches, corrupted by the habits, debased by the ignominy, of a prison. If the creditor had a right to those carcases, as a natural claim for his property, I am sure we have no right to deprive him of that security. But if the few pounds of flesh were not necessary to his security, we had not a right to detain the unfortunate debtor, without any benefit at all to the person that confined him.

As the extent of our wars has scattered the ac­countants under the Paymaster into every part of the globe, the grand and sure paymaster, Death, in all [Page 2] his shapes, calls these accountants to another reckon­ing. Death, indeed, domineers over every thing but the forms of the Exchequer. Over these he has no power; they are impassive and immortal. The audit of the Exchequer, more severe than the audit to which the accountants are gone, demands proofs which in the nature of things are difficult, sometimes impossible to be had. In this respect too, rigour, as usual, defeats itself. Then, the Exchequer never gives a particular receipt, or clears a man of his account, as far as it goes. A final acquittance, (or a quietus, as they term it) is scarcely ever to be ob­tained. Terrors and ghosts of unlaid accountants haunt the houses of their children from generation to generation. Families, in the course of succession, fall into minorities; the inheritance comes into the hands of females; and very perplexed affairs are often delivered over into the hands of negligent guardians and faithless stewards. So that the demand remains, when the advantage of the money is gone, if ever any advantage at all has been made of it. This is a cause of infinite distress to families; and becomes a source of influence to an extent that can scarcely be imagined, but by those who have taken some pains to trace it. The mildness of Govern­ment in the employment of useless and dangerous powers, furnishes no reason for their continuance.

IT is necessary, [...]n all matters of public complaint, where men frequently feel right and argue wrong, to separate prejudice from reason; and to be very sure, in attempting the redress of a grievance, that we hit upon its real seat, and its true nature. Where there is an abuse in office, the first thing that occurs in heat is to censure the officer. Our natural dispo­sition leads all our inquiries rather to persons than [Page 3] to things. But this prejudice is to be corrected by maturer thinking.—

BUT there is a time, when men will not suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse. There is a time, when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain pro­tection.— Ibid.

THE foreign Ministers are the links of our con­nection with other nations.— Ibid.

THERE are many circumstances in the zeal shewn for civil war, which seem to discover little of real magnanimity. The addressers offer their own persons, and they are satisfied with hiring Germans; they promise their private fortunes, and they mort­gage their country. They have all the merit of volunteers, without risque of person, or charge of contribution; and when the unfeeling arm of a foreign soldiery pours out their kindred blood like water, they exult and triumph, as if they themselves had performed some notable exploit.

I should be sorry, that any thing framed in con­tradiction to the spirit of our constitution, did not [Page 4] instantly produce, in fact, the grossest of the evils with which it was pregnant in its nature. It is by lying dormant a long time, or being first very rarely exercised, that arbitrary power steals upon a people. On the next unconstitutional act, all the fashionable world will be ready to say, Your prophecies are ridiculous, your fears are vain, you see how little of the mischiefs which you formerly foreboded are come to pass. Thus, by degrees, that artful softening of all arbitrary power, the alledged unfrequency, or narrow extent of its operations, will be received as a sort of aphorism; and Mr. Hume will not be singular in telling us, that the felicity of mankind is no more disturbed by it, than by earthquakes, or thunder, or the more universal accidents of nature.—

GOD has planted in man a sense of ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable amongst them. It is this passion that drives men to all the ways we see in use of signalizing themselves, and that tends to make whatever excites in a man the idea of this distinction so very pleasant. It has been so strong as to make very miserable men take com­fort, that they were supreme in misery; and certain it is, that where we cannot distinguish ourselves by something excellent, we begin to take a complacency in some singular infirmities, follies, or defects of one kind or other. It is on this principle that flattery is so prevalent; for flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not. Now, whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is ex­tremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling [Page 5] is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates. Hence proceeds what Longinus has observed of that glorying and sense of inward greatness, that always fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are sublime; it is what every man must have felt in himself upon such occasions.—

IT is now found, by abundant experience, that an aristocracy and a despotism differ but in name, and that a people who are in general excluded from any share of the legislative, are to all intents and purposes, as much slaves, when twenty, independent of them, govern, as when but one domineers. The tyranny is even more felt, as every individual of the nobles has the haughtiness of a sultan; the people are more miserable, as they seem on the verge of liberty, from which they are for ever debarred; this fallacious idea of liberty, whilst it presents a vain shadow of hap­piness to the subject, binds faster the chains of his subjection. What is left undone, by the natural avarice and pride of those who are raised above the others, is compleated by their suspicions, and their dread of losing an authority, which has no support in the common utility of the nation.

THE Athenians made a very rapid progress to the most enormous excesses; the people under no re­straint soon grew dissipated, luxurious, and idle. [Page 6] They renounced all labour, and began to subsist themselves from the public revenues. They lost all concern for their common honour or safety, and could bear no advice that tended to reform them. At this time truth became offensive to those lords the people, and most highly dangerous to the speaker. The orators no longer ascended the rostrum, but to corrupt them further with the most fulsome adula­tion. These orators were all bribed by foreign princes on the one side or the other. And besides its own parties, in this city there were parties, and avowed ones too, for the Persians, Spartans, and Mac donians, supported each of them by one or more demagogues pensioned and bribed to this iniquitous service. The people, forgetful of all virtue and public spirit, and intoxicated with the flatteries of their orators, (these courtiers of repub­lics, and endowed with the distinguishing cha­racteristics of all other courtiers) this people, I say, at last arrived at that pitch of madness, that they coolly and deliberately, by an express law, made it capital for any man to propose an application of the immense sums squandered in public shows, even to the most necessary purposes of the state. When you see the people of this republic banishing or murdering their best and ablest citizens, dissipating the public treasure with the most senseless extravagance, and spending their whole time, as spectators or actors, in playing, fiddling, dancing, and singing, does it not, my Lord, strike your imagination with the image of a sort of a complex Nero? And does it not strike you with the greater horror, when you observe, not one man only, but a whole city, grown drunk with pride and power, running with a rage of folly into the same mean and senseless debauchery and extra­vagance?

The whole history of this celebrated republic is but one tissue of rashness, folly, ingratitude, injustice, [Page 7] tumult, violence, and tyranny; and indeed of every species of wickedness that can well be imagined.—This was a city of wise men, in which a minister could not exercise his functions; a warlike people, amongst whom a general did not dare either to gain or lose a battle; a learned nation, in which a philosopher could not venture on a free inquiry. This was the city which banished Themistocles, starved Aristides, forced into exile Miltiades, drove out Anaxagoras, and poisoned Socrates. This was a city which changed the form of its government with the moon; eternal conspiracies, revolutions daily, nothing fixed and established. A republic, as an ancient philo­sopher has observed, is no one species of govern­ment, but a magazine of every species; here you find every sort of it, and that in the worst form. As there is a perpetual change, one rising and the other falling, you have all the violence and wicked policy, by which a beginning power must always acquire its strength, and all the weakness by which falling states are brought to a complete destruction.

THE act of which I speak is among the fruits of the American war: a war, in my humble opinion, productive of many mischiefs, of a kind which dis­tinguish it from all others. Not only our policy is deranged, and our empire distracted, but our laws and our legislative spirit appear to have been totally perverted by it. We have made war on our colonies, not by arms only, but by laws. As hos­tility and law are not very concordant ideas, every step we have taken in this business, has been made by trampling on some maxim of justice, or some capital principle of wise government. What pre­cedents were established, and what principles over­turned, [Page 8] (I will not say of English privilege but of general justice) in the Boston Port, the Massachu­set's Charter, the Military Bill, and all that long array of hostile acts of parliament, by which the war with America has been begun and supported! Had the principles of any of these acts been first exerted on English ground, they would probably have ex­pired as soon as they touched it. But by being re­moved from our persons, they have rooted in our laws; and the latest posterity will taste the fruits of them.

Nor is it the worst effect of this unnatural con­tention, that our laws are corrupted. Whilst man­ners remain intire, they will correct the vices of law, and soften it at length to their own temper. But we have to lament, that in most of the late proceedings we see very few traces of that generosity, humanity, and dignity of mind which formerly characterized this nation. War suspends the rules of moral obli­gation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they per­vert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in an hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very names of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity whilst we agreed, become new in­centives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved. We may flatter our­selves that we shall not fall into this misfortune. But we have no charter of exemption, that I know of, from the ordinary frailties of our nature.

What but that blindness of heart which arises from the phrensy of civil contention, could have made any persons conceive the present situation of the British affairs as an object of triumph to themselves, or of congratulation to their sovereign? Nothing, [Page 9] surely, could be more lamentable to those who re­member the flourishing days of this kingdom, than to see the insane joy of several unhappy people, amidst the sad spectacle which our affairs and con­duct exhibit to the scorn of Europe. We behold, (and it seems some people rejoice in beholding) our native land, which used to sit the envied arbiter of all her neighbours, reduced to a servile dependence on their mercy; acquiescing in assurances of friend­ship which she does not trust; complaining of hosti­lities which she dares not resent; deficient to her allies; lofty to her subjects, and submissive to her enemies; whilst the liberal government of this free nation is supported by the hireling sword of German boors and vassals; and three millions of the subjects of Great Britain are seeking for protection to English privileges in the arms of France!

Indeed our affairs are in a bad condition. I do assure those gentlemen who have prayed for war, and obtained the blessing they have sought, that they are, at this instant, in very great straits.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

BELIEVE me, gentlemen, the way still before you is intricate, dark, and full of perplexed and treacherous mazes. Those who think they have the clue, may lead us out of this labyrinth. We may trust them as amply as we think proper; but as they have most certainly a call for all the reason which their stock can furnish, why should we think it proper to disturb its operation by inflaming their passions? I may be unable to lend an helping hand to those who direct the state; but I should be ashamed to make myself one of a noisy multitude to hollow and hearten them into doubtful and dan­gerous [Page 10] courses. A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play, without any sort of knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance, that it is directed by insolence or passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from notice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and Man, but I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which in the depth of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more odious and disgusting than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it; bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles, which he is not to sight, contending for a violent dominion, which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.— Ibid.

I am really ashamed of the fashionable language which has been held for some time past; which to say the best of it, is full of levity. You know, that I allude to the general cry against the cowardice of the Americans, as if we despised them for not making the king's soldiery purchase the advantage they have obtained, at a dearer rate. It is not, gentlemen, it is not, to respect the dispensations of Providence, nor to provide any decent re­treat in the mutability of human affairs. It leaves no medium between insolent victory and infamous defeat. It tends to alienate our minds further and further from our natural regards, and to make an eternal rent and schism in the British nation. Those [Page 11] who do not wish for such a separation, would not dissolve that cement of reciprocal esteem and regard, which can alone bind together the parts of this great fabric. It ought to be our wish, as it is our duty, not only to forbear this style of outrage ourselves, but to make every one as sensible as we can of the impropriety and unworthiness of the tempers which give rise to it, and which designing men are labouring with such malignant industry to diffuse amongst us. It is our business to counteract them, if possible; if possible to awake our natural regards; and to revive the old partiality to the English name. Without something of this kind I do not see how it is ever practicable really to recon­cile with those, whose affection, after all, must be the surest hold of our government; and which is a thousand times more worth to us, than the mer­cenary zeal of all the circles of Germany.— Ibid.

ALL this rage against unresisting dissent, con­vinces me, that at bottom, they are far from satis­fied they are in the right. For what is it they would have? A war? They certainly have at this moment the blessing of something that is very like one; and if the war they enjoy at present be not sufficiently hot and extensive, they may shortly have it as warm and as spreading as their hearts can desire. Is it the force of the kingdom they call for? They have it already; and if they choose to fight their battles in their own person, no body prevents their setting sail to America in the next transports. Do they think, that the service is stinted for want of liberal supplies? Indeed they complain without reason. The table of the House of Commons will glut them, let their appetite for expence be never so keen. And I assure them further, that those who [Page 12] think with them in the House of Commons are full as easy in the controul, as they are liberal in the vote of these expences. If this be not supply or confidence sufficient, let them open their own pri­vate purse-strings, and give from what is left to them, as largely and with as little care as they think proper.— Ibid.

AT the first designation of these assemblies, they were probably not intended for any thing more (nor perhap, did they think themselves much higher) than the municipal corporations within this island, to which some at present love to compare them. But nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a numerous and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe, it was natural that they should attribute to assemblies, so respectable in their formal constitution, some part of the dignity of the great nations which they represented. No longer tied to by-laws, these assemblies made acts of all sorts, and in all cases whatsoever. They levied money, not for parochial purposes, but upon regular grants to the crown, following all the rules and principles of a parliament, to which they approached every day more and more nearly. Those who think themselves wiser than Providence, and stronger than the course of nature, may complain of all this variation, on the one side or the other, as their several humours and prejudices may lead them. But things could not be otherwise; and English colonies must be had on these terms, or not had at all.— Ibid.

I know, and have long felt, the difficulty of reconciling the unwieldy haughtiness of a great ruling nation, habituated to command, pampered by enormous wealth, and confident from a long course of prosperity and victory, to the high spirit of free dependencies, animated with the first glow and activity of juvenile heat, and assuming to them­selves as their birthright, some part of that very pride which oppresses them.— Ibid.

THERE never, gentleman, was a period in which the stedfastness of some men has been put to so sore a trial. It is not very difficult for well-formed minds to abandon their interest; but the separation of same and virtue is an harsh divorce. Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen. Contending for an imaginary power we begin to acquire the spirit of domination and to lose the relish of honest equality. The principles of our forefathers become suspected to us, because we see them animating the present opposition of our chil­dren. The faults which grow out of the luxuri­ance of freedom, appear much more shocking to us, than the base vices which are generated from the rankness of servitude. Accordingly the least resistance to power appears more inexcusable in our eyes than the greatest abuses of authority. All dread of a standing military force is looked upon as a superstitious panic. All shame of calling in foreigners and savages in a civil contest is worn off. We grow indifferent to the consequences inevitable to ourselves from the plan of ruling half [Page 14] he empire by a mercenary sword. We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country; that those who hate civil war abet rebellion, and that the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness to the privileges of those who depend on this kingdom are a sort of treason to the state.

It is impossible that we should remain long in a situation, which breeds such notions and dispositions, without some great alteration in the national cha­racter. Those ingenuous and feeling minds who are so fortified against all other things, and so un­armed to whatever approaches in the shape of dis­grace, finding these principles, which they considered as sure means of honour to be grown into disrepute, will retire disheartened and disgusted. Those of a more robust make, the bold, able, ambitious men, who pay some of their court to power through the people, and substitute the voice of transient opinion in the place of true glory, will give into the general mode; and those superior understandings which ought to correct vulgar prejudice, will confirm and aggravate its errors. Many things have been long operating towards a gradual change in our principles. But this American war has done more in a very few years than all the other causes could have effected in a century. It is therefore not on its own separate account, but because of its attendant circumstances that I consider its continuance, or its ending in any way but that of an honourable and liberal accommodation, as the greatest evils which can befal us.— Ibid.

YOU remember, that in the beginning of this American war (that aera of calamity, disgrace and downfall, an aera which no feeling mind will ever [Page 15] mention without a tear for England) you were greatly divided; and a very strong body, if not the strongest, opposed itself to the madness which every art and every power were employed to render popular, in order that the errors of the rulers might be lost in the general blindness of the nation. This opposition continued until after our great, but most unfortunate victory at Long Island. Then all the mounds and banks of our constancy were borne down at once; and the phrensy of the American war broke in upon us like a deluge. This victory, which seemed to put an immediate end to all difficulties, perfected us in that spirit of domination, which our unparalleled prosperity had but too long nurtured. We had been so very powerful, and so very prosperous, that even the humblest of us were degraded into the vices and follies of kings. We lost all measure between means and ends; and our headlong desires became our politics and our morals. All men who wished for peace, or retained any sentiments of mo­deration, were overborne or silenced; and this city was led by every artifice (and probably with the more management, because I was one of your mem­bers) to distinguish itself by its zeal for that fatal cause. In this temper of yours and of my mind, I should have sooner fled to the extremities of the earth, than have shewn myself here. I, who saw in every American victory (for you have had a long series of these misfortunes) the germ and seed of the naval power of France and Spain, which all our heat and warmth against America was only hatching into life, I should not have been a welcome visitant with the brow and the language of such feelings.

When afterwards, the other face of your calamity was turned upon you, and shewed itself in defeat and distress, I shunned you full as much. I felt sorely this variety in our wretchedness; and I did not wish to have the least appearance of insulting you with that shew of superiority, which, though it [Page 16] may not be assumed, is generally suspected in a time of calamity, from those whose previous warnings have been despised. I could not bear to shew you a representative whose face did not reflect that of his constituents; a face that could not joy in your joys, and sorrow in your sorrows. But time at length has made us all of one opinion; and we have all opened our eyes on the true nature of the American war, to the true nature of all its successes and all its failures.—

THE proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negociations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented, from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of per­plexing questions; or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simply peace; sought in its natural course, and its ordinary haunts.—It is peace sought in the spirit of peace; and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country, to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act, and by the bond of the very same interest, which reconciles them to British go­vernment.

My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion; and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good inten­tion, which is as easily discovered at the first view, as fraud is surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the government of mankind. Ge­nuine [Page 17] simplicity of heart is an healing and cementing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the most simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some people, when they hear it. It has nothing to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There is nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the splendor of the project, which has been lately laid upon your table by the noble lord in the blue ribband. ^* It does not propose to fill your lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition of your mace, at every instant, to keep the peace amongst them. It does not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated provinces come to general ransom by bidding against each other, until you knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of pay­ments, beyond all the powers of algebra to equalize and settle.

THE first thing that we have to consider with regard to the nature of the object is—the number of people in the colonies. I have taken for some years a good deal of pains on that point. I can by no cal­culation justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own European blood and colour; besides at least 500,000 others, who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true number. There is no occasion to exaggerate, where plain truth is of so much weight and importance.

But whether I put the present numbers too high or too low, is a matter of little moment. Such is the strength with which population shoots in that part of the world, that state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Whilst we are discussing any given magnitude, they are grown to it. Whilst we spend our time in deli­berating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find we have millions more to manage. Your children do not grow faster from infancy to man­hood, than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations.— Ibid.

I put this consideration of the present and the growing numbers in the front of our deliberation; because, Sir, this consideration will make it evident to a blunter discernment than yours, that no partial, narrow, contracted, pinched, occasional system will be at all suitable to such an object. It will shew you, that it is not to be considered as one of those minima which are out of the eye and consideration of the law; not a paltry excrescence of the state; not a [Page 19] mean dependant, who may be neglected with little damage, and provoked with little danger. It will prove, that some degree of care and caution is re­quired in the handling such an object; it will shew, that you ought not, in reason, to trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human race. You could at no time do so without guilt; and be assured you will not be able to do it long with impunity.— Ibid.

WHEN we speak of the commerce with our colo­nies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.— Ibid.

IF I were to detail the imports, I could shew how many enjoyments they procure, which deceive the burthen of life; how many materials which invigo­rate the springs of national industry, and extend and animate every part of our foreign and domestic commerce.— Ibid.

I pass therefore to the colonies in another point of view, their agriculture. This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that besides feeding plentifully their own growing multitude, their annual export of grain, comprehending rice, has some years ago ex­ceeded a million in value. Of their last harvest, I am persuaded they will export much more. At the beginning of the century, some of these colonies imported corn from the northern country. For some time past the old world has been fed from the new. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a [Page 20] desolating famine. That if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.—

AS to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value; for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit, by which that enter­prizing employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admi­ration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay, and Davis's Streights, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and en­gaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falk­land Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their vic­torious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprize, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy in­dustry [Page 21] to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection: when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me. My rigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.—

IN this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature, which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is al­ways a jealous affection, your colonies become sus­picious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to under­stand the true temper of their minds, and the direc­tion which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.— Ibid.

FIRST, the people of the colonies are descendants of England. England, Sir, is a nation, which still [Page 22] I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this biass and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the antient commonwealths turned pri­marily on the right of election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so imme­diate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English constitution, to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove, that the right had been acknowledged in antient parchments, and blind usages, to reside in a certain body called an house of commons. They went much further; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a house of commons, as an immediate representative of the peo­ple; whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that, in all monarchies, the people must in effect themselves mediately or im­mediately possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The [Page 23] colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe, or might be endan­gered in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not easy indeed to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The fact is, that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles.— Ibid.

THEY were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their provincial legislative as­semblies. Their governments are popular in an high degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with losty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.— Ibid.

IF any thing were wanting to this necessary opera­tion of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a prin­ciple of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are protestants, and of that kind, which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opi­nion. [Page 24] This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute government is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history.—

PERMIT me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part to­wards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profes­sion itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of public devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plan­tations. The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commenta­ries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states, that all the people in his go­vernment are lawyers, or smatterers in law, and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions. The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obliga­tions to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty well. But my ^* honourabe and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark [Page 25] what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formi­dable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stub­born and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in go­vernment only by an actual grievance; here they an­ticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.— Ibid.

THE last cause of this disobedient spirit in the co­lonies is hardly less powerful than the rest, as it is not merely moral, but laid deep in the natural consti­tution of things. Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance, in weakening government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution: and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point, is enough to defeat an whole system. You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea. But there a power steps in, that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, ‘"So far shalt thou go, and no farther."’ Who are you, that should fret and rage, and bite the chains of nature?—Nothing worse happens to you, than does to all nations, who have extensive empire; and it happens in all the forms into which empire can be thrown. In large [Page 26] bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigor­ous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Aegypt, and Arabia, and Cur­distan, as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers, which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre, is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders. Spain, in her provinces, is, perhaps, not so well obeyed, as you are in yours. She complies too; she submits; she watches times. This is the immutable condition; the eternal law of extensive and detached empire.— Ibid.

AS the growing population in the colonies is evi­dently one cause of their resistance, it was last session mentioned in both houses, by men of weight, and received not without applause, that, in order to check this evil, it would be proper for the crown to make no further grants of land. But to this scheme, there are two objections. The first, that there is already so much unsettled land in private hands, as to afford room for an immense future population, although the crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil. If this be the case, then the only effect of this avarice of desolation, this hoarding of a royal wilderness, would be to raise the value of the possessions in the hands of the great private monopolists, without any adequate check to the growing and alarming mischief of population.

But, if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy with­out grants. They have already so occupied in many [Page 27] places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Apalachian mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander, without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with the habits of their life; would soon forget a govern­ment, by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and, in no long time, must be, the effect of attempt­ing to forbid as a crime, and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence, ‘"En­crease and multiply."’ Such would be the happy result of an endeavour to keep as a lair of wild beasts, that earth, which God, by an express char­ter, has given to the children of men.— Ibid.

BUT let us suppose all these moral difficulties got over. The ocean remains. You cannot pump this dry; and as long as it continues in its present bed, so long all the causes which weaken authority by distance will continue. ‘"Ye gods, annihilate but space and time, and make two lovers happy!"’ —was a pious and passionate prayer;—but just as reasonable, as many of the serious wishes of very grave and solemn politicians.— Ibid.

IT is not a pleasant consideration; but nothing in the world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson, as the conduct of ministry in this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal ideas in the management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the state looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view. They have taken things, by bits and scraps, some at one time and one pretence, and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort of regard to their relations or dependencies. They never had any kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented occa­sionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties, into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act, which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honourably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philo­sopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial em­pire that circled the whole globe.— Speech on American Taxation.

IT is through the American trade of tea that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crush­ing you with their burthen. They are ponderous indeed; and they must have that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the west and of the east. This folly has thrown open [Page 29] folding-doors to contraband; and will be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies, to every nation but yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble. It must be given up. For on what principle does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too com­prehensive!) vocabulary of finance— a preambulary tax. It is indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedan­try, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for any thing but benefit to the imposers, or satisfaction to the subject.— Ibid.

THE feelings of the colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden when called upon for the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune? No; but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble, of which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty, that the Ame­ricans are unable and unwilling to bear.— Ibid.

IT was in America that your resolutions were pre-declared. It was from thence that we knew to a certainty, how much exactly, and not a scruple more or less, we were to repeal. We were unworthy to be let into the secret of our own conduct. The assemblies had confidential communications from his majesty's confidential servants. We were nothing but instruments. Do you, after this, wonder, that you have no weight and no respect in the colonies? After this, are you surprized, that parliament is every [Page 30] day and every where losing (I feel it with sorrow, I utter it with reluctance) that reverential affection, which so endearing a name of authority ought ever to carry with it; that you are obeyed solely from respect to the bayonet; and that this house, the ground and pillar of freedom, is itself held up only by the treacherous under-pinning and clumsy buttresses of arbitrary power?—

IT is remarkable, Sir, that the persons who for­merly trumpeted forth the most loudly, the violent resolutions of assemblies; the universal insurrections; the seizing and burning the stamped papers; the forcing stamp officers to resign their commissions under the gallows; the rifling and pulling down of the houses of magistrates; and the expulsion from their country of all who dared to write or speak a single word in defence of the powers of parliament; these very trumpeters are now the men that represent the whole as a mere trifle; and choose to date all the disturbances from the repeal of the stamp act, which put an end to them. Hear your officers abroad, and let them refute this shameless falsehood, who, in all their correspondence, state the disturb­ances as owing to their true causes, the discontent of the people, from the taxes. You have this evi­dence in your own archives—and it will give you compleat satisfaction; if you are not so far lost to all parliamentary ideas of information, as rather to cre­dit the lie of the day, than the records of your own house.

Sir, this vermin of court reporters, when they are forced into day upon one point, are sure to burrow in another, but they shall have no refuge: I will make them bolt out of all their holes. Conscious that they must be baffled, when they attribute a pre­cedent disturbance to a subsequent measure, they [Page 31] take other ground, almost as absurd, but very com­mon in modern practice, and very wicked; which is, to attribute the ill effect of ill-judged conduct to the arguments which had been used to dissuade us from it. They say, that the opposition made in parliament to the stamp act at the time of its passing, encouraged the Americans to their resistance. This has even formally appeared in print in a regular volume, from an advocate of that faction, a Dr. Tucker. This Dr. Tucker is already a dean, and his earnest labours in his vineyard will, I suppose, raise him to a bishop­ric.— Ibid.

FOR my own part, I should chuse (If I could have my wish) that the proposition of the Honour­able Gentleman (Mr. Fuller) for the repeal, could go to America without the attendance of the penal bills. Alone I could almost answer for its success. I cannot be certain of its reception in the bad com­pany it may keep. In such heterogeneous assort­ments, the most innocent person will lose the effect of his innocency. Though you should send out this angel of peace, yet you are sending out a destroying angel too; and what would be the effect of the con­flict of these two adverse spirits, or which would pre­dominate in the end, is what I dare not say: whether the lenient measures would cause American passion to subside, or the severe would increase its fury—All this is in the hand of Providence; yet now, even now, I should confide in the prevailing virtue, and efficacious operation of lenity, though working in darkness, and in chaos, in the midst of all this unna­tural and turbid combination. I should hope it might produce order and beauty in the end.— Ibid.

LET us, Sir, embrace some system or other before we end this session. Do you mean to tax America, [Page 32] and to draw a productive revenue from thence? If you do, speak out: name, fix, ascertain this revenue; settle its quantity; define its objects; provide for its collection; and then fight when you have something to fight for. If you murder—rob! If you kill, take possession: and do not appear in the character of madmen, as well as assassins, violent, vindictive, bloody, and tyrannical, without an object. But may better counsels guide you!—

A noble lord, (Carmarthen) who spoke some time ago, is full of the fire of ingenuous youth; and when he has modelled the ideas of a lively imagina­tion by further experience, he will be an ornament to his country in either house. He has said, that the Americans are our children, and how can they revolt against their parent? He says, that if they are not free in their present state, England is not free; because Manchester, and other considerable places, are not represented. So then, because some towns in Eng­land are not represented, America is to have no re­presentative at all. They are ‘"our children;"’ but when children ask for bread, we are not to give a stone. It is because the natural resistance of things, and the various mutations of time, hinders our go­vernment, or any scheme of government, from being any more than a sort of approximation to the right, is it therefore that the colonies are to recede from it infinitely? When this child of ours wishes to assimi­late to its parent, and to reflect with a true filial re­semblance the beauteous countenance of British li­berty; are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their strength; our opprobrium for their glory; and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve them for their freedom?

If this be the case, ask yourselves this question, Will they be content in such a state of slavery? If [Page 33] not, look to the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people, who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no reve­nue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, dis­obedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to—my voice fails me; my inclination, indeed, carries me no further—all is confusion beyond it.

Well, Sir, I have recovered a little, and before I sit down I must say something to another point with which gentlemen urge us. What is to become of the declaratory act, asserting the entireness of British legislative authority, if we abandon the practice of taxation?

For my part I look upon the rights stated in that act, exactly in the manner in which I viewed them on its very first proposition, and which I have often taken the liberty, with great humility, to lay before you. I look, I say, on the imperial rights of Great Britain, and the privileges which the colonists ought to enjoy under these rights, to be just the most re­concileable things in the world. The parliament of Great Britain sits at the head of her extensive em­pire in two capacities: one as the local legislature of this island, providing for all things at home, immedi­ately, and by no other instrument than the executive power.—The other, and I think her nobler capacity, is what I call her imperial character; in which, as from the throne of heaven, she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides, and controls them all without annihilating any. As all these pro­vincial legislatures are only co-ordinate to each other, they ought all to be subordinate to her; else they can neither preserve mutual peace, nor hope for mu­tual justice, nor effectually afford mutual assistance. It is necessary to coerce the negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and deficient, by [Page 34] the over-ruling plenitude of her power. She is ne­ver to intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the common ends of their institu­tion. But in order to enable parliament to answer all these ends of provident and beneficient superin­tendance, her powers must be boundless.— Ibid.

INDEED there is nothing more prejudicial to the grandeur of buildings, than to abound in angles; a fault obvious in many; and owing to an inordinate thirst for variety, which, whenever it prevails, is sure to leave very little true taste.— Sublime and Beautiful.

A true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators, and effect the noblest designs by easy me­thods.— Ibid.

NO work of art can he great, but as it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature only. A good eye will fix the medium betwixt an excessive length or heighth (for the same objection lies against both), and a short or broken quantity: and perhaps it might be ascertained to a tolerable degree of ex­actness, if it was my purpose to descend far into the particulars of any art.— Ibid.

SUCH sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas; unless it be the well-known voice of some creature, on which we are used to look with contempt. The angry tones of wild beasts are equally capable of causing a great and awful sensation.

It might seem that these modulations of sound carry some connection with the nature of the things they represent, and are not merely arbitrary; because the natural cries of all animals, even of those animals with whom we have not been acquainted, never fail to make themselves sufficiently understood; this can­not be said of language. The modifications of sound, which may be productive of the sublime, are almost infinite. Those I have mentioned, are only a few instances to shew on what principles they are all built.— Ibid.

THERE are very few in the world who will not prefer an useful ally to an insolent master.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

NEVER expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my cotemporaries, I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionable produces (whe­ther in a greater or less number than former times, I know not) daring profligates, and insidious hypo­crites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world, because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They, who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behaviour of ill men, are of the party of the latter.— Ibid.

VIRTUE will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scruti­nize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough, (and for a worthy man perhaps too much) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostacy.— Ibid.

AN exterior administration, chosen for its impotency, or after it is chosen purposely rendered impotent, in order to be rendered subservient, will not be obeyed. The laws themselves will not be respected, when those who execute them are despised; and they will be despised, when their power is not immediate from the crown, or natural in the kingdom. Never were ministers better supported in parliament. Par­liamentary support comes and goes with office, totally regardless of the man or the merit. Is government strengthened? It grows weaker and weaker. The popular torrent gains upon it every hour. Let us learn from our experience. It is not support that is wanting to government, but reformation. When mi­nistry rests upon public opinion, it is not, indeed, built upon a rock of adamant; it has, however, some stability. But when it stands upon private humour, its structure is of stubble, and its foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it again—He that supports every administration, subverts all government. The reason is this: The whole business in which a court usually takes an interest goes on at present equally well, in whatever hands, whether high or low, wise or foolish, scandalous or reputable; there is nothing, therefore, to hold it firm to any one body of men, or to any one consistent scheme of politics. Nothing interposes, to prevent the full operation of all the [Page 37] caprices and all the passions of a court upon the ser­vants of the public. The system of administration is open to continual shocks and changes, upon the principles of the meanest cabal, and the most con­temptible intrigue. Nothing can be solid and per­manent. All good men, at length, sly with horror from such a service. Men of rank and ability, with the spirit which ought to animate such men in a free state, while they decline the jurisdiction of dark cabal on their actions and their fortunes, will, for both, chearfully put themselves upon their country. They will trust an inquisitive and distinguishing parliament; because it does enquire, and does distinguish. If they act well, they know, that in such a parliament, they will be supported against any intrigue; if they act ill, they know that no intrigue can protect them. This situation, however awful, is honourable. But in one hour, and in the self-same assembly, without any assigned or assignable cause, to be precipitated from the highest authority to the most marked neg­lect, possibly into the greatest peril of life and repu­tation, is a situation full of danger, and destitute of honour. It will be shunned equally by every man of prudence, and every man of spirit.— Cause of the Discontents of the Nation.

TO be enabled to acquire, the people, without being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success dispro­portioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal [Page 38] justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them, deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. He that does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched; at the same time that by his wicked speculations he exposes the fruits of success­ful industry, and the accumulations of fortune, to the plunder of the negligent, the disappointed, and the unprosperous.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

THE assembly took no notice of his recommenda­tion. They were in this dilemma—If they continued to receive the assignats, cash must become an alien to their treasury: If the treasury should refuse those paper amulets, or should discountenance them in any degree, they must destroy the credit of their sole re­source. They seem, then, to have made their option; and to have given some sort of credit to their paper by taking it themselves; at the same time in their speeches they made a sort of swaggering declaration, something, I rather think, above legislative compe­tence; that is, that there is no difference in value be­tween metallic money and their assignats. This was a good stout proof article of faith, pronounced under an anathema, by the venerable fathers of this phi­losophic synod. Credat who will—certainly not Ju­doeus Appella.— Ibid.

WE know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.— Ibid.

CONTROULED depravity is not innocence; and that it is not the labour of delinquency in chains, [Page 39] that will correct abuses. Never did a serious plan of amending of any old tyrannical establishment pro­pose the authors and abettors of the abuses as the reformers of them.— Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

BY beauty I mean that quality, or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it. I confine this definition to the merely sensible qualities of things, for the sake of preserving the utmost simplicity in a subject which must always distract us, whenever we take in those various causes of sympathy which attach us to any persons or things from secondary considerations, and not from the direct force which they have merely on being viewed.— Sublime and Beautiful.

THE passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only. This is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more directly than ours. The only distinction they observe with regard to their mates, is that of sex. It is true, that they stick severally to their own species in preference to all others. But this preference, I imagine, does not arise from any sense of beauty which they find in their species, as Mr. Addison supposes, but from a law of some other kind, to which they are subject; and this we may fairly conclude, from their apparent want of choice amongst those objects to which the barriers of their species have confined them. But man, who is a creature adapted to a greater variety and intricacy of relation, connects with the general passion, the idea of some social qualities, which direct and heighten the appetite which he has in common with all other [Page 40] animals; and as he is not designed, like them, to live at large, it is fit that he should have something to create a preference, and fix his choice; and this, in general, should be some sensible quality; as no other can so quickly, so powerfully, or so surely produce its effect. The object, therefore, of this mixed pas­sion, which we call love, is the beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are at­tached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sen­timents of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in many cases, this was designed, I am unable to discover; for I see no greater reason for a connection between man and several animals who are attired in so engaging a manner, than between him and some others who entirely want this attraction, or possess it in a far weaker degree. But it is pro­bable, that Providence did not make even this dis­tinction, but with a view to some great end, though we cannot perceive distinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom, nor our ways his ways.— Ibid.

OBSERVE that part of a beautiful woman where she is, perhaps, the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is car­ried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of [Page 41] surface, continual, yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? It gives me no small pleasure to find that I can strengthen my theory in this point, by the opinion of the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth; whose idea of the line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just. But the idea of variation, without attending so accurately to the manner of the variation, has led him to con­sider angular figures as beautiful; these figures, it is true, vary greatly; yet they vary in a sudden and broken manner; and I do not find any natural object which is angular, and at the same beautiful. Indeed few natural objects are entirely angular.— Ibid.

I NEED here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, and so even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it. I would not here be understood to say, that weakness betraying very bad health has any share in beauty; but the ill effect of this is not because it is weakness, but because the ill state of health which produces such weakness, alters the other conditions of beauty; the parts in such a case collapse; the bright colour, the lumen purpureum juventae, is gone; and the fine variation is lost in wrinkles, sudden breaks, and right lines.— Ibid.

THE view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing in­sensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gra­dually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in a larger swell, which continues to the middle [Page 42] of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above, below, upon every side. In this description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another; you are represented with no sudden protu­berance through the whole, and yet the whole is continually changing.— Ibid.

This act, therefore, has this distinguished evil in it, that it is the first partial suspension of the Habeas Corpus that has been made. The precedent, which is always of very great importance, is now established. For the first time a distinction is made among the people within this realm. Before this act, every man putting his foot on English ground, every stranger owing only a local and temporary allegiance, even negro slaves, who had been sold in the colonies and under an act of parliament, became as free as every other man who breathed the same air with them.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

BY the favour of my fellow-citizens, I am the representative of an honest, well ordered, virtuous city; of a people, who preserve more of the original English simplicity, and purity of manners, than per­haps any other. You possess among you several men and magistrates of large and cultivated understand­ings, fit for any employment in any sphere. I do, to the best of my power, act so as to make myself worthy of so honourable a choice.— Ibid.

THERE is, Sir, another office, which was not long since closely connected with this of the Ame­rican secretary; but has been lately separated from it for the very same purpose for which it had been conjoined; I mean the sole purpose of all the sepa­rations and all conjunctions that have been lately made—a job. I speak, Sir, of the Board of Trade and Plantations. This board is a sort of temperate bed of influence; a sort of gently ripening hot-house, where eight members of parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year, for a certain given time, in order to mature, at a proper season, a claim to two thousand, granted for doing less, and on the credit of having toiled so long in that inferior laborious department.— Oecon. Reform.

THE British state is, without question, that which pursues the greatest variety of creeds, and is the least disposed to sacrifice any one of them to another, or to the whole. It aims at taking in the whole circle of human desires, and securing for them their fair enjoyment. Our Legislature has been very closely connected in its most efficient part with individual feeling and with individual interest. Personal li­berty, the most lively of these feelings, and the most important of these interests, which in other European countries has rather arisen from the system of mea­sures, and the habitudes of life, than from the laws of the state, (in which it flourished more from neglect than attention) in England, has been a direct object of Government.— Regicide Peace.

AT present the state of their treasury (France) sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more [Page 44] and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the repre­sentative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank paper, and not the bank paper to the flourishing con­dition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper-money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on 'Change, because in Westminster­hall it is not.— Reflect. on the Revolution in France.

WITH regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons, and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance. Can any phi­losophie spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a certain, and that too a large portion of landed property, passing in succession through persons whose title to it is, always in theory, and often in fact, an eminent degree of piety, morals, and learning; a property which, by its destination, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the means of dignity and ele­vation; a property, the tenure of which is the per­formance of some duty, (whatever value you may chuse to set upon that duty) and the character of whose proprietors demands at least an exterior deco­rum and gravity of manners; who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality; part of whose [Page 45] income they are to consider as a trust for charity; and who, even when they fail in their trust, when they slide from their character, and degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions? Is it better that estates should be held by those who have no duty, than by those who have one?—by those whose character and destination point to virtues, than by those who have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own will and appetite? Nor are these estates held altogether in the character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain. They pass from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other. No excess is good; and therefore too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me of material injury to any commonwealth, that there should exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired by other means than the previous acqui­sition of money.— Ibid.

THE Board of Works, which in the seven years preceding 1777, has cost towards 400,000 l. and (if I recollect rightly) has not cost less in proportion from the beginning of the reign, is under the very same description of all the other ill-contrived establish­ments, and calls for the very same reform. We are to seek for the visible signs of all this expence.—For all this expence, we do not see a building of the size and importance of a pigeon-house. Buckingham­house was reprised by a bargain with the public, for one hundred thousand pounds; and the small house at Windsor has been, if I mistake not, undertaken since that account was brought before us. The good works of that board of works are as carefully con­cealed as other good works ought to be; they are [Page 46] perfectly invisible. But though it is the perfection of charity to be concealed, it is, Sir, the property and glory of magnificence to appear, and stand for­ward to the eye.— Oecon. Reform.

I know well enough that the bishoprics and cures, under kingly and seignoral patronage, as now they are in England, and as they have been lately in France, are sometimes acquired by unworthy me­thods.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

FROM Magna Charta to the Declaration of Rights, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assist our liberties, as an entailed inheri­tance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity, as an estate specially be­longing to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privi­leges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of pro­found reflection, or rather the happy effect of fol­lowing nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance fur­nishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, [Page 47] but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our govern­ment and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down to us and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and sym­metry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable con­stancy, moves on through the varied tenor of per­petual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.—Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on these principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of in­heritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the consti­tution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and che­rishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the [Page 48] fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small be­nefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, lead­ing in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent in­spires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably ad­hering to and disgracing those who are the first ac­quirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect; it has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors; it has its bearings and its ensigns armo­rials; it has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere in­dividual men; on account of their age; and on ac­count of those from whom they are descended.— Ibid.

THE characters of nature are legible, it is true; but they are not plain enough to enable those who run, to read them. We must make use of a cau­tious, I had almost said, a timorous method of pro­ceeding. We must not attempt to fly, when we can scarcely pretend to creep. In considering any com­plex matter, we ought to examine every distinct in­gredient in the composition, one by one, and reduce every thing to the utmost simplicity; since the con­dition of our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits. We ought afterwards to re-examine the principles by the effect of the composition, as well as the composition by that of the principles: we [Page 49] ought to compare our subject with things of a similar nature, and even with things of a contrary nature; for discoveries may be and often are made by the contrast, which would escape us on the single view.—

DO not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your register and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivisies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.— Speech on Conciliation with America.

THOSE colours which seem most appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort; light greens, soft blues, weak whites, pink reds, and violets. If the colours be strong and vivid, they are always diversified, and the object is never of one strong colour; there are almost always such a number of them, (as in variegated flowers) that the strength and glare of each is considerably abated. In a fine complexion, there is not only some variety in the colouring, but the colours; neither the red nor the white are strong and glaring. Besides, they are mixed in such a manner, and with such gradations, that it is impossible to fix the bounds. On the same [Page 50] principle it is, that the dubious colour in the necks and tails of peacocks, and about the heads of drakes, is so very agreeable. In reality, the beauty both of shape and colouring are as nearly related, as we can well suppose it possible for things of such different natures to be.—

THE States of the Christian World have grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time, and by a great variety of accidents. They have been improved to what we see them with greater or less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has been formed upon a regular plan, or with any unity of design. As their constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any peculiar end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other. The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, and have become in a manner infinite. In all these old countries the state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state. Every state has pursued, not only every sort of social advan­tage, but it has cultivated the welfare of every individual. His wants, his wishes, even his tastes have been consulted. This comprehensive scheme, virtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the most adverse to it. That was found, under monarchies stiled absolute, in a degree un­known to the ancient commonwealths. From hence the powers of all our modern states meet, in all their movements, with some obstruction. It is therefore no wonder, that when these states are to be considered as machines to operate for some one great end, that this dissipated and balanced force is not easily concentred, or made to bear upon one point.— Regicide Peace.

When I (Mr. Burke) first devoted myself to the public service, I considered how I should render myself fit for it; and this I did by endeavouring to discover what it was, that gave this country the rank it holds in the world. I found that our prosperity and dignity arose principally, if not solely, from two sources; our constitution and commerce. Both these I have spared no study to understand, and no endeavour to support.

The distinguishing part of our constitution is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate, seems the particular duty and proper trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

The other source of our power is commerce, of which you are so large a part, and which cannot exist, no more than your liberty, without a con­nection with many virtues.— Speech to the Electors of Bristol.

AT this proposition, I must pause a moment. The thing seems a great deal too big for my ideas of jurisprudence. It should seem, to my way of con­ceiving such matters, that there is a very wide difference in reason and policy, between the mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of bands of men, who disturb order within the state, and the civil dissentions which may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities which compose a great empire. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic, to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method [Page 52] of drawing up an indictment against an whole people. I cannot insult and ridicule the feelings of millions of my fellow creatures, as Sir Edward Coke insulted one excellent individual (Sir Walter Raleigh) at the bar. I am not ripe to pass sentence on the gravest public bodies, entrusted with magistracies of great authority and dignity, and charged with the safety of their fellow-citizens, upon the very same title that I am. I really think, that for wise men, this is not judicious; for sober men, not decent; for minds tinctured with humanity, not mild and merciful.—

IF your clergy, or any clergy, should shew them­selves vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity, and to those professional faults which can hardly be separated from professional virtues, though their vices never can countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit, that they would naturally have the effect of abating very much of our indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure and justice in their punishment. I can allow in clergymen, through all their divisions, some tenaciousness of their own opinion; some overflowings of zeal for its propagation; some predilection to their own state and office; some attachment to the interest of their own corps; some preference to those who listen with docility to their doctrines, beyond those who scorn and deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man who have to deal with men, and who would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the greatest of all intolerance. I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.— Re­flect. on the Revolution in France.

FIRST, I beg leave to speak of our church estab­lishment, which is the first of our prejudices, not a [Page 53] prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I speak of it first. It is first, and last, and midst in our minds. For, taking ground on that religious system, of which we are now in possession, we continue to act on the early received, and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense not only, like a wise architect, hath built up the august fabric of states, but like a provident proprietor, to preserve the structure from prophanation and ruin, as a sacred temple, purged from all the impurities of fraud, and violence, and injustice, and tyranny, hath solemnly and for ever consecrated the commonwealth, and all that officiate in it. This consecration is made, that all who ad­minister in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination; that their hope should be full of immortality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory, in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.

Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations; and religious establish­ments provided, that may continually revive and enforce them. Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than necessary, in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man; whose prerogative it is, to be in a great degree a creature of his own making; and who when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation. But whenever man is put over men, as the better nature ought ever to preside, in that case more [Page 54] particularly, he should as nearly as possible be ap­proximated to his perfection.— Ibid.

THE consecration of the state, by a state religious establishment, is necessary also to operate with an wholesome awe upon free citizens; because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determinate portion of power. To them therefore a religion connected with the state, and with their duty towards it, becomes even more necessary than in such societies, where the people by the terms of their subjection are confined to private sentiments, and the management of their own family concerns. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society.— Ibid.

SUCH a body kings generally have as a council. A monarchy may exist without it; but it seems to be in the very essence of a republican government. It holds a sort of middle place between the supreme power exercised by the people, or immediately de­legated from them, and the mere executive.— Ibid.

IT is thus, and for the same end, that they (the regi­cides) endeavour to destroy that tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees. Your despots govern by terror. They know, that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, [Page 55] hat only sort of fear which generates true courage. Their object is, that their fellow citizens may be under the dominion of no awe, but that of their committee of research, and of their lanterne—

THE power of the House of Commons, direct or indirect, is indeed great; and long may it be able to preserve its greatness, and the spirit belonging to true greatness, at the full; and it will do so, as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from becoming the makers of law for England.— Ibid.

I HAVE my eye chiefly on the House of Commons. I hope I shall be indulged in a few observations on the nature and character of that assembly; not with regard to its legal form and power, but to its spirit, and to the purposes it is meant to answer in the constitution.

The House of Commons was supposed originally to be no part of the standing government of this country. It was considered as a controul, issuing immediately from the people, and speedily to be resolved into the mass from whence it arose. In this respect it was in the higher part of government what juries are in the lower. The capacity of a magistrate being transitory, and that of a citizen permanent, the latter capacity it was hoped would of course preponderate in all discussions, not only between the people and the standing authority of the crown, but between the people and the fleeting authority of the House of Commons itself. It was hoped that, being of a middle nature between subject and government, they would feel with a more tender and a nearer interest [Page 56] every thing that concerned the people, than the other remoter and more permanent parts of legislature.

Whatever alterations time and the necessary ac­commodation of business may have introduced, this character can never be sustained, unless the House of Commons shall be made to bear some stamp of the actual disposition of the people at large. It would (among public misfortunes) be an evil more natural and tolerable, that the House of Commons should be infected with every epidemical phrensy of the people, as this would indicate some consanguinity, some sympathy of nature with their constituents, than that they should in all cases be wholly untouched by the opinions and feelings of the people out of doors. By this want of sympathy they would cease to be an House of Com­mons. For it is not the derivation of the power of that House from the people, which makes it in a distinct sense their representative. The King is the representative of the people; so are the lords; so are the judges. They all are trustees for the people, as well as the Commons; because no power is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although go­vernment certainly is an institution of divine autho­rity, yet its forms, and the persons who administer it, all originate from the people.

A popular origin cannot therefore be the charac­teristical distinction of a popular representative. This belongs equally to all parts of government, and in all forms. The virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not [...]ed to be a controul upon the people, as of late [...] been taught, by a doctrine of the most pernicious tendency. It was designed as a controul for the people. Other institutions have been formed for the purpose of checking popular excesses; and they are, I apprehend, fully adequate to their object. If not, they ought to be made so. The House of Commons, as it was never intended for the support of [Page 57] peace and subordination, is miserably appointed for that service; having no stronger weapon than its mace, and no better officer than its serjeant at arms, which it can command of its own proper authority. A vigilant and jealous eye over executory and judicial magistracy; an anxious care of public money, an openness, approaching towards facility, to public complaint: these seem to be the true characteristics of an House of Commons. But an addressing House of Commons, and a petitioning nation; an House of Commons full of confidence, when the nation is plunged in despair; in the utmost harmony with ministers, whom the people regard with the utmost abhorrence; who vote thanks, when the public opinion calls upon them for impeachments; who are eager to grant, when the general voice demands account; who, in all disputes between the people and administration, presume against the people; who punish their disorders, but refuse even to inquire into the provocations to them; this is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in this constitution. Such an assembly may be a great, wise, awful senate; but it is not to any popular purpose an House of Com­mons.— Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents.

WHEN at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty, and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an ever­lasting [Page 58] monument of vengeance; and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy, and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havock, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havock. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities. But escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.

The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity that private charity could do: but it was [Page 59] a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days, had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, re­signed, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more adviseable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

^* For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking [Page 60] literally. I mean to produce to you more than three witnesses, above all exception, who will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south (and these not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage.—

THE Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German sea east and west, emptied and embowelled (May God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination a little further, and then suppose your ministers taking a survey of this scene of waste and desolation; what would be your thoughts if you should be informed, that they were computing how much had been the amount of the excises, how much the customs, how much the land and malt tax, in order that they should charge (take it in the most favourable light) for public service, upon the relics of the satiated vengeance of relentless enemies, the whole of what England had yielded in the most ex­uberant seasons of peace and abundance? What would you call it? To call it tyranny, sublimed into madness, would be too faint an image; yet this very madness is the principle upon which the ministers at your right hand have proceeded in their estimate of the revenues of the Carnatic, when they were pro­viding, not supply for the establishments of its pro­tection, but rewards for the authors of its ruin.

Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant, ‘"the Carnatic is a country that will soon re­cover, and become instantly as prosperous as ever."’ [Page 61] They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe that by sowing of dragons teeth, men may come up ready grown and ready armed. They who will give themselves the trouble of considering (for it requires no great reach of thought, no very profound knowledge) the manner in which mankind are increased, and countries cultivated, will regard all this raving as it ought to be regarded. In order that the people, after a long period of vexation and plunder, may be in a condition to maintain govern­ment, government must begin by maintaining them. Here the road to oeconomy lies not through receipt, but through expence; and in that country nature has given no short cut to your object. Men must pro­pagate, like other animals, by the mouth. Never did oppression light the nuptial torch; never did extortion and usury spread out the genial bed.

Does any of you think that England, so wasted, would, under such a nursing attendance, so rapidly and cheaply recover? But he is meanly acquainted with either England or India, who does not know that England would a thousand times sooner resume population, fertility, and what ought to be the ultimate secretion from both, revenue, than such a country as the Carnatic.

The Carnatic is not by the bounty of nature a fertile soil. The general size of its cattle is proof enough that it is much otherwise. It is some days since I moved, that a curious and interesting map, kept in the India House, should be laid before you. The India House is not yet in readiness to send it; I have therefore brought down my own copy, and there it lies for the use of any gentleman who may think such a matter worthy of his attention. It is indeed a noble map, and of noble things; but it is decisive against the golden dreams and sanguine speculations of avarice run mad. In addition to what you know must be the case in every part of the world (the necessity of a previous provision of habi­tation, [Page 62] seed, stock, capital) that map will shew you, that the use of the influences of Heaven itself, are in that country a work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or no living brooks or running streams, and it has rain only at a season; but its product of rice exacts the use of water subject to perpetual com­mand. This is the national bank of the Carnatic, on which it must have a perpetual credit, or it perishe irretrievably. For that reason, in the happier times of India, a number almost incredible of reser­voirs have been made in chosen places throughout the whole country; they are formed, for the greater part, of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labour, and maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained in that map (Mr. Barnard's map of the Jaghire) alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or three acres to five miles in circuit. From these reservoirs currents are occasionally drawn over the fields, and these water-courses again call for a con­siderable expence to keep them properly scoured and duly levelled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot be in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs of the larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for domestic services, and the use of religious purification. These are not the enterprizes of your power, nor in a style of magnificence suited to the taste of your minister. These are the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by am­bition; but by the ambition of an unsatiable bene­volence, which, not contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the [Page 63] dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nou­rishers of mankind.

What, Sir, would a virtuous and enlightened mi­nistry do on the view of the ruins of such works be­fore them? On the view of such a chasm of desola­tion as that which yawned in the midst of those coun­tries to the north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every shilling derived from the producing to re-animate the powers of the unproductive parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty, whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity, they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors, whose crimes were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance; that they must silence their inauspicious tongues; that they must hold off their profane unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have proclaimed with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every country the first creditor is the plow; that this original, indefeasi­ble claim supersedes every other demand.

This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said. This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or doing. A ministry of another kind would have first improved the country, and have thus laid a solid founda­tion for future opulence and future force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country, there is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers, from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by fire, sword, and famine; their sympathies took an­other direction; they were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless itching of [Page 64] its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long missed the harvest of its returning months; they f [...]lt for peculation which had been for so many years [...]ing in the dust of an empty treasury; they were [...]ed into compassion for rapine and oppression, [...]king their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the necessities for which they were studious to provide.— Ibid.

AND what is the soil or climate, where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, has ever run with a more co­pious stream of revenue, than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence, by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world.— Speech on Conciliation with America.

IS confounding the order of crimes, which, whether by putting them from a higher part of the scale to the lower, or from the lower to the higher, is never done without dangerously disordering the whole frame of jurisprudence.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

WE know, that the convocation of the clergy had formerly been called, and sat with nearly as much regularity to business as parliament itself. It is now called for form only. It sits for the purpose of making some polite ecclesiastical compliments to the king; and when that grace is said, retires and is heard of no more. It is however a part of the constitution, and may be called out into act and energy, whenever there is occasion; and whenever those, who conjure [Page 65] up that spirit, will choose to abide the consequences. It is wise to permit its legal existence; it is much wiser to continue it a legal existence only. So truly has prudence, (constituted as the god of this lower world) the entire dominion over every exercise of power, committed into its hands; and yet I have lived to see prudence and conformity to circum­stances, wholly set at naught in our late controversies, and treated as if they were the most contemptible and irrational of all things. I have heard it an hundred times very gravely alledged, that in order to keep power in wind, it was necessary, by preference, to exert it in those very points in which it was most likely to be resisted, and the least likely to be pro­ductive of any advantage.— Ibid.

IT must be remembered, that since the revolution, until the period we are speaking of, the influence of the crown had been always employed in supporting the ministers of state, and in carrying on the public business according to their opinions. But the party now in question is formed upon a very different idea. It is to intercept the favour, protection and confi­dence of the crown in the passage to its ministers; it is to come between them and their importance in par­liament; it is to separate them from all their natural and acquired dependencies; it is intended as con­troul, not the support, of administration. The machinery of this system is perplexed in its movements, and false in its principle. It is formed on a supposition that the king is something external to his govern­ment; and that he may be honoured and aggrandized, even by its debility and disgrace. The plan pro­ceeds expressly on the idea of enfeebling the regular executory power. It proceeds on the idea of weak­ening the state in order to strengthen the court. The scheme depending entirely on distrust, on disconnec­tion, [Page 66] on mutability by principle, on systematic weak­ness in every particular member; it is impossible that the total result should be substantial strength of any kind.

As a foundation of their scheme, the cabal have established a sort of rota in the court. All sorts of parties, by this means, have been brought into admi­nistration, from whence few have had the good for­tune to escape without disgrace; none at all without considerable losses. In the beginning of each ar­rangement no professions of confidence and support are wanting, to induce the leading men to engage. But while the ministers of the day appear in all the pomp and pride of power, while they have all their canvas spread out to the wind, and every sail filled with the fair and prosperous gale of royal favour, in a short time they find, they know not how, a cur­rent, which sets directly against them; which pre­vents all progress; and even drives them backwards. They grow ashamed and mortified in a situation, which, by its vicinity to power, only serves to re­mind them the more strongly of their insignificance. They are obliged either to execute the orders of their inferiors, or to see themselves opposed by the natural instruments of their office. With the loss of their dignity they lose their temper. In their turn they grow troublesome to that cabal, which, whether it supports or opposes, equally disgraces and equally betrays them. It is soon found necessary to get rid of the heads of administration; but it is of the heads only. As there always are many rotten members belonging to the best connections, it is not hard to persuade several to continue in office without their leaders. By this means the party goes out much thinner than it came in; and is only reduced in strength by its temporary possession of power. Be­sides, if by accident, or in course of changes, that power should be recovered, the junto have thrown up a retrenchment of these carcases, which may serve [Page 67] to cover themselves in a day of danger. They con­clude, not unwisely, that such rotten members will become the first objects of disgust and resentment to their antient connexions.

They contrive to form in the outward administra­tion two parties at the least; which, whilst they are tearing one another to pieces, are both competitors for the favour and protection of the cabal; and, by their emulation, contribute to throw every thing more and more into the hands of the interior ma­nagers.

A minister of state will sometimes keep himself totally estranged from all his colleagues; will differ from them in their councils, will privately traverse, and publicly oppose, their measures, He will, how­ever, continue in his employment. Instead of suf­fering any mark of displeasure, he will be distin­guished by an unbounded profusion of court rewards and caresses; because he does what is expected, and all that is expected, from men in office. He helps to keep some form of administration in being, and keeps it at the same time as weak and divided as pos­sible.

However, we must take care not to be mistaken, or to imagine that such persons have any weight in their opposition. When, by them, administration is convinced of its insignificancy, they are soon to be convinced of their own. They never are suffered to succeed in their opposition. They and the world are to be satisfied, that, neither office, nor authority, nor property, nor ability, eloquence, counsel, skill, or union, are of the least importance; but that the mere influence of the court, naked of all support, and destitute of all management, is abundantly suffi­cient for all its own purposes.

When any adverse connexion is to be destroyed, the cabal seldom appear in the work themselves. They find out some person of whom the party enter­tains an high opinion. Such a person they endeavour [Page 68] to delude with various pretences. They teach him first to distrust, and then to quarrel with his friends; among whom, by the same arts, they excite a similar diffidence of him; so that, in this mutual fear and distrust, he may suffer himself to be employed as the instrument in the change which is brought about. Afterwards they are sure to destroy him in his turn, by setting up in his place some person in whom he had himself reposed the greatest confidence, and who serves to carry off a considerable part of his adhe­rents.

As in destroying their enemies they make use of instruments not immediately belonging to their corps, so in advancing their own friends they pursue exactly the same method. To promote any of them to con­siderable rank or emolument, they commonly take care that the recommendation shall pass through the hands of the oftensible ministry: such a recommen­dation might however appear to the world, as some proof of the credit of ministers, and some means of increasing their strength. To prevent this, the per­sons so advanced are directed, in all companies, in­dustriously to declare, that they are under no obli­gations whatsoever to administration; that they have received their office from another quarter; that they are totally free and independent.

When the faction has any job of lucre to obtain, or of vengeance to perpetrate, their way is, to select, for the execution, those very persons to whose habits, friendships, principles, and declarations, such pro­ceedings are publicly known to be the most adverse; at once to render the instruments the more odious, and therefore the more dependent, and to prevent the people from ever reposing a confidence in any appearance of private friendship, or public principle.

If the administration seem now and then, from re­missness, or from fear of making themselves dis­agreeable, to suffer any popular excesses to go un­punished, the cabal immediately sets up some creature [Page 69] of theirs to raise a clamour against the ministers, as having shamefully betrayed the dignity of govern­ment. Then they compel the ministry to become active in conferring rewards and honours on the per­sons who have been the instruments of their disgrace; and, after having first vilified them with the higher orders for suffering the laws to sleep over the licen­tiousness of the populace, they drive them (in order to make amends for their former inactivity) to some act of atrocious violence, which renders them com­pletely abhorred by the people.

They who remember the riots which attended the Middlesex election; the opening of the present par­liament; and the transactions relative to Saint George's Fields, will not be at a loss for an appli­cation of these remarks.

That this body may be enabled to compass all the ends of its institution, its members are scarcely ever to aim at the high and responsible offices of the state. They are distributed with art and judgment through all the secondary, but efficient, departments of office, and through the households of all the branches of the royal family: so as on one hand to occupy all the avenues to the throne; and on the other to for­ward or frustrate the execution of any measure, according to their own interests. For with the credit and support which they are known to have, though for the greater part in places which are only a genteel excuse for salary, they possess all the influence of the highest posts; and they dictate publicly in almost every thing, even with a parade of superiority. Whenever they dissent (as it often happens) from their nominal leaders, the trained part of the senate, instinctively in the secret, is sure to follow them; provided the leaders, sensible of their situation, do not of themselves recede in time from their most declared opinions. This latter is generally the case. It will not be conceivable to any one who has not seen it, what pleasure is taken by the cabal in ren­dering [Page 70] these heads of office thoroughly contemptible and ridiculous. And when they are become so, they have then the best chance for being well sup­ported.

The members of the court faction are fully indem­nified for not holding places on the slippery heights of the kingdom, not only by the lead in all affairs, but also by the perfect security in which they enjoy less conspicuous, but very advantageous situations. Their places are, in express legal tenure, or in effect, all of them for life. Whilst the first and most re­spectable persons in the kingdom are tossed about like tennis balls, the sport of a blind and insolent caprice, no minister dares even to cast an oblique glance at the lowest of their body. If an attempt be made upon one of this corps, immediately he flies to sanctuary, and pretends to the most inviolable of all promises. No conveniency of public arrange­ment is available to remove any one of them from the specific situation he holds; and the slightest at­tempt upon one of them, by the most powerful mi­nister, is a certain preliminary to his own destruc­tion.

Conscious of their independence, they bear them­selves with a lofty air to the exterior ministers. Like Janissaries, they derive a kind of freedom from the very condition of their servitude. They may act just as they please; provided they are true to the great ruling principle of their institution. It is, therefore, not at all wonderful, that people should be so desirous of adding themselves to that body, in which they may possess and reconcile satisfactions the most alluring, and seemingly the most contradictory; enjoying at once all the spirited pleasure of indepen­dence, and all the gross lucre and sat emoluments of servitude.

Here is a sketch, though a slight one, of the con­stitution, laws, and policy of this new court corpo­ration. The name by which they chuse to distinguish [Page 71] themselves, is that of king's men, or the king's friends, by an invidious exclusion of the rest of his Majesty's most loyal and affectionate subjects. The whole system, comprehending the exterior and interior ad­ministrations, is commonly called in the technical language of the court, double cabinet; in French or English, as you chuse to pronounce it.— Thoughts on the Cause of the Discontents of the Nation.

CHARTERS are kept when their purposes are main­tained: they are violated when the privilege is sup­ported against its end and its object.— Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

CONNEXION and faction are equivalent terms, is an opinion which has been carefully inculcated at all times by unconstitutional statesmen. The reason is evident. Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or effi­cacy. In a connexion, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not [Page 72] inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, un­systematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.— Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents.

THOSE who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume.— Ibid.

THIS it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficul­ties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science; and even to push forward beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the land-marks of the human understanding itself. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud sacilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with us, strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

DELUSION and weakness produce not one mischief the less, because they are universal.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

BUT as pain is stronger in its operations than plea­sure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however equisite, which are not preferred to death; nay, what generally make pain itself, if I may say so, is, that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors.— Sublime and Beautiful.

DARKNESS is more productive of sublime ideas than light. Our great poet was convinced of this; and indeed so full was he of this idea, so entirely possessed with the power of a well-managed darkness, that in describing the appearance of the Deity, amidst that profusion of magnificent images which the gran­deur of his subject provokes him to pour out upon every side, he is far from forgetting the obscurity which surrounds the most incomprehensible of all beings, but

And what is no less remarkable, our author had the secret of preserving this idea, even when he seemed to depart the farthest from it, when he describes the light and glory which flows from the divine presence; a light which by its very excess is converted into a species of darkness.

[Page 74]Here is an idea not only poetical in an high degree, but strictly and philosophically just. Extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effect exactly to resemble darkness. After looking for some time at the sun, two black spots, the impression which it leaves, seem to dance before our eyes. Thus are two ideas as opposite as can be imagined reconciled in the ex­tremes of both; and both in spite of their opposite nature brought to concur in producing the sublime. And this is not the only instance wherein the opposite extremes operate equally in favour of the sublime, which in all things abhors mediocrity.— Ibid.

DIGNITY, hitherto, has belonged to the mode of proceeding, not to the matter of a treaty. Never before has it been mentioned as the standard for rating the conditions of peace; no, never by the most violent of conquerors. Indemnity is capable of some estimate; dignity has no standard.— Regi­cide Peace.

THERE are two capital faults in our law with re­lation to civil debts. One is, that every man is pre­sumed solvent. A presumption, in innumerable cases, directly against truth. Therefore the debtor is ordered, on a supposition of ability and fraud, to be coerced his liberty until he makes payment. By this means, in all cases of civil insolvency without a pardon from his creditor, he is to be imprisoned for life:—and thus a miserable mistaken invention of artificial science, operates to change a civil into a criminal judgment, and to scourge misfortune or in­discretion with a punishment which the law does not inflict on the greatest crimes.

[Page 75]The next fault is, that the inflicting of that punish­ment is not on the opinion of an equal and public judge; but is referred to the arbitrary discretion of a private, nay interested, and irritated individual. He, who formally is, and substantially ought to be, the judge, is in reality no more than ministerial, a mere executive instrument of a private man, who is at once judge and party. Every idea of judicial order is sub­verted by this procedure. If the insolvency be no crime, why is it punished with arbitrary imprisonment? If it be a crime, why is it delivered into private hands to pardon without discretion, or to punish without mercy and without measure?— Speech previous to the Election at Bristol.

TO complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in all times; yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself, in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air and season.— Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents.

AN empire is the aggregate of many states, under one common head; whether this head be a monarch, or a presiding republic.— Speech on Conciliation with America.

THESE old establishments were formed also on a third principle, still more adverse to the living oeco­nomy of the age. They were formed, Sir, on the principle of purveyance, and receipt in kind. In former days, when the household was vast, and the supply scanty and precarious, the royal purveyors, sallying forth from under the gothic portcullis, to purchase provision with power and prerogative, in­stead of money, brought home the plunder of an hundred markets, and all that could be seized from a flying and hiding country, and deposited their spoil in an hundred caverns, with each its keeper. There, every commodity, received in its rawest condition, went through all the process which fitted it for use. This inconvenient receipt produced an oeconomy suited only to itself. It multiplied offices beyond all measure; buttery, pantry, and all that rabble of places, which, though profitable to the holders and expensive to the state, are almost too mean to men­tion.— Oeconomical Reform.

THE natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England; nor indeed any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to making a sudden for­tune, with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.

[Page 77]There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion be­fore their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any oppor­tunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds, (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean.— Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

EXTENSION is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the length strikes least; an hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower an hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude. I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than look­ing up at an object of equal height; but of that I am not very positive. A perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plain; and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished. It would carry us out of our way to enter in this place into the cause of these appearances; but certain it is they afford a large and fruitful field of speculation. However, it may not be amiss to add to these re­marks upon magnitude, that, as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness [Page 78] is in some measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet or­ganized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense, when we push our discoveries yet down­ward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of exist­ence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as well as addi­tion; because the idea of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole, to which nothing can be added.— Sublime and Beautiful.

I think then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in its clearness; what coloured eye shall please most, depends a good deal on particular fancies; but none are pleased with an eye whose water (to use that term) is dull and muddy. We are pleased with the eye in this view, on the principle upon which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such like transpa­rent substances. Secondly, the motion of the eye contributes to its beauty, by continually shifting its direction; but a slow and languid motion is more beautiful than a brisk one; the latter is enlivening; the former lovely. Thirdly, with regard to the union of the eye with the neighbouring parts, it is to hold the same rule that is given of other beautiful ones; it is not to make a strong deviation from the line of the neighbouring parts; nor to verge into any exact geometrical figure.— Ibid.

OUR education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood. Even when our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter that most important period of life which begins to link experience and study toge­ther, and when with that view they visit other coun­tries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three-fourths of those who go abroad with our young no­bility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics; not as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver character, and not seldom persons as well born as themselves. With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close con­nexion through life. By this connexion we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and we liberalize the church by an intercourse with the lead­ing characters of the country.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

FOUR hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that pe­riod. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national cha­racter, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we [Page 80] were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presump­tion, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guar­dians, the active monitors of our duty, the true sup­porters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pe­dantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to par­liaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility ^*. Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected: because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of slavery, through the whole course of our lives.

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men [Page 81] of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are preju­dices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail them­selves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, in­stead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they sel­dom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previ­ously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and un­resolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.— Ibid.

YOU might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your con­stitution, [Page 82] it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have re­paired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of in­terests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present con­stitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions. They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets mode­ration; they produce temperaments, preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations; and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbi­trary power, in the few or in the many, for ever im­practicable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their al­lotted places.

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been mould­ed into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by de­spising every thing that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last genera­tions [Page 83] of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of an­cestors, Under a pious predilection for those an­cestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yes­terday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expence of your honour, an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed, and ill fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous and gallant nation, long misled to your disadvantage by your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, ho­nour, and loyalty; that events had been unfavour­able to you, but that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition; that in your most devoted submission, you were actuated by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood, that in the delusion of this amiable error you had gone further than your wise ancestors; that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour; or, if diffident of yourselves, and not clearly dis­cerning the almost obliterated constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and [Page 84] models of the old common law of Europe melio­rated and adapted to its present state—by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth, by shewing that freedom was not only reconcileable, but as, when well disciplined, it is auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution; a po­tent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a pro­tected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggra­vate and imbitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life esta­blishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond any thing re­corded in the history of the world; but you have shewn that difficulty is good for man.

Compute your gains: see what is got by those ex­travagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable. By following those false lights, [Page 85] France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most un­equivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest; but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the refor­mation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the founda­tions of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal autho­rity, doubled the licence, of a ferocious dissolute­ness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new prin­ciples of equality in France.

France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibi­lities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confi­dence in their people, as subverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king, that in calling the states to­gether, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the [Page 86] throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such sanguine decla­rations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions, which distinguish benevolence from im­becility; and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of govern­ment or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poi­son. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sangui­nary tyrant. Their resistance was made to conces­sion; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, ye the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; every thing human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the discredited paper securities of impove­rished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a cur­rency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of poverty, whose crea­tures and representatives they are, systematically sub­verted.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

YOU had before your revolution about one hun­dred and twenty bishops. A few of them were men of eminent sanctity. When we talk of the heroic, of course we talk of rare virtue. I believe the in­stances of eminent depravity may be as rare amongst them as those of transcendent goodness. Examples of avarice and of licentiousness may be picked out, I do not question it, by those who delight in the in­vestigation which leads to such discoveries. A man, as old as I am, will not be astonished that several, in every description, do not lead that perfect life of self-denial, with regard to wealth or to pleasure, which is wished for by all, by some expected, but by none exacted with more rigour, than by those who are the most attentive to their own interests, or the most indulgent to their own passions. When I was in France, I am certain that the number of vici­ous prelates was not great. Certain individuals among them, not distinguishable for the regularity of their lives, made some amends for their want of the severe virtues, in their possession of the liberal; and were endowed with qualities which made them useful in the church and state. I am told, that with few exceptions, Louis the Sixteenth had been more attentive to character, in his promotions to that rank, than his immediate predecessor; and I believe, (as some spirit of reform has prevailed through the whole reign) that it may be true. But the present ruling power has shewn a disposition only to plunder the church. It has punished all prelates; which is to favour the vicious, at least, in point of reputa­tion. It has made a degrading pensionary establish­ment, to which no man, of liberal ideas, or liberal condition will destine his children. It must settle into the lowest classes of the people. As with you the inferior clergy are not numerous enough for their duties; as these duties are, beyond measure, minute [Page 88] and toilsome; as you have left no middle classes of clergy at their ease, in future nothing of science or erudition can exist in the Gallican church. To complete the project, without the least attention to the rights of patrons, the assembly has provided in future an elective clergy; an arrangement which will drive out of the clerical profession all men of so­briety; all who can pretend to independence in their function or their conduct; and which will throw the whole direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licentious, bold, crafty, factious, flattering wretches, of such condition and such habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions (in com­parison of which the stipend of an exciseman is lu­crative and honourable) an object of low and illiberal intrigue. Those officers, whom they still call bishops, are to be elected to a provision comparatively mean, through the same arts, (that is, electioneering arts) by men of all religious tenets that are known or can be invented. The new lawgivers have not ascertained any thing whatsoever concerning their qualifications, relative either to doctrine or to morals; no more than they have done with regard to the subordinate clergy; nor does it appear but that both the higher and the lower may, at their discretion, practise or preach any mode of religion or irreligion that they please. I do not yet see what the jurisdiction of bishops over their subordinates is to be; or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at all.— Ibid.

WHEN my occasions took me into France, to­wards the close of the late reign, the clergy, under all their forms, engaged a considerable part of my curiosity. So far from finding (except from one set of men, not then very numerous, though very active) the complaints and discontents against that body, [Page 89] which some publications had given me reason to expect, I perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their account. On further examina­tion, I found the clergy in general, persons of mode­rate minds and decorous manners; I include the se­culars, and the regulars of both sexes. I had not the good fortune to know a great many of the paro­chial clergy; but in general I received a perfectly good account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties. With some of the higher clergy I had a personal acquaintance; and of the rest in that class, very good means of information. They were, almost all of them, persons of noble birth. They resembled others of their own rank; and where there was any difference, it was in their favour. They were more fully educated than the military noblesse; so as by no means to disgrace their profession by ig­norance, or by want of fitness for the exercise of their authority. They seemed to me, beyond the clerical character, liberal and open; with the hearts of gen­tlemen, and men of honour; neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct. They seemed to me rather a superior class; a set of men, amongst whom you would not be surprized to find a Fenelon. I saw among the clergy in Paris (many of the de­scription are not to be met with any where) men of great learning and candour; and I had reason to be­lieve, that this description was not confined to Paris. What I found in other places, I know was accidental; and therefore to be presumed a fair sample. I spent a few days in a provincial town, where, in the absence of the bishop, I passed my evenings with three cler­gymen, his vicars general, persons who would have done honour to any church. They were all well in­formed; two of them of deep, general, and extensive erudition, ancient and modern, oriental and western; particularly in their own profession. They had a more extensive knowledge of our English divines than I expected; and they entered into the genius of those [Page 90] writers with a critical accuracy. One of these gen­tlemen is since dead, the Abbé Morangis. I pay this tribute, without reluctance, to the memory of that noble, reverend, learned, and excellent person; and I should do the same, with equal chearfulness, to the merits of the others, who, I believe, are still liv­ing, if I did not fear to hurt those whom I am unable to serve.

Some of these ecclesiastics of rank, are, by all titles, persons deserving of general respect. They are deserving of gratitude from me, and from many English. If this letter should ever come into their hands, I hope they will believe there are those of our nation who feel for their unmerited fall, and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes, with no common sensibility. What I say of them is a testimony, as far as one feeble voice can go, which I owe to truth. Whenever the question of this unnatural persecution is concerned, I will pay it. No one shall prevent me from being just and grateful. The time is fitted for the duty; and it is particularly becoming to shew our justice and gratitude, when those who have de­served well of us and of mankind are labouring un­der popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppres­sive power.— Ibid.

BUT the nobility of France are degenerated since the days of Henry the Fourth.—This is possible. But it is more than I can believe to be true in any great degree. I do not pretend to know France as correctly as some others; but I have endeavoured through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature: otherwise I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind. In that study I could not pass by a vast portion of our nature, as it appeared modified in a country but twenty-four miles from the shore of this island. On [Page 91] my best observation, compared with my best enqui­ries, I found your nobility for the greater part com­posed of men of an high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour, both with regard to themselves in­dividually, and with regard to their whole corps, over whom they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a censorial eye. They were toler­ably well-bred; very officious, humane, and hos­pitable; in their conversation frank and open; with a good military tone; and reasonably tinctured with literature, particularly of the authors in their own lan­guage. Many had pretensions far above this descrip­tion. I speak of those who were generally met with.— Ibid.

THE great object of your tyrants is to destroy the gentlemen of France; and for that purpose they de­stroy, to the best of their power, all the effect of those relations which may render considerable men power­ful or even safe. To destroy that order, they vitiate the whole community. That no means may exist of confederating against their tyranny, by the false sym­pathies of this Nouvelle Eloise, they endeavour to subvert those principles of domestic trust and fidelity, which form the discipline of social life. They pro­pagate principles by which every servant may think it, if not his duty, at least his privilege, to betray his master. By these principles, every considerable fa­ther of a family loses the sanctuary of his house. Debet sua cuique domus esse perfugium tu tissimum, says the law, which your legislators have taken so much pains first to decry, then to repeal. They destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life; turn­ing the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison, where the father of the family must drag out a mi­serable existence, endangered in proportion to the apparent means of his safety; where he is worse than [Page 92] solitary in a croud of domestics, and more appre­hensive from his servants and inmates, than from the hired blood-thirsty mob without doors, who are ready to pull him to the lanterne.— Ibid.

IT is not clear, whether in England we learned those grand and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to me to be— gentis incunabula nostrae. France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choaked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opi­nion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the sixth of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revo­lutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opi­nions. As things now stand, with every thing re­spectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for harbouring the com­mon feelings of men.— Ibid.

ALREADY there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their instructors. Their li­berty is not liberal; their science is presumptuous ignorance; their humanity is savage and brutal.

[Page 93]The assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and some­times mix and take their seats amongst them; domi­neering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority. As they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the house. This assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body— nec color imperii, nec frons erat ulla senatus. They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy, but none to con­struct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction.— Ibid.

IN these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring, and violent, and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Huma­nity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to indivi­duals is considered as treason to the public. Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is ren­dered insecure. Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Embracing in their arms the carcases of base crimi­nals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous per­sons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.— Ibid.

THE faction is not local or territorial. It is a general evil. Where it least appears in action, it is still full of life. In its sleep it recruits its strength, and prepares its exertion; its spirit lies deep in the corruptions of our common nature. The social order which restrains it, feeds it. It exists in every coun­try in Europe; and among all orders of men in every country, who look up to France as to a common head. The centre is there. The circumference is the world of Europe, wherever the race of Europe may be settled. Every where else the faction is mi­litant; in France it is triumphant; in France is the bank of deposit, and the bank of circulation, of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state. It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of re­straining it in any other country whilst it is predomi­nant there.— Regicide Peace.

THE politicians soon found that they could not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made them sensible, that the destruction of religion was to supply them with means of conquest first at home, and then abroad. The philosophers were the active internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and principles; the second gave the general direction.—Sometimes the one predominated in the composition, sometimes the other. The only difference between them was in the necessity of concealing the general design for a time, and in dealing with foreign nations; the fanatics going straight forward and openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zig-zag. In the course of events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloody contentions between them; but at the bottom they thoroughly agreed in all the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all the means of promoting these ends.— Ibid.

YOU may call this France, if you please; but of the ancient France nothing remains but its dangerous and central geography, its iron frontier, its spirit of ambition, its audacity of enterprise, its perplexing intrigue. These, and these alone remain; and they remain heightened in their principle and augmented in their means. All the old correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone. No single corrective is to be foung in the whole body of the new institutions.—How should such a thing be found there, when every thing has been chosen with care and selection to for­ward all those ambitious designs and dispositions, not to control them? The whole is a body of ways and means for the supply of dominion, without one heterogeneous particle in it.— Ibid.

WHEN I look to the other side of the water, I cannot help recollecting what Pyrrhus said on recon­noitring the Roman camp, ‘"These barbarians have nothing barbarous in their discipline."’ When I look, as I have pretty carefully looked, into the proceedings of the French king, I am sorry to say it, I see nothing of the character and genius of arbitrary finance; none of the bold frauds of bankrupt power; none of the wild struggles and plunges of despotism in distress; no lopping off from the capital of debt; no suspension of interest; no robbery under the name of loan; no raising the value, no debasing the substance of the coin. I see neither Louis the Four­teenth nor Louis the Fifteenth. On the contrary, I behold with astonishment, rising before me, by the very hands of arbitrary power, and in the very midst of war and confusion, a regular, methodical system of public credit; I behold a fabric laid on the na­tural and solid foundations of trust and confidence [Page 96] among men, and rising, by fair gradations, order over order, according to the just rules of symmetry and art. What a reverse of things! Principle, me­thod, regularity, economy, frugality, justice to in­dividuals, and care of the people, are the resources with which France makes war upon Great Britain. God avert the omen! But if we should see any genius in war and politics arise in France, to second what is done in the bureau!—I turn my eyes from the consequences.— Oecon. Reform.

THE body politic of France existed in the majesty of its throne; in the dignity of its nobility; in the honour of its gentry; in the sanctity of its clergy; in the reverence of its magistracy; in the weight and consideration due to its landed property; in the re­spect due to its moveable substance represented by the corporations of the kingdom in all countries. All these particular moleculae united, form the great mass of what is truly the body politic. They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice; because they can only exist by justice. Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator. France, though out of her territorial possession, exists; because the sole possible claimant, I mean the proprietary, and the government to which the proprietary adheres, exists and claims. God forbid, that if you were expelled from your house by ruffians and assassins, that I should call the mate­rial walls, doors, and windows of —, the an­cient and honourable family of —. Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all the esteem and respect I owe to you?— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I KNOW something of the constitution and compo­sition of this very extraordinary republic. It has a constitution, I admit, similar to the present tumul­tuous military tyranny of France, by which an handful of obscure russians domineer over a fertile country and a brave people. For the composition, too, I admit, the Algerine community resembles that of France, being the very scum, scandal, disgrace, and pest of the Turkish Asia. The Grand Seignior, to disburthen the country, suffers the Dey to recruit, in his dominions, the corps of Janissaries, or Asaphs which form the Directory, or Council of Elders of the African Republic, one and indivisible. But notwithstanding this resemblance, which I allow, I never shall so far injure the Janissarian republic of Algiers, as to put it in comparison for every sort of crime, turpitude, and oppression, with the Jacobin republic of Paris. There is no question with me to which of the two I should chuse to be a neighbour or a subject. But situated as I am, I am in no danger of becoming to Algiers either the one or the other. It is not so in my relation to the atheistical fanatics of France. Have the gentlemen, who borrowed this happy parallel, no idea of the different conduct to be held with regard to the very same evil at an immense distance, and when it is at your door? when its power is enormous, as when it is comparatively as feeble as its distance is remote? and when there is a barrier of languages and usages, which prevents your being corrupted through certain old correspondences and habitudes, which cannot for a long time be so wholly taken away, as not to make many of your people susceptible of contagion from horrible novelties that are introduced into every thing else? I can con­template, without horror, a royal or a national tyger [Page 98] on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him, with an easy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the mena­gerie of the Tower. But if, by Habeas Corpus, or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons, whilst your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise, who would not gladly make his escape out of the back windows. This ambassador from Bengal would disperse you sooner than a dissolution by Royal prerogative. I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tygers that are in our anti-chambers and our lobbies. Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, what­ever it may be, is not an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be expected from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point. In the mean time, the case quoted from the Algerine reports will not apply as authority. We shall put it out of court; and so far as that goes, let the counsel for the Jacobin peace take nothing by their motion.— Regi­cide Peace.

A STRANGE uncouth thing, a theatrical figure of the opera, his head shaded with three coloured plumes, his body fantastically habited, strutted from the back scenes, and after a short speech, in the mock-heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered the gentleman who came to make the representation into the custody of a guard, with directions not to lose sight of him for a moment; and then ordered him to be sent from Paris in two hours.— Ibid.

WHILST courts of justice were thrust out by re­volutionary tribunals, and silent churches were only the funeral monuments of departed religion, no fewer than ten theatres were kept open at public expence. At one time I have reckoned fourteen of their adver­tisements of public diversion. Among the gaunt, haggard forms of famine and nakedness, amidst the yells of murder, the tears of affliction, and the cries of despair, the song, the dance, the mimic scene, the buffoon laughter, went on as regularly as in the gay hour of festive peace. I have it from good autho­rity, that under the scaffold of judicial murder, and the gaping planks that poured down blood on the spectators, the space was hired out for a shew of dancing dogs. I think, without conceit, we made the very same remark on reading some of their pieces, which being written for other purposes, let us into a view of their social life.— Ibid.

IN describing the nuisance erected by so pestilen­tial a manufactory, by constructing so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and housebreakers, as never infested the world, I am so far from aggravating, that I have fallen infinitely short of the evil. No man who has attended to the particulars of what has been done in France, and combined them with the principles there asserted, can possibly doubt it. When I compare with this great cause of nations, the trifling points of honour, the still more contemptible points of interest, the light ceremonies, the undefinable punctilios, the disputes about precedency, the lowering or the hoist­ing of a sail, the dealing in a hundred or two of wild cat-skins on the other side of the globe, which have [Page 100] often kindled up the flames of war between nations, I stand astonished at those persons who do not feel a resentment, not more natural than politic, at the atrocious insults that this monstrous compound offers to the dignity of every nation, and who are not alarmed with what it threatens to their safety.—

WHEN I consider the face of the kingdom of France; the multitude and opulence of her cities; the useful magnificence of her spacious high roads and bridges; the opportunity of her artificial canals and navigations opening the conveniences of mari­time communication through a solid continent of so immense an extent; when I turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and harbours, and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war or trade; when I bring before my view the number of her for­tifications, constructed with so bold and masterly a skill, and made and maintained at so prodigious a charge, presenting an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies upon every side; when I re­collect how very small a part of that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what complete perfec­tion the culture of many of the best productions of the earth have been brought in France; when I re­flect on the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some par­ticulars not second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for ex­tending her same in war, her able statesmen, the mul­titude of her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her historians and antiqua­ries, her poets, and her orators, sacred and profane, I behold in all this something which awes and com­mands [Page 101] the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate censure, and which demands that we should very seriously examine what and how great are the latent vices that could authorise us at once to level so spacious a fabric with the ground.—

THE objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to employ it oeconomically; and when ne­cessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and for ever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, the exact­ness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. On these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the merits and abilities of those in the National Assembly, who have taken to themselves the manage­ment of this arduous concern. Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by a report of M. Vernier, from the Committee of Finances, of the second of August last, that the amount of the national revenue, as compared with its produce before the revolution, was diminished by the sum of two hundred millions, or eight millions sterling of the annual income, considerably more than one-third of the whole.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, a moral rather than a complexional timidity, were among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct. Not being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a share, they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind. He that had made them thus fallible, re­warded [Page 102] them for having in their conduct attended to their nature. Let us imitate their caution, if we wish to deserve their fortune, or to retain their be­quests. Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and, standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to ad­mire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France.— Ibid.

OF all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.— Ibid.

CIVIL freedom is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade us, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; and all the just reasoning that can be upon it, is of so coarse a texture, as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy, and of those who are to defend it. Far from any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysics, which admit no medium, but must be true or false in all their latitude; social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in very different degrees, and shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and cir­cumstances of every community. The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains no where, nor ought to obtain any where. Because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed. [Page 103] The degree of restraint it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public counsel, to find out by cautious experiments, and rational, cool endeavours, with how little, not how much of this restraint, the com­munity can subsist.— Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

WHILST freedom is true to itself, every thing becomes subject to it; and its very adversaries are an instrument in its hands.— Speech at Bristol, previous to the Election.

FRUGALITY is founded on the principle, that all riches have limits.— Oeconomical Reform.

DOES not become a slighter distemper on account of the number of those who may be infected with it.— Ibid.

OUR constitution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later, it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution. In our constitution, there has always been a difference made, a Franchise and an Office, and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the subject, as a subject, and not as a member of the governing part of the State. The policy of government has considered them as things very different; for whilst parliament excluded by the test acts, (and for a while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in England) pro­testant [Page 104] dissenters from all civil and military employ­ments, they never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament, or sitting in either House; a point, I state, not as approving or condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in reason.— Letter to Sir H. Langrishe.

GAMING is a principle inherent in human nature. It belongs to us all.— Oeconomical Reform.

THE common treasury to which we must all be taxed.— Ibid.

IN doing good, we are generally cold, and languid and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies whenever we oppress and persecute.— Speech at Bristol, previous to the Election.

GOVERNMENT is deeply interested in every thing which, even through the medium of some temporary uneasiness, may tend finally to compose the minds of the subject, and to conciliate their affections. I have nothing to do here with the abstract value of the voice of the people. But as long as reputation, the most precious possession of every individual, and as long [Page 105] as opinion, the great support of the state, depend entirely upon that voice, it can never be considered as a thing of little consequence either to individuals or to government. Nations are not primarily ruled by laws; less by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed either in force or regulation; the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it; I mean, when public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted; not when government is nothing but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude; in which sometimes the one and sometimes the other is uppermost; in which they alternately yield and prevail, in a series of contemptible victories, and scandalous submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman.—

BUT let government in what form it may be, comprehend the whole in its justice, and restrain the suspicions by its vigilance; let it keep watch and ward; let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against its power, when­ever delinquency exists in the overt acts, and then it will be as safe as ever God and nature intended it should be.— Speech at Bristol, previous to the Election.

ALL government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance [Page 106] inconveniencies; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and, we chuse rather to be happy citizens, than subtle disputants. As we must give away some natural liberty, to enjoy civil advantages; so we must sacrifice some civil liberties, for the advantages to be derived from the communion and fellowship of a great empire. But in all fair dealings, the thing bought, must bear some proportion to the purchase paid. None will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul. Though a great [...]ouse is apt to make slaves haughty, yet it is purchasing a part of the artificial importance of a great empire too dear, to pay for it all essential rights, and all the intrinsic dignity of human nature. None of us who would not risque his life, rather than fall under a government purely arbitrary. But, al­though there are some amongst us who think our constitution wants many improvements, to make it a complete system of liberty, perhaps none who are of that opinion, would think it right to aim at such im­provement, by disturbing his country, and risquing every thing that is dear to him. In every arduous enterprize, we consider what we are to lose, as well as what we are to gain; and the more and better stake of liberty every people possess, the less they will hazard in a vain attempt to make it more. These are the cords of man. Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest; and not on metaphysical spe­culations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistry.— Speech on Conciliation with America.

I AM quite clear, that if we do not go to the very origin and first ruling cause of grievances, we do [Page 107] nothing. What does it signify to turn abuses out of one door, if we are to let them in at another? What does it signify to promote oeconomy upon a measure, and to suffer it to be subverted in the principle?—

IT is the nature of grief to keep its object perpe­tually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness; to go back to every particular enjoyment, to dwell upon each, and to find a thousand new perfections in all, that were not sufficiently understood before; in grief, the pleasure is still uppermost; and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavour to shake off as soon as possible. The Odyssey of Homer, which abounds with so many natural and affecting images, has none more striking than those which Menelaus raises of the calamitous fate of his friends, and his own manner of feeling it. He owns, indeed, that he often gives himself some intermission from such melancholy re­flections; but he observes, too, that melancholy as they are, they give him pleasure.

WE do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be [Page 108] used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our in­struction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, fur­nishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissentions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by price, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same

These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these frau­dulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no inter­preters of law; no general officers; no public coun­cils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occa­sional organs by which they act, and the transitory [Page 109] modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its ap­pearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you are gibbeting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are au­thorizing and feeding the same odious vices in diffe­rent factions, and perhaps in worse.

Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as the ready instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin, at the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew. What should we say to those who could think of retaliating on the Parisians of this day the abominations and horrors of that time? They are indeed brought to abhor that massacre. Ferocious as they are, it is not difficult to make them dislike it; because the poli­ticians and fashionable teachers have no interest in giving their passions exactly the same direction. Still however they find it their interest to keep the same savage dispositions alive. It was but the other day that they caused this very massacre to be acted on the stage for the diversion of the descendants of those who committed it. In this tragic farce they produced the cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of function, ordering general slaughter. Was this spectacle in­tended to make the Parisians abhor persecution, and loath the effusion of blood?—No, it was to teach [Page 110] them to persecute their own pastors; it was to excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting down to destruction an order, which, if it ought to exist at all, ought to exist not only in safety, but in reverence: It was to stimulate their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning; and to quicken them to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it should suit the purpose of the Guises of the day. An assembly, in which fat a multitude of priests and prelates, was obliged to suffer this indignity at its door. The author was not sent to the gallies, nor the players to the house of correction. Not long after this exhi­bition, those players came forward to the assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which they had dared to expose, and to shew their prostituted faces in the senate, whilst the archbishop of Paris, whose function was known to his people only by his prayers and benedictions, and his wealth only by his alms, is forced to abandon his house, and to fly from his flock (as from ravenous wolves) because, truly, in the sixteenth century, the cardinal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer.

Such is the effect of the perversion of history, by those, who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of learning. But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the Palais Royal,—the cardinal of Lor­raine was the murderer of the sixteenth century, you have the glory of being the murderers in the eighteenth; and this is the only difference between you. But history, in the nineteenth century, better understood, and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civilized [Page 111] posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barba­rous ages.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

HUMANITY cannot be degraded by humiliation. It is it's very character to submit to such things. There is a consangunity between benevolence and humility. They are virtues of the same stock.— Regicide Peace.

THE household troops form an army, who will be ready to mutiny for want of pay, and whose mutiny will be really dreadful to a commander in chief. A rebellion of the thirteen lords of the bedchamber would be far more terrible to a minister, and would probably affect his power more to the quick, than a revolt of thirteen colonies. What an uproar such an event would create at court! What petitions, and committees, and associations, would it not produce! Bless me! what a clattering of white sticks and yellow sticks would be about his head—what a storm of gold keys would fly about the ears of the minister—what a shower of Georges, and Thistles, and medals, and collars of S. S. would assail him at his first en­trance into the anti-chamber, after an insolvent Christmas quarter. A tumult which could not be appeased by all the harmony of the New Year's Ode. Rebellion it is certain there would be; and rebellion may not now indeed be so critical an event to those who engage in it, since its price is so correctly ascer­tained at just a thousand pound.— Oecon. Reform.

BESIDES the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the [Page 112] mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination; and to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. But it must be observed, that the power of the imagination is incapable of producing any thing abso­lutely new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses. Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impression, must have the same power pretty equally over all men. For since the imagination is only the representation of the senses, it can only be pleased or displeased with the images, from the same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; and conse­quently there must be just as close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men. A little attention will convince us that this must of necessity be the case.

But in the imagination, besides the pain or pleasure arising from the properties of the natural object, a pleasure is perceived from the resemblance, which the imitation has to the original. The imagination, I conceive, can have no pleasure but what revolts from one or the other of these causes; and these causes operate pretty uniformly upon all men, because they operate by principles of nature, and are not derived from any particular habits or advantages.— Sublime and Beautiful.

IT is only to complete the view I proposed of the conduct of the company, with regard to the depen­dent provinces, that I shall say any thing at all of the Carnatic, which is the scene, if possible, of greater disorder than the northern provinces. Perhaps it were better to say of this center and metropolis of abuse, whence all the rest in India and in England diverge; from whence they are sed and methodized, what was said of Carthage— de Carthagine satius est silere quam parum dicere. This country, in all its denominations, is about 46,000 square miles. It may be affirmed universally, that not one person of substance or property, landed, commercial, or mo­nied, excepting two or three bankers, who are neces­sary deposits and distributors of the general spoil, is left in all that region. In that country the moisture, the bounty of Heaven, is given but at a certain season. Before the aera of our influence, the industry of man carefully husbanded that gift of God. The Gentûs preserved, with a provident and religious care, the precious deposit of the periodical rain in reservoirs, many of them works of royal grandeur; and from these, as occasion demanded, they fructified the whole country. To maintain these reservoirs, and to keep up an annual advance to the cultivators, for seed and cattle, formed a principal object of the piety and policy of the priests and rulers of the Gentû religion.

This object required a command of money; and there was no pollam, or castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard of trea­sure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of an enemy. In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers, for all occasions of monied assistance; and on the other hand, the native princes were in condition to obtain [Page 114] credit from them. The manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally exacted from his industry. In aid of casual distress, the country was full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller and the poor were relieved. All ranks of people had their place in the public concern, and their share in the common stock and common prosperity; but the chartered rights of men, and the right which it was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new system. It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes; to regard mo­derate rents as frauds on the sovereign; and to view, in the lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute, as an act of rebellion. Accordingly all the castles were, one after the other, plundered and destroyed. The native princes were expelled; the hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility, indigence, and depopulation, overspread the face of these once flourishing provinces.

The company was very early sensible of these mischiefs, and of their true cause. They gave precise orders, ‘"that the native princes, called polygars, should not be extirpated.—That the rebellion [so they choose to call it] of the polygars, may (they fear) with too much justice, be attributed to the mal­administration of the Nabob's collectors." That "they observe with concern, that their troops have been put to disagreeable services."’ They might have used a stronger expression without impropriety. But they make amends in another place. Speaking of the polygars, the directors say, that ‘"it was re­pugnant to humanity to force them to such dreadful extremeties as they underwent."’ That some examples of severity might be necessary, ‘"when they fell into the Nabob's hands,"’ and not by the destruction of the [Page 115] country. ‘"That they fear his government is none of the mildest; and that there is great oppression in collecting his revenues."’ They state, that the wars in which he has involved the Carnatic, had been a cause of its distresses. ‘"That these distresses have been certainly great; but those by the Nabob's op­pressions we believe to be greater than all."’ Pray, Sir, attend to the reason for their opinion that the government of this their instrument is more calamitous to the country than the ravages of war.—Because, say they, his oppressions are ‘" without intermission.—The others are temporary; by all which oppressions we believe the Nabob has great wealth in store."’ From this store neither he nor they could derive any advantage whatsoever, upon the invasion of Hyder Ali in the hour of their greatest calamity and dismay.

It is now proper to compare these declarations with the company's conduct. The principal reason which they assigned against the extirpation of the polygars was, that the weavers were protected in their for­tresses. They might have added, that the company itself, which slung them to death, had been warmed in the bosom of these unfortunate princes: for, on the taking of Madras by the French, it was in their hospitable pollams, that most of the inhabitants found refuge and protection. But, notwithstanding all these orders, reasons, and declarations, they at length gave an indirect sanction, and permitted the use of a very direct and irresistible force, to measures which they had, over and over again, declared to be false policy, cruel, inhuman, and oppressive. Hav­ing, however, forgot all attention to the princes and the people, they remembered that they had some sort of interest in the trade of the country; and it is matter of curiosity to observe the protection which they afforded to this their natural object.

Full of anxious cares on this head, they direct, ‘"that in reducing the polygars they (their servants) were to be cautious, not to deprive the weavers and [Page 116] manufacturers of the protection they often met with in the strong holds of the polygar countries;"’—and they write to their instrument, the Nabob of Arcot, concerning these poor people in a most pathetic strain. ‘"We entreat your excellency (say they) in particular, to make the manufacturers the object of your tenderest care; particularly when you root out the polygars, you do not deprive the weavers of the protection they enjoyed under them."’ When they root out the protectors in favour of the oppressor, they shew themselves religiously cautious of the rights of the protected. When they extirpate the shepherd and the shepherd's dogs, they piously re­commend the helpless flock to the mercy, and even to the tenderest care, of the wolf.— Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

BENGAL, and the provinces that are united to it, are larger than the kingdom of France; and once contained, as France does contain, a great and inde­pendent landed interest, composed of princes, of great lords, of a numerous nobility and gentry, of freeholders, of lower tenants, of religious commu­nities, and public foundations. So early as 1769, the company's servants perceived the decay into which these provinces had fallen under English admi­nistration, and they made a strong representation upon this decay, and what they apprehended to be the causes of it. Soon after this representation, Mr. Hastings became president of Bengal. Instead of administering a remedy to this melancholy disorder, upon the heels of a dreadful famine, in the year 1772, the succour which the new president and the council lent to this afflicted nation was—shall I be believed in relating it?—the landed interest of a whole kingdom, of a kingdom to be compared to France, was set up to public auction! They set up [Page 117] (Mr. Hastings set up) the whole nobility, gentry, and freeholders, to the highest bidder. No preference was given to the ancient proprietors. They must bid against every usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every servant of every European, or they were obliged to content them­selves, in lieu of their extensive domains, with their house, and such a pension as the state-auctioneers thought fit to assign. In this general calamity, several of the first nobility thought (and in all appearance justly) that they had better submit to the necessity of this pension, than continue, under the name of ze­mindars, the objects and instruments of a system, by which they ruined their tenants, and were ruined themselves. Another reform has since come upon the back of the first; and a pension having been assigned to these unhappy persons, in lieu of their hereditary lands, a new scheme of oeconomy has taken place, and deprived them of that pension.

The menial servants of Englishmen, persons (to use the emphatical phrase of a ruined and patient eastern chief) ‘" whose fathers they would not have set with the dogs of their flock,"’ entered into their patri­monial lands. Mr. Hastings's banian was, after this auction, sound possessed of territories yielding a rent of one hundred and forty thousand pounds a year.

Such an universal proscription, upon any pretence, has few examples. Such a proscription, without even a pretence of delinquency, has none. It stands by itself. It stands as a monument to astonish the imagi­nation, to confound the reason of mankind. I con­fess to you, when I first came to know this business in its true nature and extent, my surprise did a little suspend my indignation. I was in a manner stupi­fied by the desperate boldness of a few obscure young men, who having obtained, by ways which they could not comprehend, a power of which they saw neither the purposes nor the limits, tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as if it were in the [Page 118] gambols of a boyish unluckiness and malice, the most established rights, and the most ancient and most re­vered institutions, of ages and nations. Sir, I will not now trouble you with any detail with regard to what they have since done with these same lands and land-holders; only to inform you, that nothing has been suffered to settle for two seasons together upon any basis; and that the levity and inconstancy of these mock legislators were not the least afflicting parts of the oppressions suffered under their usurpation; nor will any thing give stability to the property of the natives, but an administration in England at once protecting and stable. The country sustains, almost every year, the miseries of a revolution. At present, all is uncertainty, misery, and confusion. There is to be found through these vast regions no longer one landed man, who is a resource for voluntary aid, or an object for particular rapine. Some of them were, not long since, great princes; they possessed treasures, they levied armies. There was a zemindar in Bengal (I forget his name) that, on the threat of an invasion, supplied the soubah of these provinces with the loan of a million sterling. The family this day wants credit for a breakfast at the bazar.— Ibid.

MADRAS, with its dependencies, is the second (but with a long interval, the second) member of the British empire in the east. The trade of that city, and of the adjacent territory, was, not very long ago, among the most flourishing in Asia. But since the establishment of the British power, it has wasted away under an uniform gradual decline; insomuch that in the year 1779 not one merchant of eminence was to be found in the whole country ^*. During this period of decay, about six hundred thousand sterling pounds [Page 119] a year have been drawn off by English gentlemen on their private account, by the way of China alone ^†. If we add four hundred thousand, as probably re­mitted through other channels, and in other mediums, that is, in jewels, gold, and silver directly brought to Europe, and in bills upon the British and foreign companies, you will scarcely think the matter over­rated. If we fix the commencement of this extrac­tion of money from the Carnatic at a period no ear­lier than the year 1760, and close it in the year 1780, it probably will not amount to a great deal less than twenty millions of money.

During the deep silent flow of this steady stream of wealth, which set from India into Europe, it gene­rally passed on with no adequate observation; but happening at some periods to meet rifts of rocks that checked its course, it grew more noisy, and attracted more notice. The pecuniary discussions caused by an accumulation of part of the fortunes of their ser­vants in a debt from the Nabob of Arcot, was the first thing which very particularly called for, and long engaged, the attention of the court of directors. This debt amounted to eight hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling, and was claimed, for the greater part, by English gentlemen, residing at Ma­dras. This grand capital, settled at length by order, at ten per cent. afforded an annuity of eighty-eight thousand pounds ^*.

Whilst the directors were digesting their astonish­ment at this information, a memorial was presented to them from three gentlemen, informing them that their friends had lent likewise, to merchants of Canton in China, a sum of not more than one million sterling. In this memorial they called upon the company for their assistance and interposition with the Chinese go­vernment for the recovery of the debt. This sum [Page 120] lent to Chinese merchants, was at 24 per cent. which would yield, if paid, an annuity of two hundred and forty thousand pounds ^*.

Perplexed as the directors were with these demands, you may conceive, Sir, that they did not find them­selves very much disembarrassed, by being made ac­quainted that they must again exert their influence for a new reserve of the happy parsimony of their servants, collected into a second debt from the Nabob of Arcot, amounting to two millions four hundred thousand pounds, settled at an interest of 12 per cent. This is known by the name of the Consolidation of 1777, as the former of the nabob's debts was by the title of the Consolidation of 1767. To this was added, in a separate parcel, a little reserve called the Cavalry debt, of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds, at the same interest. The whole of these four capitals, amounting to four millions four hun­dred and forty thousand pounds, produced at their several rates, annuities amounting to six hundred and and twenty-three thousand pounds a year; a good deal more than one third of the clear land-tax of England, at four shillings in the pound; a good deal more than double the whole annual dividend of the East India company, the nominal masters to the pro­prietors in these funds. Of this interest, three hun­dred and eighty-three thousand two hundred pounds a year stood chargeable on the public revenues of the Carnatic.— Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts.

SIR, at this moment, it will not be necessary to consider the various operations which the capital and interest of this debt have successively undergone. I shall speak to these operations when I come particu­larly to answer the right honourable gentleman (Mr. [Page 121] Dundas) on each of the heads, as he has thought proper to divide them. But this was the exact view in which these debts first appeared to the court of directors, and to the world. It varied afterwards. But it never appeared in any other than a most ques­tionable shape. When this gigantic phantom of debt first appeared before a young minister, (Mr. Pitt) it naturally would have justified some degree of doubt and apprehension. Such a prodigy would have filled any common man with superstitious fears. He would exorcise that shapeless, nameless form, and by every thing sacred would have adjured it to tell by what means a small number of slight individuals, of no consequence or situation, possessed of no lucrative offices, without the command of armies, or the known administration of revenues, without profession of any kind, without any sort of trade sufficient to employ a pedlar, could have, in a few years (as to some even in a few months) have amassed treasures equal to the revenues of a respectable kingdom? Was it not enough to put these gentlemen, in the no­viciate of their administration, on their guard, and to call upon them for a strict enquiry (if not to justify them in a reprobation of those demands without any enquiry at all) that when all England, Scotland, and Ireland, had for years been witness to the immense sums laid out by the servants of the company in stocks of all denominations, in the purchase of lands, in the buying and building of houses, in the securing quiet seats in parliament, or in the tumultuous riot of contested elections, in wandering throughout the whole range of those variegated modes of inventive prodigality; which sometimes have excited our won­der, sometimes roused our indignation; that after all India was four millions still in debt to them? India in debt to them! For what? Every debt for which an equivalent of some kind or other is not given, is on the face of it a fraud. What is the equivalent they have given? What equivalent had they to give? [Page 122] What are the articles of commerce, or the branches of manufacture which those gentlemen have carried hence to enrich India? What are the sciences they b [...]ed out to enlighten it? What are the arts they introduced to chear and to adorn it? What are the religious, what the moral institutions they have taught among that people as a guide to life, or as a consola­tion when life is to be no more, that there is an eternal debt, a debt ‘"still paying, still to owe,"’ which must be bound on the present generation in India, and entailed on their mortgaged posterity for ever? A debt of millions, in favour of a set of men, whose names, with few exceptions, are either buried in the obscurity of their origin and talents, or dragged into light by the enormity of their crimes?

In my opinion the courage of the minister was the most wonderful part of the transaction, especially as he must have read, or rather the right honourable gentleman says, he has read for him, whole volumes upon the subject. The volumes, by the way, are not by one tenth part so numerous as the right ho­nourable gentleman has thought proper to pretend, in order to frighten you from enquiry; but in these vo­lumes, such as they are, the minister must have found a full authority for a suspicion (at the very least) of every thing relative to the great fortunes made at Madras. What is that authority? Why no other than the standing authority for all the claims which the ministry has thought fit to provide for—the grand debtor—the nabob of Arcot himself. Hear that prince, in the letter written to the court of directors, at the precise period, whilst the main body of these debts were contracting. In this letter he states him­self to be, what undoubtedly he is, a most compe­tent witness to this point. After speaking of the war with Hyder Ali in 1768 and 1769, and of other measures which he censures (whether right or wrong it signifies nothing) and into which he says he had been led by the company's servants; he proceeds in this [Page 123] manner— ‘"If all these things were against the real interests of the company, they are ten thousand times more against mine, and against the prosperity of my country, and the happiness of my people; for your interests and mine are the same. What were they owing to then? to the private views of a few individuals, who have enriched themselves at the expence of your influence, and of my country; for your servants HAVE NO TRADE IN THIS COUNTRY; neither do you pay them high wages; yet in a few years they return to England, with many lacks of pogodas. How can you or I account for such immense fortunes, acquired in so short a time, without any visible means of getting them?"’

When he asked this question, which involves its answer, it is extraordinary that curiosity did not prompt the chancellor of the exchequer to that en­quiry which might come in vain recommended to him by his own act of parliament. Does not the nabob of Arcot tell us in so many words, that there was no fair way of making the enormous sums sent by the company's servants to England? And do you imagine that there was or could be more honesty and good faith in the demands, for what remained behind in India? Of what nature were the transactions with himself? If you follow the train of his information you must see, that if these great sums were at all lent, it was not property, but spoil that was lent; if not lent, the transaction was not a contract, but a fraud. Either way, if light enough could not be furnished to au­thorise a full condemnation of these demands, they ought to have been left to the parties who best knew and understood each others proceedings. It was not necessary that the authority of government should interpose in favour of claims, whose very foundation was a defiance of that authority, and whose object and end was its entire subversion.

It may be said that this letter was written by the nabob of Arcot in a moody humour, under the in­fluence [Page 124] of some chagrin. Certainly it was; but it is in such humours that truth comes out. And when he tells you from his own knowledge, what every one must presume, from the extreme probability of the thing, whether he told it or not, one such testimony is worth a thousand that contradict that probability, when the parties have a better understanding with each other, and when they have a point to carry, that may unite them in a common deceit.

If this body of private claims of debt, real or devised, were a question, as it is falsely pretended, between the nabob of Arcot as debtor, and Paul Benfield and his associates as creditors, I am sure I should give myself but little trouble about it. If the hoards of oppression were the fund for satisfying the claims of bribery and peculation, who would wish to interfere between such litigants? If the demands were confined to what might be drawn from the treasures which the company's records uniformly assert that the nabob is in possession of; or if he had mines of gold or silver, or diamonds (as we know that he has none) these gentlemen might break open his hoards, or dig in his mines, without any disturbance from me. But the gentlemen on the other side of the house know as well as I do, and they dare not contradict me, that the nabob of Arcot and his creditors are not adver­saries, but collusive parties, and that the whole trans­action is under a false colour, and false names. The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches. No; it is between him and them combining and confederating on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other. These are the r [...]l plaintiffs and the real defendants in the suit. Refusing a shilling from his hoards for the satis­faction of any demand, the nabob of Arcot is always ready, nay, he earnestly, and with eagerness and passion, contends for delivering up to these pretended creditors his territory and his subjects. It is therefore [Page 125] not from treasuries and mines, but from the food of your unpaid armies, from the blood withheld from the veins, and whipt out of the backs of the most miserable of men, that we are to pamper extor­tion, usury, and peculation, under the false names of debtors and creditors of state.— Ibid.

THE invariable course of the company's policy is this: Either they set up some prince too odious to maintain himself without the necessity of their assist­ance, or they soon render him odious, by making him the instrument of their government. In that case troops are bountifully sent to him to maintain his authority. That he should have no want of assist­ance, a civil gentleman, called a resident, is kept at his court, who, under pretence of providing duly for the pay of these troops, gets assignments on the revenue into his hands. Under his provident ma­nagement, debts soon accumulate; new assignments are made for these debts; until, step by step, the whole revenue, and with it the whole power of the country, is delivered into his hands. The military do not behold without a virtuous emulation the mo­derate gains of the civil department. They feel that, in a country driven to habitual rebellion by the civil government, the military is necessary; and they will not permit their services to go unrewarded. Tracts of country are delivered over to their discretion. Then it is found proper to convert their commanding officers into farmers of revenue. Thus, between the well paid civil, and well rewarded military establish­ment, the situation of the natives may be easily con­jectured. The authority of the regular and lawful government is every where and in every point ex­tinguished. Disorders and violences arise; they are repressed by other disorders and other violences. Wherever the collectors of the revenue, and the [Page 126] farming colonels and majors move, ruin is about them, rebellion before and behind them. The peo­ple in crowds fly out of the country; and the frontier is guarded by lines of troops, not to exclude an enemy, but to prevent the escape of the inhabitants.— Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill.

WORSE, far worse, has been the fate of the poor creatures, the natives of India, whom the hypocrisy of the company has betrayed into complaint of op­pression, and discovery of peculation. The first woman in Bengal, the ranni of Rajeshahi, the ranni of Burdwan, the ranni of Amboa, by their weak and thoughtless trust in the company's honour and protection, are utterly ruined: the first of these wo­men, a person of princely rank, and once of cor­respondent fortune, who paid above two hundred thousand a year quit-rent to the state, is, according to very credible information, so completely beggared as to stand in need of the relief of alms. Mahomed Reza Khân, the second Mussulman in Bengal, for having been distinguished by the ill-omened honour of the countenance and protection of the court of directors, was, without the pretence of any enquiry whatsoever into his conduct, stripped of all his em­ployments, and reduced to the lowest condition. His ancient rival for power, the rajah Nundcomar was, by an insult on every thing which India holds respectable and sacred, hanged in the face of all his nation, by the judges you sent to protect that peo­ple; hanged for a pretended crime, upon an ex post facto British act of parliament, in the midst of his evidence against Mr. Hastings. The accuser they saw hanged. The culprit, without acquittal or en­quiry, triumphs on the ground of that murder: a [Page 127] murder not of Nundcomar only, but of all living testimony, and even of evidence yet unborn. From that time not a complaint has been heard from the natives against their governors. All the grievances of India have found a complete remedy.—

IN the northern parts it is a solid mass of land, about eight hundred miles in length, and four or five hundred broad. As you go southward, it becomes narrower for a space. It afterwards dilates; but narrower or broader, you possess the whole eastern and north-eastern coast of that vast country, quite from the borders of Pegu.—Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, with Benares (now unfortunately in our im­mediate possession) measure 161,978 square English miles; a territory considerably larger than the whole kingdom of France. Oude, with its dependant pro­vinces, is 53,286 square miles, not a great deal less than England. The Carnatic, with Tanjour and the Circars, is 65,948 square miles, very considerably larger than England; and the whole of the company's dominions, comprehending Bombay and Salsette, amounts to 281,412 square miles; which forms a territory larger than any European dominion, Russia and Turkey excepted. Through all that vast extent of country there is not a man who eats a mouthful of rice but by permission of the East India company.—So far with regard to the extent. The population of this great empire is not easy to be calculated. When the countries, of which it is composed, came into our possession, they were all eminently peopled, and eminently productive; though at that time con­siderably declined from their antient prosperity. But since they are come into our hands!—! How­ever, if we take the period of our estimate immedi­ately [Page 128] before the utter desolation of the Carnatic, and if we allow for the havoc which our government had even then made in these regions, we cannot, in my opinion, rate the population at much less than thirty millions of souls; more than four times the number of persons in the island of Great Britain.

My next enquiry to that of the number, is the quality and description of the inhabitants. This mul­titude of men does not consist of an abject and bar­barous populace; much less of gangs of savages, like the Guaranies and Chiquitos, who wander on the waste borders of the river of Amazons, or the Plate; but a people for ages civilized and cultivated; culti­vated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods. There, have been (and still the skeletons remain) princes once of great dignity, au­thority, and opulence. There, are to be found the chiefs of tribes and nations. There, is to be found an antient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and their consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities, not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England; whose credit had often supported a tottering state, and pre­served their governments in the midst of war and de­solation; millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; millions of the most diligent, and not the least intelligent, tillers of the earth. Here are to be found almost all the religions professed by men, the Bramincal, the Mussulmen, the Eastern and the Western Christians.

If I were to take the whole aggregate of our pos­sessions there, I should compare it, as the nearest parallel I can find, with the empire of Germany. Our immediate possessions I should compare with the [Page 129] Austrian dominions, and they would not suffer in the comparison. The nabob of Oude might stand for the king of Prussia; the nabob of Arcot I would compare, as superior in territory, and equal in re­venue, to the elector of Saxony. Cheyt Sing, the rajah of Benares, might well rank with the prince of Hesse, at least; and the rajah of Tanjore (though hardly equal in extent of dominion, superior in re­venue) to the elector of Bavaria. The Polygars and the northern Zemindars, and other great chiefs, might well class with the rest of the princes, dukes, counts, marquisses, and bishops in the empire; all of whom I mention to honour, and surely without dis­paragement to any or all of those most respectable princes and grandees.

All this vast mass, composed of so many orders and classes of men, is again infinitely diversified by manners, by religion, by hereditary employment, through all their possible combinations. This ren­ders the handling of India a matter in an high degree critical and delicate. But oh! it has been handled rudely indeed. Even some of the reformers seem to have forgot that they had any thing to do but to re­gulate the tenants of a manor, or the shopkeepers of the next county town.

It is an empire of this extent, of this complicated nature, of this dignity and importance, that I have compared to Germany, and the German government; not for an exact resemblance, but as a sort of a middle term, by which India might be approximated to our understandings, and if possible to our feelings; in order to awaken something of sympathy for the unfortunate natives, of which I am afraid we are not perfectly susceptible, whilst we look at this very remote object through a false and cloudy medium.— Ibid.

A Director's qualification may be worth about two thousand five hundred pounds—and the interest, at eight per cent. is about one hundred and sixty pounds a year. Of what value is that, whether it rise to ten, or fall to six, or to nothing, to him whose son, before he is in Bengal two months, and before he descends the steps of the council chamber, sells the grant of a single contract for forty thousand pounds? Accord­ingly the stock is bought up in qualifications. The vote is not to protect the stock, but the stock is bought to acquire the vote; and the end of the vote is to cover and support, against justice, some man of power who has made an obnoxious fortune in India; or to maintain in power those who are actually em­ploying it in the acquisition of such a fortune; and to avail themselves in return of his patronage, that he may shower the spoils of the east, ‘"barbaric pearl and gold,"’ on them, their families, and dependents. So that all the relations of the Company are not only changed, but inverted. The servants in India are not appointed by the Directors, but the Directors are chosen by them. The trade is carried on with their capitals; to them the revenues of the country are mortgaged. The seat of the supreme power is in Calcutta. The house in Leadenhall-street is nothing more than a 'change for their agents, factors, and deputies to meet in, to take care of their affairs, and support their interests; and this so avowedly, that we see the known agents of the delinquent servants marshalling and disciplining their forces, and the prime spokesmen in all their assemblies.— Ibid.

JACOBINISM is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property. When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of [Page 131] destroying the pre-existing laws and institutions of their country; when they secure to themselves an army, by dividing amongst the people of no property the estates of the ancient and lawful proprietors; when a state recognizes those acts; when it does not make confiscations for crimes, but makes crimes for confiscations; when it has its principal strength, and all its resources in such a violation of property; when it stands chiefly upon such a violation; massacreing by judgments, or otherwise, those who make any struggle for their old legal government, and their legal, here­ditary, or acquired possessions, I call this Jacobinism by establishment.— Regicide Peace.

I HAVE a good opinion of the general abilities of the Jacobins; not that I suppose them better born than others; but strong passions awake the faculties: they suffer not a particle to be lost; the spirit of en­terprize gives them the full use of all their native energies.— Ibid.

IT cannot be concealed. We are a divided people. But in divisions, where a part is to be taken, we are to make a muster of our strength. I have often en­deavoured to class those who, in any political view, are to be called the people. Without doing some­thing of this sort we must proceed absurdly. We should presume as absurdly, if we pretended to very great accuracy in our estimate. But I think, in the calculation I have made, the error cannot be very material. In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of some means of information, more or less, and who are above menial dependence, (or what virtually is such) may amount [Page 132] to about four hundred thousand. In this number I include the women that take a concern in those transactions, who cannot exceed twenty thousand. There is such a thing as a natural representative of the people. This body is that representative; and on this body, more than on the legal constituent, the artificial representative depends. This is the British public, and it is a public very numerous. The rest, when feeble, are the objects of protection; when strong, the means of force. They who affect to con­sider that part of us in any other light, insult while they cajole us; they do not want us for counsellors in deliberation, but to list us as soldiers for battle.

Of these four hundred thousand political citizens, I look upon one fifth, or about eighty thousand, to be pure Jacobins, utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance; and when they break out, of legal constraint. On these, no reason, no argument, no example, no venerable authority, can have the slightest influence. They desire a change, and they will have it if they can. If they cannot have it by English cabal, they will make no sort of scruple of having it by the cabal of France, into which already they are virtually incorporated.

This minority is great and formidable. I do not know whether if I aimed at the total overthrow of a kingdom, I should wish to be encumbered with a larger body of partizans. These, by their spirit of intrigue, and by their restless agitating activity, are of a force far superior to their numbers; and if times grew the least critical, have the means of de­bauching or intimidating many of those who are now sound, as well as of adding to their force large bodies of the more passive part of the nation. This mino­rity is numerous enough to make a mighty cry for peace, or for war, or for any object they are led ve­hemently to desire. By passing from place to place with a velocity incredible, and diversifying their character and description, they are capable of mi­micking [Page 133] the general voice. We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

The majority, the other four-fifths, is perfectly sound, and of the best possible dispositions to religion, to government, to the true and undivided interest of their country. Such men are naturally disposed to peace. They who are in possession of all they wish, are languid and improvident. With this fault, (and I admit its existence in all its extent) they would not endure to hear of a peace that led to the ruin of every thing for which peace is dear to them. How­ever, the desire of peace is essentially the weak side of all such men. All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities. There they are unguarded. They do not suspect that their de­struction is attempted through their virtues. This their enemies are perfectly aware of, and accordingly they, the most turbulent of mankind, who never made a scruple to shake the tranquillity of their country to its centre, raise a continual cry for peace with France. Peace with regicides, and war with the rest of the world, is their true motto. From the beginning, and even whilst the French gave the blows, and we hardly opposed the vis inertiae to their efforts, from that day to this hour, like importunate Guinea-fowls crying one note day and night, they have called Peace, peace!!— Ibid.

A rectitude of judgment in the arts, which may be called a good taste, does in a great measure depend upon sensibility; because if the mind has no bent to the pleasures of the imagination, it will never apply itself sufficiently to works of that species to acquire a competent knowledge in them. But though a degree of sensibility is requisite to form a good judgment, [Page 134] yet a good judgment does not necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure; it frequently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as every thing new, extraordinary, grand, or pas­sionate, is well calculated to affect such a person, and that the faults do not affect him, his pleasure is more pure and unmixed; and as it is merely a pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher than any which is derived from a rectitude of the judgment; the judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling-blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of our reason; for almost the only pleasure that men have in judging better than others, consists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority, which arises from thinking rightly; but then, this is an indirect pleasure, a pleasure which does not im­mediately result from the object which is under con­templation. In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inac­curate the judgments we form of things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius which I felt at that age, from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible. Every trivial cause of pleasure is apt to affect the man of too san­guine a complexion: his appetite is too keen to suffer his taste to be delicate; and he is in all respects what Ovid says of himself in love,

One of this character can never be a refined judge; never what the comic poet calls elegans formarum [Page 135] spectator. The excellence and force of a composition must always be imperfectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, except we know the temper and character of those minds. The most powerful effects of poetry and music have been displayed, and per­haps are still displayed, where these arts are but in a very low and imperfect state. The rude hearer is affected by the principles which operate in these arts even in their rudest condition; and he is not skilful enough to perceive the defects. But as arts advance towards their perfection, the science of criticism ad­vances with equal pace, and the pleasure of judges is frequently interrupted by the faults which are dis­covered in the most finished compositions.— Intro­duction on Taste.

A mercenary informer knows no distinction.—Under such a system, the obnoxious people are slaves, not only to the Government, but they live at the mercy of every individual; they are at once the slaves of the whole community, and of every part of it; and the worst and most unmerciful men are those on whose goodness they most depend.

In this situation, men not only shrink from the frowns of the stern Magistrate, but they are obliged to fly from their very places. The seeds of destruc­tion are sown in civil intercourse, in social habitudes. The blood of wholesome kindred is infected; their tables and beds are surrounded with snares; all the means given by Providence to make life safe and comfortable, are perverted into instruments of terror and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to degrade and debase mankind, and to deprive him of that assured and liberal state of mind, which alone can make us what we ought to be, that [Page 136] I vow to God I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the gaol distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground, an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and corrupting all about him.—

ALL jurisdictions, which furnish more matter of expence, more temptation to oppression, or more means or instruments of corrupt influence, than ad­vantage to justice or political administration, ought to be abolished.— Oecon. Reform.

IT is the public justice that holds the community together; the ease, therefore, and independence of the Judges, ought to supersede all other considera­tions, and they ought to be the very last to feel the necessities of the State, or to be obliged either to court or bully a Minister for their right; they ought to be as weak solicitors on their own demands, as stre­nuous assertors of the rights and liberties of others. The Judges are, or ought to be, of a reserved and retired character, and wholly unconnected with the political world.— Ibid.

WHEN any political institution is praised, in spite of great and prominent faults of every kind, and in all its parts, it must be supposed to have something excellent in its fundamental principles. It must be shewn that it was right, though imperfect; that it is not only by possibility susceptible of improvement, but that it contains a principle tending to its meliora­tion.— Appeal from the new to the old Whigs.

JUSTICE is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstance, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

THERE was a circumstance (justice will not suffer me to pass it over) which, if any thing could enforce the reasons I have given, would fully justify the act of relief, and render a repeal, or any thing like a repeal, unnatural, impossible. It was the behaviour of the persecuted Roman Catholics under the acts of violence and brutal insolence which they suffered. I suppose there are not in London less than four or five thousand of that persuasion from my country, who do a great deal of the most laborious works in the metropolis; and they chiefly inhabit those quarters which were the principal theatre of the fury of the bigotted multitude. They are known to be men of strong arms and quick feelings, and more remarkable for a determined resolution, than clear ideas, or much foresight. But though provoked by every thing that can stir the blood of men, their houses and chapels in flames, and with the most atrocious profanations of every thing which they hold sacred before their eyes, not a hand was moved to retaliate, or even to defend.— Speech at Bristol, previous to the Election.

SETTING, therefore, this case out of the question, it becomes an object of very serious consideration, [Page 138] whether, because wicked men of various descriptions are engaged in seditious courses, the rational, sober, and valuable part of one description should not be indulged in their sober and rational expectations? You, who have looked deeply into the spirit of the popery laws, must be perfectly sensible, that a great part of the present mischief, which we abhor in com­mon, if it at all exists, has arisen from them. Their declared object was to reduce the Catholics of Ire­land to a miserable populace, without property, with­out estimation, without education. The professed object was to deprive the few men who, in spite of those laws, might hold or obtain any property amongst them, of all sort of influence or authority over the rest. They divided the nation into two distinct bo­dies, without common interest, sympathy, or con­nection. One of these bodies was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education: the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. Are we to be astonished, when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation, continued without intermission for near an hundred years, we had re­duced them to a mob; that whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight? Surely it might be just now a matter of temperate discussion, whether you ought not apply a remedy to the real cause of the evil. If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristo­cratic interest; that is, an interest of property and education amongst them; and to strengthen, by every prudent means, the authority and influence of men of that description. It will deserve your best thoughts, to examine whether this can be done without giving such persons the means of demonstrating to the rest, that something more is to be got by their temperate conduct, than can be expected from the wild and senseless projects of those who do not belong to their body, who have no interest in their well being, and [Page 139] only wish to make them the dupes of their turbulent ambition.—

THE Protestants of Ireland are not alone suffici­ently the people to form a democracy; and they are too numerous to answer the ends and purposes of an aristocracy. Admiration, that first source of obedi­ence, can be only the claim or the imposture of the few. I hold it to be absolutely impossible for two millions of plebeians, (Catholics) composing cer­tainly, a very clear and decided majority in that class, to become so far in love with six or seven hun­dred thousand of their fellow-citizens (to all outward appearance plebeians like themselves, and many of them tradesmen, servants, and otherwise inferior to some of them) as to see with satisfaction, or even with patience, an exclusive power vested in them, by which constitutionally they become the absolute mas­ters; and by the manners derived from their circum­stances, must be capable of exercising upon them, daily and hourly, an insulting and vexatious superi­ority. Neither are the majority of the Irish indem­nified (as in some aristocracies) for this state of hu­miliating vassalage (often inverting the nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life: while every franchise, every honour, every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential (besides whole profes­sions) is reserved for the master cast.— Ibid.

I WILL not here examine, whether the principles of the British [the Irish] constitution, be wise or [Page 140] not. I must assume that they are; and that those who partake the franchises which make it, partake of a benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications inherent in the constitution that gives them) are excluded, not from the state, but from the British constitution. They cannot by any possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so bravely made by those who possess the privilege—that the best blood in their veins ought to be shed, to preserve their share in it; they, the disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think them­selves in an happy state, to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential advantages. The popular part of the constitution must be to them, by far the most odious part of it. To them it is not on actual, and, if possible, still less a virtual repre­sentation. It is, indeed, the direct contrary. It is power unlimited, placed in the hands of an adverse description, because it is an adverse description. And if they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, or tyran­nic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigour.

Then, since our oldest fundamental laws follow, or rather couple, freehold with franchise; since no principle of the revolution shakes these liberties; since the oldest and one of the best monuments of the consti [...]tion, demands for the Irish the privilege which they supplicate; since the principles of the revolution coincide with the declarations of the Great Charter; since the practice of the revolution, in this point, did not contradict its principles; since, from that event, twenty-five years had elapsed, before a domineering party, on a party principle, had ventured to disfranchise, without any proof whatsoever of abuse, the greater part of the community; since the king's coronation oath does not stand in his way to [Page 141] the performance of his duty to all his subjects; since you have given to all other dissenters these privileges without limit, which are hitherto withheld, without any limitation whatsoever, from the Catholics; since no nation in the world has ever been known to ex­clude so great a body of men (not born slaves) from the civil state, and all the benefits of its constitution; the whole question comes before parliament, as a matter for its prudence. I do not put the thing on a question of right. That discretion which in judica­ture is well said by Lord Coke to be a crooked cord, in legislature is a golden rule. Supplicants ought not to appear too much in the character of litigants. If the subject thinks so highly and reverently of the sovereign authority, as not to claim any thing of right, so that it may seem to be independent of the power and free choice of its government: and if the sovereign, on his part, considers the advantages of the subjects as their right, and all their reasonable wishes as so many claims; in the fortunate conjunc­tion of these mutual dispositions are laid the foun­dations of a happy and prosperous commonwealth. For my own part, desiring of all things that the autho­rity of the legislature under which I was born, and which I cherish, not only with a dutiful awe, but with a partial and cordial affection, to be maintained in the utmost possible respect, I never will suffer myself to suppose, that, at bottom, their discretion will be found to be at variance with their justice.— Ibid.

THE Irish Catholic, as a Catholic and belonging to a description, has no virtual relation to the repre­sentative; but the contrary. There is a relation in [Page 142] mutual obligation. Gratitude may not always have a very lasting power; but the frequent recurrence of an application for favours will revive and refresh it; and will necessarily produce some degree of mutual attention. It will, produce, at least, acquaintance. The several descriptions of people will not be kept so much apart as they now are, as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species. The stigma and reproach, the hideous mask will be taken off, and men will see each other as they are. Sure I am, that there have been thousands in Ireland, who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener's workmen, or to ask their way, when they had lost it in their sports; or, at best, who had known them only as footmen, or other domestics of the second and third order: and so averse were they, some time ago, to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stable. I well remember a great, and, in many respects, a good man, who ad­vertised for a blacksmith; but, at the same time, added, he must be a Protestant. It is impossible that such a state of things, though natural goodness in many persons will undoubtedly make exceptions, must not produce alienation on the one side, and pride and insolence on the other.

Reduced to a question of discretion, and that dis­cretion exercised solely upon what will appear best for the conservation of the state on its present basis, I should recommend it to your serious thoughts, whe­ther the narrowing of the foundation is always the best way to secure the building? The body of dis­franchised men will not be perfectly satisfied to re­main always in that state. If they are not satisfied, you have two millions of subjects in your bosom, full of uneasiness; not that they cannot overturn the act of settlement, and put themselves and you under an [Page 143] arbitrary master; or, that they are not permitted to fpawn an hydra of wild republics, on principles of a pretended natural equality in man; but, because you will not suffer them to enjoy the ancient, funda­mental, tried advantages of a British constitution: that you will not permit them to profit of the pro­tection of a common father, or the freedom of com­mon citizens: and that the only reason which can be assigned for this disfranchisement, has a tendency more deeply to ulcerate their minds than the act of exclusion itself. What the consequence of such feel­ings must be, it is for you to look to. To warn is not to menace.— Ibid.

SO far as to England. In Ireland you have out­ran us. Without waiting for an English example, you have totally, and without any modification what­soever, repealed the test as to Protestant Dissenters. Not having the repealing act by me, I ought not to say positively that there is no exception in it; but if it be what I suppose it is, you know very well, that a Jew in religion, or a Mahometan, or even a public, declared atheist, and blasphemer, is perfectly qualified to be lord lieutenant, a lord justice, or even keeper of the king's conscience; and by virtue of his office (if with you it be as it is with us) administrator to a great part of the ecclesiastical patronage of the crown.

Now let us deal a little fairly. We must admit, that Protestant dissent was one of the quarters from which danger was apprehended at the revolution, and against which a part of the coronation oath was pe­culiarly directed. By this unqualified repeal, you certainly did not mean to deny that it was the duty of the crown to preserve the church against Protestant Dissenters; or taking this to be the true sense of the two revolution acts of king William, and of the pre­vious [Page 144] and subsequent union acts of queen Anne, you did not declare by this most unqualified repeal, by which you broke down all the barriers, not invented, indeed, but carefully preserved at the revolution; you did not then and by that proceeding declare, that you had advised the king to perjury towards God, and persidy towards the church. No! far, very far from it! you never would have done it, if you did not think it could be done with perfect repose to the royal conscience, and perfect safety to the national esta­blished religion. You did this upon a full considera­tion of the circumstances of your country. Now, if circumstances required it, why should it be contrary to the king's oath, his parliament judging on those circumstances, to restore to his Catholic people, in such measure, and with such modifications as the public wisdom shall think proper to add, some part in these franchises which they formerly had held without any limitation at all, and which, upon no sort of ur­gent reason at the time, they were deprived of? If such means can with any probability be shown, from cir­cumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular constitution than to weaken it; surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions continued from generation to generation. They are perfectly consistent with the other parts of the coronation oath, in which the king swears to maintain ‘"the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel, and to govern the people according to the statutes in Parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the realm."’ In consenting to such a statute, the crown would act, at least, as agreeable to the laws of God, and to the true profession of the gospel, and to the laws and customs of the kingdom, as George I. did when he passed the statute which took from the body of the people, every thing which, to that hour, and even after the monstrous acts of the 2d and 8th of Anne (the objects of our common hatred) they still enjoyed inviolate.— Ibid.

WHEN we are to provide for the education of any body of men, we ought seriously to consider the par­ticular functions they are to perform in life. A Ro­man Catholic clergyman is the minister of a very ritual religion: and by his profession, subject to many restraints. His life is a life full of strict observances, and his duties are of a laborious nature towards him­self, and of the highest possible trust towards others. The duty of confession alone is sufficient to set in the strongest light the necessity of his having an ap­propriated mode of education. The theological opi­nions and peculiar rites of one religion never can be properly taught in universities, founded for the pur­poses and on the principles of another, which in many points are directly opposite. If a Roman Catholic clergyman, intended for celibacy, and the function of confession, is not strictly bred in a semi­nary where these things are respected, inculcated and enforced, as sacred, and not made the subject of derision and obloquy, he will be ill fitted for the former, and the latter will be indeed in his hands a terrible instrument.

There is a great resemblance between the whole frame and constitution of the Greek and Latin churches. The secular clergy in the former, by being married, living under little restraint, and hav­ing no particular education suited to their function, are universally fallen into such contempt, that they are never permitted to aspire to the dignities of their own church. It is not held respectful to call them papas, their true and antient appellation, but those who wish to address them with civility, always call them hieromonachi. In consequence of this disre­spect, which I venture to say, in such a church, must be the consequence of a secular life, a very great [Page 146] degeneracy from reputable christian manners has taken place throughout almost the whole of that great member of the christian church.

It was so with the Latin church, before the re­straint on marriage. Even that restraint gave rise to the greatest disorders before the council of Trent, which together with the emulation raised, and the good examples given by the reformed churches, wherever they were in view of each other, has brought on that happy amendment, which we see in the Latin communion, both at home and abroad.

The council of Trent has wisely introduced the discipline of seminaries, by which priests are not trusted for a clerical institution, even to the severe discipline of their colleges; but after they pass through them, are frequently, if not for the greater part, obliged to pass through peculiar methods, having their particular ritual function in view. It is in a great measure to this, and to similar methods used in foreign education, that the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland, miserably provided for, living among low and ill-regulated people, without any discipline of sufficient force to secure good manners, have been prevented from becoming an intolerable nuisance to the country, instead of being, as I con­ceive they generally are, a very great service to it.— Letter on the penal Laws against Irish Catholics.

I CANNOT possibly confound in my mind all the things which were done at the revolution, with the principles of the revolution. As in most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the time, well or ill understood from passion or [Page 147] from vengeance, which were not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most direct con­tradiction to them. I shall not think that the depri­vation of some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest in the constitution, in and to which they were born, was a thing conformable to the declared principles of the revolution. This, I am sure, is true relatively to England (where the opera­tion of these anti-principles comparatively were of little extent) and some of our late laws, in repealing acts made immediately after the revolution, admit that some things then done were not done in the true spirit of the revolution. But the revolution operated differently in England and Irelend, in many, and these essential particulars. Supposing the principles to have been altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the application of those principles to very dif­ferent objects, the whole spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed. In England it was the struggle of the great body of the people for the establishment of their liberties, against the efforts of a very small faction, who would have oppressed them. In Ireland it was the establishment of the power of the smaller number, at the expence of the civil li­berties and properties of the far greater part; and at the expence of the political liberties of the whole. It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but a con­quest; which is not to say a great deal in its favour. To insist on every thing done in Ireland at the re­volution, would be to insist on the severe and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent rule for its future government. This, no power, in no country that ever I heard of, has done or professed to do—ex­cept in Ireland; where it is done, and possibly by some people will be professed. Time has, by de­grees, in all other places and periods, blended and coalited the conquered with the conquerors. So, [Page 148] after some time, and after one of the most rigid con­quests that we read of in history, the Normans sof­tened into the English. I wish you to turn your re­collection to the fine speech of Cerealis to the Gauls, made to dissuade them from revolt. Speaking of the Romans,— ‘" Nos quamvis toties lacessiti, jure victo­riae id solum vobis addidimus, quo pacem tuere­mur; nam neque quies gentium sine armis; neque arma sine stipendiis; neque stipendia sine tributis, haberi queant. Coetera in communi sita sunt: ipsi plerumque nostris exercitibus proesidetis: ipsi has aliasque provincias regitis: nil seperatum clausumve—Proinde pacem et urbem, quam victores victique eodem jure obtinemus, amate, colite."’ You will consider, whether the arguments used by that Roman to these Gauls, would apply to the case in Ireland; and whether you could use so plausible a preamble to any severe warning you might think it proper to hold out to those who should resort to sedition instead of supplication, to obtain any object that they may pur­sue with the governing power.

For a much longer period than that which had suf­ficed to blend the Romans with the nation to which of all others they were the most adverse, the Pro­testants settled in Ireland, considered themselves in no other light than that of a sort of colonial garri­son, to keep the natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain. The whole spirit of the re­volution in Ireland, was that of not the mildest con­queror. In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did not commence at that aera, nor was religion, of any kind, their primary object. What was done, was not in the spirit of a contest between two religious factions; but between two adverse nations. The statutes of Kilkenny shew, that the spirit of the po­pery laws, and some even of their actual provisions, as applied between Englishry and Irishry, had ex­isted in that harassed country before the words Pro­testant [Page 149] and Papist were heard of in the world. If we read baron Finglas, Spenser, and Sir John Davis, we cannot miss the true genius and policy of the English government there before the revolution, as well as during the whole reign of queen Elizabeth. Sir John Davis boasts of the benefits received by the natives, by extending to them the English law, and turning the whole kingdom into shire ground. But the appearance of things alone was changed. The original scheme was never deviated from for a single hour. Unheard-of confiscations were made in the northern parts, upon grounds of plots and conspira­cies, never proved upon their supposed authors. The war of chicane succeeded to the war of arms and of hostile statutes; and a regular series of operations were carried on, particularly from Chichester's time, in the ordinary courts of justice, and by special com­missions and inquisitions; first, under pretence of te­nures, and then of titles in the crown, for the pur­pose of the total extirpation of the interest of the na­tives in their own soil—until this species of subtle ravage, being carried to the last excess of oppression and insolence under Lord Strafford, it kindled the flames of that rebellion which broke out in 1641. By the issue of that war, by the turn which the Earl of Clarendon gave to things at the restoration, and by the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691, the ruin of the native Irish, and in a great measure too, of the first races of the English, was completely accomplished. The new English interest was settled with as solid a stability as any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression, which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people; whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears but of their security. [Page 150] They who carried on this system, looked to the irre­sistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power. They were quite certain, that no complaints of the natives would be heard on this side of the water, with any other sentiments than those of contempt and indignation. Their cries serv­ed only to augment their torture. Machines, which could answer their purposes so well, must be of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, in England, the dou­ble name of the complainants, Irish and Papists (it would be hard to say, singly, which singly was the most odious) shut up the hearts of every one against them. Whilst that temper prevailed, and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people, who were looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigotted savages, who were a disgrace to human nature itself.

However, as the English in Ireland began to be domiciliated, they began also to recollect that they had a country. The English interest, at first by [...]aint and almost insensible degrees, but at length openly and avowedly, became an independent Irish interest; full as independent as it could ever have been, if it had continued in the persons of the native Irish; and it was maintained with more skill, and more consis­tency than probably it would have been in theirs. With their views, the Anglo-Irish changed their maxims—it was necessary to demonstrate to the whole people that there was something at least, of a com­mon interest, combined with the independency, which was to become the object of common exertions. The mildness of government produced the first relaxation towards the Irish; the necessities, and, in part too, the temper that predominated at this great change, produced the second and the most important of these relaxations. English government, and Irish legisla­ture, [Page 151] felt jointly the propriety of this measure. The Irish parliament and nation became independent.

The true revolution to you, that which most in­trinsically and substantially resembled the English re­volution of 1688, was the Irish revolution of 1782. The Irish parliament of 1782 bore little resemblance to that which sat in that kingdom, after the period of the first of these revolutions. It bore a much nearer resemblance to that which sat under king James. The change of the parliament in 1782 from the character of the parliament which, as a token of its indignation, had burned all the journals indiscriminately of the former parliament in the council chamber, was very visible. The address of king William's parliament, the parliament which assembled after the revolution, amongst other causes of complaint (many of them sufficiently just) complains of the repeal by their pre­decessors of Poyning's law; no absolute idol with the parliament of 1782.

Great Britain finding the Anglo-Irish highly ani­mated with a spirit, which had, indeed, shewn itself before, though with little energy, and many inter­ruptions, and therefore suffered a multitude of uni­form precedents to be established against it, acted, in my opinion, with the greatest temperance and wisdom. She saw that the disposition of the leading part of the nation would not permit them to act any longer the part of a garrison. She saw that true policy did not require that they ever should have appeared in that character; or if it had done so formerly, the reasons had now ceased to operate. She saw that the Irish of her race, were resolved to build their constitution and their polites upon another bottom. With those things under her view, she instantly complied with the whole of your demands, without any reservation whatsoever. She surrendered that boundless supe­riority, for the preservation of which, and the ac­quisition, she had supported the English colonies in [Page 152] Ireland for so long a time, and at so vast an expence (according to the standard of those ages) of her blood and treasure.

When we bring before us the matter which history affords for our selection, it is not improper to exa­mine the spirit of the several precedents, which are candidates for our choice. Might it not be as well for your statesmen, on the other side of the water, to take an example from this latter, and surely more conciliatory revolution, as a pattern for your conduct towards your own fellow-citizens, than from that of 1688, when a paramount sovereignty over both you and them, was more loftily claimed, and more sternly exerted, than at any former, or at any subsequent period? Great Britain in 1782, rose above the vulgar ideas of policy, the ordinary jealousies of state, and all the sentiments of national pride and national am­bition. If she had been more disposed than, I thank God for it, she was, to listen to the suggestions of passion, than to the dictates of prudence; she might have urged the principles, the maxims, the policy, the practice of the revolution, against the demands of the leading description in Ireland, with full as much plausibility, and full as good a grace, as any amongst them can possibly do, against the supplications of so vast and extensive a description of their own people.

A good deal too, if the spirit of domination and exclusion had prevailed in England, might have been excepted against some of the means then employed in Ireland, whilst her claims were in agitation. They were, at least, as much out of the ordinary course, as those which are now objected against admitting your people to any of the benefits of an English con­stitution. Most certainly, neither with you, nor here, was any one ignorant of what was at that time said, written, and done. But on all sides we separated the means from the end; and we separated the cause of the moderate and rational, from the ill-intentioned [Page 153] and seditious; which on such occasions are so fre­quently apt to march together. At that time, on your part, you were not afraid to review what was done at the revolution of 1688, and what had been continued during the subsequent flourishing period of the British empire. The change then made was a great and fundamental alteration. In the execution, it was an operose business on both sides of the water. It required the repeal of several laws; the modifi­cation of many, and a new course to be given to an infinite number of legislative, judicial, and official practices and usages in both kingdoms. This did not frighten any of us. You are now asked to give, in some moderate measure, to your fellow-citizens, what Great Britain gave to you, without any measure at all. Yet notwithstanding all the difficulties at the time, and the apprehensions which some very well-meaning people entertained, through the admirable temper in which this revolution (or restoration in the nature of a revolution) was conducted in both king­doms, it has hitherto produced no inconvenience to either; and I trust, with the continuance of the same temper, that it never will. I think that this small inconsiderable change relative to an exclusive statute not made at the revolution, for restoring the people to the benefits, from which the green soreness of a civil war had not excluded them, will be productive of no sort of mischief whatsoever. Compare what was done in 1782 with what is wished in 1792; con­sider the spirit of what has been done at the several periods of reformation; and weigh maturely, whether it be exactly true that conciliatory concessions are of good policy only in discussions between nations; but that among descriptions in the same nation, they must always be irrational and dangerous. What have you suffered in your peace, your prosperity, or, in what ought ever to be dear to a nation, your glory, by the last act by which you took the property of that [Page 154] people under the protection of the laws? What reason have you to dread the consequences of ad­mitting the people possessing that property to some share in the protection of the constitution?— Letter to Sir H. Langrishe, M. P.

IRELAND, before the English conquest, though never governed by a despotic power, had no parlia­ment. How far the English parliament itself was at that time modelled according to the present form, is disputed among antiquarians. But we have all the reason in the world to be assured, that a form of par­liament, such as England then enjoyed, she instantly communicated to Ireland; and we are equally sure that almost every successive improvement in consti­tutional liberty, as fast as it was made here, was transmitted thither. The feudal baronage, and the feudal knighthood, the roots of our primitive con­stitution, were early transplanted into that soil; and grew and flourished there. Magna Charta, if it did not give us originally the house of commons, gave us at least an house of commons of weight and con­sequence. But your ancestors did not churlishly sit down alone to the feast of Magna Charta. Ireland was made immediately a partaker. This benefit of English laws and liberties, I confess, was not at first extended to all Ireland. Mark the consequence. English authority and English liberties had exactly the same boundaries. Your standard could never be advanced an inch before your privileges. Sir John Davis shews beyond a doubt, that the refusal of a general communication of these rights, was the true cause why Ireland was five hundred years in subduing; and after the vain projects of a military government, attempted in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it was [Page 155] soon discovered, that nothing could make that country English, in civility and allegiance, but your laws and your forms of legislature. It was not English arms, but the English constitution, that conquered Ireland. From that time, Ireland has ever had a general parliament, as she had before a partial parliament. You changed the people; you altered the religion; but you never touched the form or the vital substance of free government in that kingdom. You deposed kings; you restored them; you altered the succession to theirs, as well as to your own crown; but you never altered their constitution; the principle of which was respected by usurpation; restored with the resto­ration of monarchy, and established, I trust, for ever, by the glorious Revolution. This has made Ireland the great and flourishing kingdom that it is; and from a disgrace and a burthen intolerable to this nation, has rendered a principal part of our strength and ornament. This country cannot be said to have ever formally taxed her. The irregular things done in the confusion of mighty troubles, and on the hinge of great revolutions, even if all were done that is said to have been done, form no example. If they have any effect in argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment if the casual deviations from them, at such times, were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority. Turn your eyes to those popular grants from whence all your great supplies are come; and learn to respect that only source of public wealth in the British empire— Speech on Conciliation with America.

THE first concessions to Ireland, by being (much against my will) mangled and stripped of the parts which were necessary to make out their just corre­spondence and connection in trade, were of no use. The next year a feeble attempt was made to bring the thing into better shape. This attempt (countenanced by the minister ^*) on the very first appearance of some popular uneasiness, was, after a considerable progress through the house, thrown out by him.

What was the consequence? The whole kingdom of Ireland was instantly in a flame. Threatened by foreigners, and, as they thought, insulted by Eng­land, they resolved at once to resist the power of France, and to cast off yours. As for us, we were able neither to protect nor to restrain them. Forty thousand men were raised and disciplined without commission from the crown. Two illegal armies were seen with banners displayed at the same time, and in the same country. No executive magistrate, no judicature, in Ireland, would acknowledge the legality of the army which bore the king's commission; and no law, or appearance of law, authorised the army commissioned by itself. In this unexampled state of things, which the least error, the least trespass on the right or left, would have hurried down the precipice into an abyss of blood and confusion, the people of Ireland demand a freedom of trade with arms in their hands. They interdict all commerce between the two nations. They deny all new supply in the house of commons, although in time of war. They stint the trust of the old revenue, given for two years to all the king's predecessors, to six months. The British parliament, in a former session frightened into a limited concession by the menaces of Ireland, frightened out of it by the menaces of England, was now frightened back again, and made an universal [Page 157] surrender of all that had been thought the peculiar, reserved, uncommunicable rights of England;—the exclusive commerce of America, of Africa, of the West-Indies—all the enumerations of the acts of navigation—all the manufactures,—iron, glass, even the last pledge of jealousy and pride, the interest hid in the secret of our hearts, the inveterate prejudice moulded into the constitution of our frame, even the sacred fleece itself, all went together. No reserve; no exception; no debate; no discussion. A sudden light broke in upon us all. It broke in, not through well-contrived and well-disposed windows, but through flaws and breaches; through the yawning chasms of our ruin. We were taught wisdom by humiliation. No town in England presumed to have a prejudice; or dared to mutter a petition. What was worse, the whole Parliament of England, which retained autho­rity for nothing but surrenders, was despoiled of every shadow of its superintendance. It was, without any qualification, denied in theory, as it had been trampled upon in practice. This scene of shame and disgrace has, in a manner whilst I am speaking, ended by the perpetual establishment of a military power, in the dominions of this crown, without con­sent of the British legislature ^*, contrary to the policy of the constitution, contrary to the declaration of right: and by this your liberties are swept away along with your supreme authority—and both, linked together from the beginning, have, I am afraid, both together perished for ever.

What! gentlemen, was I not to foresee, or fore­seeing, was I not to endeavour to save you from all these multiplied mischiefs and disgraces? Would the little, silly, canvass prattle of obeying instructions, and having no opinions but yours, and such idle senseless tales, which amuse the vacant ears of un­thinking men, have saved you from ‘"the pelting of [Page 158] that pitiless storm,"’ to which the loose improvi­dence, the cowardly rashness of those who dare not look danger in the face, so as to provide against it in time, and therefore throw themselves headlong into the midst of it, have exposed this degraded nation, beat down and prostrate on the earth, un­sheltered, unarmed, unresisting? Was I an Irishman on that day, that I boldly withstood our pride? or on the day that I hung down my head, and wept in shame and silence over the humiliation of Great Britain? I became unpopular in England for the one, and in Ireland for the other. What then? What obligation lay on me to be popular? I was bound to serve both kingdoms. To be pleased with my service, was their affair, not mine.— Speech previous to the Election at Bristol.

CORRUPT influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigour from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.— Oecon. Reform.

INDIVIDUALS pass like shadows; but the com­monwealth is fixed and stable. The difference therefore of to-day and to-morrow, which to private people is immense, to the state is nothing.— Ibid.

KINGS are naturally lovers of low company.—They are so elevated above all the rest of mankind, that they must look upon all their subjects as on a [Page 159] level. They are rather apt to hate than to love their nobility, on account of the occasional resistance to their will, which will be made by their virtue, their petulance, or their pride. It must indeed be ad­mitted, that many of the nobility are as perfectly willing to act the part of flatterers, tale-bearers, pa­rasites, pimps, and bussoons, as any of the lowest and vilest of mankind can possibly be. But they are not properly qualified for this object of their ambi­tion. The want of a regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch, a mountebank, a fidler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that tribe. The Roman Emperors, almost from the beginning, threw them­selves into such hands, and the mischief increased every day till its decline, and its final ruin. It is therefore of very great importance (provided the thing is not overdone) to contrive such an establish­ment as must, almost whether a prince will or not, bring into daily and hourly offices about his person, a great number of his first nobility; and it is rather an useful prejudice that gives them a pride in such a servitude. Though they are not much the better for a court, a court will be much the better for them. I have therefore not attempted to reform any of the offices of honour about the king's person.— Ibid.

Dr. Price, in this sermon ^*, condemns very pro­perly the practice of gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of this fulsome style, he proposes that his majesty should be told, on occasions of con­gratulation, that ‘"he is to consider himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of his people."’ For a compliment, this new form of [Page 160] address does not seem to be very soothing. Those who are servants, in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave, in the old play, tells his master, ‘" Haec commemoratio est quafi exprobratio."’ It is not pleasant as compliment, it is not wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take the appellation of Ser­vant of the People as his royal style, how either he or we should be much mended by it, I cannot ima­gine. I have seen very assuming letters, signed, Your most obedient, humble servant. The proudest domination that ever was endured on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself ‘"the Servant of Servants;"’ and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of ‘"the Fisherman."’

I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of slippant vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavory fume, several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not plainly in sup­port of the idea, and a part of the scheme of ‘"ca­shiering kings for misconduct."’ In that light it is worth some observation.

Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other ra­tional end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense (by our constitution at least) any thing like servants; the essence of whose situation is to obey the commands of some other, and to be removeable at pleasure.—But the King of Great Britain obeys no other per­son; all other persons are individually, and col­lectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate, not our ser­vant, [Page 161] as this humble Divine calls him, but ‘" our sovereign lord the King;"’ and we, on our parts, have learned to speak only the primitive language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian pulpits.

As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law in him, our constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like the Justicia of Arragon; nor of any court legally appointed, nor of any process le­gally settled for submitting the king to the respon­sibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not distinguished from the Commons and the Lords; who, in their several public capacities, can never be called to an account for their conduct; although the Revolution Society chuses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that ‘"a king is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible to it."’— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

TO reconcile the minds of the people to all these movements, principles correspondent to them had been preached up with great zeal. Every one must remember that the cabal set out with the most asto­nishing prudery, both moral and political. Those who in a few months after soused over head and ears into the deepest and dirtiest pits of corruption, cried out violently against the indirect practices in the electing and managing of parliaments, which had for­merly prevailed. This marvellous abhorrence which the Court had suddenly taken to all influence, was not only circulated in conversation through the king­dom, but pompously announced to the public, with [Page 162] many other extraordinary things, in a pamphlet which had all the appearance of a manifesto preparatory to some considerable enterprize. Throughout, it was a satire, though in terms managed and decent enough, on the politics of the former reign. It was indeed written with no small art and address.

In this piece (Sentiments of an honest Man) ap­peared the first dawning of the new system; there first appeared the idea (then only in speculation) of separating the court from the administration; of carry­ing every thing from national connection to personal regards; and of forming a regular party for that pur­pose, under the name of king's men.

To recommend this system to the people, a per­spective view of the Court, gorgeously painted, and finely illuminated from within, was exhibited to the gaping multitude. Party was to be totally done away, with all its evil works. Corruption was to be cast down from Court, as Atè was from Heaven. Power was thenceforward to be the chosen residence of public spirit; and no one was to be supposed under any sinister influence, except those who had the mis­fortune to be in disgrace at court, which was to stand in lieu of all vices and all corruptions. A scheme of perfection to be realized in a monarchy far beyond the visionary republic of Plato. The whole scenery was exactly disposed to captivate those good souls, whose credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty politicians. Indeed there was wherewithal to charm every body, except those few who are not much pleased with professions of super­natural virtue, who know of what stuff such profes­sions are made, for what purposes they are designed, and in what they are sure constantly to end. Many innocent gentlemen, who had been talking prose all their lives without knowing any thing of the matter, began at last to open their eyes upon their own merits, and to attribute their not having been Lords of the Treasury and Lords of Trade many years before, [Page 163] merely to the prevalence of party, and to the mini­sterial power, which had frustrated the good intentions of the Court in favour of their abilities. Now was the time to unlock the sealed fountain of royal bounty, which had been infamously monopolized and huck­stered, and to let it flow at large upon the whole people. The time was come to restore royalty to its original splendor. Mettre le Roy hors de page, became a sort of watch-word; and it was constantly in the mouths of all the runners of the Court, that nothing could preserve the balance of the constitution from being overturned by the rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but to free the sovereign effectually from that ministerial tyranny under which the royal dignity had been oppressed in the person of his Majesty's grandfather.

These were some of the many artifices used to re­concile the people to the great change which was made in the persons who composed the ministry, and the still greater which was made and avowed in its constitution. As to individuals, other methods were employed with them; in order so thoroughly to dis­unite every party, and even every family, that no concert; order, or effect, might appear in any future opposition. And in this manner an Administration, without connection with the people, or with one another, was first put in possession of government. What good consequences followed from it; we have all seen; whether with regard to virtue, public or private; to the ease and happiness of the sovereign; or to the real strength of government. But as so much stress was then laid on the necessity of this new project, it will not be amiss to take a view of the ef­fects of this royal servitude and vile durance, which was so deplored in the reign of the late monarch, and was so carefully to be avoided in the reign of his successor.— Thoughts on the Cause of the present Dis­contents.

KINGS will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.— Ibid.

THERE is ground enough for the opinion that all the kingdoms of Europe were, at a remote period, elective, with more or fewer limitations in the objects of choice; but whatever kings might have been here or elsewhere, a thousand years ago, or in whatever manner the ruling dynasties of England or France may have begun, the King of Great Britain is at this day king by a fixed rule of succession, according to the laws of his country; and whilst the legal condi­tions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by him (as they are performed) he holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a king amongst them, either individually or collectively; though I make no doubt they would soon erect themselves into an elec­toral college, if things were ripe to give effect to their claim. His Majesty's heirs and successors, each in his time and order, will come to the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears.

Whatever may be the success of evasion in ex­plaining away the gross error of fact, which supposes that his Majesty (though he holds it in concurrence with the wishes) owes his crown to the choice of his people, yet nothing can evade their full explicit de­claration, concerning the principle of a right in the people to chuse, which right is directly maintained, and tenaciously adhered to. All the oblique insinu­ations concerning election bottom in this proposition, and are referable to it. Lest the foundation of the king's exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant [Page 165] of adulatory freedom, the political divine (Dr. Price) proceeds dogmatically to assert ^*, that by the prin­ciples of the revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one system, and lie together in one short sentence; namely, that we have acquired a right

This new, and hitherto unheard of bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, be­longs to those gentlemen (Revolution Society) and their faction only. The body of the people of Eng­land have no share in it; they utterly disclaim it; they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their country, made at the time of that very revolution, which is appealed to in favour of the fictitious rights claimed by the society which abuses its name.

These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the revolution of 1688, have a revolu­tion which happened in England about forty years before, and the late French revolution, so much be­fore their eyes, and in their hearts, that they are constantly confounding all the three together. It is necessary that we should separate what they confound. We must recall their erring fancies to the acts of the revolution which we revere, for the discovery of its true principles. If the principles of the revolution of 1688 are any where to be found, it is in the statute called the Declaration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration, drawn up by great lawyers and great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts, not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right ‘"to [Page 166] chuse our own governors; to cashier them for mis­conduct; and to form a government for ourselves."’

This declaration of right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2. ch. 2.) is the corner-stone of our constitution, as reinforced, explained, im­proved, and in its fundamental principles for ever settled. It is called ‘"An act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown."’ You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together.

A few years after this period, a second opportu­nity offered for asserting a right of election to the crown. On the prospect of a total failure of issue from King William, and from the Princess, after­wards Queen Anne, the consideration of the settle­ment of the crown, and of a further security for the liberties of the people, again came before the Le­gislature. Did they this second time make any pro­vision for legalizing the crown on the spurious revo­lution principles of the Old Jewry? No. They fol­lowed the principles which prevailed in the Declara­tion of Right; indicating with more precision the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant line.—This act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties, and an hereditary succession in the same act. Instead of a right to chuse our own governors, they declared that the succession in that line (the Protestant line drawn from James the First) was absolutely ne­cessary ‘"for the peace, quiet, and security of the realm,"’ and that it was equally urgent on them ‘"to maintain a certainty in the succession thereof, to which the subjects may safely have recourse for their protection."’ Both these acts, in which are heard the unerring, unambiguous oracles of revolution policy, instead of countenancing the delusive, gipsey predictions of a ‘"right to chuse our governors,"’ prove to a demonstration how totally adverse the wis­dom [Page 167] of the nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law.

Unquestionably there was at the revolution, in the person of King William, a small and a temporary de­viation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case, and regarding an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle, that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it was at the revolution. Its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time. There is no person so completely ignorant of our history, as not to know that the majority in Parlia­ment of both parties were so little disposed to any thing resembling that principle, that at first they were determined to place the vacant crown, not on the head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his wife Mary, daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of that king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all those circum­stances which demonstrated that their accepting King William was not properly a choice; but to all those who did not wish, in effect, to recall King James, or to deluge their country in blood, and again to bring their religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had just escaped, it was an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken.

In the very act, in which, for a time, and in a single case, Parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance, in favour of a prince, who, though not next, was however very near in the line of suc­cession, it is curious to observe how Lord Somers, who drew the bill, called the Declaration of Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion. It is curious to observe with what address this temporary [Page 168] solution of continuity is kept from the eye; whilst all that could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward, and fostered, and made the most of, by this great man, and by the Legislature who followed him. Quitting the dry, imperative style of an act of Parliament, he makes the Lords and Com­mons fall to a pious, legislative ejaculation, and declare, that they consider it ‘"as a marvellous pro­vidence, and merciful goodness of God to this nation, to preserve their said Majesties royal per­sons, most happily to reign over us on the throne of their ancestors, for which, from the bottom of their hearts, they return their humblest thanks and praises."’ The Legislature plainly had in view the act of recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3d, and of that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable na­ture of the crown, and in many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words, and even the form of thanksgiving, which is found in these old declaratory statutes.

The two houses, in the act of King William, did not thank God that they had found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their own governors, much less to make an election the only lawful title to the crown. Their having been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it, as much as possible, was by them considered as a providential escape. They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every cir­cumstance tending to weaken the rights, which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate; or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they had then settled for ever. Accordingly, that they might not relax the nerves of their monarchy, and that they might preserve a close conformity to the practice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the declaratory statutes of [Page 169] Queen Mary ^* and Queen Elizabeth, in the next clause they vest, by recognition, in their majesties, all the legal prerogatives of the crown, declaring, ‘"that in them they are most fully, rightfully, and intirely invested, incorporated, united, and an­nexed."’ In the clause which follows, for pre­venting questions, by reason of any pretended titles to the crown, they declare (observing also in this the traditionary language, along with the traditionary policy of the nation, and repeating as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James) that on the preserving ‘"a certainty in the SUCCESSION thereof, the unity, peace, and tran­quillity of this nation doth, under God, wholly depend."’

They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble an election; and that an election would be utterly destructive of the ‘"unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation,"’ which they thought to be considerations of some moment. To provide for these objects, and there­fore to exclude for ever the Old Jewry doctrine of ‘"a right to choose our own governors,"’ they follow with a clause, containing a most solemn pledge, taken from the preceding act of Queen Elizabeth, as solemn a pledge as ever was or can be given in favour of an hereditary succession, and as solemn a renunciation as could be made of the principles by this society imputed to them. ‘"The lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do, in the name of all the people aforesaid, most humbly and faith­fully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for ever; and do faithfully promise, that they will stand to, maintain, and defend their said majesties, and also the limitation of the crown, herein specified and contained, to the utmost of their powers," &c. &c.’

[Page 170]So far is it from being true, that we acquired a right by the revolution to elect our kings, that if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity for ever. These gentlemen may value themselves as much as they please on their whig principles; but I never desire to be thought a better whig than Lord Somers; or to understand the principles of the revolution better than those by whom it was brought about; or to read in the declaration of right any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law.

It is true that, aided with the powers derived from force and opportunity, the nation was at that time, in some sense, free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne; but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy, and every other part of their constitution. However they did not think such bold changes within their commission. It is indeed difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exercised by parliament at that time; but the limits of a moral competence, sub­jecting, even in powers more indisputably sovereign, occasional will to permanent reason, and to the steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental po­licy, are perfectly intelligible, and perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name, or under any title, in the state. The house of lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the house of commons; no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom. Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its [Page 171] share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engage­ments, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by the common law; in the new by the statute law, operat­ing on the principles of the common law, not chang­ing the substance, but regulating the mode, and de­scribing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same force, and are derived from an equal authority, emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they continue the same body politic.

It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation; the sacredness of an here­ditary principle of succession in our government, with a power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity (if we take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the revolution) the change is to be confined to the peccant part only; to the part which produced the necessary deviation; and even then it is to be effected without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society.

A state without the means of some change is with­out the means of its conservation. Without such [Page 172] means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical pe­riods of the restoration and revolution, when Eng­land found itself without a king. At both those pe­riods the nation had lost the bond of union in their antient edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the antient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculoe of a disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British constitutional policy, than at the time of the revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent; still an hereditary descent in the same blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they shewed that they held it inviolable.

On this principle, the law of inheritance had ad­mitted some amendment in the old time, and long before the aera of the revolution. Some time after the conquest, great questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became a matter of doubt, whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether the heir per ca­pita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes took place, or the catholic heir when the protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of immortality through all transmigrations— [Page 173] multosque per annos slat fortuna domûs et avi numerantur avorum. This is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law, or by force, the he­reditary succession was either continued or adopted.

The gentlemen of the society for revolutions see nothing in that of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution; and they take the deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they must see, that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded their aera of fictitious election can be valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors, who dragged the bodies of our antient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into question, together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as usurpers? to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties—of as great value at least as any which have passed at or since the period of the revolution? If kings, who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people, had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute de tullagio non concedendo?—of the petition of right?—of the act of habeas corpus? Do these new doctors of the rights of men presume to assert, that King James the Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, according to the rules of a then unqualified succession, was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of England, before he had [Page 174] done any of those acts which were justly construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not; much trouble in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and not an usurper. The princes who succeeded according to the act of parliament which settled the crown on the electress Sophia and on her descendants, being pro­testants, came in as much by a title of inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law, as it stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the house of Brunswick came to the in­heritance of the crown, not by election, but by the law, as it stood at their several accessions of protestant descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shewn suf­ficiently.

The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession, is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of this act bind ‘"us and our heirs, and our posterity, to them, their heirs, and their posterity,"’ the declaration of right had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an heredi­tary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people for ever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our own country presented to them, and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men through a series of ages?

The Princess Sophia was named in the act of set­tlement of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power, which she might not, and, in fact, did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for one reason, [Page 175] and for one only, because, says the act, ‘"the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Dutchess Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohe­mia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and is hereby de­clared to be the next in succession in the Protestant line," &c. &c.; "and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being Protestants."’ This limitation was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line, not only was to be continued in future, but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First; in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be pre­served (with safety to our religion) in the old ap­proved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No experience hrs taught us, that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown, our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convul­sive disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act for the limita­tion of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn through the female descendants of James the First, a due sense of the inconveniencies of having two or three, or possibly more, foreigners in succession to the British throne? No!—they had a due sense of the evils which might happen from such foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them. But a more decisive proof cannot be given of the full conviction of the British nation, that the principles of the revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure, and without any attention to the antient fundamental [Page 176] principles of our government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary Protestant succession in the old line, with all the dangers and all the inconve­niencies of its being a foreign line full before their eyes, and operating with the utmost force upon their minds.— Reflections on the Revolution in France.

KINGS, even such as are truly kings, may and ought to bear the freedom of subjects that are ob­noxious to them. They may too, without derogating from themselves, bear even the authority of such per­sons if it promotes their service. Louis the XIIIth mortally hated the cardinal de Richlieu; but his sup­port of that minister against his rivals was the source of all the glory of his reign, and the solid foundation of his throne itself. Louis the XIVth, when come to the throne, did not love the cardinal Mazarin; but for his interests he preserved him in power. When old, he detested Louvois; but for years, whilst he faithfully served his greatness, he endured his person. When George II. took Mr. Pitt, who certainly was not agree­able to him, into his councils, he did nothing which could humble a wise sovereign. But these ministers, who were chosen by affairs, not by affections, acted in the name of, and in trust for, kings; and not as their avowed, constitutional, and ostensible masters.— Ibid.

LAWS are commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.— Ibid.