Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and Speeches

But admit it were true that the great mass of the electors were too vast an object for court influence to grasp, or extend to, and that in despair they must abandon it; he must be very ignorant of the state of every popular interest, who does not know that in all the corporations, all the open boroughs—indeed, in every district of the kingdom—there is some leading man, some agitator, some wealthy merchant, or considerable manufacturer, some active attorney, some popular preacher, some money-lender, &c., &c., who is followed by the whole flock.  This is the style of all free countries.

—Multùm in Fabiâ valet hic, valet ille Velinâ;Cuilibet hic fasces dabit eripietque curule.

These spirits, each of which informs and governs his own little orb, are neither so many, nor so little powerful, nor so incorruptible, but that a Minister may, as he does frequently, find means of gaining them, and through them all their followers.  To establish, therefore, a very general influence among electors will no more be found an impracticable project, than to gain an undue influence over members of parliament.  Therefore I am apprehensive that this bill, though it shifts the place of the disorder, does by no means relieve the Constitution.  I went through almost every contested election in the beginning of this parliament, and acted as a manager in very many of them: by which, though at a school of pretty severe and ragged discipline, I came to have some degree of instruction concerning the means by which parliamentary interests are in general procured and supported.

Theory, I know, would suppose, that every general election is to the representative a day of judgment, in which he appears before his constituents to account for the use of the talent with which they entrusted him, and of the improvement he had made of it for the public advantage.  It would be so, if every corruptible representative were to find an enlightened and incorruptible constituent.  But the practice and knowledge of the world will not suffer us to be ignorant, that the Constitution on paper is one thing, and in fact and experience is another.  We must know that the candidate, instead of trusting at his election to the testimony of his behaviour in parliament, must bring the testimony of a large sum of money, the capacity of liberal expense in entertainments, the power of serving and obliging the rulers of corporations, of winning over the popular leaders of political clubs, associations, and neighbourhoods.  It is ten thousand times more necessary to show himself a man of power, than a man of integrity, in almost all the elections with which I have been acquainted.  Elections, therefore, become a matter of heavy expense; and if contests are frequent, to many they will become a matter of an expense totally ruinous, which no fortunes can bear; but least of all the landed fortunes, encumbered as they often, indeed as they mostly are, with debts, with portions, with jointures; and tied up in the hands of the possessor by the limitations of settlement.  It is a material, it is in my opinion a lasting, consideration, in all the questions concerning election.  Let no one think the charges of election a trivial matter.

The charge, therefore, of elections ought never to be lost sight of, in a question concerning their frequency, because the grand object you seek is independence.  Independence of mind will ever be more or less influenced by independence of fortune; and if, every three years, the exhausting sluices of entertainments, drinkings, open houses, to say nothing of bribery, are to be periodically drawn up and renewed—if government favours, for which now, in some shape or other, the whole race of men are candidates, are to be called for upon every occasion, I see that private fortunes will be washed away, and every, even to the least, trace of independence, borne down by the torrent.  I do not seriously think this Constitution, even to the wrecks of it, could survive five triennial elections.  If you are to fight the battle, you must put on the armour of the Ministry; you must call in the public, to the aid of private, money.  The expense of the last election has been computed (and I am persuaded that it has not been overrated) at £1,500,000; three shillings in the pound more on the Land Tax.  About the close of the last Parliament, and the beginning of this, several agents for boroughs went about, and I remember well that it was in every one of their mouths—“Sir, your election will cost you three thousand pounds, if you are independent; but if the Ministry supports you, it may be done for two, and perhaps for less;” and, indeed, the thing spoke itself.  Where a living was to be got for one, a commission in the army for another, a post in the navy for a third, and Custom-house offices scattered about without measure or number, who doubts but money may be saved?  The Treasury may even add money; but, indeed, it is superfluous.  A gentleman of two thousand a year, who meets another of the same fortune, fights with equal arms; but if to one of the candidates you add a thousand a year in places for himself, and a power of giving away as much among others, one must, or there is no truth in arithmetical demonstration, ruin his adversary, if he is to meet him and to fight with him every third year.  It will be said, I do not allow for the operation of character; but I do; and I know it will have its weight in most elections; perhaps it may be decisive in some.  But there are few in which it will prevent great expenses.

The destruction of independent fortunes will be the consequence on the part of the candidate.  What will be the consequence of triennial corruption, triennial drunkenness, triennial idleness, triennial law-suits, litigations, prosecutions, triennial frenzy; of society dissolved, industry interrupted, ruined; of those personal hatreds that will never be suffered to soften; those animosities and feuds, which will be rendered immortal; those quarrels, which are never to be appeased; morals vitiated and gangrened to the vitals?  I think no stable and useful advantages were ever made by the money got at elections by the voter, but all he gets is doubly lost to the public; it is money given to diminish the general stock of the community, which is the industry of the subject.  I am sure that it is a good while before he or his family settle again to their business.  Their heads will never cool; the temptations of elections will be for ever glittering before their eyes.  They will all grow politicians; every one, quitting his business, will choose to enrich himself by his vote.  They will take the gauging-rod; new places will be made for them; they will run to the Custom-house quay, their looms and ploughs will be deserted.

So was Rome destroyed by the disorders of continual elections, though those of Rome were sober disorders.  They had nothing but faction, bribery, bread, and stage plays to debauch them.  We have the inflammation of liquor superadded, a fury hotter than any of them.  There the contest was only between citizen and citizen; here you have the contests of ambitious citizens on one side, supported by the Crown, to oppose to the efforts (let it be so) of private and unsupported ambition on the other.  Yet Rome was destroyed by the frequency and charge of elections, and the monstrous expense of an unremitted courtship to the people.  I think, therefore, the independent candidate and elector may each be destroyed by it, the whole body of the community be an infinite sufferer, and a vicious Ministry the only gainer.  Gentlemen, I know, feel the weight of this argument; they agree that this would be the consequence of more frequent elections, if things were to continue as they are.  But they think the greatness and frequency of the evil would itself be a remedy for it; that, sitting but for a short time, the member would not find it worth while to make such vast expenses, while the fear of their constituents will hold them the more effectually to their duty.

To this I answer, that experience is full against them.  This is no new thing; we have had triennial parliaments; at no period of time were seats more eagerly contested.  The expenses of elections ran higher, taking the state of all charges, than they do now.  The expense of entertainments was such, that an Act, equally severe and ineffectual, was made against it; every monument of the time bears witness of the expense, and most of the Acts against corruption in elections were then made; all the writers talked of it and lamented it.  Will any one think that a corporation will be contented with a bowl of punch, or a piece of beef the less, because elections are every three, instead of every seven years?  Will they change their wine for ale, because they are to get more ale three years hence?  Do not think it.  Will they make fewer demands for the advantages of patronage in favours and offices, because their member is brought more under their power?  We have not only our own historical experience in England upon this subject, but we have the experience co-existing with us in Ireland, where, since their Parliament has been shortened, the expense of elections has been so far from being lowered that it has been very near doubled.  Formerly they sat for the king’s life; the ordinary charge of a seat in Parliament was then £1,500.  They now sit eight years, four sessions: it is now £2,500 and upwards.  The spirit of emulation has also been extremely increased, and all who are acquainted with the tone of that country have no doubt that the spirit is still growing, that new candidates will take the field, that the contests will be more violent, and the expenses of elections larger than ever.

It never can be otherwise.  A seat in this House, for good purposes, for bad purposes, for no purpose at all (except the mere consideration derived from being concerned in the public councils) will ever be a first-rate object of ambition in England.  Ambition is no exact calculator.  Avarice itself does not calculate strictly when it games.  One thing is certain, that in this political game the great lottery of power is that into which men will purchase with millions of chances against them.  In Turkey, where the place, where the fortune, where the head itself, are so insecure, that scarcely any have died in their beds for ages, so that the bowstring is the natural death of Bashaws, yet in no country is power and distinction (precarious enough, God knows, in all) sought for with such boundless avidity, as if the value of place was enhanced by the danger and insecurity of its tenure.  Nothing will ever make a seat in this House not an object of desire to numbers by any means or at any charge, but the depriving it of all power and all dignity.  This would do it.  This is the true and only nostrum for that purpose.  But a House of Commons without power and without dignity, either in itself or its members, is no House of Commons for the purposes of this Constitution.

But they will be afraid to act ill, if they know that the day of their account is always near.  I wish it were true, but it is not; here again we have experience, and experience is against us.  The distemper of this age is a poverty of spirit and of genius; it is trifling, it is futile, worse than ignorant, superficially taught, with the politics and morals of girls at a boarding-school, rather than of men and statesmen; but it is not yet desperately wicked, or so scandalously venal as in former times.  Did not a triennial parliament give up the national dignity, approve the Peace of Utrecht, and almost give up everything else in taking every step to defeat the Protestant succession?  Was not the Constitution saved by those who had no election at all to go to, the Lords, because the Court applied to electors, and by various means carried them from their true interests; so that the Tory Ministry had a majority without an application to a single member?  Now, as to the conduct of the members, it was then far from pure and independent.  Bribery was infinitely more flagrant.  A predecessor of yours, Mr. Speaker, put the question of his own expulsion for bribery.  Sir William Musgrave was a wise man, a grave man, an independent man, a man of good fortune and good family; however, he carried on while in opposition a traffic, a shameful traffic with the Ministry.  Bishop Burnet knew of £6,000 which he had received at one payment.  I believe the payment of sums in hard money—plain, naked bribery—is rare amongst us.  It was then far from uncommon.

A triennial was near ruining, a septennial parliament saved, your Constitution; nor perhaps have you ever known a more flourishing period for the union of national prosperity, dignity, and liberty, than the sixty years you have passed under that Constitution of parliament.

The shortness of time, in which they are to reap the profits of iniquity, is far from checking the avidity of corrupt men; it renders them infinitely more ravenous.  They rush violently and precipitately on their object, they lose all regard to decorum.  The moments of profit are precious; never are men so wicked as during a general mortality.  It was so in the great plague at Athens, every symptom of which (and this its worst amongst the rest) is so finely related by a great historian of antiquity.  It was so in the plague of London in 1665.  It appears in soldiers, sailors, &c.  Whoever would contrive to render the life of man much shorter than it is, would, I am satisfied, find the surest recipe for increasing the wickedness of our nature.

Thus, in my opinion, the shortness of a triennial sitting would have the following ill effects:—It would make the member more shamelessly and shockingly corrupt, it would increase his dependence on those who could best support him at his election, it would wrack and tear to pieces the fortunes of those who stood upon their own fortunes and their private interest, it would make the electors infinitely more venal, and it would make the whole body of the people, who are, whether they have votes or not, concerned in elections, more lawless, more idle, more debauched; it would utterly destroy the sobriety, the industry, the integrity, the simplicity of all the people, and undermine, I am much afraid, the deepest and best laid foundations of the commonwealth.

Those who have spoken and written upon this subject without doors, do not so much deny the probable existence of these inconveniences in their measure, as they trust for the prevention to remedies of various sorts, which they propose.  First, a place bill; but if this will not do, as they fear it will not, then, they say, we will have a rotation, and a certain number of you shall be rendered incapable of being elected for ten years.  Then, for the electors, they shall ballot; the members of parliament also shall decide by ballot; and a fifth project is the change of the present legal representation of the kingdom.  On all this I shall observe, that it will be very unsuitable to your wisdom to adopt the project of a bill, to which there are objections insuperable by anything in the bill itself, upon the hope that those objections may be removed by subsequent projects; every one of which is full of difficulties of its own, and which are all of them very essential alterations in the Constitution.  This seems very irregular and unusual.  If anything should make this a very doubtful measure, what can make it more so than that, in the opinion of its advocates, it would aggravate all our old inconveniences in such a manner as to require a total alteration in the Constitution of the kingdom?  If the remedies are proper in a triennial, they will not be less so in septennial elections; let us try them first, see how the House relishes them, see how they will operate in the nation; and then, having felt your way, you will be prepared against these inconveniences.

The honourable gentleman sees that I respect the principle upon which he goes, as well as his intentions and his abilities.  He will believe that I do not differ from him wantonly, and on trivial grounds.  He is very sure that it was not his embracing one way which determined me to take the other.  I have not, in newspapers, to derogate from his fair fame with the nation, printed the first rude sketch of his bill with ungenerous and invidious comments.  I have not, in conversations industriously circulated about the town, and talked on the benches of this House, attributed his conduct to motives low and unworthy, and as groundless as they are injurious.  I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism, and every kind of incantation.  I invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of his muddy gulf.  I do not tell the respectable mover and seconder, by a perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition halts between the ridiculous and the dangerous.  I am not one of those who start up three at a time, and fall upon and strike at him with so much eagerness, that our daggers hack one another in his sides.  My honourable friend has not brought down a spirited imp of chivalry, to win the first achievement and blazon of arms on his milk-white shield in a field listed against him, nor brought out the generous offspring of lions, and said to them, “Not against that side of the forest, beware of that—here is the prey where you are to fasten your paws;” and seasoning his unpractised jaws with blood, tell him, “This is the milk for which you are to thirst hereafter.”  We furnish at his expense no holiday, nor suspend hell that a crafty Ixion may have rest from his wheel; nor give the common adversary, if he be a common adversary, reason to say, “I would have put in my word to oppose, but the eagerness of your allies in your social war was such that I could not break in upon you.”  I hope he sees and feels, and that every member sees and feels along with him, the difference between amicable dissent and civil discord.

SPEECH ON REFORM OF REPRESENTATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

June, 1784

Mr. Speaker,—We have now discovered, at the close of the eighteenth century, that the Constitution of England, which for a series of ages had been the proud distinction of this country, always the admiration, and sometimes the envy, of the wise and learned in every other nation—we have discovered that this boasted Constitution, in the most boasted part of it, is a gross imposition upon the understanding of mankind, an insult to their feelings, and acting by contrivances destructive to the best and most valuable interests of the people.  Our political architects have taken a survey of the fabric of the British Constitution.  It is singular that they report nothing against the Crown, nothing against the Lords; but in the House of Commons everything is unsound; it is ruinous in every part.  It is infested by the dry rot, and ready to tumble about our ears without their immediate help.  You know by the faults they find what are their ideas of the alteration.  As all government stands upon opinion, they know that the way utterly to destroy it is to remove that opinion, to take away all reverence, all confidence from it; and then, at the first blast of public discontent and popular tumult, it tumbles to the ground.

In considering this question, they who oppose it, oppose it on different grounds; one is in the nature of a previous question—that some alterations may be expedient, but that this is not the time for making them.  The other is, that no essential alterations are at all wanting, and that neither now, nor at any time, is it prudent or safe to be meddling with the fundamental principles and ancient tried usages of our Constitution—that our representation is as nearly perfect as the necessary imperfection of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be; and that it is a subject of prudent and honest use and thankful enjoyment, and not of captious criticism and rash experiment.

On the other side, there are two parties, who proceed on two grounds—in my opinion, as they state them, utterly irreconcilable.  The one is juridical, the other political.  The one is in the nature of a claim of right, on the supposed rights of man as man; this party desire the decision of a suit.  The other ground, as far as I can divine what it directly means, is, that the representation is not so politically framed as to answer the theory of its institution.  As to the claim of right, the meanest petitioner, the most gross and ignorant, is as good as the best; in some respects his claim is more favourable on account of his ignorance; his weakness, his poverty and distress only add to his titles; he sues in formâ pauperis: he ought to be a favourite of the Court.  But when the other ground is taken, when the question is political, when a new Constitution is to be made on a sound theory of government, then the presumptuous pride of didactic ignorance is to be excluded from the council in this high and arduous matter, which often bids defiance to the experience of the wisest.  The first claims a personal representation; the latter rejects it with scorn and fervour.  The language of the first party is plain and intelligible; they who plead an absolute right, cannot be satisfied with anything short of personal representation, because all natural rights must be the rights of individuals: as by nature there is no such thing as politic or corporate personality; all these ideas are mere fictions of law, they are creatures of voluntary institution; men as men are individuals, and nothing else.  They, therefore, who reject the principle of natural and personal representation, are essentially and eternally at variance with those who claim it.  As to the first sort of reformers, it is ridiculous to talk to them of the British Constitution upon any or all of its bases; for they lay it down, that every man ought to govern himself, and that where he cannot go himself he must send his representative; that all other government is usurpation, and is so far from having a claim to our obedience, that it is not only our right, but our duty, to resist it.  Nine-tenths of the reformers argue thus—that is, on the natural right.  It is impossible not to make some reflection on the nature of this claim, or avoid a comparison between the extent of the principle and the present object of the demand.  If this claim be founded, it is clear to what it goes.  The House of Commons, in that light, undoubtedly is no representative of the people as a collection of individuals.  Nobody pretends it, nobody can justify such an assertion.  When you come to examine into this claim of right, founded on the right of self-government in each individual, you find the thing demanded infinitely short of the principle of the demand.  What! one-third only of the legislature, of the government no share at all?  What sort of treaty of partition is this for those who have no inherent right to the whole?  Give them all they ask, and your grant is still a cheat; for how comes only a third to be their younger children’s fortune in this settlement?  How came they neither to have the choice of kings, or lords, or judges, or generals, or admirals, or bishops, or priests, or ministers, or justices of peace?  Why, what have you to answer in favour of the prior rights of the Crown and peerage but this—our Constitution is a proscriptive Constitution; it is a Constitution whose sole authority is, that it has existed time out of mind.  It is settled in these two portions against one, legislatively; and in the whole of the judicature, the whole of the federal capacity, of the executive, the prudential and the financial administration, in one alone.  Nor were your House of Lords and the prerogatives of the Crown settled on any adjudication in favour of natural rights, for they could never be so portioned.  Your king, your lords, your judges, your juries, grand and little, all are prescriptive; and what proves it is the disputes not yet concluded, and never near becoming so, when any of them first originated.  Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to government.  They harmonise with each other, and give mutual aid to one another.  It is accompanied with another ground of authority in the constitution of the human mind—presumption.  It is a presumption in favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project, that a nation has long existed and flourished under it.  It is a better presumption even of the choice of a nation, far better than any sudden and temporary arrangement by actual election.  Because a nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space.  And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is a Constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice—it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time.  It is a vestment, which accommodates itself to the body.  Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices—for man is a most unwise, and a most wise being.  The individual is foolish.  The multitude, for the moment, are foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.