Page images
PDF
EPUB

The artifice had thus achieved its purpose; and the records of literature have never given an example of an artifice more required by the innate deficiencies of a work of fame. This celebrated romance realizes the saying of a witty profligate of Versailles-"If it were not for the vice, it would be the dullest affair in the world." The New Heloise, if it were not for its guilt, would never have been endured even among Frenchwomen. All higher taste is as much revolted by it as all higher morality. Infinite languor of story, dreary inflation of sentiment, and intolerable length of description, perpetually dispose the English reader more to sleep over its pages, than to criticise them. The masculine effrontery of the heroine-the gross insensibility of the husband-and the mingled meanness and exaggeration, the cold treachery, and the dry formality of the half-mendicant, half-pedagogue, who acts as the seducer, leave us only to be astonished at the chances which give celebrity. It contains passages of French eloquence, and therefore eloquence in no other land or language of earth; ostentatious appeals to improbable emotions; laboured amplifications of commonplace thought; and overflowing raptures on skies and stars, winds and waters, by a man whose only delight was in the low sensualities of a life at war with every feeling of purity and nature.

Having thus given his contribution to the private shame of society, he was the fitter to assist in its public ruin. The double apostate in religion, the corruptor in morals, he was by instinct the Jacobin. He now turned from profligacy to politics, and shewed that the change of subject had not diminished his venom. He published his "Social Contract," a work which declared that freedom was incompatible with all governments but à Republic.

The times were threatening, and the advocate of rebellion could not expect to meet with impunity in the days when kings were in peril. He was driven successively from France and Switzerland-again stole into Paris, where he fantastically assumed the disguise of an Armenian; and from France, in 1766, on the instigation of his brother atheist Hume,

came to England. Here he soon grew weary of the decencies required by English life; felt that the first attentions of curiosity and partisanship were passing away; and, unable to live without perpetual food for his vanity, invented a plot for his own assassination, and, under cover of his imaginary peril, found an excuse for flying back to Paris once more. But he had now exhausted his fame; other men had filled up his place, the subterranean voices of war and revolution were too loud for the public to listen to the querulousness of a half maniac of sixty, who had insulted every benefactor, and whose only enjoyment was that of continually exclaiming, that he was betrayed by all. He now became domestic, and married his mistress! His five children by her the man of sentiment had previously sent to the public hospital for orphans, never to see them again. He was now nearly forgotten, when the eccentric Marquis Girardin gave him a place of refuge in the grounds of his chateau at Ermenonville. He enjoyed this liberality but for a few months. In July, 1777, he was found dead in his chamber, the victim of his own hand!

But his evil was not extinguished with his death. His posthumous work," The Confessions," contained the detail of his first thirty years, and by its mixture of corrupt details and solemn blasphemies, has set the seal to his character as one of the most heartless and abandoned men of the most profligate period of Europe. The writer of this sketch must acknowledge that he speaks of the "Confessions" upon the judgment of others. He has never read them, and is content to abide in an ignorance, which could scarcely be enlightened without a crime.

Through what new illusions we must pass, what new impostor is to lead us after them into the desert, and bewilder us with the sight of cities in the clouds, and castles fabricated of the vapours of the burning soil of rebellion,-what new shape of "glory star-bright" the tempter is to take in those times of peril, which undoubtedly shall yet try the firmness of Europe by a still keener test, and finish the long series of falls and restorations by one

vast consummate struggle of national good and evil, is among the secrets of the future. But it is only by looking to the wisdom of the past, by remembering the fallacies that have been detected, and the dreadful calamities which were the price even of their detection, that we can reap the advantage of the most formidable and anxious experience that has yet fallen to the lot of man.

ESTABLISHMENTS. "Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good whence good is derived. In old establishments, various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory. They are not often constructed after any theory. Theories are rather drawn from them. In them we often see the end best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable to what we may fancy was the original scheme. ✶ ✶ ** I think all this might be curiously exemplified in the British Constitution. At worst, the errors and deviations of every kind in reckoning are found and computed, and the ship proceeds in her course. This is the case of old establishments."

One of the strange absurdities of Republicanism is, that while it universally proclaims the virtues of the multitude, it universally legislates as if vice were the only quality of mankind. All is the basest suspicion. Every man is to be deemed a villain; and the whole manly theory of reliance on public spirit, or personal feeling, is extinguished in the practice of precautions, at once degrading to human nature, and fatal to the machinery of government. With the Republican, all must be representation of the people, for kings must be tyrants, and nobles oppressors. Yet even this representation has nothing to do with confidence. The representative is a mere delegate. Every movement of the man of the people is watched with the closeness of a fraudulent debtor, and every hour of his office is an object of account worthy of the vigilance of a jailer. The whole system is one of checks and hindrances. Every

step of the depositary of the national interests is prescribed. He never moves without the sound of the shackles on his legs. He never opens his lips without remembering that he is speaking not to the national council, but to the dignitaries of the hovel. His true house of legislature is the highway; and his true advisers, masters and makers, are the race whom he would naturally employ to sweep his chimneys, or wipe his shoes. The first acts of regenerated France were to put this system into practice. They exiled all the ministers from their houses of legislation, on the established principle that ministers must essentially be traitors. They then curtailed the duration of their legislatures, on the equally established ground that all parliaments must have no other object in their continuance than public robbery, personal corruption, and everlasting despotism. They next prohibited the continuance of any member in the legislature for more than two years. They next prohibited the re-election of any members before an interval of two years. On those regulations, worthy of a gang of swindlers, trusting their concerns to the "honour that exists among thieves," Burke pounces with indignant scorn. "If your representative," says he, "act improperly at the end of his two years' lease, it does not concern him for two years more. By the French Constitution, the best and wisest representatives go, equally with the worst, into this limbus patrum. Their bottoms are supposed frail, and they must go into dock to be refitted. Every man who has served in an Assembly is ineligible for two years after. Just as those magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney-sweepers, they are disqualified from exercising it. Superficial, new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken recollection, is to be the defined character of all your future Governors. Your Constitution has too much of jealousy to have much of sense in it. You consider the breach of trust in the representative so principally, that you do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it. The purgatory interval is not unfavourable to a faithless representative, who

may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad Governor."

One of the characteristics of the Revolution was the enormous issue of paper; an issue which is always the longing of Jacobinism in all countries, and of which the true interpretation is the making of rapid fortunes in the hands of swindling politicians. ASSIGNATS." Your Legislators have founded a commonwealth upon gaming. The great object in their politics is to metamorphose France from a great kingdom into a great play-table; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters; to make speculation as extensive as life; and to divert the whole of the hopes and fears of the people from their usual channels into the impulses, passions, and superstitions of those who live on chance. The old gaming in Funds was mischievous enough, but it was so only to individuals. Even when it had its greatest extent in the Mississippi and South Sea, it affected but few, comparatively. But where the law is itself debauched so as to force the subject to this destructive table, by bringing the spirit of gaming into the minutest matters, and engaging every body and every thing in it, a more dreadful epidemic of that kind is spread than has yet appeared in the world. With you, a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation. What he receives in the morning, will not have the same value at night. What he is compelled to take as pay for an old debt, will not be received as the same when he comes to pay a debt contracted by himself. Industry must wither away. Economy must be driven from your country. Careful provision will have no existence. Who will labour without knowing the amount of his pay? Who will study to increase what none can estimate? If you abstract it from its uses in gaming to accumulate your paper wealth, would not be the providence of a man, but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw!"

The prediction was fulfilled to the letter. The Assignats, after having poured millions into the coffers of the ruling rebellion, suddenly sunk into their value in the paper of which they were made. Thousands and

tens of thousands were undone. The nation was bankrupt, but the Jacobin Government was rich, and the operation had all the results that it was ever made for.

All the wisdom of all our rectifiers of the Constitution is lavished on libelling the Peerage. With those sages it is an encumbrance on the shoulders of freedom, a chronic distemper of the State, a worthless effigy of times of popular weakness and lordly insolence. A suit of the old armour of old tyranny, but now divested of the spirit within, which gave it force, superseded by more modern instruments of personal greatness and national defence, and fit only to be consigned to the natural receptacles of dust and decay. Burke turned the light of his mind on the subject, and shewed that a House of Peers, or Senate, was essential to the peace, power, and continuance of a free constitution; that it was, of all the parts of a free constitution, that which it was least in the power of a legislation to make, and therefore ought to be most sacredly preserved; and that, useful as it was in old times, in standing between the prerogative and the populace, it was still more useful in our own day, in forming a defence for freedom against the rashness of the populace acting upon the fears of the Legislature. "Your all-sufficient Legisla tors," says Burke, " have forgot one thing which, I believe, never has been before, in theory or practice, omitted by any projector of a Republic. They have forgotten to constitute a Senate. Never before this time was heard of a body politic composed of one legislative and active assembly, and its executive officers, without such a council; without something to which foreign States might connect themselves; something to which, in the ordinary detail of Government, the people could look up; something which might give a bias and steadiness, and preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of the State. Such a body Kings generally have as a council. A monarchy may exist without it, but it seems to be of the very essence of a Republican Government. It holds a sort of middle place between the supreme power

exercised by the people, or immediately delegated from them and the mere Executive. Of this there are no traces in your Constitution, and in providing nothing of this kind, your Solons and Numas have, as much as in any thing else, discovered a sovereign incapacity."

Absurdities on the topic of Royalty are the trading stock of modern declamation. That the direct revolter should desire first to extinguish all reverence for the object which he proposes to destroy, is natural. But our object is with that vast and foolish class, who talk the language of insult through the excess of ignorance, and who vilify a King, simply from the obtuseness of brain, which cannot discover the essential importance of Royalty to the peaceful progress of mankind. In Burke's observations on the French Assembly, he obviously had the British Peerage in his view; and, though he talks of the Senate as absolutely required in Governments, which, from their nature, refuse to acknowledge a nobility, yet he continually turns to the Peerage of this country, as affording the clearest example of the materials of which a constitutional Senate should be composed. France afterwards adopted the idea, and the Senates under the Directory and Napoleon were the fruits of her discovery of their importance. But France has been always destined to be the experimentalist for Europe: -her projector, ruined by shewing how far his projects were extravagant-the alchymist worn down by his own search after the philosopher's stone-the engineer" hoist by his own petard." The French Senate proved at once the value of a nobility to form a house of Peers, and the utter incompetence of the land of Jacobinism to fabricate one. The Parisian Senates were mere bureaus of retired functionaries, meeting to register the commands of their masters-mere cages to pen up the wolves and tigers of Jacobinism as an exhibition-a Directorial and Imperial menagerie, for the ostentation or amusement of the Sovereign for the time being-mere lazar-houses, in which all the diseased in the seasons of Republican frenzy, augmented by all the infected in the hot corruptions of the oligarchy and the

empire, were restrained from public view, and, indulged as they were with harmless affectations of authority, and equipped with their coronets and sceptres of straw, were kept rigidly under the lash of power.

THE KING." They have chosen a degraded King. This, their first executive officer, is to be a machine, without any sort of deliberative discretion in any part of his function.

* According to the new Constitution, the higher parts of judicature in either of its lines are not in the King. The King of France is not the fountain of justice; the judges, neither the original nor the appellate, are of his nomination; he is not even the public prosecutor. When we look into the true nature of his authority, he appears to be nothing more than a chief of sergeants-at-mace, catchpoles, jailers, and hangmen. It is impossible to place any thing called Royalty in a more degrading point of view. A thousand times better had it been for this unhappy Prince, that he had nothing at all to do with the administration of justice, deprived as he is of all that is venerable, and all that is consolatory in that function, without a power of suspension, mitigation, or pardon. Every thing in justice that is vile and odious is thrown upon him. It is not in nature, that, situated as is the King of the French, he can respect himself, or be respected by others. View this new executive officer on the side of his political capacity-as he acts under the orders of the National Assembly, To execute laws is a royal officeto execute orders is not to be a King! However, a political executive magistracy is a great trust. Means of performing the duty ought to be given by regulation; and dispositions towards it ought to be infused by the circumstances attendant on the trust. It ought to be environed with dignity, authority, and consideration; and it ought to lead to glory. The office of execution is an office of exertion. It is not from impotence we are to expect the tasks of power. What sort of person is a King to command executory service, who has no means whatever to reward it? Not in a permanent office

not in a grant of land—no, not in

a pension of fifty pounds a-year-not in the vainest and most trivial title. In France, the King is no more the fountain of honour, than he is the fountain of justice. All rewards, all distinctions, are in other hands. Those who serve their King can be actuated by no natural motive but fear-by a fear of every thing except their master."

So much for stripping a King of his constitutional power to please the rabble, who then can have nothing to strip him of but his crown and his life. Yet, to coerce the monarch, to have "a cheap King," in other words, to have a nominal depository of power, to cut away the royal robe until it is too scanty for the royal person, to pauperise the royal functions, as a preliminary to getting rid of the name of King, is intelligible enough in the haters of all constitutions. But it is utter folly in those who desire only to live in peace, and enjoy liberty. Those should know, that it is the strength of the Government that makes the security of the peaceable; that a King without power is a King without protection; that in striking the sword out of his hands, they but disarm their defender. At this hour, instead of diminishing the royal power of resistance, it would be wisdom to invigorate it into active power; to give it the means of meeting popular aggressions on the constitution; and answer the menaces of insurrection, the trumpets of the boasted millions of Jacobins in our manufacturing provinces, and the rebellious signal-fires of Ireland, by a prompt and bold authority, which would rescue the land for half a century to come.

The calamities of the French Revolution have now, in some measure, passed away; yet the ground is still covered with the wrecks of that tre

mendous time. The present race live in perpetual fear. Their royalty is but a hurried gathering of the an cient remnant of the great earthquake, in which the King is barely distinguished from the multitude. The nation itself is hutted; its whole constitution is but a scrambling together of the old régime, mingled with the scarcely cold slag and ashes thrown up by the revolutionary explosion. All is temporary, foundationless, and tentative. All is palpable conviction, too, that it is not worth while to erect any governmental fabric of a more solid kind, while nature continues still to fret the land with perpetual symptoms of her old fever; all eyes look for the bursting up of those flames which once wrapt the land; every murmur sounds hollow and predictive; every darkening of the political horizon makes men look, not abroad, as once, but at home-feel the ground quivering under their feet-and think, not of war, but of revolution. Is there a man in Europe who would be surprised to hear to-morrow that Paris had risen in a mass-that the King was on his way to exile—that the National Guard were the masters of France-and that a President of the French Republic, one and indivisible, was sitting in the Tuileries? Is there a sound politician in Europe who does not see that the only preservative against this sweeping calamity of Europe, would be to strengthen the hands of the French Monarch-to give him the power of acting with prompt and extensive energy-to render him invincible in any contest with the mere brute violence of the mob-and, by surrounding him with authority fit for a King, to constitute him the true barrier of law, religion, and government, against the passions of the rabble?

« PreviousContinue »