Reflections On The Revolution In France / Burke, Edmund

                                      1790

                    REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

                                by Edmund Burke

                        REFLECTIONS

                            ON

                  THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

                        IN A LETTER

                 INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT

                   TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS

                          [1790]

    IT MAY NOT BE UNNECESSARY to inform the reader that the
following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the
Author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of
desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then, and
ever since, have so much occupied the attention of all men. An
answer was written some time in the month of October 1789, but it
was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded
to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since
forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for
the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same
gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application
for the Author's sentiments.

    The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject.
This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but,
the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken
not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance
required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had
any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first
thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to
write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult
to change the form of address when his sentiments had grown into a
greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan,
he is sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and
distribution of his matter.

DEAR SIR,

    You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my
thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason
to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish
myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little
consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It
was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the
time when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had
the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither
for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this. My errors,
if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.

    You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that
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.

    YOU IMAGINED, WHEN YOU WROTE LAST, that I might possibly be
reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from
the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs
of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society and the
Revolution Society.

    I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one, in
which the constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the
glorious Revolution are held in high reverence, and I reckon myself
among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that constitution
and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor. It is because I
do so, that I think it necessary for me that there should be no
mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution and those
who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom will take good
care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of zeal
toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently wander from
their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart from
the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one,
and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more
material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you
such information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs
which have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns
of France, first assuring you that I am not, and that I have never
been, a member of either of those societies.

    The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society
for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I
believe, of seven or eight years standing. The institution of this
society appears to be of a charitable and so far of a laudable nature;
it was intended for the circulation, at the expense of the members, of
many books which few others would be at the expense of buying, and
which might lie on the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss
of an useful body of men. Whether the books, so charitably circulated,
were ever as charitably read is more than I know. Possibly several
of them have been exported to France and, like goods not in request
here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk of
the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What
improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some
liquors are meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never
heard a man of common judgment or the least degree of information
speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications
circulated by that society, nor have their proceedings been accounted,
except by some of themselves, as of any serious consequence.

    Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion
that I do of this poor charitable club. As a nation, you reserved
the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution
Society, when their fellows in the Constitutional were, in equity,
entitled to some share. Since you have selected the Revolution Society
as the great object of your national thanks and praises, you will
think me excusable in making its late conduct the subject of my
observations. The National Assembly of France has given importance
to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the favor by
acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of the
National Assembly. Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of
privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic
body. This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to
obscurity, and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very lately I
do not recollect to have heard of this club. I am quite sure that it
never occupied a moment of my thoughts, nor, I believe, those of any
person out of their own set. I find, upon inquiry, that on the
anniversary of the Revolution in 1688, a club of dissenters, but of
what denomination I know not, have long had the custom of hearing a
sermon in one of their churches; and that afterwards they spent the
day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I never heard
that any public measure or political system, much less that the merits
of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a
formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible
surprise, I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a
congratulatory address, giving an authoritative sanction to the
proceedings of the National Assembly in France.

    In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least
as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could take
exception. I think it very probable that for some purpose new
members may have entered among them, and that some truly Christian
politicians, who love to dispense benefits but are careful to
conceal the hand which distributes the dole, may have made them the
instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may have reason to
suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of nothing as
of a certainty but what is public.

    For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or
indirectly, concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take my full
share, along with the rest of the world, in my individual and
private capacity, in speculating on what has been done or is doing
on the public stage in any place ancient or modern; in the republic of
Rome or the republic of Paris; but having no general apostolical
mission, being a citizen of a particular state and being bound up,
in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should think it at
least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public
correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without
the express authority of the government under which I live.

    I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence
under anything like an equivocal description, which to many,
unacquainted with our usages, might make the address, in which I
joined, appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate
capacity acknowledged by the laws of this kingdom and authorized to
speak the sense of some part of it. On account of the ambiguity and
uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit
which may be practiced under them, and not from mere formality, the
House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the
most trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have
thrown open the folding doors of your presence chamber, and have
ushered into your National Assembly with as much ceremony and
parade, and with as great a bustle of applause, as if you have been
visited by the whole representative majesty of the whole English
nation. If what this society has thought proper to send forth had been
a piece of argument, it would have signified little whose argument
it was. It would be neither the more nor the less convincing on
account of the party it came from. But this is only a vote and
resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is
the mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their
signatures ought, in my opinion, to have been annexed to their
instrument. The world would then have the means of knowing how many
they are; who they are; and of what value their opinions may be,
from their personal abilities, from their knowledge, their experience,
or their lead and authority in this state. To me, who am but a plain
man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and too ingenious; it
has too much the air of a political strategem adopted for the sake
of giving, under a high-sounding name, an importance to the public
declarations of this club which, when the matter came to be closely
inspected, they did not altogether so well deserve. It is a policy
that has very much the complexion of a fraud.

    I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty
as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and
perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause
in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as
little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward
and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions,
and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands
stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen
pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its
distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious
to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty,
is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated
France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a
government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or
how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon
its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed
amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate
a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and
wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of
light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer
who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This
would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the
galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the
Sorrowful Countenance.

    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. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and
adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. 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. Prudence
would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men,
but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people,
before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made
of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new
persons of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have
little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear
the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

    ALL these considerations, however, were below the transcendental
dignity of the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the
country, from whence I had the honor of writing to you, I had but an
imperfect idea of their transactions. On my coming to town, I sent for
an account of their proceedings, which had been published by their
authority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de
Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of Aix's letter, and several
other documents annexed. The whole of that publication, with the
manifest design of connecting the affairs of France with those of
England by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National
Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect of
that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquility of
France became every day more evident. The form of constitution to be
settled for its future polity became more clear. We are now in a
condition to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the
object held up to our imitation. If the prudence of reserve and
decorum dictates silence in some circumstances, in others prudence
of a higher order may justify us in speaking our thoughts. The
beginnings of confusion with us in England are at present feeble
enough, but, with you, we have seen an infancy still more feeble
growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon mountains
and to wage war with heaven itself. Whenever our neighbor's house is
on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our
own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined
by too confident a security.

    Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no
means unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate more largely what
was at first intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall
still keep your affairs in my eye and continue to address myself to
you. Indulging myself in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I
beg leave to throw out my thoughts and express my feelings just as
they arise in my mind, with very little attention to formal method.
I set out with the proceedings of the Revolution Society, but I
shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible I should? It
appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of
France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All
circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most
astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most
wonderful things are brought about, in many instances by means the
most absurd and ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and
apparently by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems
out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all
sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing
this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions
necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind:
alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears,
alternate scorn and horror.

    It cannot, however, be denied that to some this strange scene
appeared in quite another point of view. Into them it inspired no
other sentiments than those of exultation and rapture. They saw
nothing in what has been done in France but a firm and temperate
exertion of freedom, so consistent, on the whole, with morals and with
piety as to make it deserving not only of the secular applause of
dashing Machiavellian politicians, but to render it a fit theme for
all the devout effusions of sacred eloquence.

    On the forenoon of the fourth of November last, Doctor Richard
Price, a non-conforming minister of eminence, preached, at the
dissenting meeting house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a
very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some
good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up
in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections;
but the Revolution in France is the grand ingredient in the
cauldron. I consider the address transmitted by the Revolution Society
to the National Assembly, through Earl Stanhope, as originating in the
principles of the sermon and as a corollary from them. It was moved by
the preacher of that discourse. It was passed by those who came
reeking from the effect of the sermon without any censure or
qualification, expressed or implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen
concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution,
they know how to acknowledge the one and to disavow the other. They
may do it: I cannot.

    For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration
of a man much connected with literary caballers and intriguing
philosophers, with political theologians and theological politicians
both at home and abroad. I know they set him up as a sort of oracle,
because, with the best intentions in the world, he naturally
philippizes and chants his prophetic song in exact unison with their
designs.

    That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been heard in
this kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are tolerated or
encouraged in it, since the year 1648, when a predecessor of Dr.
Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters, made the vault of the king's own chapel
at St. James's ring with the honor and privilege of the saints, who,
with the "high praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword
in their hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen, and
punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and
their nobles with fetters of iron".* Few harangues from the pulpit,
except in the days of your league in France or in the days of our
Solemn League and Covenant in England, have ever breathed less of
the spirit of moderation than this lecture in the Old Jewry.
Supposing, however, that something like moderation were visible in
this political sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have
little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the
healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and
civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion
of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does
not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the
character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly
unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and
inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so
much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they
excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be
allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

    * Psalm CXLIX.

    This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, had
to me the air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly without
danger. I do not charge this danger equally to every part of the
discourse. The hint given to a noble and reverend lay divine, who is
supposed high in office in one of our universities,* and other lay
divines "of rank and literature" may be proper and seasonable,
though somewhat new. If the noble Seekers should find nothing to
satisfy their pious fancies in the old staple of the national
church, or in all the rich variety to be found in the well-assorted
warehouses of the dissenting congregations, Dr. Price advises them
to improve upon non-conformity and to set up, each of them, a separate
meeting house upon his own particular principles.*(2) It is somewhat
remarkable that this reverend divine should be so earnest for
setting up new churches and so perfectly indifferent concerning the
doctrine which may be taught in them. His zeal is of a curious
character. It is not for the propagation of his own opinions, but of
any opinions. It is not for the diffusion of truth, but for the
spreading of contradiction. Let the noble teachers but dissent, it
is no matter from whom or from what. This great point once secured, it
is taken for granted their religion will be rational and manly. I
doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the
calculating divine computes from this "great company of great
preachers". It would certainly be a valuable addition of
nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera and
species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus of dissent. A
sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or
baron bold would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of
this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its
vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new
Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in
the democratic and leveling principles which are expected from their
titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the
hopes that are conceived of them. They will not become, literally as
well as figuratively, polemic divines, nor be disposed so to drill
their congregations that they may, as in former blessed times,
preach their doctrines to regiments of dragoons and corps of
infantry and artillery. Such arrangements, however favorable to the
cause of compulsory freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally
conducive to the national tranquility. These few restrictions I hope
are no great stretches of intolerance, no very violent exertions of
despotism.

    * Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr.
Richard Price, 3d ed., pp. 17, 18.

    *(2) "Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed
by public authority, ought, if they can find no worship out of the
church which they approve, to set up a separate worship for
themselves; and by doing this, and giving an example of a rational and
manly worship, men of weight from their rank and literature may do the
greatest service to society and the world".- P 18, Dr. Price's Sermon.

    BUT I may say of our preacher "utinam nugis tota illa dedisset
tempora saevitiae".- All things in this his fulminating bull are not
of so innoxious a tendency. His doctrines affect our constitution in
its vital parts. He tells the Revolution Society in this political
sermon that his Majesty "is almost the only lawful king in the world
because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his
people." As to the kings of the world, all of whom (except one) this
archpontiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude and with more
than the boldness of the papal deposing power in its meridian fervor
of the twelfth century, puts into one sweeping clause of ban and
anathema and proclaims usurpers by circles of longitude and
latitude, over the whole globe, it behooves them to consider how
they admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries who are
to tell their subjects they are not lawful kings. That is their
concern. It is ours, as a domestic interest of some moment,
seriously to consider the solidity of the only principle upon which
these gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be entitled
to their allegiance.

    This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British throne,
either is nonsense and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms
a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position.
According to this spiritual doctor of politics, if his Majesty does
not owe his crown to the choice of his people, he is no lawful king.
Now nothing can be more untrue than that the crown of this kingdom
is so held by his Majesty. Therefore, if you follow their rule, the
king of Great Britain, who most certainly does not owe his high office
to any form of popular election, is in no respect better than the rest
of the gang of usurpers who reign, or rather rob, all over the face of
this our miserable world without any sort of right or title to the
allegiance of their people. The policy of this general doctrine, so
qualified, is evident enough. The propagators of this political gospel
are in hopes that their abstract principle (their principle that a
popular choice is necessary to the legal existence of the sovereign
magistracy) would be overlooked, whilst the king of Great Britain
was not affected by it. In the meantime the ears of their
congregations would be gradually habituated to it, as if it were a
first principle admitted without dispute. For the present it would
only operate as a theory, pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit
eloquence, and laid by for future use. Condo et compono quae mox
depromere possim. By this policy, whilst our government is soothed
with a reservation in its favor, to which it has no claim, the
security which it has in common with all governments, so far as
opinion is security, is taken away.

    Thus these politicians proceed whilst little notice is taken of
their doctrines; but when they come to be examined upon the plain
meaning of their words and the direct tendency of their doctrines,
then equivocations and slippery constructions come into play. When
they say the king owes his crown to the choice of his people and is
therefore the only lawful sovereign in the world, they will perhaps
tell us they mean to say no more than that some of the king's
predecessors have been called to the throne by some sort of choice,
and therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his people. Thus,
by a miserable subterfuge, they hope to render their proposition
safe by rendering it nugatory. They are welcome to the asylum they
seek for their offense, since they take refuge in their folly. For
if you admit this interpretation, how does their idea of election
differ from our idea of inheritance?

    And how does the settlement of the crown in the Brunswick line
derived from James the First come to legalize our monarchy rather than
that of any of the neighboring countries? At some time or other, to be
sure, all the beginners of dynasties were chosen by those who called
them to govern. There is ground enough for the opinion that all the
kingdoms of Europe were, at a remote period, elective, with more or
fewer limitations in the objects of choice. But whatever kings might
have been here or elsewhere a thousand years ago, or in whatever
manner the ruling dynasties of England or France may have begun, the
king of Great Britain is, at this day, king by a fixed rule of
succession according to the laws of his country; and whilst the
legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by him
(as they are performed), he holds his crown in contempt of the
choice of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a
king amongst them, either individually or collectively, though I
make no doubt they would soon erect themselves into an electoral
college if things were ripe to give effect to their claim. His
Majesty's heirs and successors, each in his time and order, will
come to the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which
his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears.

    Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining away the
gross error of fact, which supposes that his Majesty (though he
holds it in concurrence with the wishes) owes his crown to the
choice of his people, yet nothing can evade their full explicit
declaration concerning the principle of a right in the people to
choose; which right is directly maintained and tenaciously adhered to.
All the oblique insinuations concerning election bottom in this
proposition and are referable to it. Lest the foundation of the king's
exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory
freedom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert* that,
by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have
acquired three fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one
system and lie together in one short sentence, namely, that we have
acquired a right:

    (1) to choose our own governors.

    (2) to cashier them for misconduct.

    (3) to frame a government for ourselves.

This new and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the
name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction
only. The body of the people of England have no share in it. They
utterly disclaim it. They will resist the practical assertion of it
with their lives and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws
of their country made at the time of that very Revolution which is
appealed to in favor of the fictitious rights claimed by the Society
which abuses its name.

    * Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr. Price, p. 34.

    THESE GENTLEMEN OF THE OLD JEWRY, in all their reasonings on the
Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England
about forty years before and the late French revolution, so much
before their eyes and in their hearts that they are constantly
confounding all the three together. It is necessary that we should
separate what they confound. We must recall their erring fancies to
the acts of the Revolution which we revere, for the discovery of its
true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of 1688 are
anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Declaration of
Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration, drawn up
by great lawyers and great statesmen, and not by warm and
inexperienced enthusiasts, not one word is said, nor one suggestion
made, of a general right "to choose our own governors, to cashier them
for misconduct, and to form a government for ourselves".

    This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary,
sess. 2, ch. 2) is the cornerstone of our constitution as
reinforced, explained, improved, and in its fundamental principles for
ever settled. It is called, "An Act for declaring the rights and
liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the
crown". You will observe that these rights and this succession are
declared in one body and bound indissolubly together.

    A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered for
asserting a right of election to the crown. On the prospect of a total
failure of issue from King William, and from the Princess,
afterwards Queen Anne, the consideration of the settlement of the
crown and of a further security for the liberties of the people
again came before the legislature. Did they this second time make
any provision for legalizing the crown on the spurious revolution
principles of the Old Jewry? No. They followed the principles which
prevailed in the Declaration of Right, indicating with more
precision the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant line. This
act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties and an
hereditary succession in the same act. Instead of a right to choose
our own governors, they declared that the succession in that line (the
Protestant line drawn from James the First), was absolutely
necessary "for the peace, quiet, and security of the realm", and
that it was equally urgent on them "to maintain a certainty in the
succession thereof, to which the subjects may safely have recourse for
their protection". Both these acts, in which are heard the unerring,
unambiguous oracles of revolution policy, instead of countenancing the
delusive, gipsy predictions of a "right to choose our governors",
prove to a demonstration how totally adverse the wisdom of the
nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law.

    Unquestionably, there was at the Revolution, in the person of King
William, a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of
a regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine
principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a
special case and regarding an individual person. Privilegium non
transit in exemplum. If ever there was a time favorable for
establishing the principle that a king of popular choice was the
only legal king, without all doubt it was at the Revolution. Its not
being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it
ought not to be done at any time. There is no person so completely
ignorant of our history as not to know that the majority in parliament
of both parties were so little disposed to anything resembling that
principle that at first they were determined to place the vacant
crown, not on the head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his
wife Mary, daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of
that king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be
to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all those
circumstances which demonstrated that their accepting King William was
not properly a choice; but to all those who did not wish, in effect,
to recall King James or to deluge their country in blood and again
to bring their religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had
just escaped, it was an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense
in which necessity can be taken.

    In the very act in which for a time, and in a single case,
parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance in favor of a
prince who, though not next, was, however, very near in the line of
succession, it is curious to observe how Lord Somers, who drew the
bill called the Declaration of Right, has comported himself on that
delicate occasion. It is curious to observe with what address this
temporary solution of continuity is kept from the eye, whilst all that
could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the idea of
an hereditary succession is brought forward, and fostered, and made
the most of, by this great man and by the legislature who followed
him. Quitting the dry, imperative style of an act of parliament, he
makes the Lords and Commons fall to a pious, legislative ejaculation
and declare that they consider it "as a marvellous providence and
merciful goodness of God to this nation to preserve their said
Majesties' royal persons most happily to reign over us on the throne
of their ancestors, for which, from the bottom of their hearts, they
return their humblest thanks and praises".- The legislature plainly
had in view the act of recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth,
chap. 3rd, and of that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts
strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in
many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words and
even the form of thanksgiving which is found in these old
declaratory statutes.

    The two Houses, in the act of King William, did not thank God that
they had found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their
own governors, much less to make an election the only lawful title
to the crown. Their having been in a condition to avoid the very
appearance of it, as much as possible, was by them considered as a
providential escape. They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over
every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the
meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which
might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they
had then settled forever. Accordingly, that they might not relax the
nerves of their monarchy, and that they might preserve a close
conformity to the practice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the
declaratory statutes of Queen Mary* and Queen Elizabeth, in the next
clause they vest, by recognition, in their Majesties all the legal
prerogatives of the crown, declaring "that in them they are most
fully, rightfully, and entirely invested, incorporated, united, and
annexed". In the clause which follows, for preventing questions by
reason of any pretended titles to the crown, they declare (observing
also in this the traditionary language, along with the traditionary
policy of the nation, and repeating as from a rubric the language of
the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James,) that on the preserving
"a certainty in the SUCCESSION thereof, the unity, peace, and
tranquillity of this nation doth, under God, wholly depend".

    * 1st Mary, sess. 3, ch. 1.

    They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much
resemble an election, and that an election would be utterly
destructive of the "unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation",
which they thought to be considerations of some moment. To provide for
these objects and, therefore, to exclude for ever the Old Jewry
doctrine of "a right to choose our own governors", they follow with
a clause containing a most solemn pledge, taken from the preceding act
of Queen Elizabeth, as solemn a pledge as ever was or can be given
in favor of an hereditary succession, and as solemn a renunciation
as could be made of the principles by this Society imputed to them:
The Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of
all the people aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit
themselves, their heirs and posterities for ever; and do faithfully
promise that they will stand to maintain, and defend their said
Majesties, and also the limitation of the crown, herein specified
and contained, to the utmost of their powers, etc. etc.

    So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the
Revolution 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. These
gentlemen may value themselves as much as they please on their whig
principles, but I never desire to be thought a better whig than Lord
Somers, or to understand the principles of the Revolution better
than those, by whom it was brought about, or to read in the
Declaration of Right any mysteries unknown to those whose
penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts,
the words and spirit of that immortal law.

    It is true that, aided with the powers derived from force and
opportunity, the nation was at that time, in some sense, free to
take what course it pleased for filling the throne, but only free to
do so upon the same grounds on which they might have wholly
abolished their monarchy and every other part of their constitution.
However, they did not think such bold changes within their commission.
It is indeed difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere
abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exercised by
parliament at that time, but the limits of a moral competence
subjecting, even in powers more indisputably sovereign, occasional
will to permanent reason and to the steady maxims of faith, justice,
and fixed fundamental policy, are perfectly intelligible and perfectly
binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name or under
any title, in the state. The House of Lords, for instance, is not
morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons, no, nor even to
dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the
legislature of the kingdom. Though a king may abdicate for his own
person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a
stronger reason, the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of
authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by
the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such
surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold
their public faith with each other and with all those who derive any
serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state
is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise
competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but
the will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of
the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession
by law; in the old line it was a succession by the common law; in
the new, by the statute law operating on the principles of the
common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode and
describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same
force and are derived from an equal authority emanating from the
common agreement and original compact of the state, communi
sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king and
people, too, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the
same body politic.

    It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer
ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the
use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation: the sacredness
of an hereditary principle of succession in our government with a
power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency. Even
in that extremity (if we take the measure of our rights by our
exercise of them at the Revolution), the change is to be confined to
the peccant part only, to the part which produced the necessary
deviation; and even then it is to be effected without a
decomposition of the whole civil and political mass for the purpose of
originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society.

    A state without the means of some change is without the means of
its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of
that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously
to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction
operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and
Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those
periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their ancient
edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the
contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old
constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept
these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be
suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the
shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a
disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature
manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British
constitutional policy than at the time of the Revolution, when it
deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown
was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved, but
the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of
hereditary descent, still an hereditary descent in the same blood,
though an hereditary descent qualified with Protestantism. When the
legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they showed
that they held it inviolable.

    On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some
amendment in the old time, and long before the era of the
Revolution. Some time after the Conquest, great questions arose upon
the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became a matter of
doubt whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to
succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per
stirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was
preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of
immortality through all transmigrations- multosque per annos stat
fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum. This is the spirit of our
constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its
revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he
obtained the crown by law or by force, the hereditary succession was
either continued or adopted.

    The gentlemen of the Society for Revolution see nothing in that of
1688 but the deviation from the constitution; and they take the
deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little
regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they must
see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive
institutions of this country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once
established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act
of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be
valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors
who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of
their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and disable backward all the
kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to
stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?
Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into question,
together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great
body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as
usurpers, to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties- of as
great value at least as any which have passed at or since the period
of the Revolution? If kings who did not owe their crown to the
choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become
of the statute de tallagio non concedendo?- of the petition of right?-
of the act of habeas corpus? Do these new doctors of the rights of men
presume to assert that King James the Second, who came to the crown as
next of blood, according to the rules of a then unqualified
succession, was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of
England before he had done any of those acts which were justly
construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, much trouble
in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen
commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and
not an usurper. The princes who succeeded, according to the act of
parliament which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on
her descendants, being Protestants, came in as much by a title of
inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law as it
stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the House of
Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but
by the law as it stood at their several accessions of Protestant
descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shown sufficiently.

    The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the
succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The
terms of this act bind "us and our heirs, and our posterity, to
them, their heirs, and their posterity", being Protestants, to the end
of time, in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to
the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an
hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground,
except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure
that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people
forever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and
abundant choice which our country presented to them and searched in
strange lands for a foreign princess from whose womb the line of our
future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men
through a series of ages?

    The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th
and 13th of King William for a stock and root of inheritance to our
kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power
which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She
was adopted for one reason, and for one only, because, says the act,
"the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager
of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late
Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the
First, of happy memory, and is hereby declared to be the next in
succession in the Protestant line etc., etc., and the crown shall
continue to the heirs of her body, being Protestants." This limitation
was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an
inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but (what
they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected
with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First, in order
that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages
and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old
approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once
endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of
prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No
experience has taught us that in any other course or method than
that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated
and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An irregular, convulsive
movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive
disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the
British constitution. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act
for the limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn
through the female descendants of James the First, a due sense of
the inconveniences of having two or three, or possibly more,
foreigners in succession to the British throne? No!- they had a due
sense of the evils which might happen from such foreign rule, and more
than a due sense of them. But a more decisive proof cannot be given of
the full conviction of the British nation that the principles of the
Revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure,
and without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our
government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary
Protestant succession in the old line, with all the dangers and all
the inconveniences of its being a foreign line full before their
eyes and operating with the utmost force upon their minds.

    A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so
capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any
argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now
publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to
revolutions, the signals for which have so often been given from
pulpits; the spirit of change that is gone abroad; the total
contempt which prevails with you, and may come to prevail with us,
of all ancient institutions when set in opposition to a present
sense of convenience or to the bent of a present inclination: all
these considerations make it not unadvisable, in my opinion, to call
back our attention to the true principles of our own domestic laws;
that you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we should
continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either side of the water,
to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares
which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit
bottoms as raw commodities of British growth, though wholly alien to
our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this
country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved
liberty.

    The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never
tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on
trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown
as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as
a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of
servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it
stands, to be of inestimable value, and they conceive the
undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability
and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.

    I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some
paltry artifices which the abettors of election, as the only lawful
title to the crown, are ready to employ in order to render the support
of the just principles of our constitution a task somewhat
invidious. These sophisters substitute a fictitious cause and
feigned personages, in whose favor they suppose you engaged whenever
you defend the inheritable nature of the crown. It is common with them
to dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those exploded
fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained what I believe no
creature now maintains, "that the crown is held by divine hereditary
and indefeasible right".- These old fanatics of single arbitrary power
dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful government
in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power
maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of
authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did
speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had
more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government; and as if
a right to govern by inheritance were in strictness indefeasible in
every person who should be found in the succession to a throne, and
under every circumstance, which no civil or political right can be.
But an absurd opinion concerning the king's hereditary right to the
crown does not prejudice one that is rational and bottomed upon
solid principles of law and policy. If all the absurd theories of
lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are
conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no
justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous
maxims on the other.

    THE second claim of the Revolution Society is "a right of
cashiering their governors for misconduct". Perhaps the
apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as
that "of cashiering for misconduct" was the cause that the declaration
of the act, which implied the abdication of King James, was, if it had
any fault, rather too guarded and too circumstantial.* But all this
guard and all this accumulation of circumstances serves to show the
spirit of caution which predominated in the national councils in a
situation in which men irritated by oppression, and elevated by a
triumph over it, are apt to abandon themselves to violent and
extreme courses; it shows the anxiety of the great men who
influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event to make the
Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future
revolutions.

    * "That King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the
constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract
between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other
wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having
withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath abdicated the Government,
and the throne is thereby vacant".

    No government could stand a moment if it could be blown down
with anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of "misconduct".
They who led at the Revolution grounded the virtual abdication of King
James upon no such light and uncertain principle. They charged him
with nothing less than a design, confirmed by a multitude of illegal
overt acts, to subvert the Protestant church and state, and their
fundamental, unquestionable laws and liberties; they charged him
with having broken the original contract between king and people. This
was more than misconduct. A grave and overruling necessity obliged
them to take the step they took, and took with infinite reluctance, as
under that most rigorous of all laws. Their trust for the future
preservation of the constitution was not in future revolutions. The
grand policy of all their regulations was to render it almost
impracticable for any future sovereign to compel the states of the
kingdom to have again recourse to those violent remedies. They left
the crown what, in the eye and estimation of law, it had ever
been-perfectly irresponsible. In order to lighten the crown still
further, they aggravated responsibility on ministers of state. By
the statute of the 1st of King William, sess. 2nd, called "the act for
declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling
the succession of the crown", they enacted that the ministers should
serve the crown on the terms of that declaration. They secured soon
after the frequent meetings of parliament, by which the whole
government would be under the constant inspection and active control
of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom. In
the next great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King
William, for the further limitation of the crown and better securing
the rights and liberties of the subject, they provided "that no pardon
under the great seal of England should be pleadable to an
impeachment by the Commons in parliament". The rule laid down for
government in the Declaration of Right, the constant inspection of
parliament, the practical claim of impeachment, they thought
infinitely a better security, not only for their constitutional
liberty, but against the vices of administration, than the reservation
of a right so difficult in the practice, so uncertain in the issue,
and often so mischievous in the consequences, as that of "cashiering
their governors".

    Dr. Price, in this sermon,* condemns very properly the practice of
gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of this fulsome style, he
proposes that his Majesty should be told, on occasions of
congratulation, that "he is to consider himself as more properly the
servant than the sovereign of his people". For a compliment, this
new form of address does not seem to be very soothing. Those who are
servants in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of
their situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave, in
the old play, tells his master, "Haec commemoratio est quasi
exprobatio". It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not wholesome
as instruction. After all, if the king were to bring himself to echo
this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take the
appellation of Servant of the People as his royal style, how either he
or we should be much mended by it I cannot imagine. I have seen very
assuming letters, signed "Your most obedient, humble servant". The
proudest denomination that ever was endured on earth took a title of
still greater humility than that which is now proposed for
sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and nations were
trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself "the Servant of
Servants"; and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the
signet of "the Fisherman".

    * Pp. 22-24.

    I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of
flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavory fume, several
persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not
plainly in support of the idea and a part of the scheme of "cashiering
kings for misconduct". In that light it is worth some observation.

    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. The law, which knows
neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate not our
servant, as this humble divine calls him, but "our sovereign Lord
the king"; and we, on our parts, have learned to speak only the
primitive language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their
Babylonian pulpits.

    As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law in him, our
constitution has made no sort of provision toward rendering him, as
a servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing
of a magistrate like the Justicia of Aragon, nor of any court
legally appointed, nor of any process legally settled, for
submitting the king to the responsibility belonging to all servants.
In this he is not distinguished from the Commons and the Lords, who,
in their several public capacities, can never be called to an
account for their conduct, although the Revolution Society chooses
to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most
beautiful parts of our constitution, that "a king is no more than
the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible to it"

    Ill would our ancestors at the 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. Let these gentlemen state who
that representative public is to whom they will affirm the king, as
a servant, to be responsible. It will then be time enough for me to
produce to them the positive statute law which affirms that he is not.

    The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so
much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
It then becomes a case of war, and not of constitution. Laws are
commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms, and tribunals fall to
the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The
Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in
which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella
quibus necessaria. The question of dethroning or, if these gentlemen
like the phrase better, "cashiering kings" will always be, as it has
always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the
law- a question (like all other questions of state) of dispositions
and of means and of probable consequences rather than of positive
rights. As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be
agitated by common minds. The speculative line of demarcation where
obedience ought to end and resistance must begin is faint, obscure,
and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event,
which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged,
indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future
must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in
that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate
the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in
extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered
state. Times and occasions and provocations will teach their own
lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the
irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded, from
disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the
brave and bold, from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause;
but, with or without right, a revolution will be the very last
resource of the thinking and the good.

    THE third head of right, asserted by the pulpit of the Old
Jewry, namely, the "right to form a government for ourselves", has, at
least, as little countenance from anything done at the Revolution,
either in precedent or principle, as the two first of their claims.
The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and
liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our
only security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing
the spirit of our constitution and the policy which predominated in
that great period which has secured it to this hour, pray look for
both in our histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament,
and journals of parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry
and the after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the former
you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as
ill-suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any
appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new
government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished
at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we
possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and
stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon
alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we
have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reverence to
antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which
possibly may be made hereafter will be carefully formed upon
analogical precedent, authority, and example.

    Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see
that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the
great men who follow him, to Blackstone,* are industrious to prove the
pedigree of our liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ancient
charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another
positive charter from Henry I, and that both the one and the other
were nothing more than a reaffirmance of the still more ancient
standing law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the greater
part these authors appear to be in the right; perhaps not always;
but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, it proves my
position still the more strongly, because it demonstrates the powerful
prepossession toward antiquity, with which the minds of all our
lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to
influence, have been always filled, and the stationary policy of
this kingdom in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as
an inheritance.

    * See Blackstone's Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759.

    In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I, called the Petition
of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have
inherited this freedom", claiming their franchises not on abstract
principles "as the rights of men", but as the rights of Englishmen,
and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden and the
other profoundly learned men who drew this Petition of Right were as
well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning
the "rights of men" as any of the discoursers in our pulpits or on
your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price or as the Abbe Sieyes. But,
for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their
theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded,
hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the
citizen, to that vague speculative right which exposed their sure
inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild,
litigious spirit.

    The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made
for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary,
in the famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two
Houses utter not a syllable of "a right to frame a government for
themselves". You will see that their whole care was to secure the
religion, laws, and liberties that had been long possessed, and had
been lately endangered. "Taking* into their most serious consideration
the best means for making such an establishment, that their
religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being again
subverted", they auspicate all their proceedings by stating as some of
those best means, "in the first place" to do "as their ancestors in
like cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient rights
and liberties, to declare"- and then they pray the king and queen
"that it may be declared and enacted that all and singular the
rights and liberties asserted and declared are the true ancient and
indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom".

    * W. and M.

    You will observe that from Magna Charta to the 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.

    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.

    Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our
artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and
powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances
of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small,
benefits from considering our liberties in the light of an
inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized
forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal
descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which
prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and
disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By
this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing
and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors.
It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of
portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and
titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the
principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on
account of their age and on account of those from whom they are
descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better
adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course
that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our
speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great
conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

    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. Your constitution was suspended before it was
perfected, but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as
good as could be wished. In your old states you possessed that variety
of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your
community was happily composed; you had all that combination and all
that opposition of interests; you had that action and counteraction
which, in the natural and in the political world, from the
reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the
universe. These opposed and conflicting interests which you considered
as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution
interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions. They render
deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of necessity; they make
all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation;
they produce temperaments preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude,
unqualified reformations, and rendering all the headlong exertions
of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable.
Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had
as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders,
whilst, by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy,
the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting
from their allotted places.

    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. You set up your trade
without a capital. 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; and you would have risen with the example to
whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would
have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to
consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of lowborn
servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to
furnish, at the expense of your honor, an excuse to your apologists
here for several enormities of yours, you would not have been
content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves suddenly broke
loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your
abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed and ill
fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you
thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous and gallant
nation, long misled to your disadvantage by your high and romantic
sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that events had been
unfavorable to you, but that you were not enslaved through any
illiberal or servile disposition; that in your most devoted submission
you were actuated by a principle of public spirit, and that it was
your country you worshiped in the person of your king? Had you made it
to be understood that in the delusion of this amiable error you had
gone further than your wise ancestors, that you were resolved to
resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of
your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; or if, diffident of
yourselves and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated
constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbors in
this land who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of
the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its present
state- by following wise examples you would have given new examples of
wisdom to the world. 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 an unoppressive but a
productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to
feed it. 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. You had a smooth and
easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond anything
recorded in the history of the world, but you have shown that
difficulty is good for man.

    COMPUTE your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and
presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise
all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to
despise themselves until the moment in which they become truly
despicable. By following those false lights, France has bought
undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased
the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime!
France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has
abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All
other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the
reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by enforcing with
greater exactness some rites or other of religion. All other people
have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a
system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she
let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a
ferocious dissoluteness in manners and of an insolent irreligion in
opinions and practice, and has extended through all ranks of life,
as if she were communicating some privilege or laying open some
secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the
disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of
equality in France.

    France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the
tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of
its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims
of tyrannous distrust, and taught kings to tremble at (what will
hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians.
Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited
confidence in their people as subverters of their thrones, as traitors
who aim at their destruction by leading their easy good-nature,
under specious pretenses, to admit combinations of bold and
faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if
there were nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to
mankind. Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king that,
in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear but the
prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the
throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads. It is
right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel
has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such sanguine
declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly
to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect those
provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish
benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for
the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of
freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state
corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a
mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than
ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal
usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to
concession, their revolt was from protection, their blow was aimed
at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities.

    This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their
punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted;
industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the
people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved;
civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom;
everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,
and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the
paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the
discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared
rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire in lieu of
the two great recognized species that represent the lasting,
conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves
in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property,
whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically
subverted.

    Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable
results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to
wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and
prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France,
which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the
devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments
of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the
display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and
irresistible, authority. The persons who have thus squandered away the
precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this
prodigal and wild waste of public evils (the last stake reserved for
the ultimate ransom of the state) have met in their progress with
little or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more
like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. Their pioneers
have gone before them and demolished and laid everything level at
their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of
the country they have ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their
projects of greater consequence than their shoebuckles, whilst they
were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow citizens, and
bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress thousands of
worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the
base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of
perfect safety, in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes,
assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harassed
land. But the cause of all was plain from the beginning.

    THIS unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear
perfectly unaccountable if we did not consider the composition of
the National Assembly. I do not mean its formal constitution, which,
as it now stands, is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which,
in a great measure, it is composed, which is of ten thousand times
greater consequence than all the formalities in the world. If we
were to know nothing of this assembly but by its title and function,
no colors could paint to the imagination anything more venerable. In
that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image
as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a
focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the
very worst aspect. Instead of blamable, they would appear only
mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial
institution whatsoever can make the men of whom any system of
authority is composed any other than God, and nature, and education,
and their habits of life have made them. Capacities beyond these the
people have not to give. Virtue and wisdom may be the objects of their
choice, but their choice confers neither the one nor the other on
those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the
engagement of nature, they have not the promise of revelation, for any
such powers.

    After I had read over the list of the persons and descriptions
elected into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could
appear astonishing. Among them, indeed, I saw some of known rank, some
of shining talents; but of any practical experience in the state,
not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory. But
whatever the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance
and mass of the body which constitutes its character and must
finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those who will lead
must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their
propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom
they wish to conduct; therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly
composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree
of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason
cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent
disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of
absurd projects! If, what is the more likely event, instead of that
unusual degree of virtue, they should be actuated by sinister ambition
and a lust of meretricious glory, then the feeble part of the
assembly, to whom at first they conform, becomes in its turn the
dupe and instrument of their designs. In this political traffic, the
leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers,
and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of
their leaders.

    To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the
leaders in any public assembly, they ought to respect, in some
degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct. To be led any
otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for
actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural
weight and authority. Nothing can secure a steady and moderate conduct
in such assemblies but that the body of them should be respectably
composed, in point of condition in life or permanent property, of
education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the
understanding.

    In the calling of the States-General of France, the first thing
that struck me was a great departure from the ancient course. I
found the representation for the Third Estate composed of six
hundred persons. They were equal in number to the representatives of
both the other orders. If the orders were to act separately, the
number would not, beyond the consideration of the expense, be of
much moment. But when it became apparent that the three orders were to
be melted down into one, the policy and necessary effect of this
numerous representation became obvious. A very small desertion from
either of the other two orders must throw the power of both into the
hands of the third. In fact, the whole power of the state was soon
resolved into that body. Its due composition became therefore of
infinitely the greater importance.

    Judge, Sir, of my surprise when I found that a very great
proportion of the assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members
who attended) was composed of practitioners in the law. It was
composed, not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to
their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of
leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in
universities;- but for the far greater part, as it must in such a
number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental
members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions, but
the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of
stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries,
and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the
fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From
the moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it
has happened, all that was to follow.

    The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes
the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold
themselves. Whatever the personal merits of many individual lawyers
might have been, and in many it was undoubtedly very considerable,
in that military kingdom no part of the profession had been much
regarded except the highest of all, who often united to their
professional offices great family splendor, and were invested with
great power and authority. These certainly were highly respected,
and even with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not much
esteemed; the mechanical part was in a very low degree of repute.

    Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so composed, it
must evidently produce the consequences of supreme authority placed in
the hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves, who
had no previous fortune in character at stake, who could not be
expected to bear with moderation, or to conduct with discretion, a
power which they themselves, more than any others, must be surprised
to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself that these men,
suddenly and, as it were, by enchantment snatched from the humblest
rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their
unprepared greatness? Who could conceive that men who are habitually
meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and
unquiet minds would easily fall back into their old condition of
obscure contention and laborious, low, unprofitable chicane? Who could
doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they
understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which
they understand but too well? It was not an event depending on
chance or contingency. It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was
planted in the nature of things. They must join (if their capacity did
not permit them to lead) in any project which could procure to them
a litigious constitution; which could lay open to them those
innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all great
convulsions and revolutions in the state, and particularly in all
great and violent permutations of property. Was it to be expected that
they would attend to the stability of property, whose existence had
always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable,
ambiguous, and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their
elevation, but their disposition and habits, and mode of accomplishing
their designs, must remain the same.

    Well! but these men were to be tempered and restrained by other
descriptions, of more sober and more enlarged understandings. Were
they then to be awed by the supereminent authority and awful dignity
of a handful of country clowns who have seats in that assembly, some
of whom are said not to be able to read and write, and by not a
greater number of traders who, though somewhat more instructed and
more conspicuous in the order of society, had never known anything
beyond their counting house? No! Both these descriptions were more
formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of
lawyers than to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous
disproportion, the whole must needs be governed by them. To the
faculty of law was joined a pretty considerable proportion of the
faculty of medicine. This faculty had not, any more than that of the
law, possessed in France its just estimation. Its professors,
therefore, must have the qualities of men not habituated to sentiments
of dignity. But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and
as with us they do actually, the sides of sickbeds are not the
academies for forming statesmen and legislators. Then came the dealers
in stocks and funds, who must be eager, at any expense, to change
their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance of land. To
these were joined men of other descriptions, from whom as little
knowledge of, or attention to, the interests of a great state was to
be expected, and as little regard to the stability of any institution;
men formed to be instruments, not controls. Such in general was the
composition of the Tiers Etat in the National Assembly, in which was
scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of what we call the
natural landed interest of the country.

    We know that the British House of Commons, without shutting its
doors to any merit in any class, is, by the sure operation of adequate
causes, filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in
hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in
military, civil, naval, and politic distinction that the country can
afford. But supposing, what hardly can be supposed as a case, that the
House of Commons should be composed in the same manner with the
Tiers Etat in France, would this dominion of chicane be borne with
patience or even conceived without horror? God forbid I should
insinuate anything derogatory to that profession which is another
priesthood, administering the rights of sacred justice. But whilst I
revere men in the functions which belong to them, and would do as much
as one man can do to prevent their exclusion from any, I cannot, to
flatter them, give the lie to nature. They are good and useful in
the composition; they must be mischievous if they preponderate so as
virtually to become the whole. Their very excellence in their peculiar
functions may be far from a qualification for others. It cannot escape
observation that when men are too much confined to professional and
faculty habits and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent employment
of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for
whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed
affairs, on a comprehensive, connected view of the various,
complicated, external and internal interests which go to the formation
of that multifarious thing called a state.

    After all, if the House of Commons were to have a wholly
professional and faculty composition, what is the power of the House
of Commons, circumscribed and shut in by the immovable barriers of
laws, usages, positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised
by the House of Lords, and every moment of its existence at the
discretion of the crown to continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The
power of the House of Commons, direct or indirect, is indeed great;
and long may it be able to preserve its greatness and the spirit
belonging to true greatness at the full; and it will do so as long
as it can keep the breakers of law in India from becoming the makers
of law for England. The power, however, of the House of Commons,
when least diminished, is as a drop of water in the ocean, compared to
that residing in a settled majority of your National Assembly. That
assembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no fundamental law,
no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it. Instead of
finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed constitution, they
have a power to make a constitution which shall conform to their
designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on
them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions that
are qualified or that dare, not only to make laws under a fixed
constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new constitution
for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the monarch on
the throne to the vestry of a parish? But- "fools rush in where angels
fear to tread". In such a state of unbounded power for undefined and
undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical
inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest we can
conceive to happen in the management of human affairs.

    Having considered the composition of the Third Estate as it
stood in its original frame, I took a view of the representatives of
the clergy. There, too, it appeared that full as little regard was had
to the general security of property or to the aptitude of the deputies
for the public purposes, in the principles of their election. That
election was so contrived as to send a very large proportion of mere
country curates to the great and arduous work of new-modeling a state:
men who never had seen the state so much as in a picture- men who knew
nothing of the world beyond the bounds of an obscure village; who,
immersed in hopeless poverty, could regard all property, whether
secular or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of envy;
among whom must be many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest
dividend in plunder, would readily join in any attempts upon a body of
wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share except in a
general scramble. Instead of balancing the power of the active
chicaners in the other assembly, these curates must necessarily become
the active coadjutors, or at best the passive instruments, of those by
whom they had been habitually guided in their petty village
concerns. They, too, could hardly be the most conscientious of their
kind who, presuming upon their incompetent understanding, could
intrigue for a trust which led them from their natural relation to
their flocks and their natural spheres of action to undertake the
regeneration of kingdoms. This preponderating weight, being added to
the force of the body of chicane in the Tiers Etat, completed that
momentum of ignorance, rashness, presumption, and lust of plunder,
which nothing has been able to resist.

    To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning that the
majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction with such a deputation
from the clergy as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction
of the nobility, would inevitably become subservient to the worst
designs of individuals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation
of their own order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the
pay of their new followers. To squander away the objects which made
the happiness of their fellows would be to them no sacrifice at all.
Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are
puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their
own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and
mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they
partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the
little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the
germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the
series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to
mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust
in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men
would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away
for their own personal advantage.

    There were in the time of our civil troubles in England (I do
not know whether you have any such in your assembly in France) several
persons, like the then Earl of Holland, who by themselves or their
families had brought an odium on the throne by the prodigal
dispensation of its bounties toward them, who afterwards joined in the
rebellions arising from the discontents of which they were
themselves the cause; men who helped to subvert that throne to which
they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power
which they employed to ruin their benefactor. If any bounds are set to
the rapacious demands of that sort of people, or that others are
permitted to partake in the objects they would engross, revenge and
envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice.
Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason
is disturbed; their views become vast and perplexed; to others
inexplicable, to themselves uncertain. They find, on all sides, bounds
to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. Both in
the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged and appears without
any limit.

    When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition
without a distinct object and work with low instruments and for low
ends, the whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something
like this now appear in France? Does it not produce something
ignoble and inglorious- a kind of meanness in all the prevalent
policy, a tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals
all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolutions have
been conducted by persons who, whilst they attempted or affected
changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing
the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long
views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their
country. They were men of great civil and great military talents,
and if the terror, the ornament of their age. They were not like Jew
brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with
fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin
brought on their country by their degenerate councils. The
compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp
(Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favorite poet of that time, shows what it
was he proposed, and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished, in
the success of his ambition:

        Still as you rise, the state exalted too,

        Finds no distemper whilst 'tis changed by you;

        Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise

        The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys.

    These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as
asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to
illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their
competitors was by outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying
angel, smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under
which it suffered. I do not say (God forbid), I do not say that the
virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but
they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our
Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis.
Such the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of
a civil war. Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were
your Henry the Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil
confusions and not wholly without some of their taint. It is a thing
to be wondered at, to see how very soon France, when she had a
moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and most
dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation. Why? Because
among all their massacres they had not slain the mind in their
country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory
and emulation was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled
and inflamed. The organs also of the state, however shattered,
existed. All the prizes of honor and virtue, all the rewards, all
the distinctions remained. But your present confusion, like a palsy,
has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your
country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor, is
disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life
except in a mortified and humiliated indignation. But this
generation will quickly pass away. The next generation of the nobility
will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers usurers,
and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.

    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. The association of tailors and
carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is
composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which by the worst
of usurpations- an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature- you
attempt to force them.

    The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the states, said, in a
tone of oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honorable. If
he meant only that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would
not have gone beyond the truth. But in asserting that anything is
honorable, we imply some distinction in its favor. The occupation of a
hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of
honor to any person- to say nothing of a number of other more
servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer
oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as
they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In
this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with
nature.*

    * Ecclesiasticus, chap. xxxviii. verses 24, 25. "The wisdom of a
learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath
little business shall become wise".- "How can he get wisdom that
holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth
oxen; and is occupied in their labours; and whose talk is of
bullocks"?

    Ver. 27. "So every carpenter and work-master that laboureth
night and day", etc.

    Ver. 33. "They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor
sit high in the congregation: they shall not sit on the judge's
seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment; they cannot declare
justice and judgment, and they shall not be found where parables are
spoken".

    Ver. 34. "But they will maintain the state of the world".

    I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican
church (till lately) has considered it, or apocryphal, as here it is
taken. I am sure it contains a great deal of sense and truth.

    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.
Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state,
condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place
and honor. 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.

    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. The same quantity of
property, which is by the natural course of things divided among many,
has not the same operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is
diffused. In this diffusion each man's portion is less than what, in
the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by
dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder of the few
would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the
distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making
this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend
this distribution.

    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. For though hereditary wealth and the
rank which goes with it are too much idolized by creeping sycophants
and the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly
slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant, assuming,
short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated
preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to
birth is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

    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. These commonwealths will
not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris. They
will not bear that this body should monopolize the captivity of the
king and the dominion over the assembly calling itself national.
Each will keep its own portion of the spoil of the church to itself,
and it will not suffer either that spoil, or the more just fruits of
their industry, or the natural produce of their soil to be sent to
swell the insolence or pamper the luxury of the mechanics of Paris. In
this they will see none of the equality, under the pretense of which
they have been tempted to throw off their allegiance to their
sovereign as well as the ancient constitution of their country.
There can be no capital city in such a constitution as they have
lately made. They have forgot that, when they framed democratic
governments, they had virtually dismembered their country. The
person whom they persevere in calling king has not power left to him
by the hundredth part sufficient to hold together this collection of
republics. The republic of Paris will endeavor, indeed, to complete
the debauchery of the army, and illegally to perpetuate the
assembly, without resort to its constituents, as the means of
continuing its despotism. It will make efforts, by becoming the
heart of a boundless paper circulation, to draw everything to
itself; but in vain. All this policy in the end will appear as
feeble as it is now violent.

    IF this be your actual situation, compared to the situation to
which you were called, as it were, by the voice of God and man, I
cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on the choice you
have made or the success which has attended your endeavors. I can as
little recommend to any other nation a conduct grounded on such
principles, and productive of such effects. That I must leave to those
who can see farther into your affairs than I am able to do, and who
best know how far your actions are favorable to their designs. The
gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were so early in their
congratulations, appear to be strongly of opinion that there is some
scheme of politics relative to this country in which your
proceedings may, in some way, be useful. For your Dr. Price, who seems
to have speculated himself into no small degree of fervor upon this
subject, addresses his auditory in the following very remarkable
words: "I cannot conclude without recalling particularly to your
recollection a consideration which I have more than once alluded to,
and which probably your thoughts have been all along anticipating; a
consideration with which my mind is impressed more than I can express.
I mean the consideration of the favourableness of the present times to
all exertions in the cause of liberty."

    It is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at the
time big with some extraordinary design; and it is very probable
that the thoughts of his audience, who understood him better than I
do, did all along run before him in his reflection and in the whole
train of consequences to which it led.

    Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in a
free country; and it was an error I cherished, because it gave me a
greater liking to the country I lived in. I was, indeed, aware that
a jealous, ever-waking vigilance to guard the treasure of our liberty,
not only from invasion, but from decay and corruption, was our best
wisdom and our first duty. However, I considered that treasure
rather as a possession to be secured than as a prize to be contended
for. I did not discern how the present time came to be so very
favorable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The present time
differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in
France. If the example of that nation is to have an influence on this,
I can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an
unpleasant aspect and are not quite reconcilable to humanity,
generosity, good faith, and justice are palliated with so much milky
good-nature toward the actors, and borne with so much heroic fortitude
toward the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent to discredit the
authority of an example we mean to follow. But allowing this, we are
led to a very natural question: What is that cause of liberty, and
what are those exertions in its favor to which the example of France
is so singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with
all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of
the kingdom? Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor
of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of
Lords to be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the
church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers or given to bribe
new-invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege?
Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a
patriotic contribution or patriotic presents? Are silver shoebuckles
to be substituted in the place of the land tax and the malt tax for
the support of the naval strength of this kingdom? Are all orders,
ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal
anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four thousand
democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they may all,
by some sort of unknown attractive power, be organized into one? For
this great end, is the army to be seduced from its discipline and
its fidelity, first, by every kind of debauchery and, then, by the
terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the
curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the
delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order? Are
the citizens of London to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding
them at the expense of their fellow subjects? Is a compulsory paper
currency to be substituted in the place of the legal coin of this
kingdom? Is what remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to
be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to watch
over and to fight with each other? If these are the ends and means
of the Revolution Society, I admit that they are well assorted; and
France may furnish them for both with precedents in point.

    I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know that we
are supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive by finding our
situation tolerable, and prevented by a mediocrity of freedom from
ever attaining to its full perfection. Your leaders in France began by
affecting to admire, almost to adore, the British constitution; but as
they advanced, they came to look upon it with a sovereign contempt.
The friends of your National Assembly amongst us have full as mean
an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory of their country.
The Revolution Society has discovered that the English nation is not
free. They are convinced that the inequality in our representation
is a "defect in our constitution so gross and palpable as to make it
excellent chiefly in form and theory".* That a representation in the
legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional
liberty in it, but of "all legitimate government; that without it a
government is nothing but an usurpation";- that "when the
representation is partial, the kingdom possesses liberty only
partially; and if extremely partial, it gives only a semblance; and if
not only extremely partial, but corruptly chosen, it becomes a
nuisance". Dr. Price considers this inadequacy of representation as
our fundamental grievance; and though, as to the corruption of this
semblance of representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its
full perfection of depravity, he fears that "nothing will be done
towards gaining for us this essential blessing, until some great abuse
of power again provokes our resentment, or some great calamity again
alarms our fears, or perhaps till the acquisition of a pure and
equal representation by other countries, whilst we are mocked with the
shadow, kindles our shame." To this he subjoins a note in these words.
"A representation chosen chiefly by the treasury, and a few
thousands of the dregs of the people, who are generally paid for their
votes".

    * Discourse on the Love of our Country, 3d ed., p. 39.

    You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists
who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the
community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they
pretend to make them the depositories of all power. It would require a
long discourse to point out to you the many fallacies that lurk in the
generality and equivocal nature of the terms "inadequate
representation". I shall only say here, in justice to that
old-fashioned constitution under which we have long prospered, that
our representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the
purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or
devised. I defy the enemies of our constitution to show the
contrary. To detail the particulars in which it is found so well to
promote its ends would demand a treatise on our practical
constitution. I state here the doctrine of the Revolutionists only
that you and others may see what an opinion these gentlemen
entertain of the constitution of their country, and why they seem to
think that some great abuse of power or some great calamity, as giving
a chance for the blessing of a constitution according to their
ideas, would be much palliated to their feelings; you see why they are
so much enamored of your fair and equal representation, which being
once obtained, the same effects might follow. You see they consider
our House of Commons as only "a semblance", "a form", "a theory", "a
shadow", "a mockery", perhaps "a nuisance".

    These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic, and not
without reason. They must therefore look on this gross and palpable
defect of representation, this fundamental grievance (so they call it)
as a thing not only vicious in itself, but as rendering our whole
government absolutely illegitimate, and not at all better than a
downright usurpation. Another revolution, to get rid of this
illegitimate and usurped government, would of course be perfectly
justifiable, if not absolutely necessary. Indeed, their principle,
if you observe it with any attention, goes much further than to an
alteration in the election of the House of Commons; for, if popular
representation, or choice, is necessary to the legitimacy of all
government, the House of Lords is, at one stroke, bastardized and
corrupted in blood. That House is no representative of the people at
all, even in "semblance or in form". The case of the crown is