Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and Speeches

However, to put the matter beyond all doubt, in the Speech from the Throne, after thanking Parliament for the relief so liberally granted, the Ministers inform the two Houses that they will endeavour to confine the expenses of the Civil Government—within what limits, think you? those which the law had prescribed?  Not in the least—“such limits as the honour of the Crown can possibly admit.”

Thus they established an arbitrary standard for that dignity which Parliament had defined and limited to a legal standard.  They gave themselves, under the lax and indeterminate idea of the honour of the Crown, a full loose for all manner of dissipation, and all manner of corruption.  This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of Parliament, estimating the dignity of the Crown at £800,000, and confining it to that sum, adds to the number of obsolete statutes which load the shelves of libraries without any sort of advantage to the people.

After this proceeding, I suppose that no man can be so weak as to think that the Crown is limited to any settled allowance whatsoever.  For if the Ministry has £800,000 a year by the law of the land, and if by the law of Parliament all the debts which exceed it are to be paid previous to the production of any account, I presume that this is equivalent to an income with no other limits than the abilities of the subject and the moderation of the Court—that is to say, it is such in income as is possessed by every absolute Monarch in Europe.  It amounts, as a person of great ability said in the debate, to an unlimited power of drawing upon the Sinking Fund.  Its effect on the public credit of this kingdom must be obvious; for in vain is the Sinking Fund the great buttress of all the rest, if it be in the power of the Ministry to resort to it for the payment of any debts which they may choose to incur, under the name of the Civil List, and through the medium of a committee, which thinks itself obliged by law to vote supplies without any other account than that of the more existence of the debt.

Five hundred thousand pounds is a serious sum.  But it is nothing to the prolific principle upon which the sum was voted—a principle that may be well called, the fruitful mother of a hundred more.  Neither is the damage to public credit of very great consequence when compared with that which results to public morals and to the safety of the Constitution, from the exhaustless mine of corruption opened by the precedent, and to be wrought by the principle of the late payment of the debts of the Civil List.  The power of discretionary disqualification by one law of Parliament, and the necessity of paying every debt of the Civil List by another law of Parliament, if suffered to pass unnoticed, must establish such a fund of rewards and terrors as will make Parliament the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.  This is felt.  The quarrel is begun between the Representatives and the People.  The Court Faction have at length committed them.

In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered.  The circumstances are in a great measure new.  We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.  At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.  I know the diligence with which my observations on our public disorders have been made.  I am very sure of the integrity of the motives on which they are published: I cannot be equally confident in any plan for the absolute cure of those disorders, or for their certain future prevention.  My aim is to bring this matter into more public discussion.  Let the sagacity of others work upon it.  It is not uncommon for medical writers to describe histories of diseases, very accurately, on whose cure they can say but very little.

The first ideas which generally suggest themselves for the cure of Parliamentary disorders are, to shorten the duration of Parliaments, and to disqualify all, or a great number of placemen, from a seat in the House of Commons.  Whatever efficacy there may be in those remedies, I am sure in the present state of things it is impossible to apply them.  A restoration of the right of free election is a preliminary indispensable to every other reformation.  What alterations ought afterwards to be made in the constitution is a matter of deep and difficult research.

If I wrote merely to please the popular palate, it would indeed be as little troublesome to me as to another to extol these remedies, so famous in speculation, but to which their greatest admirers have never attempted seriously to resort in practice.  I confess them, that I have no sort of reliance upon either a Triennial Parliament or a Place-bill.  With regard to the former, perhaps, it might rather serve to counteract than to promote the ends that are proposed by it.  To say nothing of the horrible disorders among the people attending frequent elections, I should be fearful of committing, every three years, the independent gentlemen of the country into a contest with the Treasury.  It is easy to see which of the contending parties would be ruined first.  Whoever has taken a careful view of public proceedings, so as to endeavour to ground his speculations on his experience, must have observed how prodigiously greater the power of Ministry is in the first and last session of a Parliament, than it is in the intermediate periods, when Members sit a little on their seats.  The persons of the greatest Parliamentary experience, with whom I have conversed, did constantly, in canvassing the fate of questions, allow something to the Court side, upon account of the elections depending or imminent.  The evil complained of, if it exists in the present state of things, would hardly be removed by a triennial Parliament: for, unless the influence of Government in elections can be entirely taken away, the more frequently they return, the more they will harass private independence; the more generally men will be compelled to fly to the settled systematic interest of Government, and to the resources of a boundless Civil List.  Certainly something may be done, and ought to be done, towards lessening that influence in elections; and this will be necessary upon a plan either of longer or shorter duration of Parliament.  But nothing can so perfectly remove the evil, as not to render such contentions, foot frequently repeated, utterly ruinous, first to independence of fortune, and then to independence of spirit.  As I am only giving an opinion on this point, and not at all debating it in an adverse line, I hope I may be excused in another observation.  With great truth I may aver that I never remember to have talked on this subject with any man much conversant with public business who considered short Parliaments as a real improvement of the Constitution.  Gentlemen, warm in a popular cause, are ready enough to attribute all the declarations of such persons to corrupt motives.  But the habit of affairs, if, on one hand, it tends to corrupt the mind, furnishes it, on the other, with the, means of better information.  The authority of such persons will always have some weight.  It may stand upon a par with the speculations of those who are less practised in business; and who, with perhaps purer intentions, have not so effectual means of judging.  It is besides an effect of vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every Statesman is of course corrupt: and that his opinion, upon every constitutional point, is solely formed upon some sinister interest.

The next favourite remedy is a Place-bill.  The same principle guides in both: I mean the opinion which is entertained by many of the infallibility of laws and regulations, in the cure of public distempers.  Without being as unreasonably doubtful as many are unwisely confident, I will only say, that this also is a matter very well worthy of serious and mature reflection.  It is not easy to foresee what the effect would be of disconnecting with Parliament, the greatest part of those who hold civil employments, and of such mighty and important bodies as the military and naval establishments.  It were better, perhaps, that they should have a corrupt interest in the forms of the constitution, than they should have none at all.  This is a question altogether different from the disqualification of a particular description of Revenue Officers from seats in Parliament; or, perhaps, of all the lower sorts of them from votes in elections.  In the former case, only the few are affected; in the latter, only the inconsiderable.  But a great official, a great professional, a great military and naval interest, all necessarily comprehending many people of the first weight, ability, wealth, and spirit, has been gradually formed in the kingdom.  These new interests must be let into a share of representation, else possibly they may be inclined to destroy those institutions of which they are not permitted to partake.  This is not a thing to be trifled with: nor is it every well-meaning man that is fit to put his hands to it.  Many other serious considerations occur.  I do not open them here, because they are not directly to my purpose; proposing only to give the reader some taste of the difficulties that attend all capital changes in the Constitution; just to hint the uncertainty, to say no worse, of being able to prevent the Court, as long as it has the means of influence abundantly in its power, from applying that influence to Parliament; and perhaps, if the public method were precluded, of doing it in some worse and more dangerous method.  Underhand and oblique ways would be studied.  The science of evasion, already tolerably understood, would then be brought to the greatest perfection.  It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a degree of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners, instead of cutting off the subsisting ill practices, new corruptions might be produced for the concealment and security of the old.  It were better, undoubtedly, that no influence at all could affect the mind of a Member of Parliament.  But of all modes of influence, in my opinion, a place under the Government is the least disgraceful to the man who holds it, and by far the most safe to the country.  I would not shut out that sort of influence which is open and visible, which is connected with the dignity and the service of the State, when it is not in my power to prevent the influence of contracts, of subscriptions, of direct bribery, and those innumerable methods of clandestine corruption, which are abundantly in the hands of the Court, and which will be applied as long as these means of corruption, and the disposition to be corrupted, have existence amongst us.  Our Constitution stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it.  In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other.  Every project of a material change in a Government so complicated as ours, combined at the same time with external circumstances still more complicated, is a matter full of difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to decide; a prudent man too ready to undertake; or an honest man too ready to promise.  They do not respect the public nor themselves, who engage for more than they are sure that they ought to attempt, or that they are able to perform.  These are my sentiments, weak perhaps, but honest and unbiassed; and submitted entirely to the opinion of grave men, well affected to the constitution of their country, and of experience in what may best promote or hurt it.

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country.  This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty.  That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.  When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.  It is surely no very rational account of a man’s life that he has always acted right; but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence.

I do not wonder that the behaviour of many parties should have made persons of tender and scrupulous virtue somewhat out of humour with all sorts of connection in politics.  I admit that people frequently acquire in such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit; that they are apt to sink the idea of the general good in this circumscribed and partial interest.  But, where duty renders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation itself.  If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer of the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must not desert his station.  Every profession, not excepting the glorious one of a soldier, or the sacred one of a priest, is liable to its own particular vices; which, however, form no argument against those ways of life; nor are the vices themselves inevitable to every individual in those professions.  Of such a nature are connections in politics; essentially necessary for the full performance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into faction.  Commonwealths are made of families, free Commonwealths of parties also; and we may as well affirm, that our natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the reader believes that there really exists such a Faction as I have described, a Faction ruling by the private inclinations of a Court, against the general sense of the people; and that this Faction, whilst it pursues a scheme for undermining all the foundations of our freedom, weakens (for the present at least) all the powers of executory Government, rendering us abroad contemptible, and at home distracted; he will believe, also, that nothing but a firm combination of public men against this body, and that, too, supported by the hearty concurrence of the people at large, can possibly get the better of it.  The people will see the necessity of restoring public men to an attention to the public opinion, and of restoring the Constitution to its original principles.  Above all, they will endeavour to keep the House of Commons from assuming a character which does not belong to it.  They will endeavour to keep that House, for its existence for its powers, and its privileges, as independent of every other, and as dependent upon themselves, as possible.  This servitude is to a House of Commons (like obedience to the Divine law), “perfect freedom.”  For if they once quit this natural, rational, and liberal obedience, having deserted the only proper foundation of their power, they must seek a support in an abject and unnatural dependence somewhere else.  When, through the medium of this just connection with their constituents, the genuine dignity of the House of Commons is restored, it will begin to think of casting from it, with scorn, as badges of servility, all the false ornaments of illegal power, with which it has been, for some time, disgraced.  It will begin to think of its old office of CONTROL.  It will not suffer that last of evils to predominate in the country; men without popular confidence, public opinion, natural connection, or natural trust, invested with all the powers of Government.

When they have learned this lesson themselves, they will be willing and able to teach the Court, that it is the true interest of the Prince to have but one Administration; and that one composed of those who recommend themselves to their Sovereign through the opinion of their country, and not by their obsequiousness to a favourite.  Such men will serve their Sovereign with affection and fidelity; because his choice of them, upon such principles, is a compliment to their virtue.  They will be able to serve him effectually; because they will add the weight of the country to the force of the executory power.  They will be able to serve their King with dignity; because they will never abuse his name to the gratification of their private spleen or avarice.  This, with allowances for human frailty, may probably be the general character of a Ministry, which thinks itself accountable to the House of Commons, when the House of Commons thinks itself accountable to its constituents.  If other ideas should prevail, things must remain in their present confusion, until they are hurried into all the rage of civil violence; or until they sink into the dead repose of despotism.

SPEECH ON THE MIDDLESEX ELECTION

February, 1771

Mr. Speaker,—In every complicated Constitution (and every free Constitution is complicated) cases will arise, when the several orders of the State will clash with one another, and disputes will arise about the limits of their several rights and privileges.  It may be almost impossible to reconcile them.

Carry the principle on by which you expelled Mr. Wilkes, there is not a man in the House, hardly a man in the nation, who may not be disqualified.  That this House should have no power of expulsion is a hard saying.  That this House should have a general discretionary power of disqualification is a dangerous saying.  That the people should not choose their own representative, is a saying that shakes the Constitution.  That this House should name the representative, is a saying which, followed by practice, subverts the constitution.  They have the right of electing, you have a right of expelling; they of choosing, you of judging, and only of judging, of the choice.  What bounds shall be set to the freedom of that choice?  Their right is prior to ours, we all originate there.  They are the mortal enemies of the House of Commons, who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people and unconnected with their opinions and feelings.  Under a pretence of exalting the dignity, they undermine the very foundations of this House.  When the question is asked here, what disturbs the people, whence all this clamour, we apply to the treasury-bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of libellers and the wickedness of the people, a worn-out ministerial pretence.  If abroad the people are deceived by popular, within we are deluded by ministerial, cant.  The question amounts to this, whether you mean to be a legal tribunal, or an arbitrary and despotic assembly.  I see and I feel the delicacy and difficulty of the ground upon which we stand in this question.  I could wish, indeed, that they who advised the Crown had not left Parliament in this very ungraceful distress, in which they can neither retract with dignity nor persist with justice.  Another parliament might have satisfied the people without lowering themselves.  But our situation is not in our own choice: our conduct in that situation is all that is in our own option.  The substance of the question is, to put bounds to your own power by the rules and principles of law.  This is, I am sensible, a difficult thing to the corrupt, grasping, and ambitious part of human nature.  But the very difficulty argues and enforces the necessity of it.  First, because the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.  Since the Revolution, at least, the power of the nation has all flowed with a full tide into the House of Commons.  Secondly, because the House of Commons, as it is the most powerful, is the most corruptible part of the whole Constitution.  Our public wounds cannot be concealed; to be cured, they must be laid open.  The public does think we are a corrupt body.  In our legislative capacity we are, in most instances, esteemed a very wise body.  In our judicial, we have no credit, no character at, all.  Our judgments stink in the nostrils of the people.  They think us to be not only without virtue, but without shame.  Therefore, the greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of our corruptibility and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some bound, to plant some landmark, which we are never to exceed.  That is what the bill proposes.  First, on this head, I lay it down as a fundamental rule in the law and constitution of this country, that this House has not by itself alone a legislative authority in any case whatsoever.  I know that the contrary was the doctrine of the usurping House of Commons which threw down the fences and bulwarks of law, which annihilated first the lords, then the Crown, then its constituents.  But the first thing that was done on the restoration of the Constitution was to settle this point.  Secondly, I lay it down as a rule, that the power of occasional incapacitation, on discretionary grounds, is a legislative power.  In order to establish this principle, if it should not be sufficiently proved by being stated, tell me what are the criteria, the characteristics, by which you distinguish between a legislative and a juridical act.  It will be necessary to state, shortly, the difference between a legislative and a juridical act.  A legislative act has no reference to any rule but these two: original justice, and discretionary application.  Therefore, it can give rights; rights where no rights existed before; and it can take away rights where they were before established.  For the law, which binds all others, does not and cannot bind the law-maker; he, and he alone, is above the law.  But a judge, a person exercising a judicial capacity, is neither to apply to original justice, nor to a discretionary application of it.  He goes to justice and discretion only at second hand, and through the medium of some superiors.  He is to work neither upon his opinion of the one nor of the other; but upon a fixed rule, of which he has not the making, but singly and solely the application to the case.

The power assumed by the House neither is, nor can be, judicial power exercised according to known law.  The properties of law are, first, that it should be known; secondly, that it should be fixed and not occasional.  First, this power cannot be according to the first property of law; because no man does or can know it, nor do you yourselves know upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man.  No man in Westminster Hall, or in any court upon earth, will say that is law, upon which, if a man going to his counsel should say to him, “What is my tenure in law of this estate?” he would answer, “Truly, sir, I know not; the court has no rule but its own discretion: they will determine.”  It is not a, fixed law, because you profess you vary it according to the occasion, exercise it according to your discretion; no man can call for it as a right.  It is argued that the incapacity is not originally voted, but a consequence of a power of expulsion: but if you expel, not upon legal, but upon arbitrary, that is, upon discretionary grounds, and the incapacity is ex vi termini and inclusively comprehended in the expulsion, is not the incapacity voted in the expulsion?  Are they not convertible terms? and, if incapacity is voted to be inherent in expulsion, if expulsion be arbitrary, incapacity is arbitrary also.  I have, therefore, shown that the power of incapacitation is a legislative power; I have shown that legislative power does not belong to the House of Commons; and, therefore, it follows that the House of Commons has not a power of incapacitation.

I know not the origin of the House of Commons, but am very sure that it did not create itself; the electors wore prior to the elected; whose rights originated either from the people at large, or from some other form of legislature, which never could intend for the chosen a power of superseding the choosers.

If you have not a power of declaring an incapacity simply by the mere act of declaring it, it is evident to the most ordinary reason you cannot have a right of expulsion, inferring, or rather, including, an incapacity, For as the law, when it gives any direct right, gives also as necessary incidents all the means of acquiring the possession of that right, so where it does not give a right directly, it refuses all the means by which such a right may by any mediums be exercised, or in effect be indirectly acquired.  Else it is very obvious that the intention of the law in refusing that right might be entirely frustrated, and the whole power of the legislature baffled.  If there be no certain invariable rule of eligibility, it were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had; and to resolve all the franchises of the subject into this one short proposition—the will and pleasure of the House of Commons.

The argument, drawn from the courts of law, applying the principles of law to new cases as they emerge, is altogether frivolous, inapplicable, and arises from a total ignorance of the bounds between civil and criminal jurisdiction, and of the separate maxims that govern these two provinces of law, that are eternally separate.  Undoubtedly the courts of law, where a new case comes before them, as they do every hour, then, that there may be no defect in justice, call in similar principles, and the example of the nearest determination, and do everything to draw the law to as near a conformity to general equity and right reason as they can bring it with its being a fixed principle.  Boni judicis est ampliare justitiam—that is, to make open and liberal justice.  But in criminal matters this parity of reason, and these analogies, ever have been, and ever ought to be, shunned.

Whatever is incident to a court of judicature, is necessary to the House of Commons, as judging in elections.  But a power of making incapacities is not necessary to a court of judicature; therefore a power of making incapacities is not necessary to the House of Commons.

Incapacity, declared by whatever authority, stands upon two principles: first, an incapacity arising from the supposed incongruity of two duties in the commonwealth; secondly, an incapacity arising from unfitness by infirmity of nature, or the criminality of conduct.  As to the first class of incapacities, they have no hardship annexed to them.  The persons so incapacitated are paid by one dignity for what they abandon in another, and, for the most part, the situation arises from their own choice.  But as to the second, arising from an unfitness not fixed by nature, but superinduced by some positive acts, or arising from honourable motives, such as an occasional personal disability, of all things it ought to be defined by the fixed rule of law—what Lord Coke calls the Golden Metwand of the Law, and not by the crooked cord of discretion.  Whatever is general is better born.  We take our common lot with men of the same description.  But to be selected and marked out by a particular brand of unworthiness among our fellow-citizens, is a lot of all others the hardest to be borne: and consequently is of all others that act which ought only to be trusted to the legislature, as not only legislative in its nature, but of all parts of legislature the most odious.  The question is over, if this is shown not to be a legislative act.  But what is very usual and natural, is to corrupt judicature into legislature.  On this point it is proper to inquire whether a court of judicature, which decides without appeal, has it as a necessary incident of such judicature, that whatever it decides de jure is law.  Nobody will, I hope, assert this, because the direct consequence would be the entire extinction of the difference between true and false judgments.  For, if the judgment makes the law, and not the law directs the judgment, it is impossible there could be such a thing as an illegal judgment given.

But, instead of standing upon this ground, they introduce another question, wholly foreign to it, whether it ought not to be submitted to as if it were law.  And then the question is, By the Constitution of this country, what degree of submission is due to the authoritative acts of a limited power?  This question of submission, determine it how you please, has nothing to do in this discussion and in this House.  Here it is not how long the people are bound to tolerate the illegality of our judgments, but whether we have a right to substitute our occasional opinion in the place of law, so as to deprive the citizen of his franchise.

SPEECH ON THE POWERS OF JURIES IN PROSECUTIONS FOR LIBELS

March, 1771

I have always understood that a superintendence over the doctrines, as well as the proceedings, of the courts of justice, was a principal object of the constitution of this House; that you were to watch at once over the lawyer and the law; that there should he an orthodox faith as well as proper works: and I have always looked with a degree of reverence and admiration on this mode of superintendence.  For being totally disengaged from the detail of juridical practice, we come to something, perhaps, the better qualified, and certainly much the better disposed to assert the genuine principle of the laws; in which we can, as a body, have no other than an enlarged and a public interest.  We have no common cause of a professional attachment, or professional emulations, to bias our minds; we have no foregone opinions, which, from obstinacy and false point of honour, we think ourselves at all events obliged to support.  So that with our own minds perfectly disengaged from the exercise, we may superintend the execution of the national justice; which from this circumstance is better secured to the people than in any other country under heaven it can be.  As our situation puts us in a proper condition, our power enables us to execute this trust.  We may, when we see cause of complaint, administer a remedy; it is in our choice by an address to remove an improper judge, by impeachment before the peers to pursue to destruction a corrupt judge, or by bill to assert, to explain, to enforce, or to reform the law, just as the occasion and necessity of the case shall guide us.  We stand in a situation very honourable to ourselves, and very useful to our country, if we do not abuse or abandon the trust that is placed in us.

The question now before you is upon the power of juries in prosecuting for libels.  There are four opinions.  1. That the doctrine as held by the courts is proper and constitutional, and therefore should not be altered.  2. That it is neither proper nor constitutional, but that it will be rendered worse by your interference.  3. That it is wrong, but that the only remedy is a bill of retrospect.  4. The opinion of those who bring in the bill; that the thing is wrong, but that it is enough to direct the judgment of the court in future.

The bill brought in is for the purpose of asserting and securing a great object in the juridical constitution of this kingdom; which, from a long series of practices and opinions in our judges, has, in one point, and in one very essential point, deviated from the true principle.

It is the very ancient privilege of the people of England that they shall be tried, except in the known exceptions, not by judges appointed by the Crown, but by their own fellow-subjects, the peers of that county court at which they owe their suit and service; out of this principle trial by juries has grown.  This principle has not, that I can find, been contested in any case, by any authority whatsoever; but there is one case, in which, without directly contesting the principle, the whole substance, energy, acid virtue of the privilege, is taken out of it; that is, in the case of a trial by indictment or information for libel.  The doctrine in that case laid down by several judges amounts to this, that the jury have no competence where a libel is alleged, except to find the gross corporeal facts of the writing and the publication, together with the identity of the things and persons to which it refers; but that the intent and the tendency of the work, in which intent and tendency the whole criminality consists, is the sole and exclusive province of the judge.  Thus having reduced the jury to the cognisance of facts, not in themselves presumptively criminal, but actions neutral and indifferent the whole matter, in which the subject has any concern or interest, is taken out of the hands of the jury: and if the jury take more upon themselves, what they so take is contrary to their duty; it is no moral, but a merely natural power; the same, by which they may do any other improper act, the same, by which they may even prejudice themselves with regard to any other part of the issue before them.  Such is the matter as it now stands, in possession of your highest criminal courts, handed down to them from very respectable legal ancestors.  If this can once be established in this case, the application in principle to other cases will be easy; and the practice will run upon a descent, until the progress of an encroaching jurisdiction (for it is in its nature to encroach, when once it has passed its limits) coming to confine the juries, case after case, to the corporeal fact, and to that alone, and excluding the intention of mind, the only source of merit and demerit, of reward or punishment, juries become a dead letter in the constitution.

For which reason it is high time to take this matter into the consideration of Parliament, and for that purpose it will be necessary to examine, first, whether there is anything in the peculiar nature of this crime that makes it necessary to exclude the jury from considering the intention in it, more than in others.  So far from it, that I take it to be much less so from the analogy of other criminal cases, where no such restraint is ordinarily put upon them.  The act of homicide is primâ facie criminal.  The intention is afterwards to appear, for the jury to acquit or condemn.  In burglary do they insist that the jury have nothing to do but to find the taking of goods, and that, if they do, they must necessarily find the party guilty, and leave the rest to the judge; and that they have nothing to do with the word felonicé in the indictment?