Chapter VI: Letter IV: To the Earl Fitzwilliam (4)

In conversation I have not yet found nor heard of any persons, except those who undertake to instruct the public, so unconscious of the actual state of things, or so little prescient of the future, who do not shudder all over and feel a secret horror at the approach of this communication. I do not except from this observation those who are willing, more than I find myself disposed, to submit to this fraternity. Never has it been mentioned in my hearing, or from what I can learn in my inquiry, without the suggestion of an Alien Bill, or some other measures of the same nature, as a defence against its manifest mischief. Who does not see the utter insufficiency of such a remedy, if such a remedy could be at all adopted? We expel suspected foreigners from hence; and we suffer every Englishman to pass over into France to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place, to cabal and to be corrupted by every means of cabal and of corruption, and then to return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs. In France he is out of the reach of your police; and when he returns to England, one such English emissary is worse than a legion of French, who are either tongue-tied, or whose speech betrays them. But the worst aliens are the ambassador and his train. These you cannot expel without a proof (always difficult) of direct practice against the state. A French ambassador, at the head of a French party, is an evil which we have never experienced. The mischief is by far more visible than the remedy. But, after all, every such measure as an Alien Bill is a measure of hostility, a preparation for it, or a cause of dispute that shall bring it on. In effect, it is fundamentally contrary to a relation of amity, whose essence is a perfectly free communication. Everything done to prevent it will provoke a foreign war. Everything, when we let it proceed, will produce domestic distraction. We shall be in a perpetual dilemma. But it is easy to see which side of the dilemma will be taken. The same temper which brings us to solicit a Jacobin peace will induce us to temporize with all the evils of it. By degrees our minds will be made to our circumstances. The novelty of such things, which produces half the horror and all the disgust, will be worn off. Our ruin will be disguised in profit, and the sale of a few wretched baubles will bribe a degenerate people to barter away the most precious jewel of their souls. Our Constitution is not made for this kind of warfare. It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence. It is formed, in a great measure, upon the principle of jealousy of the crown,--and as things stood, when it took that turn, with very great reason. I go farther: it must keep alive some part of that fire of jealousy eternally and chastely burning, or it cannot be the British Constitution. At various periods we have had tyranny in this country, more than enough. We have had rebellions with more or less justification. Some of our kings have made adulterous connections abroad, and trucked away for foreign gold the interests and glory of their crown. But, before this time, our liberty has never been corrupted. I mean to say, that it has never been debauched from its domestic relations. To this time it has been English liberty, and English liberty only. Our love of liberty and our love of our country were not distinct things. Liberty is now, it seems, put upon a larger and more liberal bottom. We are men,--and as men, undoubtedly, nothing human is foreign to us. We cannot be too liberal in our general wishes for the happiness of our kind. But in all questions on the mode of procuring it for any particular community, we ought to be fearful of admitting those who have no interest in it, or who have, perhaps, an interest against it, into the consultation. Above all, we cannot be too cautious in our communication with those who seek their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion, and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those restraints which are imposed by the virtues upon the passions.

When we invite danger from a confidence in defensive measures, we ought, first of all, to be sure that it is a species of danger against which any defensive measures that can be adopted will be sufficient. Next, we ought to know that the spirit of our laws, or that our own dispositions, which are stronger than laws, are susceptible of all those defensive measures which the occasion may require. A third consideration is, whether these measures will not bring more odium than strength to government; and the last, whether the authority that makes them, in a general corruption of manners and principles, can insure their execution. Let no one argue, from the state of things, as he sees them at present, concerning what will be the means and capacities of government, when the time arrives which shall call for remedies commensurate to enormous evils.

It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men. These are what no constitution can give: they are the gifts of God; and He alone knows whether we shall possess such gifts at the time we stand in need of them. Constitutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural: it is all that in this case they can do. But our Constitution has more impediments than helps. Its excellencies, when they come to be put to this sort of proof, may be found among its defects.

Nothing looks more awful and imposing than an ancient fortification. Its lofty, embattled walls, its bold, projecting, rounded towers, that pierce the sky, strike the imagination and promise inexpugnable strength. But they are the very things that make its weakness. You may as well think of opposing one of these old fortresses to the mass of artillery brought by a French irruption into the field as to think of resisting by your old laws and your old forms the new destruction which the corps of Jacobin engineers of to-day prepare for all such forms and all such laws. Besides the debility and false principle of their construction to resist the present modes of attack, the fortress itself is in ruinous repair, and there is a practicable breach in every part of it.

Such is the work. But miserable works have been defended by the constancy of the garrison. Weather-beaten ships have been brought safe to port by the spirit and alertness of the crew. But it is here that we shall eminently fail. The day that, by their consent, the seat of Regicide has its place among the thrones of Europe, there is no longer a motive for zeal in their favor; it will at best be cold, unimpassioned, dejected, melancholy duty. The glory will seem all on the other side. The friends of the crown will appear, not as champions, but as victims; discountenanced, mortified, lowered, defeated, they will fall into listlessness and indifference. They will leave things to take their course, enjoy the present hour, and submit to the common fate.

Is it only an oppressive nightmare with which we have been loaded? Is it, then, all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the world? Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian who would not suffer his benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped for execution, to say one parting word to his deluded people,--of Santerre, who commanded the drums and trumpets to strike up to stifle his voice, and dragged him backward to the machine of murder! This nefarious villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in a republic of robbers and murderers he ought. What hinders this monster from being sent as ambassador to convey to his Majesty the first compliments of his brethren, the Regicide Directory? They have none that can represent them more properly. I anticipate the day of his arrival. He will make his public entry into London on one of the pale horses of his brewery. As he knows that we are pleased with the Paris taste for the orders of knighthood,[13] he will fling a bloody sash across his shoulders, with the order of the holy guillotine surmounting the crown appendant to the riband. Thus adorned, he will proceed from Whitechapel to the further end of Pall Mall, all the music of London playing the Marseillaise Hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of the _Légion de l'Échafaud_. It were only to be wished that no ill-fated loyalist, for the imprudence of his zeal, may stand in the pillory at Charing Cross, under the statue of King Charles the First, at the time of this grand procession, lest some of the rotten eggs which the Constitutional Society shall let fly at his indiscreet head may hit the virtuous murderer of his king. They might soil the state dress which the ministers of so many crowned heads have admired, and in which Sir Clement Cotterel is to introduce him at St. James's.

If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home, Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage. He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of the Departments. Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall at the next Sheriff's feast. He may open the ball with my Lady Mayoress. But this will be after he has retired from the public table, and gone into the private room for the enjoyment of more social and unreserved conversation with the ministers of state and the judges of the bench. There these ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain the worthy aldermen with an instructing and pleasing narrative of the manner in which he made the rich citizens of Bordeaux squeak, and gently led them by the public credit of the guillotine to disgorge their anti-revolutionary pelf.

All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendor of the _Hôtel de la République_. There another scene of gaudy grandeur will be opened. When his Citizen Excellency keeps the festival, which every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a grand ball of course will be given on the occasion. Then what a hurly-burly! what a crowding! what a glare of a thousand flambeaux in the square! what a clamor of footmen contending at the door! what a rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys, choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle who should be first to pay her court to the _Citoyenne_, the spouse of the twenty-first husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the rank of honorable matrons before the four days' duration of marriage is expired!--Morals, as they were, decorum, the great outguard of the sex, and the proud sentiment of honor, which makes virtue more respectable, where it is, and conceals human frailty, where virtue may not be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve.

We had before an ambassador from the most Christian King. We shall have then one, perhaps two, as lately, from the most Anti-Christian Republic. His chapel will be great and splendid, formed on the model of the Temple of Reason at Paris; while the famous ode of the infamous Chénier will be sung, and a prostitute of the street adored as a goddess. We shall then have a French ambassador without a suspicion of Popery. One good it will have: it will go some way in quieting the minds of that synod of zealous Protestant lay elders who govern Ireland on the pacific principles of polemic theology, and who now, from dread of the Pope, cannot take a cool bottle of claret, or enjoy an innocent Parliamentary job, with any tolerable quiet.

So far as to the French communication here:--what will be the effect of our communication there? We know that our new brethren, whilst they everywhere shut up the churches, increased in Paris, at one time at least fourfold, the opera-houses, the playhouses, the public shows of all kinds; and even in their state of indigence and distress, no expense was spared for their equipment and decoration. They were made an affair of state. There is no invention of seduction, never wholly wanting in that place, that has not been increased,--brothels, gaming-houses, everything. And there is no doubt, but, when they are settled in a triumphant peace, they will carry all these arts to their utmost perfection, and cover them with every species of imposing magnificence. They have all along avowed them as a part of their policy; and whilst they corrupt young minds through pleasure, they form them to crimes. Every idea of corporal gratification is carried to the highest excess, and wooed with all the elegance that belongs to the senses. All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. Any one, who attends to all their own descriptions, narratives, and dissertations, will find in that whole place more of the air of a body of assassins, banditti, housebreakers, and outlawed smugglers, joined to that of a gang of strolling players expelled from and exploded orderly theatres, with their prostitutes in a brothel, at their debauches and bacchanals, than anything of the refined and perfected virtues, or the polished, mitigated vices of a great capital.

Is it for this benefit we open "the usual relations of peace and amity"? Is it for this our youth of both sexes are to form themselves by travel? Is it for this that with expense and pains we form their lisping infant accents to the language of France? I shall be told that this abominable medley is made rather to revolt young and ingenuous minds. So it is in the description. So perhaps it may in reality to a chosen few. So it may be, when the magistrate, the law, and the church frown on such manners, and the wretches to whom they belong,--when they are chased from the eye of day, and the society of civil life, into night-cellars and caves and woods. But when these men themselves are the magistrates,--when all the consequence, weight, and authority of a great nation adopt them,--when we see them conjoined with victory, glory, power, and dominion, and homage paid to them by every government,--it is not possible that the downhill should not be slid into, recommended by everything which has opposed it. Let it be remembered that no young man can go to any part of Europe without taking this place of pestilential contagion in his way; and whilst the less active part of the community will be debauched by this travel, whilst children are poisoned at these schools, our trade will put the finishing hand to our ruin. No factory will be settled in France, that will not become a club of complete French Jacobins. The minds of young men of that description will receive a taint in their religion, their morals, and their politics, which they will in a short time communicate to the whole kingdom.

Whilst everything prepares the body to debauch and the mind to crime, a regular church of avowed atheism, established by law, with a direct and sanguinary persecution of Christianity, is formed to prevent all amendment and remorse. Conscience is formally deposed from its dominion over the mind. What fills the measure of horror is, that schools of atheism are set up at the public charge in every part of the country. That some English parents will be wicked enough to send their children to such schools there is no doubt. Better this island should be sunk to the bottom of the sea than that (so far as human infirmity admits) it should not be a country of religion and morals!

With all these causes of corruption, we may well judge what the general fashion of mind will be through both sexes and all conditions. Such spectacles and such examples will overbear all the laws that ever blackened the cumbrous volumes of our statutes. When royalty shall have disavowed itself,--when it shall have relaxed all the principles of its own support,--when it has rendered the system of Regicide fashionable, and received it as triumphant, in the very persons who have consolidated that system by the perpetration, of every crime, who have not only massacred the prince, but the very laws and magistrates which were the support of royalty, and slaughtered with an indiscriminate proscription, without regard to either sex or age, every person that was suspected of an inclination to king, law, or magistracy,--I say, will any one dare to be loyal? Will any one presume, against both authority and opinion, to hold up this unfashionable, antiquated, exploded Constitution?

The Jacobin faction in England must grow in strength and audacity; it will be supported by other intrigues and supplied by other resources than yet we have seen in action. Confounded at its growth, the government may fly to Parliament for its support. But who will answer for the temper of a House of Commons elected under these circumstances? Who will answer for the courage of a House of Commons to arm the crown with the extraordinary powers that it may demand? But the ministers will not venture to ask half of what they know they want. They will lose half of that half in the contest; and when they have obtained their nothing, they will be driven by the cries of faction either to demolish the feeble works they have thrown up in a hurry, or, in effect, to abandon them. As to the House of Lords, it is not worth mentioning. The peers ought naturally to be the pillars of the crown; but when their titles are rendered contemptible, and their property invidious, and a part of their weakness, and not of their strength, they will be found so many degraded and trembling individuals, who will seek by evasion to put off the evil day of their ruin. Both Houses will be in perpetual oscillation between abortive attempts at energy and still more unsuccessful attempts at compromise. You will be impatient of your disease, and abhorrent of your remedy. A spirit of subterfuge and a tone of apology will enter into all your proceedings, whether of law or legislation. Your judges, who now sustain so masculine an authority, will appear more on their trial than the culprits they have before them. The awful frown of criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction. Judges will think to insinuate and soothe the accused into conviction and condemnation, and to wheedle to the gallows the most artful of all delinquents. But they will not be so wheedled. They will not submit even to the appearance of persons on their trial. Their claim to this exemption will be admitted. The place in which some of the greatest names which ever distinguished the history of this country have stood will appear beneath their dignity. The criminal will climb from the dock to the side-bar, and take his place and his tea with the counsel. From the bar of the counsel, by a natural progress, he will ascend to the bench, which long before had been virtually abandoned. They who escape from justice will not suffer a question upon reputation. They will take the crown of the causeway; they will be revered as martyrs; they will triumph as conquerors. Nobody will dare to censure that popular part of the tribunal whose only restraint on misjudgment is the censure of the public. They who find fault with the decision will be represented as enemies to the institution. Juries that convict for the crown will be loaded with obloquy. The juries who acquit will be held up as models of justice. If Parliament orders a prosecution, and fails, (as fail it will,) it will be treated to its face as guilty of a conspiracy maliciously to prosecute. Its care in discovering a conspiracy against the state will be treated as a forged plot to destroy the liberty of the subject: every such discovery, instead of strengthening government, will weaken its reputation.

In this state things will be suffered to proceed, lest measures of vigor should precipitate a crisis. The timid will act thus from character, the wise from necessity. Our laws had done all that the old condition of things dictated to render our judges erect and independent; but they will naturally fail on the side upon which they had taken no precautions. The judicial magistrates will find themselves safe as against the crown, whose will is not their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame or abuse as they think fit. They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands. They will speculate on consequences, when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges. It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the criminal of to-day turned into the magistrate of to-morrow.

The press------

The army------

When thus the helm of justice is abandoned, an universal abandonment of all other posts will succeed. Government will be for a while the sport of contending factions, who, whilst they fight with one another, will all strike at her. She will be buffeted and beat forward and backward by the conflict of those billows, until at length, tumbling from the Gallic coast, the victorious tenth wave shall ride, like the bore, over all the rest, and poop the shattered, weather-beaten, leaky, water-logged vessel, and sink her to the bottom of the abyss.

Among other miserable remedies that have been found in the _materia medica_, of the old college, a change of ministry will be proposed, and probably will take place. They who go out can never long with zeal and good-will support government in the hands of those they hate. In a situation of fatal dependence on popularity, and without one aid from the little remaining power of the crown, it is not to be expected that they will take on them that odium which more or less attaches upon every exertion of strong power. The ministers of popularity will lose all their credit at a stroke, if they pursue any of those means necessary to give life, vigor, and consistence to government. They will be considered as venal wretches, apostates, recreant to all their own principles, acts, and declarations. They cannot preserve their credit, but by betraying that authority of which they are the guardians.

To be sure, no prognosticating symptoms of these things have as yet appeared,--nothing even resembling their beginnings. May they never appear! May these prognostications of the author be justly laughed at and speedily forgotten! If nothing as yet to cause them has discovered itself, let us consider, in the author's excuse, that we have not yet seen a Jacobin legation in England. The natural, declared, sworn ally of sedition has not yet fixed its head-quarters in London.

There never was a political contest, upon better or worse grounds, that by the heat of party-spirit may not ripen into civil confusion. If ever a party adverse to the crown should be in a condition here publicly to declare itself, and to divide, however unequally, the natural force of the kingdom, they are sure of an aid of fifty thousand men, at ten days' warning, from the opposite coast of France. But against this infusion of a foreign force the crown has its guaranties, old and new. But I should be glad to hear something said of the assistance which loyal subjects in France have received from other powers in support of that lawful government which secured their lawful property. I should be glad to know, if they are so disposed to a neighborly, provident, and sympathetic attention to their public engagements, by what means they are to come at us. Is it from the powerful states of Holland we are to reclaim our guaranty? Is it from the King of Prussia, and his steady good affections, and his powerful navy, that we are to look for the guaranty of our security? Is it from the Netherlands, which the French may cover with the swarms of their citizen-soldiers in twenty-four hours, that we are to look for this assistance? This is to suppose, too, that all these powers have no views offensive or necessities defensive of their own. They will cut out work for one another, and France will cut out work for them all.

That the Christian religion cannot exist in this country with such a fraternity will not, I think, be disputed with me. On that religion, according to our mode, all our laws and institutions stand, as upon their base. That scheme is supposed in every transaction of life; and if that were done away, everything else, as in France, must be changed along with it. Thus, religion perishing, and with it this Constitution, it is a matter of endless meditation what order of things would follow it. But what disorder would fill the space between the present and that which is to come, in the gross, is no matter of doubtful conjecture. It is a great evil, that of a civil war. But, in that state of things, a civil war, which would give to good men and a good cause some means of struggle, is a blessing of comparison that England will not enjoy. The moment the struggle begins, it ends. They talk of Mr. Hume's euthanasia of the British Constitution gently expiring, without a groan, in the paternal arms of a mere monarchy. In a monarchy!--fine trifling indeed!--there is no such euthanasia for the British Constitution.

* * * * *

The manuscript copy of this Letter ends here.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Here I have fallen into an unintentional mistake. Rider's Almanack for 1794 lay before me; and, in troth, I then had no other. For variety, that sage astrologer has made some small changes on the weather side of 1795; but the caution is the same on the opposite page of instruction.

[10] _Souverains opprimés_.--See the whole proceeding in the _Procès-Verbal_ of the National Assembly.

[11]

Hic auratis volitans argenteus anser
Porticibus GALLOS in limine adesse canebat.

[12] See debates in Parliament upon motions made in both Houses for prosecuting Mr. Reeves for a libel upon the Constitution, Dec., 1795.

[13] "In the costume assumed by the members of the legislative body we almost behold the revival of the extinguished insignia of knighthood," &c., &c.--See _A View of the Relative State of Great Britain and France at the Commencement of the Year_ 1796.

A

LETTER

TO

THE EMPRESS OF RUSSIA.

NOVEMBER 1, 1791.

Madam,--The Comte de Woronzow, your Imperial Majesty's minister, and Mr. Fawkener, have informed me of the very gracious manner in which your Imperial Majesty, and, after your example, the Archduke and Archduchess, have condescended to accept my humble endeavors in the service of that cause which connects the rights and duties of sovereigns with the true interest and happiness of their people.

If, confiding in titles derived from your own goodness, I venture to address directly to your Imperial Majesty the expressions of my gratitude for so distinguished an honor, I hope it will not be thought a presumptuous intrusion. I hope, too, that the willing homage I pay to the high and ruling virtues which distinguish your Imperial Majesty, and which form the felicity of so large a part of the world, will not be looked upon as the language of adulation to power and greatness. In my humble situation, I can behold majesty in its splendor without being dazzled, and I am capable of respecting it in its fall.

It is, Madam, from my strong sense of what is due to dignity in undeserved misfortune, that I am led to felicitate your Imperial Majesty on the use you have lately made of your power. The princes and nobility of France, who from honor and duty, from blood and from principle, are attached to that unhappy crown, have experienced your favor and countenance; and there is no doubt that they will finally enjoy the full benefit of your protection. The generosity of your Imperial Majesty has induced you to take an interest in their cause; and your sagacity has made you perceive that in the case of the sovereign of France the cause of all sovereigns is tried,--that in the case of its church, the cause of all churches,--and that in the case of its nobility is tried the cause of all the respectable orders of all society, and even of society itself.

Your Imperial Majesty has sent your minister to reside where the crown of France, in this disastrous eclipse of royalty, can alone truly and freely be represented, that is, in its royal blood,--where alone the nation can be represented, that is, in its natural and inherent dignity. A throne cannot be represented by a prison. The honor of a nation cannot be represented by an assembly which disgraces and degrades it: at Coblentz only the king and the nation of France are to be found.

Your Imperial Majesty, who reigns and lives for glory, has nobly and wisely disdained to associate your crown with a faction which has for its object the subversion of all thrones.

You have not recognized this universal public enemy as a part of the system of Europe. You have refused to sully the lustre of your empire by any communion with a body of fanatical usurpers and tyrants, drawn out of the dregs of society, and exalted to their evil eminence by the enormity of their crimes,--an assemblage of tyrants, wholly destitute of any distinguished qualification in a single person amongst them, that can command reverence from our reason, or seduce it from our prejudices. These enemies of sovereigns, if at all acknowledged, must be acknowledged on account of that enmity alone: they have nothing else to recommend them.

Madam, it is dangerous to praise any human virtue before the accomplishment of the tasks which it imposes on itself. But in expressing my part of what I hope is, or will become, the general voice, in admiration of what you have done, I run no risk at all. With your Imperial Majesty, declaration and execution, beginning and conclusion, are, at their different seasons, one and the same thing.

On the faith and declaration of some of the first potentates of Europe, several thousands of persons, comprehending the best men and the best gentlemen in France, have given up their country, their houses, their fortunes, their professional situation, their all, and are now in foreign lands, struggling under the most grievous distresses. Whatever appearances may menace, nobody fears that they can be finally abandoned. Such a dereliction could not be without a strong imputation on the public and private honor of sovereignty itself, nor without an irreparable injury to its interests. It would give occasion to represent monarchs as natural enemies to each other, and that they never support or countenance any subjects of a brother prince, except when they rebel against him. We individuals, mere spectators of the scene, but who sock our liberties under the shade of legal authority, and of course sympathize with the sufferers in that cause, never can permit ourselves to believe that such an event can disgrace the history of our time. The only thing to be feared is delay, in winch are included many mischiefs. The constancy of the oppressed will be broken; the power of tyrants will be confirmed. Already the multitude of French officers, drawn from their several corps by hopes inspired by the freely declared disposition of sovereigns, have left all the posts in which they might one day have effectually served the good cause abandoned to the enemy.

Tour Imperial Majesty's just influence, which is still greater than your extensive power, will animate and expedite the efforts of other sovereigns. From your wisdom other states will learn that they who wait until all the powers of Europe are at once in motion can never move at all. It would add to the unexampled calamities of our time, if the uncommon union of sentiment in so many powers should prove the very cause of defeating the benefit which ought to flow from their general good disposition. No sovereign can run any risk from the designs of other powers, whilst engaged in tins glorious and necessary work. If any attempt could be feared, your Imperial Majesty's power and justice would secure your allies against all danger. Madam, your glory will be complete, if, after having given peace to Europe by your moderation, you shall bestow stability on all its governments by your vigor and decision. The debt which your Imperial Majesty's august predecessors have contracted to the ancient manners of Europe, by means of which they civilized a vast empire, will be nobly repaid by preserving those manners from the hideous change with which they are now menaced. By the intervention of Russia the world will be preserved from barbarism and ruin.

A private individual, of a remote country, in himself wholly without importance, unauthorized and unconnected, not as an English subject, but as a citizen of the world, presumes to submit his thoughts to one of the greatest and wisest sovereigns that Europe has seen. He does it without fear, because he does not involve in his weakness (if such it is) his king, his country, or his friends. He is not' afraid that he shall offend your Imperial Majesty,--because, secure in itself, true greatness is always accessible, and because respectfully to speak what we conceive to be truth is the best homage which can be paid to true dignity.

I am, Madam, with the utmost possible respect and veneration,

Your Imperial Majesty's

Most obedient and most humble servant,

EDM. BURKE.

BEACONSFIELD, November 1st, 1791.

A

LETTER

TO

SIR CHARLES BINGHAM, BART.,

ON THE

IRISH ABSENTEE TAX.

OCTOBER 30, 1773.

NOTE.

From authentic documents found with the copy of this Letter
among Mr. Burke's papers, it appears that in the year 1773 a
project of imposing a tax upon all proprietors of landed
estates in Ireland, whose ordinary residence should be in
Great Britain, had been adopted and avowed by his Majesty's
ministers at that time. A remonstrance against this measure,
as highly unjust and impolitic, was presented to the
ministers by several of the principal Irish absentees, and
the project was subsequently abandoned.

LETTER.

Dear Sir,--I am much flattered by your very obliging letter, and the rather because it promises an opening to our future correspondence. This may be my only indemnification for very great losses. One of the most odious parts of the proposed Absentee Tax is its tendency to separate friends, and to make as ugly breaches in private society as it must make in the unity of the great political body. I am sure that much of the satisfaction of some circles in London will be lost by it. Do you think that our friend Mrs. Vesey will suffer her husband to vote for a tax that is to destroy the evenings at Bolton Row? I trust we shall have other supporters of the same sex, equally powerful, and equally deserving to be so, who will not abandon the common cause of their own liberties and our satisfactions. We shall be barbarized on both sides of the water, if we do not see one another now and then. _We_ shall sink into surly, brutish Johns, and _you_ will degenerate into wild Irish. It is impossible that we should be the wiser or the more agreeable, certainly we shall not love one another the better, for this forced separation, which our ministers, who have already done so much for the dissolution of every other sort of good connection, are now meditating for the further improvement of this too well united empire. Their next step will be to encourage all the colonies, about thirty separate governments, to keep their people from all intercourse with each other and with the mother country. A gentleman of New York or Barbadoes will be as much gazed at as a strange animal from Nova Zembla or Otaheite; and those rogues, the travellers, will tell us what stories they please about poor old Ireland.

In all seriousness, (though I am a great deal more than half serious in what I have been saying,) I look upon this projected tax in a very evil light; I think it is not advisable; I am sure it is not necessary; and as it is not a mere matter of finance, but involves a political question of much, importance, I consider the principle and precedent as far worse than the thing itself. You are too kind in imagining I can suggest anything new upon the subject. The objections to it are very glaring, and must strike the eyes of all those who have not their reasons for shutting them against evident truth. I have no feelings or opinions on this subject which I do not partake with all the sensible and informed people that I meet with. At first I could scarcely meet with any one who could believe that this scheme originated from the English government. They considered it not only as absurd, but as something monstrous and unnatural. In the first instance, it strikes at the power of this country; in the end, at the union of the whole empire. I do not mean to express, most certainly I do not entertain in my mind, anything invidious concerning the superintending authority of Great Britain. But if it be true that the several bodies which make up this complicated mass are to be preserved as one empire, an authority sufficient to preserve that unity, and by its equal weight and pressure to consolidate the various parts that compose it, must reside somewhere: that somewhere can only be in England. Possibly any one member, distinctly taken, might decide in favor of that residence within itself; but certainly no member would give its voice for any other except this. So that I look upon the residence of the supreme power to be settled here: not by force, or tyranny, or even by mere long usage, but by the very nature of things, and the joint consent of the whole body.

If all this be admitted, then without question this country must have the sole right to the imperial legislation: by which I mean that law which regulates the polity and economy of the several parts, as they relate to one another and to the whole. But if any of the parts, which (not for oppression, but for order) are placed in a subordinate situation, will assume to themselves the power of hindering or checking the resort of their municipal subjects to the centre, or even to any other part of the empire, they arrogate to themselves the imperial rights, which do not, which cannot, belong to them, and, so far as in them lies, destroy the happy arrangement of the entire empire.

A free communication by _discretionary residence_ is necessary to all the other purposes of communication. For what purpose are the Irish and Plantation laws sent hither, but as means of preserving this sovereign constitution? Whether such a constitution was originally right or wrong this is not the time of day to dispute. If any evils arise from it, let us not strip it of what may be useful in it. By taking the English Privy Council into your legislature, you obtain a new, a further, and possibly a more liberal consideration of all your acts. If a local legislature shall by oblique means tend to deprive any of the people of this benefit, and shall make it penal to them to follow into England the laws which may affect them, then the English Privy Council will have to decide upon your acts without those lights that may enable them to judge upon what grounds you made them, or how far they ought to be modified, received, or rejected.

To what end is the ultimate appeal in judicature lodged in this kingdom, if men may be disabled from following their suits here, and may be taxed into an absolute _denied of justice_? You observe, my dear Sir, that I do not assert that in all cases two shillings will necessarily cut off this means of correcting legislative and judicial mistakes, and thus amount to a denial of justice. I might, indeed, state cases in which this very quantum of tax would be fully sufficient to defeat this right. But I argue not on the case, but on the principle, and I am sure the principle implies it. They who may restrain may prohibit; they who may impose two shillings may impose ten shillings in the pound; and those who may condition the tax to six months' annual absence may carry that condition to six weeks, or even to six days, and thereby totally defeat the wise means which have been provided for extensive and impartial justice, and for orderly, well-poised, and well-connected government.

What is taxing the resort to and residence in any place, but declaring that your connection with that place is a grievance? Is not such an Irish tax as is now proposed a virtual declaration that England is a foreign country, and a renunciation on your part of the principle of _common naturalization_, which runs through this whole empire?

Do you, or does any Irish gentleman, think it a mean privilege, that, the moment he sets his foot upon this ground, he is to all intents and purposes an Englishman? You will not be pleased with a law which by its operation tends to disqualify you from a seat in this Parliament; and if your own virtue or fortune, or if that of your children, should carry you or them to it, should you like to be excluded from the possibility of a peerage in this kingdom? If in Ireland we lay it down as a maxim, that a residence in Great Britain is a political evil, and to be discouraged by penal taxes, you must necessarily reject all the privileges and benefits which are connected with such a residence.

I can easily conceive that a citizen of Dublin, who looks no further than his counter, may think that Ireland will be repaid for such a loss by any small diminution of taxes, or any increase in the circulation of money that may be laid out in the purchase of claret or groceries in his corporation. In such a man an error of that kind, as it would be natural, would be excusable. But I cannot think that any educated man, any man who looks with an enlightened eye on the interest of Ireland, can believe that it is not highly for the advantage of Ireland, that this Parliament, which, whether right or wrong, whether we will or not, will make some laws to bind Ireland, should always have in it some persons who by connection, by property, or by early prepossessions and affections, are attached to the welfare of that country. I am so clear upon this point, not only from the clear reason of the thing, but from the constant course of my observation, by now having sat eight sessions in Parliament, that I declare it to you as my sincere opinion, that (if you must do either the one or the other) it would be wiser by far, and far better for Ireland, that some new privileges should attend the estates of Irishmen, members of the two Houses here, than that their characters should be stained by penal impositions, and their properties loaded by unequal and unheard-of modes of taxation. I do really trust, that, when the matter comes a little to be considered, a majority of our gentlemen will never consent to establish such a principle of disqualification against themselves and their posterity, and, for the sake of gratifying the schemes of a transitory administration of the cockpit or the castle, or in compliance with the lightest part of the most vulgar and transient popularity, fix so irreparable an injury on the permanent interest of their country.

This law seems, therefore, to me to go directly against the fundamental points of the legislative and judicial constitution of these kingdoms, and against the happy communion of their privileges. But there is another matter in the tax proposed, that contradicts as essentially a very great principle necessary for preserving the union of the various parts of a state; because it does, in effect, discountenance mutual intermarriage and inheritance, things that bind countries more closely together than any laws or constitutions whatsoever. Is it right that a woman who marries into Ireland, and perhaps well purchases her jointure or her dower there, should not after her husband's death have it in her choice to return to her country and her friends without being taxed for it? If an Irish heiress should marry into an English family, and that great property in both countries should thereby come to be united in this common issue, shall the descendant of that marriage abandon his natural connection, his family interests, his public and his private duties, and be compelled to take up his residence in Ireland? Is there any sense or any justice in it, unless you affirm that there should be no such intermarriage and no such mutual inheritance between the natives? Is there a shadow of reason, that, because a Lord Rockingham, a Duke of Devonshire, a Sir George Savile, possess property in Ireland, which has descended to them without any act of theirs, they should abandon their duty in Parliament, and spend the winters in Dublin? or, having spent the session in Westminster, must they abandon their seats and all their family interests in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and pass the rest of the year in Wicklow, in Cork, or Tyrone?

See what the consequence must be from a municipal legislature considering itself as an unconnected body, and attempting to enforce a partial residence. A man may have property in more parts than two of this empire. He may have property in Jamaica and in North America, as well as in England and Ireland. I know some that have property in all of them. What shall we say to this case? After the poor distracted citizen of the whole empire has, in compliance with your partial law, removed his family, bid adieu to his connections, and settled himself quietly and snug in a pretty box by the Liffey, he hears that the Parliament of Great Britain is of opinion that all English estates ought to be spent in England, and that they will tax him double, if he does not return. Suppose him then (if the nature of the two laws will permit it) providing a flying camp, and dividing his year as well as he can between England and Ireland, and at the charge of two town houses and two country-houses in both kingdoms; in this situation he receives an account, that a law is transmitted from Jamaica, and another from Pennsylvania, to tax absentees from these provinces, which are impoverished by the European residence of the possessors of their lands. How is he to escape this _ricochet_ cross-firing of so many opposite batteries of police and regulation? If he attempts to comply, he is likely to be more a citizen of the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea than of any of these countries. The matter is absurd and ridiculous, and, while ever the idea of mutual marriages, inheritances, purchases, and privileges subsist, can never be carried into execution with common sense or common justice.

I do not know how gentlemen of Ireland reconcile such an idea to their own liberties, or to the natural use and enjoyment of their estates. If any of their children should be left in a minority, and a guardian should think, as many do, (it matters not whether properly or no,) that his ward had better he educated in a school or university here than in Ireland, is he sure that he can justify the bringing a tax of ten per cent, perhaps twenty, on his pupil's estate, by giving what in his opinion is the best education in general, or the best for that pupil's particular character and circumstances? Can he justify his sending him to travel, a necessary part of the higher style of education, and, notwithstanding what some narrow writers have said, of great benefit to all countries, but very particularly so to Ireland? Suppose a guardian, under the authority or pretence of such a tax of police, had prevented our dear friend, Lord Charlemont, from going abroad, would he have lost no satisfaction? would his friends have lost nothing in the companion? would his country have lost nothing in the cultivated taste with which he has adorned it in so many ways? His natural elegance of mind would undoubtedly do a great deal; but I will venture to assert, without the danger of being contradicted, that he adorns his present residence in Ireland much the more for having resided a long time out of it. Will Mr. Flood himself think he ought to have been driven by taxes into Ireland, whilst he prepared himself by an English education to understand and to defend the rights of the subject in Ireland, or to support the dignity of government there, according as his opinions, or the situation of things, may lead him to take either part, upon respectable principles? I hope it is not forgot that an Irish act of Parliament sends its youth to England for the study of the law, and compels a residence in the inns of court hero for some years. Will you send out with one breath and recall with another? This act plainly provides for that intercourse which supposes the strictest union in laws and policy, in both which the intended tax supposes an entire separation.

It would be endless to go into all the inconveniences this tax will lead to, in the conduct of private life, and the use of property. How many infirm people are obliged to change their climate, whose life depends upon that change! How many families straitened in their circumstances are there, who, from the shame, sometimes from the utter impossibility otherwise of retrenching, are obliged to remove from their country, in order to preserve their estates in their families! You begin, then, to burden these people precisely at the time when their circumstances of health and fortune render them rather objects of relief and commiseration.