Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and Speeches

Indeed, in the situation in which we stand, with an immense revenue, an enormous debt, mighty establishments, Government itself a great banker and a great merchant, I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power.  This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy.  But, if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be used; to be used then only, when it is evident that nothing else can hold the Constitution to its true principles.

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The distempers of Monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress, in the last century; in this, the distempers of Parliament.  It is not in Parliament alone that the remedy for Parliamentary disorders can be completed; hardly, indeed, can it begin there.  Until a confidence in Government is re-established, the people ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their Representatives.  Standards, for judging more systematically upon their conduct, ought to be settled in the meetings of counties and corporations.  Frequent and correct lists of the voters in all important questions ought to be procured.

By such means something may be done.  By such means it may appear who those are, that, by an indiscriminate support of all Administrations, have totally banished all integrity and confidence out of public proceedings; have confounded the best men with the worst; and weakened and dissolved, instead of strengthening and compacting, the general frame of Government.  If any person is more concerned for government and order than for the liberties of his country, even he is equally concerned to put an end to this course of indiscriminate support.  It is this blind and undistinguishing support that feeds the spring of those very disorders, by which he is frighted into the arms of the faction which contains in itself the source of all disorders, by enfeebling all the visible and regular authority of the State.  The distemper is increased by his injudicious and preposterous endeavours, or pretences, for the cure of it.

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

Such are the consequences of the division of Court from the Administration; and of the division of public men among themselves.  By the former of these, lawful Government is undone; by the latter, all opposition to lawless power is rendered impotent.  Government may in a great measure be restored, if any considerable bodies of men have honesty and resolution enough never to accept Administration, unless this garrison of King’s meat, which is stationed, as in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with the ground.  The disposition of public men to keep this corps together, and to act under it, or to co-operate with it, is a touchstone by which every Administration ought in future to be tried.  There has not been one which has not sufficiently experienced the utter incompatibility of that faction with the public peace, and with all the ends of good Government; since, if they opposed it, they soon lost every power of serving the Crown; if they submitted to it they lost all the esteem of their country.  Until Ministers give to the public a full proof of their entire alienation from that system, however plausible their pretences, we may be sure they are more intent on the emoluments than the duties of office.  If they refuse to give this proof, we know of what stuff they are made.  In this particular, it ought to be the electors’ business to look to their Representatives.  The electors ought to esteem it no less culpable in their Member to give a single vote in Parliament to such an Administration, than to take an office under it; to endure it, than to act in it.  The notorious infidelity and versatility of Members of Parliament, in their opinions of men and things, ought in a particular manner to be considered by the electors in the inquiry which is recommended to them.  This is one of the principal holdings of that destructive system which has endeavoured to unhinge all the virtuous, honourable, and useful connections in the kingdom.

This cabal has, with great success, propagated a doctrine which serves for a colour to those acts of treachery; and whilst it receives any degree of countenance, it will be utterly senseless to look for a vigorous opposition to the Court Party.  The doctrine is this: That all political connections are in their nature factious, and as such ought to be dissipated and destroyed; and that the rule for forming Administrations is mere personal ability, rated by the judgment of this cabal upon it, and taken by drafts from every division and denomination of public men.  This decree was solemnly promulgated by the head of the Court corps, the Earl of Bute himself, in a speech which he made, in the year 1766, against the then Administration, the only Administration which, he has ever been known directly and publicly to oppose.

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

It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to 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 politics.  I admit that people frequently acquire in such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit; that they are apt to sink the idea of the general good in this circumscribed and partial interest.  But, where duty renders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation itself.  If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer of the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must not desert his station.  Every profession, not excepting the glorious one of a soldier, or the sacred one of a priest, is liable to its own particular vices; which, however, form no argument against those ways of life; nor are the vices themselves inevitable to every individual in those professions.  Of such a nature are connections in politics; essentially necessary for the full performance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into faction.  Commonwealths are made of families, free Commonwealths of parties also; and we may as well affirm, that our natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country.

Some legislators went so far as to make neutrality in party a crime against the State.  I do not know whether this might not have been rather to overstrain the principle.  Certain it is, the best patriots in the greatest commonwealths have always commanded and promoted such connections.  Idem sentire de republica, was with them a principal ground of friendship and attachment; nor do I know any other capable of forming firmer, dearer, more pleasing, more honourable, and more virtuous habitudes.  The Romans carried this principle a great way.  Even the holding of offices together, the disposition of which arose from chance, not selection, gave rise to a relation which continued for life.  It was called necessitudo sortis; and it was looked upon with a sacred reverence.  Breaches of any of these kinds of civil relation were considered as acts of the most distinguished turpitude.  The whole people was distributed into political societies, in which they acted in support of such interests in the State as they severally affected.  For it was then thought no crime, to endeavour by every honest means to advance to superiority and power those of your own sentiments and opinions.  This wise people was far from imagining that those connections had no tie, and obliged to no duty; but that men might quit them without shame, upon every call of interest.  They believed private honour to be the great foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in a public situation, might probably consult some other interest than his own.  Never may we become plus sages que les sages, as the French comedian has happily expressed it—wiser than all the wise and good men who have lived before us.  It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported.  In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this country was governed by a connection; I mean the great connection of Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne.  They were complimented upon the principle of this connection by a poet who was in high esteem with them.  Addison, who knew their sentiments, could not praise them for what they considered as no proper subject of commendation.  As a poet who knew his business, he could not applaud them for a thing which in general estimation was not highly reputable.  Addressing himself to Britain,

“Thy favourites grow not up by fortune’s sport,Or from the crimes or follies of a Court;On the firm basis of desert they rise,From long-tried faith, and friendship’s holy ties.”

The Whigs of those days believed that the only proper method of rising into power was through bard essays of practised friendship and experimented fidelity.  At that time it was not imagined that patriotism was a bloody idol, which required the sacrifice of children and parents, or dearest connections in private life, and of all the virtues that rise from those relations.  They were not of that ingenious paradoxical morality to imagine that a spirit of moderation was properly shown in patiently bearing the sufferings of your friends, or that disinterestedness was clearly manifested at the expense of other people’s fortune.  They believed that no men could act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert who did not act with confidence; that no men could act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.

These wise men, for such I must call Lord Sunderland, Lord Godolphin, Lord Somers, and Lord Marlborough, were too well principled in these maxims, upon which the whole fabric of public strength is built, to be blown off their ground by the breath of every childish talker.  They were not afraid that they should be called an ambitious Junto, or that their resolution to stand or fall together should, by placemen, be interpreted into a scuffle for places.

Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.  For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice.  It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of Government.  It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect.  Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.  As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty to contend for these situations.  Without a proscription of others, they are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things, and by no means, for private considerations, to accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included, nor to suffer themselves to be led, or to be controlled, or to be over-balanced, in office or in council, by those who contradict, the very fundamental principles on which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must stand.  Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and honourable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument.  The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless impostors who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles.  They are light and portable.  They are as current as copper coin, and about as valuable.  They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest, and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as the best.  Of this stamp is the cant of Not men, but measures; a sort of charm, by which many people got loose from every honourable engagement.  When I see a man acting this desultory and disconnected part, with as much detriment to his own fortune as prejudice to the cause of any party, I am not persuaded that he is right, but I am ready to believe he is in earnest.  I respect virtue in all its situations, even when it is found in the unsuitable company of weakness.  I lament to see qualities, rare and valuable, squandered away without any public utility.  But when a gentleman with great visible emoluments abandons the party in which he has long acted, and tells you it is because he proceeds upon his own judgment that he acts on the merits of the several measures as they arise, and that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, and not that of others, he gives reasons which it is impossible to controvert, and discovers a character which it is impossible to mistake.  What shall we think of him who never differed from a certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards?  Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate?  Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice that a man’s connections should degenerate into faction, precisely at the critical moment when they lose their power or he accepts a place?  When people desert their connections, the desertion is a manifest fact, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men.  Whether a measure of Government be right or wrong is no matter of fact, but a mere affair of opinion, on which men may, as they do, dispute and wrangle without end.  But whether the individual thinks the measure right or wrong is a point at still a greater distance from the reach of all human decision.  It is therefore very convenient to politicians not to put the judgment of their conduct on overt acts, cognisable in any ordinary court, but upon such a matter as can be triable only in that secret tribunal, where they are sure of being heard with favour, or where at worst the sentence will be only private whipping.

I believe the reader would wish to find no substance in a doctrine which has a tendency to destroy all test of character as deduced from conduct.  He will therefore excuse my adding something more towards the further clearing up a point which the great convenience of obscurity to dishonesty has been able to cover with some degree of darkness and doubt.

In order to throw an odium on political connection, these politicians suppose it a necessary incident to it that you are blindly to follow the opinions of your party when in direct opposition to your own clear ideas, a degree of servitude that no worthy man could bear the thought of submitting to, and such as, I believe, no connections (except some Court factions) ever could be so senselessly tyrannical as to impose.  Men thinking freely will, in particular instances, think differently.  But still, as the greater Part of the measures which arise in the course of public business are related to, or dependent on, some great leading general principles in Government, a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company if he does not agree with them at least nine times in ten.  If he does not concur in these general principles upon which the party is founded, and which necessarily draw on a concurrence in their application, he ought from the beginning to have chosen some other, more conformable to his opinions.  When the question is in its nature doubtful, or not very material, the modesty which becomes an individual, and (in spite of our Court moralists) that partiality which becomes a well-chosen friendship, will frequently bring on an acquiescence in the general sentiment.  Thus the disagreement will naturally be rare; it will be only enough to indulge freedom, without violating concord or disturbing arrangement.  And this is all that ever was required for a character of the greatest uniformity and steadiness in connection.  How men can proceed without any connection at all is to me utterly incomprehensible.  Of what sort of materials must that man be made, how must he be tempered and put together, who can sit whole years in Parliament, with five hundred and fifty of his fellow-citizens, amidst the storm of such tempestuous passions, in the sharp conflict of so many wits, and tempers, and characters, in the agitation of such mighty questions, in the discussion of such vast and ponderous interests, without seeing any one sort of men, whose character, conduct, or disposition would lead him to associate himself with them, to aid and be aided, in any one system of public utility?

I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says that “the man who lives wholly detached from others must be either an angel or a devil.”  When I see in any of these detached gentlemen of our times the angelic purity, power, and beneficence, I shall admit them to be angels.  In the meantime, we are born only to be men.  We shall do enough if we form ourselves to be good ones.  It is therefore our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature.  To bring the, dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget we are gentlemen.  To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities.  To have both strong, but both selected: in the one, to be placable; in the other, immovable.  To model our principles to our duties and our situation.  To be fully persuaded that all virtue which is impracticable is spurious, and rather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which leads us to act with effect and energy than to loiter out our days without blame and without use.  Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.

There is, however, a time for all things.  It is not every conjuncture which calls with equal force upon the activity of honest men; but critical exigences now and then arise, and I am mistaken if this be not one of them.  Men will see the necessity of honest combination, but they may see it when it is too late.  They may embody when it will be ruinous to themselves, and of no advantage to the country; when, for want of such a timely union as may enable them to oppose in favour of the laws, with the laws on their side, they may at length find themselves under the necessity of conspiring, instead of consulting.  The law, for which they stand, may become a weapon in the hands of its bitterest enemies; and they will be cast, at length, into that miserable alternative, between slavery and civil confusion, which no good man can look upon without horror, an alternative in which it is impossible he should take either part with a conscience perfectly at repose.  To keep that situation of guilt and remorse at the utmost distance is, therefore, our first obligation.  Early activity may prevent late and fruitless violence.  As yet we work in the light.  The scheme of the enemies of public tranquillity has disarranged, it has not destroyed us.