( PDF ) Thoughts on Present Discontents

Download PDF

ads:

Thoughts on Present Discontents

Burke

Project Gutenberg Etext Thoughts on Present Discontents by Burke

the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.

We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an

electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and

further information is included below. We need your donations.

Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and Speeches

by Edmund Burke

May, 2000 [Etext #2173]

Project Gutenberg Etext Thoughts on Present Discontents by Burke

******This file should be named thdsc10.txt or thdsc10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, thdsc11.txt

VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, thdsc10a.txt

This etext was transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,

proofing by David, Terry L. Jeffress and Edgar A. Howard. The edition

was the 1886 Cassell & Co. edition.

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,

all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a

these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance

of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.

Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till

midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.

The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at

Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A

ads:

Livros Grátis

http://www.livrosgratis.com.br

Milhares de livros grátis para download.

preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment

and editing by those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an

up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes

in the first week of the next month. Since our ftp program has

a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a

look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a

new copy has at least one byte more or less.

Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The

time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours

to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright

searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This

projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value

per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2

million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text

files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+

If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the

total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext

Files by December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]

This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,

which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.

At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third

of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we

manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly

from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an

assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few

more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we

don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.

We need your donations more than ever!

All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are

tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. (CMU = Carnegie-

Mellon University).

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg

P. O. Box 2782

Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

[email protected] forwards to [email protected] and archive.org

if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if

it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .

We would prefer to send you this information by email.

******

To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser

ads:

to view http://promo.net/pg. This site lists Etexts by

author and by title, and includes information about how

to get involved with Project Gutenberg. You could also

download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here. This

is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,

for a more complete list of our various sites.

To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any

Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror

sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed

at http://promo.net/pg).

Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.

Example FTP session:

ftp sunsite.unc.edu

password: your@login

cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg

cd etext90 through etext99

dir [to see files]

get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]

GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]

GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]

***

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**

(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***

Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.

They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with

your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from

someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our

fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement

disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how

you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT

By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm

etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept

this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive

a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by

sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person

you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical

medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS

This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-

tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor

Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at

Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project"). Among other

things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright

on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and

distribute it in the United States without permission and

without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth

below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext

under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable

efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain

works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any

medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other

things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or

corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other

intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged

disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer

codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES

But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,

[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this

etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all

liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including

legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR

UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,

INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE

OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE

POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of

receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)

you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that

time to the person you received it from. If you received it

on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and

such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement

copy. If you received it electronically, such person may

choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to

receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER

WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS

TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT

LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A

PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or

the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the

above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you

may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY

You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,

officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost

and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or

indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:

[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,

or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"

You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by

disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this

"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,

or:

[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this

requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the

etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,

if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable

binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,

including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-

cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as

*EITHER*:

[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and

does *not* contain characters other than those

intended by the author of the work, although tilde

(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may

be used to convey punctuation intended by the

author, and additional characters may be used to

indicate hypertext links; OR

[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at

no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent

form by the program that displays the etext (as is

the case, for instance, with most word processors);

[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at

no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the

etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC

or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this

"Small Print!" statement.

[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the

net profits you derive calculated using the method you

already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you

don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are

payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon

University" within the 60 days following each

date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)

your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?

The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,

scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty

free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution

you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg

Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".

*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

This etext was transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,

proofing by David, Terry L. Jeffress and Edgar A. Howard. The edition

was the 1886 Cassell & Co. edition.

THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS AND SPEECHES

by Edmund Burke

Contents

Introduction

Thoughts on the Present Discontents

Speech on the Middlesex Election.

Speech on the Powers of Juries in Prosecutions for Libels.

Speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments

Speech on Reform of Representation in the House of Commons

INTRODUCTION

Edmund Burke was born at Dublin on the first of January, 1730. His

father was an attorney, who had fifteen children, of whom all but

four died in their youth. Edmund, the second son, being of delicate

health in his childhood, was taught at home and at his grandfather's

house in the country before he was sent with his two brothers

Garrett and Richard to a school at Ballitore, under Abraham

Shackleton, a member of the Society of Friends. For nearly forty

years afterwards Burke paid an annual visit to Ballitore.

In 1744, after leaving school, Burke entered Trinity College,

Dublin. He graduated B.A. in 1748; M.A., 1751. In 1750 he came to

London, to the Middle Temple. In 1756 Burke became known as a

writer, by two pieces. One was a pamphlet called "A Vindication of

Natural Society." This was an ironical piece, reducing to absurdity

those theories of the excellence of uncivilised humanity which were

gathering strength in France, and had been favoured in the

philosophical works of Bolingbroke, then lately published. Burke's

other work published in 1756, was his "Essay on the Sublime and

Beautiful."

At this time Burke's health broke down. He was cared for in the

house of a kindly physician, Dr. Nugent, and the result was that in

the spring of 1757 he married Dr. Nugent's daughter. In the

following year Burke made Samuel Johnson's acquaintance, and

acquaintance ripened fast into close friendship. In 1758, also, a

son was born; and, as a way of adding to his income, Burke suggested

the plan of "The Annual Register."

In 1761 Burke became private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton,

who was then appointed Chief Secretary to Ireland. In April, 1763,

Burke's services were recognised by a pension of 300 pounds a year;

but he threw this up in April, 1765, when he found that his services

were considered to have been not only recognised, but also bought.

On the 10th of July in that year (1765) Lord Rockingham became

Premier, and a week later Burke, through the good offices of an

admiring friend who had come to know him in the newly-founded Turk's

Head Club, became Rockingham's private secretary. He was now the

mainstay, if not the inspirer, of Rockingham's policy of pacific

compromise in the vexed questions between England and the American

colonies. Burke's elder brother, who had lately succeeded to his

father's property, died also in 1765, and Burke sold the estate in

Cork for 4,000 pounds.

Having become private secretary to Lord Rockingham, Burke entered

Parliament as member for Wendover, and promptly took his place among

the leading speakers in the House.

On the 30th of July, 1766, the Rockingham Ministry went out, and

Burke wrote a defence of its policy in "A Short Account of a late

Short Administration." In 1768 Burke bought for 23,000 pounds an

estate called Gregories or Butler's Court, about a mile from

Beaconsfield. He called it by the more territorial name of

Beaconsfield, and made it his home. Burke's endeavours to stay the

policy that was driving the American colonies to revolution, caused

the State of New York, in 1771, to nominate him as its agent. About

May, 1769, Edmund Burke began the pamphlet here given, Thoughts on

the Present Discontents. It was published in 1770, and four

editions of it were issued before the end of the year. It was

directed chiefly against Court influence, that had first been used

successfully against the Rockingham Ministry. Allegiance to

Rockingham caused Burke to write the pamphlet, but he based his

argument upon essentials of his own faith as a statesman. It was

the beginning of the larger utterance of his political mind.

Court influence was strengthened in those days by the large number

of newly-rich men, who bought their way into the House of Commons

for personal reasons and could easily be attached to the King's

party. In a population of 8,000,000 there were then but 160,000

electors, mostly nominal. The great land-owners generally held the

counties. When two great houses disputed the county of York, the

election lasted fourteen days, and the costs, chiefly in bribery,

were said to have reached three hundred thousand pounds. Many seats

in Parliament were regarded as hereditary possessions, which could

be let at rental, or to which the nominations could be sold. Town

corporations often let, to the highest bidders, seats in Parliament,

for the benefit of the town funds. The election of John Wilkes for

Middlesex, in 1768, was taken as a triumph of the people. The King

and his ministers then brought the House of Commons into conflict

with the freeholders of Westminster. Discontent became active and

general. "Junius" began, in his letters, to attack boldly the

King's friends, and into the midst of the discontent was thrown a

message from the Crown asking for half a million, to make good a

shortcoming in the Civil List. Men asked in vain what had been done

with the lost money. Confusion at home was increased by the great

conflict with the American colonies; discontents, ever present, were

colonial as well as home. In such a time Burke endeavoured to show

by what pilotage he would have men weather the storm.

H. M.

THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS

It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the

cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such

an inquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the

true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons

of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the

discovery of their errors than thankful for the occasion of

correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of

the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he

censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of

faction. But in all exertions of duty something is to be hazarded.

In cases of tumult and disorder, our law has invested every man, in

some sort, with the authority of a magistrate. When the affairs of

the nation are distracted, private people are, by the spirit of that

law, justified in stepping a little out of their ordinary sphere.

They enjoy a privilege of somewhat more dignity and effect than that

of idle lamentation over the calamities of their country. They may

look into them narrowly; they may reason upon them liberally; and if

they should be so fortunate as to discover the true source of the

mischief, and to suggest any probable method of removing it, though

they may displease the rulers for the day, they are certainly of

service to the cause of Government. Government is deeply interested

in everything which, even through the medium of some temporary

uneasiness, may tend finally to compose the minds of the subjects,

and to conciliate their affections. I have nothing to do here with

the abstract value of the voice of the people. But as long as

reputation, the most precious possession of every individual, and as

long as opinion, the great support of the State, depend entirely

upon that voice, it can never be considered as a thing of little

consequence either to individuals or to Government. Nations are not

primarily ruled by laws; less by violence. Whatever original energy

may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operation of both

is, in truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the same

methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual without

authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his

superiors, by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious

management of it; I mean, when public affairs are steadily and

quietly conducted: not when Government is nothing but a continued

scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes

the one and sometimes the other is uppermost--in which they

alternately yield and prevail, in a series of contemptible victories

and scandalous submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom

he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman.

And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for

him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what

it is his duty to learn.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present

possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant

hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greater part

of mankind--indeed, the necessary effects of the ignorance and

levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in

all times; yet as all times have NOT been alike, true political

sagacity manifests itself, in distinguishing that complaint which

only characterises the general infirmity of human nature from those

which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air

and season.

Nobody, I believe, will consider it merely as the language of spleen

or disappointment, if I say that there is something particularly

alarming in the present conjuncture. There is hardly a man, in or

out of power, who holds any other language. That Government is at

once dreaded and contemned; that the laws are despoiled of all their

respected and salutary terrors; that their inaction is a subject of

ridicule, and their exertion of abhorrence; that rank, and office,

and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of the world, have lost

their reverence and effect; that our foreign politics are as much

deranged as our domestic economy; that our dependencies are

slackened in their affection, and loosened from their obedience;

that we know neither how to yield nor how to enforce; that hardly

anything above or below, abroad or at home, is sound and entire; but

that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in

families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevail beyond the disorders

of any former time: these are facts universally admitted and

lamented.

This state of things is the more extraordinary, because the great

parties which formerly divided and agitated the kingdom are known to

be in a manner entirely dissolved. No great external calamity has

visited the nation; no pestilence or famine. We do not labour at

present under any scheme of taxation new or oppressive in the

quantity or in the mode. Nor are we engaged in unsuccessful war, in

which our misfortunes might easily pervert our judgment, and our

minds, sore from the loss of national glory, might feel every blow

of fortune as a crime in Government.

It is impossible that the cause of this strange distemper should not

sometimes become a subject of discourse. It is a compliment due,

and which I willingly pay, to those who administer our affairs, to

take notice in the first place of their speculation. Our Ministers

are of opinion that the increase of our trade and manufactures, that

our growth by colonisation and by conquest, have concurred to

accumulate immense wealth in the hands of some individuals; and this

again being dispersed amongst the people, has rendered them

universally proud, ferocious, and ungovernable; that the insolence

of some from their enormous wealth, and the boldness of others from

a guilty poverty, have rendered them capable of the most atrocious

attempts; so that they have trampled upon all subordination, and

violently borne down the unarmed laws of a free Government--barriers

too feeble against the fury of a populace so fierce and licentious

as ours. They contend that no adequate provocation has been given

for so spreading a discontent, our affairs having been conducted

throughout with remarkable temper and consummate wisdom. The wicked

industry of some libellers, joined to the intrigues of a few

disappointed politicians, have, in their opinion, been able to

produce this unnatural ferment in the nation.

Nothing indeed can be more unnatural than the present convulsions of

this country, if the above account be a true one. I confess I shall

assent to it with great reluctance, and only on the compulsion of

the clearest and firmest proofs; because their account resolves

itself into this short but discouraging proposition, "That we have a

very good Ministry, but that we are a very bad people;" that we set

ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us; that with a malignant

insanity we oppose the measures, and ungratefully vilify the

persons, of those whose sole object is our own peace and prosperity.

If a few puny libellers, acting under a knot of factious

politicians, without virtue, parts, or character (such they are

constantly represented by these gentlemen), are sufficient to excite

this disturbance, very perverse must be the disposition of that

people amongst whom such a disturbance can be excited by such means.

It is besides no small aggravation of the public misfortune that the

disease, on this hypothesis, appears to be without remedy. If the

wealth of the nation be the cause of its turbulence, I imagine it is

not proposed to introduce poverty as a constable to keep the peace.

If our dominions abroad are the roots which feed all this rank

luxuriance of sedition, it is not intended to cut them off in order

to famish the fruit. If our liberty has enfeebled the executive

power, there is no design, I hope, to call in the aid of despotism

to fill up the deficiencies of law. Whatever may be intended, these

things are not yet professed. We seem therefore to be driven to

absolute despair, for we have no other materials to work upon but

those out of which God has been pleased to form the inhabitants of

this island. If these be radically and essentially vicious, all

that can be said is that those men are very unhappy to whose fortune

or duty it falls to administer the affairs of this untoward people.

I hear it indeed sometimes asserted that a steady perseverance in

the present measures, and a rigorous punishment of those who oppose

them, will in course of time infallibly put an end to these

disorders. But this, in my opinion, is said without much

observation of our present disposition, and without any knowledge at

all of the general nature of mankind. If the matter of which this

nation is composed be so very fermentable as these gentlemen

describe it, leaven never will be wanting to work it up, as long as

discontent, revenge, and ambition have existence in the world.

Particular punishments are the cure for accidental distempers in the

State; they inflame rather than allay those heats which arise from

the settled mismanagement of the Government, or from a natural ill

disposition in the people. It is of the utmost moment not to make

mistakes in the use of strong measures, and firmness is then only a

virtue when it accompanies the most perfect wisdom. In truth,

inconstancy is a sort of natural corrective of folly and ignorance.

I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the

wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in

other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes

between them and their rulers the presumption is at least upon a par

in favour of the people. Experience may perhaps justify me in going

further. When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may

well be affirmed and supported that there has been generally

something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of

Government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do

wrong, it is their error, and not their crime. But with the

governing part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may

act ill by design, as well as by mistake. "Les revolutions qui

arrivent dans les grands etats ne sont point un effect du hasard, ni

du caprice des peuples. Rien ne revolte les grands d'un royaume

comme un Gouvernoment foible et derange. Pour la populace, ce n'est

jamais par envie d'attaquer qu'elle se souleve, mais par impatience

de souffrir." These are the words of a great man, of a Minister of

State, and a zealous assertor of Monarchy. They are applied to the

system of favouritism which was adopted by Henry the Third of

France, and to the dreadful consequences it produced. What he says

of revolutions is equally true of all great disturbances. If this

presumption in favour of the subjects against the trustees of power

be not the more probable, I am sure it is the more comfortable

speculation, because it is more easy to change an Administration

than to reform a people.

Upon a supposition, therefore, that, in the opening of the cause,

the presumptions stand equally balanced between the parties, there

seems sufficient ground to entitle any person to a fair hearing who

attempts some other scheme besides that easy one which is

fashionable in some fashionable companies, to account for the

present discontents. It is not to be argued that we endure no

grievance, because our grievances are not of the same sort with

those under which we laboured formerly--not precisely those which we

bore from the Tudors, or vindicated on the Stuarts. A great change

has taken place in the affairs of this country. For in the silent

lapse of events as material alterations have been insensibly brought

about in the policy and character of governments and nations as

those which have been marked by the tumult of public revolutions.

It is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings

concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their

speculation upon the cause of it. I have constantly observed that

the generality of people are fifty years, at least, behindhand in

their politics. There are but very few who are capable of comparing

and digesting what passes before their eyes at different times and

occasions, so as to form the whole into a distinct system. But in

books everything is settled for them, without the exertion of any

considerable diligence or sagacity. For which reason men are wise

with but little reflection, and good with little self-denial, in the

business of all times except their own. We are very uncorrupt and

tolerably enlightened judges of the transactions of past ages; where

no passions deceive, and where the whole train of circumstances,

from the trifling cause to the tragical event, is set in an orderly

series before us. Few are the partisans of departed tyranny; and to

be a Whig on the business of a hundred years ago is very consistent

with every advantage of present servility. This retrospective

wisdom and historical patriotism are things of wonderful

convenience, and serve admirably to reconcile the old quarrel

between speculation and practice. Many a stern republican, after

gorging himself with a full feast of admiration of the Grecian

commonwealths and of our true Saxon constitution, and discharging

all the splendid bile of his virtuous indignation on King John and

King James, sits down perfectly satisfied to the coarsest work and

homeliest job of the day he lives in. I believe there was no

professed admirer of Henry the Eighth among the instruments of the

last King James; nor in the court of Henry the Eighth was there, I

dare say, to be found a single advocate for the favourites of

Richard the Second.

No complaisance to our Court, or to our age, can make me believe

nature to be so changed but that public liberty will be among us, as

among our ancestors, obnoxious to some person or other, and that

opportunities will be furnished for attempting, at least, some

alteration to the prejudice of our constitution. These attempts

will naturally vary in their mode, according to times and

circumstances. For ambition, though it has ever the same general

views, has not at all times the same means, nor the same particular

objects. A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is worn

to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion. Besides, there are

few statesmen so very clumsy and awkward in their business as to

fall into the identical snare which has proved fatal to their

predecessors. When an arbitrary imposition is attempted upon the

subject, undoubtedly it will not bear on its forehead the name of

SHIP-MONEY. There is no danger that an extension of the FOREST LAWS

should be the chosen mode of oppression in this age. And when we

hear any instance of ministerial rapacity to the prejudice of the

rights of private life, it will certainly not be the exaction of two

hundred pullets, from a woman of fashion, for leave to lie with her

own husband.

Every age has its own manners, and its politics dependent upon them;

and the same attempts will not be made against a constitution fully

formed and matured, that were used to destroy it in the cradle, or

to resist its growth during its infancy.

Against the being of Parliament, I am satisfied, no designs have

ever been entertained since the Revolution. Every one must perceive

that it is strongly the interest of the Court to have some second

cause interposed between the Ministers and the people. The

gentlemen of the House of Commons have an interest equally strong in

sustaining the part of that intermediate cause. However they may

hire out the usufruct of their voices, they never will part with the

FEE AND INHERITANCE. Accordingly those who have been of the most

known devotion to the will and pleasure of a Court, have at the same

time been most forward in asserting a high authority in the House of

Commons. When they knew who were to use that authority, and how it

was to be employed, they thought it never could be carried too far.

It must be always the wish of an unconstitutional statesman, that a

House of Commons who are entirely dependent upon him, should have

every right of the people entirely dependent upon their pleasure.

It was soon discovered that the forms of a free, and the ends of an

arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.

The power of the Crown, almost dead and rotten as Prerogative, has

grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium, under

the name of Influence. An influence which operated without noise

and without violence; an influence which converted the very

antagonist into the instrument of power; which contained in itself a

perpetual principle of growth and renovation; and which the

distresses and the prosperity of the country equally tended to

augment, was an admirable substitute for a prerogative that, being

only the offspring of antiquated prejudices, had moulded in its

original stamina irresistible principles of decay and dissolution.

The ignorance of the people is a bottom but for a temporary system;

the interest of active men in the State is a foundation perpetual

and infallible. However, some circumstances, arising, it must be

confessed, in a great degree from accident, prevented the effects of

this influence for a long time from breaking out in a manner capable

of exciting any serious apprehensions. Although Government was

strong and flourished exceedingly, the COURT had drawn far less

advantage than one would imagine from this great source of power.

At the Revolution, the Crown, deprived, for the ends of the

Revolution itself, of many prerogatives, was found too weak to

struggle against all the difficulties which pressed so new and

unsettled a Government. The Court was obliged therefore to delegate

a part of its powers to men of such interest as could support, and

of such fidelity as would adhere to, its establishment. Such men

were able to draw in a greater number to a concurrence in the common

defence. This connection, necessary at first, continued long after

convenient; and properly conducted might indeed, in all situations,

be a useful instrument of Government. At the same time, through the

intervention of men of popular weight and character, the people

possessed a security for their just proportion of importance in the

State. But as the title to the Crown grew stronger by long

possession, and by the constant increase of its influence, these

helps have of late seemed to certain persons no better than

incumbrances. The powerful managers for Government were not

sufficiently submissive to the pleasure of the possessors of

immediate and personal favour, sometimes from a confidence in their

own strength, natural and acquired; sometimes from a fear of

offending their friends, and weakening that lead in the country,

which gave them a consideration independent of the Court. Men acted

as if the Court could receive, as well as confer, an obligation.

The influence of Government, thus divided in appearance between the

Court and the leaders of parties, became in many cases an accession

rather to the popular than to the royal scale; and some part of that

influence, which would otherwise have been possessed as in a sort of

mortmain and unalienable domain, returned again to the great ocean

from whence it arose, and circulated among the people. This method

therefore of governing by men of great natural interest or great

acquired consideration, was viewed in a very invidious light by the

true lovers of absolute monarchy. It is the nature of despotism to

abhor power held by any means but its own momentary pleasure; and to

annihilate all intermediate situations between boundless strength on

its own part, and total debility on the part of the people.

To get rid of all this intermediate and independent importance, and

TO SECURE TO THE COURT THE UNLIMITED AND UNCONTROLLED USE OF ITS OWN

VAST INFLUENCE, UNDER THE SOLE DIRECTION OF ITS OWN PRIVATE FAVOUR,

has for some years past been the great object of policy. If this

were compassed, the influence of the Crown must of course produce

all the effects which the most sanguine partisans of the Court could

possibly desire. Government might then be carried on without any

concurrence on the part of the people; without any attention to the

dignity of the greater, or to the affections of the lower sorts. A

new project was therefore devised by a certain set of intriguing

men, totally different from the system of Administration which had

prevailed since the accession of the House of Brunswick. This

project, I have heard, was first conceived by some persons in the

Court of Frederick, Prince of Wales.

The earliest attempt in the execution of this design was to set up

for Minister a person, in rank indeed respectable, and very ample in

fortune; but who, to the moment of this vast and sudden elevation,

was little known or considered in the kingdom. To him the whole

nation was to yield an immediate and implicit submission. But

whether it was from want of firmness to bear up against the first

opposition, or that things were not yet fully ripened, or that this

method was not found the most eligible, that idea was soon

abandoned. The instrumental part of the project was a little

altered, to accommodate it to the time, and to bring things more

gradually and more surely to the one great end proposed.

The first part of the reformed plan was to draw A LINE WHICH SHOULD

SEPARATE THE COURT FROM THE MINISTRY. Hitherto these names had been

looked upon as synonymous; but, for the future, Court and

Administration were to be considered as things totally distinct. By

this operation, two systems of Administration were to be formed:

one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other

merely ostensible, to perform the official and executory duties of

Government. The latter were alone to be responsible; whilst the

real advisers, who enjoyed all the power, were effectually removed

from all the danger.

Secondly, A PARTY UNDER THESE LEADERS WAS TO BE FORMED IN FAVOUR OF

THE COURT AGAINST THE MINISTRY: this party was to have a large

share in the emoluments of Government, and to hold it totally

separate from, and independent of, ostensible Administration.

The third point, and that on which the success of the whole scheme

ultimately depended, was TO BRING PARLIAMENT TO AN ACQUIESCENCE IN

THIS PROJECT. Parliament was therefore to be taught by degrees a

total indifference to the persons, rank, influence, abilities,

connections, and character of the Ministers of the Crown. By means

of a discipline, on which I shall say more hereafter, that body was

to be habituated to the most opposite interests, and the most

discordant politics. All connections and dependencies among

subjects were to be entirely dissolved. As hitherto business had

gone through the hands of leaders of Whigs or Tories, men of talents

to conciliate the people, and to engage their confidence, now the

method was to be altered; and the lead was to be given to men of no

sort of consideration or credit in the country. This want of

natural importance was to be their very title to delegated power.

Members of parliament were to be hardened into an insensibility to

pride as well as to duty. Those high and haughty sentiments, which

are the great support of independence, were to be let down

gradually. Point of honour and precedence were no more to be

regarded in Parliamentary decorum than in a Turkish army. It was to

be avowed, as a constitutional maxim, that the King might appoint

one of his footmen, or one of your footmen, for Minister; and that

he ought to be, and that he would be, as well followed as the first

name for rank or wisdom in the nation. Thus Parliament was to look

on, as if perfectly unconcerned while a cabal of the closet and

back-stairs was substituted in the place of a national

Administration.

With such a degree of acquiescence, any measure of any Court might

well be deemed thoroughly secure. The capital objects, and by much

the most flattering characteristics of arbitrary power, would be

obtained. Everything would be drawn from its holdings in the

country to the personal favour and inclination of the Prince. This

favour would be the sole introduction to power, and the only tenure

by which it was to be held: so that no person looking towards

another, and all looking towards the Court, it was impossible but

that the motive which solely influenced every man's hopes must come

in time to govern every man's conduct; till at last the servility

became universal, in spite of the dead letter of any laws or

institutions whatsoever.

How it should happen that any man could be tempted to venture upon

such a project of Government, may at first view appear surprising.

But the fact is that opportunities very inviting to such an attempt

have offered; and the scheme itself was not destitute of some

arguments, not wholly unplausible, to recommend it. These

opportunities and these arguments, the use that has been made of

both, the plan for carrying this new scheme of government into

execution, and the effects which it has produced, are in my opinion

worthy of our serious consideration.

His Majesty came to the throne of these kingdoms with more

advantages than any of his predecessors since the Revolution.

Fourth in descent, and third in succession of his Royal family, even

the zealots of hereditary right, in him, saw something to flatter

their favourite prejudices; and to justify a transfer of their

attachments, without a change in their principles. The person and

cause of the Pretender were become contemptible; his title disowned

throughout Europe, his party disbanded in England. His Majesty came

indeed to the inheritance of a mighty war; but, victorious in every

part of the globe, peace was always in his power, not to negotiate,

but to dictate. No foreign habitudes or attachments withdrew him

from the cultivation of his power at home. His revenue for the

Civil establishment, fixed (as it was then thought) at a large, but

definite sum, was ample, without being invidious; his influence, by

additions from conquest, by an augmentation of debt, by an increase

of military and naval establishment, much strengthened and extended.

And coming to the throne in the prime and full vigour of youth, as

from affection there was a strong dislike, so from dread there

seemed to be a general averseness from giving anything like offence

to a monarch against whose resentment opposition could not look for

a refuge in any sort of reversionary hope.

These singular advantages inspired his Majesty only with a more

ardent desire to preserve unimpaired the spirit of that national

freedom to which he owed a situation so full of glory. But to

others it suggested sentiments of a very different nature. They

thought they now beheld an opportunity (by a certain sort of

statesman never long undiscovered or unemployed) of drawing to

themselves, by the aggrandisement of a Court faction, a degree of

power which they could never hope to derive from natural influence

or from honourable service; and which it was impossible they could

hold with the least security, whilst the system of Administration

rested upon its former bottom. In order to facilitate the execution

of their design, it was necessary to make many alterations in

political arrangement, and a signal change in the opinions, habits,

and connections of the greater part of those who at that time acted

in public.

In the first place, they proceeded gradually, but not slowly, to

destroy everything of strength which did not derive its principal

nourishment from the immediate pleasure of the Court. The greatest

weight of popular opinion and party connection were then with the

Duke of Newcastle and Mr. Pitt. Neither of these held his

importance by the NEW TENURE of the Court; they were not, therefore,

thought to be so proper as others for the services which were

required by that tenure. It happened very favourably for the new

system, that under a forced coalition there rankled an incurable

alienation and disgust between the parties which composed the

Administration. Mr. Pitt was first attacked. Not satisfied with

removing him from power, they endeavoured by various artifices to

ruin his character. The other party seemed rather pleased to get

rid of so oppressive a support; not perceiving that their own fall

was prepared by his, and involved in it. Many other reasons

prevented them from daring to look their true situation in the face.

To the great Whig families it was extremely disagreeable, and seemed

almost unnatural, to oppose the Administration of a Prince of the

House of Brunswick. Day after day they hesitated, and doubted, and

lingered, expecting that other counsels would take place; and were

slow to be persuaded that all which had been done by the Cabal was

the effect, not of humour, but of system. It was more strongly and

evidently the interest of the new Court faction to get rid of the

great Whig connections than to destroy Mr. Pitt. The power of that

gentleman was vast indeed, and merited; but it was in a great degree

personal, and therefore transient. Theirs was rooted in the

country. For, with a good deal less of popularity, they possessed a

far more natural and fixed influence. Long possession of

Government; vast property; obligations of favours given and

received; connection of office; ties of blood, of alliance, of

friendship (things at that time supposed of some force); the name of

Whig, dear to the majority of the people; the zeal early begun and

steadily continued to the Royal Family; all these together formed a

body of power in the nation, which was criminal and devoted. The

great ruling principle of the Cabal, and that which animated and

harmonised all their proceedings, how various soever they may have

been, was to signify to the world that the Court would proceed upon

its own proper forces only; and that the pretence of bringing any

other into its service was an affront to it, and not a support.

Therefore when the chiefs were removed, in order to go to the root,

the whole party was put under a proscription, so general and severe

as to take their hard-earned bread from the lowest officers, in a

manner which had never been known before, even in general

revolutions. But it was thought necessary effectually to destroy

all dependencies but one, and to show an example of the firmness and

rigour with which the new system was to be supported.

Thus for the time were pulled down, in the persons of the Whig

leaders and of Mr. Pitt (in spite of the services of the one at the

accession of the Royal Family, and the recent services of the other

in the war), the TWO ONLY SECURITIES FOR THE IMPORTANCE OF THE

PEOPLE: POWER ARISING FROM POPULARITY, AND POWER ARISING FROM

CONNECTION. Here and there indeed a few individuals were left

standing, who gave security for their total estrangement from the

odious principles of party connection and personal attachment; and

it must be confessed that most of them have religiously kept their

faith. Such a change could not, however, be made without a mighty

shock to Government.

To reconcile the minds of the people to all these movements,

principles correspondent to them had been preached up with great

zeal. Every one must remember that the Cabal set out with the most

astonishing prudery, both moral and political. Those who in a few

months after soused over head and ears into the deepest and dirtiest

pits of corruption, cried out violently against the indirect

practices in the electing and managing of Parliaments, which had

formerly prevailed. This marvellous abhorrence which the Court had

suddenly taken to all influence, was not only circulated in

conversation through the kingdom, but pompously announced to the

public, with many other extraordinary things, in a pamphlet which

had all the appearance of a manifesto preparatory to some

considerable enterprise. Throughout, it was a satire, though in

terms managed and decent enough, on the politics of the former

reign. It was indeed written with no small art and address.

In this piece appeared the first dawning of the new system; there

first appeared the idea (then only in speculation) of SEPARATING THE

COURT FROM THE ADMINISTRATION; of carrying everything from national

connection to personal regards; and of forming a regular party for

that purpose, under the name of KING'S MEN.

To recommend this system to the people, a perspective view of the

Court, gorgeously painted, and finely illuminated from within, was

exhibited to the gaping multitude. Party was to be totally done

away, with all its evil works. Corruption was to be cast down from

Court, as Ate was from heaven. Power was thenceforward to be the

chosen residence of public spirit; and no one was to be supposed

under any sinister influence, except those who had the misfortune to

be in disgrace at Court, which was to stand in lieu of all vices and

all corruptions. A scheme of perfection to be realised in a

Monarchy, far beyond the visionary Republic of Plato. The whole

scenery was exactly disposed to captivate those good souls, whose

credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty

politicians. Indeed, there was wherewithal to charm everybody,

except those few who are not much pleased with professions of

supernatural virtue, who know of what stuff such professions are

made, for what purposes they are designed, and in what they are sure

constantly to end. Many innocent gentlemen, who had been talking

prose all their lives without knowing anything of the matter, began

at last to open their eyes upon their own merits, and to attribute

their not having been Lords of the Treasury and Lords of Trade many

years before merely to the prevalence of party, and to the

Ministerial power, which had frustrated the good intentions of the

Court in favour of their abilities. Now was the time to unlock the

sealed fountain of Royal bounty, which had been infamously

monopolised and huckstered, and to let it flow at large upon the

whole people. The time was come to restore Royalty to its original

splendour. Mettre le Roy hors de page, became a sort of watchword.

And it was constantly in the mouths of all the runners of the Court,

that nothing could preserve the balance of the constitution from

being overturned by the rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but

to free the Sovereign effectually from that Ministerial tyranny

under which the Royal dignity had been oppressed in the person of

his Majesty's grandfather.

These were some of the many artifices used to reconcile the people

to the great change which was made in the persons who composed the

Ministry, and the still greater which was made and avowed in its

constitution. As to individuals, other methods were employed with

them, in order so thoroughly to disunite every party, and even every

family, that NO CONCERT, ORDER, OR EFFECT, MIGHT APPEAR IN ANY

FUTURE OPPOSITION. And in this manner an Administration without

connection with the people, or with one another, was first put in

possession of Government. What good consequences followed from it,

we have all seen; whether with regard to virtue, public or private;

to the ease and happiness of the Sovereign; or to the real strength

of Government. But as so much stress was then laid on the necessity

of this new project, it will not be amiss to take a view of the

effects of this Royal servitude and vile durance, which was so

deplored in the reign of the late Monarch, and was so carefully to

be avoided in the reign of his successor. The effects were these.

In times full of doubt and danger to his person and family, George

the Second maintained the dignity of his Crown connected with the

liberty of his people, not only unimpaired, but improved, for the

space of thirty-three years. He overcame a dangerous rebellion,

abetted by foreign force, and raging in the heart of his kingdoms;

and thereby destroyed the seeds of all future rebellion that could

arise upon the same principle. He carried the glory, the power, the

commerce of England, to a height unknown even to this renowned

nation in the times of its greatest prosperity: and he left his

succession resting on the true and only true foundation of all

national and all regal greatness; affection at home, reputation

abroad, trust in allies, terror in rival nations. The most ardent

lover of his country cannot wish for Great Britain a happier fate

than to continue as she was then left. A people emulous as we are

in affection to our present Sovereign, know not how to form a prayer

to Heaven for a greater blessing upon his virtues, or a higher state

of felicity and glory, than that he should live, and should reign,

and, when Providence ordains it, should die, exactly like his

illustrious predecessor.

A great Prince may be obliged (though such a thing cannot happen

very often) to sacrifice his private inclination to his public

interest. A wise Prince will not think that such a restraint

implies a condition of servility; and truly, if such was the

condition of the last reign, and the effects were also such as we

have described, we ought, no less for the sake of the Sovereign whom

we love, than for our own, to hear arguments convincing indeed,

before we depart from the maxims of that reign, or fly in the face

of this great body of strong and recent experience.

One of the principal topics which was then, and has been since, much

employed by that political school, is an effectual terror of the

growth of an aristocratic power, prejudicial to the rights of the

Crown, and the balance of the constitution. Any new powers

exercised in the House of Lords, or in the House of Commons, or by

the Crown, ought certainly to excite the vigilant and anxious

jealousy of a free people. Even a new and unprecedented course of

action in the whole Legislature, without great and evident reason,

may be a subject of just uneasiness. I will not affirm, that there

may not have lately appeared in the House of Lords a disposition to

some attempts derogatory to the legal rights of the subject. If any

such have really appeared, they have arisen, not from a power

properly aristocratic, but from the same influence which is charged

with having excited attempts of a similar nature in the House of

Commons; which House, if it should have been betrayed into an

unfortunate quarrel with its constituents, and involved in a charge

of the very same nature, could have neither power nor inclination to

repel such attempts in others. Those attempts in the House of Lords

can no more be called aristocratic proceedings, than the proceedings

with regard to the county of Middlesex in the House of Commons can

with any sense be called democratical.

It is true, that the Peers have a great influence in the kingdom,

and in every part of the public concerns. While they are men of

property, it is impossible to prevent it, except by such means as

must prevent all property from its natural operation: an event not

easily to be compassed, while property is power; nor by any means to

be wished, while the least notion exists of the method by which the

spirit of liberty acts, and of the means by which it is preserved.

If any particular Peers, by their uniform, upright, constitutional

conduct, by their public and their private virtues, have acquired an

influence in the country; the people on whose favour that influence

depends, and from whom it arose, will never be duped into an

opinion, that such greatness in a Peer is the despotism of an

aristocracy, when they know and feel it to be the effect and pledge

of their own importance.

I am no friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that

word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit to moot

cases on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should be free to

declare, that if it must perish, I would rather by far see it

resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere and insolent

domination. But, whatever my dislikes may be, my fears are not upon

that quarter. The question, on the influence of a Court, and of a

Peerage, is not, which of the two dangers is the most eligible, but

which is the most imminent. He is but a poor observer, who has not

seen, that the generality of Peers, far from supporting themselves

in a state of independent greatness, are but too apt to fall into an

oblivion of their proper dignity, and to run headlong into an abject

servitude. Would to God it were true, that the fault of our Peers

were too much spirit! It is worthy of some observation, that these

gentlemen, so jealous of aristocracy, make no complaints of the

power of those peers (neither few nor inconsiderable) who are always

in the train of a Court, and whose whole weight must be considered

as a portion of the settled influence of the Crown. This is all

safe and right; but if some Peers (I am very sorry they are not as

many as they ought to be) set themselves, in the great concern of

Peers and Commons, against a back-stairs influence and clandestine

government, then the alarm begins; then the constitution is in

danger of being forced into an aristocracy.

I rest a little the longer on this Court topic, because it was much

insisted upon at the time of the great change, and has been since

frequently revived by many of the agents of that party: for, whilst

they are terrifying the great and opulent with the horrors of mob-

government, they are by other managers attempting (though hitherto

with little success) to alarm the people with a phantom of tyranny

in the Nobles. All this is done upon their favourite principle of

disunion, of sowing jealousies amongst the different orders of the

State, and of disjointing the natural strength of the kingdom; that

it may be rendered incapable of resisting the sinister designs of

wicked men, who have engrossed the Royal power.

Thus much of the topics chosen by the courtiers to recommend their

system; it will be necessary to open a little more at large the

nature of that party which was formed for its support. Without

this, the whole would have been no better than a visionary

amusement, like the scheme of Harrington's political club, and not a

business in which the nation had a real concern. As a powerful

party, and a party constructed on a new principle, it is a very

inviting object of curiosity.

It must be remembered, that since the Revolution, until the period

we are speaking of, the influence of the Crown had been always

employed in supporting the Ministers of State, and in carrying on

the public business according to their opinions. But the party now

in question is formed upon a very different idea. It is to

intercept the favour, protection, and confidence of the Crown in the

passage to its Ministers; it is to come between them and their

importance in Parliament; it is to separate them from all their

natural and acquired dependencies; it is intended as the control,

not the support, of Administration. The machinery of this system is

perplexed in its movements, and false in its principle. It is

formed on a supposition that the King is something external to his

government; and that he may be honoured and aggrandised, even by its

debility and disgrace. The plan proceeds expressly on the idea of

enfeebling the regular executory power. It proceeds on the idea of

weakening the State in order to strengthen the Court. The scheme

depending entirely on distrust, on disconnection, on mutability by

principle, on systematic weakness in every particular member; it is

impossible that the total result should be substantial strength of

any kind.

As a foundation of their scheme, the Cabal have established a sort

of Rota in the Court. All sorts of parties, by this means, have

been brought into Administration, from whence few have had the good

fortune to escape without disgrace; none at all without considerable

losses. In the beginning of each arrangement no professions of

confidence and support are wanting, to induce the leading men to

engage. But while the Ministers of the day appear in all the pomp

and pride of power, while they have all their canvas spread out to

the wind, and every sail filled with the fair and prosperous gale of

Royal favour, in a short time they find, they know not how, a

current, which sets directly against them; which prevents all

progress, and even drives them backwards. They grow ashamed and

mortified in a situation, which, by its vicinity to power, only

serves to remind them the more strongly of their insignificance.

They are obliged either to execute the orders of their inferiors, or

to see themselves opposed by the natural instruments of their

office. With the loss of their dignity, they lose their temper. In

their turn they grow troublesome to that Cabal, which, whether it

supports or opposes, equally disgraces and equally betrays them. It

is soon found necessary to get rid of the heads of Administration;

but it is of the heads only. As there always are many rotten

members belonging to the best connections, it is not hard to

persuade several to continue in office without their leaders. By

this means the party goes out much thinner than it came in; and is

only reduced in strength by its temporary possession of power.

Besides, if by accident, or in course of changes, that power should

be recovered, the Junto have thrown up a retrenchment of these

carcases, which may serve to cover themselves in a day of danger.

They conclude, not unwisely, that such rotten members will become

the first objects of disgust and resentment to their ancient

connections.

They contrive to form in the outward Administration two parties at

the least; which, whilst they are tearing one another to pieces, are

both competitors for the favour and protection of the Cabal; and, by

their emulation, contribute to throw everything more and more into

the hands of the interior managers.

A Minister of State will sometimes keep himself totally estranged

from all his colleagues; will differ from them in their counsels,

will privately traverse, and publicly oppose, their measures. He

will, however, continue in his employment. Instead of suffering any

mark of displeasure, he will be distinguished by an unbounded

profusion of Court rewards and caresses; because he does what is

expected, and all that is expected, from men in office. He helps to

keep some form of Administration in being, and keeps it at the same

time as weak and divided as possible.

However, we must take care not to be mistaken, or to imagine that

such persons have any weight in their opposition. When, by them,

Administration is convinced of its insignificancy, they are soon to

be convinced of their own. They never are suffered to succeed in

their opposition. They and the world are to be satisfied, that

neither office, nor authority, nor property, nor ability, eloquence,

counsel, skill, or union, are of the least importance; but that the

mere influence of the Court, naked of all support, and destitute of

all management, is abundantly sufficient for all its own purposes.

When any adverse connection is to be destroyed, the Cabal seldom

appear in the work themselves. They find out some person of whom

the party entertains a high opinion. Such a person they endeavour

to delude with various pretences. They teach him first to distrust,

and then to quarrel with his friends; among whom, by the same arts,

they excite a similar diffidence of him; so that in this mutual fear

and distrust, he may suffer himself to be employed as the instrument

in the change which is brought about. Afterwards they are sure to

destroy him in his turn; by setting up in his place some person in

whom he had himself reposed the greatest confidence, and who serves

to carry on a considerable part of his adherents.

When such a person has broke in this manner with his connections, he

is soon compelled to commit some flagrant act of iniquitous personal

hostility against some of them (such as an attempt to strip a

particular friend of his family estate), by which the Cabal hope to

render the parties utterly irreconcilable. In truth, they have so

contrived matters, that people have a greater hatred to the

subordinate instruments than to the principal movers.

As in destroying their enemies they make use of instruments not

immediately belonging to their corps, so in advancing their own

friends they pursue exactly the same method. To promote any of them

to considerable rank or emolument, they commonly take care that the

recommendation shall pass through the hands of the ostensible

Ministry: such a recommendation might, however, appear to the world

as some proof of the credit of Ministers, and some means of

increasing their strength. To prevent this, the persons so advanced

are directed in all companies, industriously to declare, that they

are under no obligations whatsoever to Administration; that they

have received their office from another quarter; that they are

totally free and independent.

When the Faction has any job of lucre to obtain, or of vengeance to

perpetrate, their way is, to select, for the execution, those very

persons to whose habits, friendships, principles, and declarations,

such proceedings are publicly known to be the most adverse; at once

to render the instruments the more odious, and therefore the more

dependent, and to prevent the people from ever reposing a confidence

in any appearance of private friendship, or public principle.

If the Administration seem now and then, from remissness, or from

fear of making themselves disagreeable, to suffer any popular

excesses to go unpunished, the Cabal immediately sets up some

creature of theirs to raise a clamour against the Ministers, as

having shamefully betrayed the dignity of Government. Then they

compel the Ministry to become active in conferring rewards and

honours on the persons who have been the instruments of their

disgrace; and, after having first vilified them with the higher

orders for suffering the laws to sleep over the licentiousness of

the populace, they drive them (in order to make amends for their

former inactivity) to some act of atrocious violence, which renders

them completely abhorred by the people. They who remember the riots

which attended the Middlesex Election; the opening of the present

Parliament; and the transactions relative to Saint George's Fields,

will not be at a loss for an application of these remarks.

That this body may be enabled to compass all the ends of its

institution, its members are scarcely ever to aim at the high and

responsible offices of the State. They are distributed with art and

judgment through all the secondary, but efficient, departments of

office, and through the households of all the branches of the Royal

Family: so as on one hand to occupy all the avenues to the Throne;

and on the other to forward or frustrate the execution of any

measure, according to their own interests. For with the credit and

support which they are known to have, though for the greater part in

places which are only a genteel excuse for salary, they possess all

the influence of the highest posts; and they dictate publicly in

almost everything, even with a parade of superiority. Whenever they

dissent (as it often happens) from their nominal leaders, the

trained part of the Senate, instinctively in the secret, is sure to

follow them; provided the leaders, sensible of their situation, do

not of themselves recede in time from their most declared opinions.

This latter is generally the case. It will not be conceivable to

any one who has not seen it, what pleasure is taken by the Cabal in

rendering these heads of office thoroughly contemptible and

ridiculous. And when they are become so, they have then the best

chance, for being well supported.

The members of the Court faction are fully indemnified for not

holding places on the slippery heights of the kingdom, not only by

the lead in all affairs, but also by the perfect security in which

they enjoy less conspicuous, but very advantageous, situations.

Their places are, in express legal tenure, or in effect, all of them

for life. Whilst the first and most respectable persons in the

kingdom are tossed about like tennis balls, the sport of a blind and

insolent caprice, no Minister dares even to cast an oblique glance

at the lowest of their body. If an attempt be made upon one of this

corps, immediately he flies to sanctuary, and pretends to the most

inviolable of all promises. No conveniency of public arrangement is

available to remove any one of them from the specific situation he

holds; and the slightest attempt upon one of them, by the most

powerful Minister, is a certain preliminary to his own destruction.

Conscious of their independence, they bear themselves with a lofty

air to the exterior Ministers. Like Janissaries, they derive a kind

of freedom from the very condition of their servitude. They may act

just as they please; provided they are true to the great ruling

principle of their institution. It is, therefore, not at all

wonderful, that people should be so desirous of adding themselves to

that body, in which they may possess and reconcile satisfactions the

most alluring, and seemingly the most contradictory; enjoying at

once all the spirited pleasure of independence, and all the gross

lucre and fat emoluments of servitude.

Here is a sketch, though a slight one, of the constitution, laws,

and policy, of this new Court corporation. The name by which they

choose to distinguish themselves, is that of KING'S MEN, or the

KING'S FRIENDS, by an invidious exclusion of the rest of his

Majesty's most loyal and affectionate subjects. The whole system,

comprehending the exterior and interior Administrations, is commonly

called, in the technical language of the Court, DOUBLE CABINET; in

French or English, as you choose to pronounce it.

Whether all this be a vision of a distracted brain, or the invention

of a malicious heart, or a real faction in the country, must be

judged by the appearances which things have worn for eight years

past. Thus far I am certain, that there is not a single public man,

in or out of office, who has not, at some time or other, borne

testimony to the truth of what I have now related. In particular,

no persons have been more strong in their assertions, and louder and

more indecent in their complaints, than those who compose all the

exterior part of the present Administration; in whose time that

faction has arrived at such a height of power, and of boldness in

the use of it, as may, in the end, perhaps bring about its total

destruction.

It is true, that about four years ago, during the administration of

the Marquis of Rockingham, an attempt was made to carry on

Government without their concurrence. However, this was only a

transient cloud; they were hid but for a moment; and their

constellation blazed out with greater brightness, and a far more

vigorous influence, some time after it was blown over. An attempt

was at that time made (but without any idea of proscription) to

break their corps, to discountenance their doctrines, to revive

connections of a different kind, to restore the principles and

policy of the Whigs, to reanimate the cause of Liberty by

Ministerial countenance; and then for the first time were men seen

attached in office to every principle they had maintained in

opposition. No one will doubt, that such men were abhorred and

violently opposed by the Court faction, and that such a system could

have but a short duration.

It may appear somewhat affected, that in so much discourse upon this

extraordinary party, I should say so little of the Earl of Bute, who

is the supposed head of it. But this was neither owing to

affectation nor inadvertence. I have carefully avoided the

introduction of personal reflections of any kind. Much the greater

part of the topics which have been used to blacken this nobleman are

either unjust or frivolous. At best, they have a tendency to give

the resentment of this bitter calamity a wrong direction, and to

turn a public grievance into a mean personal, or a dangerous

national, quarrel. Where there is a regular scheme of operations

carried on, it is the system, and not any individual person who acts

in it, that is truly dangerous. This system has not risen solely

from the ambition of Lord Bute, but from the circumstances which

favoured it, and from an indifference to the constitution which had

been for some time growing among our gentry. We should have been

tried with it, if the Earl of Bute had never existed; and it will

want neither a contriving head nor active members, when the Earl of

Bute exists no longer. It is not, therefore, to rail at Lord Bute,

but firmly to embody against this Court party and its practices,

which can afford us any prospect of relief in our present condition.

Another motive induces me to put the personal consideration of Lord

Bute wholly out of the question. He communicates very little in a

direct manner with the greater part of our men of business. This

has never been his custom. It is enough for him that he surrounds

them with his creatures. Several imagine, therefore, that they have

a very good excuse for doing all the work of this faction, when they

have no personal connection with Lord Bute. But whoever becomes a

party to an Administration, composed of insulated individuals,

without faith plighted, tie, or common principle; an Administration

constitutionally impotent, because supported by no party in the

nation; he who contributes to destroy the connections of men and

their trust in one another, or in any sort to throw the dependence

of public counsels upon private will and favour, possibly may have

nothing to do with the Earl of Bute. It matters little whether he

be the friend or the enemy of that particular person. But let him

be who or what he will, he abets a faction that is driving hard to

the ruin of his country. He is sapping the foundation of its

liberty, disturbing the sources of its domestic tranquillity,

weakening its government over its dependencies, degrading it from

all its importance in the system of Europe.

It is this unnatural infusion of a SYSTEM OF FAVOURITISM into a

Government which in a great part of its constitution is popular,

that has raised the present ferment in the nation. The people,

without entering deeply into its principles, could plainly perceive

its effects, in much violence, in a great spirit of innovation, and

a general disorder in all the functions of Government. I keep my

eye solely on this system; if I speak of those measures which have

arisen from it, it will be so far only as they illustrate the

general scheme. This is the fountain of all those bitter waters of

which, through a hundred different conducts, we have drunk until we

are ready to burst. The discretionary power of the Crown in the

formation of Ministry, abused by bad or weak men, has given rise to

a system, which, without directly violating the letter of any law,

operates against the spirit of the whole constitution.

A plan of Favouritism for our executory Government is essentially at

variance with the plan of our Legislature. One great end

undoubtedly of a mixed Government like ours, composed of Monarchy,

and of controls, on the part of the higher people and the lower, is

that the Prince shall not be able to violate the laws. This is

useful indeed and fundamental. But this, even at first view, is no

more than a negative advantage; an armour merely defensive. It is

therefore next in order, and equal in importance, THAT THE

DISCRETIONARY POWERS WHICH ARE NECESSARILY VESTED IN THE MONARCH,

WHETHER FOR THE EXECUTION OF THE LAWS, OR FOR THE NOMINATION TO

MAGISTRACY AND OFFICE, OR FOR CONDUCTING THE AFFAIRS OF PEACE AND

WAR, OR FOR ORDERING THE REVENUE, SHOULD ALL BE EXERCISED UPON

PUBLIC PRINCIPLES AND NATIONAL GROUNDS, AND NOT ON THE LIKINGS OR

PREJUDICES, THE INTRIGUES OR POLICIES OF A COURT. This, I said, is

equal in importance to the securing a Government according to law.

The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute Government how you

please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the

exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and

uprightness of Ministers of State. Even all the use and potency of

the laws depends upon them. Without them, your Commonwealth is no

better than a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective

constitution. It is possible, that through negligence, or

ignorance, or design artfully conducted, Ministers may suffer one

part of Government to languish, another to be perverted from its

purposes: and every valuable interest of the country to fall into

ruin and decay, without possibility of fixing any single act on

which a criminal prosecution can be justly grounded. The due

arrangement of men in the active part of the state, far from being

foreign to the purposes of a wise Government, ought to be among its

very first and dearest objects. When, therefore, the abettors of

new system tell us, that between them and their opposers there is

nothing but a struggle for power, and that therefore we are no-ways

concerned in it; we must tell those who have the impudence to insult

us in this manner, that, of all things, we ought to be the most

concerned, who and what sort of men they are, that hold the trust of

everything that is dear to us. Nothing can render this a point of

indifference to the nation, but what must either render us totally

desperate, or soothe us into the security of idiots. We must soften

into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men

virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to

believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt. Men are in

public life as in private--some good, some evil. The elevation of

the one, and the depression of the other, are the first objects of

all true policy. But that form of Government, which, neither in its

direct institutions, nor in their immediate tendency, has contrived

to throw its affairs into the most trustworthy hands, but has left

its whole executory system to be disposed of agreeably to the

uncontrolled pleasure of any one man, however excellent or virtuous,

is a plan of polity defective not only in that member, but

consequentially erroneous in every part of it.

In arbitrary Governments, the constitution of the Ministry follows

the constitution of the Legislature. Both the Law and the

Magistrate are the creatures of Will. It must be so. Nothing,

indeed, will appear more certain, on any tolerable consideration of

this matter, than that EVERY SORT OF GOVERNMENT OUGHT TO HAVE ITS

ADMINISTRATION CORRESPONDENT TO ITS LEGISLATURE. If it should be

otherwise, things must fall into a hideous disorder. The people of

a free Commonwealth, who have taken such care that their laws should

be the result of general consent, cannot be so senseless as to

suffer their executory system to be composed of persons on whom they

have no dependence, and whom no proofs of the public love and

confidence have recommended to those powers, upon the use of which

the very being of the State depends.

The popular election of magistrates, and popular disposition of

rewards and honours, is one of the first advantages of a free State.

Without it, or something equivalent to it, perhaps the people cannot

long enjoy the substance of freedom; certainly none of the vivifying

energy of good Government. The frame of our Commonwealth did not

admit of such an actual election: but it provided as well, and

(while the spirit of the constitution is preserved) better, for all

the effects of it, than by the method of suffrage in any democratic

State whatsoever. It had always, until of late, been held the first

duty of Parliament TO REFUSE TO SUPPORT GOVERNMENT, UNTIL POWER WAS

IN THE HANDS OF PERSONS WHO WERE ACCEPTABLE TO THE PEOPLE, OR WHILE

FACTIONS PREDOMINATED IN THE COURT IN WHICH THE NATION HAD NO

CONFIDENCE. Thus all the good effects of popular election were

supposed to be secured to us, without the mischiefs attending on

perpetual intrigue, and a distinct canvass for every particular

office throughout the body of the people. This was the most noble

and refined part of our constitution. The people, by their

representatives and grandees, were intrusted with a deliberative

power in making laws; the King with the control of his negative.

The King was intrusted with the deliberative choice and the election

to office; the people had the negative in a Parliamentary refusal to

support. Formerly this power of control was what kept Ministers in

awe of Parliaments, and Parliaments in reverence with the people.

If the use of this power of control on the system and persons of

Administration is gone, everything is lost, Parliament and all. We

may assure ourselves, that if Parliament will tamely see evil men

take possession of all the strongholds of their country, and allow

them time and means to fortify themselves, under a pretence of

giving them a fair trial, and upon a hope of discovering, whether

they will not be reformed by power, and whether their measures will

not be better than their morals; such a Parliament will give

countenance to their measures also, whatever that Parliament may

pretend, and whatever those measures may be.

Every good political institution must have a preventive operation as

well as a remedial. It ought to have a natural tendency to exclude

bad men from Government, and not to trust for the safety of the

State to subsequent punishment alone--punishment which has ever been

tardy and uncertain, and which, when power is suffered in bad hands,

may chance to fall rather on the injured than the criminal.

Before men are put forward into the great trusts of the State, they

ought by their conduct to have obtained such a degree of estimation

in their country as may be some sort of pledge and security to the

public that they will not abuse those trusts. It is no mean

security for a proper use of power, that a man has shown by the

general tenor of his actions, that the affection, the good opinion,

the confidence of his fellow-citizens have been among the principal

objects of his life, and that he has owed none of the gradations of

his power or fortune to a settled contempt or occasional forfeiture

of their esteem.

That man who, before he comes into power, has no friends, or who,

coming into power, is obliged to desert his friends, or who, losing

it, has no friends to sympathise with him, he who has no sway among

any part of the landed or commercial interest, but whose whole

importance has begun with his office, and is sure to end with it, is

a person who ought never to be suffered by a controlling Parliament,

to continue in any of those situations which confer the lead and

direction of all our public affairs; because such a man HAS NO

CONNECTION WITH THE SENTIMENTS AND OPINIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

Those knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly without

any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at

the higher rate, and are therefore universally odious, ought never

to be suffered to domineer in the State; because they have NO

CONNECTION WITH THE SENTIMENTS AND OPINIONS OF THE PEOPLE.

These are considerations which, in my opinion, enforce the necessity

of having some better reason, in a free country and a free

Parliament, for supporting the Ministers of the Crown, than that

short one, THAT THE KING HAS THOUGHT PROPER TO APPOINT THEM. There

is something very courtly in this. But it is a principle pregnant

with all sorts of mischief, in a constitution like ours, to turn the

views of active men from the country to the Court. Whatever be the

road to power, that is the road which will be trod. If the opinion

of the country be of no use as a means of power or consideration,

the qualities which usually procure that opinion will be no longer

cultivated. And whether it will be right, in a State so popular in

its constitution as ours, to leave ambition without popular motives,

and to trust all to the operation of pure virtue in the minds of

Kings and Ministers, and public men, must be submitted to the

judgment and good sense of the people of England.

Cunning men are here apt to break in, and, without directly

controverting the principle, to raise objections from the difficulty

under which the Sovereign labours to distinguish the genuine voice

and sentiments of his people from the clamour of a faction, by which

it is so easily counterfeited. The nation, they say, is generally

divided into parties, with views and passions utterly

irreconcilable. If the King should put his affairs into the hands

of any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select

particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts

them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon

run into a body of opposition, which, being a collection of many

discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent

enough. Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as

if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much

the better part, will seem for awhile, as it were, annihilated by

the quiet in which their virtue and moderation incline them to enjoy

the blessings of Government. Besides that, the opinion of the mere

vulgar is a miserable rule even with regard to themselves, on

account of their violence and instability. So that if you were to

gratify them in their humour to-day, that very gratification would

be a ground of their dissatisfaction on the next. Now as all these

rules of public opinion are to be collected with great difficulty,

and to be applied with equal uncertainty as to the effect, what

better can a King of England do than to employ such men as he finds

to have views and inclinations most conformable to his own, who are

least infected with pride and self-will, and who are least moved by

such popular humours as are perpetually traversing his designs, and

disturbing his service; trusting that when he means no ill to his

people he will be supported in his appointments, whether he chooses

to keep or to change, as his private judgment or his pleasure leads

him? He will find a sure resource in the real weight and influence

of the Crown, when it is not suffered to become an instrument in the

hands of a faction.

I will not pretend to say that there is nothing at all in this mode

of reasoning, because I will not assert that there is no difficulty

in the art of government. Undoubtedly the very best Administration

must encounter a great deal of opposition, and the very worst will

find more support than it deserves. Sufficient appearances will

never be wanting to those who have a mind to deceive themselves. It

is a fallacy in constant use with those who would level all things,

and confound right with wrong, to insist upon the inconveniences

which are attached to every choice, without taking into

consideration the different weight and consequence of those

inconveniences. The question is not concerning absolute discontent

or perfect satisfaction in Government, neither of which can be pure

and unmixed at any time or upon any system. The controversy is

about that degree of good-humour in the people, which may possibly

be attained, and ought certainly to be looked for. While some

politicians may be waiting to know whether the sense of every

individual be against them, accurately distinguishing the vulgar

from the better sort, drawing lines between the enterprises of a

faction and the efforts of a people, they may chance to see the

Government, which they are so nicely weighing, and dividing, and

distinguishing, tumble to the ground in the midst of their wise

deliberation. Prudent men, when so great an object as the security

of Government, or even its peace, is at stake, will not run the risk

of a decision which may be fatal to it. They who can read the

political sky will seen a hurricane in a cloud no bigger than a hand

at the very edge of the horizon, and will run into the first

harbour. No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom.

They are a matter incapable of exact definition. But, though no man

can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light

and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable. Nor will

it be impossible for a Prince to find out such a mode of government,

and such persons to administer it, as will give a great degree of

content to his people, without any curious and anxious research for

that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which, while he is

seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are

in his power without any research at all.

It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a Prince to aim

at giving tranquillity to his Government. If those who advise him

may have an interest in disorder and confusion. If the opinion of

the people is against them, they will naturally wish that it should

have no prevalence. Here it is that the people must on their part

show themselves sensible of their own value. Their whole

importance, in the first instance, and afterwards their whole

freedom, is at stake. Their freedom cannot long survive their

importance. Here it is that the natural strength of the kingdom,

the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants

and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to

rescue their Prince, themselves, and their posterity.

We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in the great

crisis of this contention, and the part which men take, one way or

other, will serve to discriminate their characters and their

principles. Until the matter is decided, the country will remain in

its present confusion. For while a system of Administration is

attempted, entirely repugnant to the genius of the people, and not

conformable to the plan of their Government, everything must

necessarily be disordered for a time, until this system destroys the

constitution, or the constitution gets the better of this system.

There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in this

political distemper beyond any that I have heard or read of. In

former lines the projectors of arbitrary Government attacked only

the liberties of their country, a design surely mischievous enough

to have satisfied a mind of the most unruly ambition. But a system

unfavourable to freedom may be so formed as considerably to exalt

the grandeur of the State, and men may find in the pride and

splendour of that prosperity some sort of consolation for the loss

of their solid privileges. Indeed, the increase of the power of the

State has often been urged by artful men, as a pretext for some

abridgment of the public liberty. But the scheme of the junto under

consideration not only strikes a palsy into every nerve of our free

constitution, but in the same degree benumbs and stupefies the whole

executive power, rendering Government in all its grand operations

languid, uncertain, ineffective, making Ministers fearful of

attempting, and incapable of executing, any useful plan of domestic

arrangement, or of foreign politics. It tends to produce neither

the security of a free Government, nor the energy of a Monarchy that

is absolute. Accordingly, the Crown has dwindled away in proportion

to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the Court.

The interior Ministry are sensible that war is a situation which

sets in its full light the value of the hearts of a people, and they

well know that the beginning of the importance of the people must be

the end of theirs. For this reason they discover upon all occasions

the utmost fear of everything which by possibility may lead to such

an event. I do not mean that they manifest any of that pious fear

which is backward to commit the safety of the country to the dubious

experiment of war. Such a fear, being the tender sensation of

virtue, excited, as it is regulated, by reason, frequently shows

itself in a seasonable boldness, which keeps danger at a distance,

by seeming to despise it. Their fear betrays to the first glance of

the eye its true cause and its real object. Foreign powers,

confident in the knowledge of their character, have not scrupled to

violate the most solemn treaties; and, in defiance of them, to make

conquests in the midst of a general peace, and in the heart of

Europe. Such was the conquest of Corsica, by the professed enemies

of the freedom of mankind, in defiance of those who were formerly

its professed defenders. We have had just claims upon the same

powers--rights which ought to have been sacred to them as well as to

us, as they had their origin in our lenity and generosity towards

France and Spain in the day of their great humiliation. Such I call

the ransom of Manilla, and the demand on France for the East India

prisoners. But these powers put a just confidence in their resource

of the double Cabinet. These demands (one of them, at least) are

hastening fast towards an acquittal by prescription. Oblivion

begins to spread her cobwebs over all our spirited remonstrances.

Some of the most valuable branches of our trade are also on the

point of perishing from the same cause. I do not mean those

branches which bear without the hand of the vine-dresser; I mean

those which the policy of treaties had formerly secured to us; I

mean to mark and distinguish the trade of Portugal, the loss of

which, and the power of the Cabal, have one and the same era.

If, by any chance, the Ministers who stand before the curtain

possess or affect any spirit, it makes little or no impression.

Foreign Courts and Ministers, who were among the first to discover

and to profit by this invention of the DOUBLE CABINET, attended very

little to their remonstrances. They know that those shadows of

Ministers have nothing to do in the ultimate disposal of things.

Jealousies and animosities are sedulously nourished in the outward

Administration, and have been even considered as a causa sine qua

non in its constitution: thence foreign Courts have a certainty,

that nothing can be done by common counsel in this nation. If one

of those Ministers officially takes up a business with spirit, it

serves only the better to signalise the meanness of the rest, and

the discord of them all. His colleagues in office are in haste to

shake him off, and to disclaim the whole of his proceedings. Of

this nature was that astonishing transaction, in which Lord

Rochford, our Ambassador at Paris, remonstrated against the attempt

upon Corsica, in consequence of a direct authority from Lord

Shelburne. This remonstrance the French Minister treated with the

contempt that was natural; as he was assured, from the Ambassador of

his Court to ours, that these orders of Lord Shelburne were not

supported by the rest of the (I had like to have said British)

Administration. Lord Rochford, a man of spirit, could not endure

this situation. The consequences were, however, curious. He

returns from Paris, and comes home full of anger. Lord Shelburne,

who gave the orders, is obliged to give up the seals. Lord

Rochford, who obeyed these orders, receives them. He goes, however,

into another department of the same office, that he might not be

obliged officially to acquiesce in one situation, under what he had

officially remonstrated against in another. At Paris, the Duke of

Choiseul considered this office arrangement as a compliment to him:

here it was spoke of as an attention to the delicacy of Lord

Rochford. But whether the compliment was to one or both, to this

nation it was the same. By this transaction the condition of our

Court lay exposed in all its nakedness. Our office correspondence

has lost all pretence to authenticity; British policy is brought

into derision in those nations, that a while ago trembled at the

power of our arms, whilst they looked up with confidence to the

equity, firmness, and candour, which shone in all our negotiations.

I represent this matter exactly in the light in which it has been

universally received.

Such has been the aspect of our foreign politics under the influence

of a DOUBLE CABINET. With such an arrangement at Court, it is

impossible it should have been otherwise. Nor is it possible that

this scheme should have a better effect upon the government of our

dependencies, the first, the dearest, and most delicate objects of

the interior policy of this empire. The Colonies know that

Administration is separated from the Court, divided within itself,

and detested by the nation. The double Cabinet has, in both the

parts of it, shown the most malignant dispositions towards them,

without being able to do them the smallest mischief.

They are convinced, by sufficient experience, that no plan, either

of lenity or rigour, can be pursued with uniformity and

perseverance. Therefore they turn their eyes entirely from Great

Britain, where they have neither dependence on friendship nor

apprehension from enmity. They look to themselves, and their own

arrangements. They grow every day into alienation from this

country; and whilst they are becoming disconnected with our

Government, we have not the consolation to find that they are even

friendly in their new independence. Nothing can equal the futility,

the weakness, the rashness, the timidity, the perpetual

contradiction, in the management of our affairs in that part of the

world. A volume might be written on this melancholy subject; but it

were better to leave it entirely to the reflections of the reader

himself, than not to treat it in the extent it deserves.

In what manner our domestic economy is affected by this system, it

is needless to explain. It is the perpetual subject of their own

complaints.

The Court party resolve the whole into faction. Having said

something before upon this subject, I shall only observe here, that,

when they give this account of the prevalence of faction, they

present no very favourable aspect of the confidence of the people in

their own Government. They may be assured, that however they amuse

themselves with a variety of projects for substituting something

else in the place of that great and only foundation of Government,

the confidence of the people, every attempt will but make their

condition worse. When men imagine that their food is only a cover

for poison, and when they neither love nor trust the hand that

serves it, it is not the name of the roast beef of Old England that

will persuade them to sit down to the table that is spread for them.

When the people conceive that laws, and tribunals, and even popular

assemblies, are perverted from the ends of their institution, they

find in those names of degenerated establishments only new motives

to discontent. Those bodies, which, when full of life and beauty,

lay in their arms and were their joy and comfort; when dead and

putrid, become but the more loathsome from remembrance of former

endearments. A sullen gloom, and furious disorder, prevail by fits:

the nation loses its relish for peace and prosperity, as it did in

that season of fulness which opened our troubles in the time of

Charles the First. A species of men to whom a state of order would

become a sentence of obscurity, are nourished into a dangerous

magnitude by the heat of intestine disturbances; and it is no wonder

that, by a sort of sinister piety, they cherish, in their turn, the

disorders which are the parents of all their consequence.

Superficial observers consider such persons as the cause of the

public uneasiness, when, in truth, they are nothing more than the

effect of it. Good men look upon this distracted scene with sorrow

and indignation. Their hands are tied behind them. They are

despoiled of all the power which might enable them to reconcile the

strength of Government with the rights of the people. They stand in

a most distressing alternative. But in the election among evils

they hope better things from temporary confusion, than from

established servitude. In the mean time, the voice of law is not to

be heard. Fierce licentiousness begets violent restraints. The

military arm is the sole reliance; and then, call your constitution

what you please, it is the sword that governs. The civil power,

like every other that calls in the aid of an ally stronger than

itself, perishes by the assistance it receives. But the contrivers

of this scheme of Government will not trust solely to the military

power, because they are cunning men. Their restless and crooked

spirit drives them to rake in the dirt of every kind of expedient.

Unable to rule the multitude, they endeavour to raise divisions

amongst them. One mob is hired to destroy another; a procedure

which at once encourages the boldness of the populace, and justly

increases their discontent. Men become pensioners of state on

account of their abilities in the array of riot, and the discipline

of confusion. Government is put under the disgraceful necessity of

protecting from the severity of the laws that very licentiousness,

which the laws had been before violated to repress. Everything

partakes of the original disorder. Anarchy predominates without

freedom, and servitude without submission or subordination. These

are the consequences inevitable to our public peace, from the scheme

of rendering the executory Government at once odious and feeble; of

freeing Administration from the constitutional and salutary control

of Parliament, and inventing for it a new control, unknown to the

constitution, an INTERIOR Cabinet; which brings the whole body of

Government into confusion and contempt.

After having stated, as shortly as I am able, the effects of this

system on our foreign affairs, on the policy of our Government with

regard to our dependencies, and on the interior economy of the

Commonwealth; there remains only, in this part of my design, to say

something of the grand principle which first recommended this system

at Court. The pretence was to prevent the King from being enslaved

by a faction, and made a prisoner in his closet. This scheme might

have been expected to answer at least its own end, and to indemnify

the King, in his personal capacity, for all the confusion into which

it has thrown his Government. But has it in reality answered this

purpose? I am sure, if it had, every affectionate subject would

have one motive for enduring with patience all the evils which

attend it.

In order to come at the truth in this matter, it may not be amiss to

consider it somewhat in detail. I speak here of the King, and not

of the Crown; the interests of which we have already touched.

Independent of that greatness which a King possesses merely by being

a representative of the national dignity, the things in which he may

have an individual interest seem to be these: wealth accumulated;

wealth spent in magnificence, pleasure, or beneficence; personal

respect and attention; and above all, private ease and repose of

mind. These compose the inventory of prosperous circumstances,

whether they regard a Prince or a subject; their enjoyments

differing only in the scale upon which they are formed.

Suppose then we were to ask, whether the King has been richer than

his predecessors in accumulated wealth, since the establishment of

the plan of Favouritism? I believe it will be found that the

picture of royal indigence which our Court has presented until this

year, has been truly humiliating. Nor has it been relieved from

this unseemly distress, but by means which have hazarded the

affection of the people, and shaken their confidence in Parliament.

If the public treasures had been exhausted in magnificence and

splendour, this distress would have been accounted for, and in some

measure justified. Nothing would be more unworthy of this nation,

than with a mean and mechanical rule, to mete out the splendour of

the Crown. Indeed, I have found very few persons disposed to so

ungenerous a procedure. But the generality of people, it must be

confessed, do feel a good deal mortified, when they compare the

wants of the Court with its expenses. They do not behold the cause

of this distress in any part of the apparatus of Royal magnificence.

In all this, they see nothing but the operations of parsimony,

attended with all the consequences of profusion. Nothing expended,

nothing saved. Their wonder is increased by their knowledge, that

besides the revenue settled on his Majesty's Civil List to the

amount of 800,000 pounds a year, he has a farther aid, from a large

pension list, near 90,000 pounds a year, in Ireland; from the

produce of the Duchy of Lancaster (which we are told has been

greatly improved); from the revenue of the Duchy of Cornwall; from

the American quit-rents; from the four and a half per cent. duty in

the Leeward Islands; this last worth to be sure considerably more

than 40,000 pounds a year. The whole is certainly not much short of

a million annually.

These are revenues within the knowledge and cognizance of our

national Councils. We have no direct right to examine into the

receipts from his Majesty's German Dominions, and the Bishopric of

Osnaburg. This is unquestionably true. But that which is not

within the province of Parliament, is yet within the sphere of every

man's own reflection. If a foreign Prince resided amongst us, the

state of his revenues could not fail of becoming the subject of our

speculation. Filled with an anxious concern for whatever regards

the welfare of our Sovereign, it is impossible, in considering the

miserable circumstances into which he has been brought, that this

obvious topic should be entirely passed over. There is an opinion

universal, that these revenues produce something not inconsiderable,

clear of all charges and establishments. This produce the people do

not believe to be hoarded, nor perceive to be spent. It is

accounted for in the only manner it can, by supposing that it is

drawn away, for the support of that Court faction, which, whilst it

distresses the nation, impoverishes the Prince in every one of his

resources. I once more caution the reader, that I do not urge this

consideration concerning the foreign revenue, as if I supposed we

had a direct right to examine into the expenditure of any part of

it; but solely for the purpose of showing how little this system of

Favouritism has been advantageous to the Monarch himself; which,

without magnificence, has sunk him into a state of unnatural

poverty; at the same time that he possessed every means of

affluence, from ample revenues, both in this country and in other

parts of his dominions.

Has this system provided better for the treatment becoming his high

and sacred character, and secured the King from those disgusts

attached to the necessity of employing men who are not personally

agreeable? This is a topic upon which for many reasons I could wish

to be silent; but the pretence of securing against such causes of

uneasiness, is the corner-stone of the Court party. It has however

so happened, that if I were to fix upon any one point, in which this

system has been more particularly and shamefully blameable, the

effects which it has produced would justify me in choosing for that

point its tendency to degrade the personal dignity of the Sovereign,

and to expose him to a thousand contradictions and mortifications.

It is but too evident in what manner these projectors of Royal

greatness have fulfilled all their magnificent promises. Without

recapitulating all the circumstances of the reign, every one of

which is more or less a melancholy proof of the truth of what I have

advanced, let us consider the language of the Court but a few years

ago, concerning most of the persons now in the external

Administration: let me ask, whether any enemy to the personal

feelings of the Sovereign, could possibly contrive a keener

instrument of mortification, and degradation of all dignity, than

almost every part and member of the present arrangement? Nor, in

the whole course of our history, has any compliance with the will of

the people ever been known to extort from any Prince a greater

contradiction to all his own declared affections and dislikes, than

that which is now adopted, in direct opposition to every thing the

people approve and desire.

An opinion prevails, that greatness has been more than once advised

to submit to certain condescensions towards individuals, which have

been denied to the entreaties of a nation. For the meanest and most

dependent instrument of this system knows, that there are hours when

its existence may depend upon his adherence to it; and he takes his

advantage accordingly. Indeed it is a law of nature, that whoever

is necessary to what we have made our object, is sure, in some way,

or in some time or other, to become our master. All this however is

submitted to, in order to avoid that monstrous evil of governing in

concurrence with the opinion of the people. For it seems to be laid

down as a maxim, that a King has some sort of interest in giving

uneasiness to his subjects: that all who are pleasing to them, are

to be of course disagreeable to him: that as soon as the persons

who are odious at Court are known to be odious to the people, it is

snatched at as a lucky occasion of showering down upon them all

kinds of emoluments and honours. None are considered as well-

wishers to the Crown, but those who advised to some unpopular course

of action; none capable of serving it, but those who are obliged to

call at every instant upon all its power for the safety of their

lives. None are supposed to be fit priests in the temple of

Government, but the persons who are compelled to fly into it for

sanctuary. Such is the effect of this refined project; such is ever

the result of all the contrivances which are used to free men from

the servitude of their reason, and from the necessity of ordering

their affairs according to their evident interests. These

contrivances oblige them to run into a real and ruinous servitude,

in order to avoid a supposed restraint that might be attended with

advantage.

If therefore this system has so ill answered its own grand pretence

of saving the King from the necessity of employing persons

disagreeable to him, has it given more peace and tranquillity to his

Majesty's private hours? No, most certainly. The father of his

people cannot possibly enjoy repose, while his family is in such a

state of distraction. Then what has the Crown or the King profited

by all this fine-wrought scheme? Is he more rich, or more splendid,

or more powerful, or more at his ease, by so many labours and

contrivances? Have they not beggared his Exchequer, tarnished the

splendour of his Court, sunk his dignity, galled his feelings,

discomposed the whole order and happiness of his private life?

It will be very hard, I believe, to state in what respect the King

has profited by that faction which presumptuously choose to call

themselves HIS FRIENDS.

If particular men had grown into an attachment, by the distinguished

honour of the society of their Sovereign, and, by being the

partakers of his amusements, came sometimes to prefer the

gratification of his personal inclinations to the support of his

high character, the thing would be very natural, and it would be

excusable enough. But the pleasant part of the story is, that these

KING'S FRIENDS have no more ground for usurping such a title, than a

resident freeholder in Cumberland or in Cornwall. They are only

known to their Sovereign by kissing his hand, for the offices,

pensions, and grants into which they have deceived his benignity.

May no storm ever come, which will put the firmness of their

attachment to the proof; and which, in the midst of confusions and

terrors, and sufferings, may demonstrate the eternal difference

between a true and severe friend to the Monarchy, and a slippery

sycophant of the Court; Quantum infido scurrae distabit amicus!

So far I have considered the effect of the Court system, chiefly as

it operates upon the executive Government, on the temper of the

people and on the happiness of the Sovereign. It remains that we

should consider, with a little attention, its operation upon

Parliament.

Parliament was indeed the great object of all these politics, the

end at which they aimed, as well as the instrument by which they

were to operate. But, before Parliament could be made subservient

to a system, by which it was to be degraded from the dignity of a

national council, into a mere member of the Court, it must be

greatly changed from its original character.

In speaking of this body, I have my eye chiefly on the House of

Commons. I hope I shall be indulged in a few observations on the

nature and character of that assembly; not with regard to its LEGAL

FORM AND POWER, but to its SPIRIT, and to the purposes it is meant

to answer in the constitution.

The House of Commons was supposed originally to be NO PART OF THE

STANDING GOVERNMENT OF THIS COUNTRY. It was considered as a

control, issuing immediately from the people, and speedily to be

resolved into the mass from whence it arose. In this respect it was

in the higher part of Government what juries are in the lower. The

capacity of a magistrate being transitory, and that of a citizen

permanent, the latter capacity it was hoped would of course

preponderate in all discussions, not only between the people and the

standing authority of the Crown, but between the people and the

fleeting authority of the House of Commons itself. It was hoped

that, being of a middle nature between subject and Government, they

would feel with a more tender and a nearer interest everything that

concerned the people, than the other remoter and more permanent

parts of Legislature.

Whatever alterations time and the necessary accommodation of

business may have introduced, this character can never be sustained,

unless the House of Commons shall be made to bear some stamp of the

actual disposition of the people at large. It would (among public

misfortunes) be an evil more natural and tolerable, that the House

of Commons should be infected with every epidemical frenzy of the

people, as this would indicate some consanguinity, some sympathy of

nature with their constituents, than that they should in all cases

be wholly untouched by the opinions and feelings of the people out

of doors. By this want of sympathy they would cease to be a House

of Commons. For it is not the derivation of the power of that House

from the people, which makes it in a distinct sense their

representative. The King is the representative of the people; so

are the Lords; so are the Judges. They all are trustees for the

people, as well as the Commons; because no power is given for the

sole sake of the holder; and although Government certainly is an

institution of Divine authority, yet its forms, and the persons who

administer it, all originate from the people.

A popular origin cannot therefore be the characteristical

distinction of a popular representative. This belongs equally to

all parts of Government, and in all forms. The virtue, spirit, and

essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express

image of the feelings of the nation. It was not instituted to be a

control upon the people, as of late it has been taught, by a

doctrine of the most pernicious tendency. It was designed as a

control FOR the people. Other institutions have been formed for the

purpose of checking popular excesses; and they are, I apprehend,

fully adequate to their object. If not, they ought to be made so.

The House of Commons, as it was never intended for the support of

peace and subordination, is miserably appointed for that service;

having no stronger weapon than its Mace, and no better officer than

its Serjeant-at-Arms, which it can command of its own proper

authority. A vigilant and jealous eye over executory and judicial

magistracy; an anxious care of public money, an openness,

approaching towards facility, to public complaint; these seem to be

the true characteristics of a House of Commons. But an addressing

House of Commons, and a petitioning nation; a House of Commons full

of confidence, when the nation is plunged in despair; in the utmost

harmony with Ministers, whom the people regard with the utmost

abhorrence; who vote thanks, when the public opinion calls upon them

for impeachments; who are eager to grant, when the general voice

demands account; who, in all disputes between the people and

Administration, presume against the people; who punish their

disorder, but refuse even to inquire into the provocations to them;

this is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in this

constitution. Such an Assembly may be a great, wise, awful senate;

but it is not, to any popular purpose, a House of Commons. This

change from an immediate state of procuration and delegation to a

course of acting as from original power, is the way in which all the

popular magistracies in the world have been perverted from their

purposes. It is indeed their greatest and sometimes their incurable

corruption. For there is a material distinction between that

corruption by which particular points are carried against reason

(this is a thing which cannot be prevented by human wisdom, and is

of less consequence), and the corruption of the principle itself.

For then the evil is not accidental, but settled. The distemper

becomes the natural habit.

For my part, I shall be compelled to conclude the principle of

Parliament to be totally corrupted, and therefore its ends entirely

defeated, when I see two symptoms: first, a rule of indiscriminate

support to all Ministers; because this destroys the very end of

Parliament as a control, and is a general previous sanction to

misgovernment; and secondly, the setting up any claims adverse to

the right of free election; for this tends to subvert the legal

authority by which the House of Commons sits.

I know that, since the Revolution, along with many dangerous, many

useful powers of Government have been weakened. It is absolutely

necessary to have frequent recourse to the Legislature. Parliaments

must therefore sit every year, and for great part of the year. The

dreadful disorders of frequent elections have also necessitated a

septennial instead of a triennial duration. These circumstances, I

mean the constant habit of authority, and the infrequency of

elections, have tended very much to draw the House of Commons

towards the character of a standing Senate. It is a disorder which

has arisen from the cure of greater disorders; it has arisen from

the extreme difficulty of reconciling liberty under a monarchical

Government, with external strength and with internal tranquillity.

It is very clear that we cannot free ourselves entirely from this

great inconvenience; but I would not increase an evil, because I was

not able to remove it; and because it was not in my power to keep

the House of Commons religiously true to its first principles, I

would not argue for carrying it to a total oblivion of them. This

has been the great scheme of power in our time. They who will not

conform their conduct to the public good, and cannot support it by

the prerogative of the Crown, have adopted a new plan. They have

totally abandoned the shattered and old-fashioned fortress of

prerogative, and made a lodgment in the stronghold of Parliament

itself. If they have any evil design to which there is no ordinary

legal power commensurate, they bring it into Parliament. In

Parliament the whole is executed from the beginning to the end. In

Parliament the power of obtaining their object is absolute, and the

safety in the proceeding perfect: no rules to confine, no after

reckonings to terrify. Parliament cannot with any great propriety

punish others for things in which they themselves have been

accomplices. Thus the control of Parliament upon the executory

power is lost; because Parliament is made to partake in every

considerable act of Government. IMPEACHMENT, THAT GREAT GUARDIAN OF

THE PURITY OF THE CONSTITUTION, IS IN DANGER OF BEING LOST, EVEN TO

THE IDEA OF IT.

By this plan several important ends are answered to the Cabal. If

the authority of Parliament supports itself, the credit of every act

of Government, which they contrive, is saved; but if the act be so

very odious that the whole strength of Parliament is insufficient to

recommend it, then Parliament is itself discredited; and this

discredit increases more and more that indifference to the

constitution, which it is the constant aim of its enemies, by their

abuse of Parliamentary powers, to render general among the people.

Whenever Parliament is persuaded to assume the offices of executive

Government, it will lose all the confidence, love, and veneration

which it has ever enjoyed, whilst it was supposed the CORRECTIVE and

CONTROL of the acting powers of the State. This would be the event,

though its conduct in such a perversion of its functions should be

tolerably just and moderate; but if it should be iniquitous,

violent, full of passion, and full of faction, it would be

considered as the most intolerable of all the modes of tyranny.

For a considerable time this separation of the representatives from

their constituents went on with a silent progress; and had those,

who conducted the plan for their total separation, been persons of

temper and abilities any way equal to the magnitude of their design,

the success would have been infallible; but by their precipitancy

they have laid it open in all its nakedness; the nation is alarmed

at it; and the event may not be pleasant to the contrivers of the

scheme. In the last session, the corps called the KING'S FRIENDS

made a hardy attempt all at once, TO ALTER THE RIGHT OF ELECTION

ITSELF; to put it into the power of the House of Commons to disable

any person disagreeable to them from sitting in Parliament, without

any other rule than their own pleasure; to make incapacities, either

general for descriptions of men, or particular for individuals; and

to take into their body, persons who avowedly had never been chosen

by the majority of legal electors, nor agreeably to any known rule

of law.

The arguments upon which this claim was founded and combated, are

not my business here. Never has a subject been more amply and more

learnedly handled, nor upon one side, in my opinion, more

satisfactorily; they who are not convinced by what is already

written would not receive conviction THOUGH ONE AROSE FROM THE DEAD.

I too have thought on this subject; but my purpose here, is only to

consider it as a part of the favourite project of Government; to

observe on the motives which led to it; and to trace its political

consequences.

A violent rage for the punishment of Mr. Wilkes was the pretence of

the whole. This gentleman, by setting himself strongly in

opposition to the Court Cabal, had become at once an object of their

persecution, and of the popular favour. The hatred of the Court

party pursuing, and the countenance of the people protecting him, it

very soon became not at all a question on the man, but a trial of

strength between the two parties. The advantage of the victory in

this particular contest was the present, but not the only, nor by

any means, the principal, object. Its operation upon the character

of the House of Commons was the great point in view. The point to

be gained by the Cabal was this: that a precedent should be

established, tending to show, THAT THE FAVOUR OF THE PEOPLE WAS NOT

SO SURE A ROAD AS THE FAVOUR OF THE COURT EVEN TO POPULAR HONOURS

AND POPULAR TRUSTS. A strenuous resistance to every appearance of

lawless power; a spirit of independence carried to some degree of

enthusiasm; an inquisitive character to discover, and a bold one to

display, every corruption and every error of Government; these are

the qualities which recommend a man to a seat in the House of

Commons, in open and merely popular elections. An indolent and

submissive disposition; a disposition to think charitably of all the

actions of men in power, and to live in a mutual intercourse of

favours with them; an inclination rather to countenance a strong use

of authority, than to bear any sort of licentiousness on the part of

the people; these are unfavourable qualities in an open election for

Members of Parliament.

The instinct which carries the people towards the choice of the

former, is justified by reason; because a man of such a character,

even in its exorbitancies, does not directly contradict the purposes

of a trust, the end of which is a control on power. The latter

character, even when it is not in its extreme, will execute this

trust but very imperfectly; and, if deviating to the least excess,

will certainly frustrate instead of forwarding the purposes of a

control on Government. But when the House of Commons was to be new

modelled, this principle was not only to be changed, but reversed.

Whist any errors committed in support of power were left to the law,

with every advantage of favourable construction, of mitigation, and

finally of pardon; all excesses on the side of liberty, or in

pursuit of popular favour, or in defence of popular rights and

privileges, were not only to be punished by the rigour of the known

law, but by a DISCRETIONARY proceeding, which brought on THE LOSS OF

THE POPULAR OBJECT ITSELF. Popularity was to be rendered, if not

directly penal, at least highly dangerous. The favour of the people

might lead even to a disqualification of representing them. Their

odium might become, strained through the medium of two or three

constructions, the means of sitting as the trustee of all that was

dear to them. This is punishing the offence in the offending part.

Until this time, the opinion of the people, through the power of an

Assembly, still in some sort popular, led to the greatest honours

and emoluments in the gift of the Crown. Now the principle is

reversed; and the favour of the Court is the only sure way of

obtaining and holding those honours which ought to be in the

disposal of the people.

It signifies very little how this matter may be quibbled away.

Example, the only argument of effect in civil life, demonstrates the

truth of my proposition. Nothing can alter my opinion concerning

the pernicious tendency of this example, until I see some man for

his indiscretion in the support of power, for his violent and

intemperate servility, rendered incapable of sitting in parliament.

For as it now stands, the fault of overstraining popular qualities,

and, irregularly if you please, asserting popular privileges, has

led to disqualification; the opposite fault never has produced the

slightest punishment. Resistance to power has shut the door of the

House of Commons to one man; obsequiousness and servility, to none.

Not that I would encourage popular disorder, or any disorder. But I

would leave such offences to the law, to be punished in measure and

proportion. The laws of this country are for the most part

constituted, and wisely so, for the general ends of Government,

rather than for the preservation of our particular liberties.

Whatever therefore is done in support of liberty, by persons not in

public trust, or not acting merely in that trust, is liable to be

more or less out of the ordinary course of the law; and the law

itself is sufficient to animadvert upon it with great severity.

Nothing indeed can hinder that severe letter from crushing us,

except the temperaments it may receive from a trial by jury. But if

the habit prevails of GOING BEYOND THE LAW, and superseding this

judicature, of carrying offences, real or supposed, into the

legislative bodies, who shall establish themselves into COURTS OF

CRIMINAL EQUITY, (so THE STAR CHAMBER has been called by Lord

Bacon,) all the evils of the STAR Chamber are revived. A large and

liberal construction in ascertaining offences, and a discretionary

power in punishing them, is the idea of criminal equity; which is in

truth a monster in Jurisprudence. It signifies nothing whether a

court for this purpose be a Committee of Council, or a House of

Commons, or a House of Lords; the liberty of the subject will be

equally subverted by it. The true end and purpose of that House of

Parliament which entertains such a jurisdiction will be destroyed by

it.

I will not believe, what no other man living believes, that Mr.

Wilkes was punished for the indecency of his publications, or the

impiety of his ransacked closet. If he had fallen in a common

slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well believe that

nothing more was meant than was pretended. But when I see, that,

for years together, full as impious, and perhaps more dangerous

writings to religion, and virtue, and order, have not been punished,

nor their authors discountenanced; that the most audacious libels on

Royal Majesty have passed without notice; that the most treasonable

invectives against the laws, liberties, and constitution of the

country, have not met with the slightest animadversion; I must

consider this as a shocking and shameless pretence. Never did an

envenomed scurrility against everything sacred and civil, public and

private, rage through the kingdom with such a furious and unbridled

licence. All this while the peace of the nation must be shaken, to

ruin one libeller, and to tear from the populace a single favourite.

Nor is it that vice merely skulks in an obscure and contemptible

impunity. Does not the public behold with indignation, persons not

only generally scandalous in their lives, but the identical persons

who, by their society, their instruction, their example, their

encouragement, have drawn this man into the very faults which have

furnished the Cabal with a pretence for his persecution, loaded with

every kind of favour, honour, and distinction, which a Court can

bestow? Add but the crime of servility (the foedum crimem

servitutis) to every other crime, and the whole mass is immediately

transmuted into virtue, and becomes the just subject of reward and

honour. When therefore I reflect upon this method pursued by the

Cabal in distributing rewards and punishments, I must conclude that

Mr. Wilkes is the object of persecution, not on account of what he

has done in common with others who are the objects of reward, but

for that in which he differs from many of them: that he is pursued

for the spirited dispositions which are blended with his vices; for

his unconquerable firmness, for his resolute, indefatigable,

strenuous resistance against oppression.

In this case, therefore, it was not the man that was to be punished,

nor his faults that were to be discountenanced. Opposition to acts

of power was to be marked by a kind of civil proscription. The

popularity which should arise from such an opposition was to be

shown unable to protect it. The qualities by which court is made to

the people, were to render every fault inexpiable, and every error

irretrievable. The qualities by which court is made to power, were

to cover and to sanctify everything. He that will have a sure and

honourable seat, in the House of Commons, must take care how he

adventures to cultivate popular qualities; otherwise he may,

remember the old maxim, Breves et infaustos populi Romani amores.

If, therefore, a pursuit of popularity expose a man to greater

dangers than a disposition to servility, the principle which is the

life and soul of popular elections will perish out of the

Constitution.

It behoves the people of England to consider how the House of

Commons under the operation of these examples must of necessity be

constituted. On the side of the Court will be, all honours,

offices, emoluments; every sort of personal gratification to avarice

or vanity; and, what is of more moment to most gentlemen, the means

of growing, by innumerable petty services to individuals, into a

spreading interest in their country. On the other hand, let us

suppose a person unconnected with the Court, and in opposition to

its system. For his own person, no office, or emolument, or title;

no promotion ecclesiastical, or civil, or military, or naval, for

children, or brothers, or kindred. In vain an expiring interest in

a borough calls for offices, or small livings, for the children of

mayors, and aldermen, and capital burgesses. His court rival has

them all. He can do an infinite number of acts of generosity and

kindness, and even of public spirit. He can procure indemnity from

quarters. He can procure advantages in trade. He can get pardons

for offences. He can obtain a thousand favours, and avert a

thousand evils. He may, while he betrays every valuable interest of

the kingdom, be a benefactor, a patron, a father, a guardian angel,

to his borough. The unfortunate independent member has nothing to

offer, but harsh refusal, or pitiful excuse, or despondent

representation of a hopeless interest. Except from his private

fortune, in which he may be equalled, perhaps exceeded, by his Court

competitor, he has no way of showing any one good quality, or of

making a single friend. In the House, he votes for ever in a

dispirited minority. If he speaks, the doors are locked. A body of

loquacious placemen go out to tell the world, that all he aims at,

is to get into office. If he has not the talent of elocution, which

is the case of many as wise and knowing men as any in the House, he

is liable to all these inconveniences, without the eclat which

attends upon any tolerably successful exertion of eloquence. Can we

conceive a more discouraging post of duty than this? Strip it of

the poor reward of popularity; suffer even the excesses committed in

defence of the popular interest to become a ground for the majority

of that House to form a disqualification out of the line of the law,

and at their pleasure, attended not only with the loss of the

franchise, but with every kind of personal disgrace; if this shall

happen, the people of this kingdom may be assured that they cannot

be firmly or faithfully served by any man. It is out of the nature

of men and things that they should; and their presumption will be

equal to their folly, if they expect it. The power of the people,

within the laws, must show itself sufficient to protect every

representative in the animated performance of his duty, or that duty

cannot be performed. The House of Commons can never be a control on

other parts of Government, unless they are controlled themselves by

their constituents; and unless these constituents possess some right

in the choice of that House, which it is not in the power of that

House to take away. If they suffer this power of arbitrary

incapacitation to stand, they have utterly perverted every other

power of the House of Commons. The late proceeding, I will not say,

IS contrary to law; it MUST be so; for the power which is claimed

cannot, by any possibility, be a legal power in any limited member

of Government.

The power which they claim, of declaring incapacities, would not be

above the just claims of a final judicature, if they had not laid it

down as a leading principle, that they had no rule in the exercise

of this claim but their own DISCRETION. Not one of their abettors

has ever undertaken to assign the principle of unfitness, the

species or degree of delinquency, on which the House of Commons will

expel, nor the mode of proceeding upon it, nor the evidence upon

which it is established. The direct consequence of which is, that

the first franchise of an Englishman, and that on which all the rest

vitally depend, is to be forfeited for some offence which no man

knows, and which is to be proved by no known rule whatsoever of

legal evidence. This is so anomalous to our whole constitution,

that I will venture to say, the most trivial right, which the

subject claims, never was, nor can be, forfeited in such a manner.

The whole of their usurpation is established upon this method of

arguing. We do not make laws. No; we do not contend for this

power. We only declare law; and, as we are a tribunal both

competent and supreme, what we declare to be law becomes law,

although it should not have been so before. Thus the circumstance

of having no appeal from their jurisdiction is made to imply that

they have no rule in the exercise of it: the judgment does not

derive its validity from its conformity to the law; but

preposterously the law is made to attend on the judgment; and the

rule of the judgment is no other than the OCCASIONAL WILL OF THE

HOUSE. An arbitrary discretion leads, legality follows; which is

just the very nature and description of a legislative act.

This claim in their hands was no barren theory. It was pursued into

its utmost consequences; and a dangerous principle has begot a

correspondent practice. A systematic spirit has been shown upon

both sides. The electors of Middlesex chose a person whom the House

of Commons had voted incapable; and the House of Commons has taken

in a member whom the electors of Middlesex had not chosen. By a

construction on that legislative power which had been assumed, they

declared that the true legal sense of the country was contained in

the minority, on that occasion; and might, on a resistance to a vote

of incapacity, be contained in any minority.

When any construction of law goes against the spirit of the

privilege it was meant to support, it is a vicious construction. It

is material to us to be represented really and bona fide, and not in

forms, in types, and shadows, and fictions of law. The right of

election was not established merely as a MATTER OF FORM, to satisfy

some method and rule of technical reasoning; it was not a principle

which might substitute a Titius or a Maevius, a John Doe or Richard

Roe, in the place of a man specially chosen; not a principle which

was just as well satisfied with one man as with another. It is a

right, the effect of which is to give to the people that man, and

that man only, whom by their voices, actually, not constructively

given, they declare that they know, esteem, love, and trust. This

right is a matter within their own power of judging and feeling; not

an ens rationis and creature of law: nor can those devices, by

which anything else is substituted in the place of such an actual

choice, answer in the least degree the end of representation.

I know that the courts of law have made as strained constructions in

other cases. Such is the construction in common recoveries. The

method of construction which in that case gives to the persons in

remainder, for their security and representative, the door-keeper,

crier, or sweeper of the Court, or some other shadowy being without

substance or effect, is a fiction of a very coarse texture. This

was however suffered, by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for

ages; because the evasion of the old Statute of Westminster, which

authorised perpetuities, had more sense and utility than the law

which was evaded. But an attempt to turn the right of election into

such a farce and mockery as a fictitious fine and recovery, will, I

hope, have another fate; because the laws which give it are

infinitely dear to us, and the evasion is infinitely contemptible.

The people indeed have been told, that this power of discretionary

disqualification is vested in hands that they may trust, and who

will be sure not to abuse it to their prejudice. Until I find

something in this argument differing from that on which every mode

of despotism has been defended, I shall not be inclined to pay it

any great compliment. The people are satisfied to trust themselves

with the exercise of their own privileges, and do not desire this

kind intervention of the House of Commons to free them from the

burthen. They are certainly in the right. They ought not to trust

the House of Commons with a power over their franchises; because the

constitution, which placed two other co-ordinate powers to control

it, reposed no such confidence in that body. It were a folly well

deserving servitude for its punishment, to be full of confidence

where the laws are full of distrust; and to give to an House of

Commons, arrogating to its sole resolution the most harsh and odious

part of legislative authority, that degree of submission which is

due only to the Legislature itself.

When the House of Commons, in an endeavour to obtain new advantages

at the expense of the other orders of the State, for the benefits of

the COMMONS AT LARGE, have pursued strong measures; if it were not

just, it was at least natural, that the constituents should connive

at all their proceedings; because we were ourselves ultimately to

profit. But when this submission is urged to us, in a contest

between the representatives and ourselves, and where nothing can be

put into their scale which is not taken from ours, they fancy us to

be children when they tell us they are our representatives, our own

flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they give us are for our

good. The very desire of that body to have such a trust contrary to

law reposed in them, shows that they are not worthy of it. They

certainly will abuse it; because all men possessed of an

uncontrolled discretionary power leading to the aggrandisement and

profit of their own body have always abused it: and I see no

particular sanctity in our times, that is at all likely, by a

miraculous operation, to overrule the course of nature.

But we must purposely shut our eyes, if we consider this matter

merely as a contest between the House of Commons and the Electors.

The true contest is between the Electors of the Kingdom and the

Crown; the Crown acting by an instrumental House of Commons. It is

precisely the same, whether the Ministers of the Crown can

disqualify by a dependent House of Commons, or by a dependent court

of STAR CHAMBER, or by a dependent court of King's Bench. If once

Members of Parliament can be practically convinced that they do not

depend on the affection or opinion of the people for their political

being, they will give themselves over, without even an appearance of

reserve, to the influence of the Court.

Indeed, a Parliament unconnected with the people, is essential to a

Ministry unconnected with the people; and therefore those who saw

through what mighty difficulties the interior Ministry waded, and

the exterior were dragged, in this business, will conceive of what

prodigious importance, the new corps of KING'S MEN held this

principle of occasional and personal incapacitation, to the whole

body of their design.

When the House of Commons was thus made to consider itself as the

master of its constituents, there wanted but one thing to secure

that House against all possible future deviation towards popularity;

an unlimited fund of money to be laid out according to the pleasure

of the Court.

To complete the scheme of bringing our Court to a resemblance to the

neighbouring Monarchies, it was necessary, in effect, to destroy

those appropriations of revenue, which seem to limit the property,

as the other laws had done the powers, of the Crown. An opportunity

for this purpose was taken, upon an application to Parliament for

payment of the debts of the Civil List; which in 1769 had amounted

to 513,000 pounds. Such application had been made upon former

occasions; but to do it in the former manner would by no means

answer the present purpose.

Whenever the Crown had come to the Commons to desire a supply for

the discharging of debts due on the Civil List, it was always asked

and granted with one of the three following qualifications;

sometimes with all of them. Either it was stated that the revenue

had been diverted from its purposes by Parliament; or that those

duties had fallen short of the sum for which they were given by

Parliament, and that the intention of the Legislature had not been

fulfilled; or that the money required to discharge the Civil List

debt was to be raised chargeable on the Civil List duties. In the

reign of Queen Anne, the Crown was found in debt. The lessening and

granting away some part of her revenue by Parliament was alleged as

the cause of that debt, and pleaded as an equitable ground (such it

certainly was), for discharging it. It does not appear that the

duties which wore then applied to the ordinary Government produced

clear above 580,000 pounds a year; because, when they were

afterwards granted to George the First, 120,000 pounds was added, to

complete the whole to 700,000 pounds a year. Indeed it was then

asserted, and, I have no doubt, truly, that for many years the nett

produce did not amount to above 550,000 pounds. The Queen's

extraordinary charges were besides very considerable; equal, at

least, to any we have known in our time. The application to

Parliament was not for an absolute grant of money, but to empower

the Queen to raise it by borrowing upon the Civil List funds.

The Civil List debt was twice paid in the reign of George the First.

The money was granted upon the same plan which had been followed in

the reign of Queen Anne. The Civil List revenues were then

mortgaged for the sum to be raised, and stood charged with the

ransom of their own deliverance.

George the Second received an addition to his Civil List. Duties

were granted for the purpose of raising 800,000 pounds a year. It

was not until he had reigned nineteen years, and after the last

rebellion, that he called upon Parliament for a discharge of the

Civil List debt. The extraordinary charges brought on by the

rebellion, account fully for the necessities of the Crown. However,

the extraordinary charges of Government were not thought a ground

fit to be relied on. A deficiency of the Civil List duties for

several years before was stated as the principal, if not the sole,

ground on which an application to Parliament could be justified.

About this time the produce of these duties had fallen pretty low;

and even upon an average of the whole reign they never produced

800,000 pounds a year clear to the Treasury.

That Prince reigned fourteen years afterwards: not only no new

demands were made, but with so much good order were his revenues and

expenses regulated, that, although many parts of the establishment

of the Court were upon a larger and more liberal scale than they

have been since, there was a considerable sum in hand, on his

decease, amounting to about 170,000 pounds, applicable to the

service of the Civil List of his present Majesty. So that, if this

reign commenced with a greater charge than usual, there was enough,

and more than enough, abundantly to supply all the extraordinary

expense. That the Civil List should have been exceeded in the two

former reigns, especially in the reign of George the First, was not

at all surprising. His revenue was but 700,000 pounds annually; if

it ever produced so much clear. The prodigious and dangerous

disaffection to the very being of the establishment, and the cause

of a Pretender then powerfully abetted from abroad, produced many

demands of an extraordinary nature both abroad and at home. Much

management and great expenses were necessary. But the throne of no

Prince has stood upon more unshaken foundations than that of his

present Majesty.

To have exceeded the sum given for the Civil List, and to have

incurred a debt without special authority of Parliament, was, prima

facie, a criminal act: as such Ministers ought naturally rather to

have withdrawn it from the inspection, than to have exposed it to

the scrutiny, of Parliament. Certainly they ought, of themselves,

officially to have come armed with every sort of argument, which, by

explaining, could excuse a matter in itself of presumptive guilt.

But the terrors of the House of Commons are no longer for Ministers.

On the other hand, the peculiar character of the House of Commons,

as trustee of the public purse, would have led them to call with a

punctilious solicitude for every public account, and to have

examined into them with the most rigorous accuracy.

The capital use of an account is, that the reality of the charge,

the reason of incurring it, and the justice and necessity of

discharging it, should all appear antecedent to the payment. No man

ever pays first, and calls for his account afterwards; because he

would thereby let out of his hands the principal, and indeed only

effectual, means of compelling a full and fair one. But, in

national business, there is an additional reason for a previous

production of every account. It is a cheek, perhaps the only one,

upon a corrupt and prodigal use of public money. An account after

payment is to no rational purpose an account. However, the House of

Commons thought all these to be antiquated principles; they were of

opinion that the most Parliamentary way of proceeding was, to pay

first what the Court thought proper to demand, and to take its

chance for an examination into accounts at some time of greater

leisure.

The nation had settled 800,000 pounds a year on the Crown, as

sufficient for the purpose of its dignity, upon the estimate of its

own Ministers. When Ministers came to Parliament, and said that

this allowance had not been sufficient for the purpose, and that

they had incurred a debt of 500,000 pounds, would it not have been

natural for Parliament first to have asked, how, and by what means,

their appropriated allowance came to be insufficient? Would it not

have savoured of some attention to justice, to have seen in what

periods of Administration this debt had been originally incurred;

that they might discover, and if need were, animadvert on the

persons who were found the most culpable? To put their hands upon

such articles of expenditure as they thought improper or excessive,

and to secure, in future, against such misapplication or exceeding?

Accounts for any other purposes are but a matter of curiosity, and

no genuine Parliamentary object. All the accounts which could

answer any Parliamentary end were refused, or postponed by previous

questions. Every idea of prevention was rejected, as conveying an

improper suspicion of the Ministers of the Crown.

When every leading account had been refused, many others were

granted with sufficient facility.

But with great candour also, the House was informed, that hardly any

of them could be ready until the next session; some of them perhaps

not so soon. But, in order firmly to establish the precedent of

PAYMENT PREVIOUS TO ACCOUNT, and to form it into a settled rule of

the House, the god in the machine was brought down, nothing less

than the wonder-working LAW OF PARLIAMENT. It was alleged, that it

is the law of Parliament, when any demand comes from the Crown, that

the House must go immediately into the Committee of Supply; in which

Committee it was allowed, that the production and examination of

accounts would be quite proper and regular. It was therefore

carried that they should go into the Committee without delay, and

without accounts, in order to examine with great order and

regularity things that could not possibly come before them. After

this stroke of orderly and Parliamentary wit and humour, they went

into the Committee, and very generously voted the payment.

There was a circumstance in that debate too remarkable to be

overlooked. This debt of the Civil List was all along argued upon

the same footing as a debt of the State, contracted upon national

authority. Its payment was urged as equally pressing upon the

public faith and honour; and when the whole year's account was

stated, in what is called THE BUDGET, the Ministry valued themselves

on the payment of so much public debt, just as if they had

discharged 500,000 pounds of navy or exchequer bills. Though, in

truth, their payment, from the Sinking Fund, of debt which was never

contracted by Parliamentary authority, was, to all intents and

purposes, so much debt incurred. But such is the present notion of

public credit and payment of debt. No wonder that it produces such

effects.

Nor was the House at all more attentive to a provident security

against future, than it had been to a vindictive retrospect to past,

mismanagements. I should have thought indeed that a Ministerial

promise, during their own continuance in office, might have been

given, though this would have been but a poor security for the

public. Mr. Pelham gave such an assurance, and he kept his word.

But nothing was capable of extorting from our Ministers anything

which had the least resemblance to a promise of confining the

expenses of the Civil List within the limits which had been settled

by Parliament. This reserve of theirs I look upon to be equivalent

to the clearest declaration that they were resolved upon a contrary

course.

However, to put the matter beyond all doubt, in the Speech from the

Throne, after thanking Parliament for the relief so liberally

granted, the Ministers inform the two Houses that they will

ENDEAVOUR to confine the expenses of the Civil Government--within

what limits, think you? those which the law had prescribed? Not in

the least--"such limits as the HONOUR OF THE CROWN can possibly

admit."

Thus they established an arbitrary standard for that dignity which

Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard. They gave

themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the HONOUR OF

THE CROWN, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all

manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid

to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of

Parliament, estimating the dignity of the Crown at 800,000 pounds,

and confining it to that sum, adds to the number of obsolete

statutes which load the shelves of libraries without any sort of

advantage to the people.

After this proceeding, I suppose that no man can be so weak as to

think that the Crown is limited to any settled allowance whatsoever.

For if the Ministry has 800,000 pounds a year by the law of the

land, and if by the law of Parliament all the debts which exceed it

are to be paid previous to the production of any account, I presume

that this is equivalent to an income with no other limits than the

abilities of the subject and the moderation of the Court--that is to

say, it is such in income as is possessed by every absolute Monarch

in Europe. It amounts, as a person of great ability said in the

debate, to an unlimited power of drawing upon the Sinking Fund. Its

effect on the public credit of this kingdom must be obvious; for in

vain is the Sinking Fund the great buttress of all the rest, if it

be in the power of the Ministry to resort to it for the payment of

any debts which they may choose to incur, under the name of the

Civil List, and through the medium of a committee, which thinks

itself obliged by law to vote supplies without any other account

than that of the more existence of the debt.

Five hundred thousand pounds is a serious sum. But it is nothing to

the prolific principle upon which the sum was voted--a principle

that may be well called, THE FRUITFUL MOTHER OF A HUNDRED MORE.

Neither is the damage to public credit of very great consequence

when compared with that which results to public morals and to the

safety of the Constitution, from the exhaustless mine of corruption

opened by the precedent, and to be wrought by the principle of the

late payment of the debts of the Civil List. The power of

discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the

necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of

Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a

fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best

appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by

the wit of man. This is felt. The quarrel is begun between the

Representatives and the People. The Court Faction have at length

committed them.

In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest

staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have

hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.

At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other

cases. I know the diligence with which my observations on our

public disorders have been made. I am very sure of the integrity of

the motives on which they are published: I cannot be equally

confident in any plan for the absolute cure of those disorders, or

for their certain future prevention. My aim is to bring this matter

into more public discussion. Let the sagacity of others work upon

it. It is not uncommon for medical writers to describe histories of

diseases, very accurately, on whose cure they can say but very

little.

The first ideas which generally suggest themselves for the cure of

Parliamentary disorders are, to shorten the duration of Parliaments,

and to disqualify all, or a great number of placemen, from a seat in

the House of Commons. Whatever efficacy there may be in those

remedies, I am sure in the present state of things it is impossible

to apply them. A restoration of the right of free election is a

preliminary indispensable to every other reformation. What

alterations ought afterwards to be made in the constitution is a

matter of deep and difficult research.

If I wrote merely to please the popular palate, it would indeed be

as little troublesome to me as to another to extol these remedies,

so famous in speculation, but to which their greatest admirers have

never attempted seriously to resort in practice. I confess them,

that I have no sort of reliance upon either a Triennial Parliament

or a Place-bill. With regard to the former, perhaps, it might

rather serve to counteract than to promote the ends that are

proposed by it. To say nothing of the horrible disorders among the

people attending frequent elections, I should be fearful of

committing, every three years, the independent gentlemen of the

country into a contest with the Treasury. It is easy to see which

of the contending parties would be ruined first. Whoever has taken

a careful view of public proceedings, so as to endeavour to ground

his speculations on his experience, must have observed how

prodigiously greater the power of Ministry is in the first and last

session of a Parliament, than it is in the intermediate periods,

when Members sit a little on their seats. The persons of the

greatest Parliamentary experience, with whom I have conversed, did

constantly, in canvassing the fate of questions, allow something to

the Court side, upon account of the elections depending or imminent.

The evil complained of, if it exists in the present state of things,

would hardly be removed by a triennial Parliament: for, unless the

influence of Government in elections can be entirely taken away, the

more frequently they return, the more they will harass private

independence; the more generally men will be compelled to fly to the

settled systematic interest of Government, and to the resources of a

boundless Civil List. Certainly something may be done, and ought to

be done, towards lessening that influence in elections; and this

will be necessary upon a plan either of longer or shorter duration

of Parliament. But nothing can so perfectly remove the evil, as not

to render such contentions, foot frequently repeated, utterly

ruinous, first to independence of fortune, and then to independence

of spirit. As I am only giving an opinion on this point, and not at

all debating it in an adverse line, I hope I may be excused in

another observation. With great truth I may aver that I never

remember to have talked on this subject with any man much conversant

with public business who considered short Parliaments as a real

improvement of the Constitution. Gentlemen, warm in a popular

cause, are ready enough to attribute all the declarations of such

persons to corrupt motives. But the habit of affairs, if, on one

hand, it tends to corrupt the mind, furnishes it, on the other, with

the, means of better information. The authority of such persons

will always have some weight. It may stand upon a par with the

speculations of those who are less practised in business; and who,

with perhaps purer intentions, have not so effectual means of

judging. It is besides an effect of vulgar and puerile malignity to

imagine that every Statesman is of course corrupt: and that his

opinion, upon every constitutional point, is solely formed upon some

sinister interest.

The next favourite remedy is a Place-bill. The same principle

guides in both: I mean the opinion which is entertained by many of

the infallibility of laws and regulations, in the cure of public

distempers. Without being as unreasonably doubtful as many are

unwisely confident, I will only say, that this also is a matter very

well worthy of serious and mature reflection. It is not easy to

foresee what the effect would be of disconnecting with Parliament,

the greatest part of those who hold civil employments, and of such

mighty and important bodies as the military and naval

establishments. It were better, perhaps, that they should have a

corrupt interest in the forms of the constitution, than they should

have none at all. This is a question altogether different from the

disqualification of a particular description of Revenue Officers

from seats in Parliament; or, perhaps, of all the lower sorts of

them from votes in elections. In the former case, only the few are

affected; in the latter, only the inconsiderable. But a great

official, a great professional, a great military and naval interest,

all necessarily comprehending many people of the first weight,

ability, wealth, and spirit, has been gradually formed in the

kingdom. These new interests must be let into a share of

representation, else possibly they may be inclined to destroy those

institutions of which they are not permitted to partake. This is

not a thing to be trifled with: nor is it every well-meaning man

that is fit to put his hands to it. Many other serious

considerations occur. I do not open them here, because they are not

directly to my purpose; proposing only to give the reader some taste

of the difficulties that attend all capital changes in the

Constitution; just to hint the uncertainty, to say no worse, of

being able to prevent the Court, as long as it has the means of

influence abundantly in its power, from applying that influence to

Parliament; and perhaps, if the public method were precluded, of

doing it in some worse and more dangerous method. Underhand and

oblique ways would be studied. The science of evasion, already

tolerably understood, would then be brought to the greatest

perfection. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how

much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a degree

of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners, instead of

cutting off the subsisting ill practices, new corruptions might be

produced for the concealment and security of the old. It were

better, undoubtedly, that no influence at all could affect the mind

of a Member of Parliament. But of all modes of influence, in my

opinion, a place under the Government is the least disgraceful to

the man who holds it, and by far the most safe to the country. I

would not shut out that sort of influence which is open and visible,

which is connected with the dignity and the service of the State,

when it is not in my power to prevent the influence of contracts, of

subscriptions, of direct bribery, and those innumerable methods of

clandestine corruption, which are abundantly in the hands of the

Court, and which will be applied as long as these means of

corruption, and the disposition to be corrupted, have existence

amongst us. Our Constitution stands on a nice equipoise, with steep

precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it

from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of

oversetting it on the other. Every project of a material change in

a Government so complicated as ours, combined at the same time with

external circumstances still more complicated, is a matter full of

difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to

decide; a prudent man too ready to undertake; or an honest man too

ready to promise. They do not respect the public nor themselves,

who engage for more than they are sure that they ought to attempt,

or that they are able to perform. These are my sentiments, weak

perhaps, but honest and unbiassed; and submitted entirely to the

opinion of grave men, well affected to the constitution of their

country, and of experience in what may best promote or hurt it.

Indeed, in the situation in which we stand, with an immense revenue,

an enormous debt, mighty establishments, Government itself a great

banker and a great merchant, I see no other way for the preservation

of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but

THE INTERPOSITION OF THE BODY OF THE PEOPLE ITSELF, whenever it

shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital

innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the

fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power. This

interposition is a most unpleasant remedy. But, if it be a legal

remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be used; to be used then

only, when it is evident that nothing else can hold the Constitution

to its true principles.

The distempers of Monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension

and redress, in the last century; in this, the distempers of

Parliament. It is not in Parliament alone that the remedy for

Parliamentary disorders can be completed; hardly, indeed, can it

begin there. Until a confidence in Government is re-established,

the people ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed

attention to the conduct of their Representatives. Standards, for

judging more systematically upon their conduct, ought to be settled

in the meetings of counties and corporations. Frequent and correct

lists of the voters in all important questions ought to be procured.

By such means something may be done. By such means it may appear

who those are, that, by an indiscriminate support of all

Administrations, have totally banished all integrity and confidence

out of public proceedings; have confounded the best men with the

worst; and weakened and dissolved, instead of strengthening and

compacting, the general frame of Government. If any person is more

concerned for government and order than for the liberties of his

country, even he is equally concerned to put an end to this course

of indiscriminate support. It is this blind and undistinguishing

support that feeds the spring of those very disorders, by which he

is frighted into the arms of the faction which contains in itself

the source of all disorders, by enfeebling all the visible and

regular authority of the State. The distemper is increased by his

injudicious and preposterous endeavours, or pretences, for the cure

of it.

An exterior Administration, chosen for its impotency, or after it is

chosen purposely rendered impotent, in order to be rendered

subservient, will not be obeyed. The laws themselves will not be

respected, when those who execute them are despised: and they will

be despised, when their power is not immediate from the Crown, or

natural in the kingdom. Never were Ministers better supported in

Parliament. Parliamentary support comes and goes with office,

totally regardless of the man, or the merit. Is Government

strengthened? It grows weaker and weaker. The popular torrent

gains upon it every hour. Let us learn from our experience. It is

not support that is wanting to Government, but reformation. When

Ministry rests upon public opinion, it is not indeed built upon a

rock of adamant; it has, however, some stability. But when it

stands upon private humour, its structure is of stubble, and its

foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it again--He that supports

every Administration, subverts all Government. The reason is this.

The whole business in which a Court usually takes an interest goes

on at present equally well, in whatever hands, whether high or low,

wise or foolish, scandalous or reputable; there is nothing,

therefore, to hold it firm to any one body of men, or to any one

consistent scheme of politics. Nothing interposes to prevent the

full operation of all the caprices and all the passions of a Court

upon the servants of the public. The system of Administration is

open to continual shocks and changes, upon the principles of the

meanest cabal, and the most contemptible intrigue. Nothing can be

solid and permanent. All good men at length fly with horror from

such a service. Men of rank and ability, with the spirit which

ought to animate such men in a free state, while they decline the

jurisdiction of dark cabal on their actions and their fortunes,

will, for both, cheerfully put themselves upon their country. They

will trust an inquisitive and distinguishing Parliament; because it

does inquire, and does distinguish. If they act well, they know

that, in such a Parliament, they will be supported against any

intrigue; if they act ill, they know that no intrigue can protect

them. This situation, however awful, is honourable. But in one

hour, and in the self-same Assembly, without any assigned or

assignable cause, to be precipitated from the highest authority to

the most marked neglect, possibly into the greatest peril of life

and reputation, is a situation full of danger, and destitute of

honour. It will be shunned equally by every man of prudence, and

every man of spirit.

Such are the consequences of the division of Court from the

Administration; and of the division of public men among themselves.

By the former of these, lawful Government is undone; by the latter,

all opposition to lawless power is rendered impotent. Government

may in a great measure be restored, if any considerable bodies of

men have honesty and resolution enough never to accept

Administration, unless this garrison of KING'S MEN, which is

stationed, as in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely

broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled

with the ground. The disposition of public men to keep this corps

together, and to act under it, or to co-operate with it, is a

touchstone by which every Administration ought in future to be

tried. There has not been one which has not sufficiently

experienced the utter incompatibility of that faction with the

public peace, and with all the ends of good Government; since, if

they opposed it, they soon lost every power of serving the Crown; if

they submitted to it they lost all the esteem of their country.

Until Ministers give to the public a full proof of their entire

alienation from that system, however plausible their pretences, we

may be sure they are more intent on the emoluments than the duties

of office. If they refuse to give this proof, we know of what stuff

they are made. In this particular, it ought to be the electors'

business to look to their Representatives. The electors ought to

esteem it no less culpable in their Member to give a single vote in

Parliament to such an Administration, than to take an office under

it; to endure it, than to act in it. The notorious infidelity and

versatility of Members of Parliament, in their opinions of men and

things, ought in a particular manner to be considered by the

electors in the inquiry which is recommended to them. This is one

of the principal holdings of that destructive system which has

endeavoured to unhinge all the virtuous, honourable, and useful

connections in the kingdom.

This cabal has, with great success, propagated a doctrine which

serves for a colour to those acts of treachery; and whilst it

receives any degree of countenance, it will be utterly senseless to

look for a vigorous opposition to the Court Party. The doctrine is

this: That all political connections are in their nature factious,

and as such ought to be dissipated and destroyed; and that the rule

for forming Administrations is mere personal ability, rated by the

judgment of this cabal upon it, and taken by drafts from every

division and denomination of public men. This decree was solemnly

promulgated by the head of the Court corps, the Earl of Bute

himself, in a speech which he made, in the year 1766, against the

then Administration, the only Administration which, he has ever been

known directly and publicly to oppose.

It is indeed in no way wonderful, that such persons should make such

declarations. That connection and faction are equivalent terms, is

an opinion which has been carefully inculcated at all times by

unconstitutional Statesmen. The reason is evident. Whilst men are

linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of

an evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel,

and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie

dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is

uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where

men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced

in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their mutual

habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal

confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among

them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part

with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the

most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has

his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly

unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by

vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single,

unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to

defeat, the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall,

one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a

man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single

person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his

conscience, and even harangued against every design which he

apprehended to he prejudicial to the interests of his country. This

innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan

of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of

public duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right

should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil

should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man

omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect,

it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost

as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very

rational account of a man's life that he has always acted right; but

has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours

could not possibly be productive of any consequence.

I do not wonder that the behaviour of many parties should have made

persons of tender and scrupulous virtue somewhat out of humour with

all sorts of connection in politics. I admit that people frequently

acquire in such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive

spirit; that they are apt to sink the idea of the general good in

this circumscribed and partial interest. But, where duty renders a

critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep free

from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation

itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer

of the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he

must not desert his station. Every profession, not excepting the

glorious one of a soldier, or the sacred one of a priest, is liable

to its own particular vices; which, however, form no argument

against those ways of life; nor are the vices themselves inevitable

to every individual in those professions. Of such a nature are

connections in politics; essentially necessary for the full

performance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate

into faction. Commonwealths are made of families, free

Commonwealths of parties also; and we may as well affirm, that our

natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad

citizens, as that the bonds of our party weaken those by which we

are held to our country.

Some legislators went so far as to make neutrality in party a crime

against the State. I do not know whether this might not have been

rather to overstrain the principle. Certain it is, the best

patriots in the greatest commonwealths have always commanded and

promoted such connections. Idem sentire de republica, was with them

a principal ground of friendship and attachment; nor do I know any

other capable of forming firmer, dearer, more pleasing, more

honourable, and more virtuous habitudes. The Romans carried this

principle a great way. Even the holding of offices together, the

disposition of which arose from chance, not selection, gave rise to

a relation which continued for life. It was called necessitudo

sortis; and it was looked upon with a sacred reverence. Breaches of

any of these kinds of civil relation were considered as acts of the

most distinguished turpitude. The whole people was distributed into

political societies, in which they acted in support of such

interests in the State as they severally affected. For it was then

thought no crime, to endeavour by every honest means to advance to

superiority and power those of your own sentiments and opinions.

This wise people was far from imagining that those connections had

no tie, and obliged to no duty; but that men might quit them without

shame, upon every call of interest. They believed private honour to

be the great foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean

step towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of

life, showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to

act in a public situation, might probably consult some other

interest than his own. Never may we become plus sages que les

sages, as the French comedian has happily expressed it--wiser than

all the wise and good men who have lived before us. It was their

wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring,

and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of

one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally

supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate periods of

our history this country was governed by a connection; I mean the

great connection of Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne. They were

complimented upon the principle of this connection by a poet who was

in high esteem with them. Addison, who knew their sentiments, could

not praise them for what they considered as no proper subject of

commendation. As a poet who knew his business, he could not applaud

them for a thing which in general estimation was not highly

reputable. Addressing himself to Britain,

"Thy favourites grow not up by fortune's sport,

Or from the crimes or follies of a Court;

On the firm basis of desert they rise,

From long-tried faith, and friendship's holy ties."

The Whigs of those days believed that the only proper method of

rising into power was through bard essays of practised friendship

and experimented fidelity. At that time it was not imagined that

patriotism was a bloody idol, which required the sacrifice of

children and parents, or dearest connections in private life, and of

all the virtues that rise from those relations. They were not of

that ingenious paradoxical morality to imagine that a spirit of

moderation was properly shown in patiently bearing the sufferings of

your friends, or that disinterestedness was clearly manifested at

the expense of other people's fortune. They believed that no men

could act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could

act in concert who did not act with confidence; that no men could

act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions,

common affections, and common interests.

These wise men, for such I must call Lord Sunderland, Lord

Godolphin, Lord Somers, and Lord Marlborough, were too well

principled in these maxims, upon which the whole fabric of public

strength is built, to be blown off their ground by the breath of

every childish talker. They were not afraid that they should be

called an ambitious Junto, or that their resolution to stand or fall

together should, by placemen, be interpreted into a scuffle for

places.

Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint

endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in

which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to

conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them

to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them

reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative

philosopher to mark the proper ends of Government. It is the

business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to

find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with

effect. Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as

their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who

hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to

carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and

authority of the State. As this power is attached to certain

situations, it is their duty to contend for these situations.

Without a proscription of others, they are bound to give to their

own party the preference in all things, and by no means, for private

considerations, to accept any offers of power in which the whole

body is not included, nor to suffer themselves to be led, or to be

controlled, or to be over-balanced, in office or in council, by

those who contradict, the very fundamental principles on which their

party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection

must stand. Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and

honourable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and

interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such

persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless

impostors who have deluded the ignorant with professions

incompatible with human practice, and have afterwards incensed them

by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their

maxims have a plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to

first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current

as copper coin, and about as valuable. They serve equally the first

capacities and the lowest, and they are, at least, as useful to the

worst men as the best. Of this stamp is the cant of NOT MEN, BUT

MEASURES; a sort of charm, by which many people got loose from every

honourable engagement. When I see a man acting this desultory and

disconnected part, with as much detriment to his own fortune as

prejudice to the cause of any party, I am not persuaded that he is

right, but I am ready to believe he is in earnest. I respect virtue

in all its situations, even when it is found in the unsuitable

company of weakness. I lament to see qualities, rare and valuable,

squandered away without any public utility. But when a gentleman

with great visible emoluments abandons the party in which he has

long acted, and tells you it is because he proceeds upon his own

judgment that he acts on the merits of the several measures as they

arise, and that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, and not

that of others, he gives reasons which it is impossible to

controvert, and discovers a character which it is impossible to

mistake. What shall we think of him who never differed from a

certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who

never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards? Would not

such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate?

Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice that a man's

connections should degenerate into faction, precisely at the

critical moment when they lose their power or he accepts a place?

When people desert their connections, the desertion is a manifest

fact, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men.

Whether a MEASURE of Government be right or wrong is NO MATTER OF

FACT, but a mere affair of opinion, on which men may, as they do,

dispute and wrangle without end. But whether the individual thinks

the measure right or wrong is a point at still a greater distance

from the reach of all human decision. It is therefore very

convenient to politicians not to put the judgment of their conduct

on overt acts, cognisable in any ordinary court, but upon such a

matter as can be triable only in that secret tribunal, where they

are sure of being heard with favour, or where at worst the sentence

will be only private whipping.

I believe the reader would wish to find no substance in a doctrine

which has a tendency to destroy all test of character as deduced

from conduct. He will therefore excuse my adding something more

towards the further clearing up a point which the great convenience

of obscurity to dishonesty has been able to cover with some degree

of darkness and doubt.

In order to throw an odium on political connection, these

politicians suppose it a necessary incident to it that you are

blindly to follow the opinions of your party when in direct

opposition to your own clear ideas, a degree of servitude that no

worthy man could bear the thought of submitting to, and such as, I

believe, no connections (except some Court factions) ever could be

so senselessly tyrannical as to impose. Men thinking freely will,

in particular instances, think differently. But still, as the

greater Part of the measures which arise in the course of public

business are related to, or dependent on, some great leading general

principles in Government, a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in

the choice of his political company if he does not agree with them

at least nine times in ten. If he does not concur in these general

principles upon which the party is founded, and which necessarily

draw on a concurrence in their application, he ought from the

beginning to have chosen some other, more conformable to his

opinions. When the question is in its nature doubtful, or not very

material, the modesty which becomes an individual, and (in spite of

our Court moralists) that partiality which becomes a well-chosen

friendship, will frequently bring on an acquiescence in the general

sentiment. Thus the disagreement will naturally be rare; it will be

only enough to indulge freedom, without violating concord or

disturbing arrangement. And this is all that ever was required for

a character of the greatest uniformity and steadiness in connection.

How men can proceed without any connection at all is to me utterly

incomprehensible. Of what sort of materials must that man be made,

how must he be tempered and put together, who can sit whole years in

Parliament, with five hundred and fifty of his fellow-citizens,

amidst the storm of such tempestuous passions, in the sharp conflict

of so many wits, and tempers, and characters, in the agitation of

such mighty questions, in the discussion of such vast and ponderous

interests, without seeing any one sort of men, whose character,

conduct, or disposition would lead him to associate himself with

them, to aid and be aided, in any one system of public utility?

I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says that "the man who

lives wholly detached from others must be either an angel or a

devil." When I see in any of these detached gentlemen of our times

the angelic purity, power, and beneficence, I shall admit them to be

angels. In the meantime, we are born only to be men. We shall do

enough if we form ourselves to be good ones. It is therefore our

business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most

perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest

feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the, dispositions that

are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the

commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget we are gentlemen.

To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities. To have both

strong, but both selected: in the one, to be placable; in the

other, immovable. To model our principles to our duties and our

situation. To be fully persuaded that all virtue which is

impracticable is spurious, and rather to run the risk of falling

into faults in a course which leads us to act with effect and energy

than to loiter out our days without blame and without use. Public

life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his

duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the

enemy.

There is, however, a time for all things. It is not every

conjuncture which calls with equal force upon the activity of honest

men; but critical exigences now and then arise, and I am mistaken if

this be not one of them. Men will see the necessity of honest

combination, but they may see it when it is too late. They may

embody when it will be ruinous to themselves, and of no advantage to

the country; when, for want of such a timely union as may enable

them to oppose in favour of the laws, with the laws on their side,

they may at length find themselves under the necessity of

conspiring, instead of consulting. The law, for which they stand,

may become a weapon in the hands of its bitterest enemies; and they

will be cast, at length, into that miserable alternative, between

slavery and civil confusion, which no good man can look upon without

horror, an alternative in which it is impossible he should take

either part with a conscience perfectly at repose. To keep that

situation of guilt and remorse at the utmost distance is, therefore,

our first obligation. Early activity may prevent late and fruitless

violence. As yet we work in the light. The scheme of the enemies

of public tranquillity has disarranged, it has not destroyed us.

If the reader believes that there really exists such a Faction as I

have described, a Faction ruling by the private inclinations of a

Court, against the general sense of the people; and that this

Faction, whilst it pursues a scheme for undermining all the

foundations of our freedom, weakens (for the present at least) all

the powers of executory Government, rendering us abroad

contemptible, and at home distracted; he will believe, also, that

nothing but a firm combination of public men against this body, and

that, too, supported by the hearty concurrence of the people at

large, can possibly get the better of it. The people will see the

necessity of restoring public men to an attention to the public

opinion, and of restoring the Constitution to its original

principles. Above all, they will endeavour to keep the House of

Commons from assuming a character which does not belong to it. They

will endeavour to keep that House, for its existence for its powers,

and its privileges, as independent of every other, and as dependent

upon themselves, as possible. This servitude is to a House of

Commons (like obedience to the Divine law), "perfect freedom." For

if they once quit this natural, rational, and liberal obedience,

having deserted the only proper foundation of their power, they must

seek a support in an abject and unnatural dependence somewhere else.

When, through the medium of this just connection with their

constituents, the genuine dignity of the House of Commons is

restored, it will begin to think of casting from it, with scorn, as

badges of servility, all the false ornaments of illegal power, with

which it has been, for some time, disgraced. It will begin to think

of its old office of CONTROL. It will not suffer that last of evils

to predominate in the country; men without popular confidence,

public opinion, natural connection, or natural trust, invested with

all the powers of Government.

When they have learned this lesson themselves, they will be willing

and able to teach the Court, that it is the true interest of the

Prince to have but one Administration; and that one composed of

those who recommend themselves to their Sovereign through the

opinion of their country, and not by their obsequiousness to a

favourite. Such men will serve their Sovereign with affection and

fidelity; because his choice of them, upon such principles, is a

compliment to their virtue. They will be able to serve him

effectually; because they will add the weight of the country to the

force of the executory power. They will be able to serve their King

with dignity; because they will never abuse his name to the

gratification of their private spleen or avarice. This, with

allowances for human frailty, may probably be the general character

of a Ministry, which thinks itself accountable to the House of

Commons, when the House of Commons thinks itself accountable to its

constituents. If other ideas should prevail, things must remain in

their present confusion, until they are hurried into all the rage of

civil violence; or until they sink into the dead repose of

despotism.

SPEECH ON THE MIDDLESEX ELECTION

FEBRUARY, 1771

Mr. Speaker,--In every complicated Constitution (and every free

Constitution is complicated) cases will arise, when the several

orders of the State will clash with one another, and disputes will

arise about the limits of their several rights and privileges. It

may be almost impossible to reconcile them.

Carry the principle on by which you expelled Mr. Wilkes, there is

not a man in the House, hardly a man in the nation, who may not be

disqualified. That this House should have no power of expulsion is

a hard saying. That this House should have a general discretionary

power of disqualification is a dangerous saying. That the people

should not choose their own representative, is a saying that shakes

the Constitution. That this House should name the representative,

is a saying which, followed by practice, subverts the constitution.

They have the right of electing, you have a right of expelling; they

of choosing, you of judging, and only of judging, of the choice.

What bounds shall be set to the freedom of that choice? Their right

is prior to ours, we all originate there. They are the mortal

enemies of the House of Commons, who would persuade them to think or

to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of

the people and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. Under

a pretence of exalting the dignity, they undermine the very

foundations of this House. When the question is asked here, what

disturbs the people, whence all this clamour, we apply to the

treasury-bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of libellers

and the wickedness of the people, a worn-out ministerial pretence.

If abroad the people are deceived by popular, within we are deluded

by ministerial, cant. The question amounts to this, whether you

mean to be a legal tribunal, or an arbitrary and despotic assembly.

I see and I feel the delicacy and difficulty of the ground upon

which we stand in this question. I could wish, indeed, that they

who advised the Crown had not left Parliament in this very

ungraceful distress, in which they can neither retract with dignity

nor persist with justice. Another parliament might have satisfied

the people without lowering themselves. But our situation is not in

our own choice: our conduct in that situation is all that is in our

own option. The substance of the question is, to put bounds to your

own power by the rules and principles of law. This is, I am

sensible, a difficult thing to the corrupt, grasping, and ambitious

part of human nature. But the very difficulty argues and enforces

the necessity of it. First, because the greater the power, the more

dangerous the abuse. Since the Revolution, at least, the power of

the nation has all flowed with a full tide into the House of

Commons. Secondly, because the House of Commons, as it is the most

powerful, is the most corruptible part of the whole Constitution.

Our public wounds cannot be concealed; to be cured, they must be

laid open. The public does think we are a corrupt body. In our

legislative capacity we are, in most instances, esteemed a very wise

body. In our judicial, we have no credit, no character at, all.

Our judgments stink in the nostrils of the people. They think us to

be not only without virtue, but without shame. Therefore, the

greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of our

corruptibility and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some

bound, to plant some landmark, which we are never to exceed. That

is what the bill proposes. First, on this head, I lay it down as a

fundamental rule in the law and constitution of this country, that

this House has not by itself alone a legislative authority in any

case whatsoever. I know that the contrary was the doctrine of the

usurping House of Commons which threw down the fences and bulwarks

of law, which annihilated first the lords, then the Crown, then its

constituents. But the first thing that was done on the restoration

of the Constitution was to settle this point. Secondly, I lay it

down as a rule, that the power of occasional incapacitation, on

discretionary grounds, is a legislative power. In order to

establish this principle, if it should not be sufficiently proved by

being stated, tell me what are the criteria, the characteristics, by

which you distinguish between a legislative and a juridical act. It

will be necessary to state, shortly, the difference between a

legislative and a juridical act. A legislative act has no reference

to any rule but these two: original justice, and discretionary

application. Therefore, it can give rights; rights where no rights

existed before; and it can take away rights where they were before

established. For the law, which binds all others, does not and

cannot bind the law-maker; he, and he alone, is above the law. But

a judge, a person exercising a judicial capacity, is neither to

apply to original justice, nor to a discretionary application of it.

He goes to justice and discretion only at second hand, and through

the medium of some superiors. He is to work neither upon his

opinion of the one nor of the other; but upon a fixed rule, of which

he has not the making, but singly and solely the application to the

case.

The power assumed by the House neither is, nor can be, judicial

power exercised according to known law. The properties of law are,

first, that it should be known; secondly, that it should be fixed

and not occasional. First, this power cannot be according to the

first property of law; because no man does or can know it, nor do

you yourselves know upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity

of any man. No man in Westminster Hall, or in any court upon earth,

will say that is law, upon which, if a man going to his counsel

should say to him, "What is my tenure in law of this estate?" he

would answer, "Truly, sir, I know not; the court has no rule but its

own discretion: they will determine." It is not a, fixed law,

because you profess you vary it according to the occasion, exercise

it according to your discretion; no man can call for it as a right.

It is argued that the incapacity is not originally voted, but a

consequence of a power of expulsion: but if you expel, not upon

legal, but upon arbitrary, that is, upon discretionary grounds, and

the incapacity is ex vi termini and inclusively comprehended in the

expulsion, is not the incapacity voted in the expulsion? Are they

not convertible terms? and, if incapacity is voted to be inherent in

expulsion, if expulsion be arbitrary, incapacity is arbitrary also.

I have, therefore, shown that the power of incapacitation is a

legislative power; I have shown that legislative power does not

belong to the House of Commons; and, therefore, it follows that the

House of Commons has not a power of incapacitation.

I know not the origin of the House of Commons, but am very sure that

it did not create itself; the electors wore prior to the elected;

whose rights originated either from the people at large, or from

some other form of legislature, which never could intend for the

chosen a power of superseding the choosers.

If you have not a power of declaring an incapacity simply by the

mere act of declaring it, it is evident to the most ordinary reason

you cannot have a right of expulsion, inferring, or rather,

including, an incapacity, For as the law, when it gives any direct

right, gives also as necessary incidents all the means of acquiring

the possession of that right, so where it does not give a right

directly, it refuses all the means by which such a right may by any

mediums be exercised, or in effect be indirectly acquired. Else it

is very obvious that the intention of the law in refusing that right

might be entirely frustrated, and the whole power of the legislature

baffled. If there be no certain invariable rule of eligibility, it

were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had; and to

resolve all the franchises of the subject into this one short

proposition--the will and pleasure of the House of Commons.

The argument, drawn from the courts of law, applying the principles

of law to new cases as they emerge, is altogether frivolous,

inapplicable, and arises from a total ignorance of the bounds

between civil and criminal jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims

that govern these two provinces of law, that are eternally separate.

Undoubtedly the courts of law, where a new case comes before them,

as they do every hour, then, that there may be no defect in justice,

call in similar principles, and the example of the nearest

determination, and do everything to draw the law to as near a

conformity to general equity and right reason as they can bring it

with its being a fixed principle. Boni judicis est ampliare

justitiam--that is, to make open and liberal justice. But in

criminal matters this parity of reason, and these analogies, ever

have been, and ever ought to be, shunned.

Whatever is incident to a court of judicature, is necessary to the

House of Commons, as judging in elections. But a power of making

incapacities is not necessary to a court of judicature; therefore a

power of making incapacities is not necessary to the House of

Commons.

Incapacity, declared by whatever authority, stands upon two

principles: first, an incapacity arising from the supposed

incongruity of two duties in the commonwealth; secondly, an

incapacity arising from unfitness by infirmity of nature, or the

criminality of conduct. As to the first class of incapacities, they

have no hardship annexed to them. The persons so incapacitated are

paid by one dignity for what they abandon in another, and, for the

most part, the situation arises from their own choice. But as to

the second, arising from an unfitness not fixed by nature, but

superinduced by some positive acts, or arising from honourable

motives, such as an occasional personal disability, of all things it

ought to be defined by the fixed rule of law--what Lord Coke calls

the Golden Metwand of the Law, and not by the crooked cord of

discretion. Whatever is general is better born. We take our common

lot with men of the same description. But to be selected and marked

out by a particular brand of unworthiness among our fellow-citizens,

is a lot of all others the hardest to be borne: and consequently is

of all others that act which ought only to be trusted to the

legislature, as not only legislative in its nature, but of all parts

of legislature the most odious. The question is over, if this is

shown not to be a legislative act. But what is very usual and

natural, is to corrupt judicature into legislature. On this point

it is proper to inquire whether a court of judicature, which decides

without appeal, has it as a necessary incident of such judicature,

that whatever it decides de jure is law. Nobody will, I hope,

assert this, because the direct consequence would be the entire

extinction of the difference between true and false judgments. For,

if the judgment makes the law, and not the law directs the judgment,

it is impossible there could be such a thing as an illegal judgment

given.

But, instead of standing upon this ground, they introduce another

question, wholly foreign to it, whether it ought not to be submitted

to as if it were law. And then the question is, By the Constitution

of this country, what degree of submission is due to the

authoritative acts of a limited power? This question of submission,

determine it how you please, has nothing to do in this discussion

and in this House. Here it is not how long the people are bound to

tolerate the illegality of our judgments, but whether we have a

right to substitute our occasional opinion in the place of law, so

as to deprive the citizen of his franchise.

SPEECH ON THE POWERS OF JURIES IN PROSECUTIONS FOR LIBELS

MARCH, 1771

I have always understood that a superintendence over the doctrines,

as well as the proceedings, of the courts of justice, was a

principal object of the constitution of this House; that you were to

watch at once over the lawyer and the law; that there should he an

orthodox faith as well as proper works: and I have always looked

with a degree of reverence and admiration on this mode of

superintendence. For being totally disengaged from the detail of

juridical practice, we come to something, perhaps, the better

qualified, and certainly much the better disposed to assert the

genuine principle of the laws; in which we can, as a body, have no

other than an enlarged and a public interest. We have no common

cause of a professional attachment, or professional emulations, to

bias our minds; we have no foregone opinions, which, from obstinacy

and false point of honour, we think ourselves at all events obliged

to support. So that with our own minds perfectly disengaged from

the exercise, we may superintend the execution of the national

justice; which from this circumstance is better secured to the

people than in any other country under heaven it can be. As our

situation puts us in a proper condition, our power enables us to

execute this trust. We may, when we see cause of complaint,

administer a remedy; it is in our choice by an address to remove an

improper judge, by impeachment before the peers to pursue to

destruction a corrupt judge, or by bill to assert, to explain, to

enforce, or to reform the law, just as the occasion and necessity of

the case shall guide us. We stand in a situation very honourable to

ourselves, and very useful to our country, if we do not abuse or

abandon the trust that is placed in us.

The question now before you is upon the power of juries in

prosecuting for libels. There are four opinions. 1. That the

doctrine as held by the courts is proper and constitutional, and

therefore should not be altered. 2. That it is neither proper nor

constitutional, but that it will be rendered worse by your

interference. 3. That it is wrong, but that the only remedy is a

bill of retrospect. 4. The opinion of those who bring in the bill;

that the thing is wrong, but that it is enough to direct the

judgment of the court in future.

The bill brought in is for the purpose of asserting and securing a

great object in the juridical constitution of this kingdom; which,

from a long series of practices and opinions in our judges, has, in

one point, and in one very essential point, deviated from the true

principle.

It is the very ancient privilege of the people of England that they

shall be tried, except in the known exceptions, not by judges

appointed by the Crown, but by their own fellow-subjects, the peers

of that county court at which they owe their suit and service; out

of this principle trial by juries has grown. This principle has

not, that I can find, been contested in any case, by any authority

whatsoever; but there is one case, in which, without directly

contesting the principle, the whole substance, energy, acid virtue

of the privilege, is taken out of it; that is, in the case of a

trial by indictment or information for libel. The doctrine in that

case laid down by several judges amounts to this, that the jury have

no competence where a libel is alleged, except to find the gross

corporeal facts of the writing and the publication, together with

the identity of the things and persons to which it refers; but that

the intent and the tendency of the work, in which intent and

tendency the whole criminality consists, is the sole and exclusive

province of the judge. Thus having reduced the jury to the

cognisance of facts, not in themselves presumptively criminal, but

actions neutral and indifferent the whole matter, in which the

subject has any concern or interest, is taken out of the hands of

the jury: and if the jury take more upon themselves, what they so

take is contrary to their duty; it is no moral, but a merely natural

power; the same, by which they may do any other improper act, the

same, by which they may even prejudice themselves with regard to any

other part of the issue before them. Such is the matter as it now

stands, in possession of your highest criminal courts, handed down

to them from very respectable legal ancestors. If this can once be

established in this case, the application in principle to other

cases will be easy; and the practice will run upon a descent, until

the progress of an encroaching jurisdiction (for it is in its nature

to encroach, when once it has passed its limits) coming to confine

the juries, case after case, to the corporeal fact, and to that

alone, and excluding the intention of mind, the only source of merit

and demerit, of reward or punishment, juries become a dead letter in

the constitution.

For which reason it is high time to take this matter into the

consideration of Parliament, and for that purpose it will be

necessary to examine, first, whether there is anything in the

peculiar nature of this crime that makes it necessary to exclude the

jury from considering the intention in it, more than in others. So

far from it, that I take it to be much less so from the analogy of

other criminal cases, where no such restraint is ordinarily put upon

them. The act of homicide is prima facie criminal. The intention

is afterwards to appear, for the jury to acquit or condemn. In

burglary do they insist that the jury have nothing to do but to find

the taking of goods, and that, if they do, they must necessarily

find the party guilty, and leave the rest to the judge; and that

they have nothing to do with the word felonice in the indictment?

The next point is to consider it as a question of constitutional

policy, that is, whether the decision of the question of libel ought

to be left to the judges as a presumption of law, rather than to the

jury as matter of popular judgment, as the malice in the case of

murder, the felony in the case of stealing. If the intent and

tendency are not matters within the province of popular judgment,

but legal and technical conclusions, formed upon general principles

of law, let us see what they are. Certainly they are most

unfavourable, indeed, totally adverse, to the Constitution of this

country.

Here we must have recourse to analogies, for we cannot argue on

ruled cases one way or the other. See the history. The old books,

deficient in general in Crown cases furnish us with little on this

head. As to the crime, in the very early Saxon Law, I see an

offence of this species, called Folk-leasing, made a capital

offence, but no very precise definition of the crime, and no trial

at all: see the statute of 3rd Edward I. cap. 34. The law of

libels could not have arrived at a very early period in this

country. It is no wonder that we find no vestige of any

constitution from authority, or of any deductions from legal science

in our old books and records upon that subject. The statute of

scandalum magnatum is the oldest that I know, and this goes but a

little way in this sort of learning. Libelling is not the crime of

an illiterate people. When they were thought no mean clerks who

could read and write, when he who could read and write was

presumptively a person in holy orders, libels could not be general

or dangerous; and scandals merely oral could spread little, and must

perish soon. It is writing, it is printing more emphatically, that

imps calumny with those eagle wings, on which, as the poet says,

"immortal slanders fly." By the press they spread, they last, they

leave the sting in the wound. Printing was not known in England

much earlier than the reign of Henry VII., and in the third year of

that reign the Court of Star Chamber was established. The press and

its enemy are nearly coeval. As no positive law against libels

existed, they fell under the indefinite class of misdemeanours. For

the trial of misdemeanours that court was instituted, their tendency

to produce riots and disorders was a main part of the charge, and

was laid, in order to give the court jurisdiction chiefly against

libels. The offence was new. Learning of their own upon the

subject they had none, and they were obliged to resort to the only

emporium where it was to be had, the Roman Law. After the Star

Chamber was abolished in the 10th of Charles I. its authority indeed

ceased, but its maxims subsisted and survived it. The spirit of the

Star Chamber has transmigrated and lived again, and Westminster Hall

was obliged to borrow from the Star Chamber, for the same reasons as

the Star Chamber had borrowed from the Roman Forum, because they had

no law, statute, or tradition of their own. Thus the Roman Law took

possession of our courts, I mean its doctrine, not its sanctions;

the severity of capital punishment was omitted, all the rest

remained. The grounds of these laws are just and equitable.

Undoubtedly the good fame of every man ought to be under the

protection of the laws as well as his life, and liberty, and

property. Good fame is an outwork, that defends them all, and

renders them all valuable. The law forbids you to revenge; when it

ties up the hands of some, it ought to restrain the tongues of

others. The good fame of government is the same, it ought not to be

traduced. This is necessary in all government, and if opinion be

support, what takes away this destroys that support; but the liberty

of the press is necessary to this government.

The wisdom, however, of government is of more importance than the

laws. I should study the temper of the people before I ventured on

actions of this kind. I would consider the whole of the prosecution

of a libel of such importance as Junius, as one piece, as one

consistent plan of operations; and I would contrive it so that, if I

were defeated, I should not be disgraced; that even my victory

should not be more ignominious than my defeat; I would so manage,

that the lowest in the predicament of guilt should not be the only

one in punishment. I would not inform against the mere vender of a

collection of pamphlets. I would not put him to trial first, if I

could possibly avoid it. I would rather stand the consequences of

my first error, than carry it to a judgment that must disgrace my

prosecution, or the court. We ought to examine these things in a

manner which becomes ourselves, and becomes the object of the

inquiry; not to examine into the most important consideration which

can come before us, with minds heated with prejudice and filled with

passions, with vain popular opinions and humours, and when we

propose to examine into the justice of others, to be unjust

ourselves.

An inquiry is wished, as the most effectual way of putting an end to

the clamours and libels, which are the disorder and disgrace of the

times. For people remain quiet, they sleep secure, when they

imagine that the vigilant eye of a censorial magistrate watches over

all the proceedings of judicature, and that the sacred fire of an

eternal constitutional jealousy, which is the guardian of liberty,

law, and justice, is alive night and day, and burning in this house.

But when the magistrate gives up his office and his duty, the people

assume it, and they inquire too much, and too irreverently, because

they think their representatives do not inquire at all.

We have in a libel, 1st. The writing. 2nd. The communication,

called by the lawyers the publication. 3rd. The application to

persons and facts. 4th. The intent and tendency. 5th. The

matter--diminution of fame. The law presumptions on all these are

in the communication. No intent can, make a defamatory publication

good, nothing can make it have a good tendency; truth is not

pleadable. Taken juridically, the foundation of these law

presumptions is not unjust; taken constitutionally, they are

ruinous, and tend to the total suppression of all publication. If

juries are confined to the fact, no writing which censures, however

justly, or however temperately, the conduct of administration, can

be unpunished. Therefore, if the intent and tendency be left to the

judge, as legal conclusions growing from the fact, you may depend

upon it you can have no public discussion of a public measure, which

is a point which even those who are most offended with the

licentiousness of the press (and it is very exorbitant, very

provoking) will hardly contend for.

So far as to the first opinion, that the doctrine is right and needs

no alteration. 2nd. The next is, that it is wrong, but that we are

not in a condition to help it. I admit, it is true, that there are

cases of a nature so delicate and complicated, that an Act of

Parliament on the subject may become a matter of great difficulty.

It sometimes cannot define with exactness, because the subject-

matter will not bear an exact definition. It may seem to take away

everything which it does not positively establish, and this might be

inconvenient; or it may seem vice versa to establish everything

which it does not expressly take away. It may be more advisable to

leave such matters to the enlightened discretion of a judge, awed by

a censorial House of Commons. But then it rests upon those who

object to a legislative interposition to prove these inconveniences

in the particular case before them. For it would be a most

dangerous, as it is a most idle and most groundless, conceit to

assume as a general principle, that the rights and liberties of the

subject are impaired by the care and attention of the legislature to

secure them. If so, very ill would the purchase of Magna Charta

have merited the deluge of blood, which was shed in order to have

the body of English privileges defined by a positive written law.

This charter, the inestimable monument of English freedom, so long

the boast and glory of this nation, would have been at once an

instrument of our servitude, and a monument of our folly, if this

principle were true. The thirty four confirmations would have been

only so many repetitions of their absurdity, so many new links in

the chain, and so many invalidations of their right.

You cannot open your statute book without seeing positive provisions

relative to every right of the subject. This business of juries is

the subject of not fewer than a dozen. To suppose that juries are

something innate in the Constitution of Great Britain, that they

have jumped, like Minerva, out of the head of Jove in complete

armour, is a weak fancy, supported neither by precedent nor by

reason. Whatever is most ancient and venerable in our Constitution,

royal prerogative, privileges of parliament, rights of elections,

authority of courts, juries, must have been modelled according to

the occasion. I spare your patience, and I pay a compliment to your

understanding, in not attempting to prove that anything so elaborate

and artificial as a jury was not the work of chance, but a matter of

institution, brought to its present state by the joint efforts of

legislative authority and juridical prudence. It need not be

ashamed of being (what in many parts of it at least it is) the

offspring of an Act of Parliament, unless it is a shame for our laws

to be the results of our legislature. Juries, which sensitively

shrank from the rude touch of parliamentary remedy, have been the

subject of not fewer than, I think, forty-three Acts of Parliament,

in which they have been changed with all the authority of a creator

over its creature, from Magna Charta to the great alterations which

were made in the 29th of George II.

To talk of this matter in any other way is to turn a rational

principle into an idle and vulgar superstition, like the antiquary,

Dr. Woodward, who trembled to have his shield scoured, for fear it

should be discovered to be no better than an old pot-lid. This

species of tenderness to a jury puts me in mind of a gentleman of

good condition, who had been reduced to great poverty and distress;

application was made to some rich fellows in his neighbourhood to

give him some assistance; but they begged to be excused for fear of

affronting a person of his high birth; and so the poor gentleman was

left to starve out of pure respect to the antiquity of his family.

From this principle has risen an opinion that I find current amongst

gentlemen, that this distemper ought to be left to cure itself; that

the judges having been well exposed, and something terrified on

account of these clamours, will entirely change, if not very much

relax from their rigour; if the present race should not change, that

the chances of succession may put other more constitutional judges

in their place; lastly, if neither should happen, yet that the

spirit of an English jury will always be sufficient for the

vindication of its own rights, and will not suffer itself to be

overborne by the bench. I confess that I totally dissent from all

these opinions. These suppositions become the strongest reasons

with me to evince the necessity of some clear and positive

settlement of this question of contested jurisdiction. If judges

are so full of levity, so full of timidity, if they are influenced

by such mean and unworthy passions, that a popular clamour is

sufficient to shake the resolution they build upon the solid basis

of a legal principle, I would endeavour to fix that mercury by a

positive law. If to please an administration the judges can go one

way to-day, and to please the crowd they can go another to-morrow;

if they will oscillate backward and forward between power and

popularity, it is high time to fix the law in such a manner as to

resemble, as it ought, the great Author of all law, in "whom there

is no variableness nor shadow of turning."

As to their succession, I have just the same opinion. I would not

leave it to the chances of promotion, or to the characters of

lawyers, what the law of the land, what the rights of juries, or

what the liberty of the press should be. My law should not depend

upon the fluctuation of the closet, or the complexion of men.

Whether a black-haired man or a fair-haired man presided in the

Court of King's Bench, I would have the law the same: the same

whether he was born in domo regnatrice, and sucked from his infancy

the milk of courts, or was nurtured in the rugged discipline of a

popular opposition. This law of court cabal and of party, this mens

quaedam nullo perturbata affectu, this law of complexion, ought not

to be endured for a moment in a country whose being depends upon the

certainty, clearness, and stability of institutions.

Now I come to the last substitute for the proposed bill, the spirit

of juries operating their own jurisdiction. This, I confess, I

think the worst of all, for the same reasons on which I objected to

the others, and for other weighty reasons besides which are separate

and distinct. First, because juries, being taken at random out of a

mass of men infinitely large, must be of characters as various as

the body they arise from is large in its extent. If the judges

differ in their complexions, much more will a jury. A timid jury

will give way to an awful judge delivering oracularly the law, and

charging them on their oaths, and putting it home to their

consciences, to beware of judging where the law had given them no

competence. We know that they will do so, they have done so in a

hundred instances; a respectable member of your own house, no vulgar

man, tells you that on the authority of a judge he found a man

guilty, in whom, at the same time, he could find no guilt. But

supposing them full of knowledge and full of manly confidence in

themselves, how will their knowledge, or their confidence, inform or

inspirit others? They give no reason for their verdict, they can

but condemn or acquit; and no man can tell the motives on which they

have acquitted or condemned. So that this hope of the power of

juries to assert their own jurisdiction must be a principle blind,

as being without reason, and as changeable as the complexion of men

and the temper of the times.

But, after all, is it fit that this dishonourable contention between

the court and juries should subsist any longer? On what principle

is it that a jury refuses to be directed by the court as to his

competence? Whether a libel or no libel be a question of law or of

fact may be doubted, but a question of jurisdiction and competence

is certainly a question of law; on this the court ought undoubtedly

to judge, and to judge solely and exclusively. If they judge wrong

from excusable error, you ought to correct it, as to-day it is

proposed, by an explanatory bill; or if by corruption, by bill of

penalties declaratory, and by punishment. What does a juror say to

a judge when he refuses his opinion upon a question of judicature?

You are so corrupt, that I should consider myself a partaker of your

crime, were I to be guided by your opinion; or you are so grossly

ignorant, that I, fresh from my bounds, from my plough, my counter,

or my loom, am fit to direct you in your profession. This is an

unfitting, it is a dangerous, state of things. The spirit of any

sort of men is not a fit rule for deciding on the bounds of their

jurisdiction. First, because it is different in different men, and

even different in the same at different times; and can never become

the proper directing line of law; next, because it is not reason,

but feeling; and when once it is irritated, it is not apt to confine

itself within its proper limits. If it becomes, not difference in

opinion upon law, but a trial of spirit between parties, our courts

of law are no longer the temple of justice, but the amphitheatre for

gladiators. No--God forbid! Juries ought to take their law from

the bench only; but it is our business that they should hear nothing

from the bench but what is agreeable to the principles of the

Constitution. The jury are to hear the judge, the judge is to hear

the law where it speaks plain; where it does not, he is to hear the

legislature. As I do not think these opinions of the judges to be

agreeable to those principles, I wish to take the only method in

which they can or ought to be corrected, by bill.

Next, my opinion is, that it ought to be rather by a bill for

removing controversies than by a bill in the state of manifest and

express declaration, and in words de praeterito. I do this upon

reasons of equity and constitutional policy. I do not want to

censure the present judges. I think them to be excused for their

error. Ignorance is no excuse for a judge: it is changing the

nature of his crime--it is not absolving. It must be such error as

a wise and conscientious judge may possibly fall into, and must

arise from one or both these causes: first, a plausible principle

of law; secondly, the precedents of respectable authorities, and in

good times. In the first, the principle of law, that the judge is

to decide on law, the jury to decide on fact, is an ancient and

venerable principle and maxim of the law, and if supported in this

application by precedents of good times and of good men, the judge,

if wrong, ought to be corrected; he ought not to be reproved, or to

be disgraced, or the authority or respect to your tribunals to be

impaired. In cases in which declaratory bills have been made, where

by violence and corruption some fundamental part of the Constitution

has been struck at; where they would damn the principle, censure the

persons, and annul the acts; but where the law having been, by the

accident of human frailty, depraved, or in a particular instance

misunderstood, where you neither mean to rescind the acts, nor to

censure the persons, in such cases you have taken the explanatory

mode, and, without condemning what is done, you direct the future

judgment of the court.

All bills for the reformation of the law must be according to the

subject-matter, the circumstances, and the occasion, and are of four

kinds:- 1. Either the law is totally wanting, and then a new

enacting statute must be made to supply that want; or, 2. It is

defective, then a new law must be made to enforce it. 3. Or it is

opposed by power or fraud, and then an act must be made to declare

it. 4 Or it is rendered doubtful and controverted, and then a law

must be made to explain it. These must be applied according to the

exigence of the case; one is just as good as another of them.

Miserable, indeed, would be the resources, poor and unfurnished the

stores and magazines of legislation, if we were bound up to a little

narrow form, and not able to frame our acts of parliament according

to every disposition of our own minds, and to every possible

emergency of the commonwealth; to make them declaratory, enforcing,

explanatory, repealing, just in what mode, or in what degree we

please.

Those who think that the judges, living and dead, are to be

condemned, that your tribunals of justice are to be dishonoured,

that their acts and judgments on this business are to be rescinded,

they will undoubtedly vote against this bill, and for another sort.

I am not of the opinion of those gentlemen who are against

disturbing the public repose; I like a clamour whenever there is an

abuse. The fire-bell at midnight disturbs your sleep, but it keeps

you from being burned in your bed. The hue and cry alarms the

county, but it preserves all the property of the province. All

these clamours aim at redress. But a clamour made merely for the

purpose of rendering the people discontented with their situation,

without an endeavour to give them a practical remedy, is indeed one

of the worst acts of sedition.

I have read and heard much upon the conduct of our courts in the

business of libels. I was extremely willing to enter into, and very

free to act as facts should turn out on that inquiry, aiming

constantly at remedy as the end of all clamour, all debate, all

writing, and all inquiry; for which reason I did embrace, and do now

with joy, this method of giving quiet to the courts, jurisdiction to

juries, liberty to the press, and satisfaction to the people. I

thank my friends for what they have done; I hope the public will one

day reap the benefit of their pious and judicious endeavours. They

have now sown the seed; I hope they will live to see the flourishing

harvest. Their bill is sown in weakness; it will, I trust, be

reaped in power; and then, however, we shall have reason to apply to

them what my Lord Coke says was an aphorism continually in the mouth

of a great sage of the law, "Blessed be not the complaining tongue,

but blessed be the amending hand."

SPEECH ON A BILL FOR SHORTENING THE DURATION OF PARLIAMENTS

It is always to be lamented when men are driven to search into the

foundations of the commonwealth. It is certainly necessary to

resort to the theory of your government whenever you propose any

alteration in the frame of it, whether that alteration means the

revival of some former antiquated and forsaken constitution of

state, or the introduction of some new improvement in the

commonwealth. The object of our deliberation is, to promote the

good purposes for which elections have been instituted, and to

prevent their inconveniences. If we thought frequent elections

attended with no inconvenience, or with but a trifling

inconvenience, the strong overruling principle of the Constitution

would sweep us like a torrent towards them. But your remedy is to

be suited to your disease--your present disease, and to your whole

disease. That man thinks much too highly, and therefore he thinks

weakly and delusively, of any contrivance of human wisdom, who

believes that it can make any sort of approach to perfection. There

is not, there never was, a principle of government under heaven,

that does not, in the very pursuit of the good it proposes,

naturally and inevitably lead into some inconvenience, which makes

it absolutely necessary to counterwork and weaken the application of

that first principle itself; and to abandon something of the extent

of the advantage you proposed by it, in order to prevent also the

inconveniences which have arisen from the instrument of all the good

you had in view.

To govern according to the sense and agreeably to the interests of

the people is a great and glorious object of government. This

object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular

election, and popular election is a mighty evil. It is such, and so

great an evil, that though there are few nations whose monarchs were

not originally elective, very few are now elected. They are the

distempers of elections, that have destroyed all free states. To

cure these distempers is difficult, if not impossible; the only

thing therefore left to save the commonwealth is to prevent their

return too frequently. The objects in view are, to have parliaments

as frequent as they can be without distracting them in the

prosecution of public business; on one hand, to secure their

dependence upon the people, on the other to give them that quiet in

their minds, and that ease in their fortunes, as to enable them to

perform the most arduous and most painful duty in the world with

spirit, with efficiency, with independency, and with experience, as

real public counsellors, not as the canvassers at a perpetual

election. It is wise to compass as many good ends as possibly you

can, and seeing there are inconveniences on both sides, with

benefits on both, to give up a part of the benefit to soften the

inconvenience. The perfect cure is impracticable, because the

disorder is dear to those from whom alone the cure can possibly be

derived. The utmost to be done is to palliate, to mitigate, to

respite, to put off the evil day of the Constitution to its latest

possible hour, and may it be a very late one!

This bill, I fear, would precipitate one of two consequences, I know

not which most likely, or which most dangerous: either that the

Crown by its constant stated power, influence, and revenue, would

wear out all opposition in elections, or that a violent and furious

popular spirit would arise. I must see, to satisfy me, the

remedies; I must see, from their operation in the cure of the old

evil, and in the cure of those new evils, which are inseparable from

all remedies, how they balance each other, and what is the total

result. The excellence of mathematics and metaphysics is to have

but one thing before you, but he forms the best judgment in all

moral disquisitions, who has the greatest number and variety of

considerations, in one view before him, and can take them in with

the best possible consideration of the middle results of all.

We of the opposition, who are not friends to the bill, give this

pledge at least of our integrity and sincerity to the people, that

in our situation of systematic opposition to the present ministers,

in which all our hope of rendering it effectual depends upon popular

interest and favour, we will not flatter them by a surrender of our

uninfluenced judgment and opinion; we give a security, that if ever

we should be in another situation, no flattery to any other sort of

power and influence would induce us to act against the true

interests of the people.

All are agreed that parliaments should not be perpetual; the only

question is, what is the most convenient time for their duration?

On which there are three opinions. We are agreed, too, that the

term ought not to be chosen most likely in its operation to spread

corruption, and to augment the already overgrown influence of the

crown. On these principles I mean to debate the question. It is

easy to pretend a zeal for liberty. Those who think themselves not

likely to be encumbered with the performance of their promises,

either from their known inability, or total indifference about the

performance, never fail to entertain the most lofty ideas. They are

certainly the most specious, and they cost them neither reflection

to frame, nor pains to modify, nor management to support. The task

is of another nature to those who mean to promise nothing that it is

not in their intentions, or may possibly be in their power to

perform; to those who are bound and principled no more to delude the

understandings than to violate the liberty of their fellow-subjects.

Faithful watchmen we ought to be over the rights and privileges of

the people. But our duty, if we are qualified for it as we ought,

is to give them information, and not to receive it from them; we are

not to go to school to them to learn the principles of law and

government. In doing so we should not dutifully serve, but we

should basely and scandalously betray, the people, who are not

capable of this service by nature, nor in any instance called to it

by the Constitution. I reverentially look up to the opinion of the

people, and with an awe that is almost superstitious. I should be

ashamed to show my face before them, if I changed my ground, as they

cried up or cried down men, or things, or opinions; if I wavered and

shifted about with every change, and joined in it, or opposed, as

best answered any low interest or passion; if I held them up hopes,

which I knew I never intended, or promised what I well knew I could

not perform. Of all these things they are perfect sovereign judges

without appeal; but as to the detail of particular measures, or to

any general schemes of policy, they have neither enough of

speculation in the closet, nor of experience in business, to decide

upon it. They can well see whether we are tools of a court, or

their honest servants. Of that they can well judge; and I wish that

they always exercised their judgment; but of the particular merits

of a measure I have other standards. That the frequency of

elections proposed by this bill has a tendency to increase the power

and consideration of the electors, not lessen corruptibility, I do

most readily allow; so far as it is desirable, this is what it has;

I will tell you now what it has not: 1st. It has no sort of

tendency to increase their integrity and public spirit, unless an

increase of power has an operation upon voters in elections, that it

has in no other situation in the world, and upon no other part of

mankind. 2nd. This bill has no tendency to limit the quantity of

influence in the Crown, to render its operation more difficult, or

to counteract that operation, which it cannot prevent, in any way

whatsoever. It has its full weight, its full range, and its

uncontrolled operation on the electors exactly as it had before.

3rd. Nor, thirdly, does it abate the interest or inclination of

Ministers to apply that influence to the electors: on the contrary,

it renders it much more necessary to them, if they seek to have a

majority in parliament, to increase the means of that influence, and

redouble their diligence, and to sharpen dexterity in the

application. The whole effect of the bill is therefore the removing

the application of some part of the influence from the elected to

the electors, and further to strengthen and extend a court interest

already great and powerful in boroughs; here to fix their magazines

and places of arms, and thus to make them the principal, not the

secondary, theatre of their manoeuvres for securing a determined

majority in parliament.

I believe nobody will deny that the electors are corruptible. They

are men; it is saying nothing worse of them; many of them are but

ill-informed in their minds, many feeble in their circumstances,

easily over-reached, easily seduced. If they are many, the wages of

corruption are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a

contemptible and hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment,

to say that there is already no debauchery, no corruption, no

bribery, no perjury, no blind fury, and interested faction among the

electors in many parts of this kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at

all blamable, in that class of private men, when they see their

neighbours aggrandised, and themselves poor and virtuous, without

that eclat or dignity which attends men in higher stations.

But admit it were true that the great mass of the electors were too

vast an object for court influence to grasp, or extend to, and that

in despair they must abandon it; he must be very ignorant of the

state of every popular interest, who does not know that in all the

corporations, all the open boroughs--indeed, in every district of

the kingdom--there is some leading man, some agitator, some wealthy

merchant, or considerable manufacturer, some active attorney, some

popular preacher, some money-lender, &c., &c., who is followed by

the whole flock. This is the style of all free countries.

- Multum in Fabia valet hic, valet ille Velina;

Cuilibet hic fasces dabit eripietque curule.

These spirits, each of which informs and governs his own little orb,

are neither so many, nor so little powerful, nor so incorruptible,

but that a Minister may, as he does frequently, find means of

gaining them, and through them all their followers. To establish,

therefore, a very general influence among electors will no more be

found an impracticable project, than to gain an undue influence over

members of parliament. Therefore I am apprehensive that this bill,

though it shifts the place of the disorder, does by no means relieve

the Constitution. I went through almost every contested election in

the beginning of this parliament, and acted as a manager in very

many of them: by which, though at a school of pretty severe and

ragged discipline, I came to have some degree of instruction

concerning the means by which parliamentary interests are in general

procured and supported.

Theory, I know, would suppose, that every general election is to the

representative a day of judgment, in which he appears before his

constituents to account for the use of the talent with which they

entrusted him, and of the improvement he had made of it for the

public advantage. It would be so, if every corruptible

representative were to find an enlightened and incorruptible

constituent. But the practice and knowledge of the world will not

suffer us to be ignorant, that the Constitution on paper is one

thing, and in fact and experience is another. We must know that the

candidate, instead of trusting at his election to the testimony of

his behaviour in parliament, must bring the testimony of a large sum

of money, the capacity of liberal expense in entertainments, the

power of serving and obliging the rulers of corporations, of winning

over the popular leaders of political clubs, associations, and

neighbourhoods. It is ten thousand times more necessary to show

himself a man of power, than a man of integrity, in almost all the

elections with which I have been acquainted. Elections, therefore,

become a matter of heavy expense; and if contests are frequent, to

many they will become a matter of an expense totally ruinous, which

no fortunes can bear; but least of all the landed fortunes,

encumbered as they often, indeed as they mostly are, with debts,

with portions, with jointures; and tied up in the hands of the

possessor by the limitations of settlement. It is a material, it is

in my opinion a lasting, consideration, in all the questions

concerning election. Let no one think the charges of election a

trivial matter.

The charge, therefore, of elections ought never to be lost sight of,

in a question concerning their frequency, because the grand object

you seek is independence. Independence of mind will ever be more or

less influenced by independence of fortune; and if, every three

years, the exhausting sluices of entertainments, drinkings, open

houses, to say nothing of bribery, are to be periodically drawn up

and renewed--if government favours, for which now, in some shape or

other, the whole race of men are candidates, are to be called for

upon every occasion, I see that private fortunes will be washed

away, and every, even to the least, trace of independence, borne

down by the torrent. I do not seriously think this Constitution,

even to the wrecks of it, could survive five triennial elections.

If you are to fight the battle, you must put on the armour of the

Ministry; you must call in the public, to the aid of private, money.

The expense of the last election has been computed (and I am

persuaded that it has not been overrated) at 1,500,000 pounds; three

shillings in the pound more on the Land Tax. About the close of the

last Parliament, and the beginning of this, several agents for

boroughs went about, and I remember well that it was in every one of

their mouths--"Sir, your election will cost you three thousand

pounds, if you are independent; but if the Ministry supports you, it

may be done for two, and perhaps for less;" and, indeed, the thing

spoke itself. Where a living was to be got for one, a commission in

the army for another, a post in the navy for a third, and Custom-

house offices scattered about without measure or number, who doubts

but money may be saved? The Treasury may even add money; but,

indeed, it is superfluous. A gentleman of two thousand a year, who

meets another of the same fortune, fights with equal arms; but if to

one of the candidates you add a thousand a year in places for

himself, and a power of giving away as much among others, one must,

or there is no truth in arithmetical demonstration, ruin his

adversary, if he is to meet him and to fight with him every third

year. It will be said, I do not allow for the operation of

character; but I do; and I know it will have its weight in most

elections; perhaps it may be decisive in some. But there are few in

which it will prevent great expenses.

The destruction of independent fortunes will be the consequence on

the part of the candidate. What will be the consequence of

triennial corruption, triennial drunkenness, triennial idleness,

triennial law-suits, litigations, prosecutions, triennial frenzy; of

society dissolved, industry interrupted, ruined; of those personal

hatreds that will never be suffered to soften; those animosities and

feuds, which will be rendered immortal; those quarrels, which are

never to be appeased; morals vitiated and gangrened to the vitals?

I think no stable and useful advantages were ever made by the money

got at elections by the voter, but all he gets is doubly lost to the

public; it is money given to diminish the general stock of the

community, which is the industry of the subject. I am sure that it

is a good while before he or his family settle again to their

business. Their heads will never cool; the temptations of elections

will be for ever glittering before their eyes. They will all grow

politicians; every one, quitting his business, will choose to enrich

himself by his vote. They will take the gauging-rod; new places

will be made for them; they will run to the Custom-house quay, their

looms and ploughs will be deserted.

So was Rome destroyed by the disorders of continual elections,

though those of Rome were sober disorders. They had nothing but

faction, bribery, bread, and stage plays to debauch them. We have

the inflammation of liquor superadded, a fury hotter than any of

them. There the contest was only between citizen and citizen; here

you have the contests of ambitious citizens on one side, supported

by the Crown, to oppose to the efforts (let it be so) of private and

unsupported ambition on the other. Yet Rome was destroyed by the

frequency and charge of elections, and the monstrous expense of an

unremitted courtship to the people. I think, therefore, the

independent candidate and elector may each be destroyed by it, the

whole body of the community be an infinite sufferer, and a vicious

Ministry the only gainer. Gentlemen, I know, feel the weight of

this argument; they agree that this would be the consequence of more

frequent elections, if things were to continue as they are. But

they think the greatness and frequency of the evil would itself be a

remedy for it; that, sitting but for a short time, the member would

not find it worth while to make such vast expenses, while the fear

of their constituents will hold them the more effectually to their

duty.

To this I answer, that experience is full against them. This is no

new thing; we have had triennial parliaments; at no period of time

were seats more eagerly contested. The expenses of elections ran

higher, taking the state of all charges, than they do now. The

expense of entertainments was such, that an Act, equally severe and

ineffectual, was made against it; every monument of the time bears

witness of the expense, and most of the Acts against corruption in

elections were then made; all the writers talked of it and lamented

it. Will any one think that a corporation will be contented with a

bowl of punch, or a piece of beef the less, because elections are

every three, instead of every seven years? Will they change their

wine for ale, because they are to get more ale three years hence?

Do not think it. Will they make fewer demands for the advantages of

patronage in favours and offices, because their member is brought

more under their power? We have not only our own historical

experience in England upon this subject, but we have the experience

co-existing with us in Ireland, where, since their Parliament has

been shortened, the expense of elections has been so far from being

lowered that it has been very near doubled. Formerly they sat for

the king's life; the ordinary charge of a seat in Parliament was

then 1,500 pounds. They now sit eight years, four sessions: it is

now 2,500 pounds and upwards. The spirit of emulation has also been

extremely increased, and all who are acquainted with the tone of

that country have no doubt that the spirit is still growing, that

new candidates will take the field, that the contests will be more

violent, and the expenses of elections larger than ever.

It never can be otherwise. A seat in this House, for good purposes,

for bad purposes, for no purpose at all (except the mere

consideration derived from being concerned in the public councils)

will ever be a first-rate object of ambition in England. Ambition

is no exact calculator. Avarice itself does not calculate strictly

when it games. One thing is certain, that in this political game

the great lottery of power is that into which men will purchase with

millions of chances against them. In Turkey, where the place, where

the fortune, where the head itself, are so insecure, that scarcely

any have died in their beds for ages, so that the bowstring is the

natural death of Bashaws, yet in no country is power and distinction

(precarious enough, God knows, in all) sought for with such

boundless avidity, as if the value of place was enhanced by the

danger and insecurity of its tenure. Nothing will ever make a seat

in this House not an object of desire to numbers by any means or at

any charge, but the depriving it of all power and all dignity. This

would do it. This is the true and only nostrum for that purpose.

But a House of Commons without power and without dignity, either in

itself or its members, is no House of Commons for the purposes of

this Constitution.

But they will be afraid to act ill, if they know that the day of

their account is always near. I wish it were true, but it is not;

here again we have experience, and experience is against us. The

distemper of this age is a poverty of spirit and of genius; it is

trifling, it is futile, worse than ignorant, superficially taught,

with the politics and morals of girls at a boarding-school, rather

than of men and statesmen; but it is not yet desperately wicked, or

so scandalously venal as in former times. Did not a triennial

parliament give up the national dignity, approve the Peace of

Utrecht, and almost give up everything else in taking every step to

defeat the Protestant succession? Was not the Constitution saved by

those who had no election at all to go to, the Lords, because the

Court applied to electors, and by various means carried them from

their true interests; so that the Tory Ministry had a majority

without an application to a single member? Now, as to the conduct

of the members, it was then far from pure and independent. Bribery

was infinitely more flagrant. A predecessor of yours, Mr. Speaker,

put the question of his own expulsion for bribery. Sir William

Musgrave was a wise man, a grave man, an independent man, a man of

good fortune and good family; however, he carried on while in

opposition a traffic, a shameful traffic with the Ministry. Bishop

Burnet knew of 6,000 pounds which he had received at one payment. I

believe the payment of sums in hard money--plain, naked bribery--is

rare amongst us. It was then far from uncommon.

A triennial was near ruining, a septennial parliament saved, your

Constitution; nor perhaps have you ever known a more flourishing

period for the union of national prosperity, dignity, and liberty,

than the sixty years you have passed under that Constitution of

parliament.

The shortness of time, in which they are to reap the profits of

iniquity, is far from checking the avidity of corrupt men; it

renders them infinitely more ravenous. They rush violently and

precipitately on their object, they lose all regard to decorum. The

moments of profit are precious; never are men so wicked as during a

general mortality. It was so in the great plague at Athens, every

symptom of which (and this its worst amongst the rest) is so finely

related by a great historian of antiquity. It was so in the plague

of London in 1665. It appears in soldiers, sailors, &c. Whoever

would contrive to render the life of man much shorter than it is,

would, I am satisfied, find the surest recipe for increasing the

wickedness of our nature.

Thus, in my opinion, the shortness of a triennial sitting would have

the following ill effects:- It would make the member more

shamelessly and shockingly corrupt, it would increase his dependence

on those who could best support him at his election, it would wrack

and tear to pieces the fortunes of those who stood upon their own

fortunes and their private interest, it would make the electors

infinitely more venal, and it would make the whole body of the

people, who are, whether they have votes or not, concerned in

elections, more lawless, more idle, more debauched; it would utterly

destroy the sobriety, the industry, the integrity, the simplicity of

all the people, and undermine, I am much afraid, the deepest and

best laid foundations of the commonwealth.

Those who have spoken and written upon this subject without doors,

do not so much deny the probable existence of these inconveniences

in their measure, as they trust for the prevention to remedies of

various sorts, which they propose. First, a place bill; but if this

will not do, as they fear it will not, then, they say, we will have

a rotation, and a certain number of you shall be rendered incapable

of being elected for ten years. Then, for the electors, they shall

ballot; the members of parliament also shall decide by ballot; and a

fifth project is the change of the present legal representation of

the kingdom. On all this I shall observe, that it will be very

unsuitable to your wisdom to adopt the project of a bill, to which

there are objections insuperable by anything in the bill itself,

upon the hope that those objections may be removed by subsequent

projects; every one of which is full of difficulties of its own, and

which are all of them very essential alterations in the

Constitution. This seems very irregular and unusual. If anything

should make this a very doubtful measure, what can make it more so

than that, in the opinion of its advocates, it would aggravate all

our old inconveniences in such a manner as to require a total

alteration in the Constitution of the kingdom? If the remedies are

proper in a triennial, they will not be less so in septennial

elections; let us try them first, see how the House relishes them,

see how they will operate in the nation; and then, having felt your

way, you will be prepared against these inconveniences.

The honourable gentleman sees that I respect the principle upon

which he goes, as well as his intentions and his abilities. He will

believe that I do not differ from him wantonly, and on trivial

grounds. He is very sure that it was not his embracing one way

which determined me to take the other. I have not, in newspapers,

to derogate from his fair fame with the nation, printed the first

rude sketch of his bill with ungenerous and invidious comments. I

have not, in conversations industriously circulated about the town,

and talked on the benches of this House, attributed his conduct to

motives low and unworthy, and as groundless as they are injurious.

I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some

hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back

again by every form of exorcism, and every kind of incantation. I

invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of his muddy

gulf. I do not tell the respectable mover and seconder, by a

perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition

halts between the ridiculous and the dangerous. I am not one of

those who start up three at a time, and fall upon and strike at him

with so much eagerness, that our daggers hack one another in his

sides. My honourable friend has not brought down a spirited imp of

chivalry, to win the first achievement and blazon of arms on his

milk-white shield in a field listed against him, nor brought out the

generous offspring of lions, and said to them, "Not against that

side of the forest, beware of that--here is the prey where you are

to fasten your paws;" and seasoning his unpractised jaws with blood,

tell him, "This is the milk for which you are to thirst hereafter."

We furnish at his expense no holiday, nor suspend hell that a crafty

Ixion may have rest from his wheel; nor give the common adversary,

if he be a common adversary, reason to say, "I would have put in my

word to oppose, but the eagerness of your allies in your social war

was such that I could not break in upon you." I hope he sees and

feels, and that every member sees and feels along with him, the

difference between amicable dissent and civil discord.

SPEECH ON REFORM OF REPRESENTATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

June, 1784

Mr. Speaker,--We have now discovered, at the close of the eighteenth

century, that the Constitution of England, which for a series of

ages had been the proud distinction of this country, always the

admiration, and sometimes the envy, of the wise and learned in every

other nation--we have discovered that this boasted Constitution, in

the most boasted part of it, is a gross imposition upon the

understanding of mankind, an insult to their feelings, and acting by

contrivances destructive to the best and most valuable interests of

the people. Our political architects have taken a survey of the

fabric of the British Constitution. It is singular that they report

nothing against the Crown, nothing against the Lords; but in the

House of Commons everything is unsound; it is ruinous in every part.

It is infested by the dry rot, and ready to tumble about our ears

without their immediate help. You know by the faults they find what

are their ideas of the alteration. As all government stands upon

opinion, they know that the way utterly to destroy it is to remove

that opinion, to take away all reverence, all confidence from it;

and then, at the first blast of public discontent and popular

tumult, it tumbles to the ground.

In considering this question, they who oppose it, oppose it on

different grounds; one is in the nature of a previous question--that

some alterations may be expedient, but that this is not the time for

making them. The other is, that no essential alterations are at all

wanting, and that neither now, nor at any time, is it prudent or

safe to be meddling with the fundamental principles and ancient

tried usages of our Constitution--that our representation is as

nearly perfect as the necessary imperfection of human affairs and of

human creatures will suffer it to be; and that it is a subject of

prudent and honest use and thankful enjoyment, and not of captious

criticism and rash experiment.

On the other side, there are two parties, who proceed on two

grounds--in my opinion, as they state them, utterly irreconcilable.

The one is juridical, the other political. The one is in the nature

of a claim of right, on the supposed rights of man as man; this

party desire the decision of a suit. The other ground, as far as I

can divine what it directly means, is, that the representation is

not so politically framed as to answer the theory of its

institution. As to the claim of right, the meanest petitioner, the

most gross and ignorant, is as good as the best; in some respects

his claim is more favourable on account of his ignorance; his

weakness, his poverty and distress only add to his titles; he sues

in forma pauperis: he ought to be a favourite of the Court. But

when the other ground is taken, when the question is political, when

a new Constitution is to be made on a sound theory of government,

then the presumptuous pride of didactic ignorance is to be excluded

from the council in this high and arduous matter, which often bids

defiance to the experience of the wisest. The first claims a

personal representation; the latter rejects it with scorn and

fervour. The language of the first party is plain and intelligible;

they who plead an absolute right, cannot be satisfied with anything

short of personal representation, because all natural rights must be

the rights of individuals: as by nature there is no such thing as

politic or corporate personality; all these ideas are mere fictions

of law, they are creatures of voluntary institution; men as men are

individuals, and nothing else. They, therefore, who reject the

principle of natural and personal representation, are essentially

and eternally at variance with those who claim it. As to the first

sort of reformers, it is ridiculous to talk to them of the British

Constitution upon any or all of its bases; for they lay it down,

that every man ought to govern himself, and that where he cannot go

himself he must send his representative; that all other government

is usurpation, and is so far from having a claim to our obedience,

that it is not only our right, but our duty, to resist it. Nine-

tenths of the reformers argue thus--that is, on the natural right.

It is impossible not to make some reflection on the nature of this

claim, or avoid a comparison between the extent of the principle and

the present object of the demand. If this claim be founded, it is

clear to what it goes. The House of Commons, in that light,

undoubtedly is no representative of the people as a collection of

individuals. Nobody pretends it, nobody can justify such an

assertion. When you come to examine into this claim of right,

founded on the right of self-government in each individual, you find

the thing demanded infinitely short of the principle of the demand.

What! one-third only of the legislature, of the government no share

at all? What sort of treaty of partition is this for those who have

no inherent right to the whole? Give them all they ask, and your

grant is still a cheat; for how comes only a third to be their

younger children's fortune in this settlement? How came they

neither to have the choice of kings, or lords, or judges, or

generals, or admirals, or bishops, or priests, or ministers, or

justices of peace? Why, what have you to answer in favour of the

prior rights of the Crown and peerage but this--our Constitution is

a proscriptive Constitution; it is a Constitution whose sole

authority is, that it has existed time out of mind. It is settled

in these two portions against one, legislatively; and in the whole

of the judicature, the whole of the federal capacity, of the

executive, the prudential and the financial administration, in one

alone. Nor were your House of Lords and the prerogatives of the

Crown settled on any adjudication in favour of natural rights, for

they could never be so portioned. Your king, your lords, your

judges, your juries, grand and little, all are prescriptive; and

what proves it is the disputes not yet concluded, and never near

becoming so, when any of them first originated. Prescription is the

most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to

secure that property, to government. They harmonise with each

other, and give mutual aid to one another. It is accompanied with

another ground of authority in the constitution of the human mind--

presumption. It is a presumption in favour of any settled scheme of

government against any untried project, that a nation has long

existed and flourished under it. It is a better presumption even of

the choice of a nation, far better than any sudden and temporary

arrangement by actual election. Because a nation is not an idea

only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation, but it

is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in

numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one

set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate

election of ages and of generations; it is a Constitution made by

what is ten thousand times better than choice--it is made by the

peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral,

civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves

only in a long space of time. It is a vestment, which accommodates

itself to the body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon

blind, unmeaning prejudices--for man is a most unwise, and a most

wise being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the

moment, are foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the

species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it

almost always acts right.

The reason for the Crown as it is, for the Lords as they are, is my

reason for the Commons as they are, the electors as they are. Now,

if the Crown and the Lords, and the judicatures, are all

prescriptive, so is the House of Commons of the very same origin,

and of no other. We and our electors have powers and privileges

both made and circumscribed by prescription, as much to the full as

the other parts; and as such we have always claimed them, and on no

other title. The House of Commons is a legislative body corporate

by prescription, not made upon any given theory, but existing

prescriptively--just like the rest. This prescription has made it

essentially what it is--an aggregate collection of three parts--

knights, citizens, burgesses. The question is, whether this has

been always so, since the House of Commons has taken its present

shape and circumstances, and has been an essential operative part of

the Constitution; which, I take it, it has been for at least five

hundred years.

This I resolve to myself in the affirmative: and then another

question arises; whether this House stands firm upon its ancient

foundations, and is not, by time and accidents, so declined from its

perpendicular as to want the hand of the wise and experienced

architects of the day to set it upright again, and to prop and

buttress it up for duration;--whether it continues true to the

principles upon which it has hitherto stood;--whether this be de

facto the Constitution of the House of Commons as it has been since

the time that the House of Commons has, without dispute, become a

necessary and an efficient part of the British Constitution? To ask

whether a thing, which has always been the same, stands to its usual

principle, seems to me to be perfectly absurd; for how do you know

the principles but from the construction? and if that remains the

same, the principles remain the same. It is true, that to say your

Constitution is what it has been, is no sufficient defence for those

who say it is a bad Constitution. It is an answer to those who say

that it is a degenerate Constitution. To those who say it is a bad

one, I answer, Look to its effects. In all moral machinery the

moral results are its test.

On what grounds do we go to restore our Constitution to what it has

been at some given period, or to reform and reconstruct it upon

principles more conformable to a sound theory of government? A

prescriptive government, such as ours, never was the work of any

legislator, never was made upon any foregone theory. It seems to me

a preposterous way of reasoning, and a perfect confusion of ideas,

to take the theories, which learned and speculative men have made

from that government, and then, supposing it made on these theories,

which were made from it, to accuse the government as not

corresponding with them. I do not vilify theory and speculation--

no, because that would be to vilify reason itself. "Neque decipitur

ratio, neque decipit unquam." No; whenever I speak against theory,

I mean always a weak, erroneous, fallacious, unfounded, or imperfect

theory; and one of the ways of discovering that it is a false theory

is by comparing it with practice. This is the true touchstone of

all theories which regard man and the affairs of men: Does it suit

his nature in general?--does it suit his nature as modified by his

habits?

The more frequently this affair is discussed, the stronger the case

appears to the sense and the feelings of mankind. I have no more

doubt than I entertain of my existence, that this very thing, which

is stated as a horrible thing, is the means of the preservation of

our Constitution whilst it lasts: of curing it of many of the

disorders which, attending every species of institution, would

attend the principle of an exact local representation, or a

representation on the principle of numbers. If you reject personal

representation, you are pushed upon expedience; and then what they

wish us to do is, to prefer their speculations on that subject to

the happy experience of this country of a growing liberty and a

growing prosperity for five hundred years. Whatever respect I have

for their talents, this, for one, I will not do. Then what is the

standard of expedience? Expedience is that which is good for the

community, and good for every individual in it. Now this expedience

is the desideratum to be sought, either without the experience of

means, or with that experience. If without, as in the case of the

fabrication of a new commonwealth, I will hear the learned arguing

what promises to be expedient; but if we are to judge of a

commonwealth actually existing, the first thing I inquire is, What

has been found expedient or inexpedient? And I will not take their

promise rather than the performance of the Constitution.

But no; this was not the cause of the discontents. I went through

most of the northern parts--the Yorkshire election was then raging;

the year before, through most of the western counties--Bath,

Bristol, Gloucester--not one word, either in the towns or country,

on the subject of representation; much on the receipt tax, something

on Mr. Fox's ambition; much greater apprehension of danger from

thence than from want of representation. One would think that the

ballast of the ship was shifted with us, and that our Constitution

had the gunnel under water. But can you fairly and distinctly point

out what one evil or grievance has happened, which you can refer to

the representative not following the opinion of his constituents?

What one symptom do we find of this inequality? But it is not an

arithmetical inequality with which we ought to trouble ourselves.

If there be a moral, a political equality, this is the desideratum

in our Constitution, and in every Constitution in the world. Moral

inequality is as between places and between classes. Now, I ask,

what advantage do you find, that the places which abound in

representation possess over others in which it is more scanty, in

security for freedom, in security for justice, or in any one of

those means of procuring temporal prosperity and eternal happiness,

the ends for which society was formed? Are the local interests of

Cornwall and Wiltshire, for instance--their roads, canals, their

prisons, their police--better than Yorkshire, Warwickshire, or

Staffordshire? Warwick has members; is Warwick or Stafford more

opulent, happy, or free, than Newcastle or than Birmingham? Is

Wiltshire the pampered favourite, whilst Yorkshire, like the child

of the bondwoman, is turned out to the desert? This is like the

unhappy persons who live, if they can be said to live, in the

statical chair; who are ever feeling their pulse, and who do not

judge of health by the aptitude of the body to perform its

functions, but by their ideas of what ought to be the true balance

between the several secretions. Is a committee of Cornwall, &c.,

thronged, and the others deserted? No. You have an equal

representation, because you have men equally interested in the

prosperity of the whole, who are involved in the general interest

and the general sympathy; and perhaps these places, furnishing a

superfluity of public agents and administrators (whether, in

strictness, they are representatives or not, I do not mean to

inquire, but they are agents and administrators), will stand clearer

of local interests, passions, prejudices, and cabals than the

others, and therefore preserve the balance of the parts, and with a

more general view and a more steady hand than the rest.

In every political proposal we must not leave out of the question

the political views and object of the proposer; and these we

discover, not by what he says, but by the principles he lays down.

"I mean," says he, "a moderate and temperate reform;" that is, "I

mean to do as little good as possible. If the Constitution be what

you represent it, and there be no danger in the change, you do wrong

not to make the reform commensurate to the abuse." Fine reformer,

indeed! generous donor! What is the cause of this parsimony of the

liberty which you dole out to the people? Why all this limitation

in giving blessings and benefits to mankind? You admit that there

is an extreme in liberty, which may be infinitely noxious to those

who are to receive it, and which in the end will leave them no

liberty at all. I think so too; they know it, and they feel it.

The question is, then, What is the standard of that extreme? What

that gentleman, and the associations, or some parts of their

phalanxes, think proper. Then our liberties are in their pleasure;

it depends on their arbitrary will how far I shall be free. I will

have none of that freedom. If, therefore, the standard of

moderation be sought for, I will seek for it. Where? Not in their

fancies, nor in my own: I will seek for it where I know it is to be

found--in the Constitution I actually enjoy. Here it says to an

encroaching prerogative--"Your sceptre has its length; you cannot

add a hair to your head, or a gem to your crown, but what an eternal

law has given to it." Here it says to an overweening peerage--"Your

pride finds banks that it cannot overflow;" here to a tumultuous and

giddy people--"There is a bound to the raging of the sea." Our

Constitution is like our island, which uses and restrains its

subject sea; in vain the waves roar. In that Constitution I know,

and exultingly I feel, both that I am free and that I am not free

dangerously to myself or to others. I know that no power on earth,

acting as I ought to do, can touch my life, my liberty, or my

property. I have that inward and dignified consciousness of my own

security and independence, which constitutes, and is the only thing

which does constitute, the proud and comfortable sentiment of

freedom in the human breast. I know, too, and I bless God for my

safe mediocrity; I know that if I possessed all the talents of the

gentlemen on the side of the House I sit, and on the other, I

cannot, by royal favour, or by popular delusion, or by oligarchical

cabal, elevate myself above a certain very limited point, so as to

endanger my own fall or the ruin of my country. I know there is an

order that keeps things fast in their place; it is made to us, and

we are made to it. Why not ask another wife, other children,

another body, another mind?

The great object of most of these reformers is to prepare the

destruction of the Constitution, by disgracing and discrediting the

House of Commons. For they think--prudently, in my opinion--that if

they can persuade the nation that the House of Commons is so

constituted as not to secure the public liberty; not to have a

proper connection with the public interests; so constituted as not,

either actually or virtually, to be the representative of the

people, it will be easy to prove that a government composed of a

monarchy, an oligarchy chosen by the Crown, and such a House of

Commons, whatever good can be in such a system, can by no means be a

system of free government.

The Constitution of England is never to have a quietus; it is to be

continually vilified, attacked, reproached, resisted; instead of

being the hope and sure anchor in all storms, instead of being the

means of redress to all grievances, itself is the grand grievance of

the nation, our shame instead of our glory. If the only specific

plan proposed--individual, personal representation--is directly

rejected by the person who is looked on as the great support of this

business, then the only way of considering it is as a question of

convenience. An honourable gentleman prefers the individual to the

present. He therefore himself sees no middle term whatsoever, and

therefore prefers of what he sees the individual; this is the only

thing distinct and sensible that has been advocated. He has then a

scheme, which is the individual representation; he is not at a loss,

not inconsistent--which scheme the other right honourable gentleman

reprobates. Now, what does this go to, but to lead directly to

anarchy? For to discredit the only government which he either

possesses or can project, what is this but to destroy all

government; and this is anarchy. My right honourable friend, in

supporting this motion, disgraces his friends and justifies his

enemies, in order to blacken the Constitution of his country, even

of that House of Commons which supported him. There is a difference

between a moral or political exposure of a public evil, relative to

the administration of government, whether in men or systems, and a

declaration of defects, real or supposed, in the fundamental

Constitution of your country. The first may be cured in the

individual by the motives of religion, virtue, honour, fear, shame,

or interest. Men may be made to abandon, also, false systems by

exposing their absurdity or mischievous tendency to their own better

thoughts, or to the contempt or indignation of the public; and after

all, if they should exist, and exist uncorrected, they only disgrace

individuals as fugitive opinions. But it is quite otherwise with

the frame and Constitution of the State; if that is disgraced,

patriotism is destroyed in its very source. No man has ever

willingly obeyed, much less was desirous of defending with his

blood, a mischievous and absurd scheme of government. Our first,

our dearest, most comprehensive relation, our country, is gone.

It suggests melancholy reflections, in consequence of the strange

course we have long held, that we are now no longer quarrelling

about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the tenor of

measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English

Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of

Englishmen. This Constitution in former days used to be the

admiration and the envy of the world; it was the pattern for

politicians; the theme of the eloquent; the meditation of the

philosopher in every part of the world. As to Englishmen, it was

their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, for it they were

ready to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly covered by

partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its excellencies

are forgotten, its faults are now forcibly dragged into day,

exaggerated by every artifice of representation. It is despised and

rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity, or

idleness, set up in opposition or in preference to it. It is to

this humour, and it is to the measures growing out of it, that I set

myself (I hope not alone) in the most determined opposition. Never

before did we at any time in this country meet upon the theory of

our frame of government, to sit in judgment on the Constitution of

our country, to call it as a delinquent before us, and to accuse it

of every defect and every vice; to see whether it, an object of our

veneration, even our adoration, did or did not accord with a

preconceived scheme in the minds of certain gentlemen. Cast your

eyes on the journals of Parliament. It is for fear of losing the

inestimable treasure we have, that I do not venture to game it out

of my hands for the vain hope of improving it. I look with filial

reverence on the Constitution of my country, and never will cut it

in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to

boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigour.

On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its

venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath.

End of Project Gutenberg Etext Thoughts on Present Discontents by Burke

Livros Grátis
( http://www.livrosgratis.com.br )
 
Milhares de Livros para Download:
 
Baixar livros de Administração
Baixar livros de Agronomia
Baixar livros de Arquitetura
Baixar livros de Artes
Baixar livros de Astronomia
Baixar livros de Biologia Geral
Baixar livros de Ciência da Computação
Baixar livros de Ciência da Informação
Baixar livros de Ciência Política
Baixar livros de Ciências da Saúde
Baixar livros de Comunicação
Baixar livros do Conselho Nacional de Educação - CNE
Baixar livros de Defesa civil
Baixar livros de Direito
Baixar livros de Direitos humanos
Baixar livros de Economia
Baixar livros de Economia Doméstica
Baixar livros de Educação
Baixar livros de Educação - Trânsito
Baixar livros de Educação Física
Baixar livros de Engenharia Aeroespacial
Baixar livros de Farmácia
Baixar livros de Filosofia
Baixar livros de Física
Baixar livros de Geociências
Baixar livros de Geografia
Baixar livros de História
Baixar livros de Línguas

Baixar livros de Literatura
Baixar livros de Literatura de Cordel
Baixar livros de Literatura Infantil
Baixar livros de Matemática
Baixar livros de Medicina
Baixar livros de Medicina Veterinária
Baixar livros de Meio Ambiente
Baixar livros de Meteorologia
Baixar Monografias e TCC
Baixar livros Multidisciplinar
Baixar livros de Música
Baixar livros de Psicologia
Baixar livros de Química
Baixar livros de Saúde Coletiva
Baixar livros de Serviço Social
Baixar livros de Sociologia
Baixar livros de Teologia
Baixar livros de Trabalho
Baixar livros de Turismo
 
 