It is not the confiscation of our church property from this example in France that I dread, though I think this would be no trifling evil.
The great source of my solicitude is, lest it should ever be considered in England as the policy of a state to seek a resource in confiscations of any kind, or that any one description of citizens should be brought to regard any of the others as their proper prey.
Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt.
Public debts, which at first were a security to governments by interesting many in the public tranquillity, are likely in their excess to become the means of their subversion.
If governments provide for these debts by heavy impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the people.
If they do not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most dangerous of all parties — I mean an extensive, discontented monied interest, injured and not destroyed.
The men who compose this interest look for their security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, to its power.
If they find the old governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy; and this energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt of justice.
Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorized.
I am sure that the principles predominant in France extend to very many persons and descriptions of persons, in all countries, who think their innoxious indolence their security.
This kind of innocence in proprietors may be argued into inutility; and inutility into an unfitness for their estates.
Many parts of Europe are in open disorder.
In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement is felt that threatens a general earthquake in the political world.
Already confederacies and correspondencies of the most extraordinary nature are forming in several countries.
In such a state of things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard.
In all mutations (if mutations must be) the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief and to promote what good may be in them is that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of property.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
But it will be argued that this confiscation in France ought not to alarm other nations.
They say it is not made from wanton rapacity, that it is a great measure of national policy adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief.
It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice.
Justice itself is the great standing policy of civil society, and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation; when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their habits to it; when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty — I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor.
If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotic sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.
If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, the policy of the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from it, ought to be at least as evident and at least as important.
To a man who acts under the influence of no passion, who has nothing in view in his projects but the public good, a great difference will immediately strike him between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions and on a question of their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where, by long habit, things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other.
He might be embarrassed if the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of debating.
But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle.
There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence.
Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna.
This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer.
I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche — upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.
A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
They say it is not made from wanton rapacity, that it is a great measure of national policy adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief.
It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice.
Justice itself is the great standing policy of civil society, and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation; when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their habits to it; when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of penalty — I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor.
If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotic sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.
If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, the policy of the measure, that is, the public benefit to be expected from it, ought to be at least as evident and at least as important.
To a man who acts under the influence of no passion, who has nothing in view in his projects but the public good, a great difference will immediately strike him between what policy would dictate on the original introduction of such institutions and on a question of their total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and deep, and where, by long habit, things more valuable than themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner interwoven with them, that the one cannot be destroyed without notably impairing the other.
He might be embarrassed if the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of debating.
But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle.
There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence.
Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna.
This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer.
I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche — upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.
A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
There are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are called to make improvements by great mental exertion.
In those moments, even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country, and to be invested with full authority, they have not always apt instruments.
A politician, to do great things, looks for a power what our workmen call a purchase; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it.
In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence.
There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom.
In vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them.
The winds blow as they list.
These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom.
Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use.
The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished.
He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.
On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind.
To destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.
It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism.
These energies always existed in nature, and they were always discernible.
They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children, until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents in subservience to the great views and designs of men.
Did fifty thousand persons whose mental and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield?
Had you no way of using them but by converting monks into pensioners?
Had you no way of turning the revenue to account but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale?
If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its natural course.
Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
In those moments, even when they seem to enjoy the confidence of their prince and country, and to be invested with full authority, they have not always apt instruments.
A politician, to do great things, looks for a power what our workmen call a purchase; and if he finds that power, in politics as in mechanics, he cannot be at a loss to apply it.
In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence.
There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune; men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom.
In vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he wants them.
The winds blow as they list.
These institutions are the products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom.
Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use.
The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished.
He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.
On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest themselves to a contriving mind.
To destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material.
It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism.
These energies always existed in nature, and they were always discernible.
They seemed, some of them unserviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to children, until contemplative ability, combining with practic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents in subservience to the great views and designs of men.
Did fifty thousand persons whose mental and whose bodily labor you might direct, and so many hundred thousand a year of a revenue which was neither lazy nor superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield?
Had you no way of using them but by converting monks into pensioners?
Had you no way of turning the revenue to account but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift sale?
If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the proceeding is in its natural course.
Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
But the institutions savor of superstition in their very principle, and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence.
This I do not mean to dispute, but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage.
You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself.
It was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions.
But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?
In its possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil.
It is, however, a moral subject and, of course, admits of all degrees and all modifications.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in his declarations, and in imitation of his perfections.
The rest is our own.
It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be auxiliary.
Wise men, who as such are not admirers (not admirers at least of the Munera Terrae), are not violently attached to these things, nor do they violently hate them.
Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly.
They are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of their advantages as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on the one side or the other, in their quarrels.
Prudence would be neuter, but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the superstition which builds to be more tolerable than that which demolishes; that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it; that which endows, than that which plunders; that which disposes to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real injustice; that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial.
Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
This I do not mean to dispute, but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the public advantage.
You derive benefits from many dispositions and many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful a color, in the moral eye, as superstition itself.
It was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the passions.
But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?
In its possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil.
It is, however, a moral subject and, of course, admits of all degrees and all modifications.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in his declarations, and in imitation of his perfections.
The rest is our own.
It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be auxiliary.
Wise men, who as such are not admirers (not admirers at least of the Munera Terrae), are not violently attached to these things, nor do they violently hate them.
Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of folly.
They are the rival follies which mutually wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of their advantages as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on the one side or the other, in their quarrels.
Prudence would be neuter, but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the superstition which builds to be more tolerable than that which demolishes; that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it; that which endows, than that which plunders; that which disposes to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real injustice; that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial.
Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
For the present I postpone all consideration of the supposed public profit of the sale, which however I conceive to be perfectly delusive.
I shall here only consider it as a transfer of property.
On the policy of that transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer.
This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist.
It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labor.
But this idleness is itself the spring of labor; this repose the spur to industry.
The only concern of the state is that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it, and to those of the people to whom it is returned.
In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal employment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his place.
Before the inconveniences are incurred which must attend all violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated property will be in a considerable degree more laborious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the laborer, or to consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for the measure of an individual; or that they should be qualified to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode, so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the old possessors, call those possessors bishops, or canons, or commendatory abbots, or monks, or what you please.
The monks are lazy.
Be it so.
Suppose them no otherwise employed than by singing in the choir.
They are as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say; as usefully even as those who sing upon the stage.
They are as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed.
If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely-directed labor of these unhappy people, I should be infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quietude.
Humanity, and perhaps policy, might better justify me in the one than in the other.
It is a subject on which I have often reflected, and never reflected without feeling from it.
I am sure that no consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration of such trades and employments in a well-regulated state.
But for this purpose of distribution, it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay-loiterers.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
I shall here only consider it as a transfer of property.
On the policy of that transfer I shall trouble you with a few thoughts.
In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer.
This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist.
It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labor.
But this idleness is itself the spring of labor; this repose the spur to industry.
The only concern of the state is that the capital taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the industry from whence it came, and that its expenditure should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of those who expend it, and to those of the people to whom it is returned.
In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal employment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the possessor whom he was recommended to expel with the stranger who was proposed to fill his place.
Before the inconveniences are incurred which must attend all violent revolutions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the confiscated property will be in a considerable degree more laborious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed to extort an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the laborer, or to consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for the measure of an individual; or that they should be qualified to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode, so as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the old possessors, call those possessors bishops, or canons, or commendatory abbots, or monks, or what you please.
The monks are lazy.
Be it so.
Suppose them no otherwise employed than by singing in the choir.
They are as usefully employed as those who neither sing nor say; as usefully even as those who sing upon the stage.
They are as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed.
If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely-directed labor of these unhappy people, I should be infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quietude.
Humanity, and perhaps policy, might better justify me in the one than in the other.
It is a subject on which I have often reflected, and never reflected without feeling from it.
I am sure that no consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration of such trades and employments in a well-regulated state.
But for this purpose of distribution, it seems to me that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well directed as the idle expenses of us lay-loiterers.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
When the advantages of the possession and of the project are on a par, there is no motive for a change.
But in the present case, perhaps, they are not upon a par, and the difference is in favor of the possession.
It does not appear to me that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through whom they pass as the expenses of those favorites whom you are intruding into their houses.
Why should the expenditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation; through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave; through collections of the specimens of nature which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world that by disposition facilitate and, by exciting curiosity, open the avenues to science?
If by great permanent establishments all these objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same tastes prevailed in scattered individuals?
Does not the sweat of the mason and carpenter, who toil in order to partake of the sweat of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as salubriously in the construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury; as honorably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness; in opera houses, and brothels, and gaming houses, and clubhouses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars?
Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by construing in the service of God, than in pampering the innumerable multitude of those who are degraded by being made useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man?
Are the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man than ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petit maisons, and petit soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence sports away the burden of its superfluity?
We tolerate even these, not from love of them, but for fear of worse.
We tolerate them because property and liberty, to a degree, require that toleration.
But why proscribe the other, and surely, in every point of view, the more laudable, use of estates?
Why, through the violation of all property, through an outrage upon every principle of liberty, forcibly carry them from the better to the worse?
TO BE CONTINUED ...
But in the present case, perhaps, they are not upon a par, and the difference is in favor of the possession.
It does not appear to me that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through whom they pass as the expenses of those favorites whom you are intruding into their houses.
Why should the expenditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation; through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave; through collections of the specimens of nature which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world that by disposition facilitate and, by exciting curiosity, open the avenues to science?
If by great permanent establishments all these objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and personal extravagance, are they worse than if the same tastes prevailed in scattered individuals?
Does not the sweat of the mason and carpenter, who toil in order to partake of the sweat of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as salubriously in the construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury; as honorably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness; in opera houses, and brothels, and gaming houses, and clubhouses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars?
Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise to dignity by construing in the service of God, than in pampering the innumerable multitude of those who are degraded by being made useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man?
Are the decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man than ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petit maisons, and petit soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence sports away the burden of its superfluity?
We tolerate even these, not from love of them, but for fear of worse.
We tolerate them because property and liberty, to a degree, require that toleration.
But why proscribe the other, and surely, in every point of view, the more laudable, use of estates?
Why, through the violation of all property, through an outrage upon every principle of liberty, forcibly carry them from the better to the worse?
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
This comparison between the new individuals and the old corps is made upon a supposition that no reform could be made in the latter.
But in a question of reformation I always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the power of the state, in the use of their property and in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than private citizens ever can be or, perhaps, ought to be; and this seems to me a very material consideration for those who undertake anything which merits the name of a politic enterprise.
So far as to the estates of monasteries.
With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance.
Can any philosophic spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a certain, and that too a large, portion of landed property passing in succession through persons whose title to it is, always in theory and often in fact, an eminent degree of piety, morals, and learning — a property which, by its destination, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the means of dignity and elevation; a property the tenure of which is the performance of some duty (whatever value you may choose to set upon that duty), and the character of whose proprietors demands, at least, an exterior decorum and gravity of manners; who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality; part of whose income they are to consider as a trust for charity; and who, even when they fail in their trust, when they slide from their character and degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions?
Is it better that estates should be held by those who have no duty than by those who have one?
By those whose character and destination point to virtues than by those who have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own will and appetite?
Nor are these estates held together in the character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain.
They pass from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other.
No excess is good; and, therefore, too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me of material injury to any commonwealth that there should exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired by other means than the previous acquisition of money.
THIS LETTER HAS GROWN to a great length, though it is, indeed, short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject.
Various avocations have from time to time called my mind from the subject.
I was not sorry to give myself leisure to observe whether, in the proceedings of the National Assembly, I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of my first sentiments.
Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions.
It was my original purpose to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great and fundamental establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of our British constitution.
But this plan is of a greater extent than at first I computed, and I find that you have little desire to take the advantage of any examples.
At present I must content myself with some remarks upon your establishments, reserving for another time what I proposed to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as practically they exist.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
But in a question of reformation I always consider corporate bodies, whether sole or consisting of many, to be much more susceptible of a public direction by the power of the state, in the use of their property and in the regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than private citizens ever can be or, perhaps, ought to be; and this seems to me a very material consideration for those who undertake anything which merits the name of a politic enterprise.
So far as to the estates of monasteries.
With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and canons and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than by inheritance.
Can any philosophic spoiler undertake to demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having a certain, and that too a large, portion of landed property passing in succession through persons whose title to it is, always in theory and often in fact, an eminent degree of piety, morals, and learning — a property which, by its destination, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the means of dignity and elevation; a property the tenure of which is the performance of some duty (whatever value you may choose to set upon that duty), and the character of whose proprietors demands, at least, an exterior decorum and gravity of manners; who are to exercise a generous but temperate hospitality; part of whose income they are to consider as a trust for charity; and who, even when they fail in their trust, when they slide from their character and degenerate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman, are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in their forfeited possessions?
Is it better that estates should be held by those who have no duty than by those who have one?
By those whose character and destination point to virtues than by those who have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but their own will and appetite?
Nor are these estates held together in the character or with the evils supposed inherent in mortmain.
They pass from hand to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other.
No excess is good; and, therefore, too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me of material injury to any commonwealth that there should exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired by other means than the previous acquisition of money.
THIS LETTER HAS GROWN to a great length, though it is, indeed, short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject.
Various avocations have from time to time called my mind from the subject.
I was not sorry to give myself leisure to observe whether, in the proceedings of the National Assembly, I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of my first sentiments.
Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions.
It was my original purpose to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great and fundamental establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of our British constitution.
But this plan is of a greater extent than at first I computed, and I find that you have little desire to take the advantage of any examples.
At present I must content myself with some remarks upon your establishments, reserving for another time what I proposed to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as practically they exist.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
I have taken a view of what has been done by the governing power in France.
I have certainly spoken of it with freedom.
Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind and to set up a scheme of society on new principles must naturally expect that such of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon their trial.
They must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their authority.
They have not one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor.
They avow their hostility to opinion.
Of course, they must expect no support from that influence which, with every other authority, they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction.
I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state.
They have not the sanction and authority of the character under which they first met.
They have assumed another of a very different nature and have completely altered and inverted all the relations in which they originally stood.
They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state.
They have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent, which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority.
The most considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions.
If they had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription which, through long usage, mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.
All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth, and on which they justify their continuance.
But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed.
This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription.
We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution.
To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology.
To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.
The sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.
In obtaining and securing their power the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use of it.
An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct.
Everything which they have done, or continue to do in order to obtain and keep their power is by the most common arts.
They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have done before them.
Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is new.
They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader.
They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation.
But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the spirit has been the very reverse of this.
There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.
They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road.
The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance; I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
I have certainly spoken of it with freedom.
Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient, permanent sense of mankind and to set up a scheme of society on new principles must naturally expect that such of us who think better of the judgment of the human race than of theirs should consider both them and their devices as men and schemes upon their trial.
They must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their authority.
They have not one of the great influencing prejudices of mankind in their favor.
They avow their hostility to opinion.
Of course, they must expect no support from that influence which, with every other authority, they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction.
I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state.
They have not the sanction and authority of the character under which they first met.
They have assumed another of a very different nature and have completely altered and inverted all the relations in which they originally stood.
They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state.
They have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent, which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority.
The most considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions.
If they had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription which, through long usage, mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.
All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate which has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth, and on which they justify their continuance.
But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed.
This Assembly has hardly a year's prescription.
We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution.
To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology.
To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country; and no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.
The sense of mankind authorizes us to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to criticize on the use that is made of it, with less awe and reverence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and recognized authority.
In obtaining and securing their power the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use of it.
An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct.
Everything which they have done, or continue to do in order to obtain and keep their power is by the most common arts.
They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have done before them.
Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is new.
They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader.
They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation.
But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the spirit has been the very reverse of this.
There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns.
They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road.
The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance; I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of themselves with regard to points wherein the happiness of mankind is concerned.
But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender, parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment.
In the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions, they far outdo all the boasting of empirics.
The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.
I AM convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in the National Assembly.
Some of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writings.
This cannot be without powerful and cultivated talents.
But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom.
When I speak of ability, I am obliged to distinguish.
What they have done toward the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men.
In the system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring the prosperity and security of the citizen, and for promoting the strength and grandeur of the state, I confess myself unable to find out anything which displays in a single instance the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence.
Their purpose everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty.
This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties, thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science and even to push forward, beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the landmarks of the human understanding itself.
Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better, too.
Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper.
This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations.
It will not suffer us to be superficial.
It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking shortcuts and little fallacious facilities that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers.
They have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France.
They have created the arbitrary republic of Paris.
With them defects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plenitude of force.
They get nothing by it.
Commencing their labors on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men.
The difficulties, which they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction; and, in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender, parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment.
In the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions, they far outdo all the boasting of empirics.
The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.
I AM convinced that there are men of considerable parts among the popular leaders in the National Assembly.
Some of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writings.
This cannot be without powerful and cultivated talents.
But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom.
When I speak of ability, I am obliged to distinguish.
What they have done toward the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men.
In the system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic constructed for procuring the prosperity and security of the citizen, and for promoting the strength and grandeur of the state, I confess myself unable to find out anything which displays in a single instance the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind or even the provisions of a vulgar prudence.
Their purpose everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty.
This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties, thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science and even to push forward, beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the landmarks of the human understanding itself.
Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better, too.
Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper.
This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations.
It will not suffer us to be superficial.
It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking shortcuts and little fallacious facilities that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers.
They have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France.
They have created the arbitrary republic of Paris.
With them defects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plenitude of force.
They get nothing by it.
Commencing their labors on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men.
The difficulties, which they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction; and, in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: EDMUND BURKE ON FRENCH REVOLUTION
It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction.
But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed?
Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies.
The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand is more than equal to that task.
Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable.
It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together.
The same lazy but restless disposition which loves sloth and hates quiet directs the politicians when they come to work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed.
To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy.
No difficulties occur in what has never been tried.
Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.
At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing.
When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.
But you may object — "A process of this kind is slow."
"It is not fit for an assembly which glories in performing in a few months the work of ages."
"Such a mode of reforming, possibly, might take up many years".
Without question it might; and it ought.
It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible.
If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty, too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits multitudes may be rendered miserable.
But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.
Far different are my ideas of that high office.
The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility.
He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.
It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance, but his movements toward it ought to be deliberate.
Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.
There mind must conspire with mind.
Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observation of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
By a slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.
We see that the parts of the system do not clash.
The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise.
One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another.
We compensate, we reconcile, we balance.
We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.
From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.
Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them.
If justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish.
It is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government — a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed?
Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies.
The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand is more than equal to that task.
Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable.
It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together.
The same lazy but restless disposition which loves sloth and hates quiet directs the politicians when they come to work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed.
To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy.
No difficulties occur in what has never been tried.
Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.
At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing.
When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.
But you may object — "A process of this kind is slow."
"It is not fit for an assembly which glories in performing in a few months the work of ages."
"Such a mode of reforming, possibly, might take up many years".
Without question it might; and it ought.
It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible.
If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty, too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits multitudes may be rendered miserable.
But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.
Far different are my ideas of that high office.
The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility.
He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.
It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance, but his movements toward it ought to be deliberate.
Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.
There mind must conspire with mind.
Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observation of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
By a slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.
We see that the parts of the system do not clash.
The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise.
One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another.
We compensate, we reconcile, we balance.
We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men.
From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.
Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them.
If justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish.
It is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government — a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation.
TO BE CONTINUED ...