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Their first object was to seat William on the throne; and they were right. We
say this without any reference to the eminent personal qualities of William, or
to the follies and crimes of James. If the two princes had interchanged
characters, our opinions would still have been the same. It was even more
necessary to England at that time that her king should be a usurper than that he
should be a hero. There could be no security for good government without a
change of dynasty. The reverence for hereditary right and the doctrine of
passive obedience had taken such a hold on the minds of the Tories, that, if
James had been restored to power on any conditions, their attachment to him
would in all probability have revived, as the indignation which recent
oppression had produced faded from their minds. It had become indispensable to
have a sovereign whose title to his throne was strictly bound up with the title
of the nation to its liberties. In the compact between the Prince of Orange and
the Convention, there was one most important article which, though not
expressed, was perfectly understood by both parties, and for the performance of
which the country had securities far better than all the engagements that
Charles the First or Ferdinand the Seventh ever took in the day of their
weakness, and broke in the day of their power. The article to which we allude
was this, that William would in all things conform himself to what should appear
to be the fixed and deliberate sense of his Parliament. The security for the
performance was this, that he had no claim to the throne except the choice of
Parliament, and no means of maintaining himself on the throne but the support of
Parliament. All the great and inestimable reforms which speedily followed the
Revolution were implied in those simple words; "The Lords Spiritual and
Temporal, and Commons, assembled at Westminster, do resolve that William and
Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be, and be declared King and Queen of
England."
And what were the reforms of which we speak? We will shortly recount some which
we think the most important; and we will then leave our readers to judge whether
those who consider the Revolution as a mere change of dynasty, beneficial to a
few aristocrats, but useless to the body of the people, or those who consider it
as a happy era in the history of the British nation and of the human species,
have judged more correctly of its nature.
Foremost in the list of the benefits which our country owes to the Revolution we
place the Toleration Act. It is true that this measure fell short of the wishes
of the leading Whigs. It is true also that, where Catholics were concerned, even
the most enlightened of the leading Whigs held opinions by no means so liberal
as those which are happily common at the present day. Those distinguished
statesmen did, however, make a noble, and, in some respects, a successful
struggle for the rights of conscience. Their wish was to bring the great body of
the Protestant Dissenters within the pale of the Church by judicious alterations
in the Liturgy and the Articles, and to grant to those who still remained
without that pale the most ample toleration. They framed a plan of comprehension
which would have satisfied a great majority of the seceders; and they proposed
the complete abolition of that absurd and odious test which, after having been,
during a century and a half, a scandal to the pious and a laughing-stock to the
profane, was at length removed in our time. The immense power of the Clergy and
of the Tory gentry frustrated these excellent designs. The Whigs, however, did
much. They succeeded in obtaining a law in the provisions of which a philosopher
will doubtless find much to condemn, but which had the practical effect of
enabling almost every Protestant Nonconformist to follow the dictates of his own
conscience without molestation. Scarcely a law in the statute-book is
theoretically more objectionable than the Toleration Act. But we question
whether in the whole of that vast mass of legislation, from the Great Charter
downwards, there be a single law which has so much diminished the sum of human
suffering, which has done so much to allay bad passions, which has put an end to
so much petty tyranny and vexation, which has brought gladness, peace, and a
sense of security to so many private dwellings.
The second of those great reforms which the Revolution produced was the final
establishment of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. We shall not now inquire
whether the Episcopal or the Calvinistic form of church government be more
agreeable to primitive practice. Far be it from us to disturb with our doubts
the repose of any Oxonian Bachelor of Divinity who conceives that the English
prelates with their baronies and palaces, their purple and their fine linen,
their mitered carriages and their sumptuous tables, are the true successors of
those ancient bishops who lived by catching fish and mending tents. We say only
that the Scotch, doubtless from their own inveterate stupidity and malice, were
not Episcopalians; that they could not be made Episcopalians; that the whole
power of government had been in vain employed for the purpose of converting
them; that the fullest instruction on the mysterious questions of the
Apostolical succession and the imposition of hands had been imparted by the very
logical process of putting the legs of the students into wooden boots, and
driving two or more wedges between their knees; that a course of divinity
lectures, of the most edifying kind, had been given in the Grassmarket of
Edinburgh; yet that, in spite of all the exertions of those great theological
professors, Lauderdale and Dundee, the Covenanters were as obstinate as ever. To
the contest between the Scotch nation and the Anglican Church are to be ascribed
near thirty years of the most frightful misgovernment ever seen in any part of
Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect than that of
freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which they detested, and
giving them one to which they were attached, it would have been one of the
happiest events in our history.
The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution was the
alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the practice to
settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign, the produce of certain
taxes which, it was supposed, would yield a sum sufficient to defray the
ordinary expenses of government. The distribution of the revenue was left wholly
to the sovereign. He might be forced by a war, or by his own profusion, to ask
for an extraordinary grant. But, if his policy were economical and pacific, he
might reign many years without once being under the necessity of summoning his
Parliament, or of taking their advice when he had summoned them. This was not
all. The natural tendency of every society in which property enjoys tolerable
security is to increase in wealth. With the national wealth, the produce of the
customs, of the excise, and of the post-office, would of course increase; and
thus it might well happen that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign,
were barely sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might,
before the end of that reign, enable the sovereign to imitate the extravagance
of Nero or Heliogabalus, to raise great armies, to carry on expensive wars.
Something of this sort had actually happened under Charles the Second, though
his reign, reckoned from the Restoration, lasted only twenty-five years. His
first Parliament settled on him taxes estimated to produce twelve hundred
thousand pounds a year. This they thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing
for a standing army in time of peace. At the time of Charles's death, the annual
produce of these taxes considerably exceeded a million and a half; and the King
who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was perpetually
in distress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments for money, was at last able
to keep a body of regular troops without any assistance from the House of
Commons. If his reign had been as long as that of George the Third, he would
probably, before the close of it, have been in the annual receipt of several
millions over and above what the ordinary expenses of civil government required;
and of those millions he would have been as absolutely master as the King now is
of the sum allotted for his privy-purse. He might have spent them in luxury, in
corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in carrying into effect
wild schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of the Revolution applied a remedy
to this great abuse. They settled on the King, not the fluctuating produce of
certain fixed taxes, but a fixed sum sufficient for the support of his own royal
state. They established it as a rule that all the expenses of the army, the
navy, and the ordnance should be brought annually under the review of the House
of Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service specified
in the vote. The direct effect of this change was important. The indirect effect
has been more important still. From that time the House of Commons has been
really the paramount power in the State. It has, in truth, appointed and removed
ministers, declared war, and concluded peace. No combination of the King and the
Lords has ever been able to effect anything against the Lower House, backed by
its constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able to
break the force of an opposition by dissolving the Parliament. But if that
experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind with their
representatives, he would clearly have no course left but to yield, to abdicate,
or to fight.
The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the purification of
the administration of justice in political cases. Of the importance of this
change no person can judge who is not well acquainted with the earlier volumes
of the State Trials. Those volumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most
frightful record of baseness and depravity that is extant in the world. Our
hatred is altogether turned away from the crimes and the criminals, and directed
against the law and its ministers. We see villainies as black as ever were
imputed to any prisoner at any bar daily committed on the bench and in the
jury-box. The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old
parliaments of France, the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of
Calas, may seem praiseworthy when compared with the atrocities which follow each
other in endless succession as we turn over that huge chronicle of the shame of
England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse were blinded by prejudice,
passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges of our own country committed
murder with their eyes open. The cause of this is plain. In France there was no
constitutional opposition. If a man held language offensive to the Government,
he was at once sent to the Bastile or to Vincennes. But in England, at least
after the days of the Long Parliament, the King could not, by a mere act of his
prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to remove
those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed juries, and
corrupt, hardhearted, browbeating judges. The Opposition naturally retaliated
whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that the power passed from one
party to the other, there was a proscription and a massacre, thinly disguised
under the forms of judicial procedure. The tribunals ought to be sacred places
of refuge, where, in all the vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all
parties may find shelter. They were, before the Revolution, an unclean public
shambles, to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each
found the same venal and ferocious butchers waiting for its custom. Papist or
Protestant, Tory or Whig, Priest or Alderman, all was one to those greedy and
savage natures, provided only there was money to earn, and blood to shed.
Of course, these worthless judges soon created around them, as was natural, a
breed of informers more wicked, if possible, than themselves. The trial by jury
afforded little or no protection to the innocent. The juries were nominated by
the sheriffs. The sheriffs were in most parts of England nominated by the Crown.
In London, the great scene of political contention, those officers were chosen
by the people. The fiercest parliamentary election of our time will give but a
faint notion of the storm which raged in the city on the day when two infuriated
parties, each bearing its badge, met to select the men in whose hands were to be
the issues of life and death for the coming year. On that day, nobles of the
highest descent did not think it beneath them to canvass and marshal the livery,
to head the procession, and to watch the poll. On that day, the great chiefs of
parties waited in an agony of suspense for the messenger who was to bring from
Guildhall the news whether their lives and estates were, for the next twelve
months, to be at the mercy of a friend or of a foe. In 1681, Whig sheriffs were
chosen; and Shaftesbury defied the whole power of the Government. In 1682 the
sheriffs were Tories. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. The other chiefs of the party
broke up their councils, and retired in haste to their country seats. Sydney on
the scaffold told those sheriffs that his blood was on their heads. Neither of
them could deny the charge; and one of them wept with shame and remorse.
Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs took his life in his hand.
The consequence was that men of gentle natures stood aloof from contests in
which they could not engage without hazarding their own necks and the fortunes
of their children. This was the course adopted by Sir William Temple, by Evelyn,
and by many other men who were, in every respect, admirably qualified to serve
the State. On the other hand, those resolute and enterprising men who put their
heads and lands to hazard in the game of politics naturally acquired, from the
habit of playing for so deep a stake, a reckless and desperate turn of mind. It
was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a distinguished
leader of Opposition. This may serve to explain, and in some degree to excuse,
the violence with which the factions of that age are justly reproached. They
were fighting, not merely for office, but for life. If they reposed for a moment
from the work of agitation, if they suffered the public excitement to flag, they
were lost men. Hume, in describing this state of things, has employed an image
which seems hardly to suit the general simplicity of his style, but which is by
no means too strong for the occasion. "Thus," says he, "the two parties actuated
by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, leveled with
poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other's breast, and buried
in their factious divisions all, regard to truth, honor, and humanity."
From this terrible evil the Revolution set us free. The law which secured to the
judges their seats during life or good behavior did something. The law
subsequently passed for regulating trials in cases of treason did much more. The
provisions of that law show, indeed, very little legislative skill. It is not
framed on the principle of securing the innocent, but on the principle of giving
a great chance of escape to the accused, whether innocent or guilty. This,
however, is decidedly a fault on the right side. The evil produced by the
occasional escape of a bad citizen is not to be compared with the evils of that
Reign of Terror, for such it was, which preceded the Revolution. Since the
passing of this law scarcely one single person has suffered death in England as
a traitor, who had not been convicted on overwhelming evidence, to the
satisfaction of all parties, of the highest crime against the State. Attempts
have been made in times of great excitement, to bring in persons guilty of high
treason for acts which, though sometimes highly blamable, did not necessarily
imply a design falling within the legal definition of treason. All those
attempts have failed. During a hundred and forty years no statesman, while
engaged in constitutional opposition to a government, has had the axe before his
eyes. The smallest minorities, struggling against the most powerful majorities,
in the most agitated times, have felt themselves perfectly secure. Pulteney and
Fox wore the two most distinguished leaders of Opposition, since the Revolution.
Both were personally obnoxious to the Court. But the utmost harm that the utmost
anger of the Court could do to them was to strike off the "Right Honorable" from
before their names.
But of all the reforms produced by the Revolution, perhaps the most important
was the full establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing. The Censorship
which, under some form or other, had existed, with rare and short intermissions,
under every government, monarchical or republican, from the time of Henry the
Eighth downwards, expired, and has never since been renewed.
We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated were, in
many respects, imperfectly and unskillfully executed. The authors of those
improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated a great practical evil,
continued to recognize the erroneous principle from which that evil had sprung.
Sometimes, when they had adopted a sound principle, they shrank from following
it to all the conclusions to which it would have led them. Sometimes they failed
to perceive that the remedies which they applied to one disease of the State
were certain to generate another disease, and to render another remedy
necessary. Their knowledge was inferior to ours: nor were they always able to
act up to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of
compromising differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party which
was altogether hostile to the new settlement, must be taken into the account.
When these things are fairly weighed, there will, we think, be little difference
of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to the real value of what the
great events of 1688 did for this country.
We have recounted what appear to us the most important of those changes which
the Revolution produced in our laws. The changes which it produced in our laws,
however, were not more important than the change which it indirectly produced in
the public mind, The Whig party had, during seventy years, an almost
uninterrupted possession of power. It had always been the fundamental doctrine
of that party, that power is a trust for the people; that it is given to
magistrates, not for their own, but for the public advantage--that, where it is
abused by magistrates, even by the highest of all, it may lawfully be withdrawn.
It is perfectly true, that the Whigs were not more exempt than other men from
the vices and infirmities of our nature, and that, when they had power, they
sometimes abused it. But still they stood firm to their theory. That theory was
the badge of their party. It was something more. It was the foundation on which
rested the power of the houses of Nassau and Brunswick. Thus, there was a
government interested in propagating a class of opinions which most governments
are interested in discouraging, a government which looked with complacency on
all speculations favorable to public liberty, and with extreme aversion on all
speculations favorable to arbitrary power. There was a King who decidedly
preferred a republican to a believer in the divine right of kings; who
considered every attempt to exalt his prerogative as an attack on his title; and
who reserved all his favours for those who declaimed on the natural equality of
men, and the popular origin of government. This was the state of things from the
Revolution till the death of George the Second. The effect was what might have
been expected. Even in that profession which has generally been most disposed to
magnify the prerogative, a great change took place. Bishopric after bishopric
and deanery after deanery were bestowed on Whigs and Latitudinarians. The
consequence was that Whiggism and Latitudinarianism were professed by the ablest
and most aspiring churchmen.
Hume complained bitterly of this at the close of his history. "The Whig party,"
says he, "for a course of near seventy years, has almost without interruption
enjoyed the whole authority of government, and no honors or offices could be
obtained but by their countenance and protection. But this event, which in some
particulars has been advantageous to the State, has proved destructive to the
truth of history, and has established many gross falsehoods, which it is
unaccountable how any civilized nation could have embraced, with regard to its
domestic occurrences. Compositions the most despicable, both for style and
matter,"--in a note he instances the writings of Locke, Sydney, Hoadley, and
Rapin,--"have been extolled and propagated and read as if they had equaled the
most celebrated remains of antiquity. And forgetting that a regard to liberty,
though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subservient to a reverence for
established government, the prevailing faction has celebrated only the partisans
of the former." We will not here enter into an argument about the merit of
Rapin's History or Locke's political speculations. We call Hume merely as
evidence to a fact well known to all reading men, that the literature patronized
by the English Court and the English ministry, during the first half of the
eighteenth century, was of that kind which courtiers and ministers generally do
all in their power to discountenance, and tended to inspire zeal for the
liberties of the people rather than respect for the authority of the Government.
There was still a very strong Tory party in England. But that party was in
opposition. Many of its members still held the doctrine of passive obedience.
But they did not admit that the existing dynasty had any claim to such
obedience. They condemned resistance. But by resistance they meant the keeping
out of James the Third, and not the turning out of George the Second. No radical
of our times could grumble more at the expenses of the royal household, could
exert himself more strenuously to reduce the military establishment, could
oppose with more earnestness every proposition for arming the executive with
extraordinary powers, or could pour more unmitigated abuse on placemen and
courtiers. If a writer were now, in a massive Dictionary, to define a Pensioner
as a traitor and a slave, the Excise as a hateful tax, the Commissioners of the
Excise as wretches, if he were to write a satire full of reflections on men who
receive "the price of boroughs and of souls," who "explain their country's
dear-bought rights away," or
"whom pensions can incite, To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,"
we should set him down for something more democratic than a Whig. Yet this was
the language which Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories and High Churchmen held
under the administration of Walpole and Pelham.
Thus doctrines favorable to public liberty were inculcated alike by those who
were in power and by those who were in opposition. It was by means of these
doctrines alone that the former could prove that they had a King de jure. The
servile theories of the latter did not prevent them from offering every
molestation to one whom they considered as merely a King de facto. The
attachment of one party to the House of Hanover, of the other to that of Stuart,
induced both to talk a language much more favorable to popular rights than to
monarchical power. What took place at the first representation of Cato is no bad
illustration of the way in which the two great sections of the community almost
invariably acted. A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately
rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan, about hating tyrants and dying for
freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political excitement. Both
parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider every line as a
compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst
an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of the Kit Cat embrace the author, and
assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory
secretary of state presents a purse to the chief actor for defending the cause
of liberty so well. The history of that night was, in miniature, the history of
two generations.
We well know how much sophistry there was in the reasonings, and how much
exaggeration in the declamations of both parties. But when we compare the state
in which political science was at the close of the reign of George the Second
with the state in which it had been when James the Second came to the throne, it
is impossible not to admit that a prodigious improvement had taken place. We are
no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in Blackstone's Commentaries.
But if we consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the
very schools where, seventy or eighty years before, books had been publicly
burned by order of the University of Oxford for containing the damnable doctrine
that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary
change had taken place. "The Jesuits," says Pascal, in the last of his
incomparable letters, "have obtained a Papal decree, condemning Galileo's
doctrine about the motion of the earth. It is all in vain. If the world is
really turning round, all mankind together will not be able to keep it from
turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it." The decrees of Oxford were
as ineffectual to stay the great moral and political revolution as those of the
Vatican to stay the motion of our globe. That learned University found itself
not only unable to keep the mass from moving, but unable to keep itself from
moving along with the mass. Nor was the effect of the discussions and
speculations of that period confined to our own country. While the Jacobite
party was in the last dotage and weakness of its paralytic old age, the
political philosophy of England began to produce a mighty effect on France, and,
through France, on Europe.
Here another vast field opens itself before us. But we must resolutely turn away
from it. We will conclude by advising all our readers to study Sir James
Mackintosh's valuable Fragment, and by expressing our hope that they will soon
be able to study it without those accompaniments which have hitherto impeded its
circulation.
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