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And what, after all, is the security which this training gives to governments?
Mr. Southey would scarcely propose that discussion should be more effectually
shackled, that public opinion should be more strictly disciplined into
conformity with established institutions, than in Spain and Italy. Yet we know
that the restraints which exist in Spain and Italy have not prevented atheism
from spreading among the educated classes, and especially among those whose
office it is to minister at the altars of God. All our readers know how, at the
time of the French Revolution, priest after priest came forward to declare that
his doctrine, his ministry, his whole life, had been a lie, a mummery during
which he could scarcely compose his countenance sufficiently to carry on the
imposture. This was the case of a false, or at least of a grossly corrupted
religion. Let us take then the case of all others most favorable to Mr.
Southey's argument. Let us take that form of religion which he holds to be the
purest, the system of the Arminian part of the Church of England. Let us take
the form of government which he most admires and regrets, the government of
England in the time of Charles the First. Would he wish to see a closer
connection between Church and State than then existed? Would he wish for more
powerful ecclesiastical tribunals? for a more zealous King? for a more active
primate? Would he wish to see a more complete monopoly of public instruction
given to the Established Church? Could any government do more to train the
people in the way in which he would have them go? And in what did all this
training end? The Report of the state of the Province of Canterbury, delivered
by Laud to his master at the close of 1639, represents the Church of England as
in the highest and most palmy state. So effectually had the Government pursued
that policy which Mr. Southey wishes to see revived that there was scarcely the
least appearance of dissent. Most of the bishops stated that all was well among
their flocks. Seven or eight persons in the diocese of Peterborough had seemed
refractory to the Church, but had made ample submission. In Norfolk and Suffolk
all whom there had been reason to suspect had made profession of conformity, and
appeared to observe it strictly. It is confessed that there was a little
difficulty in bringing some of the vulgar in Suffolk to take the sacrament at
the rails in the chancel. This was the only open instance of nonconformity which
the vigilant eye of Laud could detect in all the dioceses of his twenty-one
suffragans, on the very eve of a revolution in which primate, and Church, and
monarch, and monarchy were to perish together.
At which time would Mr. Southey pronounce the constitution more secure: in 1639,
when Laud presented this Report to Charles; or now, when thousands of meetings
openly collect millions of dissenters, when designs against the tithes are
openly avowed, when books attacking not only the Establishment, but the first
principles of Christianity, are openly sold in the streets? The signs of
discontent, he tells us, are stronger in England now than in France when the
States-General met: and hence he would have us infer that a revolution like that
of France may be at hand. Does he not know that the danger of states is to be
estimated, not by what breaks out of the public mind, but by what stays in it?
Can he conceive anything more terrible than the situation of a government which
rules without apprehension over a people of hypocrites, which is flattered by
the press and cursed in the inner chambers, which exults in the attachment and
obedience of its subjects, and knows not that those subjects are leagued against
it in a free-masonry of hatred, the sign of which is every day conveyed in the
glance of ten thousand eyes, the pressure of ten thousand hands, and the tone of
ten thousand voices? Profound and ingenious policy! Instead of curing the
disease, to remove those symptoms by which alone its nature can be known! To
leave the serpent his deadly sting, and deprive him only of his warning rattle!
When the people whom Charles had so assiduously trained in the good way had
rewarded his paternal care by cutting off his head, a new kind of training came
into fashion. Another government arose which, like the former, considered
religion as its surest basis, and the religious discipline of the people as its
first duty. Sanguinary laws were enacted against libertinism; profane pictures
were burned; drapery was put on indecorous statues; the theatres were shut up;
fast-days were numerous; and the Parliament resolved that no person should be
admitted into any public employment, unless the House should be first satisfied
of his vital godliness. We know what was the end of this training. We know that
it ended in impiety in filthy and heartless sensuality, in the dissolution of
all ties of honor and morality. We know that at this very day scriptural
phrases, scriptural names, perhaps some scriptural doctrines excite disgust and
ridicule, solely because they are associated with the austerity of that period.
Thus has the experiment of training the people in established forms of religion
been twice tried in England on a large scale, once by Charles and Laud, and once
by the Puritans. The High Tories of our time still entertain many of the
feelings and opinions of Charles and Laud, though in a mitigated form; nor is it
difficult to see that the heirs of the Puritans are still amongst us. It would
be desirable that each of these parties should remember how little advantage or
honor it formerly derived from the closest alliance with power, that it fall by
the support of rulers and rose by their opposition, that of the two systems that
in which the people were at any time drilled was always at that time the
unpopular system, that the training of the High Church ended in the reign of the
Puritans, and that the training of the Puritans ended in the reign of the
harlots.
This was quite natural. Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the
birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government
which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink, and wear. Our
fathers could not bear it two hundred year ago; and we are not more patient than
they. Mr. Southey thinks that the yoke of the Church is dropping off because it
is loose. We feel convinced that it is borne only because it is easy, and that,
in the instant in which an attempt is made to tighten it, it will be flung away.
It will be neither the first nor the strongest yoke that has been broken asunder
and trampled under foot in the day of the vengeance of England.
How far Mr. Southey would have the Government carry its measures for training
the people in the doctrines of the Church, we are unable to discover. In one
passage Sir Thomas More asks with great vehemence,
"Is it possible that your laws should suffer the unbelievers to exist as a
party? Vetitum est adeo sceleris nihil?"
Montesinos answers: "They avow themselves in defiance of the laws. The
fashionable doctrine which the press at this time maintains is, that this is a
matter in which the laws ought not to interfere, every man having a right, both
to form what opinion he pleases upon religious subjects, and to promulgate that
opinion."
It is clear, therefore, that Mr. Southey would not give full and perfect
toleration to infidelity. In another passage, however, he observes with some
truth, though too sweepingly, that "any degree of intolerance short of that full
extent which the Papal Church exercises where it has the power, acts upon the
opinions which it is intended to suppress, like pruning upon vigorous plants;
they grow the stronger for it." These two passages, put together, would lead us
to the conclusion that, in Mr. Southey's opinion, the utmost severity ever
employed by the Roman Catholic Church in the days of its greatest power ought to
be employed against unbelievers in England; in plain words, that Carlile and his
shopmen ought to be burned in Smithfield, and that every person who, when called
upon, should decline to make a solemn profession of Christianity ought to suffer
the same fate. We do not, however, believe that Mr. Southey would recommend such
a course, though his language would, according to all the rules of logic,
justify us in supposing this to be his meaning. His opinions form no system at
all. He never sees, at one glance, more of a question than will furnish matter
for one flowing and well-turned sentence; so that it would be the height of
unfairness to charge him personally with holding a doctrine merely because that
doctrine is deducible, though by the closest and most accurate reasoning, from
the premises which he has laid down. We are, therefore, left completely in the
dark as to Mr. Southey's opinions about toleration. Immediately after censuring
the Government for not punishing infidels, he proceeds to discuss the question
of the Catholic disabilities, now, thank God, removed, and defends them on the
ground that the Catholic doctrines tend to persecution, and that the Catholics
persecuted when they had power.
"They must persecute," says he, "if they believe their own creed, for
conscience-sake; and if they do not believe it, they must persecute for policy;
because it is only by intolerance that so corrupt and injurious a system can be
upheld."
That unbelievers should not be persecuted is an instance of national depravity
at which the glorified spirits stand aghast. Yet a sect of Christians is to be
excluded from power, because those who formerly held the same opinions were
guilty of persecution. We have said that we do not very well know what Mr.
Southey's opinion about toleration is. But, on the whole, we take it to be this,
that everybody is to tolerate him, and that he is to tolerate nobody.
We will not be deterred by any fear of misrepresentation from expressing our
hearty approbation of the mild, wise, and eminently Christian manner in which
the Church and the Government have lately acted with respect to blasphemous
publications. We praise them for not having thought it necessary to encircle a
religion pure, merciful, and philosophical, a religion to the evidence of which
the highest intellects have yielded, with the defenses of a false and bloody
superstition. The ark of God was never taken till it was surrounded by the arms
of earthly defenders. In captivity, its sanctity was sufficient to vindicate it
from insult, and to lay the hostile fiend prostrate on the threshold of his own
temple. The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent
morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with
which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect,
in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with
which it brightens the great mystery of the grave. To such a system it can bring
no addition of dignity or of strength, that it is part and parcel of the common
law. It is not now for the first time left to rely on the force of its own
evidences and the attractions of its own beauty. Its sublime theology confounded
the Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason with reason. The bravest and
wisest of the Caesars found their arms and their policy unavailing, when opposed
to the weapons that were not carnal and the kingdom that was not of this world.
The victory which Porphyry and Diocletian failed to gain is not, to all
appearance, reserved for any of those who have in this age, directed their
attacks against the last restraint of the powerful and the last hope of the
wretched. The whole history of Christianity shows, that she is in far greater
danger of being corrupted by the alliance of power, than of being crushed by its
opposition. Those who thrust temporal sovereignty upon her treat her as their
prototypes treated her author. They bow the knee, and spit upon her; they cry
"Hail!" and smite her on the cheek; they put a scepter in her hand, but it is a
fragile reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the
wounds which their own hands have inflicted on her; and inscribe magnificent
titles over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and
pain.
The general view which Mr. Southey takes of the prospects of society is very
gloomy; but we comfort ourselves with the consideration that Mr. Southey is no
prophet. He foretold, we remember, on the very eve of the abolition of the Test
and Corporation Acts, that these hateful laws were immortal, and that pious
minds would long be gratified by seeing the most solemn religious rite of the
Church profaned for the purpose of upholding her political supremacy. In the
book before us, he says that Catholics cannot possibly be admitted into
Parliament until those whom Johnson called "the bottomless Whigs" come into
power. While the book was in the press, the prophecy was falsified; and a Tory
of the Tories, Mr. Southey's own favorite hero, won and wore that noblest
wreath, "Ob cives servatos."
The signs of the times, Mr. Southey tells us, are very threatening. His fears
for the country would decidedly preponderate over his hopes, but for a firm
reliance on the mercy of God. Now, as we know that God has once suffered the
civilized world to be overrun by savages, and the Christian religion to be
corrupted by doctrines which made it, for some ages, almost as bad as Paganism,
we cannot think it inconsistent with his attributes that similar calamities
should again befall mankind.
We look, however, on the state of the world, and of this kingdom in particular,
with much greater satisfaction and with better hopes. Mr. Southey speaks with
contempt of those who think the savage state happier than the social. On this
subject, he says, Rousseau never imposed on him even in his youth. But he
conceives that a community which has advanced a little way in civilization is
happier than one which has made greater progress. The Britons in the time of
Caesar were happier, he suspects, than the English of the nineteenth century. On
the whole, he selects the generation which preceded the Reformation as that in
which the people of this country were better off than at any time before or
since.
This opinion rests on nothing, as far as we can see, except his own individual
associations. He is a man of letters; and a life destitute of literary pleasures
seems insipid to him. He abhors the spirit of the present generation, the
severity of its studies, the boldness of its inquiries, and the disdain with
which it regards some old prejudices by which his own mind is held in bondage.
He dislikes an utterly unenlightened age; he dislikes an investigating and
reforming age. The first twenty years of the sixteenth century would have
exactly suited him. They furnished just the quantity of intellectual excitement
which he requires. The learned few read and wrote largely. A scholar was held in
high estimation. But the rabble did not presume to think; and even the most
inquiring and independent of the educated classes paid more reverence to
authority, and less to reason, than is usual in our time. This is a state of
things in which Mr. Southey would have found himself quite comfortable; and,
accordingly, he pronounces it the happiest state of things ever known in the
world.
The savages were wretched, says Mr. Southey; but the people in the time of Sir
Thomas More were happier than either they or we. Now we think it quite certain
that we have the advantage over the contemporaries of Sir Thomas More, in every
point in which they had any advantage over savages.
Mr. Southey does not even pretend to maintain that the people in the sixteenth
century were better lodged or clothed than at present. He seems to admit that in
these respects there has been some little improvement. It is indeed a matter
about which scarcely any doubt can exist in the most perverse mind that the
improvements of machinery have lowered the price of manufactured articles, and
have brought within the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir Thomas
More or his master could not have obtained at any price.
The laboring classes, however, were, according to Mr. Southey, better fed three
hundred years ago than at present. We believe that he is completely in error on
this point. The condition of servants in noble and wealthy families, and of
scholars at the Universities, must surely have been better in those times than
that of day-laborers; and we are sure that it was not better than that of our
workhouse paupers. From the household book of the Northumberland family, we find
that in one of the greatest establishments of the kingdom the servants lived
very much as common sailors live now. In the reign of Edward the Sixth the state
of the students at Cambridge is described to us, on the very best authority, as
most wretched. Many of them dined on pottage made of a farthing's worth of beef
with a little salt and oatmeal, and literally nothing else. This account we have
from a contemporary master of St. John's. Our parish poor now eat wheaten bread.
In the sixteenth century the laborer was glad to get barley, and was often
forced to content himself with poorer fare. In Harrison's introduction to
Holinshed we have an account of the state of our working population in the
"golden days," as Mr. Southey calls them, "of good Queen Bess." "The gentility,
"says he, "commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat for their own
tables, whylest their household and poore neighbors in some shires are enforced
to content themselves with rye or barleie; yea, and in time of dearth, many with
bread made either of beans, peas on, or oats, or of altogether, and some accrues
among. I will not say that this extremity is oft so well to be seen in time of
plenty as of dearth; but if I should I could easily bring my trial: for albeit
there be much more ground cared now almost in every place then bathe been of
late years, yet such a price of corn continueth in each town and market, without
any just cause, that the artificer and poore laboring man is not able to reach
unto it, but is driven to content him self with horse-corn." We should like to
see what the effect would be of putting any parish in England now on allowance
of "horse-corn." The helotry of Mammon are not, in our day, so easily enforced
to content themselves as the peasantry of that happy period, as Mr. Southey
considers it, which elapsed between the fall of the feudal and the rise of the
commercial tyranny.
"The people," says Mr. Southey, "are worse fed than when they were fishers." And
yet in another place he complains that they will not eat fish. "They have
contracted," says he, "I know not how, some obstinate prejudice against a kind
of food at once wholesome and delicate, and everywhere to be obtained cheaply
and in abundance, were the demand for it as general as it ought to be." It is
true that the lower orders have an obstinate prejudice against fish. But hunger
has no such obstinate prejudices. If what was formerly a common diet is now
eaten only in times of severe pressure, the inference is plain. The people must
be fed with what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors.
The advice and medicine which the poorest laborer can now obtain, in disease, or
after an accident, is far superior to what Henry the Eighth could have
commanded. Scarcely any part of the country is out of the reach of
practitioners, who are probably not so far inferior to Sir Henry Halford as they
are superior to Dr. Butts. That there has been a great improvement in this
respect, Mr. Southey allows. Indeed he could not well have denied it. "But,"
says he, "the evils for which these sciences are the palliative, have increased
since the time of the Druids, in a proportion that heavily overweighs the
benefit of improved therapeutics." We know nothing either of the diseases or the
remedies of the Druids. But we are quite sure that the improvement of medicine
has far more than kept pace with the increase of disease during the last three
centuries. This is proved by the best possible evidence. The term of human life
is decidedly longer in England than in any former age, respecting which we
possess any information on which we can rely. All the rants in the world about
picturesque cottages and temples of Mammon will not shake this argument. No test
of the physical well-being of society can be named so decisive as that which is
furnished by bills of mortality. That the lives of the people of this country
have been gradually lengthening during the course of several generations, is as
certain as any fact in statistics; and that the lives of men should become
longer and longer, while their bodily condition during life is becoming worse
and worse, is utterly incredible.
Let our readers think over these circumstances. Let them take into the account
the sweating sickness and the plague. Let them take into the account that
fearful disease which first made its appearance in the generation to which Mr.
Southey assigns the palm of felicity, and raged through Europe with a fury at
which the physician stood aghast, and before which the people were swept away by
myriads. Let them consider the state of the northern counties, constantly the
scene of robberies, rapes, massacres, and conflagrations. Let them add to all
this the fact that seventy-two thousand persons suffered death by the hands of
the executioner during the reign of Henry the Eighth, and judge between the
nineteenth and the sixteenth century.
We do not say that the lower orders in England do not suffer severe hardships.
But, in spite of Mr. Southey's assertions, and in spite of the assertions of a
class of politicians, who, differing from Mr. Southey in every other point,
agree with him in this, we are inclined to doubt whether the laboring classes
here really suffer greater physical distress than the laboring classes of the
most flourishing countries of the Continent.
It will scarcely be maintained that the lazzaroni who sleep under the porticoes
of Naples, or the beggars who besiege the convents of Spain, are in a happier
situation than the English commonalty. The distress which has lately been
experienced in the northern part of Germany, one of the best governed and most
prosperous regions of Europe, surpasses, if we have been correctly informed,
anything which has of late years been known among us. In Norway and Sweden the
peasantry are constantly compelled to mix bark. with their bread; and even this
expedient has not always preserved whole families and neighborhoods from
perishing together of famine. An experiment has lately been tried in the kingdom
of the Netherlands, which has been cited to prove the possibility of
establishing agricultural colonies on the waste lands of England, but which
proves to our minds nothing so clearly as this, that the rate of subsistence to
which the laboring classes are reduced in the Netherlands is miserably low, and
very far inferior to that of the English paupers. No distress which the people
here have endured for centuries approaches to that which has been felt by the
French in our own time. The beginning of the year 1817 was a time of great
distress in this island. But the state of the lowest classes here was luxury
compared with that of the people of France. We find in Magendie's Journal de
Physiologie Experimentale a paper on a point of physiology connected with the
distress of that season. It appears that the inhabitants of six departments,
Aix, Jura, Doubs, Haute Saone, Vosges, and Saone-et-Loire, were reduced first to
oatmeal and potatoes, and at last to nettles, beanstalks, and other kinds of
herbage fit only for cattle; that when the next harvest enabled them to eat
barley-bread, many of them died from intemperate indulgence in what they thought
an exquisite repast; and that a dropsy of a peculiar description was produced by
the hard fare of the year. Dead bodies were found on the roads and in the
fields. A single surgeon dissected six of these, and found the stomach shrunk,
and filled with the unwholesome aliments which hunger had driven men to share
with beasts. Such extremity of distress as this is never heard of in England, or
even in Ireland. We are, on the whole, inclined to think, though we would speak
with diffidence on a point on which it would be rash to pronounce a positive
judgment without a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed
upon it, that the laboring classes of this island, though they have their
grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence, some by the
errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than
the inhabitants of an equally extensive district of the old world. For this very
reason, suffering is more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than
elsewhere. We must take into the account the liberty of discussion, and the
strong interest which the opponents of a ministry always have, to exaggerate the
extent of the public disasters. There are countries in which the people quietly
endure distress that here would shake the foundations of the State, countries in
which the inhabitants of a whole province turn out to eat grass with less clamor
than one Spitalfields weaver would make here, if the overseers were to put him
on barley-bread. In those new commonwealths in which a civilized population has
at its command a boundless extent of the richest soil, the condition of the
laborer is probably happier than in any society which has lasted for many
centuries. But in the old world we must confess ourselves unable to find any
satisfactory record of any great nation, past or present, in which the working
classes have been in a more comfortable situation than in England during the
last thirty years. When this island was thinly peopled, it was barbarous: there
was little capital; and that little was insecure. It is now the richest and most
highly civilized spot in the world; but the population is dense. Thus we have
never known that golden age which the lower orders in the United States are now
enjoying. We have never known an age of liberty, of order, and of education, an
age in which the mechanical sciences were carried to a great height, yet in
which the people were not sufficiently numerous to cultivate even the most
fertile valleys. But, when we compare our own condition with that of our
ancestors, we think it clear that the advantages arising from the progress of
civilization have far more than counterbalanced the disadvantages arising from
the progress of population. While our numbers have increased tenfold, our wealth
has increased a hundredfold. Though there are so many more people to share the
wealth now existing in the country than there were in the sixteenth century, it
seems certain that a greater share falls to almost every individual than fell to
the share of any of the corresponding class in the sixteenth century. The King
keeps a more splendid court. The establishments of the nobles are more
magnificent. The esquires are richer; the merchants are richer; the shopkeepers
are richer. The serving-man, the artisan, and the husbandman, have a more
copious and palatable supply of food, better clothing, and better furniture.
This is no reason for tolerating abuses, or for neglecting any means of
ameliorating the condition of our poorer countrymen. But it is a reason against
telling them, as some of our philosophers are constantly telling them, that they
are the most wretched people who ever existed on the face of the earth.
We have already adverted to Mr. Southey's amusing doctrine about national
wealth. A state, says he, cannot be too rich; but a people may be too rich. His
reason for thinking this is extremely curious.
"A people may be too rich, because it is the tendency of the commercial, and
more especially of the manufacturing system, to collect wealth rather than to
diffuse it. Where wealth is necessarily employed in any of the speculations of
trade, its increase is in proportion to its amount. Great capitalists become
like pikes in a fish-pond who devour the weaker fish; and it is but too certain,
that the poverty of one part of the people seems to increase in the same ratio
as the riches of another. There are examples of this in history. In Portugal,
when the high tide of wealth flowed in from the conquests in Africa and the
East, the effect of that great influx was not more visible in the augmented
splendor of the court, and the luxury of the higher ranks, than in the distress
of the people."
Mr. Southey's instance is not a very fortunate one. The wealth which did so
little for the Portuguese was not the fruit either of manufactures or of
commerce carried on by private individuals. It was the wealth, not of the
people, but of the Government and its creatures, of those who, as Mr. Southey
thinks, can never be too rich. The fact is, that Mr. Southey's proposition is
opposed to all history, and to the phenomena which surround us on every side.
England is the richest country in Europe, the most commercial country, and the
country in which manufactures flourish most. Russia and Poland are the poorest
countries in Europe. They have scarcely any trade, and none but the rudest
manufactures. Is wealth more diffused in Russia and Poland than in England?
There are individuals in Russia and Poland whose incomes are probably equal to
those of our richest countrymen. It may be doubted whether there are not, in
those countries, as many fortunes of eighty thousand a year as here. But are
there as many fortunes of two thousand a year, or of one thousand a year? There
are parishes in England which contain more people of between three hundred and
three thousand pounds a year than could be found in all the dominions of the
Emperor Nicholas. The neat and commodious houses which have been built in London
and its vicinity, for people of this class, within the last thirty years, would
of themselves form a city larger than the capitals of some European kingdoms.
And this is the state of society in which the great proprietors have devoured a
smaller!
The cure which Mr. Southey thinks that he has discovered is worthy of the
sagacity which he has shown in detecting the evil. The calamities arising from
the collection of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists are to be remedied by
collecting it in the hands of one great capitalist, who has no conceivable
motive to use it better than other capitalists, the all-devouring State.
It is not strange that, differing so widely from Mr. Southey as to the past
progress of society, we should differ from him also as to its probable destiny.
He thinks, that to all outward appearance, the country is hastening to
destruction; but he relies firmly on the goodness of God. We do not see either
the piety or the rationality of thus confidently expecting that the Supreme
Being will interfere to disturb the common succession of causes and effects. We,
too, rely on his goodness, on his goodness as manifested, not in extraordinary
interpositions, but in those general laws which it has pleased him to establish
in the physical and in the moral world. We rely on the natural tendency of the
human intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency of society to improvement.
We know no well-authenticated instance of a people which has decidedly
retrograded in civilization and prosperity, except from the influence of violent
and terrible calamities, such as those which laid the Roman Empire in ruins, or
those which, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, desolated Italy. We
know of no country which, at the end of fifty years of peace and tolerably good
government, has been less prosperous than at the beginning of that period. The
political importance of a state may decline, as the balance of power is
disturbed by the introduction of new forces. Thus the influence of Holland and
of Spain is much diminished. But are Holland and Spain poorer than formerly? We
doubt it. Other countries have outrun them. But we suspect that they have been
positively, though not relatively, advancing. We suspect that Holland is richer
than when she sent her navies up the Thames, that Spain is richer than when a
French king was brought captive to the footstool of Charles the Fifth.
History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We see in
almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals,
struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous
prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates faster than governments
can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can destroy. We see the wealth of
nations increasing, and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to
perfection, in spite of the grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the
part of rulers.
The present moment is one of great distress. But how small will that distress
appear when we think over the history of the last forty years; a war, compared
with which all other wars sink into insignificance; taxation, such as the most
heavily taxed people of former times could not have conceived; a debt larger
than all the public debts that ever existed in the world added together; the
food of the people studiously rendered dear; the currency imprudently debased,
and imprudently restored. Yet is the country poorer than in 1790? We firmly
believe that, in spite of all the misgovernment of her rulers, she has been
almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has been a
stoppage, now and then a short retrogression; but as to the general tendency
there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently
coming in.
If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions,
better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these
islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest
parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that cultivation, rich as that of
a flower-garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn,
that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house,
that there will be no highways but railroads, no traveling but by steam, that
our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our great-grandchildren a
trifling encumbrance, which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many
people would think us insane. We prophesy nothing; but this we say: If any
person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the
crash in 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest
dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which
they considered as an intolerable burden, that for one man of ten thousand
pounds then living there would be five men of fifty thousand pounds, that London
would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of
mortality would have diminished to one-half of what it then was, that the
post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had
brought in together under Charles the Second, that stage coaches would run from
London to York in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing
without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would
have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.
Yet the prediction would have been true; and they would have perceived that it
was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that the country was then
raising every year a sum which would have purchased the fee-simple of the
revenue of the Plantagenets, ten times what supported the Government of
Elizabeth, three times what, in the time of Cromwell, had been thought
intolerably oppressive. To almost all men the state of things under which they
have been used to live seems to be the necessary state of things. We have heard
it said that five per cent. is the natural interest of money, that twelve is the
natural number of a jury, that forty shillings is the natural qualification of a
county voter. Hence it is that, though in every age everybody knows that up to
his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody seems to
reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove
that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point,
that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with
just as much apparent reason.
"A million a year will beggar us," said the patriots of 1640. "Two millions a
year will grind the country to powder," was the cry in 1660. "Six millions a
year, and a debt of fifty millions!" exclaimed Swift, "the high allies have been
the ruin of us." "A hundred and forty millions of debt!" said Junius; "well may
we say that we owe Lord Chatham more than we shall ever pay, if we owe him such
a load as this." "Two hundred and forty millions of debt!" cried all the
statesmen of 1783 in chorus; "what abilities, or what economy on the part of a
minister, can save a country so burdened?" We know that if, since 1783, no fresh
debt had been incurred, the increased resources of the country would have
enabled us to defray that debt at which Pitt, Fox, and Burke stood aghast, nay,
to defray it over and over again, and that with much lighter taxation than what
we have actually borne. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but
improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey's idol, the omniscient and
omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has
hitherto been carried forward in civilization; and it is to the same prudence
and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will
best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to
their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative
course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural
reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by
defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict
economy in every department of the State. Let the Government do this: the People
will assuredly do the rest.
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