Gallows Thief

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Gallows Thief

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26 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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/^ capita or the heir per
stripes wras to succeed ; but whether the heir per capita gave way
when the heirdom per stripes 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 foHuna 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
Revolutions 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 autho rity
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
sove- ' reigns out of the quiet of their tombs ? Do they mean to
attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before
the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne i of England
with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to invalidate,
annul, or to call into question,
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 27 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 taliagio non
concedendo ? — of the petition of right 1 — 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
abdi cation of his crown ? If he was not, much trouble in parlia ment
might have been saved at the period these gentlemen
commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and
not a 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 des tined to the
succession, is the act of the i2th and i3th of King William. The terms
of this act bind "us and our htirS) and our posterity, to them, their
fairs, and their pos terity" being Protestants, to the end of time, in
the same
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28 REFLECTIONS ON THE words as the Declaration of Right

had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It there
fore secures both a hereditary crown and a 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 for ever, 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 1 2th and isth 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)
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 29 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 a heredi tary
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 authorise 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, unconstitu tional 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
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3o REFLECTIONS ON THE 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
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 31 whose favour 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 main tained, what I believe no creature now maintains, "
that the crown is held by divine hereditary and indefeasible right." —
These old fanactics of single arbitrary power dogmatised as if
hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in ;he world, just
as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary 3ower 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 f monarchy had more of a divine sanction
than any other mode of government ; and as if a right to govern by
inherit ance 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 jottomed 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 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 :ause that the declaration of the act, which implied the ibdication
of King James, was, if it had any fault, rather too
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32 REFLECTIONS ON THE guarded, and too

circumstantial.1 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. 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
else 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 : I 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 \ 1 "That King
James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution
of the kingdom by breaking the original contract •• between king
and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits, and other j wicked
persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having\
withdrawn himself out of t Jit kingdom, hath abdicate { the
government, ! and the throne is thereby vacant " }
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 33 remedies. They left the crown

what, in the eye and estima tion 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
ist of King William, sess. 2nd, called " the act for declaring the rights
and liberties of tlie subject, and for settling the succession to the
crow a" 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 govern ment 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 1 2th and i3th 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 inspec tion of parliament, the
practical claim of impeachment, they thought infinitely a better
security not only for their consti tutional liberty, but against the vices
of administration, than the reservation of a right so difficult in the
practice, so un certain in the issue, and often so mischievous in the
conse quences, as that of "cashiering their governors." Dr. Price, in
his sermon,1 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." Eor a compliment, this
new form of address 'js not seem to be very soothing. Those who
are servants 1 Pp. 22-24. 3
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34 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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, "Hcec commemoratio est
quasi exprobatio.n It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not whole
some 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 domination 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." I should have considered all this as
no more than a sort of flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an
unsavoury 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,
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 35 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 towards rendering him, as
a servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing
of a magistrate like the Justida of Arragon ; nor of any court legally
appointed, nor of any process legally settled, for submitting the king
to the respon sibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not dis
tinguished 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" 111 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 be then 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 gentle men
talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be per 
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L 36 REFLECTIONS ON THE formed 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
Re volution 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. 4 ' 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 de
marcation, 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 honourable 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
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 37 Jewry, namely, the "right to

form a government for our selves," 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 secu rity 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 ser mons 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 ap pearance 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 fore fathers. Upon that body and stock of
inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion 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,1 are industrious to prove the pedigree of our
liberties. They endeavour to prove that the ancient charter, the
Magna 1 See Blackstone's Mag)ia C/ia/'la, printed at Oxfuixl, 1759.
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33 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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 re-affirmance 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 towards 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. 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
discourses 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 ist of William and Mary, in the famous statute called the \
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 39 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. "Taking1 into their most serious
consideration the best means for making such an establish ment,
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."
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 what ever 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 1 i W. and M.
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40 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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
prin ciple 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 for ever. 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 trans mit 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, moulding
together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the
whole, at one time, is never old, or middleaged, 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 super stition
of antiquarians, but by thespirit 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 con- |
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 41 stitution 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 ail 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 con trivances 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 canonised forefathers, the spirit of freedom,
leading in it self 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 inso lence 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 haye 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,
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42 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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 descrip tions 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 con
stitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolu tions.
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 tempera ments preventing the
sore evil of 1 a-sh, crude, unqualified reformations ; and rendering
all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the
many, for ever im practicable. Through that diversity of members
and inter ests, 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 \
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 43 you chose to act as if you had

never been moulded 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 lustre 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 imagina tions would have realised 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 low-
born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order
to furnish, at the expense of your honour, 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, honour, and loyalty ;
that events had been unfavourable 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 cojntry you worshipped, 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 ;
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44 REFLECTIONS ON THE that you were resolved to

resume your ancient privileges, whilst you preserved the spirit of
your ancient and your recent loyalty and honour ; or if, diffident of
yourselves, and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated
constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours 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 recognise 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 4n 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 estab lishes 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
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 45 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 became
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 founda tions 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 licence of a •ferocious dissoluteness in
manners, and of an insolent jirreligion in opinions and practices; and
has extended | through all ranks of life, as if she were
communicating some j 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 I
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)
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46 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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 pretences, 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 ri^ht
D 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 hold- j ; ing out graces, favours, and
immunities. This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have I:
found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned ; I
tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce-' expiring;
the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished ;
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 47 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 dis credited 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 recognised 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 crea tures 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! no thing
like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever
we can turn our eyes, are not the devasta tion 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, be cause 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
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48 REFLECTIONS ON THE ruined. They have made no

sacrifices to their projects of greater consequence than their shoe-
buckles, 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 authorising 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 conse quence than all the formalities in the world. If
we were to know nothing of this assembly but by its title and func
tion, no colours 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 mys terious. 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
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 49 engagement of nature, they

have not the promise of revela tion, for any such powers. After I had
read over the list of the persons and descrip tions elected into the
Tiers Etat, nothing which they after wards 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 disposi tion 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 talents
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 de signs. -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 4
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50 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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, of permanent property, of
education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalise the
understanding. In the calling of the states-general of France, the
first thing which 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 sucli a
number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental
members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions;
but the general composition was of obscure
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 51 provincial advocates, of

stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attorneys, notaries, and
the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters
and con ductors 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 splendour,
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
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52 REFLECTIONS ON THE contention, and laborious, low,

and 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 understood 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 over
borne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers, than to
become their counterpoise. With such a danger ous disproportion,
the whole must needs be governed by them. To the faculty of law
was joined a pretty consider 
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 53 able 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 sick beds 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 Elat 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 illustri ous in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in
acquired opu lence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and
politic distinction, that the country can afford. But sup posing, 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 pro fession, which is another priesthood,
administrating 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
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54 REFLECTIONS ON THE 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 prepon derate so as virtually to become the whole. Their very
excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from a quali fication
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 experi ence in mixed affairs, on a
comprehensive, connected view of the various, complicated, external
and internal interests, which go to the formation ot 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, how ever,
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 funda mental law, no strict convention, no respected
usage to re strain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to
conform
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REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 55 to a fixed constitution, they

have a power to make a constitu tion 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 con stitution
for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the monarch on
the throne to the vestry of a parish? But— "fools rusk in where
angels fear to tread? In such a state of unbounded power for
undefined and undefinablc 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 representa tives 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 their
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-modelling a state; .
limen 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 J 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, I except in a general scramble.
Instead of balancing the 1 ' power of the active chicaners in the
other assembly, these 1 ^.curates must necessarily become the
active coadjutors, or at