Revolution and Liberty
{1}Though I do most heartily wish that
France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that
I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent
body in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by
which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts
concerning several material points in your late transactions. .
. .
{2}When I see the spirit of liberty in
action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while,
is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air,
is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment
until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the
liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the
agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably
sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a
blessing, that they have really received one. . . .
I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new
liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined
with government, with public force, with the discipline and
obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and
well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the
solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and
social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too,
and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and
is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to
individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to
see what it will please them to do, before we risk
congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. . . .
{3}So far is it from being true that we
acquired a right by the [Glorious Revolution of 1688] to elect
our kings that, if we had possessed it before, the English
nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it,
for themselves and for all their posterity forever. . . .
{4}An irregular, convulsive movement may
be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But
the course of [royal] succession is the healthy habit of the
British constitution. . . .
{5}Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly
the servants of the people because their power has no other
rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not
true that they are, in the ordinary sense (by our constitution,
at least), anything like servants; the essence of whose
situation is to obey the commands of some other and to be
removable at pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no
other person; all other persons are individually, and
collectively too, under him and owe to him a legal obedience. .
. . Ill would our ancestors at the [1688 or "Glorious"]
Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom if they had found
no security for their freedom but in rendering their government
feeble in its operations, and precarious in its tenure; if they
had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary
power than civil confusion. . . .
{6} With or without right, a revolution
will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.
Inherited Rights
{7}You will observe that from Magna
Charta to the [1689] Declaration of Right it has been the
uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our
liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our
forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity - - as an
estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom,
without any reference whatever to any other more general or
prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in
so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown,
an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people
inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long
line of ancestors.
{8}This policy appears to me to be the
result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of
following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above
it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish
temper and confined views. People will not look forward to
posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides,
the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance
furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle
of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of
improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it
acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding
on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family
settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a
constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we
receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges
in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property
and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune,
the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in
the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a
just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and
with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed
of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous
wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of
the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or
middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay,
fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the
method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve
we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly
obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to
our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of
antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this
choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the
image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our
country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental
laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping
inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined
and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our
sepulchres, and our altars. . . .
{9}YOU MIGHT, IF YOU PLEASED, have
profited of our example and have given to your recovered freedom
a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued,
were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst
you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but
you possessed in some parts the walls and in all the foundations
of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those
walls; you might have built on those old foundations. . . .
{10}You had all these advantages in your
ancient states, but you chose to act as if you had never been
molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You
began ill, because you began by despising everything that
belonged to you. . . .
If the last generations of your country appeared without much
luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by and derived
your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious
predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations
would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom
beyond the vulgar practice of the hour. . . .
Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to
respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the
French as . . . a nation of lowborn servile wretches until the
emancipating year of 1789. . . .
You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the
eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed
despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only
reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to
law. . . . You would have had a free constitution, a potent
monarchy, a disciplined army,
a reformed and venerated clergy, a mitigated but spirited
nobility to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have
had a liberal order of commons to emulate and to recruit that
nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious,
and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the
happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in
which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in
that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain
expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of
laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real
inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of
civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it
must leave in a humble state as those whom it is able to exalt
to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. . . .
Property
{11}BELIEVE ME, SIR, those who attempt
to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of
various descriptions of citizens, some description must be
uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the
natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by
setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure
requires to be on the ground. . . .
{12}I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you
to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid
dulness, as to require, for every general observation or
sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions
which reason will presume to be included in all the general
propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine
that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to
blood and names and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification
for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. . .
.
Woe to the country which would madly and impiously reject the
service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or
religious, that are given to grace and to serve it, and would
condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse luster and
glory around a state. Woe to that country, too, that, passing
into the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean
contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation as a
preferable title to command. Everything ought to be open, but
not indifferently, to every man. No rotation; no appointment by
lot; no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or
rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in
extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or
indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty or to
accommodate the one to the other. I do not hesitate to say that
the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought
not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare
merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through
some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated
on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be
remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some
difficulty and some struggle.
{13}Nothing is a due and adequate
representation of a state that does not represent its ability as
well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active
principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it
never can be safe from the invasion of ability unless it be, out
of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be
represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not
rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property,
formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and
conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses, therefore,
which excite envy and tempt rapacity must be put out of the
possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about
the lesser properties in all their gradations. . . .
{14}The power of perpetuating our
property in our families is one of the most valuable and
interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends
the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our
weakness subservient to our virtue, it grafts benevolence even
upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the
distinction which attends hereditary possession (as most
concerned in it), are the natural securities for this
transmission. With us the House of Peers is formed upon this
principle. It is wholly composed of hereditary property and
hereditary distinction, and made, therefore, the third of the
legislature and, in the last event, the sole judge of all
property in all its subdivisions. The House of Commons, too,
though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in
the far greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they
will - - and they have their chance of being amongst the best -
- they are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the
commonwealth. . . . Some decent, regulated preeminence, some
preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth is
neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.
{15}IT is said that twenty-four millions
ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the
constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort
of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for its second;
to men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the
many and their interest must very often differ, and great will
be the difference when they make an evil choice. A government of
five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good
for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight
and forty millions, nor is it the better for being guided by a
dozen of persons of quality who have betrayed their trust in
order to obtain that power. At present, you seem in everything
to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property of
France does not govern it. Of course, property is destroyed and
rational liberty has no existence. All you have got for the
present is a paper circulation and a stock-jobbing constitution;
and as to the future, do you seriously think that the territory
of France, upon the republican system of eighty-three
independent municipalities (to say nothing of the parts that
compose them), can ever be governed as one body or can ever be
set in motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National
Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its
ruin. . . .
Mechanistic View of Society
{16}The science of constructing a
commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every
other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. . . .
The science of government being therefore so practical in itself
and intended for such practical purposes - - a matter which
requires experience, and even more experience than any person
can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he
may be - - it is with infinite caution that any man ought to
venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any
tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on
building it up again without having models and patterns of
approved utility before his eyes. . . .
{17}The nature of man is intricate; the
objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and,
therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can be
suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his
affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and
boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss
to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their
trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments
are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. . . .
Marie Antoinette
{18}Although this work of our new light
and knowledge did not go to the length that in all probability
it was intended it should be carried, yet I must think that such
treatment of any human creatures must be shocking to any but
those who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But I cannot
stop here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature, and
not being illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung modern
light, I confess to you, Sir, that the exalted rank of the
persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty, and the
amiable qualities of the descendant of so many kings and
emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, insensible only
through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages to which
their parents were exposed, instead of being a subject of
exultation, adds not a little to any sensibility on that most
melancholy occasion.
{19}I hear that the . . .[king], though
he supported himself, felt much on that shameful occasion. As a
man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and
the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold
blood about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the
strange and frightful transformation of his civilized subjects,
and to be more grieved for them than solicitous for himself. It
derogates little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to
the honor of his humanity. I am very sorry to say it, very sorry
indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it is
not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the great.
{20}I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that
the great lady, the other object of the triumph, has borne that
day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should
suffer well), and that she bears all the succeeding days, that
she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own
captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting
adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated
wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank
and race, and becoming the offspring of a sovereign
distinguished for her piety and her courage; that, like her, she
has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman
matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from
the last disgrace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by
no ignoble hand.
{21}It is now sixteen or seventeen years
since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at
Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she
hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just
above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere
she just began to move in - - glittering like the morning star,
full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and
what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that
elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added
titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant,
respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the
sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little
did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters
fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men
of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must
have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that
threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
{22}That of sophisters, economists; and
calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is
extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that
generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of
nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is
gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity
of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage
whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by
losing all its grossness.
{23}THIS mixed system of opinion and
sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the
principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state
of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long
succession of generations even to the time we live in. If it
should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be
great. It is this which has given its character to modern
Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its
forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from
the states of Asia and possibly from those states which
flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world.
It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a
noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of
social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into
companions and raised private men to be fellows with kings.
Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride
and power, it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of
social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance,
and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by
manners.
{24}But now all is to be changed. All
the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience
liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and
which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the
sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be
dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All
the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the
super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral
imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies
as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering
nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to
be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
{25}On this scheme of things, a king is
but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and
an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex
in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be
regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and
sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting
jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a
king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are only common
homicide; and if the people are by any chance or in any way
gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and
into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.
- - -
{26}On the scheme of this barbarous
philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy
understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is
destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported
only by their own terrors and by the concern which each
individual may find in them from his own private speculations or
can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves
of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but
the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the
part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic
philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use
the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love,
veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason
which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their
place. These public affections, combined with manners, are
required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives,
always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well
as a great critic, for the construction of poems is equally true
as to states: - - - Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia
sunto. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation
which a well-informed mind would be disposed to relish. To make
us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. . . .
{27}We are not the converts of Rousseau;
we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no
progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are
not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and
we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor
many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of
liberty, which were understood long before we were born,
altogether as well as they will be after the grace has heaped
its mold upon our presumption and the silent tomb shall have
imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not
yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still
feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred
sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors
of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly
morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may
be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags
and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men. We
preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire,
unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts
of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look
up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty
to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to
nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our
minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other
feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds,
to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational
liberty.
