DA
510
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1882
B 871,062

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
DE
GRADUATE LIBRARY
2 1974
NOW 1 7 1974
P13 1976
JUL 2 6 1976
DEC
DATE DUE
1980
NOV 17 1980


EDMUND BURKE:
DA
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510
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THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE
·B96
.896
1882
1882
OF THE
PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
"The question is not whether their spirit deserves praise or blame, but—
what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?"-(BURKE: On Conciliation
with America.)
With an Introduction
BY
VINCENT SCULLY.
DUBLIN
M. H. GILL & SON, 50 UPPER SACKVILLE STREET.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO., STATIONERS'-HALL COURT.
1882.
PRINTED BY M. H. GILL AND SON, 50 UPPER SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN.
༢.“-༡,༦
"Reflect how you are to govern a people, who think they ought to be
free, and think they are not."
BURKE: On American Taxation, 1774.
"If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any
practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not Ï,
are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.
BURKE: Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the
Affairs of America.
"In this state of things I make no difficulty in affirming that the
proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is
not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert
itself. The superior power may offer peace with honour and safety. Such
an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity; but the
concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear. When such a one
is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior; and he loses for
ever that time and those chances which, as they happen to all men, are
the strength and resources of all inferior power.
BURKE: On Conciliation with America, 1775.
INTRODUCTION.
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, who has opportunely brought out Edmund
Burke's "Speeches and Writings on Irish Affairs," complains, and too
truly, that the greatAnglo-Irishman "the greatest of our political thinkers
and writers," is entirely neglected by ordinary readers-so much so
that his works have never been properly edited. On both sides of
the Channel we are now keen students of the history and politics
of Ireland with a view to the changes which are casting their shadows.
before. The English are indebted in great measure for their progress
in education on this subject to the obstructive capacity of the Irish
M.P.'s, who forced on English politicians this distasteful study.
Under the circumstances, Burke would not have regretted our paying
less attention to the Montenegrins, or the Bulgarians, or the Russian
Jews, for he says: "To commiserate the distresses of all men suffering
innocently, perhaps meritoriously, is generous, and very agreeable to
the better part of our nature-a disposition that ought by all means
to be cherished. But to transfer humanity from its natural basis-
our legitimate and homebred connections; to lose all feeling for those
who have grown up by our sides, in our eyes, the benefit of whose
cares and labours we have partaken from our birth, and meretriciously
to hunt abroad after foreign affections, is such a disarrangement of
the whole system of our duties, that I do not know whether benevo-
lence so displaced is not almost the same thing as destroyed, or what
effect bigotry could have produced that is more fatal to society."
"'*
It is thought that a cheap reprint of some of Burke's works may
do good service now, both in England and in Ireland. From Burke
Englishmen may still learn the value of timely concessions, which
they did not know one hundred years ago, when they lost the American
colonies. "Early reformations are amicable arrangements with a
friend in power; late reformations are terms imposed upon a conquered
* Tracts on the
6
INTRODUCTION.
1*
enemy; early reformations are made in cold blood; late reformations
are made under a state of inflammation. In that state of things the
people behold in government nothing that is respectable. They see
the abuse, and they will see nothing else-They fall into the temper
of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill-fame;
they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to the work by
the shortest way-They abate the nuisance, they pull down the
house.' One great source of the charm and strength of Burke's
teaching lies in his sympathy, his power of entering into the thoughts
and feelings of others, even of those who differed with him. As he
says himself:-"But until we come to respect what stands in a
respectable light with others, we are very deficient in the temper
which qualifies us to make any laws and regulations about them. It
even disqualifies us from being charitable to them with any effect or
judgment."+ For this rare quality of Burke's, if for no other reason
Englishmen ought to study him, and take him to heart; for, as has
often been remarked, this sympathy is not a strong point in the English
character. John Stuart Mill talks of the "extraordinary inability to
understand one another which exists between England and the rest.
of Europe, whilst it does not exist to anything like the same degree
between one nation of Continental Europe and another."
Talford lamented the want of sympathy with his dying breath.
I were to be asked," said he, "what is the great want of English
society, so as to mingle class with class, I would say, in one word-
the want is, the want of sympathy." To this want of sympathy in
the case of Ireland may be traced (to a greater extent than blue-book
politicians will allow) many of the woes inflicted by England upon
the weaker nation. Through want of sympathy the English, till
lately, studied nothing of Irish affairs; they rarely give Ireland what
she asks for, but when hard pressed they give something else, which,
they say, ought to satisfy all her wants-only she is so pigheaded!
As Burke says, "If you mean to please any people, you must give
them the boon which they ask for; not what you may think better
Speech on Economical Reform, Feb. 11th, 1780.
† Letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws, 1782.
Inaugural Address at St. Andrew's.
Judge
"If
§ Smiles' Life of George Moore (514), who used to say, "Sympathy is the grandest
word in the world."
INTRODUCTION.
7
for them, but of a kind totally different. Such an act may be a.
wise regulation, but it is no concession; whereas our present theme
is the mode of giving satisfaction.'* English statesmen try to make
a mosaic† of little bits of Church Establishments, and Tenant-rights,
and Purchase-clauses, relieved by the darker colours of Coercion and
Cloture, but they have no solid ground to arrange their pattern on,
and it looks now nearly as mixed up as ever. The good-will of the
millions is wanting, and it is not by giving Irishmen presents they
value as second rate, that Englishmen can gloss over the odium of
refusing them what they set their hearts upon.
But it is chiefly for Irishmen that this reprint in a cheap form is
now issued, as they have no public libraries, and few opportunities of
reading good books. Burke said, in 1778:-" Believe me, if Ireland
is beneficial to you, it is not so from the parts in which it is restrained,
but from those in which it is left free, though not unrivalled. The
greater its freedom the greater must be your advantage. If you
should lose in one way, you will gain in twenty;"‡ and in 1792,
Burke was of opinion that a union with England would not be for
the mutual advantage of the two kingdoms."§ If Burke was right
here, and in saying, "Depend upon it the lovers of freedom will be
free," the time may not be so far off when Irishmen will have to
show that they are able to govern themselves. Before they come to
have power, let Irishmen learn the value of moderation, the value of
building upon the old foundations, the value of making changes as
gradually as circumstances will permit-all this, and much more,
they may learn from Burke. If the spirit of Burke's teaching pre-
vailed to any extent in the two islands, we should not have come to
the present pass. What Burke said in 1797 is true enough now:-
"As to the people at large in this country [England], I am sure they
have no disposition to intermeddle in your affairs. They mean you
no ill whatever; and they are too ignorant of the state of your affairs
to be able to do you any good. Whatever opinion they have on your
* Speech on Conciliation with America, 1775.
+ Since writing the above I find Burke has used mosaic as a simile in his speech on
American Taxation, 1774.
Two Letters to gentlemen in Bristol; second Letter, May 2nd, 1778.
§ Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, Jan. 3rd, 1792.
|| Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol, 1780.
8
INTRODUCTION.
subject is very faint and indistinct; and if there is anything like a
formed notion, even that amounts to no more than a sort of humming,
that remains in their ears, of the burden of the old song about
Popery. Poor souls, they are to be pitied who think of nothing but
dangers long passed by; and but little of the perils that actually sur-
round them."* Whenever we compare the difficulties of Burke's
time with our own troubles, we find fresh proofs that his works are a
кτñµа έç άεì—a possession for all time, and for all countries. For
instance, is there no modern lesson to be gleaned from this :-"Would
the people consider the being taken out of their beds, and transported
from their family and friends, to be an equitable, and legal, and
charitable proceeding, unless I should say that it was a violation of
justice and a dissolution, pro tanto, of the very compact of human
society? If a House of Parliament, whose essence it is to be the
guardian of the laws, and a sympathetic protector of the rights of the
people, and eminently so of the most defenceless, should not only coun-
tenance but applaud this very violation of all law, and refuse even to
examine into the grounds of the necessity, upon the allegation of
which the law was so violated, would this be taken for a tender soli-
citude for the welfare of the poor, and a true proof of the representative
capacity of the House of Commons, unless I should happen to say
(what I do say) that the House had not done its duty, either in pre-
serving the sacred rules of law, or in justifying the woeful and
humiliating privilege of necessity? They may indemnify and reward
others. They might contrive, if I was within their grasp, to punish
me, or, if they thought it worth their while, to stigmatise me by
their censures; but who will indemnify them for the disgrace of such
an act? Who will save them from the censures of posterity? What
act of oblivion will cover them from the wakeful memory, from the
notices and issues of the grand remembrancer-the God within?
Would it pass with the people who suffer from the abuse of lawful
power, when at the same time they suffer from the use of lawless violence
of factions amongst themselves, that Government had done its duty,
and acted leniently in not animadverting on one of those acts of
violence, if I did not tell them that the lenity with which Govern-
ment passes by the crimes and oppressions of a favourite faction was
* Letter on the Affairs of Ireland, 1797.
INTRODUCTION.
9
itself an act of atrocious cruelty? If a Parliament should hear a
declamation attributing the sufferings of those who are destroyed by
these riotous proceedings to their misconduct, and then to make them
self-felonious, and should in effect refuse an inquiry into the facts, is
no inference to be drawn from thence, unless I tell men in high
places that these proceedings, taken together, form not only an en-
couragement to the abuse of power, but to riot, sedition, and a
rebellious spirit, which, sooner or later, will turn upon those that
encourage it?”*
Again: "And I would, sir, recommend to
your serious consideration, whether it be prudent to form a rule
for punishing people, not on their own acts, but on your con-
jectures? Surely it is preposterous at the very best."+ Read
what Burke says of a military occupation of Ireland :-" Eng-
land will be indisposed, I suspect, to send an army for the con-
quest of Ireland. What was done in 1782 [making the Irish
Parliament independent] is a decisive proof of her sentiments of
justice and moderation. She will not be fond of making another
American war in Ireland. The principles of such a war would but
too much resemble the former one. The well-disposed and the ill-
disposed in England would (for different reasons perhaps) be equally
averse to such an enterprise. The confiscations, the public auctions,
the private grants, the plantations, the transplantations, which formerly
animated so many adventurers, even among sober citizens, to such
Irish expeditions, and which possibly might have animated some of
them to the American, can have no existence in the case that we sup-
pose." And again:-"God forbid that on a worthy occasion authority
should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it. But
where a prudent and enlarged policy does not precede it, and attend
it too, where the hearts of the better sort of people do not go with the
hands of the soldiery, you may call your constitution what you will,
in effect it will consist of three parts (orders, if you please)—cavalry,
infantry, and artillery—and of nothing else, or better."§ Again, on
June 5th, 1797 (he died July 9th), Burke writes :-"When I object
to the scheme of any military government, you do not imagine that I
*Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hussey, December, 1796.
+ Speech on Conciliation with America, 1775.
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, January 3rd, 1792.
§ Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, May 26th, 1795.
•
10
INTRODUCTION.
object to the use of the military arm in its proper place and order;
but I am sure that so long as this is looked upon as principal it will
become the sole reliance of Government: and that from its apparent
facility, everything whatsoever belonging to real civil policy in the
management of a people will be postponed, if not totally set aside.
The truth is, the government of Ireland grows every day more and
more difficult; and, consequently, the incapacity of the jobbers there
every day more and more evident; but as long as they can draw upon
England for indefinite aids of men and sums of money, they will go
on with more resolution than ever in their jobbing system. Things
must take their course."*
It is hoped that enough has been said in this preface to stimulate
the interest of many to whom Edmund Burke was but a stranger.
The more we study this great and good man the more we admire him,
and the wiser and better we feel. His teachings ought to form a
golden link between England and Ireland. "If we set about this
great work, on both sides, with the same conciliatory turn of mind, we
may now owe even to our mutual mistakes, contentions, and animosi-
ties, the lasting concord, freedom, happiness, and glory of this em-
pire."+
Reflective readers can compare for themselves the discontents in
1770 with Irish discontents in 1882-the comparison is easily drawn
from Burke.
To encourage moderate men to speak out at such crises as ours
in Ireland, we should not so often seem to forget Burke's saying,
"That to warn is not to menace."
""
No attempt has been made to edit Burke's celebrated work; an exact
reprint is merely given, and the italics are taken from Burke.
VINCENT SCULLY.
Mantlehill, Golden, County Tipperary, May, 1882.
* Letter to Dr. Laurence, June 5th, 1797.
† Address to the British Colonists in North America.
THOUGHTS,
ON THE
CAUSE OF THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
Hoc vero occultum, intestinum, domesticum malum, non modo non existit, verum
etiam opprimit antequam perspicere atque explorare potueris.—Cic.
1770.
Ir 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 dis-
tracted, 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 nar-
rowly; 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 dis-
please 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 subject, and to conciliate their
affections. I have nothing to do here with the abstract value of the
voice of the people. But as long as reputation, the most precious
possession of every individual, and as long as opinion, the great sup-
port of the State, depend entirely upon that voice, it can never be
considered as a thing of little consequence either to individuals or to
governments. Nations are not primarily ruled by laws; less by
2
12
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 prin-
ciples, 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 govern-
ment 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 pos-
sessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of
the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of man-
kind; indeed, the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the
vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in all times; yet
as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself
in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general
infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the
particular distemperature of our own air and season.
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 an unsuccessful war,
in which our misfortunes might easily pervert our judgment, and our
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
13
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 accumu-
late immense wealth in the hands of some individuals; and this again
being dispersed among 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 convul-
sions 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 our-
selves 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 distur-
bance can be excited by such means. It is besides no small aggrava-
tion 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. What-
ever 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
14
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 un-
happy, 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 punish-
ment of those who oppose them, will in course of time infalliby put
an end to these disorders. But this, in my opinion, is said without
much observation of our present disposition, and without any know-
ledge 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. Par-
ticular 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 in-
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, in-
constancy 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 be-
tween 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 govern-
ing part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill
by design, as well as by mistake. "Les révolutions qui arrivent dans
les grands états ne sont point un effect du hazard, ni du caprice des peuples.
Rien ne révolte les grands d'un royaume comme un gouvernement foible
et dérangé. Pour la populace, ce n'est jamais par envie d'attaquer
qu'elle se soulève, mais par impatience de souffrir."* These are the
words of a great man, of a minister of state, and a zealous assertor of
monarchy. They are applied to the system of favouritism which was
adopted by Henry the Third of France, and to the dreadful conse-
quences 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
Mem. de Sully, tom. i., p. 133.
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
15
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 vin-
dicated on the Stuarts. A great change has taken place in the affairs
of this country. For in the silent lapse of events as material altera-
tions 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 con-
cerning 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, behind-hand 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 every-
thing 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 a little self-denial, in the business of all
times except their own. We are very uncorrupt and tolerably en-
lightened judges of the transactions of past ages; where no passions
deceive, and where the whole train of circumstances, from the trifling
cause to the tragic 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 advan-
tage 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 in-
struments 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 altera-
tion 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
gi
16
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 oppres-
sion 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. Everyone 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 inheri-
tance. 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 em-
ployed, 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 dis-
tresses 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 igno-
rance of the people is a bottom but for a temporary system; the
-interest of active men in the State is a foundation perpetual and in-
* “Uxor Hugonis de Nevill dat Domino Regi ducentas Gallinas, eo quod possit
jacere una nocte cum Domino suo Hugone de Nevill." Maddox, Hist. Exch. c. xiii.
p. 325.
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
17
fallible. However, some circumstances, arising, it must be confessed,
in a great degree from accident, prevented the effects of this influ-
ence for a long time from breaking out in a manner capable of ex-
citing 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 Revo-
lution itself, of many prerogatives, was found too weak to struggle
against all the difficulties which pressed so new and unsettled a go-
vernment. 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
connexion, necessary at first, continued long after convenient, and,
properly conducted, might indeed, in all situations, be a useful in-
strument of government. At the same time, through the interven-
tion 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 encumbrances. The powerful managers
for government were not sufficiently submissive to the pleasure of the
possessors of immediate and personal favour, sometimes from a con-
fidence 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 obliga-
tion. The influence of Government, thus divided in appearance be-
tween 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 com-
passed, 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 concur-
rence on the part of the people; without any attention to the dignity
18
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 Frederic 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 op-
position, 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 adminis-
tration 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, connexions,
and character of the ministers of the Crown. By means of a discip-
line, on which I shall say more hereafter, that body was to be habitu-
ated to the most opposite interests, and the most discordant politics.
All connexions 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 inde-
pendence, were to be let down gradually. Points of honour and pre-
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
19
cedence 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 foot-
men, for minister, and that he ought to be, and that he would be, 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 mo-
tive 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 surpris-
ing. But the fact is, that opportunities very inviting to such an at-
tempt have offered; and the scheme itself was not destitute of some
arguments, not wholly unplausible, to recommend it. These oppor-
tunities 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 ad-
vantages 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 inheri-
tance 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 with-
out being invidious. His influence, by additions from conquest, by
an augmentation of debt, by an increase of military and naval estab-
lishment, was 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
20
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 free-
dom 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 statesmen never long
undiscovered or employed) of drawing to themselves, by the aggran-
dizement 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 connexions of the greatest 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 their import-
ance 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 administra-
tion a prince of the House of Brunswick. Day after day they hesi-
tated, 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 govern-
ment, vast property, obligations of favours given and received, con-
nection 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
21
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 pro-
ceedings, 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 re-
moved, in order to go to the root, the whole party was put under a pro-
scription, 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 ac-
cession 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 con-
nection 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, prin-
ciples correspondent to them had been preached up with great zeal.
Everyone must remember that the cabal set out with the most as-
tonishing 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 pre-
vailed. 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 appear-
ance 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 ex-
* "Sentiments of an Honest Man."
22
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
hibited to the gaping multitude. Party was to be totally done away,
with all its evil works. Corruption was to be cast down from court,
as Atè was from heaven. Power was thenceforward to be the chosen
residence of public spirit; and no one was supposed to be under any
sinister influence, except those who had the misfortune to be in dis-
grace at court, which was to stand in lieu of all vices and all corrup-
tions. A scheme of perfection to be realised in a monarchy far be-
yond 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 where-
withal 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 minis-
terial 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 pre-
serve the balance of the constitution from being overturned by the
rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but to free the sovereign effec-
tually 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 connexion
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 pro-
ject, 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 anger to his person and family,
George II. maintained the dignity of his crown connected with the
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
23
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 com-
merce 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 foundations 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
* See the political writings of the late Dr. Brown, and many others.
24
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE 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 con-
duct, 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 more eligible, but which is the more
imminent? He is but a poor observer who has not seen that the
generality of peers, far from supporting themselves in a state of inde-
pendent 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 them-
selves, 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 ren-
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
25
dered 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 parlia-
ment; it is to separate them from all their natural and acquired
dependencies; it is intended as the control, not the support, of ad-
ministration. The machinery of this system is perplexed in its move-
ments 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 disconnexion, 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 for-
tune 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 canvass 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
26
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
equally betrays them. It is soon found necessary to get rid of the
heads of administration; but it is of their heads only. As there
always are many rotten members belonging to the best connexions,
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 an entrenchment 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
connexions.
They contrive to form in the outward administration two parties
at the least, which, whilst they are tearing one another to pieces, are
both competitors for the favour and protection of the cabal, and by
their emulation contribute to throw 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 councils, will
privately traverse and publicly oppose their measures. He will,
however, continue in his employment. Instead of suffering any mark
of displeasure he will be distinguished by an unbounded profusion of
court rewards and caresses, because he does what is expected, and all
that is expected, from men in office. He helps to keep some form of
administration in being, and keeps it at the same time as weak and
divided as possible.
However, we must take care not to be mistaken or to imagine that
such persons have any weight in their opposition. When, by them,
administration is convinced of its insignificancy they are soon to be
convinced of their own. They never are suffered to succeed in their
opposition. They and the world are to be satisfied that neither office,
nor authority, nor property, nor ability, eloquence, counsel, skill, or
union, are of the least importance; but that the mere influence of the
court, naked of all support, and destitute of all management, is abun-
dantly sufficient for all its own purposes.
When any adverse connexion is to be destroyed, the cabal seldom
appear in the work themselves. They find out some person of whom
the party entertains 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 off a considerable part of his adherents.
When such a person has broke in this manner with his connexions,
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
27
he is soon compelled to commit some flagrant act of iniquitous, per-
sonal 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 con-
trived 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 osten-
sible 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 atteneed 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 appli-
cation of these remarks.
That this body may be enabled to compass all the ends of its insti-
tution, 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
3
28
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF

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 anyone 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 pre-
liminary 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 of 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
29
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 constella-
tion 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 un-
just or frivolous. At best, they have a tendency to give the resent-
ment 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 arisen 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 con-
triving 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 ever been his custom. It is enough for him that he
30
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 connexion with Lord Bute. But who-
ever 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 to 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 import-
ance 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 dis-
order 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 conduits, 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 un-
doubtedly 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 there-
fore next in order, and equal in importance, that the discretionary
powers which are necessarily vested in the monarch, whether for the execu-
tion 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 politics 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 govern-
ment 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
31
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 pro-
secution 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 the new system tells 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 iudifference 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 milki-
ness 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
hauds, 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 policy 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 laws 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 cor-
respondent 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 depend-
ance, 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
32
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 predomi-
nated 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
deliberate power in making laws; the king with the control of his
negative. The king was intrusted with the deliberate 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 ex-
clude 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
occaines
to a settled contempt, or occasional forfeiture of their esteem.
tos,
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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
33
has no friends to sympathise with him; he who has no sway among
any part of the landed or commercial interest, but whose whole im-
portance 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 direc-
tion of all our public affairs; because such a man has no connection
with the interest 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 con-
nection with the sentiments and opinions of the people.
These are considerations which, in my opinion, enforce the neces-
sity of having some better reason, in a free country, and a free parlia-
ment, 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 con-
troverting 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 a
while, 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
34
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 instru-
ment 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 that it deserves. Sufficient appearances will never be want-
ing 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 con-
cerning 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 see 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 dark-
ness 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.
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
35
It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a prince, to aim
at giving tranquillity to his Government. But 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 yoemanry, must interpose, to rescue their prince, them-
selves, 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 en-
tirely repugnant to the genius of the people, and not conformable to
the plan of their government, everything must necessarily be dis-
ordered 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 times 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 splen-
dour 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 considera-
tion, not only strikes a palsy into every nerve of our free constitution,
but in the same degree benumbs and stupifies 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. Accor-
dingly, 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
36
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 know-
ledge of their character, have not scrupled to violate the most solemn
treaties; and, in defiance of them, to make conquest in the midst of
a general peace, and in the heart of Europe. Such was the conquest
of Corsica, by the professed enemies of mankind, in defiance of those
who were formerly its professed defenders. We have 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 pre-
scription. 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, attend 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 constitu-
tion: 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 signalize
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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
37
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 remon-
strated against in another. At Paris, the Duke of Choiseul con-
sidered this office arrangement as a compliment to him: here it was
spoken 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 in-
fluence 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 administra-
tion is separated from the court, divided within itself, and de-
tested 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 in-
dependence. Nothing can equal the futility, the weakness, the rash-
ness, 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
38
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
Government. They may be assured, that however they amuse them-
selves 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 degene-
rated 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 loath-
some 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. Super-
ficial observers consider such persons as the cause of the public un-
easiness, 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
They are despoiled of all the
power which might enable them to reconcile the strength of govern-
ment with the rights of the people. They stand in a most distres-
sing alternative. But in the election among evils they hope better
things from temporary confusion than from established servitude. In
the meantime, the voice of law is not to be heard. Fierce licentious-
ness 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 par-
takes of the original disorder. Anarchy predominates without freedom,
and servitude without submission or subordination. These are the
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
39
consequences inevitable to our public peace, from the scheme of ren-
dering the executory government at once odious and feeble; of freeing
administration from the constitutional and salutary control of parlia-
ment, 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 com-
monwealth, 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. Inde-
pendent of that greatness which a king possesses by being merely 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
ratus of royal magnificence. In all this they see nothing but the
operations of parsimony, attended with all the consequences of pro-
fusion. Nothing expended, nothing saved. Their wonder is increased
appa-
40
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
by their knowledge, that besides the revenue settled on his Majesty's
civil list to the amount of £800,000 a year, he has a further aid from
a large pension list, near £90,000 a year, in Ireland; from the pro-
duce of the duchy of Lancaster (which we are told has been greatly
improved); from the revenue of the duchy of Cornwall; from the
American quit-rents; from the four and a half per cent. duty in the
Leeward Islands; this last worth, to be sure, considerably more than
£40,000 a year. The whole is certainly not much short of a million
annually.
These are revenues within the knowledge and cognizance of our
national councils. We have no direct right to examine into the
receipts from his Majesty's German dominions, and the bishopric of
Osnaburg. This is unquestionably true. But that which is not
within the province of parliament is yet within the sphere of every
man's own reflection. If a foreign prince resided amongst us, the
state of his revenues could not fail of becoming the subject of our
speculation. Filled with an anxious concern for whatever regards the
welfare of our sovereign, it is impossible, in considering the miserable
circumstances into which he has been brought, that this obvious topic
should be entirely passed over. There is an opinion universal that
these revenues produce something not inconsiderable, clear of all
charges and establishments. This produce the people do not believe
to be hoarded, nor perceive to be spent. It is accounted for in the
only manner it can, by supposing that it is drawn away, for the sup-
port of that court faction, which, whilst it distresses the nation, im-
poverishes 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 great-
ness have fulfilled all their magnificent promises. Without recapitu-
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
41
lating 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 administrations: let me ask,
whether any enemy to the personal feelings of the sovereign could
possibly contrive a keener instrument of mortification, and degrada-
tion 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 affec-
tions and dislikes than that which is now adopted in direct opposition
to everything 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 pleas-
ing 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 disagree-
able to him, has it given more grace and tranquillity to his Majesty's
private hours? No, most certainly. The father of his people can-
not possibly enjoy repose while his family is in such a state of dis-
traction. 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 ?
42
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 dis-
tinguished honour of the society of their sovereign; and, by being
the partakers of his amusements, came sometimes to prefer the grati-
fication of his personal inclinations to the support of his high
character, the thing would be very natural, and it would be excus-
able 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 suffer-
ings may demonstrate the eternal difference between a true and
severe friend to the monarchy, and a slippery sycophant of the court!
Quantum infido scurræ distabit amicus.
So far I have considered the effect of the court system, chiefly as
it operates upon the executive government, on the temper of the
people, and on the happiness of the sovereign. It remains that we
should consider, with a little attention, its operation upon Parliament.
Parliament was, indeed, the great object of all these politics, the
end at which they aimed, as well as the instrument by which they
were to operate. But, before parliament could be made subservient
to a system, by which it was to be degraded from the dignity of a
national council into a mere member of the court, it must be greatly
changed from its original character.
In speaking of this body, I have my eye chiefly on the House of
Commons. I hope I shall be indulged in a few observations on the
nature and character of that assembly: not with regard to its legal
form and power, but to its spirit, and to the purposes it is meant to
answer in the constitution.
The House of Commons was supposed originally to be no part of
the standing government of this country. It was considered as a control,
issuing immediately from the people, and speedily to be resolved into
the mass from whence it arose. In this respect it was in the higher
part of government what juries are in the lower. The capacity of a
magistrate being transitory, and that of a citizen permanent, the
latter capacity it was hoped would of course preponderate in all dis-
cussions, 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
43
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 phrensy of the
people, as this would indicate some consanguinity, some sympathy of
nature with their constituents, than that they should in all cases be
wholly untouched by the opinions and feelings of the people out of
doors. By this want of sympathy they would cease to be 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 representa-
tive. 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 distinc-
tion 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 feel-
ings 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 perni-
cious 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 sergeant-at-arms, which it can command
of its own proper authority. A vigilant and jealous eye over execu-
tory 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 its ministers, whom the people regard
with the utmost abhorrence; who vote thanks, when the public.
opinion calls upon them for impeachments; who are eager to grant,
when the general voice demands account; who, in all disputes,
between the people and administration, presume against the people;
who punish their disorders, but refuse even to inquire into the provo-
cation to them: this is an unnatural, a monstrous state of things in
this constitution. Such an assembly may be a great, wise, awful
4
44
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 corrup-
tion 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 par-
liament as a control, and is a general, previous sanction to mis-
government; 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 abso-
lutely necessary to have frequent recourse to the legislature. Parlia-
ments 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 unfrequency of elec-
tions, bave 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 aban-
doned 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 com-
mensurate, 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. Parlia-
ment cannot, with any great propriety, punish others for things in
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
45
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. Impeach-
ment, 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 recom-
mend it, then parliament is itself discredited; and this discredit in-
creases 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 en-
joyed 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 mode-
rate; 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 disagree-
able to them from sitting in parliament without any other rule than
their own pleasure; to make incapacities, either general for descrip-
tions 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 ob-
serve on the motives which led to it, and to trace its political conse-
quences.
A violent rage for the punishment of Mr. Wilkes was the pretence
of the whole. This gentleman, by setting himself strongly in oppo-
•
46
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
sition to the court cabal, had become at once an object of their perse-
cution, 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 par-
ticular 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 the 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 indepen-
dence 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 exorbitances, 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 imper-
fectly; 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. Whilst any errors com-
mitted 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 represent-
ing them. Their odium might become stained 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 re-
served, 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
47
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. Re-
sistance 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 con-
stituted, 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 Com-
mons, 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 Parlia-
ment, 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.
48
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 fadum crimen servitutis) to every other
crime, and the whole mass is immediately transmuted into virtue,
and becomes the just subject of reward and honour. When, there-
fore, 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 dispo-
sitions which are blended with his vices; for his unconquerable firm-
ness, 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 popu-
larity 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 irre-
trievable; 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, Breres et infaustos populi Romani amores. If, there-
fore, 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 grow-
ing, 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 ecclesi-
astical, 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
49
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 thou-
sand 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 indepen-
dent 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 inconveniencies, 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 Com-
mons can never be a control on other parts of government, unless they
are controlled themselves by their constituents, and unless these con-
stituents 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
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 fran-
chise of an Englishman, and that on which all the rest vitally depend,
50
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 privi-
lege 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 Mævius, 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 re-
mainder, for their security and representative, the door-keeper, crier,
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
51
or sweeper of the court, or some other shadowy being without sub-
stance 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 authorized
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 compli-
ment. 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 burden. 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 con-
fidence 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 a 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
benefit 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 ulti-
mately 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 aggrandizement 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
52
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 constitutents, there wanted but one thing to
secure that House against all possible future deviation towards popu-
larity, an unlimited fund of money to be laid out according to the
pleasure of the court.
To complete the scheme of bringing our court to a resemblance to
the neighbouring monarchies it was necessary, in effect, to destroy
those appropriations of revenue which seem to limit the property, as
the other laws had done the powers of the Crown. An opportunity
for this purpose was taken, upon an application to parliament for
payment of the debts of the civil list, which, in 1769, had amounted
to £513,000. Such application had been made upon former occa-
sions; 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 cer-
tainly was), for discharging it. It does not appear that the duties
which were then applied to the ordinary government produced clear
above £580,000 a year; because, when they were afterwards granted
to George the First, £120,000 was added, to complete the whole to
£700,000 a year. Indeed, it was then asserted and I have no doubt.
truly, that for many years the net produce did not amount to above
£550,000. The queen's extraordinary charges were besides very
considerable equal, at least, to any we have known in our time.
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
53
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 mort-
gaged for the sum to be raised, and stood charged with the ransom
of their own deliverance.
George the Second received an addition to his civil list. Duties
were granted for the purpose of raising £800,000 a year. It was not
until he had reigned nineteen years, and after the last rebellion,
that he called upon parliament for a discharge of the civil list debt.
The extraordinary charges brought on by the rebellion, account fully
for the necessities of the Crown. However, the extraordinary charges
of Government were not thought a ground fit to be relied on.
A deficiency of the civil list duties for several years before was
stated as the principal, if not the sole, ground on which an applica-
tion to parliament could be justified. About this time the produce
of these duties had fallen pretty low; and even upon an average of
the whole reign, they never produced £800,000 a year clear to the
treasury.
That prince reigned fourteen years afterwards. Not only no new
demands were made; but with so much good order were his revenues
and expenses regulated that, although many parts of the establish-
ment of the court were upon a larger and more liberal scale than they
have been since, there was a considerable sum in hand, on his decease,
amounting to about £170,000, applicable to the service of the civil
list of his present Majesty. So that, if this reign commenced with
a greater charge than usual, there was enough, and more than
enough, abundantly to supply all the extraordinary expense. That
the civil list should have been exceeded in the two former reigns,
especially in the reign of George the First, was not at all surprising.
His revenue was but £700,000 annually-if it ever produced so much
clear. The prodigious and dangerous disaffection to the very being
of the establishment, and the cause of a Pretender then powerfully
abetted from abroad, produced many demands of an extraordinary
nature both abroad and at home. Much management and great ex-
penses 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 in-
curred a debt without special authority of parliament was, primâ 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.
54
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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.
It
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.
is a check, 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 parlia-
mentary way of proceeding was to pay first what the court thought
proper to demand, and to take its chance for an examination into ac-
counts at some time of greater leisure.
The nation had settled £800,000 a year on the Crown as sufficient
for the support of its dignity, upon the estimate of its own ministers.
When ministers came to parliament, and said that this allowance had
not been sufficient for the purpose, and that they had incurred a debt
of £500,000, would it not have been natural for parliament first to
have asked how, and by what means, their appropriated allowance
came to be insufficient? Would it not have savoured of some atten-
tion 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 cul-
pable? 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? Account 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 exami
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
55
nation of accounts would be quite proper and regular. It was there-
fore carried, that they should go into the committee without delay,
and without accounts, in order to examine with great order and re-
gularity things that could not possibly come before them. After this
stroke of orderly and parliamentary wit and humour they went into
the committee, and very generously voted the payment.
There was a circumstance in that debate too remarkable to be
overlooked. This debt of the civil list was all along argued upon the
same footing as a debt of the State, contracted upon national authority.
Its payment was urged as equally pressing upon the public faith and
honour; and when the whole year's account was stated, in what is
called the budget, the ministry valued themselves on the payment of
so much public debt, just as if they had discharged £500,000 of navy
or exchequer bills. Though, in truth, their payment, from the sink-
ing 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 en-
deavour 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 unoperative act of parliament,
estimating the dignity of the Crown at £800,000 and confining it to
that sum, adds to the number of obsolete statutes which load the
shelves of libraries, without any sort of advantage to the people.
After this proceeding, I suppose that no man can be so weak as
to think that the Crown is limited to any settled allowance whatsoever.
For if the ministry has £800,000 a year by the law of the land, and
56
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 an
income as is possessed by every absolute monarch in Europe. It
amounts, as a person of great ability said in the debate, to an un-
limited power of drawing upon the sinking fund. Its effect on the pub-
lic 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 mere existence
of the debt.
a
Five hundred thousand pounds is a serious sum. But it is
nothing to the prolific principle upon which the sum was voted-
principle that may be well called the fruitful mother of a hundred
more. Neither is the damage to public credit of very great conse-
quence, when compared with that which results to public morals and
to the safety of the constitution, from the exhaustless mine of corrup-
tion 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 dis-
cretionary disqualification by one law of parliament, and the neces-
sity of paying every debt of the civil list by another law of parlia-
ment, 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.
În 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 land-marks 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 prelimi-
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
57
nary indispensable to every other reformation.
What alterations
ought afterwards to be made in the constitution is a matter of deep
and difficult research.
To
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, then, 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.
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 proceed-
ings, 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 inter-
mediate periods, when members sit a little firm 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, too 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 improve-
ment 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 the 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
58
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
effect of vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every states-
man is of course corrupt, and that his opinion upon every constitu-
tional point is solely formed upon some siuister 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 dis-
tempers. 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 that 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 represen-
tation, 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 tried 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, of
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 cor-
ruptions 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
59
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 on other way for
the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the repre-
sentatives, 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 in-
tended 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 confi-
dence in Government is re-established, the people ought to be excited
to a more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their repre-
sentatives. Standards for judging more systematically upon their
conduct ought to be settled in the meetings of counties and corpora-
tions. 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 ad-
ministrations, 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 con-
cerned for government and order, than for the liberties of his country,
5
60
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
even he is equally concerned to put an end to this course of indis-.
criminate support. It is this blind and undistinguishing support,
that feeds the spring of those very disorders, by which he is frightened
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 subser-
vient, 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 struc-
ture is of stubble, and its foundation is on quicksand. I repeat it
again—He that supports every administration subverts all govern-
ment. 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 principal 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 ani-
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 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 assign-
able 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
61
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 administra-
tion, 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 co-operate with it, is a touch-stone by which every adminis-
tration ought in future to be tried. There has not been one which has
not experienced sufficiently 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 adminis-
tration, 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 oppo-
sition to the court party. The doctrine is this: That all political con-
nections 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 draughts 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 un-
constitutional statesmen. The reason is evident. Whilst men are
linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of
any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel,
and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dis-
62
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
persed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncer-
tain, 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 dis-
positions by joint efforts in business, no personal confidence, no
friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evi-
dently 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 vain-glory, into enthusiasm,
can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic
endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals
of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must asso-
ciate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a con-
temptible struggle.
It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth that
a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single
person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his
conscience, and even harangued against every design which he
apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This
innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan
of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of
public duty. That duty demands and requires that what is right
should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is
evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public
man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect,
it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as
much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very
rational account of a man's life that he has always acted right, but
has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours
could not possibly be productive of any consequence.
I do not wonder that the behaviour of many parties should have
made persons of tender and scrupulous virtue somewhat out of
humour with all sorts of connection in polities. I admit that people
frequently acquire in such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and pro-
scriptive 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
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
63
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 commended 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 tur-
pitude. 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 interests 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 grada-
tion, 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 con-
sidered 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 frm basis of desert they rise,
From long-tried faith, and friendship's holy ties."
64
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
The Whigs of those days believed that the only proper method of
rising into power was through hard 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 ingeni-
ous 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 anyone 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 is 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 overbalanced 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 incom-
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
65
patible 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 get 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 indivi-
dual 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, cognizable in any ordinary court, but upon such 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
66
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF
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 conform-
able 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 in-
terests, 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 feel-
ing that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are
lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the common-
wealth; 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
:
THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS.
67
ather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which leads us
o act with effect and energy, than to loiter out our days without blame
nd without use. Public life is a situation of power and energy; he
respasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he
hat goes over to the enemy.
There is, however, a time for all things. It is not every conjunc-
ure which calls with equal force upon the activity of honest men;
out critical exigencies now and then arise; and I am mistaken if this
be not one of them. Men will see the necessity of honest combina-
ion; 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
o oppose in favour of the laws, with the laws on their side, they may
it 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
he utmost distance is, therefore, our first obligation. Early activity
nay prevent late and fruitless violence. As yet we work in the light.
The scheme of the enemies of public tranquillity has disarranged, it
as 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 free-
dom, weakens (for the present at least) all the powers of executory
government, rendering us abroad contemptible, and at home dis-
tracted, 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 atten-
tion 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
's powers, and its privileges, as independent of every other, and as
ependent upon themselves, as possible. This servitude is to a House
f Commons (like obedience to the Divine Law) "perfect freedom;"
or if they once quit this natural, rational, and liberal obedience,
having deserted the only proper foundation of their power, they must
eek a support in an abject and unnatural dependence somewhere else.
When, through the medium of this just connection with their consti-
uents, the genuine dignity of the House of Commons is restored, it
ill begin to think of casting from it, with scorn, as badges of
68
THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE, ETC.
servility, all the false ornaments of illegal power, with which it ha
been for some time disgraced. It will begin to think of its old offic
of CONTROL. It will not suffer that last of evils to predominate i
the country: men without popular confidence, public opinion, natura
connection, or mutual trust, invested with all the powers of govern
ment.
When they have learned this lesson themselves, they will be will
ing and able to teach the 'court that it is the true interest of the
prince to have but one administration, and that one composed o
those who recommend themselves to their sovereign through the
opinion of their country, and not by their obsequiousness to
favourite. Such men will serve their sovereign with affection and
fidelity; because his choice of them upon such principles is a com
pliment 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 o
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.
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