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We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and temper of Sir
James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped his course through those
times. Exposed successively to two opposite infections, he took both in their
very mildest form. The constitution of his mind was such that neither of the
diseases which wrought such havoc all round him could in any serious degree, or
for any great length of time, derange his intellectual health. He, like every
honest and enlightened man in Europe, saw with delight the great awakening of
the French nation. Yet he never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm,
proclaimed doctrines inconsistent with the safety of property and the just
authority of governments. He, like almost every other honest and enlightened
man, was discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events which followed. Yet he
never in the most gloomy times abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty, and of
toleration. In that great convulsion which overset almost every other
understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned sometimes in one
direction and sometimes in the other; but he never lost his balance. The
opinions in which he at last reposed, and to which, in spite of strong
temptations, he adhered with a firm, a disinterested, an ill-requited fidelity,
were a just mean between those which he had defended with youthful ardor and
with more than manly prowess against Mr. Burke, and those to which he had
inclined during the darkest and saddest years in the history of modern Europe.
We are much mistaken if this be the picture either of a weak or of a dishonest
mind.
What the political opinions of Sir James Mackintosh were in his later years is
written in the annals of his country. Those annals will sufficiently refute what
the Editor has ventured to assert in the very advertisement to this work. "Sir
James Mackintosh," says he, "was avowedly and emphatically a Whig of the
Revolution: and since the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary
reform became a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more
dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated." If these words mean
anything, they must mean that the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh concerning
religious liberty and parliamentary reform went no further than those of the
authors of the Revolution; in other words, that Sir James Mackintosh opposed
Catholic Emancipation, and approved of the old constitution of the House of
Commons. The allegation is confuted by twenty volumes of Parliamentary Debates,
nay, by innumerable passages in the very fragment which this writer has defaced.
We will venture to say that Sir James Mackintosh often did more for religious
liberty and for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than most of those
zealots who are in the habit of depreciating him have done or will do in the
whole course of their lives.
Nothing in the "Memoir" or in the "Continuation of the History" has struck us so
much as the contempt with which the writer thinks fit to speak of all things
that were done before the coming in of the very last fashions in politics. We
think that we have sometimes observed a leaning towards the same fault in
writers of a much higher order of intellect. We will therefore take this
opportunity of making a few remarks on an error which is, we fear, becoming
common, and which appears to us not only absurd, but as pernicious as almost any
error concerning the transactions of a past age can possibly be.
We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to the doctrines and
practices of past generations. Our creed is that the science of government is an
experimental science, and that, like all other experimental sciences, it is
generally in a state of progression. No man is so obstinate an admirer of the
old times as to deny that medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering,
navigation, are better understood now than in any former age. We conceive that
it is the same with political science. Like those physical sciences which we
have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and
depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most powerful of
human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the
alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous
statesmen thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to
found monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate;
doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more
unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are
the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level
below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only
the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and penetrates to the deepest
valley. First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems,
then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one
bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority,
of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys
laugh at the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the
illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.
Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most obstinate
enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been almost constantly advancing in
knowledge, and not seeing any reason to believe that, precisely at the point of
time at which we came into the world, a change took place in the faculties of
the human mind, or in the mode of discovering truth, we are reformers: we are on
the side of progress. From the great advances which European society has made
during the last four centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer, not
that there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every science which
deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently expected.
But the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine hope to
the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the past We do not
flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained perfection, and that no
more truth remains to be found. We believe that we are wiser than our ancestors.
We believe, also, that our posterity will be wiser than we. It would be gross
injustice in our grandchildren to talk of us with contempt, merely because they
may have surpassed us; to call Watt a fool, because mechanical powers may be
discovered which may supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which
have been made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to
enlighten the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists may devise
better places of confinement than Mr. Bentham's Panopticon, and better places of
education than Mr. Lancaster's Schools. As we would have our descendants judge
us, so ought we to judge our fathers. In order to form a correct estimate of
their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to put out of our
minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they, however eager in the pursuit
of truth, could not have, and which we, however negligent we may have been,
could not help having. It was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible,
for the best and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very
commonplace person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be.
But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled by
the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be reviled by the
dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.
The truth lies between two absurd extremes. On one side is the bigot who pleads
the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they in our place
would be the first to do; who opposes the Reform Bill because Lord Somers did
not see the necessity of Parliamentary Reform; who would have opposed the
Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer professed boundless submission to the
royal prerogative; and who would have opposed the Reformation because the
Fitzwalters and Mareschals, whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were
devoted adherents to the Church of Rome. On the other side is the sciolist who
speaks with scorn of the Great Charter because it did not reform the Church of
the Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the
Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons. The former of these
errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to combat. The latter,
though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet come under our notice. The
former error bears directly on practical questions, and obstructs useful
reforms. It may, therefore, seem to be, and probably is, the more mischievous of
the two. But the latter is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of
a shallow understanding and an unamiable temper: and, if it should ever become
general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very prejudicial effects. Its
tendency is to deprive the benefactors of mankind of their honest fame, and to
put the best and the worst men of past times on the same level. The author of a
great reformation is almost always unpopular in his own age. He generally passes
his life in disquiet and danger. It is therefore for the interest of the human
race that the memory of such men should be had in reverence, and that they
should be supported against the scorn and hatred of their contemporaries by the
hope of leaving a great and imperishable name. To go on the forlorn hope of
truth is a service of peril. Who will undertake it, if it be not also a service
of honor? It is easy enough, after the ramparts are carried, to find men to
plant the flag on the highest tower. The difficulty is to find men who are ready
to go first into the breach; and it would be bad policy indeed to insult their
remains because they fell in the breach, and did not live to penetrate to the
citadel.
Now here we have a book which is by no means a favorable specimen of the English
literature of the nineteenth century, a book indicating neither extensive
knowledge nor great powers of reasoning. And, if we were to judge by the pity
with which the writer speaks of the great statesmen and philosophers of a former
age, we should guess that he was the author of the most original and important
inventions in political science. Yet not so: for men who are able to make
discoveries are generally disposed to make allowances. Men who are eagerly
pressing forward in pursuit of truth are grateful to every one who has cleared
an inch of the way for them. It is, for the most part, the man who has just
capacity enough to pick up and repeat the commonplaces which are fashionable in
his own time who looks with disdain on the very intellects to which it is owing
that those commonplaces are not still considered as startling paradoxes or
damnable heresies. This writer is just the man who, if he had lived in the
seventeenth century, would have devoutly believed that the Papists burned
London, who would have swallowed the whole of Oates's story about the forty
thousand soldiers, disguised as pilgrims, who were to meet in Gallicia, and sail
thence to invade England, who would have carried a Protestant flail under his
coat, and who would have been angry if the story of the warming-pan had been
questioned. It is quite natural that such a man should speak with contempt of
the great reformers of that time, because they did not know some things which he
never would have known but for the salutary effects of their exertions. The men
to whom we owe it that we have a House of Commons are sneered at because they
did not suffer the debates of the House to be published. The authors of the
Toleration Act are treated as bigots, because they did not go the whole length
of Catholic Emancipation. Just so we have heard a baby, mounted on the shoulders
of its father, cry out, "How much taller I am than Papa!"
This gentleman can never want matter for pride, if he finds it so easily. He may
boast of an indisputable superiority to all the greatest men of all past ages.
He can read and write: Homer probably did not know a letter. He has been taught
that the earth goes round the sun: Archimedes held that the sun went round the
earth. He is aware that there is a place called New Holland: Columbus and Gama
went to their graves in ignorance of the fact. He has heard of the Georgium
Sidus: Newton was ignorant of the existence of such a planet. He is acquainted
with the use of gunpowder: Hannibal and Caesar won their victories with sword
and spear. We submit, however, that this is not the way in which men are to be
estimated. We submit that a wooden spoon of our day would not be justified in
calling Galileo and Napier blockheads, because they never heard of the
differential calculus. We submit that Caxton's press in Westminster Abbey, rude
as it is, ought to be looked at with quite as much respect as the best
constructed machinery that ever, in our time, impressed the clearest type on the
finest paper. Sydenham first discovered that the cool regimen succeeded best in
cases of small-pox. By this discovery he saved the lives of hundreds of
thousands; and we venerate his memory for it, though he never heard of
inoculation. Lady Mary Montague brought inoculation into use; and we respect her
for it, though she never heard of vaccination. Jenner introduced vaccination; we
admire him for it, and we shall continue to admire him for it, although some
still safer and more agreeable preservative should be discovered. It is thus
that we ought to judge of the events and the men of other times. They were
behind us. It could not be otherwise. But the question with respect to them is
not where they were, but which way they were going. Were their faces set in the
right or in the wrong direction? Were they in the front or in the rear of their
generation? Did they exert themselves to help onward the great movement of the
human race, or to stop it? This is not charity, but simple justice and common
sense. It is the fundamental law of the world in which we live that truth shall
grow, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A
person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1835 might
just as well complain of a projectile for describing a parabola, or of
quicksilver for being heavier than water.
Undoubtedly we ought to look at ancient transactions by the light of modern
knowledge. Undoubtedly it is among the first duties of a historian to point out
the faults of the eminent men of former generations. There are no errors which
are so likely to be drawn into precedent, and therefore none which it is so
necessary to expose, as the errors of persons who have a just title to the
gratitude and admiration of posterity. In politics, as in religion, there are
devotees who show their reverence for a departed saint by converting his tomb
into a sanctuary for crime. Receptacles of wickedness are suffered to remain
undisturbed in the neighborhood of the church which glories in the relics of
some martyred apostle. Because he was merciful, his bones give security to
assassins. Because he was chaste, the precinct of his temple is filled with
licensed stews. Privileges of an equally absurd kind have been set up against
the jurisdiction of political philosophy. Vile abuses cluster thick round every
glorious event, round every venerable name; and this evil assuredly calls for
vigorous measures of literary police. But the proper course is to abate the
nuisance without defacing the shrine, to drive out the gangs of thieves and
prostitutes without doing foul and cowardly wrong to the ashes of the
illustrious dead.
In this respect, two historians of our own time may be proposed as models, Sir
James Mackintosh and Mr. Mill. Differing in most things, in this they closely
resemble each other. Sir James is lenient. Mr. Mill is severe. But neither of
them ever omits, in the apportioning of praise and of censure, to make ample
allowance for the state of political science and political morality in former
ages. In the work before us, Sir James Mackintosh speaks with just respect of
the Whigs of the Revolution, while he never fails to condemn the conduct of that
party towards the members of the Church of Rome. His doctrines are the liberal
and benevolent doctrines of the nineteenth century. But he never forgets that
the men whom he is describing were men of the seventeenth century.
From Mr. Mill this indulgence, or, to speak more properly, this justice, was
less to be expected. That gentleman, in some of his works, appears to consider
politics not as an experimental, and therefore a progressive science, but as a
science of which all the difficulties may be resolved by short synthetical
arguments drawn from truths of the most vulgar notoriety. Were this opinion well
founded, the people of one generation would have little or no advantage over
those of another generation. But though Mr. Mill, in some of his Essays, has
been thus misled, as we conceive, by a fondness for neat and precise forms of
demonstration, it would be gross injustice not to admit that, in his History, he
has employed a very different method of investigation with eminent ability and
success. We know no writer who takes so much pleasure in the truly useful, noble
and philosophical employment of tracing the progress of sound opinions from
their embryo state to their full maturity. He eagerly culls from old dispatches
and minutes every expression in which he can discern the imperfect germ of any
great truth which has since been fully developed. He never fails to bestow
praise on those who, though far from coming up to his standard of perfection,
yet rose in a small degree above the common level of their contemporaries. It is
thus that the annals of past times ought to be written. It is thus, especially,
that the annals of our own country ought to be written.
The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the
history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant change in the
institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the
twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most
degraded nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a
handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the
victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the
population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel
superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent
minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few
engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course
of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and
most highly civilized people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion
over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and
republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached
Ptolemy or Strabo, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a
quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa
together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and
correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that
promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have
thought magical, have produced a literature which may boast of works not
inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, have discovered the
laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have speculated with
exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human mind, have been the
acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement.
The history of England is the history of this great change in the moral,
intellectual, and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island. There is
much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action. To
us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the
steps by which the England of Domesday Book, the England of the Curfew and the
Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs,
outlaws, became the England which we know and love, the classic ground of
liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade. The
Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great Charter, the first assembling of the House
of Commons, the extinction of personal slavery, the separation from the See of
Rome, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Revolution, the
establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing, the abolition of religious
disabilities, the reform of the representative system, all these seem to us to
be the successive stages of one great revolution--nor can we fully comprehend
any one of these memorable events unless we look at it in connection with those
which preceded, and with those which followed it. Each of those great and
ever-memorable struggles, Saxon against Norman, Villein against Lord, Protestant
against Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter against Churchman,
Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle, on
the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the human race; and
every man who, in the contest which, in his time, divided our country,
distinguished himself on the right side, is entitled to our gratitude and
respect.
Whatever the editor of this book may think, those persons who estimate most
correctly the value of the improvements which have recently been made in our
institutions are precisely the persons who are least disposed to speak
slightingly of what was done in 1688. Such men consider the Revolution as a
reform, imperfect indeed, but still most beneficial to the English people and to
the human race, as a reform, which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, as a
reform, the happy effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout
Our own country, but in half the monarchies of Europe, and in the depth of the
forests of Ohio. We shall be pardoned, we hope, if we call the attention of our
readers to the causes and to the consequences of that great event.
We said that the history of England is the history of progress; and, when we
take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But, when examined in small separate
portions, it way with more propriety be called a history of actions and
reactions. We have often thought that the motion of the public mind in our
country resembles that of the sea when the tide is rising. Each successive wave
rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back; but the great flood is steadily coming
in. A person who looked on the waters only for a moment might fancy that they
were retiring. A person who looked on them only for five minutes might fancy
that they were rushing capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on
them for a quarter of an hour, and sees one seamark disappear after another, it
is impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean is
moved. Just such has been the course of events in England. In the history of the
national mind, which is, in truth, the history of the nation, we must carefully
distinguish between that recoil which regularly follows every advance and a
great general ebb. If we take short intervals, if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680
and 1685, 1708 and 1712, 1782 and 1794, we find a retrogression. But if we take
centuries, if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660 or with 1685, we cannot
doubt in which direction society is proceeding.
The interval which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution naturally
divides itself into three periods. The first extends from 1660 to 1678, the
second from 1678 to 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688.
In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal excitement. If we had to choose a
lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn since the
beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the Second on the day of
his return. He was in a situation in which the dictates of ambition coincided
with those of benevolence, in which it was easier to be virtuous than to be
wicked, to be loved than to be hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than
to become infamous. For once the road of goodness was a smooth descent. He had
done nothing to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in
advance without measure. Elizabeth, after the destruction of the Armada, or
after the abolition of monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of the
enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was not, like Lewis
the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign conquerors; nor did he, like
Lewis the Eighteenth, come back to a country which had undergone a complete
change. The House of Bourbon was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of
the European confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably
associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive provinces, with the
payment of an immense tribute, with the devastation of flourishing departments,
with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile armies, with the emptiness of
those niches in which the gods of Athens and Rome had been the objects of a new
idolatry, with the nakedness of those walls on which the Transfiguration had
shone with light as glorious as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They came back
to a land in which they could recognize nothing. The seven sleepers of the
legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians,
and woke when the Christians were persecuting each other, did not find
themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done the
work of twenty generations. Events had come thick. Men had lived fast. The old
institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the roots. There was a new
Church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new nobility whose titles were
taken from fields of battle, disastrous to the ancient line; a new chivalry
whose crosses had been won by exploits which had seemed likely to make the
banishment of the emigrants perpetual. A new code was administered by a new
magistracy. A new body of proprietors held the soil by a new tenure. The most
ancient local distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become
obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany and a
Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely as one
of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite
curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to
animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. It
was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the feudal
system, as that our globe could be overrun by Mammoths. The revolution in the
laws and in the form of government was but an outward sign of that mightier
revolution which had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which
affected every transaction of life, trading, farming, studying, marrying, and
giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant prince had to govern were no
more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth were like the
French of the Jacquerie. He came back to a people who knew not him nor his
house, to a people to whom a Bourbon was no more than a Carlovingian or a
Merovingian. He might substitute the white flag for the tricolor; he might put
lilies in the place of bees; he might order the initials of the Emperor to be
carefully effaced. But he could turn his eyes nowhere without meeting some
object which reminded him that he was a stranger in the palace of his fathers.
He returned to a country in which even the passing traveler is every moment
reminded that there has lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of
the social system. To win the hearts of a people under such circumstances would
have been no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.
In the English Revolution the case was altogether different. Charles was not
imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was not attended
by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their national pride.
Insulated by our geographical position, insulated by our character, we had
fought out our quarrels and effected our reconciliation among ourselves. Our
great internal questions had never been mixed up with the still greater question
of national independence. The political doctrines of the Roundheads were not,
like those of the French philosophers, doctrines of universal application. Our
ancestors, for the most part, took their stand, not on a general theory, but on
the particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of men,
but of Englishmen. Their doctrines therefore were not contagious; and, had it
been otherwise, no neighboring country was then susceptible of the contagion.
The language in which our discussions were generally conducted was scarcely
known even to a single man of letters out of the islands. Our local situation
made it almost impossible that we should effect great conquests on the
Continent. The kings of Europe had, therefore, no reason to fear that their
subjects would follow the example of the English Puritans, and looked with
indifference, perhaps with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the
abolition of the monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we
believe that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a
French or Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been cut to
pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the first day on which
it came face to face with the soldiers of Preston and Dunbar, with Colonel
Fight-the-good-Fight, and Captain Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, the House of
Cromwell would probably now have been reigning in England. The nation would have
forgotten all the misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign
invaders.
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