‘Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’dAt hewing mountains into men, and someAt building human wonders mountain-high.But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,Kings would not play at.’Cowper.
‘Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’dAt hewing mountains into men, and someAt building human wonders mountain-high.But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,Kings would not play at.’Cowper.
‘Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’dAt hewing mountains into men, and someAt building human wonders mountain-high.But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,Kings would not play at.’Cowper.
‘Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’d
At hewing mountains into men, and some
At building human wonders mountain-high.
But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.’Cowper.
August 13, 1817.
The whole question of the effect of war and taxes, in an economical point of view, reduces itself to the distinction betweenproductiveandunproductive labour. It is a pity that some member of the House of Commons does not move a string of resolutions on this subject, as a comment on the measures of the present, and a guide to those of future reigns. A film appears to have been spread for some time over the eyes of the nation, as to the consequences of the course they were pursuing; and a good deal of pains has been taken, by sophistry, and false statements, to perplex a very plain question. But we are not without hopes, in the following observations, of putting the merits of our debt and taxes in so clear a light, that not even the Finance Committee shall be any longer blind to them.
Labour is of two kinds, productive and unproductive:—that which adds materially to the comforts and necessaries of life, or that which adds nothing to the common stock, or nothing in proportion to what it takes away from it in order to maintain itself. Money may be laid out, and people employed in either of these two kinds of labour equally, but not, we imagine, with equal benefit to the community.—[See p.130, &c. of this volume.]
Suppose I employ a man in standing on his head, or running up and down a hill all day, and that I give him five shillings a day for his pains. He is equally employed, equally paid, and equally gains a subsistence in this way, as if he was employed, in his original trade of a shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes for a person who wants them. But in the one case he is employed in unproductive, in the other in productive labour. In the one, he is employed and paid and receives a subsistence for doing that which might as well be let alone; in the other, for doing that which is of use and importance, and which must either be done by him, or give some one else double trouble to do it. If I hire a livery-servant, and keep him fine and lazy and well-fed to stand behind my chair while I eat turtle or venison, this is another instance of unproductive labour. Now the person who is in real want of a pair of shoes, and who has by his own labour and skill raised money enough to pay for them will not assuredly lay it out, in preference, in hiring the shoemaker to run up a hill for him, or to stand upon his head, or behind a chair for his amusement.[42]But if I have received this money from him in the shape of taxes, having already received enough in the same way to pay for my shoes, my stockings, my house, my furniture, &c., then it is very likely (as we see it constantly happen) that I shall lay out this last five shillings worth of taxes, which I probably get for doing nothing, in employing another person to do nothing,—or to run up a hill, or to stand upon his head, or wait behind me at dinner, while the poor man, who pays me the tax, goes without his shoes and his dinner. Is this clear? Or put it thus in two words.Thatis productive labour, for which a man will give the only money he has in the world, or a certain sum, having no more than other people:thatis unproductive labour, for which a manwill never give the only money he is worth, the money he has earned by his own labour, nor any money at all, unless he has ten times as much as he wants, or as other people have, to throw away in superfluities. A man who has only got money to buy a loaf will not lay it out in an ice. But he may lay it out in a dram? Yes; because to the wretched it is often more important to forget their future than even to supply their present wants. The extravagance and thoughtlessness of the poor arise, not from their having more than enough to satisfy their immediate necessities, but from their not having enough to ward off impending ones,—in a word, fromdesperation. This is the true answer to Mr. Malthus’s politico-theological system of parish ethics, the only real clue to the causes and the cure of pauperism!
If the Board of Works were to have a canal made from London to the Land’s End (as has been proposed) this, for aught we know, would be productive labour, and well paid for out of the public taxes; because the public might in the end reap the benefit of the money and the labour so employed. But if the Prince Regent were by the advice of some fantastical, purblind politician, to order this canal to be lined all the way with gold-leaf, which would be washed away as soon as the water came into the canal, this is what we should call unproductive labour. Such a project would indeed cost as much money, it would require the raising of as many taxes, it would keep as many men employed, it would maintain them while they were so employed, just as well as if they were employed in any other way; but when done, it would be of no use to Prince or people. We have heard of a patriotic nobleman, who had a brick-wall built round his estate, to give employment to the poor in his neighbourhood. If he had afterwards employed them to pull it down again, it would have given them twice the employment and done twice the good. But if the same persons had been employed in productive labour, in raising corn, in making furniture, in building or improving cottages, it would not have been equally adviseable to set them to work again to burn the corn, or destroy the furniture, or pull down the cottages. In spite then of the fashionable doctrines of political economy, so well suited to the extravagance of the times, there is something else to be considered in judging of the value of labour, besides what it costs,viz., what itproduces; whether it is of use to any body, and to whom. All is not gain that goes out of the purse. The nobleman above mentioned did not take the money to pay for building the wall round his estate out of the pockets of the people; but suppose an equal sum to be taken yearly out of the Civil List or any other branch of public revenue, and employed in raising somehuge heap of stones—not a monument, but a mausoleum of royal taste and magnificence—the question is, whether the money thus raised by taxes, and laid out in a job, is a saving or a loss to the public? And this question is, we conceive, answered by another, whether if the money had remained in the hands of the public, they would have agreed among themselves, to have laid it out in such a building for them to look at? It would hardly be thought wise to vote a sum of money, to build aCottage Ornée, large enough to cover a whole county; though the expense (and, according to the theory we are combating, the benefit) would increase with the size of the building and the waste of work. The Pyramids of Egypt and the Pavilion at Brighton, are among the instances of unproductive labour.
We have been twenty years at war, and have laid out five hundred millions in war taxes; and what have we gained by it? Where are theproceeds? If it has not been thrown away in what produces no return, if it has not been sunk in the war, as much as if it had been sunk in the sea, if the government as good factors for the general weal have laid out all this enormous sum in useful works, inproductive labour, let them give us back the principal and the interest, (which is just double) and keep the profits to themselves—instead of which, they have made away with the principal, and come to us to paythemthe interest in taxes. They have nothing to shew for either, but spiked cannon, rotten ships, gunpowder blown into the air, heaps of dead men’s skulls, the turned heads and coats of Poets Laureate, with the glories of Trafalgar and Waterloo, which however will pay no scores. Let them set them up at auction, and see what they will fetch. Not asous! We have killed so many French, it is true. But we had better have spent powder and shot in shooting at crows. Though we have laid the ghost of the French Revolution, we cannot ‘go to supper’ upon the carcase. If the present distress and difficulty arise merely from our no longer having a bugbear to contend with, or because (as Mr. Southey says), the war is no longer a customer to the markets, to the amount of fifty millions a year, why not declare war upon the Man in the Moon to-morrow, and never leave off till we have sent him to keep Bonaparte company at St. Helena? Why, it is but ordering so many cannon and cutlasses, no matter for what purpose—and equipping, and fantastically accoutring so many loyal corps ofminions of the moon,Diana’s foresters, and ‘the manufactures of Birmingham and Sheffield would revive to-morrow.’ If we had howitzers before of a prodigious size, let us have bombs of a calibre that Lord Castlereagh never dreamt of; and instead of iron balls, goldenones. Why not? The expense would be the greater. If we made the earth ring before, let us now make the welkin roar. The absurdity would be as costly, and more bloodless. A voyage to the moon would take at least as much time, as many lives and millions to accomplish as the march to Paris. But then our merchants would not meanwhile get a monopoly of the trade of Europe, to stimulate their laggard patriotism, nor would the sovereigns of Europe be able to plant the standard of Legitimacy on the horns of the moon!—But though we have nothing to shew for the money we have madly squandered in war, we have something to pay for it (rather more than we can afford) to contractors, monopolists, and sinecurists, to the great fundholders and borough-mongers, to those who have helped to carry on, and to those who have been paid for applauding this sport-royal, as the most patriotic and profitable employment of the wealth and resources of a country. These persons, the tax-receivers, have got a mortgage on the property, health, strength, and skill of the rest of the community, who pay the taxes, which bows their industry to the ground, and deprives them of the necessary means of subsistence. The principal of the debt which the nation has contracted, has been laid out inunproductive labour, in inflicting the mischiefs and miseries of war; and the interest is for the most part equally laid out inunproductive labour, in fomenting the pride and luxury of those who have made their fortunes by the war and taxes. In a word, the debt and taxes are a government machine, which diverts that portion of the wealth and industry of the people, which would otherwise be employed in supplying the wants and comforts (say) of a hundred persons, to pamper the extravagance, vices, and artificial appetites of a single individual; and so on in proportion to the whole country. Every tax laid on in this manner, unnerves the arm of industry, is wrung from the bowels of want, and breaks the spirit of a nation, lessens the number of hands which are employed in useful labour, to seduce them into artificial, dependent, and precarious modes of subsistence, while the rich themselves find their reward for the indulgence of their indolence and voluptuousness in ‘the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,’ so that ‘their proper loins do curse them.’ It has been said that the taxes taken from the people return to them again, like the vapours drawn up from the earth in clouds, that descend again in refreshing dews and fertilizing showers. On the contrary, they are like these dews and showers drawn off from the ground by artificial channels into private reservoirs and useless cisterns to stagnate and corrupt. The money which is paid in taxes is taken from the people; the labour for which it pays does not benefit the people. A tax whichgoes to pay for the feeding of a pair of curricle horses or favourite hunters, swallows up the subsistence of several poor families. We cannot for ourselves approve of the privations, of the hunger, cold, or nakedness, to which these poor families are exposed, to keep up the flesh and the spirit of the sleek and high-mettled inhabitants of the warm, well-littered stable, even though they were of the breed of Swift’s Houynhyms! But that is a different question. All that we mean to say here is, that the tax takes the corn out of the bellies of the one to put it into those of the other species. A tax which is laid on to pay for a dog-kennel or a stable, might have saved a whole village from going into ruin and decay: and the carriage that glitters like a meteor along the streets of the metropolis, often deprives the wretched inmate of the distant cottage of the chair he sits on, the table be eats on, the bed he lies on. A street lined with coaches and with beggars dying at the steps of the doors, gives a strong lesson to common sense and political foresight, if not to humanity. A nation cannot subsist on unproductive labour, on war and taxes, or be composed merely of parish and state paupers. All unproductive labour is supported by productive labour. All persons maintained by the taxes or employed by those who are maintained by them are a clog, a dead weight upon those who pay them, that consume the produce of the State, and add nothing to it—a dead carcase fastened to a living one, with this difference, that it still devours the food which it does not provide. Need we ask any farther, how war and taxes, sinecures and monopolies, by degrees, weaken, impoverish, and ruin a State? Or whether they can go on increasing for ever? There is an excess of inequality and oppression, of luxury and want, which no state can survive; as there is a point at which the palsied frame can no longer support itself, and at which the withered tree falls to the ground.
If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-account of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted—of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of thegreat mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness, and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kickshaws of legitimacy. Half the resources and productive labour of the country for the last twenty years, have been sunk in this debt, and we are now called upon to make good the deficiency—how we can!—It has been shrewdly asked, whether, if every one paid a hundredper cent.income tax, the nation could flourish? And when we are told that ‘the war has been acustomerto the country for a length of time to the amount of fifty millions a year,’ that is, has drained that sum from the pockets of the nation to employ the hands of the nation inproducing nothing—we are at no loss to account for the consequences. A writer, whose own fault it is that we do not feel all the respect for him we could wish, has ridiculed the idea of a nation being in debt to itself, ‘like a tradesman to his creditors,’ and contends that ‘a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where what the one loses, the other gains.’ Now men and their wives do not usually pay one another the money they lose at cards; and most people will be ready enough to reduce this simile to practice, by not paying the taxes, whenever the author shall have convinced Mr. Vansittart, that it is no matter whether the money is in the hands of the people or the government, and that to save trouble it had better remain where it is. Mr. Southey, in his late pamphlet, has very emphatically described the different effects of money laid out in war and peace. ‘What bounds,’ he exclaims, ‘could imagination set to the welfare and glory of this island, if a tenth part, or even a twentieth of what the war expenditure has been, were annually applied in improving and creating harbours, in bringing roads to the best possible repair, in colonizing upon our waste lands, in reclaiming fens, and conquering tracts from the sea, in encouraging the liberal arts, endowing schools and churches,’ &c. This is a singular slip of the pen in so noisy and triumphant a war-monger as the Poet Laureate. But logical inconsistency seems to be a sort of poetical license. Even in contradicting himself, he is not right. For the money as he proposes to employ it, would only degenerate into so many government jobs, and the low-lived mummery of Bible Societies. The pinnacle of prosperity and glory to which he would by these means raise the country, does not seem quite so certain. The other extreme of distress and degradation, to which the war-system has reduced it, is deep and deplorable indeed.
CHARACTER OF MR. BURKE
October 5, 1817.
October 5, 1817.
October 5, 1817.
October 5, 1817.
It is not without reluctance that we speak of the vices and infirmities of such a mind as Burke’s: but the poison of high example has by far the widest range of destruction: and, for the sake of public honour and individual integrity, we think it right to say, that however it may be defended upon other grounds, the political career of that eminent individual has no title to the praise of consistency. Mr. Burke, the opponent of the American war, and Mr. Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons—not opposite persons only, but deadly enemies. In the latter period, he abandoned not only all his practical conclusions, but all the principles on which they were founded. He proscribed all his former sentiments, denounced all his former friends, rejected and reviled all the maxims to which he had formerly appealed as incontestable. In the American war, he constantly spoke of the rights of the people as inherent, and inalienable: after the French Revolution, he began by treating them with the chicanery of a sophist, and ended by raving at them with the fury of a maniac. In the former case, he held out the duty of resistance to oppression, as the palladium and only ultimate resource of natural liberty; in the latter, he scouted, prejudged, vilified, and nicknamed, all resistance in the abstract, as a foul and unnatural union of rebellion and sacrilege. In the one case, to answer the purposes of faction, he made it out, that the people are always in the right; in the other, to answer different ends, he made it out that they are always in the wrong—lunatics in the hands of their royal keepers, patients in the sick-wards of an hospital, or felons in the condemned cells of a prison. In the one, he considered that there was a constant tendency on the part of the prerogative to encroach on the rights of the people, which ought always to be the object of the most watchful jealousy, and of resistance, when necessary: in the other, he pretended to regard it as the sole occupation and ruling passion of those in power, to watch over the liberties and happiness of their subjects. The burthen of all his speeches on the American war, was conciliation, concession, timely reform, as the only practicable or desirable alternative of rebellion: the object of all his writings on the French Revolution was, to deprecate and explode all concession and all reform, as encouraging rebellion, and as an irretrievable step to revolution and anarchy. In the one, he insulted kings personally, as among the lowest and worst of mankind; in the other, he held them up to theimagination of his readers, as sacred abstractions. In the one case, he was a partisan of the people, to court popularity; in the other, to gain the favour of the Court, he became the apologist of all courtly abuses. In the one case, he took part with those who were actually rebels against his Sovereign: in the other, he denounced as rebels and traitors, all those of his own countrymen who did not yield sympathetic allegiance to a foreign Sovereign, whom we had always been in the habit of treating as an arbitrary tyrant.
Nobody will accuse the principles of his present Majesty, or the general measures of his reign, of inconsistency. If they had no other merit, they have, at least, that of having been all along actuated by one uniform and constant spirit: yet Mr. Burke at one time vehemently opposed, and afterwards most intemperately extolled them: and it was for his recanting his opposition, not for his persevering in it, that he received his pension. He does not himself mention his flaming speeches in the American war, as among the public services which had entitled him to this remuneration.
The truth is, that Burke was a man of fine fancy and subtle reflection; but not of sound and practical judgment, nor of high or rigid principles.—As to his understanding, he certainly was not a great philosopher; for his works of mere abstract reasoning are shallow and inefficient:—nor was he a man of sense and business; for, both in counsel, and in conduct, he alarmed his friends as much at least as his opponents:—but he was an acute and accomplished man of letters—an ingenious political essayist. He applied the habit of reflection, which he had borrowed from his metaphysical studies, but which was not competent to the discovery of any elementary truth in that department, with great facility and success, to the mixed mass of human affairs. He knew more of the political machine than a recluse philosopher; and he speculated more profoundly on its principles and general results than a mere politician. He saw a number of fine distinctions and changeable aspects of things, the good mixed with the ill, and the ill mixed with the good; and with a sceptical indifference, in which the exercise of his own ingenuity was obviously the governing principle, suggested various topics to qualify or assist the judgment of others. But for this very reason, he was little calculated to become a leader or a partizan in any important practical measure. For the habit of his mind would lead him to find out a reason for or against any thing: and it is not on speculative refinements, (which belong toeveryside of a question), but on a just estimate of the aggregate mass and extended combinations of objections and advantages, that we ought to decide or act. Burke had the power of throwing true or false weights into the scales of politicalcasuistry, but not firmness of mind (or, shall we say, honesty enough) to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or his spleen more frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and the fieriness of his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his understanding, and the want of conscious sincerity.
He was fitted by nature and habit for the studies and labours of the closet; and was generally mischievous when he came out; because the very subtlety of his reasoning, which, left to itself, would have counteracted its own activity, or found its level in the common sense of mankind, became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is always eager to make use of the most plausible pretexts to cover the most fatal designs. That which, if applied as a general observation to human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind, may, when forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system, become the grossest and basest sophistry. Facts or consequences never stood in the way of this speculative politician. He fitted them to his preconceived theories, instead of conforming his theories to them. They were the playthings of his style, the sport of his fancy. They were the straws of which his imagination made a blaze, and were consumed, like straws, in the blaze they had served to kindle. The fine things he said about Liberty and Humanity, in his speech on the Begum’s affairs, told equally well, whether Warren Hastings was a tyrant or not: nor did he care one jot who caused the famine he described, so that he described it in a way that no one else could. On the same principle, he represented the French priests and nobles under the old regime as excellent moral people, very charitable and very religious, in the teeth of notorious facts—to answer to the handsome things he had to say in favour of priesthood and nobility in general; and, with similar views, he falsifies the records of our English Revolution, and puts an interpretation on the wordabdication, of which a school-boy would be ashamed. He constructed his whole theory of government, in short, not on rational, but on picturesque and fanciful principles; as if the king’s crown were a painted gewgaw, to be looked at on gala-days; titles an empty sound to please the ear; and the whole order of society a theatrical procession. His lamentations over the age of chivalry, and his projected crusade to restore it, are about as wise as if any one, from reading the Beggar’s Opera, should take to picking of pockets: or, from admiring the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, should wish to convert the abodes of civilized life into the haunts of wild beasts and banditti. On this principle of false refinement, there is no abuse, nor system of abuses, that does not admit of an easy and triumphant defence; for there is something which a merely speculative enquirer may alwaysfind out, good as well as bad, in every possible system, the best or the worst; and if we can once get rid of the restraints of common sense and honesty, we may easily prove, by plausible words, that liberty and slavery, peace and war, plenty and famine, are matters of perfect indifference. This is the school of politics, of which Mr. Burke was at the head; and it is perhaps to his example, in this respect, that we owe the prevailing tone of many of those newspaper paragraphs, which Mr. Coleridge thinks so invaluable an accession to our political philosophy.
Burke’s literary talents were, after all, his chief excellence. His style has all the familiarity of conversation, and all the research of the most elaborate composition. He says what he wants to say, by any means, nearer or more remote, within his reach. He makes use of the most common or scientific terms, of the longest or shortest sentences, of the plainest and most downright, or of the most figurative modes of speech. He gives for the most part loose reins to his imagination, and follows it as far as the language will carry him. As long as the one or the other has any resources in store to make the reader feel and see the thing as he has conceived it, in its nicest shades of difference, in its utmost degree of force and splendour, he never disdains, and never fails to employ them. Yet, in the extremes of his mixed style, there is not much affectation, and but little either of pedantry or of coarseness. He everywhere gives the image he wishes to give, in its true and appropriate colouring: and it is the very crowd and variety of these images that has given to his language its peculiar tone of animation, and even of passion. It is his impatience to transfer his conceptions entire, living, in all their rapidity, strength, and glancing variety, to the minds of others, that constantly pushes him to the verge of extravagance, and yet supports him there in dignified security—
‘Never so sure our rapture to create,As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’
‘Never so sure our rapture to create,As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’
‘Never so sure our rapture to create,As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’
‘Never so sure our rapture to create,
As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’
He is the most poetical of our prose writers, and at the same time his prose never degenerates into the mere effeminacy of poetry; for he always aims at overpowering rather than at pleasing; and consequently sacrifices beauty and delicacy to force and vividness. He has invariably a task to perform, a positive purpose to execute, an effect to produce. His only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist.
ON COURT-INFLUENCE
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
January 3, 1818.
January 3, 1818.
January 3, 1818.
January 3, 1818.
It is not interest alone, but prejudice or fashion that sways mankind. Opinion governs opinion. It is not merely what we can get by a certain line of conduct that we have to consider, but what others will think of it. The possession of money is but one mode of recommending ourselves to the good opinion of the world, of securing distinction and respect. Except as a bribe to popularity, money is of very limited value. Avarice is (oftener than we might at first suspect) only vanity in disguise. We should not want fine clothes or fine houses, an equipage or livery-servants, but for what others will think of us for having or wanting them. The chief and most expensive commodity that money is laid out in purchasing, is respect. Money, like other things, is worth no more than it will fetch. It is a passport into society; but if other things will answer the same purpose, as beauty, birth, wit, learning, desert in art or arms, dress, behaviour, the want of wealth is not felt as a very severe privation. If a man, who, on whatever pretensions is received into good company, behaves with propriety, and converses rationally, it is not inquired after he is gone, nor once thought of while he is present, whether he is rich or poor. In the mixed intercourse of private society every one finds his level, in proportion as he can contribute to its amusement or information. It is even more so in the general intercourse of the world, where a poet and a man of genius (if extrinsic circumstances make any difference) is as much courted and run after for being a common ploughman, as for being a peer of the realm. Burns, had he been living, would have started fair with Lord Byron in the race of popularity, and would not have lost it.
The temptation to men in public life to swerve from the path of duty, less frequently arises from a sordid regard to their private interests, than from an undue deference to popular applause. A want of political principle is, in nine cases out of ten, a want of firmness of mind to differ with those around us, and to stand the brunt of their avowed hostility or secret calumnies.
‘But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!’
‘But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!’
‘But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!’
‘But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!’
An honest man is one whose sense of right and wrong is strongerthan his anxiety that others should think or speak well of him. A man in the same sense forfeits his character for political integrity, whose love of truth truckles to his false shame and cringing complaisance, and who tampers with his own convictions, that he may stand well with the world. A man who sells his opinion merely to gain by his profligacy, is not a man without public principle, but common honesty. He ranks in the same class with a highwayman or a pickpocket.—It is true, interest and opinion are in general linked together; but opinion flies before, and interest comes limping after. As a woman first loses her virtue through her heart, so the yielding patriot generally sacrifices his character to his love of reputation.
It is usually opposed by those who make no distinction between the highest point of integrity and the lowest mercenariness, that Mr. Burke changed his principles to gain a pension: and that this was the main-spring of his subsequent conduct. We do not think so; though this may have been one motive, and a strong one to a needy and extravagant man. But the pension which he received was something more than a mere grant of money—it was a mark of royal favour, it was a tax upon public opinion. If any thing were wanting to fix his veering loyalty, it was the circumstance of the king’s having his ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ bound in morocco (not an unsuitable binding), and giving it to all his particular friends, saying, ‘It was a book which every gentleman ought to read!’ This praise would go as far with a vain man as a pension with a needy one; and we may be sure, that if there were any lurking seeds of a leaning to the popular side remaining in the author’s breast, he would after this lose no time in rooting them out of the soil, that his works might reflect the perfect image of his royal master’s mind, and have no plebeian stains left to sully it. Kings are great critics: they are the fountain of honour; the judges of merit. After such an authority had pronounced it ‘a book which every gentleman ought to read,’ what gentleman could refuse to read, or dare to differ with it? With what feelings a privy-counsellor would open the leaves of a book, which the king had had richly bound, and presented with his own hand! How lords of the bed-chamber would wonder at the profound arguments! How peeresses in their own right must simper over the beautiful similes! How the judges must puzzle over it! How the bishops would bless themselves at the number of fine things; and our great classical scholars, Doctors Parr and Burney, sit down for the first time in their lives to learn English, to write themselves into a bishopric! Burke had long laboured hardto attain a doubtful pre-eminence. He had worked his way into public notice by talents which were thought specious rather than solid, and by sentiments which were obnoxious to some, suspected by others. His connexions and his views were ambiguous. He professedly espoused the cause of the people, and found it as hard to defend himself against popular jealousy as ministerial resentment. He saw court-lacqueys put over his head; and country squires elbowing him aside. He was neither understood by friends nor enemies. He was opposed, thwarted, cross-questioned, and obliged to present ‘a certificate of merit’ (as he himself says) at every stage of his progress through life. But the king’s having pronounced that ‘his book was one which every gentleman ought to read,’ floated him at once out of the flats and shallows in which his voyage of popularity had been bound, into the full tide of court-favour; settled all doubts; smoothed all difficulties; rubbed off old scores; made the crooked straight, and the rough plain;—what was obscure, became profound;—what was extravagant, lofty; every sentiment was liberality, every expression elegance: and from that time to this, Burke has been the oracle of every dull venal pretender to taste or wisdom. Those who had never heard of or despised him before, now joined in his praise. He became a fashion; he passed into a proverb; he was an idol in the eyes of his readers, as much as he could ever, in the days of his youthful vanity, have been in his own; he was dazzled with his own popularity; and all this was owing to the king. No wonder he was delighted with the change, infatuated with it, infuriated! It was better to him than four thousand pounds a-year for his own life, and fifteen hundred a-year to his widow during the joint-lives of four other persons. It was what all his life he had been aiming at.—‘Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all!’ It was what the nurses had prophecied of him, and what the school-boy had dreamt; and that which is first, is also last in our thoughts. It was this that tickled his vanity more than his pension: it was this that raised his gratitude, that melted his obdurate pride, that opened the sluices of his heart to the poison of corruption, that exorcised the low, mechanic, vulgar, morose, sour principles of liberty clean out of him, left his mind ‘swept and garnished,’ parched and dry, fevered with revenge, bloated with adulation; and made him as shameless and abandoned in sacrificing every feeling of attachment or obligation to the people, as he had before been bold and prodigal in heaping insult and contumely upon the throne. He denounced his former principles, in the true spirit of an apostate, with a fury equalto the petulant and dogmatical tone in which he had asserted them; and then proceeded to abuse all those who doubted the honesty or wisdom of this change of opinion. He, in short, looked upon every man as his enemy who did not think ‘his book fit for a gentleman to read’; and would willingly have committed every such presumptuous sceptic to the flames for not bowing down in servile adoration before this idol of his vanity and reputation. Hence the frantic philippics in his latter revolutionary speeches and writings, and the alteration from a severe and stately style of eloquence and reasoning in his earlier compositions to the most laboured paradoxes and wildest declamation. We do not mean to say that his latest works did not display the greatest genius. His native talents blazed out, undisguised and unconfined in them.Indignatio facit versus.Burke’s best Muse was his vanity or spleen. He felt quite at home in giving vent to his personal spite and venal malice. He pleaded his own cause and the cause of the passions better and with more eloquence, than he ever pleaded the cause of truth and justice. He felt the one rankling in his heart with all their heat and fury; he only conceived the other with his understanding coldly and circuitously.—The ‘Letters of William Burke’ give one, however, a low idea of Burke’s honesty, even in a pecuniary point of view.—(See Barry’s ‘Life.’) He constantly tells Barry, as a source of consolation to his friend, and a compliment to his brother, ‘that though his party had not hitherto been successful, or had not considered him as they ought, matters were not so bad with him but that he could still afford to be honest, and not desert the cause.’ This is very suspicious. This querulous tone of disappointment, and cockering up of his boasted integrity, must have come from Burke himself; who would hardly have expressed such a sentiment, if it had not been frequently in his thoughts; or if he had not made out a previous debtor and creditor account between preferment and honesty, as one of the regular principles of his political creed.
The same narrow view of the subject, drawn from a supposition that money, or interest in the grossest sense, is the only inducement to a dereliction of principle or sinister conduct, has been applied to shew the sincerity of the present laureate in his change of opinions; for it was said that the paltry salary of 100l.a-year was not a sufficient temptation to any man of common sense, and who had other means of gaining an ample livelihood honourably, to give up his principles and his party, unless he did so conscientiously. That is not the real alternative of the case. It is not the hundred pounds salary; it is the honour (some may think it a disgrace) conferred along with it, that enhances the prize. ‘And with it words of so sweet breathcomposed, as made the gift more rare.’[43]It is the introduction to Carlton-House, the smile, the squeeze by the hand that awaits him there, ‘escap’d from Pyrrho’s maze, and Epicurus’ sty.’ The being presented at court is worth more than a hundred pounds a-year. A person with a hundred thousand pounds a-year can only be presented at court, and would consider it the greatest mortification to be shut out. It is the highest honour in the land; and Mr. Southey, by accepting his place and discarding his principles, receives that highest honour as a matter of course, in addition to his salary and his butt of sack. He is ushered into the royal presence as by a magic charm, the palace-gates fly open at the sight of his laurel-crown, and he stands in the midst of ‘Britain’s warriors, her statesman, and her fair,’ as if suddenly dropped from the clouds. Is this nothing to a vain man? Is it nothing to the author of ‘Wat Tyler’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ to have those errors of his youth veiled in the honours of his riper years? To fill the poetic throne of Dryden, of Shadwell, of Cibber, and of Pye? To receive distinctions which Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton never received, and to chaunt to the unaverted ear of sovereignty strains such as they never sung? To be seen on each returning birth-day joining the bright throng, the lengthened procession, gay, gilt, painted, coronetted, garlanded, that as it passes to and from St. James’s, all London, in sunshine or in shower, pours out to gaze at? We tremble for the consequences, should any thing happen to disturb the Laureate in his dream of perfect felicity. Racine died broken-hearted, because LouisXIV.frowned upon him as he passed; and yet Racine was as great a poet and as pious a man as Mr. Southey.
To move in the highest circles, to be in favour at courts, to be familiar with princes, is then an object of ambition, which may be supposed to fascinate a less romantic mind than Mr. Southey’s, setting the lucrativeness of his conversion out of the question. Many persons have paid dear for this proud elevation, with bankrupt health and beggared fortunes. How many are ready to do so still! Mr. Southey only paid for itwith his opinion; and some people think it as much as his opinion was worth. Are we to suppose Mr. Southey’s vanity of so sordid a kind, that it must be bribed by his avarice? Might not the Poet-laureate be supposed to catch at a title or a blue ribbon, if it were offered him, without a round salary attached to it?
Why do country gentlemen wish to get into parliament, but to be seen there? Why do overgrown merchants and rich nabobs wish tosit there, like so many overgrown school-boys? Look at the hundreds of thousands of pounds squandered in contested elections? It is not ‘gain but glory’ that provokes the combatants. Do you suppose that these persons expect to repay themselves by making a market of their constituents, and selling their votes to the best bidder? No: but they wish to be thought to have the greatest influence, the greatest number of friends and adherents in their county; and they will pay any price for it. We put into the lottery, indeed, in hopes of what we can get, but in the lottery of life honour is the great prize. It is the opinion of the people for which the candidate at an election contends; and on the same principles he will barter the opinion of the people, their rights and liberty, and his own independence and character, not for gold, but for the friendship of a court-favourite. Not that gold has not its weight too, for the great and powerful have that also to bestow:—it is true, that
——‘In their LiveryWalk Crowns and Crownets, Realms and IslandsAs Plates drop from their Pockets.’
——‘In their LiveryWalk Crowns and Crownets, Realms and IslandsAs Plates drop from their Pockets.’
——‘In their LiveryWalk Crowns and Crownets, Realms and IslandsAs Plates drop from their Pockets.’
——‘In their Livery
Walk Crowns and Crownets, Realms and Islands
As Plates drop from their Pockets.’
But opinion is a still more insinuating and universal menstruum for dissolving honesty.That sweet smile that hangs on princes’ favoursis more effectual than even the favours themselves!
(CONCLUDED)
(CONCLUDED)
(CONCLUDED)
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
January 10, 1818.
January 10, 1818.
January 10, 1818.
January 10, 1818.
We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion. There is no one, however mean or insignificant, whose approbation is altogether indifferent to us; whose flattery does not please, whose contempt does not mortify us. There is an atmosphere of this sort always about us, from which we can no more withdraw ourselves than from the air we breathe. But the air of a Court is the concentrated essence of the opinion of the world. The atmosphere there is mephitic. It is subtle poison, the least exhalation of which taints the vitals of its victims. It is made up of servile adulation, of sneering compliments, of broken promises, of smiling professions, of stifled opinions, of hollow thanks, of folly and lies—
‘Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good.’
‘Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good.’
‘Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good.’
‘Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good.’
It is infected with the breath of flatterers, and the thoughts of Kings! Let us see how its influence descends:—from the King to the people, to his Ministers first, from the Ministers to both Houses of Parliament, from Lords to Ladies, from the Clergy to the Laity, from the high to the low, from the rich to the poor, and ‘pierces through the body of the city, country, court’—it is beauty, birth, wit, learning, riches, numbers: it is fear and favour; it has all the splendour that can seduce, all the power that can intimidate, all the interest that can corrupt, on its side; so that the opinion of the King is the opinion of the nation; and if that opinion is not a wise one, hangs like a millstone round its neck, oppresses it like a nightmare, weighs upon it like lead, makes truth a lie, right wrong, converts liberty into slavery, peace into war, plenty to famine, turns the heads of a whole people, and bows their bodies to the earth. ‘Whosoever shall stumble against this stone, it shall bruise him: but whomsoever it falls upon, it shall grind him to powder.’ The whisper of a King rounded in the ear of a favourite is re-echoed back in speeches and votes of Parliament, in addresses and resolutions from associations in town and country, drawls from the pulpit, brawls from the bar, resounds like the thunder of a people’s voice, roars in the cannon’s mouth, and disturbs the peace of nations. The frown of monarchs is like the speck seen in the distant horizon, which soon spreads and darkens the whole hemisphere. Who is there in his senses that can withstand the gathering storm, or oppose himself to this torrent of opinion setting in upon him from the throne and absorbing by degrees every thing in its vortex—undermining every principle of independence, confounding every distinction of the understanding, and obliterating every trace of liberty? To argue against it, is like arguing against the motion of the world with which we are carried along: its influence is as powerful and as imperceptible. To question it, is folly; to resist it, madness. To differ with the opinion of a whole nation, seems as presumptuous as it is unwise: and yet the very circumstance which makes it so uniform, is that which makes it worth nothing. Authority is more absolute than reason. Truth curtesies to power. No arguments could persuade ten millions of men in one country to be all of one mind, and thirty millions in another country to be of just the contrary one; but the word of a King does it! We do not like to differ from the company we are in. How much more difficult is it to brave the opinion of the world! No man likes to be frowned out of society. No man likes to be without sympathy. He must be a proud man indeed who can do without it; and proud men do not like to be made a mark for ‘scorn to point his slow and moving finger at.’ No man likes to bethought the enemy of his king and country, without just cause. No man likes to be called a fool or a knave, merely because he is not a fool and a knave. It is not desirable to have to answer arguments backed with informations filedex officio; it is not amusing to become a bye-word with the mob. A nickname isthe hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It will knock down any man’s resolution. It will stagger his reason. It will tame his pride. Fasten it upon any man, and he will try to shake it off, at any rate, though he should part with honour and honesty along with it. To be shut out from public praise or private friendship, to be lampooned in newspapers or Anti-Jacobin reviews, to be looked blank upon in company, is not ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished.’ The unfavourable opinion of others gives you a bad opinion of yourself or them: and neither of these conduces to persevering, high-minded integrity. To wish to serve mankind, we should think well of them. To be able to serve them, they should think well of us. To keep well with the public, is not more necessary to a man’s private interest than to his general utility. It is a hopeless task to be always striving against the stream: it is a thankless one to be in a state of perpetual litigation with the community. The situation of a strange dog in a country town, barked at and worried by all the curs in the village, is about as enviable as that of a person who affects singularity in politics. What is a man to do who gets himself into this predicament, in an age when patriotism is a misnomer in language, and public principle a solecism in fact? If he cannot bring the world round to his opinion, he must as a forlorn hope go over to theirs, and be content to be knave—or nothing.
Such is the force of opinion, that we would undertake to drive a first Minister from his place and out of the country, by merely being allowed to hire a number of dirty boys to hoot him along the streets from his own house to the treasury and from the treasury back again. How would a certain distinguished character, remarkable for uniting thesuaviter in modowith thefortiter in re, and who, with an invariable consistency in his political principles, carries the easiness of his temper to a degree of apparentnon-chalance, bear to have a starling in his neighbourhood taught to repeat nothing but Walcheren, or to ring the changes in his ears upon the names of Castles, Oliver, and Reynolds? Can we wonder then at the feats which such Ministers have performed with the Attorney-General at their backs, and the country at their heels, in full cry against every one who was not a creature of the Ministers,—for whose morals they could not vouch as government-spies, or whose talents they did not reward as government-critics?—Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Biography, latelypublished, complains with pathetic bitterness of the wanton and wilful slanders formerly circulated with so much zeal in the Anti-Jacobin against himself, Mr. Southey, and his other poetical friends, merely for a difference of political opinion; and he significantly assigns these slanders as the reason why himself and his friends remained so long adverse to the party who were the authors of them! We will venture to go a little further, and say, that they were not only the reason of their long estrangement from the Court-party, but of their final reconciliation to it. They had time to balance and reflect, and to make a choice of evils—they deliberated between the loss of principle and of character, and they were undone. They thought it better to be the accomplices of venality and corruption than the mark for them to shoot their arrows at: they took shelter from the abuse by joining in the cry. Mr. Southey says that he has not changed his principles, but that circumstances have changed, and that he has grown wiser from the events of five-and-twenty years. How is it that his present friend and associate in the Quarterly Review, who was formerly a contributor to the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, has not changed too? The world has gone round in his time too, but he remains firm to his first principles. He worships the sun wherever he sees it. Court-favour, ‘the cynosure of longing eyes,’ sheds a more steady influence on its votaries than vague popularity. The confined, artificial air of a Court has a wonderful effect in stopping that progress of the mind with the march of events, of which Mr. Southey boasts, and prematurely fixes the volatility of genius in acaput mortuumof prejudice and servility, in those who are admitted within the magic circle! The Anti-Jacobin poet and orator, Mr. Canning, has not become a renegado to the opinions of the Court: the Jacobin poet and prose-writer, Mr. Southey, has become a renegado to his own.—In an article in the Quarterly Review (some months back) there was an argument to shew that the late war against France was all along the undoubted result of popular opinion, ‘because from the first party-spirit ran so high upon this subject, that any one who expressed an opinion against it did so at the hazard of his reputation, fortune, or even life.’ The author of this singular argument, we believe, was one of those, who did not at the critical period here alluded to approve of it, and who has since become a convert to its justice and humanity. His own statement may account for his change of opinion. What a pity for a man to hazard his life and fortune in a cause by maintaining an opinion, and to lose his character afterwards by relinquishing it. The present Poet-laureate has missed indeed the crown of martyrdom, and has gained a crown of laurel in its stead!
The same consistent writers, and friends of civil and religious liberty, who are delighted with the restoration of the Bourbons, of the Pope, and the Inquisition, have lately made an attempt to run down the Dissenters in this country; and in this they are right. They dwell with fondness on ‘the single-heartedness of the Spanish nation,’ who are slaves and bigots to a man, and scoff at the Presbyterians and Independents of this country (who ousted Popery and slavery at the Revolution, and who had a main hand in placing and continuing the present family on the throne) as but half-Englishmen, and as equally disaffected to Church and State. There is some ground for the antipathy of our political changelings to a respectable, useful, and conscientious body of men: and we will here, in discharge of an old debt, say what this ground is. If it were only meant that the Dissenters are but half Englishmen, because they are not professed slaves—that they are disaffected to the Constitution in Church and State, because they are not prepared to go all the lengths of despotism and intolerance under a Protestant hierarchy and Constitutional King, which they resisted ‘at the peril of their characters, their fortunes, and their lives,’ under a persecuting priesthood and an hereditary Pretender, this would be well: but there is more in it than this. Our sciolists would persuade us that the different sects are hot-beds of sedition, because they are nurseries of public spirit, and independence, and sincerity of opinion in all other respects. They are so necessarily, and by the supposition. They are Dissenters from the Established Church: they submit voluntarily to certain privations, they incur a certain portion of obloquy and ill-will, for the sake of what they believe to be the truth: they are not time-servers on the face of the evidence, and that is sufficient to expose them to the instinctive hatred and ready ribaldry of those who think venality the first of virtues, and prostitution of principle the best sacrifice a man can make to the Graces or his Country. The Dissenter does not change his sentiments with the seasons: he does not suit his conscience to his convenience. This is enough to condemn him for a pestilent fellow. He will not give up his principles because they are unfashionable, therefore he is not to be trusted. He speaks his mind bluntly and honestly, therefore he is a secret disturber of the peace, a dark conspirator against the State. On the contrary, the different sects in this country are, or have been, the steadiest supporters of its liberties and laws: they are checks and barriers against the insidious or avowed encroachments of arbitrary power, as effectual and indispensable as any others in the Constitution: they are depositaries of a principle as sacred and somewhat rarer than a devotion to Court-influence—we mean the love of truth. It ishard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter. Nothing else can sufficiently inure and steel a man against the prevailing prejudices of the world, but that habit of mind which arises from non-conformity to its decisions in matters of religion. There is a natural alliance between the love of civil and religious liberty, as much as between Church and State. Protestantism was the first school of political liberty in Europe: Presbyterianism has been one great support of it in England. The sectary in religion is taught to appeal to his own bosom for the truth and sincerity of his opinions, and to arm himself with stern indifference to what others think of them. This will no doubt often produce a certain hardness of manner and cold repulsiveness of feeling in trifling matters, but it is the only sound discipline of truth, or inflexible honesty in politics as well as in religion. The same principle of independent inquiry and unbiassed conviction which makes him reject all undue interference between his Maker and his conscience, will give a character of uprightness and disregard of personal consequences to his conduct and sentiments in what concerns the most important relations between man and man. He neither subscribes to the dogmas of priests, nor truckles to the mandates of Ministers. He has a rigid sense of duty which renders him superior to the caprice, the prejudices, and the injustice of the world; and the same habitual consciousness of rectitude of purpose, which leads him to rely for his self-respect on the testimony of his own heart, enables him to disregard the groundless malice and rash judgments of his opponents. It is in vain for him to pay his court to the world, to fawn upon power; he labours under certain insurmountable disabilities for becoming a candidate for its favour: he dares to contradict its opinion and to condemn its usages in the most important article of all. The world will always look cold and askance upon him; and therefore he may defy it with less fear of its censures. The Presbyterian is said to be sour: he is not therefore over-complaisant—