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 HISTORICAL GLEANINGS. 
 
HISTORICAL GLEANINGS 
 
 A SERIES OF SKETCHES 
 
 MONTAGU. WALPOLE. ADAM SMITH. 
 COBBETT, 
 
 BT 
 
 JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS 
 
 MACMTLLAN AND CO. 
 1869 
 
 \^All rights reserved'] 
 
OXFOKD: 
 
 BY T. COMBE, M.A., E. B. GAEDNER, E. P. HALL, AND H. LATHAM, M.A. 
 PKINTEES TO THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
 Primed !n Great Brltar«; 
 

 P E E F A C E. 
 
 The object which I have before me in the follow- 
 ing sketches, is to present a set of historical facts, 
 grouped round a principal figure. The essays are 
 in the form of lectures. Three out of the four were 
 read at Newcastle-on-Tyne, before the Philosophical 
 Society ; and at Rochdale, before the Pioneers. The 
 fourth, the subject of which is Walpole, was read 
 to an audience in University College, London. 
 
 The history of the eighteenth century ought to 
 have greater practical interest in the eyes of English- 
 men than that of any other epoch in their annals. 
 During this time, the political system of the country 
 gprew up, despite the imperfections which charac- 
 terised the machinery of Parliament and the scandals 
 which accompanied nearly every administration. The 
 same century witnessed the growth of national wealth, 
 in the expansion of this country^s commerce and 
 manufactures, despite the erroneous economical 
 theories which found acceptance with most thinkers 
 and almost every statesman. That negative side of 
 
 MGJiyaOl 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 politics and economy which gathers its inferences 
 from the refutation of persistent fallacies, and which 
 therefore assists towards dissipating other delusions, 
 which are not yet abandoned, was developed in the 
 first instance from the practice and the theory of 
 the same age. 
 
 If any writer could draw a series of sketches, which 
 might enable the general reader to arrive at a clear 
 conception of the social and economical condition of 
 our immediate ancestors, he might make truth as 
 entertaining as fiction, and be instructive as well as 
 agreeable. To effect such a result, he will need 
 certain powers. He must have skill in grouping his 
 facts, as well as the art of lively composition. But 
 the chief pai-t of his labour will consist in the collec- 
 tion of materials. 
 
 I can lay claim to no higher merit than that of 
 diligent collection. I cannot assume that I have 
 made the subjects which I am treating in the follow- 
 ing pages as clear to my reader as they are to myself. 
 But I am persuaded that the writer who possesses 
 the gift of historical exposition, might follow the 
 method pursued in these sketches with advantage, 
 and thus make the past live again to his reader. 
 
 I have not undergirded my pages with a single 
 note ; have not cited the host of authorities to whom 
 I am indebted for my facts. There is, I think, a 
 tiresome affectation in such a cumber of references, 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 when the originals are open to the study of all. If 
 I had to serve up a heap of strawberries on one 
 dish, I see no reason why I should gravely present 
 my guest with a heap of stalks on another dish. 
 
 I make no apology for the economical reasonings 
 which are interspersed in these lectures. In treating 
 any historical topic it is necessary to acknowledge 
 wars and dynastic combinations, but the best part 
 of historical teaching does not, I think, consist in 
 the more prominent events which have occupied the 
 attention of those who lived among such facts or who 
 were their agents, but in expounding the moral and 
 material progress of society, and thereupon such parts 
 of history as are too customary to attract superficial 
 attention. It is very rarely the case that persons 
 are able to form a just estimate of the time in which 
 they are living. It is certain that the only means 
 of arriving at even an imperfect estimate is to be 
 obtained by a survey of society from its economical 
 aspect. 
 
 JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS. 
 
 Oxford, Jane 5, 1869. 
 
CHAELES MONTAGU, 
 
 EARL OF HALIFAX. 
 
CHAELES MONTAGU, 
 
 EARL OF HALIFAX. 
 
 In 1658, these islands were a great republic. 
 CromwelPs administration made Great Britain more 
 powerful in Europe than it had been since the days 
 of the warrior Plantagenets. But the task which 
 he had completed was in the highest degree arduous. 
 The stars in their courses fought against him. His 
 government was revolutionary, and therefore costly. 
 He had enemies among his own partisans, for many 
 of his companions in arms envied his elevation, 
 not a few, more honestly, believed that Oliver^s 
 protectorate was a mischievous and indefensible 
 usurpation. He was in daily peril of his life from 
 his acknowledged foes. The stories told about the 
 gloomy anxiety of the great Protector's later years, 
 malignant as they probably, exaggerated as they 
 certainly are, are indirect testimony of the ceaseless 
 plots which threatened him. GromwelFs reign was 
 marked by a succession of bad seasons, under which 
 the nation was afflicted with severe dearth. But the 
 throne of no monarch was, if one may judge from 
 the respect in which he was held, more glorious than 
 his Highness' chair of state. He constrained all 
 
 B 2 
 
CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 European monarchs to acknowledge him. He even 
 arrested the arm of the Inquisition in the valleys of 
 the Southern Alps. Charles, whom he had driven 
 into exile, would have entered into negotiations with 
 the illustrious usurper — would have even allied him- 
 self with the principal author of his father s death. 
 It is known that Cromwell suspended, or broke off 
 these negotiations, because he believed that the royal 
 wanderer would never forgive the great enemy of 
 his house. But the exiles of a dynasty very rarely 
 preserve their self-respect, and Charles Stuart was 
 the least respectable among all the exiles of history. 
 He wanted nothing but ease and pleasure, and we 
 all know what his ease and pleasure were. 
 
 Thirty years after, the Revolution occurred, and 
 a limited monarchy was established. There was an 
 interregnum of two months between the day on which 
 James fled from the kingdom, and William was pro- 
 claimed. We are told by more than one authority, 
 that the republican party, which forty years before 
 had overthrown the monarchy and the Church, was 
 wholly extinct. Such a phenomenon has never been 
 witnessed before. The war of American indepen- 
 dence settled at once and for ever the form of political 
 institutions in all new communities of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin. The principle of social equality has survived 
 all the other dogmas of that revolutionary propa- 
 ganda in France which began its mission a century 
 after the English settlement. But the great Puritan 
 movement of the seventeenth century exhausted 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX, 
 
 itself in the eflPort which gives it its place in English 
 history. Like the volcanos of Auvergne^ it burnt 
 itself out. The government of the Protector is as 
 purely historical as the constitution of Athens or 
 Rome. It is even more historical, for the traditions 
 of ancient civilization still enter into modern habits 
 of political thought. The stock arguments against 
 republican institutions have been handed down from 
 the days of Plato. The code of ancient Rome is the 
 core of European law. But the policy of the Pro- 
 tectorate is, in so far as its influence on political 
 thought goes, inftnitely more archaic than that of 
 the republics of the ancient world. At the close of 
 the seventeenth century, people thought that the re- 
 publication of Milton^s Iconoclastes was an imper- 
 tinence, and languidly asked whether it was likely to 
 serve the present establishment in Church and State. 
 For the fact is, no reaction was ever so absolute 
 as the change from the era of the Rebellion to that 
 of the Restoration. The heroes of the former epoch 
 were earnest, stern, precise. Their sincerity was 
 attested by the persecution which they had endured. 
 Their discipline was perfected by the struggle in 
 which they ultimately conquered. The purpose of 
 their opposition to the King and his cavaliers must 
 have been plainly before them, if not from the day 
 of Eliot^s imprisonment and slow murder, at least 
 from the time that Charles raised his standard at 
 Nottingham. The character of the King made the 
 struggle desperate, even unto death. Charles, like 
 
CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 his son James, never forgave. Bat lie was infinitely 
 superior to his son in finesse, or as a less courtly 
 critic might say, in duplicity. 
 
 It is not easy to discover the extent to which the 
 nation took part in the great civil war. But it is 
 certain that the real combatants were few. Before 
 the armies joined battle at Naseby, it is said that 
 a party of country gentlemen crossed the field with 
 their hounds in full cry. Charles wondered that any 
 of his subjects could be neutral on that day. It was 
 the neutrality of these men which restored the 
 monarchy. Had the same impulses, the same pas- 
 sions which moved Koundhead and Cavalier moved 
 every Englishman, the victory of the former would 
 never have been followed by reaction. 
 
 If it be necessary to illustrate this statement, that 
 the great Puritan party was numerically small, no 
 better proof, I think, can be found than the fact that 
 the capitular and episcopal estates, sold in the early 
 days of the first revolution at fair market prices, were 
 resumed for their ancient owners after the Restoration, 
 without compensation. I know no parallel instance of 
 this resumption. Henry the Eighth^s courtiers se- 
 cured their grasp on the abbey lands, despite Mary^s 
 desire that they should be restored. Similarly, after 
 the restoration of the Bourbons, it was impossible to 
 recover the Church, or even the lay estates in France, 
 which the Revolution had confiscated and sold. A 
 revolution must be superficial indeed which cannot 
 secure a permanent title to its grantees. 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 
 
 It was because the leaders of the republican party 
 were few, and were trained under such exceptional 
 circumstances, that they had no successors. The 
 party was inevitably weakened by the efflux of time. 
 Had the ague, which carried Cromwell off at a com- 
 paratively early age, been cured; had his life been 
 prolonged to the general duration ; his own comrades 
 would have passed away, and his son would have 
 succeeded to a quiet hereditary throne. This event 
 was indeed in course of fulfilment. Never were 
 Charles^ prospects worse than at the beginning of the 
 year in which Oliver died. 
 
 Meanwhile the clergy, whom Cromwell was obliged 
 to conciliate, were alienating the laity by their dark 
 fanaticism, their harsh discipline, their intolerant zeal. 
 A statesman who affects to be a defender of the faith, 
 is invariably unfriendly to public liberty. Never 
 since the Reformation was the State so much the 
 handmaid of the Church as during the early days of 
 the Protectorate. Men found that they had ex- 
 changed the tyranny of the High Commission Court, 
 of which they had heard, but of which they had 
 rarely had experience, for a prying parochial inqui- 
 sition, which controlled their daily life. These unre- 
 corded grievances were far worse than the occasional 
 persecutions of the monarchical courts. The English 
 people has never submitted to clerical government 
 as patiently as the Scotch has. What that govern- 
 ment was, may be seen in the diaries of Cotton 
 Mather and Shepherd, the ministers of the Massa- 
 
CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 chusetts settlement under Governor Winthorp^ the 
 men who burnt witches and hanged Quakers by the 
 score. The harshness of the Presbyterian discipline 
 was peculiarly galling to persons who might have 
 otherwise acquiesced in the Protectorate. There were 
 few who mourned for the ejected ministers of Bar- 
 tholomew's Day 1662. The doctrine of these godly 
 men might have been pure^ but the managers of the 
 Hampton Court Conference^ the Morleys and Sheldons, 
 were wiser in their generation^ when they restored epis- 
 copal government, and with it the jolly, genial parson ; 
 and in place of the Kirk Session the Act of Uniformity. 
 As the State and the Church of the Protectorate 
 were exceptional, so was the Court of the Restoration. 
 At least let us, for the sake of human nature, hope 
 so. The Cavaliers who formed the retinue of 
 Charles, as he lived anxiously at Breda, were as 
 starved as they were licentious. Charles himself 
 was familiar with penury. It is said that he had 
 even experienced famine, and that he retained after 
 his restoration a strange fondness for putrid oysters, 
 because this happened to be the dish with which 
 he had once satiated the cravings of his hunger. 
 Tliese ravening and unclean creatures, when their 
 master returned to England, flew upon the spoil like 
 vultures. Charles^ court was one vast revel, a per- 
 petual round of debauchery. It contained no modest 
 woman, no honest man. Everybody remembers the 
 description which Evelyn gives of the last Sunday of 
 Charles^ life. It was a feast of Cotytto, a worship of 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 
 
 Ashtaroth. Everybody knows Pepys' diary and the 
 prudish gossiping* way in which he tells the story of 
 social life in England. But the annalist of these revels, 
 the most polished among the satyrs and blacklegs 
 and bullies of the restored throne, was Grammont. 
 No writer gives a clearer picture of the scene at 
 Hampton and Tonbridge than this creature does. 
 Those who can touch pitch with gloved hands may 
 read his book, and may learn how gross was the 
 pollution in which the nobles of the day wallowed, 
 and from which they were very slowly reclaimed. 
 Where is the contrast to this picture? As Milton 
 lived in Cripplegate, blind and poor, he must have 
 realized in the court, Comus and his retinue, the 
 first creation of his prophetic genius, as he drew, 
 half unconsciously, in the most sublime and charac- 
 teristic of his works, his own portrait, under the 
 name of Samson, blind and with shorn locks, a 
 captive grinding in the prison-house of the Philis- 
 tines, while his persecutors were ^ drunk with idolatry, 
 drunk with wine.^ 
 
 Charles the First and his son after him, had robbed 
 the London merchants, the former of the money 
 which they had deposited in the Mint under the 
 guarantee of Government, the latter of what was 
 an enormous sum in those days, no less than 
 ^■'i, 328,526, and which lay in the Exchequer. 
 Charles shut up the Exchequer, but promised to pay 
 six per cent, on the principal which he had appro- 
 priated, as long as it was unpaid. It is hardly 
 
lo CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 necessary to say that this promise was broken. No 
 interest was paid for thirty years. But at the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century the government 
 of William effected a compromise. The creditors of 
 Charles agreed to take three per cent, on the prin- 
 cipalj the Government stipulating that they might 
 redeem the debt on paying half the sum which had 
 been seized. This, the oldest part of the National 
 debt, for it is the only portion which was contracted 
 before the Revolution, is still one of the public liabili- 
 ties. But more than ten thousand families were 
 ruined by this robbery. The motive for the act was 
 as rapacious as the act was ruinous. 
 
 Charles was in constant want of money. His 
 pleasures,, and the accidents of these pleasures, needed 
 sustentation, the former immediately, the latter by 
 permanent provision. But Parliament, whose loyalty 
 was rather ardent than self-denying, was slow to 
 gratify him, and inquisitive in its grants of supplies. 
 Even in the first burst of affection which gushed 
 forth at the time of the Restoration, the Cavaliers 
 relieved their estates from feudal charges, as Cava- 
 liers have done before and since, by levying taxes 
 on the general public. They commuted the aids 
 and reliefs, which constituted the conditions of the 
 estates which they enjoyed, for the hereditary excise. 
 The malt tax of the present day represents the expe- 
 dient by which the landowners of the Restoration 
 freed themselves from their ancient contributions to 
 the public revenue. 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. ii 
 
 As Parliament was unwilling- to assist him, 
 Charles, who shrank from no baseness, became the 
 willing pensioner of Louis XIV. The price paid for 
 this pension was the declaration of war against 
 Holland. Charles was willing, in order to gain the 
 means for gratifying his infamous pleasures, and for 
 maintaining the wild orgies of his Court, not only to 
 make war on his own nephew, but to assist in the 
 attempted subjugation of the Dutch provinces, then, 
 as a century before, the bulwark of the Reformed 
 Religion. Fortunately, the attempt was frustrated. 
 The defeat and dishonour which attended the English 
 arms, when our fleet was burnt in the Medway, and 
 our efforts against the heroic defenders of Amsterdam 
 were foiled, saved the English people in the end. It 
 is a small matter to add, that Holland had given 
 Charles an asylum during the days of the terrible 
 Protector, where he could intrigue, and where, when 
 he had funds, he could hire his assassins in safety. 
 It was only after years had passed that William of 
 Orange learnt the terms of the bargain which Charles 
 had made with Louis, and the plot which was in- 
 tended to compass his destruction. It is not mar- 
 vellous that he felt little compunction in dispossessing 
 a kinsman who had taken part in these intrigues, 
 especially as he knew so well that the safety of 
 Europe depended on the chastisement of Louis. 
 
 The reaction of immorality during the age of Charles 
 the Second was so complete that even men of other- 
 wise stainless character were open to purchase. There 
 
12 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 is one name indeed, that of Lord Russell, on which 
 no charge of corruption can be fastened. But Sid- 
 ney seems to have been in the pay of Louis. Mr. 
 Hallam gives an odd justification of this relation 
 between the French autocrat and the English re- 
 publican. He claims a moral distinction between a 
 bribe taken to betray our principles, and a present 
 taken in order to maintain them. One would think 
 that under these abnormal circumstances, there must 
 at least have been a sympathy between the giver and 
 the receiver, and we know that there could have been 
 no honest sympathy between Louis and Sidney. But 
 the truth is this. When men walk with their lives 
 in their hands, as all public men did in England 
 during the days of Gates and Dangerfield on the one 
 hand, Scroggs and Jeffries on the other, they become 
 strangely heroic, or as strangely base. Of the former 
 class were Russell and Essex, of the latter Shaftesbury 
 and Marlborough, and a host of other men. Most 
 of the difficulties which William and his better 
 supporters had to contend with arose from the men 
 who had been trained in that perfidious school. 
 
 There is no need that I should dwell in these 
 prefatory remarks on the short and stormy reign of 
 James the Second. Very few parts of English history 
 are better known to Englishmen than the three 
 years of that reign. The base Parliament of 1685, 
 is remembered as the most infamous in our annals. 
 James did everything to shock what loyalty was left 
 towards the House of Stuart. He might indeed — 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 13 
 
 for monarchs live in strangely constructed houses, 
 in which more is seen of them than is the fact, and 
 less is always known by them — have thought that 
 the loyalty of that University of Oxford which ac- 
 cepted the dedication of Sir George Mackenzie's Jus 
 Regium, and endorsed it with their famous anathema 
 on the twenty dogmas, which they pronounced to 
 be false, seditious, and impious, was beyond suspicion 
 of change. In 1709, the House of Lords reversed 
 this Academical judgment, by ordering the decree 
 to be publicly burnt by the common hangman. 
 
 James may have counted on this loyalty. But 
 loyalty, amid the strife of factions, is a phrase which 
 denotes satisfaction at that course of policy which 
 rewards adherents. Loyalty, indeed, was entertained 
 towards the House of Stuart, but it was to be found 
 among the gallant savages of the Highlands, among 
 the desperate and persecuted outlaws of Irish bogs 
 and mountains. When James attacked the freehold 
 of the fellows of Magdalene, and threatened the High 
 Church partisans with the Indulgence, these sturdy ad- 
 vocates of his divine right fell from him, like autumn 
 leaves in a tempest. Nor was this all. The disaffection 
 of those who have been loyal, is incomparably more 
 dangerous than the plots and sedition of those who 
 have always been dissatisfied. The London Gazette 
 of February 1688 is full of congratulatory addresses 
 on the birth of the Prince of Wales. The London 
 Gazette of February 1689 is as full of congratulatory 
 addresses to William and Mary. Whigs and Tories 
 
CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 who acquiesced in the new settlement, agreed in brand- 
 ing that child, whom a few months before they had 
 welcomed as a choice gift from Heaven, as supposi- 
 titious, and in charging James with a fraud, of 
 which, with all his faults, he was incapable. In 
 his subsequent career, the old Pretender proved his 
 legitimacy, by exhibiting all the characteristic in- 
 competency, bigotry, and obstinacy of the House 
 of Stuart. 
 
 James, after his exile began, had a singular body 
 of adherents. He had imprisoned the bishops for 
 disobedience, and they had been acquitted. After 
 his enforced abdication several of the prelates, with 
 a considerable body of followers, declined to take 
 the oath of allegiance to the new Settlement. It 
 became necessary to dispossess them, a step which 
 William was very reluctant to take. But they 
 were treated with great, and I may add, with well 
 deserved leniency. Though they were not loyal 
 subjects, they were peaceable. If their principle of 
 passive obedience dissuaded them from vowing alle- 
 giance to William, it equally precluded them from 
 active co-operation in Jacobite plots. This harmless 
 secession, which seemed at first so dangerous, sur- 
 vived for more than a century. Surprise has been 
 expressed at its tenacious vitality. But travellers 
 in the United States tell us, that there are small 
 communities of American citizens whose settlement 
 is two centuries old, but who have never cast a 
 vote — passionate as is the habit of voting through- 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 15 
 
 out the Union — because the President has never 
 adopted the Solemn League and Covenant. 
 
 The real danger which the Revolution of 1688 
 ran, was the astonishing treachery of the principal 
 men in the State. Much of this was due to the 
 school in which public men had learned, not a little 
 to the conduct of William himself, his harsh manners, 
 his attachment to his Dutch troops, his intense and 
 inconsiderate partiality for his Dutch courtiers and 
 favourites. William ennobled and enriched the house 
 of Bentinck, a house which has been traditionally 
 characterised by a stubborn and unforgiving will, 
 but he intended to have heaped grants on his 
 favourite with a prodigality which would have made 
 him the richest subject, if not the richest personage 
 in Europe. But the inveterate depravity of the 
 nobles at the Revolution was William's chief diffi- 
 culty. Various as the characteristics of these men 
 were, they were at one in their greed, their dis- 
 simulation, and their perfidy. Such men as Marl- 
 borough, Admiral Russell, Godolphin, Carmarthen, 
 were able and willing to paralyse any policy. It 
 was due to such men as these that better terms 
 were not got at the peace of Ryswick. It was 
 because William was surrounded by such a crew 
 that he was constrained to become his own minister, 
 and to insist on a larger prerogative than any 
 constitutional king has subsequently exercised. It 
 was to counteract these persons that William dis- 
 covered and used the services of those men who 
 
l6 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 were faithful to him and his policy, and among 
 them of Charles Montagu, afterwards Baron and 
 Earl of Halifax. 
 
 When Shakespeare is describing the ragged regi- 
 ment with which Falstaff declined to walk through 
 Coventry, because even he was disgraced by so 
 beggarly a militia^ he reckons among his hundred 
 and fifty tattered prodigals 'discarded serving-men, 
 revolted tapsters, ostlers trade-fallen, younger sons 
 to younger brothers/ and speaks of them as 'the 
 cankers of a calm world and a long peace/ What 
 was true of the younger sons of younger brothers, 
 when military employment was not to be had, in 
 the days of Shakespeare, was true in the days of 
 William the Third, was true in Normandy eighty 
 years later still. The only refuges for these victims 
 of primogeniture were the army and the church. 
 They did not expect command in the army, for many 
 a gentleman of ancient descent, but impoverished 
 substance, trailed a pike as a common soldier at 
 Steenkirk and Landen, or at the siege of Namur. 
 The Anglican Church, nearly two centuries ago, 
 offered very little better prospects. It was im- 
 poverished at the Reformation, and has become 
 wealthy, if indeed endowments make it wealthy, 
 from subsequent accidents. At that time however, 
 the parson, and especially the chaplain, got the 
 income of the butler, and was thought lucky if 
 he married the lady^s maid of his patroness, or some 
 lower dependant of his patron. He is the perpetual 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 17 
 
 jest of the dramatists of the age, the Wycherleys, 
 and Congreves, and Vanbrughs, for his servility and 
 his shifts, for his poverty and his clumsy attempts 
 to ingratiate himself with his patrons. It has been 
 noticed that the only man of good descent and sub- 
 stance who had taken orders between the Reformation 
 and the Revolution, was Henry Compton, Bishop of 
 London^ who had been a cavalry officer, and who for 
 a while reassumed that position at the Revolution, 
 riding at the head of the guard of honour which 
 escorted the Princess Anne to a place of safety, when 
 she deserted her father in the autumn of 1688. 
 
 The younger sons of the French nobility were 
 better off up to the time of the French Revolution. 
 The custom of primogeniture was not so strictly 
 followed in France. The riches of the Church too 
 were still unimpaired, and persons of good descent 
 regularly took orders, and were nominated to abbacies. 
 There is a story told of Turgot, the teacher and prede- 
 cessor of Adam Smith, that when he had resolved 
 again to become a layman, and abandon his prospects 
 in the Gallican Church, his friends remonstrated 
 with him. ' You are,^ they said, ' the younger son 
 of a Norman nobleman, and therefore are poor. 
 Your father is a man of great reputation, your 
 relations are men of influence, and you will speedily 
 be nominated to excellent abbacies. You will soon 
 become a bishop. As easily you may be translated to 
 a better see, as for example in Provence or Brittany. 
 You will thus be able to realise your dreams of 
 
 c 
 
1 8 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 administrative usefulness, and, without ceasing to be 
 a churchman, may be a statesman at your leisure/ 
 It is needless to say that these ecclesiastics did 
 little credit to their profession. One of them, ex- 
 pelled from France for his extraordinary profligacy, 
 singular even in the bad age which I have described, 
 became the tool, the spy, and at last the would-be 
 murderer of Harley. But the Abbe Guiscard was 
 by no means a unique scoundrel. 
 
 In 1688, the Church was the only prospect before 
 Charles Montagu. His father was George Montagu, 
 his grandfather was the first Earl of Manchester. 
 He was the fourth son of nine children. Born in 
 1661, he was sent to Westminster at fourteen, then 
 and for many years before and afterwards ruled by 
 the famous Dr. Busby, who diligently instructed 
 the minds, and ruthlessly cudgelled the bodies, of 
 the ingenuous youth of the period. At sixteen, he 
 was elected a King's scholar, at twenty-one he was 
 sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. It appears that 
 his choice of University was determined by his 
 attachment to a schoolfellow. At all events, he 
 was fortunate. Had he gone to Oxford, he could 
 have been sent to Christ Church, under the discipline 
 of Dr. Fell, Dean and Bishop of the see of Oxford, 
 a strenuous partisan of the Divine right of Kings 
 and of passive obedience, and the advocate of the 
 famous decree to which I have already alluded. As 
 it was, he went to Cambridge, and became the pupil, 
 as he was afterwards the patron, of Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX, 19 
 
 It may be mentioned that he constantly lived on 
 terms of friendship with the great philosopher, and 
 that he left him a legacy in his will, 'as a mark/ 
 in his own language, 'of the honour and esteem 
 he had for so great a man/ 
 
 At Cambridge, Montagu cultivated what was 
 called poetry, as young men even now write rhymes 
 at the Universities on set subjects. It appears that 
 the trick of verse-making never left him, and that 
 he tagged couplets together, and built up Pindaric 
 odes to the day of his death. At least so Walpole 
 says, who is our best authority for the gossip of 
 that time. Never perhaps was English poetry at 
 a lower ebb. Milton had no followers, no admirers 
 even. He could have had no imitators. The poet 
 of the age had been Cowley, it was Dryden. Justice 
 is still done to the vigorous style and active genius 
 of that eminent writer, whose slovenliness in versi- 
 fication only was imitated by his disciples. After 
 Dryden^s death, Swift could quote almost every 
 living versifier in order to illustrate his essay on 
 the art of sinking in poetry. Few however of these 
 poetasters were worse than Montagu. He was a 
 generous man, and he patronized the rhymesters, 
 as Lord Palmerston did Poet Close. Intending to 
 honour him with their gratitude. Grub Street in- 
 serted his compositions in its manifold collections 
 of the British classics. It was a cruel kindness. 
 My audience will be able to judge of Montagues 
 merits as a versifier from a few specimens. 
 
 0% 
 
20 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 His earliest poem, written, it appears, at the request 
 or command of the Cambridge authorities, — Trinity 
 College is a royal foundation, and therefore officially 
 puts on Court mourning, — is on the death of Charles 
 the Second. There is little variety in the language 
 which is used to extol the merits of deceased princes ; 
 but our young poet was guilty of an inexcusable 
 flattery when he writes of Charles as 
 
 * The best good man that ever filled a throne ; ' 
 
 and speaks of his ^ awful person,^ when we know that 
 the excessive ugliness of his face was relieved only 
 by his habitual expression of good temper. Subse- 
 quently he compares him to the Almighty and King 
 David, and describes the political enemies of his 
 youth as Sauls, who were ^ made great by wandering 
 asses.^ In a similar strain he tells us that * the flying 
 towers, with canvas wings,^ by which he means the 
 mercantile marine of the day, whose development he 
 most unfairly ascribes to Charles, are the means by 
 which the English 
 
 ' In Persian silks, eat Persian spice, secure 
 From burning fluxes and their calenture ;' 
 
 a couplet in which one is at a loss which to admire 
 the most — ^the conceit, the geography, or the physi- 
 ology. He concludes his poem by sa3''ing — 
 
 'James is our Charles in all things but in name; 
 Thus Thames is daily lost, but still the same.' 
 
 Five years later, Montagues maturer powers were 
 employed in congratulating William, in even worse 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 21 
 
 verses, on the victory of the Boyne. Thus he writes 
 about the passage of the river — 
 
 * Precipitate they plunge into the flood ; 
 
 In vain the waves, the banks, the men withstood : ' 
 
 and of William — 
 
 * The King leads on ; the King does all inflame ; 
 The King — and carries millions in his name.' 
 
 I will make but one more quotation, his description 
 of Mary — 
 
 * As danger did approach, her spirits rose. 
 And, putting on the King, dismayed his foes. 
 Now, all in joy, she quits the cheerful Court ; 
 In every glance descending angels sport.' 
 
 This, you will agree with me, is sad stuff, and only 
 worthy of a prosaic economist. I know but one 
 apology for it, that in those days Locke professed a 
 profound admiration for the genius of Sir Richard 
 Blackmore. 
 
 There is one composition, the joint work of Mon- 
 tagu and a far wittier person, Matthew Prior, which 
 will live side by side with the poem which it parodies. 
 When Dry den joined the Roman communion, he 
 testified his gratitude to James, and his attachment 
 to his new creed, by composing a poem, the conception 
 of which is transcendently absurd, though the exe- 
 cution is as meritorious as that which characterises 
 any other of Dryden^s works. Under the figure of a 
 Hind and a Panther, the converted wit and man of 
 letters typified the Roman and the English Churches. 
 
22 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 The Hind invites the Panther to her cave, and there 
 discourses on Church history, discipline, and dogmas, 
 on the authority of general councils, of kings, and of the 
 Pope. The Panther, who ought to be convinced, goes 
 away unconverted ; and, instead of being so gnawed 
 by the pangs of hunger during this long and tedious 
 lecture as to devour her fellow-controversialist, leaves 
 the milk-white Hind civilly and harmlessly. Never 
 was fable composed which was open to more measure- 
 less ridicule. It was travestied by Montagu and 
 Prior under the title of The Town and Country Mouse. 
 This performance gained Montagu the friendship 
 of Lord Dorset, and opened him a career, when he 
 was still hovering between the rival misery of the 
 Church and the Bar. 
 
 About ninety of the Upper House of Parliament, 
 some being bishops, all who had sat in any Parlia- 
 ment of Charles the Second, the Lord Mayor and 
 about fifty of the Common Council, met on December 
 26, 1688, after the King^s flight, and requested the 
 Prince to issue writs for the summons of a Convention 
 Parliament. To. this Convention, which met on 
 January 22, Montagu was returned, and in this Con- 
 vention the abdication or forfeiture of King James 
 was formally affirmed ; William and Mary were in- 
 vested with the Crown. We may be certain that the 
 young statesman acquitted himself well, for the King 
 forthwith presented him with a pension of .^500. 
 For a time, this was the way in which the Court 
 rewarded its adherents in Parliament. The severity 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 23 
 
 which debars the recipient of a pension — some few 
 cases excepted — from sitting in the House of Com- 
 mons, was adopted in order to check this practice. 
 The expedient — one of the days of Queen Anne — 
 was only outwardly successful, for Walpole contrived 
 to obtain and secure partisans by the distribution of 
 secret bribes. 
 
 When Montagu was thirty years old he managed 
 a conference of the Commons with the House of 
 Lords, Both political parties in the Legislature, not 
 the least, probably, because of the insecurity of the 
 new settlement, were anxious to define anew the law 
 of treason, and to enact an amended course of pro- 
 cedure. Up to this time, that terrible law had been 
 administered after the statute of Edward the Third, 
 corrected by another of Edward the Sixth, and 
 expounded by the practice of some of the very worst 
 judges in the very worst times. The trials of Lord 
 Strafford and Archbishop Plunket, on the one hand ; 
 of Russell, Sidney, and College on the other, in the 
 time of Charles the Second, were murders carried out 
 under forms of law, and in defiance of plain justice. 
 It was everybody's interest to amend the written 
 law, and to define anew what should be the practice 
 of the Court. The Lords insisted on securing some 
 special privileges to their order; the Commons de- 
 murred, and Montagu, as I have said, managed the 
 conference. For a time, the dissentients could not 
 agree, and the bill was lost. Ultimately, however, 
 the Lower House conceded the demands of the Upper. 
 
24 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 The skill which Montagu exhibited in this and 
 similar kinds of public business^ his readiness in 
 debate, and his painstaking, methodical manner, soon 
 marked him for that kind of official life, skill in which 
 was absolutely necessary for the support of the Re- 
 volution, skill of which at that time he was the sole 
 master. Montagu was the father of English finance. 
 He pledged, and pledged successfully, the public 
 credit. He furthered the project which established 
 the Bank of England. He thwarted Harley and the 
 Tories in their attempt to degrade the currency in 
 1695. But his greatest effort of financial genius was 
 the happy audacity which invented and circulated 
 Exchequer bills. 
 
 It is a saying of Macaulay, that public debts were 
 not contracted for the first time at the Revolution; 
 but that the responsible Government which com- 
 menced at that epoch commenced also the practice of 
 paying them. Henry the Third borrowed of the Pope, 
 then and for generations afterwards, the greatest capi- 
 talist in Europe. Edward the Third borrowed of the 
 Genoese and Florentine merchants, and failing to 
 pay, ruined these traffickers. The later Plantagenet 
 and the Tudor kings borrowed of their subjects and 
 repudiated their debts. Twice in his reign Henry 
 the Eighth, the most lavish and reckless of English 
 kings, was relieved of his debts by Parliament, taking 
 with grim pleasantry the benefit of the Act. When 
 these resources failed, Henry debased the currency, 
 and dragged this country down from being one of 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 
 
 the most opulent into being for a century one of the 
 poorest states in Europe. The brilliant historian of 
 Henry ^s reign tells us that this transaction was of 
 the nature of a loan. I apprehend, if a burglar or 
 a footpad thinks proper to say that he has borrowed 
 your plate-chest or your purse, that he has not 
 materially modified the transaction by the use of this 
 euphemism. The Stuarts, as I have said, did not 
 go through the form of borrowing — they simply 
 robbed the merchants and the goldsmiths, and through 
 them the widow and the orphan. 
 
 The Government of the Revolution borrowed money, 
 but saved i)ublic credit. They loaded posterity with 
 debt, but they made good faith traditional in the 
 administration of public affairs. The fact is, re- 
 sponsibility is the guarantee of a public conscience. 
 Governments which are irresponsible, governments, 
 that is to say, which only command a minority of 
 public opinion, are dangerous to the morality of a 
 commimity, however brief their duration. If they 
 lasted long, they would be fatal to public honour. 
 History is full of examples, near and remote, of this 
 truth. It signifies nothing what the form of govern- 
 ment is, whether the faction be dominant in a repub- 
 lic, hold its grip by the machinery of a military 
 despotism, or have an accidental existence under a 
 constitutional monarchy. 
 
 At the close of the seventeenth century, the richest 
 county in England, after Middlesex, was Norfolk. 
 York followed, but Lancashire stood only twenty- 
 
26 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 eighth on the list. There were three and a-half 
 acres to each house in Middlesex^ twenty-eight and 
 a-half to each house in Lancashire. At present,, the pro- 
 portion is about two-thirds of an acre in Middlesex, 
 three in Lancashire, and Lancashire stands, by its 
 acreage, second in point of opulence to the metropo- 
 litan county. The great centres of industry, where the 
 northern population of these islands is now gathered, 
 were then open moors, wet pastures. The inhabit- 
 ants, no doubt, led a monotonous life, for they lived 
 in a damp climate, and were contiguous to a melan- 
 choly ocean. Lord Dudley had just begun to dis- 
 cover the use of pit coal in smelting Staffordshire 
 iron; but the best bars came from the Sussex forges. 
 The rails round St. Paulas Cathedral were made from 
 the iron of the Wealden. The cloth manufacture was 
 scattered over England. Defoe tells us that its prin- 
 cipal localities in the southern counties were Farn- 
 ham, Alton, Guildford, and Reading, towns known 
 now for other industries, if known at all. Even in 
 those days, however, Newcastle was conspicuous for 
 its glass trade, for the ^ London Gazette^ contains 
 frequent advertisements of quarries, selling at from 
 13^. to io<?. the hundred feet. 
 
 The ^ London Gazette^ of the time was published 
 by authority twice or thrice a week. It is a single 
 leaf, of small folio size, printed generally in small 
 type and in double columns. On the one side is 
 foreign intelligence, on the other a short and very 
 succinct account of domestic matters. The last column 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 27 
 
 contains the advertisements. These are of the ordi- 
 nary character. Notices of library sales; of new 
 books ; of picture sales ; of quack medicines, Ander- 
 son's Scotch pills figuring constantly ; rewards offered 
 for runaway negroes, and deserters from Colonel This 
 or That^s regiment; of auctions by inch of candle; 
 of patents and inventions. I must not occupy your 
 time with these items. The Government advertise- 
 ments, printed in italics, head the list, and generally 
 refer to changes in the service of the post, and to 
 contracts for timber. Thus the public is informed 
 that, 51s the Tunbridge season has commenced, there 
 will be a daily post from London, except on Sundays ; 
 again, that a bi-weekly post has been established for 
 Burton-on-Trent, and that a weekly stage coach to 
 Lincoln has been set up for the summer. While 
 the fleet was at the Nore, in the spring of 1692, a 
 mail-bag was also dispatched thither daily. Among 
 stranger advertisements I may mention one of a trades- 
 man in York Buildings, who informs his readers that 
 he is ready to dig up, embalm, and transport from 
 Ireland the bodies of Englishmen of quality who had 
 fallen there ; of an Italian lady who sings in the same 
 place ; of a book which gives an account of the value 
 of artificial grasses newly introduced to England, such 
 as ray, clover, saintfoin, and lucerne, and offers them 
 for sale at the * Fleur de Luce,' opposite to the May- 
 pole, in the Strand. And, lastly, in the ' Scotch 
 Mercury' of May 8th, 1692, is the assurance of pro- 
 tection given by the King's Privy Council in Scotland 
 
28 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 to the Highlanders of Glencoe, the tardy repentance 
 for the atrocious deed of Breadalbane and Stair. 
 
 The popular periodical of the time appears to have 
 been a publication like ' Notes and Queries/ or even 
 more like the correspondents' page of the ' Family- 
 Herald/ Questions were sent to a bookseller, and 
 after a short interval the printed question and its 
 answer were published. These questions are theo- 
 logical and scientific^ or deal with love, courtship, and 
 marriage. At intervals a title-page and index are 
 given, in order that the single sheets may be bound 
 into a volume. Nothing, however, was printed which 
 corresponds to the modern newspaper press. 
 
 This is not the place in which to discuss the jus- 
 tification which is commonly alleged for that burden 
 of a public debt which our forefathers put upon us. 
 It is sufficient to say, in the first place, that the 
 heritage was far greater than the burden, and that, 
 even if the statesmen of the age were in error when 
 they strained every nerve to adjust the balance of 
 power, they must, like the statesmen of every age, be 
 judged by their motives. At this time, at least, we 
 may do them the justice to assert that they were 
 seriously alarmed for religion and liberty when they 
 resisted the aggrandisement of Louis, and that it was 
 necessary to break off that dangerous intimacy be- 
 tween the French treasury and leading Englishmen 
 which Louis furthered, and to which Barillon was 
 the go-between. In the next place, there was the 
 plea of necessity. Mr. Hallam alludes to the fact that 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 29 
 
 the customs and excise duties in 1693 had dwindled 
 to less than half their amount before the Revo- 
 lution. But this author was not at the pains to 
 discover the reason, because, like most historians, he 
 has ignored the economical side of the events which 
 he comments on. During the six years 1686-91 
 wheat was worth on an average 34*. the quarter; 
 during the next six years, the average was 60^. 6d. 
 The inevitable consequence followed. As the indi- 
 rect sources of revenue were diminished under the 
 pressure of this dearth, it became necessary to sup- 
 plement them by direct taxation, in the form of a tax 
 of twenty per cent, on real and personal estate. If 
 the financier of the age burdened posterity with a 
 debt, it must be admitted that he did not spare the 
 existing generation. 
 
 In 169 1, Montagu was made a Lord of the Trea- 
 sury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. His first 
 great act was one of singular boldness. For some 
 time past the silver coin had been in a deplorable 
 condition. It was so worn and clippei that a guinea 
 was worth thirty shillings in silver, counted by tale. 
 It was necessary to restore the currency, but on this 
 occasion, as afterwards in 1815, the country gentle- 
 men, with Harley at their head, proposed that the 
 new coins should be issued at the average weight to 
 which the old currency had been reduced. The expe- 
 dient would have been at once an act of bankruptcy 
 and an act of robbery, — the former because it would 
 have defrauded creditors, the latter because it would 
 
30 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 have mulcted persons who were in receipt of fixed 
 sums, or of such wages as are not settled by com- 
 petition. The proposal was rejected. 
 
 The other part of Montagues re-coinage scheme was 
 of more doubtful prudence. He determined that those 
 who deposited their clipped and worn money in the 
 Mint should have new money of full weight in ex- 
 change. As a matter of abstract justice, it is clear 
 that the act of coinage, being a service which the 
 Government does for the public, and being a certi- 
 ficate of the fineness contained in the pieces issued, 
 the Exchequer should not be called on to bear the 
 loss of wear, still less losses by fraud. It was plain, 
 too, that having fixed a date at which the coin should 
 be received at the Mint, and having made the date 
 a somewhat distant one, Montagu created two evils — 
 one a sudden abstraction of the currency in circula- 
 tion, another a strong temptation to still further clip 
 and mutilate the coin. It is certain that the latter 
 temptation was yielded to. The aggregate loss to 
 the nation from this transaction was not less than 
 o£*3 ,000,000, nearly ^68,500,000 having been brought 
 into the several mints set up in London and else- 
 where. 
 
 The justification for this lavish act was the dis- 
 content which it was believed would be entertained, 
 if the worn and clipped money had been taken by 
 weight. The Government was in a most precarious 
 situation, the expenditure was great, and, as I have 
 observed before, the harvests were unpropitious. 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 31 
 
 There are those among us who can remember the 
 nuisance which the light sovereigns were some 
 fifteen years ago. It would appear however from a 
 paper lately read in London on the gold circulation 
 of Great Britain, that the people who mulcted the 
 public for light gold, sent the sovereigns back into 
 general circulation and at their full value, immedi- 
 ately after the panic was over. 
 
 Part of the difficulty which ensued from the 
 abstraction of the currency during the process of 
 re-coinage, was met by the establishment of the Bank 
 of England. The projector of this was a Scotchman, 
 one Paterson, who afterwards wrecked his fortunes, 
 and those of many others, in the unlucky Darien ex- 
 pedition. The place in which these hapless but 
 venturesome Scots thought proper to found a colony, 
 is one of the most unwholesome under the canopy of 
 heaven. It has its rivals in Massowah, the teterrima 
 causa of the late Abyssinian War, and Sierra Leone, 
 the chosen home of fever. These places were at that 
 time unknown to our countrymen. The settlers 
 perished like sheep. It is an illustration of the 
 feeling which persons have entertained as to the 
 responsibility of government, that this failure, due 
 to natural causes, was ascribed for a long time to 
 the jealousy of the English, and that the Scotch 
 made it a condition, at the negotiations which led 
 to the Union, that the loss of the Darien expedition 
 should, in part, be made good. Michael Godfrey, 
 the first governor of the Bank of England, insisted 
 
32 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 on accompanying William to the siege of Namur, 
 and on needlessly sharing his dangers. He was 
 killed in the trenches. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the present operations 
 of the Bank of England, and the influence which 
 the rate of its discount has, not only on the home 
 trade but on the markets of the mercantile world, 
 would smile at the beginnings of the House in 
 Threadneedle Street. In this day, the money market 
 of which the Bank of England is the centre, has 
 greater interest to more men than the rise and fall 
 of empires have. The excommunication of the Stock 
 Exchange is far more terrible, because far more 
 immediately effectual, than the interdict of the pope 
 or the ban of the empire ever were. The price 
 which is paid for the insertion of a stock in the 
 broker^s list, is incomparably higher than that which 
 a parvenu pays the Heralds^ College for a pedigree 
 and a shield. Unluckily, the certificate is sometimes 
 a cloak for fraud. 
 
 In those early days, the Bank had to struggle for 
 existence. It was under the patronage of the Whigs, 
 William being a subscriber of <^ 10,000 stock, as 
 Chamberlain^s abortive land bank was under that of 
 the Tories. But as its issues were based on public 
 securities, they were often at a discount, even though 
 they bore a high rate of interest. Droll stories are 
 told by Mr. Francis, the chronicler of the Bank of 
 England, as to the raids which it made on its rivals, 
 and how these rivals organised a run upon it, and 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 33 
 
 how the old Duchess of Marlborough opened her 
 hoards^ to avenge herself on her political foes, and 
 sustain the credit of an imperilled establishment. 
 With that woman, revenge was a stronger passion 
 than avarice, though her avarice was proverbial. 
 
 In 1696 the credit of the Government had reached 
 its lowest ebb. Tallies on the Exchequer were at 
 from 30 to 60 per cent, discount ; Bank notes at 20, 
 and a general bankruptcy seemed imminent. The 
 process of providing the new currency was being 
 carried out, but the want of money was sorely felt. 
 In this crisis, Montagu devised the expedient of 
 Exchequer bills, partly as a floating debt, partly to 
 meet the deficiency of the currency. They bore no 
 interest at first, and were for very small sums. But 
 they were receivable in payment of taxes, and if 
 reissued from the Exchequer, were to carry interest 
 at ^d. per cent, per diem, i.e. <^7 12*. per annum. 
 The effect of this expedient was almost magical. 
 Credit revived, (perhaps the cessation of the war had 
 something to do with this desirable result,) and from 
 that time forward, the issue of Exchequer bills has 
 been the form in which Government gets its first 
 credit from the House of Commons. Unfortunately, 
 the prevailing immorality of the period led to a dis- 
 honest use of these instruments, and several persons 
 were implicated in a fraudulent issue of Exchequer 
 bills. Two representatives convicted of this crime 
 were expelled the House of Commons. The House 
 resolved to punish Buncombe, the Receiver-General 
 
34 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 of the Excise, and passed a bill levying a fine of 
 ^400,000 on this person and his associates, but the 
 Duke of Leeds contrived that the bill should drop in 
 the Lords. Long experience had made the Duke an 
 adept in the art of bribery. Detection could not make 
 him more infamous. 
 
 In 1699, Montagu was created Baron Halifax, and 
 was made First Commissioner of the Treasury. He 
 had risen, by dint of sheer industry and keen business 
 faculties, to the post of prime minister, at the age of 
 thirty-eight. Eleven years before, the offer of a 
 living of .^150 a year would have determined his 
 career. Now he was a peer, chief minister, had 
 secured certain solid favours from William, and had 
 obtained grants of sinecure offices for himself, his 
 brother, and his nephew. Of course his prosperity 
 procured him some enemies, his vanity and arrogance 
 made him more. But an attempt to impeach him 
 in 1703 failed, after he had lost his office, on the 
 accession of Anne. From that time till 1708, he 
 was one of the junto, his political associates being 
 Somers, Wharton, Orford, and Sunderland. The 
 insolence of the Duchess of Marlborough and the 
 clamour against SachevereFs impeachment ejected 
 Halifax from power, and set Harley and St. John at 
 the head of affairs. But the amity of St. John and 
 Harley was based on no better foundation than that 
 personal ambition which soon degenerates into sordid 
 rivalry, and despite the efforts of Swift, these two 
 persons came to a rupture, in the last year of Anne^s 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX, 35 
 
 reign. The treasurer was compelled to resign his staff 
 on July 27th, 1 7 14, having been virtually a cipher 
 in the administration for a twelvemonth previously. 
 A cabinet council, which Anne attended, was held 
 the same day. It was at once determined to put the 
 Treasury into the hands of a commission of five. But 
 the ministry could agree to no other name than that 
 of Wyndham, and broke up at two in the morning, 
 without arriving at any decision. The fatigue of 
 this debate was fatal to the Queen. She was seized 
 with apoplexy or gout in the head, and, after a short 
 rally, died on the First of August. 
 
 The Queen's sudden or at least unexpected death, 
 broke down the hopes of the Jacobites. Atterbury 
 alone gave bold counsels. He advised Bolingbroke 
 to proclaim the Pretender at once. But the Secre- 
 tary shrank from the risk. ' There,' said Atterbury, 
 ^goes the best cause for want of a little courage.' 
 The circumstances of the first council, held after the 
 Queen's death, are well known. The Whig leaders 
 insisted on being present, and confounded their 
 opponents; George was proclaimed, and a regency 
 administered public affairs during the King's absence. 
 The Jacobites were furious. They knew the risk 
 before it was a certainty. Lady Masham, whose 
 foi-tunes departed with her power, railed at Harley 
 on the last day of July with aggravated feminine 
 bitterness, declaring that he had neither sense nor 
 honesty, though when she wrote. Dr. Arbuthnot 
 entertained hopes of the Queen's life, and continued 
 D 2 
 
36 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 to hope (his judgment being bewildered by his 
 anxieties), up to within a few hours of her death. 
 The council had sent for Radcliffe, then reputed 
 the most sagacious physician in England. RadclifFe 
 declined to come on some pretext or the other, and 
 was charged with having let the Queen die by 
 default. A friend of Kadcliffe^s moved in the House 
 (for the physician was a member of Parliament), that 
 he should be summoned to his place, and censured 
 for negligence; but the motion was negatived. 
 Radcliffe defended himself, partly by his previous 
 plea, partly by saying that he knew the danger of 
 attending crowned heads, unless under a certificate of 
 indemnity ; and then complained characteristically of 
 the ill usage shown him by a friend with whom ^ he 
 had drunk many hundred bottles.^ In three months 
 the physician died, his end having been, it seems, 
 hastened by the unpopularity which he underwent, 
 and in those days, by the dangers which unpopularity 
 involved. 
 
 Bolingbroke was capable of intrigue, but not of 
 action. He could cabal with the backstairs, worry 
 his colleagues, negotiate with the men of letters who 
 were of his party, and debauch as far as possible the 
 House of Commons. Immediately on the Queen^s 
 death, he writes to Swift, begging him to remain 
 in England and assist his party ; laments the ^ banter- 
 ings of fortune ; ^ states that the Tories are resolved 
 not to be crushed, and that this is enough to pre- 
 vent such a catastrophe ; addresses in that punctilious 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 37 
 
 age Swift as 'dear Jonathan;^ and concludes his letter 
 with a characteristic postscript — 'The Whigs are a 
 pack of Jacobites, and that shall be the cry in a 
 month/ People talk of the versatility of knaves, 
 but political knavery has few expedients, and the 
 chief trick it uses is that of charging opponents with 
 its own vile purposes. It is no wonder that in a few 
 days Swifb^s Jacobite correspondents could write to 
 him, that the earth has never produced such monsters 
 as Bolingbroke, Harcourt, and Atterbury ; the writer 
 of one letter having been intelligent enough to 
 predict the history of parties so accurately as to say, 
 that ' if the King keeps some Tories in employment, 
 the notion of Whig and Tory will be lost, but that 
 of court and country will arise/ What was really 
 felt at the crisis is seen by the fact, that stocks rose 
 as soon as it became manifest that the law of the 
 Hanoverian succession would be respected. 
 
 After the death of Anne, Halifax was again made 
 First Lord of the Treasury, and raised to the dignity 
 of an earl. But he did not long enjoy this later 
 elevation. He was suddenly taken ill on Sunday, 
 May 15th, 1 7 15, and died on the following Thursday. 
 
 I cannot allow myself to omit all mention of one 
 act in the public life of Halifax, his successful resist- 
 ance to the Occasional Conformity Bill of 1702. The 
 object of this measure, which the reactionary Par- 
 liament of Anne strove to carry, was to distress the 
 Dissenters. It provided that if any person holding 
 an office of trust, for the occupation of which it was 
 
38 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 necessary to take the Sacrament, sliould attend at 
 a Dissenters' meeting-liouse, he should be disabled 
 from his employment, and be fined a hundred pounds, 
 with five pounds a day additional, as long as, having 
 committed the. ofience, he remained in ofiice. The 
 management of the bill was put into the hands of 
 Bromley and St. John, the first a violent bigot, the 
 second notorious for his naked scepticism and his naked 
 political apostasy. Halifax managed the conference 
 on the part of the House of Lords, and, for once in 
 the political history of England, had nearly all the 
 Bishops with him, arrayed on the side of good sense 
 and toleration. As the Lords were resolute in their 
 resistance to it, the bill dropped. It was on this oc- 
 casion that Defoe wrote his ^Shortest Way of Dealing 
 with Dissenters.'' He was adjudged to Stand in the 
 pillory for two hours, to be imprisoned in Newgate, 
 and to pay a fine of £200. But the London Non- 
 conformists covered the pillory with laurels, pelted 
 their advocate with flowers, and drank to him in 
 silver cups. In 171 1, Nottingham contrived to enact 
 this measure of persecution, at the instance of Boling- 
 broke; but it was repealed in 1719, when Boling- 
 broke was in exile, and the Whigs were in the 
 ascendant. The Whigs of George the First's days, says 
 Lord Stanhope, were really the Tories of a later date ; 
 the Tories Whigs. It is difficult to discover any re- 
 semblance be3^ond such as might appear to the anxious 
 eye of a partisan, when one recollects the persons 
 who supported this atrocious act of pjersecution. 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 39 
 
 The accession of Anne had been followed by a poli- 
 tical reaction. Fortunately for the principles of the 
 Revolution, Louis the Fourteenth acknowledged 
 the son of James the Second on the death of his 
 father, and in contravention of the treaty of Ryswick. 
 Anne was therefore constrained to defend her crown, 
 and to maintain the principles which her courtiers 
 and she secretly abhorred. Hence the Tories were 
 continually compelled to uphold that which they 
 detested, and to intrigue against their avowed prin- 
 ciples. Nothing was so fatal to the hopes of the 
 exiled Jacobites as the ill-considered recognition of 
 James. Had it not been for this event, the reaction 
 might have triumphed. As it was, its only fruit 
 was the nonsense of Dr. Sacheverel, the rival intrigues 
 of the waiting- women, the Duchess of Marlborough 
 and Lady Masham, the victory of the latter, because 
 such a victory was necessarily won by the most 
 supple and compliant, and the defection of Harley 
 and Bolingbroke from the Whig party. 
 
 In the autumn of 17 10 a clergyman, of English 
 descent, but who was born in Ireland, and who had 
 been presented to a benefice in that island, came 
 to London, ostensibly for the purpose of furthering 
 certain interests of the Irish Church. He had been 
 long known as one of the most active and vigorous 
 political writers of the time, and his assistance had 
 been eagerly courted by both parties. But Swift was 
 unforgiving. The Whigs, shocked, or pretending to be 
 shocked, by the coarse profanity contained in his ' Tale 
 
40 • CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 of a Tub/ had withstood his preferment in the Church. 
 Even Wharton^ profiigate as he was, was justified 
 in saying, ' We must not encourage this fellow ; we 
 have not character enough ourselves/ So Swift com- 
 plained of the coldness of Soraers, and the treachery 
 of Halifax, and the bad faith of Berkeley, and the 
 unprincipled character of Wharton, and resolved to 
 desert them. Besides, Swift was shrewd. He saw 
 that the Whig party was discredited; that the re- 
 action consequent on SachevereFs trial was ruining 
 their fortunes, when he was bent on bettering his 
 own. He came to London, found Godolphin^s ad- 
 ministration tottering to its fall, and instantly deter- 
 mined on the party to which he should adhere. It 
 was in vain that Halifax entertained him at Hampton 
 Court, and invited him to his country seat. Swift 
 kept up a close friendship with only one of the Whigs. 
 But Addison was popular with everybody. ^If,^ says 
 Swift, speaking of the Essayist^s election for Malmes- 
 bury, ^ he had a mind to be chosen king, he could 
 hardly be refused."* 
 
 I have spoken of the instruction which the curious 
 may obtain as to the Court of the Restoration by 
 a perusal of Grammont^s Memoirs. A similar picture, 
 though drawn by the hand of a greater master, is 
 to be found in Swift's Journal to Stella. The coarse 
 frivolities of fashionable life, the endless intrigues of 
 court lackeys and court waiting-women, the bustle 
 of the Treasurer's levee, the suppers at taverns, the 
 card-parties at Mrs. Manley's, the Mohawks of Covent 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 41 
 
 Garden, the quarrels and the duels, the gossip and 
 the scandal of the town, are all faithfully described 
 in the plainest possible English, through a series of 
 letters to the young lady whose relations to Swift 
 were then equivocal, and which remain to our days, 
 since history has seldom leisure for private scandal, 
 eminently mysterious. 
 
 The Queen, who was to be wheedled into whatever 
 policy seemed most convenient for the ambition of 
 her ministers, made no very considerable figure in 
 the drama. She had merely exchanged the tutelage 
 of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough for that of Abigail 
 Lady Masham. Other monarchs have been governed 
 by confessors : Anne shaped her policy by the whims 
 of her favourite waiting-woman. Swift saw her when 
 he was using his pen on behalf of her ministers, as 
 Johnson saw her in his childhood, when she touched 
 him for the King^s evil — a fat, gouty, lethargic 
 woman, in black velvet and diamonds. 
 
 The most mysterious man of that time was Harley, 
 the Prime Minister. Before he reached this dignity, 
 he had been Speaker of the House of Commons. 
 Bred a Dissenter, he became the chief of the High 
 Tory party. Introduced into the Cabinet in 1704, 
 as a Whig, and made Secretary of State, he carried 
 with him St. John, another Whig, as Secretary at 
 War. Both intrigued against Godolphin and Marl- 
 borough, through the assistance of Mrs. Masham, 
 and were forced to retire from office in 1708; for 
 the statesman and the soldier threatened to resign 
 
42 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 their places unless these cabals were repudiated. But 
 Harley after his dismissal, intrigued again through 
 the same channel^ and ultimately succeeded in eject- 
 ing Godolphin_, and occupying his oflice. He held 
 this place to within a few days of the Queen^s death. 
 Almost every man in England^ who thought on the 
 matter_, believed that the sole object which Harley had 
 before him was the restoration of the Stuarts. Boling- 
 broke thought so, and committed himself finally, and for 
 himself fatally, to the project. But George succeeded 
 at Anne^s death quietly, though absent from England ; 
 nor, when the conduct of the ministers was impeached 
 after the accession of the Hanoverian line, was Harley 
 found to have played false to any but those who 
 had believed in his reputed opinions. Even these 
 people had no other proof than the strength of their 
 own presumption. Harley never committed himself. 
 To a moral certainty he would have been exposed, 
 had he done any overt act of political apostasy ; for 
 the Whigs were not likely to be tender of public 
 reputations after the Scotch rising of 17 15. 
 
 Beyond doubt, Harley had consummate art in the 
 most difficult and delicate of all finesse, the manage- 
 ment of the .House of Commons. He quarrelled with 
 no man, had a kind word for everybody. ^ Don't 
 come to my levee,-' he said to Swift, 'I have no 
 friends there.' He dropped in to parties, and chatted 
 familiarly with every one he met. He rallied his 
 acquaintances as though they had been friends. His 
 kindness of manner to his reputed friends knew no 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX. 43 
 
 bounds. He called Swift ^ Presto/ and Swift was as 
 proud of the name as if it had been a peerage. Swift, 
 the most jealous, vain, exacting of men, never sus- 
 pected that Harley used him as a mere political tool. 
 Harley had no policy, and was therefore able to say 
 that any expedient was his original purpose. He ridi- 
 culed Sacheverel, the Murphy of the day, and gave 
 him secret support. He was on good terms with the 
 Jacobites, but he was also on good terms with the 
 House of Hanover. The former believed that he 
 would restore 'the King,^ the latter that he would 
 save the Act of Succession. It was only when he 
 disappointed the former that Bolingbroke, a ruined 
 political gamester, uttered, in his letter to Wyndham, 
 that savage judgment on him, ' that he had a weak 
 spirit and a wicked soul.' And when he slunk out 
 of office, his enemies rejoiced over his fall, and joined 
 the WTiig^ in their second act of folly. The first was 
 the prosecution of Sacheverel, the other was the im- 
 peachment of Harley. They did not see that Harley was 
 an accomplished dissembler, who had one object before 
 him, that of being Prime Minister. He was satisfied 
 with his success when he reached his dignity, and he 
 enjoyed it for four years. People believed that he 
 w^as a sphinx — a great mystery ; but he was really a 
 man with much tact, infinite good temper, no prin- 
 ciples, a sincere belief in himself, and a total indif- 
 ference as to the means by which he might rise to 
 eminence. He would, I make no doubt, have pre- 
 ferred remaining a Dissenter and a Whig; against 
 
44 CHARLES MONTAGU, 
 
 his will, and in his own interest, he became a Tory, 
 and was thought to be a Jacobite. If Bolingbroke, 
 instead of being a courtier, an intriguer, and a free- 
 thinker, had been a country gentleman of our day, he 
 would have wished his Leader to have been in heaven, 
 or in some other place, at the great crisis of 17 14. 
 
 The most noteworthy fact in the political history 
 of that epoch which lies between the accession of Wil- 
 liam and the death of Anne, was the public employ- 
 ment of men who had no recommendation beside their 
 capacity. Such men were, for example. Prior, Addi- 
 son, Steele, Tickell. Swift himself might have been 
 Secretary to the Embassy at Vienna, and this at a 
 most critical period. The Bishop of Bristol nego- 
 tiated the peace of Utrecht. The scene changed when 
 Walpole came into power, and inaugurated a new sys- 
 tem of government. This minister ruled the country 
 party by pensions and peerages, by honours and hard 
 cash, by the simplest, and, for a time, the cheapest 
 expedients. He had learnt his lesson in Opposition ; 
 and in those days, the Opposition was not only 
 hungry, but desperate, and, for its personal ends, 
 preternaturally acute. 
 
 Through the epoch which I have spoken of, the 
 public life of Halifax lasted. He was the first finance 
 minister that England had. He understood the con- 
 ditions of public credit, and he had, for his time, a 
 clear comprehension of the machinery which is needed 
 for mercantile prosperity. I cannot say that, had he- 
 lived long enough, he would have saved England from 
 
EARL OF HALIFAX, 45 
 
 the wild frenzy which culminated in the South Sea 
 Scheme. Within our own experience, a greater finan- 
 cier than Montagu was at the head of affairs when 
 Parliament sanctioned the mad speculations of the 
 great railway bubble ; when projects were legalised, the 
 completion of which would have required more than 
 the annual earnings of capital and labour to efiect 
 them; when Capel Court renewed the memories of 
 'Change Alley, and the Craggses and Aislabies were 
 reproduced too numerously for reprobation and 
 punishment. 
 
 The commencement of responsible government was 
 the commencement of the science of finance. But 
 this science is yet only in its infancy. The problem 
 is twofold, — how to combine efficiency with economy 
 in the public service; how to adjust public burdens 
 so that taxation shall be equitable. But these are 
 only the most obvious of those numerous economical 
 questions, the solution of which is of pressing im- 
 portance, which grow in urgency as they are delayed, 
 and which have been delayed, only in deference to 
 clamorous interests. 
 
SIR EGBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 EARL OF ORFORD. 
 
SIE EOBEET WALPOLE, 
 
 EARL OF ORFORD. 
 
 The antiquarian who gives his attention to the 
 beginnings of constitutional history in England, finds 
 the germ of that theory of government which sur- 
 rounds the monarch with ministerial advisers, in the 
 peremptory and despotic administration of Henry the 
 Eighth. This prince, who more than any other Eng- 
 lish king ruled by sheer force of will, appears to have 
 been the author of a system which has ultimately 
 destroyed the power which it was intended to as- 
 sist, usurped the functions which it was intended to 
 strengthen. As the Merovingian kings appointed 
 their Mayors of the Palace, and the descendants of 
 Charles the Great trusted to the Counts of Paris, 
 only to find masters and successors in their ministers 
 and political servants, so the House of Tudor in- 
 vented the machinery which, professing to maintain 
 all the forms of monarchical institutions, has made 
 this country to all intents and purposes a republic, 
 the chief magistrates of which are elected by the 
 popular branch of the Legislature, and are controlled 
 by an opposition which is only a little more informal 
 than the organisation which it criticises, attacks, or 
 
50 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 condemns. The circumstances which have developed 
 the limited monarchy of the United Kingdom are 
 wholly fortuitous^ if indeed that is accidental which 
 has not only not been foreseen, but which has ori- 
 ginated by gradual progression from a system which 
 was intended to counteract the very consequences 
 which have ensued from it. 
 
 The government of a country by a board of ad- 
 ministrators,, who are in theory heads of official de- 
 partments, and whose councils and policy originate 
 in a conclave which has no legal existence, who are 
 called into being by the approval of Parliament, and 
 who are extinguished by its disapproval, is almost 
 peculiar to ourselves. In almost every country but 
 our own the will of the chief magistrate counts for 
 something. In the most popular or democratic go- 
 vernments it counts for a great deal. We have lately 
 witnessed a singularly unseemly controversy, carried 
 on between the chief of the American Republic and 
 the Houses of Parliament in the American Union. 
 The legislative and executive functions have been in 
 constant collision, and the civilised world has been 
 amused or scandalised, while the public policy of the 
 great Commonwealth of North America has been 
 checked by a deadlock. Between this political sys- 
 tem and the Csesarism which identifies the will of the 
 monarch with the life of the State, there are numerous 
 varieties of personal government more or less auto- 
 cratic. But there are no institutions precisely like 
 our own, in which the ministers of government are 
 
EARL OF ORFORD, 51 
 
 constituted or displaced by a simple and energetic 
 machinery, that by which the popular Council of the 
 Nation grants its confidence to an administration, or 
 withdraws its countenance from it. It is a century 
 and a-half since the Crown has put its veto on a 
 measure sanctioned by both Houses; it is nearly as 
 long a time since the Crown has pursued an inde- 
 pendent policy, that is, has supported or resisted 
 measures which have obtained a concurrent majority 
 in the opinion of both Houses. The early princes of 
 the Hanoverian House were willing enough to be 
 despotic, and sometimes succeeded in cajoling one of 
 the Estates into supporting their prejudices or con- 
 victions, but they have never been able to take a 
 wholly independent line of action by the aid of their 
 ministers. 
 
 This singular adjustment of political forces has 
 been developed from a simple formula. The Crown 
 is irresponsible, but its advisers are under a perpetual 
 responsibility. In early times this responsibility was 
 secured by the right of impeachment, which the Legis- 
 lature has asserted for five hundred years. Later, the 
 same result has been attained by the milder method 
 of a vote of no confidence, an act of political ostra- 
 cism under which an administration is as efiectually 
 constrained to abdicate as Continental mon^rchs have 
 been by revolutions. Nor could the most resolute 
 prince resist. He is not indeed chargeable, according 
 to the respectful language of our constitution, with 
 the errors or crimes of his advisers. But until he 
 
 E % 
 
52 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 appoints or accepts others, who possess the confidence 
 denied to their predecessors, the whole mechanism of 
 administration is arrested or suspended. These facts 
 are indeed familiar enough to us all, but they repre- 
 sent a political system which is not merely singular 
 but unique. 
 
 It is impossible to define in an unwritten or tradi- 
 tional constitution, and nearly as impossible in a con- 
 stitution which is precisely defined, what are the 
 relative functions of legislative and executive forces. 
 In this country we have given the fullest power to 
 the latter, but have made those who wield the forces 
 absolutely dependent on the former. Had no such 
 agencies interposed between the ruler and the subject, 
 the limitation of either^s rights would have been the 
 material for a perpetual and ever- varied conflict. The 
 struggle would have been provoked by the personal 
 will, the abilities, the impulses, even by the physical 
 constitution of the former, as these vary in different 
 individuals, or in the same individual. Parliaments 
 too, like monarchs, have their idiosyncrasies, and 
 there would be in the struggle between these rivals, 
 a perpetual ebb and flow of prerogative and liberty, 
 of executive authority and legislative control. Such a 
 political system did indeed characterise our parlia- 
 mentary history for many a century. The Legislature 
 was variably strong and weak from the days of the 
 first Edwards to the Revolution, sometimes assuming 
 great powers, as in the times of Richard the Second 
 and Charles the First, sometimes sinking almost to 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 53 
 
 the level which was reached by the French Parlia- 
 ments of the ancient monarchy, as in the days of 
 Henry the Eighth and Charles the Second. 
 
 The theory of ministerial responsibility, guaranteed 
 as it was in very early days by the right of parlia- 
 mentary impeachment, was, like many analogous in- 
 stitutions, of very slow growth. Familiar as the 
 process is, it is really a remarkable political abstrac- 
 tion, as abstruse as some of those metaphysical para- 
 doxes which exercised the ingenuity of the schoolmen. 
 It affirms the form of monarchical institutions, and, 
 without making an election, confers the executive 
 powers of the State on the elected head of a legis- 
 lative republic. No publicist, I may venture to 
 affirm, would have ever dreamed of developing so 
 peculiar, and at first sight so contradictory and illo- 
 gical a process of force and check, from any theory of 
 government. And, for the same reason, no such sys- 
 tem could have suddenly sprung up. It must have 
 been produced slowly, though it may perhaps be 
 imitated without difficulty by other political com- 
 munities. Had it been fully developed at the epoch 
 of the American War of Independence, it is prob- 
 able that Washington and his associates would have 
 adopted its provisions. The founders of the American 
 republic had two difficulties before them of no com- 
 mon magnitude. The first of these was how they 
 could secure the municipal independence of the several 
 states comprising the Union, and grant at the same 
 time a respectable autonomy to the federal councils. 
 
54 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE. 
 
 The second was the harmony between the executive 
 and legislative functions of the president and these 
 councils. So great was the former difficulty^ that 
 much diplomacy and not a little deceit, if indeed the 
 latter can be distinguished from the former, was 
 employed by Franklin in order to effect the union, 
 a union which, as we all know, was bound by a very 
 precarious tie. The latter is even now unsolved, 
 though the solution would have been easier had the 
 ministers of the President been absolutely responsible 
 to Congress and the Senate, instead of being respon- 
 sible to those powers for a crisis only, that is, at the 
 moment of their appointment. 
 
 One of the commonest errors into which superficial 
 critics of political events fall, is that of interpreting 
 past forces by the light of present experience. People 
 talk and write of the administration of Edward the 
 Third's days, as though they were discussing the 
 social phenomena of a time in which the forces of 
 government had each its definition, place, and func- 
 tion. But at that time, and for many a century 
 afterwards, each force in the social machine was 
 seeking to secure itself and to assert further powers, 
 and this at the expense of personal government, that 
 is, by revolution. We speak of revolution with alarm. 
 But, in fact, revolutions are matters of degree, vary- 
 ing not in kind but in intensity, between the simple 
 but organic changes which acquire the force of law 
 and abiding precedent, and earthquakes which fre- 
 quently level buildings only that they may be built 
 
EARL OF ORFORD, 55 
 
 up again in the same form but with greater solidity. 
 The English revolution of 1688 was to outward ap- 
 pearance a mere change of dynasty, accompanied by 
 a few constitutional guarantees, the force of which 
 was for a long time imperfectly understood, the spirit 
 of which was for a longer time only imperfectly appre- 
 ciated. But it was a real and great advance. The 
 French revolution of a century later shook the poli- 
 tical world. to its centre. It affected to wholly ignore 
 the past, except in its allusions to republican Greece 
 and Rome. It has left a few superficial marks on 
 French society. It has effected an equality before the 
 law. It has divided the estate of a deceased ancestor 
 equally, or almost equally, among his children or 
 descendants. But it has not given a single guarantee 
 to human liberty, has not warranted its assertions, has 
 not justified itself. At the present moment, France 
 is reproducing the social system of Louis Quatorze, 
 only in a coarser shape, with all the extravagance, 
 waste, licentiousness, irritable vanity, aggressiveness, 
 bounce, superficial orthodoxy, hard scepticism, heart- 
 lessness, intellectual brilliancy, intellectual depravity, 
 which characterised that epoch. It is not easy to 
 say what humanity has gained by the French revo- 
 lution. It would be a long story to recount what it 
 has lost by that .upheaval. 
 
 The social history of this time is to be gathered 
 from sources like Hervey^s Memoirs, Horace Wal- 
 pole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, and similar mate- 
 rials — ^the works of men who,, having no motive to 
 
56 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 praise or blame^ are valuable authorities in proportion 
 to their opportunities for learning, and capacity for 
 interpreting the facts to which they witness. Simi- 
 larly a composition of Hogarth^s gives us a clear 
 conception of the outer life of London,, such as those 
 of the '^Election/ the ^ March to Finchley/ ^ Gin 
 Alley/ and ^ Beer Lane/ How strange that the art 
 of the painter has produced one Hogarth only, has 
 never, except in this case, developed pictorial comedy! 
 
 Between June ii, 1727, and October 25, 1760, the 
 foremost personage in this country was a little fussy 
 man, who talked incessantly and fluently, though 
 with a strong foreign accent, was snappish beyond 
 measure to those he liked the best or respected the 
 most, was plentiful in coarse abuse on the smallest 
 provocation, or no provocation at all, had a fairly 
 strong memory of injuries, and none whatever of 
 benefits or services. He is reported to have loved 
 one person, his mothet, the unhappy Sophia Dorothea, 
 though the best proof that this feeling was not de- 
 rived from his hatred to his father lay in the fact 
 that immediately on his accession he set up his 
 mother^s picture in his cabinet. He is reported to 
 have respected one person, and that was his wife. 
 He hated his eldest son with the greatest bitterness, 
 much more bitterly than his father had hated him. 
 It may be doubted whether he rejoiced more at his 
 father^s death than he did at his son^s. 
 
 George the Second had a marvellous faculty for 
 shedding copious tears on the shortest notice and the 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 57 
 
 most trivial occasions. When his eldest daughter 
 married the Prince of Orange, he gave her^ says 
 Hervey, a thousand kisses, a shower of tears, but not 
 a single guinea. When Walpole pressed his Excise 
 scheme in the House of Commons, and nearly ruined 
 himself in the attempt, George used to blurt out, with 
 flushed cheeks and gushing eyes, ' He is a brave fel- 
 low; he has more spirit than any man I know.^ 
 He wept incessantly during the Queen^s last illness, 
 though he was at the time arranging the journey of 
 that Madame Walmoden whom the heralds know 
 as the Countess of Yarmouth. He wept still more 
 abundantly when his minister retired from his coun- 
 cils. But there was always a mixture of brutality in 
 his tenderest acts and words. 
 
 When Walpole's administration was in the greatest 
 peril, because it was believed that the King had 
 perished in the storms of December 1736, the great 
 minister spoke of the King as his ^ sweet master,^ and 
 was profoundly anxious for his safety. But the same 
 minister two years before had said of George, that 
 ' to talk to him of compassion, consideration for past 
 services, charity, and bounty, was to make use of 
 words which bore no meaning to him.^ His avarice 
 was enormous. The beginnings of his quarrel with 
 his worthless son were over money matters. He 
 could not endure to increase Frederic's income out 
 of his civil list to the amount which he had received 
 himself. He loved his army more than anything 
 else, and insisted that he should manage it himself. 
 
58 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 But he kept important places in the service vacant 
 for very niggardliness^ not because it would have cost 
 him anything to fill them up_, but from sheer dislike 
 to giving anything away. He crippled Walpole by 
 refusing to allow him the means of corrupting the 
 House of Commons through the Horse Guards. A 
 generation or two later, and this portion of the pre- 
 rogative was conceded to the Ministry. 
 
 He had, it seems, one conversational gift. He 
 was able (and I presume it is easier for kings to do 
 this than for subjects) to turn away any topic which 
 displeased him. He also invented the cut direct, 
 for he had the trick of looking at the place in which 
 his son stood as though no one were there. To his 
 family he was a bore of the first water. He enter- 
 tained the Queen with a minute description of his 
 Hanoverian picnics with Madame Walmoden. When 
 he was away, he filled reams of paper with similar 
 details, which were regularly posted to his wife. 
 Caroline sat during these recitals sometimes yawning, 
 sometimes smiling, always knotting. She regularly 
 and as fully answered his letters. His daughters 
 were less patient, and when he prosed over the old 
 story of his courage, and fearlessness, and presence 
 of mind, they pretended to be asleep. Lord Hervey 
 affects to be shocked at their duplicity. The daughters 
 would have been more undutiful still, had they not 
 hated and feared their brother too heartily to resent 
 anything from their father. 
 
 Queen Caroline was her husband^s good genius. 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 59 
 
 Her father-in-law loathed her, and invariably spoke 
 of her as a she-devil. She simply lived for the King. 
 It is possible that she loved him ; but she certainly 
 made the furtherance of his interests, and the study 
 of his caprices, and even the satisfaction of his peculiar 
 pleasures, the entire business of her existence. She 
 either did not feel, or she perfectly dissimulated any 
 resentment at his conduct. She condescended with 
 the strangest alacrity to the strangest compliances, 
 not indeed passively, but actively, not with him 
 alone, but in concert with Walpole for him. She 
 guided him in everything, where guidance was pos- 
 sible ; but always affected to defer to his opinion. It 
 is possible that he was taken in by an affectation 
 of profound and perpetual humility. It is said that 
 she loved power. But she does not appear to have 
 ever willingly exercised any direct influence in public 
 affairs, and she certainly never wished her husband to 
 prolong his Hanoverian visits. She was regent during 
 the King's lengthiest absence, perhaps necessarily, but 
 she knew well enough that her occupation of this office 
 only embittered her son towards her. Nor was her 
 office a sinecure during the crisis of Madame Walmo- 
 den's fascinations. There was rioting in the West 
 against the corn-laws; rioting in Spitalfields against 
 the Irish immigrants; rioting in Scotland against 
 civil authority, when the Edinburgh mob broke into the 
 Tolbooth, and hanged Porteous in the Grass-market. 
 
 The Queen was as little fastidious in her language 
 as she was sensitive on topics about which queens 
 
6o JSm ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 are, we may suppose, like other women. She jested 
 with Hervey, with Walpole^ with Stair^ with Kinski, 
 in the broadest and plainest fashion. She was always 
 alert, sprightly, and keen. She was, when she spoke 
 of men and things, the impersonation of good sense. 
 ^The triple alliance/ she said, 'between Spain, France, 
 and Sardinia, puts me in mind of the South-Sea 
 scheme, which the parties concerned in entered into, 
 not without knowing the cheat, but hoping to make 
 advantage of it, everybody designing when he had 
 made his fortune, to be the first in scrambling out 
 of it, and each thinking himself wise enough to be 
 able to leave his fellow-adventurers in the lurch.^ 
 The parallel of a commercial bubble and a diplomatic 
 alliance entered into for military purposes, is close 
 and exact. History reproduces itself. The triple 
 alliance of 1 853, as far as two of the high contracting 
 parties were concerned, was of a piece with that to 
 which the Queen alluded when she compared this 
 diplomatic intrigue to a vast commercial fraud. The 
 third part of the parallel fails only, because it re- 
 presents a minister instead of a monarch. 
 
 It was part of the Queen^s conjugal duty to hate 
 her son. If she did not really hate him, her dissimu- 
 lation was astonishing. Her daughter Caroline was 
 at one with her mother. ' No one would credit,' says 
 Hervey, ' unless he heard, the names they called him, 
 the character they gave him, the curses they lavished 
 on him, and the fervour with which they prayed 
 every day for his death." I presume that there never 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 6i 
 
 was any other mother who said of her son, that 'he 
 was the greatest ass, the greatest h*ar, the greatest 
 canaille, and the greatest beast in the world, and 
 that she heartily wished he was out of it/ The 
 daughter had another reason, for when she dined 
 with her brother, he insisted that she should sit on 
 a stool, and be served with diminished state. It is, 
 however, difficult to arrive at the reasons for this 
 unnatural disgust. The bitterness and the provoca- 
 tions seem more like the mad unreasoning rage which 
 is sometimes entertained by monks and nuns against 
 each other, when they are constrained to be per- 
 petually together. 
 
 The Queen sacrificed her health, and finally her 
 life, to her husband. She had been sorely tried by 
 her alarm for the King^s safety in the preceding 
 winter, and had undergone fresh anxiety when Pul- 
 teney, as leader of the opposition, had tried to get 
 an increase of the Prince's allowance. After strenuous 
 effi)rts, the proposal was defeated by 230 votes to 
 204. 'The victory was supposed,' said Walpole, 'to 
 have cost a great deal of money. It really was 
 settled,' he continued, ' by a bribe of some ^£^400 or 
 ^500, given to two men.' These circumstances ag- 
 gravated the disease under which she suffered, and 
 which she had concealed from every one but Lady 
 Sundon. Something may be said, too, for the com- 
 parative unskilfulness of the surgeons at that time. 
 The secret was valuable, however, to the lady in wait- 
 ing. So elated was this personage with the interest 
 
62 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 which this confidence seemed to give her, that she 
 actually proposed to Walpole that they should join 
 hands^ and govern the nation between them. Wal- 
 pole answered, that he preferred the rule of the King 
 and Queen, but added that, if she contrived to effect 
 such an alliance with any other statesman, he hoped 
 that he might reckon on her countenance. The Queen 
 died, and Pope, that ^mens curva in corpore curvo,"* 
 as Atterbury described him, continued, as might have 
 been anticipated, to lampoon her in her grave, in an 
 epigram which has no parallel for coarse spite. She 
 cared little for lampoons in her life. She had the 
 good sense to know that monarchs are always calum- 
 niated, and that half the wit and all the malignity 
 of a calumny are neutralised by indifference. The 
 King's sorrow for his wife's death gave him a popu- 
 larity which he never enjoyed before. As long as 
 he could, too, he followed her dying advice. She 
 summoned Walpole to her deathbed, and said, ' I 
 have nothing to tell you, but to recommend the King, 
 my children, and the kingdom to your care.' She 
 loved one of her sons as much as she hated the other. 
 That son was William, whose reputation was made 
 at Culloden, and lost at Closterseven. 
 
 Aristotle tells a droll story of a family in Greece, 
 in which a son was dragging his father to the door 
 of their house, and was about to turn him out, when 
 the father remonstrated, and said, * Up to the door 
 it is fair enough, for I dragged my father to this 
 point, and then stopped ; ' and adds that the apology 
 
EARL OF ORFOED. 63 
 
 for the scandal was to be found in the fact that such 
 acts of violence were characteristic of the family. A 
 similar explanation was given in the last century of 
 the quarrels between father and son in the Hano- 
 verian dynasty. George the First and his son were 
 estranged ; George the Second and his son abandoned 
 all decency in their quarrel. It is not clear that a 
 similar feud arose in the next family, but it is certain 
 that the son gave occasion enough for such a broil. 
 The explanation is more natural when one reflects 
 on the fact that the causes of difference between 
 George the Second and the Prince were so utterly 
 frivolous. The Prince wanted a larger allowance, 
 and was annoyed at not being made regent in his 
 father's absence ; and committed his crowning offence 
 by bringing the Princess, just before his eldest 
 daughter's birth, to London against the King's ex- 
 press direction. A similarly trivial circumstance 
 precipitated matters between George the First and 
 his son. The King had appointed the Duke of New- 
 castle godfather to his grandson, the unlucky Frederic, 
 and Prince George insulted the Duke after the cere- 
 mony was over. 
 
 It is manifest that Frederic, though his character 
 has generally been drawn by those who sided with 
 the King, was profuse, vain, arrogant, and uncertain. 
 He might have inherited all these vices but the first 
 from his father. The enmity which sprung up be- 
 tween them might have made him headstrong and 
 obstinate. But it is not necessary to derive such 
 
64 SIB ROBERT WALPOLB, 
 
 traits from hereditary tendencies. The youth of 
 Edward the Second and of Henry the Fifth were 
 equally marked by wilfulness and disobedience. 
 
 I have already stated that a century ago the 
 English monarchs had many opportunities for making 
 their will felt in the conduct of public affairs. When 
 kings are absolute, the eldest son is but the principal 
 subject, and cannot intrigue, except cautiously and 
 secretly. But when the monarches will is controlled by 
 constitutional forms — but especially when he still exer- 
 cises a real influence in the choice of his ministers — 
 the opposition naturally seeks its head in the Crown 
 Prince. The heir of the Prussian monarchy has al- 
 ways sided with the liberal party, the King with the 
 despotic. Thus Frederic associated himself with the 
 Patriots, his grandson with Fox^s adherents. Had 
 Frederic lived to succeed his father, he would as 
 assuredly have allied himself with the Whigs of 
 Walpole^s school as his son accepted the services of 
 Pelham, and as* his grandson, when he came to the 
 regency, employed Castlereagh and Sidmouth. Deeply 
 as the Prince of Wales hated Walpole, passionately 
 as he longed for his downfal, eagerly as he furthered 
 his impeachment in 1732, he would, I feel persuaded, 
 have been reconciled to him by the force of cir- 
 cumstances in the spring of 1737, had George the 
 Second perished in the storm of the previous De- 
 cember. But though the fact that the position of 
 the Prince of Wales naturally made him the rallying- 
 point of the opposition, it is not marvellous that he 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 65 
 
 was suspected, and, considering the temper of the 
 King", finally hated by his father. 
 
 In these days, the strength of the House of Lords 
 consisted in the control which its members exercised 
 over the nomination boroughs. It was to his enormous 
 patronage in these representative shams that the 
 silly and perfidious Duke of Newcastle owed his pro- 
 longed power. It is almost unnecessary to say, that 
 the political influence of an hereditary chamber must, 
 under a popular and responsible Government, be secured 
 by indirect means. When Walpole, then Earl of 
 Orford, met his ancient rival, Pulteney, the new Earl 
 of Bath, on the floor of the House of Lords, he said, 
 * Here we are, my lord, the two most insignificant 
 fellows in the kingdom.' But a century ago, such 
 words could not have been used, even in jest, of 
 Newcastle, Devonshire, and Marlborough. 
 
 The House of Commons was, as far as most of 
 the boroughs were concerned, filled with nominees. 
 The Scotch members from both boroughs and counties 
 were of the same character, though, strangely enough, 
 Scotland sometimes cast a vote in favour of public 
 liberty. When in 1718, Lord Stanhope, to his great 
 honour, proposed the repeal of the Occasional Con- 
 formity Act, and was opposed by the Tories, and 
 nearly the whole bench of Bishops, carrying his 
 measure by eighty-six votes to sixty-eight, and when 
 the measure was passed in the Lower House, by 243 
 votes to 202, it is noteworthy that thirty-four Scotch 
 members out of thirty- seven voted for the repeal. 
 
66 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 With such people from such boroughs, popular 
 representation would have been a total farce, but for 
 the county electors. The strength of the nation, the 
 guarantees of civil liberty, lay in the freeholders and 
 in a few large towns. In those days, there were yeo- 
 men tilling their own lands with a conscious and 
 sturdy independence. The latifundia of our time had 
 hardly begun to exist, and the great proprietors were 
 obliged to defer to the wishes and political opinions 
 of these resolute freeholders, if they were at all 
 ambitious of representing counties in Parliament. 
 Nor can it be doubted that the influence of the county 
 electors was indirectly felt by the proprietors of the 
 nomination boroughs. A century and a half ago, 
 even a Duke of Newcastle could not have ventured 
 on angrily inquiring whether he had not a right 
 to do what he would with his own, even though the 
 Duke were such a man as he was of whom Hervey 
 said ; that ^ he and Chancellor King both spoke plen- 
 tifully, and both equally unintelhgibly — the latter 
 from having lost his understanding, the former from 
 never having had any.^ How rapid has been, even in 
 recent days, the elimination of these freeholders, is 
 seen in the fact, that the number of such electors 
 in the county of Berkshire was greater before the 
 Act of 1833 than that of all the electors prior to 
 the reform of 1867. 
 
 It was, I repeat, in the counties and some large 
 boroughs that political feeling was kept alive. It 
 was in these that the most vehement contests of 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 67 
 
 parties were witnessed. The impoverishment of many 
 an ancient family, the embarrassment of more, can 
 be traced back to these conflicts. The Oxfordshire 
 election of 1754 was famous for generations. So was 
 that of Appleby, between Lowther and Lord Thane t, 
 for it cost .^55,000. In the year before Walpole's 
 fall there was a similar contest for Westminster, 
 where every effort was made to return candidates 
 unfavourable to the ministry. The effort was suc- 
 cessful. ^We should have carried the Westminster 
 election,^ said Lord Chesterfield, ' if we had set up 
 two broomsticks.^ ' So I see/ said Lord Lovel. The 
 poll was carried on till the electors were exhausted, 
 or one of the candidates retired. Bribery, notwith- 
 standing the Act of 1739, flourished and struck deep 
 root. 
 
 Petitions and disputed returns were investigated 
 by a committee of the whole House. It is almost 
 unnecessary to say, that in that age, when factions 
 strove bitterly for the mastery, fairness was the last 
 thing thought of. The most outrageous decisions 
 were arrived at. The scandal of these proceedings 
 was monstrous. In one case, the House voted that 
 forty was more than ninety. In another, they cut 
 off the votes of seven towns and some thousands of 
 voters. The decision as to whether the electoral fran- 
 chise was conferred on the corporation, the freemen, 
 or the scot-and-lot voters, was affirmed or rescinded 
 on party grounds. Hervej^, in the most natural way, 
 complains of this injustice, and asserts that the House 
 
 F 1 
 
68 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 thought nothing of robbing a man of his seat,, after 
 he had paid several thousand pounds to gain it j and 
 moralizes^ as we might moralize from other and later 
 instances^ Hhat when shame is divided among five 
 hundred men, the portion of each individual is so 
 small, that it hurts their pride as little as it dis- 
 concerts their countenances/ Those advocates of that 
 privilege of Parliament which consists in controlling 
 elections, examining disputed returns, and deciding 
 on the qualification of candidates, have probably for- 
 gotten the scandals which preceded the passing of 
 Grenville''s Act. Perhaps they do not even recollect 
 how uncertain were the principles which guided the 
 smaller committees of our own day. 
 
 Walpole fell in consequence of an adverse vote 
 given by one of these election committees in 1742; 
 the body of Patroclus, round which the Achseans and 
 Trojans waged battle, being the borough of Chippen- 
 ham. To any feeling besides the pedantic attachment 
 to precedent, nothing could be more ludicrous than 
 the fact that a ministry succumbed to a verdict on 
 a disputed claim to a seat in the House ; a verdict — 
 the word had ceased to have any etymological mean- 
 ing — which should have been determined by justice 
 and not by party passion. 
 
 Another strange rule which the House of Commons 
 at that time maintained with the greatest severity, 
 was that of enforcing secrecy about its proceedings. 
 The regulation was once a guarantee of freedom of 
 speech against regal despotism. It was well enough 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 69 
 
 in the days of the five members^ when kings turned 
 eavesdroppers by themselves or by deputy ; but it was 
 a mere blind to corruption at a time when Parliament 
 was all-powerful. In consequence, the kings of the 
 limited monarchy learned that coercion, except when 
 the members held place or pension, was impracticable 
 or clumsy, and Walpole, following the precedent of 
 Louis the Fourteenth in dealing with Charles the 
 Second's long parliament, adopted bribery in place of 
 intimidation. He saw that force is not so powerful 
 as persuasion, just as we have at last understood, 
 though slowly and imperfectly, that the real remedy 
 for treason is to make it ridiculous, the real remedy 
 for disaffection is to make a people well affected. 
 
 Those burgesses and knights of the shire who 
 gathered under the roof of old St. Stephen's, clad 
 in the costume which the Court has crystallized up 
 to our time, bewigged, and girt with swords, carried 
 on the strife of selfish faction under the guise of par- 
 liamentary forms. One of two faculties was needed 
 for any man who aspired to be a party leader. He 
 must be skilful with his weapon, or quick with his 
 tongue. At no time, I believe, has wit been more 
 keen, repartee more smart. There was no serious- 
 ness, no earnest conviction abroad, but infinite clever- 
 ness. The best poet, almost the only poet, was Pope, 
 and he elaborated social satire more exquisitely than 
 any writer before or since. But there is not a germ 
 of conscientiousness in all his poetry. The letters, 
 the memoirs, the essays of the time, sparkle with 
 
70 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 humour^ are strewn with felicitous retorts ; but they 
 contain no beliefs. The latest and the greatest of 
 these wits was Wilkes, whose pungent and lively 
 sallies are even yet remembered. 
 
 At the commencement of George the Second^s reign 
 there were four parties in the House of Commons. 
 There were a few acknowledged Jacobites^ of whom 
 the leader was Shippen. These men were on the 
 whole dispirited and indifferent. There were the 
 Hanover Tories^ the friends of the new settlement, 
 but still more the allies of the clerical party. Sir 
 Thomas Hanmer might be said to lead them. There 
 were "Whigs out of place, whose chief was Pulteney, 
 and who called themselves patriots; and Whigs in 
 place, who were called courtiers, and who were under 
 the guidance of Walpole. 
 
 Robert Walpole was the second son of a Norfolk 
 squire, who sat for King^s Lynn up to the beginning 
 of the eighteenth century, and was a steady Whig. 
 The old man, said his grandson Horace, left among 
 his memoranda an account of Ins expenses in London 
 during a session of three months and ten days. They 
 amounted to .^64 7^. 5^., a sum, says the virtuoso, 
 which we should think nothing of giving for a fan 
 or a toy. Among the items of this expenditure is 
 ' five shillings for Bob."* 
 
 This ^ Bob^ was the Minister. The policy of Eliza- 
 beth was aided for nearly forty years by William 
 Cecil, but the Queen was rather counselled than guided 
 by her astute secretary. The younger Pitt ruled for 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 71 
 
 nearly twenty years ; Lord Liverpool for fifteen. But 
 the reiorns of Prime Ministers since the Revolution 
 have, on the average, been shorter than those of 
 Popes. Walpole^s was the longest, for he governed 
 the three kingdoms uninterruptedly for twenty-one 
 years. 
 
 He was born on August 26, 1676. Originally 
 intended for the Church, as being the second son, 
 he was sent, as his younger brother Horace was, to 
 Eton, and King^s College, Cambridge. The death 
 of his elder brother made him heir to an estate of 
 .^2,000 a-year, and he was returned to Parliament 
 in 1700 for Castle Rising, and soon after for the 
 borough which his father represented. King's Lynn, 
 and for which he sat till he took his peerage. He 
 was soon employed, for he was appointed Secretary 
 at War in the room of St. John in 1708, and was 
 made Treasurer of the Navy in 1710, when he acted 
 as manager of Sachevereirs impeachment. On Har- 
 ley's accession to power he was expelled the House 
 on a cliarge of corruption, and imprisoned in the 
 Tower for seven months. On the accession of George 
 he w^as made Paymaster, and soon afterwards First 
 Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer. Two years later he was turned out of office 
 by Sunderland, but was again made Paymaster in 
 1720. In the next year Sunderland resigned, and 
 Walpole again became Prime Minister. He held 
 office till Feb. 1742, when he resigned and was raised 
 to the peerage. He still, however, though officially 
 
72 SIB ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 in retirement, advised tlie King, and thwarted his 
 enemies. He died three years after his resignation, 
 on March 1 8, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. 
 
 The management of public affairs during the six 
 years of George the First^s reign, in which Walpole 
 was Prime Minister, was easy. Fortunately for him, 
 the South Sea bubble had been blown during Sunder- 
 land^s administration. Walpole had grown rich by 
 judicious speculation, and by more judicious realization 
 during the mania, for he sold his stock at ^i,ooo 
 the share. He now assumed office with the object of 
 extricating the nation from the embarrassments into 
 which it had fallen in consequence of the wild schemes 
 upon which so many had embarked and wrecked their 
 fortunes. Simultaneously with Walpole^s accession 
 to power Atterbury's plot had been detected and 
 crushed, the bishops being foremost in the attack on 
 their restless and haughty brother. The King, to 
 be sure, was rapacious and selfish, accustomed to look 
 on England as an appanage to Hanover, and as fond 
 of his electoral dominions as he hated his wife and 
 son. Walpole retained his power by small com- 
 pliances, and of course supported the King against the 
 Prince. His political fortunes seemed to be ruined 
 by George the First's death. That King's successor 
 had ransacked a very copious vocabulary of abuse, in 
 order to stigmatise the minister and his associates. 
 Rogue and rascal, scoundrel and fool, were his com- 
 monest utterances when Robert Walpole's name was 
 mentioned. Similarly, he called Horace Walpole a 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 73 
 
 dirty buffoon, Newcastle an impertinent fool, — the 
 most just, by the way, of these contumelious descrip- 
 tions, — and Townsend, Walpole^s brother-in-law, a 
 choleric blockhead, with nearly equal justice. Nor 
 was Walpole more courteous. He had constantly 
 spoken contemptuously of the Prince, and had nick- 
 named Caroline in a w^ay which a less prudent and 
 more sensitive woman would have held unpardonable, 
 and would never have pardoned. 
 
 Walpole bowed meekly to the coming storm. The 
 King sent for Sir Spencer Compton, and everybody 
 hastened to pay his court to the new favom'ite. Sir 
 Spencer, with a simplicity which seems incredible, 
 requested Walpole to write the King^s speech, and the 
 ex-minister agreed to do so with the utmost humility 
 and complaisance. It is superfluous to say that he 
 composed it with the greatest care ; and that he made 
 no secret of his authorship. It was impossible that 
 such a farce could be carried out. The King, taking 
 counsel with his wife in reality, though affecting, as 
 he always did, to act on his own judgment, said 
 that the writer of the speech must be the minister ; 
 and the Queen sent a message to Walpole, informing 
 him, in her characteristic way, that his coarse allusion 
 to her personal appearance had been remembered, to 
 be forgiven. After Walpole's disgrace. Sir Spencer 
 Compton was allowed to succeed him, under the name 
 of Lord Wilmington. 
 
 At first, Walpole was associated with his brother- 
 in-law, Townsend. But they soon disagreed, and the 
 
74 ^/i? ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 rupture was total after the death of Walpole's sister, 
 Townsend^s wife. 'As long/ said the minister, 'as 
 the firm was Townsend and Walpole all went well, but 
 as soon as it came to be Walpole and Townsend all 
 went ill/ Lord Hervey gives another reason for the 
 difference. Before Walpole betook himself to the 
 adornment of Houghton, Eaynham was the hand- 
 somest seat in Norfolk, then the richest county in 
 England. Townsend's vanity was deeply wounded 
 when the splendour of his house was eclipsed by that 
 of his brother-in-law. To be sure, Hervey had no 
 liking for him, describing him, in a manner which 
 reminds us of Swift, ' as more tenacious of his opinion 
 than of his word, for the one he never gave up, the 
 other he seldom kept ; as blunt without being severe, 
 and false without being artful."* He further adds 
 (and here we may recognise a comment of Walpole), 
 'that he affected great strokes in politics, which a 
 wise minister should be incapable of concerting with- 
 out the utmost necessity.'' 
 
 After Townsend^s dismissal, Walpole reigned alone, 
 if, indeed, he could be said to exercise sole functions 
 while Newcastle was tied to him. Long before he 
 was betrayed by this person, of whom he justly said 
 that his name was perfidy, he knew how dangerous 
 was the association. But Newcastle was the largest 
 proprietor of rotten boroughs in the kingdom, and, 
 fool and knave as he was, he had wit enough to 
 guess at his own importance, and knavery enough 
 to make his market. Walpole^s chief business lay 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 75 
 
 in managing the King, the Queen, the Church, the 
 House of Commons, and perhaps the people. 
 
 I have ah-cady said, that hefore his accession George 
 hated Walpole. But there are hatreds and hatreds, 
 equal in fervency while they last, hut different in 
 duration. The King hated Walpole because he had 
 sei-ved his father well. But one George was gone, 
 and another George was in possession. Then came 
 before the man in possession the clear vision of 
 Wal pole's consummate usefulness. The vision was 
 made clearer by the sagacious hints of the Queen. 
 It became clear as noonday when Walpole contrived 
 to add .^115,000 to the civil list; for there was 
 one thing which the King loved more than Hanover, 
 and Queen, and children, and Lady Suffolk, and 
 Madame D'Elitz, the mistress to three generations of 
 the House of Hanover, and sister to Lady Chester- 
 field, and the Walmoden — and that was money. 
 Besides, Walpole was sincerely determined to support 
 the Hanoverian succession. He constantly insisted 
 to George that the final settlement of his House on 
 the throne would be fought out in England. It was 
 clear that a man who was so prescient, would be also 
 most capable of meeting the mischief whenever it 
 should come. Hence he was able to check one 
 of the King's ruling passions, a longing to engage 
 in war; for George was certainly brave, though given 
 to gasconade, and would have greedily entered into 
 a succession of campaigns, if he could only chastise 
 the King of Prussia, his brother-in-law, whom he 
 
76 SIE ROBERT WALFOLR 
 
 hated with one of those enduring hatreds which I 
 have referred to. And Walpole was in the right. 
 Three years and a half after his fall, six months after 
 his death, came the march to Derby, and the packing 
 np of the property at Hampton and St. Jameses, and 
 the peril of the Protestant succession — a peril which 
 it seems was met by the facts, that the young Pre- 
 tender was ill-advised or dishonest enough to proclaim 
 dubiously about keeping faith with the public cre- 
 ditor, and was scrupulous enough to persevere in a 
 religion which the English nation hated and feared. 
 The House of Stuart is the last royal stock which 
 has ever allowed its religious convictions to be a bar 
 to preferment. In these days, ruling families are 
 always ready with an 'eirenicon;'' are conveniently 
 versatile, whenever political exigencies summon them 
 to embrace an alternative of creeds. 
 
 The Queen was predisposed in favour of the minis- 
 ter. She knew his value to herself and her interests ; 
 and, had he been even more rough and coarse, she 
 perpetually avowed that she was not nice. ' She was,^ 
 said Walpole, 'main good at pumping; preferred 
 to know everything, even though the knowledge 
 shocked and pained her ; was ready to enter into any 
 scheme which seemed expedient, even though the 
 furtherance of the scheme constrained her to abandon 
 all self-respect.'' But the chief agent between Walpole 
 and the Queen was Lord Hervey, who filled an office 
 in the household during that part of George the 
 Second^s reign in which Walpole was minister. 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 77 
 
 Hervey, then eldest son of the Earl of Bristol, was a 
 man of considerable accomplishments, of great acute- 
 ness, and ready wit. Most people know of him by 
 Pope^s bitter lines, in which he is caricatured under 
 the name of Sporus. They had been friends, and had 
 quarrelled. Pope belonged, as far as his nature 
 allowed him to entertain political feelings, to the 
 Princess party, as he had belonged to Atterbury^s, 
 to the alliance of which Shippen and Wyndham and 
 Pulteney and Barnard were the heads. Hervey had 
 a personal quarrel with the Prince, and was therefore 
 willing enough to exasperate the enmity between the 
 King and his heir; between the royal family and 
 their prospective tyrant. His singularly weak con- 
 stitution constrained him to live the life of an an- 
 chorite, in days when men habitually drank to excess. 
 It made him popular with the ladies of the house- 
 hold, in whose company he was sober as well as 
 agreeable. His beverage was tea, which Lord Bristol 
 said poisoned him. At last, he became almost ne- 
 cessary to the Queen, who could hardly bear the loss 
 of his amusing company for a day, and to the Princess 
 Caroline, who was believed to entertain even tenderer 
 feelings towards him. He played his part, that of 
 alternate trifling and seriousness, with great skill, 
 and was as useful to Walpole as he was agreeable 
 to his mistress. As a narrator of Court gossip he 
 is without a rival. His memoirs are a series of 
 cabinet pictures, drawn, as he admits, in grotesque, 
 and coloured more highly than the facts would seem 
 to less interested parties. 
 
78 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 How strange the scene appears to us ! The Queen 
 is dressing, attended by Lady Suffolk or Lady Sundon; 
 the Princess Caroline putting in a word now and 
 then ; and the Princess Emily pouting by the fire. 
 Hervey, pallid and painted, is relating gossip, or dis- 
 cussing some fresh affront of the Prince, or com- 
 menting on the tactics of the Patriots, or on the King's 
 intrigues, and being bidden by the Queen not to call 
 too much attention to his reputation as an esprit 
 fort J but to speak low, because from the ante-chamber 
 and through the half-closed door come the voices 
 of the royal chaplains reading the daily service. One 
 of these chaplains, less courtly than the rest, stopped 
 when the door was too nearly closed ; and on being 
 asked why he did not go on, answered that he would 
 not whistle the word of God through a keyhole. 
 How inexpressibly soothing, to use the phrase of a 
 distinguished divine of our day, must have been the 
 service of the Establishment in those times ; or rather 
 what a hideous farce was the whole business, and 
 how little need we wonder that such a social system 
 developed monsters such as Stone and Blackburn, 
 and later on, Cornwallis and Tomline, were. 
 
 It is generally understood that Walpole managed 
 the House of Commons by bribery ; that the secret 
 service-money was thus employed : and that this 
 minister was the father of that corruption which was 
 reported to have disgraced the House during the 
 first half of the last century. I suspect that these 
 influences have been exaggerated. It is a stock story 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 79 
 
 that Walpole said he knew every man's price. It 
 might have been generally true, but the foundation 
 of this apophthegm is, in all likelihood, a recorded 
 saying of his about certain members of the Oppo- 
 sition. But Walpole knew well enough that he 
 could not have bought Shippen, or Wyndliam, or 
 Pulteney, or any among the tribe of their followers. 
 There were venal members then, as, in other forms, 
 there are venal members now. 
 
 The fact is, there were a host of places in the civil 
 list, which were given away for political support, 
 and resumed for political apostacy, or even the sus- 
 picion of apostacy. Before the Place Bill of 1743, the 
 House swarmed with pensioners. Every commission 
 in the army or navy was conditional, and the holder 
 of it might be turned adrift at the King's pleasure. 
 The great Pitt, when a cornet in the Guards, was 
 broken for ridiculing the King's negotiations about 
 the Prince's marriage. Lord Pembroke paid <^io,ooo 
 for a troop in the Guards, and was as summarily 
 deprived of it without compensation. Social position, 
 interest, and fear, kept the House docile ; just as in 
 our own days the expenditure of an election has been 
 used as a threat against malcontents and remon- 
 strants. In the later years of his administration, 
 Walpole complained to Hervey that the King 
 weakened his power by keeping army nominations 
 exclusively in his own hands, and thereupon by 
 making the army independent of the minister. ^ How 
 many people there are,' he said (in the crisis of 
 
8o SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 Pulteney's motion for increasing the Princess allow- 
 ance) 'whom I could bind to me by getting things 
 done in the army, you may imagine/ But the King 
 was obstinate on this point, though by doing as he 
 did, he disobhged the very men whom it was highly 
 important to conciliate, ultimately led the way to 
 Walpole^s fall, and helped to create the danger in 
 which his crown was placed by the events of i745- 
 
 In those days the clergy had great power, especially 
 in the county elections. Since the fall of Atterbury, 
 the Government had taken the utmost care to prevent 
 any see from being filled by any disafiected person. 
 Eut capacity might induce independence. Hence, 
 with the exception of Butler, there is hardly a single 
 prelate during this period of ecclesiastical history 
 who was distinguished either for ability, learning, 
 or piety ; though there were many who scandalized 
 even that age. But these prelates were employed, 
 and as it seems successfully, by Walpole, in keeping 
 the country clergy in good temper. To maintain this 
 good temper, it was of course necessary that no con- 
 cessions should be made to religious liberty, or even 
 to justice. With such an understanding, Walpole 
 opposed the repeal of the Occasional Conformity Act, 
 and contrived to bafile all attempts to repeal the Test 
 and Corporation Acts. 
 
 The Protestant Dissenters had been firm friends to 
 the Hanoverian succession. The most intelligent 
 among them declined the insidious Indulgence of 
 James the Second, and after his abdication remained 
 
EARL OF ORFORD, 8i 
 
 staunch to the principles of the Revolution. The 
 laws enforced against them after the Restoration were 
 abrogated or suffered to sleep when the era of respon- 
 sible government began. Once, and once only, was 
 there a reaction, when the Tories of Queen Anne's 
 later years contrived in 171 1 to pass the stringent 
 Act to which I have several times alluded, an Act 
 which was repealed after seven years' existence. In 
 course of time, the Dissenters claimed the repeal of 
 the Test and Corporation Acts. But again Walpole 
 could not venture on gratifying them. He induced 
 Hoadley to mediate between them and him. The 
 conference between this prelate, who seems to have 
 exacted his succession to the see of Winchester as the 
 price of his good oflSces, was managed by King and 
 Newcastle on the part of Government, and by a Com- 
 mittee of London Dissenters on behalf of the Non- 
 conformists. Ultimately the Dissenters gave way. 
 The time was not, or did not seem, ripe for this 
 concession to justice and toleration. The force of 
 the claim was weakened by its failure in 1730, and 
 it took nearly a century to achieve it in the long 
 run. Walpole's policy in dealing with the clergy 
 was a very simple rule; ^whoever,' he said, ^ would 
 govern any body of men must appear to be in their 
 interest.' The precedent has been followed in our 
 own experience. 
 
 If the English prelates were good for little, the 
 Irish were good for nothing. The impudent profli- 
 gacy of Primate Stone, for which we must ransack 
 
 o 
 
82 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 the annals of the French Regency to find historical 
 parallels,, is even yet remembered in Ireland. But 
 this creature had a sort of conscience. Lord Pem- 
 broke, it is reported, used to blaspheme so constantly 
 and so violently at tennis, that Stone said it was 
 as much as his character was worth to continue 
 playing with him. Swift criticised the Irish appoint- 
 ments in his customary vein. ' The English Govern- 
 ment,^ he said, ^ meant to appoint good bishops^ but 
 these people after nomination were invariably robbed 
 by footpads on leaving London^ and these fellows, 
 not content with rifling their pockets and luggage, 
 stole their clothes and patents as well, and posted 
 to Ireland in their stead."* 
 
 During the last twenty years of the seventeenth 
 century and the first forty of the eighteenth, England 
 grew rapidly in material wealth. The value of land 
 rose enormously. Great improvements were made in 
 agriculture by the introduction of winter roots and 
 artificial grasses. Farmers began to understand the 
 rotation of crops. As a consequence, population in- 
 creased largely. In 1 700, the inhabitants of England 
 and Wales were below five millions, in ] 750, there is 
 reason to believe that they had reached nearly double 
 that number. This fact explains the rapid increase 
 in the rentals of the aristocracy. Notwithstanding 
 this growth, England exported large quantities of 
 corn, wheat being so cheap during the first half 
 of the eighteenth century, as to bring about the 
 impression in the mind of so acute an observer as 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 83 
 
 Adam Smith, that silver had materially risen in 
 value. But the fact is, the era vvas one of general 
 prosperity. Added to this progress at home, was 
 that of the plantations in the tropical and semi- 
 tropical colonies. Mischievous as the process of 
 cultivation was in them, and foolish as the colonial 
 policy was, the product was so abundant as to far more 
 than compensate for these social and economical errors. 
 Besides, the wealth of foreign and colonial trade 
 was added to the home prosperity of agriculture and 
 manufacture. Of course the planter and the nabob 
 were the most conspicuous among those wealthy 
 upstarts, who were satirised at the time. The most 
 obvious and natural use which they found for their 
 money w^as in gorgeous equipages, in the purchase 
 of parliamentary next presentations, or of political 
 advowsons, and in the employment of these means 
 for the end of obtaining hereditary place and rank 
 in the great council of the nation. 
 
 It does not seem, however, that the prosperity 
 of the country was distributed as effectually as it 
 was produced. The rich were luxurious and extrava- 
 gant, and they were emulated by their inferiors in 
 wealth. There was no police whatever, and the 
 country, the suburbs, even London, swarmed with 
 footpads and highwaymen. There is no great amount 
 of romance in the beggars' opera. Men were trained 
 to the profession by adepts, who never let go the end 
 of the rope which they gave their pupils. Fielding's 
 grim history of Jonathan Wild the great is no gross 
 
 G 2 
 
84 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 exaggeration. But there was an aristocracy of birth 
 and wealth. Aristocracies are always mercilessly 
 cruel. The only schools they kept were the gaols, 
 their only discipline was transportation and the halter. 
 Death was inflicted for almost every offence. Under 
 an aristocracy, whether it be of nobles or planters, 
 property is the most sacred, human life the vilest 
 thing, and in the Georgian Era, men and women 
 were hanged in squads. The only terror which the 
 legislature thought would be effectual under this 
 sanguinary code, was that of shortening the time 
 between sentence and execution. Writing to his 
 friend from his modern Gothic villa of Strawberry 
 Hill, Horace Walpole says : ' Seventeen were hanged 
 this morning. One is forced to travel, even at noon, 
 as if one were going to battle.^ These laws in favour 
 of property and caste had a very tenacious vitality. 
 As a young child, I remember being taken to see 
 the grave — how fresh I cannot recollect — of a man 
 who had been hanged at Winchester for stealing fish 
 out of a stew. This social discipline has passed away 
 for a generation and a half. But it would be a folly 
 to conclude that its effect has been effaced, or to 
 imagine that the brutality of the law has not pro- 
 duced lasting results on the nature of the people. 
 
 Walpole has been designated, and with justice, as 
 emphatically a peace minister. He held ^that the 
 most pernicious circumstances in which this country 
 can be, are those of war, as we must be great losers 
 while the war lasts, and cannot be great gainers 
 
EARL OF ORFORD, 85 
 
 when it ends/ He kept George the Second at peace, 
 as well as he could, by insisting on it that the safety 
 of his dynasty lay in avoiding foreign embroilments. 
 He strove in vain against the war which broke out 
 in 1739, when the South Sea merchants, or, to be 
 more correct, smugglers, in violation of the Assiento 
 contract, goaded the nation into resisting the right 
 of search which that treaty involved, and roused 
 them to madness by the story of Jenkins^ ears; 
 Jenkins, the Don Pacifico of the eighteenth century. 
 So passionately eager were the mercantile classes for 
 war, that when it was proclaimed on October 19, 
 1739, the Stocks rose. When the bells were rung 
 in joy at the war, Walpole cried, ^ You ring the bells 
 now, you will soon be wringing your hands.^ He 
 had work to do in checking those influential people, 
 who, as Lord Grantham did, with earnest patriotism 
 and bad grammar, continually shouted out, 'I hate 
 the French, and I hope as we shall beat the French.^ 
 That Walpole had a rational dislike for war, be- 
 cause he believed that it could always be avoided, 
 and that its contingent advantages could never com- 
 pensate for a tithe of the evils which it inevitably 
 induces, is plain. He knew that a ministry which 
 undertakes such a responsibility, however popular it 
 is at first, is sooner or later unpopular ; sooner, if the 
 war policy be undertaken by error of judgment; later, 
 even if the war policy be justified by the vulgar arts 
 of demagogism. He was too sensible and honest a 
 financier to carry on wars, as the elder Pitt almost 
 
86 SIR EGBERT WALPOLU, 
 
 exclusively did, by loans ; and he knew therefore that 
 it was no easy matter to find current funds. But 
 he had a personal reason for his peace policy. He 
 loved povver_, and he was strongly convinced that 
 if he were forced or cajoled into war, he would in- 
 evitably be supplanted by one of those cheap heroes 
 whom chance always thrusts to the front, and ig- 
 norance as regularly invests with every capacity and 
 every virtue. 
 
 I do not intend to disparage Walpole''s adminis- 
 trative abilit}^, when I say that the country prospered 
 independently of any financial policy which he 
 adopted or carried out. This is a matter of easy 
 illustration. In the last year of the seventeenth 
 century Liverpool was a small town. A quarter of 
 a century, and it was the third port in the kingdom, 
 ranking after London and Bristol. In the same 
 period the population of Manchester doubled ; a 
 similar growth took place in Birmingham. The 
 Plantations in America and the Antilles flourished 
 exceedingly. Walpole let matters take their course, 
 for he understood that the highest merit of a minister 
 consists in his doing no mischief. 
 
 But Walpole^s praise lies in the fact, that, with 
 this evident growth of material prosperity, he steadily 
 set his face against gambling with it. He resolved, 
 as far as lay in his power, to keep the peace of 
 Europe; and he was seconded in his efforts by Car- 
 dinal Fleury. He contrived to smooth away the 
 difficulties which arose in Tj2y ; and on January 13, 
 
EARL OF OR FORD. 87 
 
 1730, negotiated the treaty of Seville, the benefits 
 of which lasted through ten years of peace, and under 
 which he reduced the army to five thousand men. 
 His domestic legislation was less successful. His 
 excise scheme failed, owing, it is plain, to the factious 
 opposition of the Patriots; his plan for creating 
 bonded warehouses for storing goods (the duty being 
 unpaid till such time as they were removed for con- 
 sumption), also failed, owing to the interested opposi- 
 tion of the great mercantile houses, while he himself, 
 apparently from administrative jealousy, resisted Sir 
 John Barnard's scheme for reducing the interest on 
 the public debt from four to three per cent. 
 
 Long before he resigned office, he was, or affected 
 to be, weary of his work. ^ I am plagued,' he said, 
 ^with the thorns, and glutted with the fruits of 
 power.' ' Few men,' he reiterated, ' should be minis- 
 ters of state, for they see too much of the badness 
 of mankind.' He really believed himself necessary 
 to the security of the Protestant succession, to the 
 peace of Europe, to the prosperity of the nation. 
 He had, and events proved that he was right, the 
 meanest opinion of those who must needs succeed 
 him. He predicted their policy as accurately as he 
 divined their motives and estimated their abilities ; 
 and he did all he could, during the three years in 
 which he survived his official life, to thwart or sus- 
 tain them, as occasion required. It was natural for 
 a cynic like Lord Hervey, when Walpole stated his 
 own opinion of his own value to the country, to 
 
88 SIE ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 comment, that ' acute and intelligent as this minister 
 was, he was unable to discern that nobody^s under- 
 standing is so much superior to the rest of mankind, 
 as to be missed in a week after he is gone/ 
 
 Walpole had scanty knowledge of books or letters. 
 He read very little, and wrote less. He carried into Par- 
 liament a little smattering of school learning, and was 
 fond of quoting Horace. But though he quoted like a 
 statesman, he knew his book only like a schoolboy. 
 On one occasion he misstated a passage, committing 
 a grammatical error for which in his youth he would 
 have been birched. He was corrected by Pulteney, 
 stuck to his version, wagered a guinea that he was 
 right, and agreed to refer the dispute to the clerk 
 of the House of Commons. Of course it was given 
 against him, and he chucked the coin he had lost 
 across the floor to his critic and antagonist. ^ This/ 
 said Pulteney, ^ is the only guinea 1 ever got from 
 the Government.^ 
 
 According to those who knew him best, Walpole 
 invariably kept to one rule on all public questions. 
 ' He never would, be the wrong ever so extensive, 
 and the circumstances ever so flagrant, allow, to the 
 best of his power, parliamentary inquiries.'' The rule 
 has been adopted by later statesmen, who have applied 
 it as much to cover their own misdeeds, as to save 
 an existing administration in critical times. It has 
 now become a tradition of cabinets. But resistance 
 to it is the duty of those whose interests are involved 
 in government, from the shareholders in a joint-stock 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 89 
 
 compaDy to the citizens of a community. The only 
 guarantee of public honour is publicity, for the only 
 protection rogues have is secresy. 
 
 Macaulay has commented on Walpole's contempt 
 for letters, and has argued that the decline of lite- 
 rature during the period of Walpole^s administration 
 was due to this minister's indifference to literary men. 
 But the discouragement is probably overstated. Pope 
 was wealthy, thanks in the first instance to Swift's 
 patronage. Gay, who had lost his money in the 
 South Sea scheme, was protected by the mad Duchess 
 of Queensberry. The Opposition was not unwilling 
 to encourage the writers of their party. But lite- 
 rature, like other phenomena of productive energy, 
 has its cycles of barrenness, its poor and abundant 
 crops. Tlie strife of faction however made the for- 
 tune of one genius. George the Second hated music 
 and poetry. It is said that he professed to have 
 admired one orchestral passage, and that its repetition 
 was ordered. The players went through their pieces. 
 At last they began to tune their fiddles, and George 
 shouted out in ecstasy, that now they were playing 
 what he liked. But to spite his son, he made 
 Handel's fortune, though he expressed his contempt 
 at this rivalry of fiddlers, this contest between 
 tweedledum and tweedledee. 'The heat which this 
 musical strife provoked, bade fair,' says Horace Wal- 
 pole, 'to recall the green and blue factions of the 
 Eastern Empire.' For a time, an anti-Handelist was 
 looked on as an anti-courtier. 
 
90 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, 
 
 In 1 741, a motion was made in both Houses^ the 
 object of which was to advise Walpole^s dismissal 
 from office. It was lost in the lower House by more 
 than two to one; in the upper by nearly an equal 
 majority. In the new Parliament,, the veteran minis- 
 ter counted on a majority of forty. In a very short 
 time, he was contemplating the alternatives of Down- 
 ing Street and the Tower. The first discomfiture 
 was the election of Dr. Lee as Chairman of Com- 
 mittees, in opposition to Earle, Sir Robertas can- 
 didate. He was beaten by four votes, and you can 
 guess, says an eyewitness, how the victors huzzaed, 
 after being defeated for twenty years. The old 
 Duchess of Marlborough was denied the satisfaction 
 of seeing this reverse. She was on her deathbed, 
 and apparently insensible. ' She must be blistered,'' 
 said her physician, ' or she will die.^ ' I won^t be 
 blistered,'' she shouted out, with her last remains of 
 strength, ^ and I won^t die.^ 
 
 After Walpole^s resignation came the struggle. 
 He took an earldom, and secretly a pension. His 
 eldest son had been made a peer in 1723. He got 
 his natural daughter by Miss Skerrett — he married 
 the mother — the rank and title of an earl^s daughter. 
 The victors resolved to punish him. Their first 
 attempt failed by 2^'^ votes to 250, the largest 
 number, it is said, which was ever told in the old 
 House. Sick — even dying members were brought 
 into the vote. One of these members had lost an 
 only son at sea, and the news had not reached him. 
 
EARL OF ORFORD. 91 
 
 It was kept a secret till he was in the House, and 
 then told him. But he did not flinch. Horatio 
 Walpole, the minister's brother, had an official 
 residence as Auditor of the Exchequer, from which 
 a private door led into the House of Commons. He 
 was on the point of bringing two or three sick 
 members in, through this door, but found that the 
 Opposition had shot the bolt, and filled the lock 
 through the keyhole, with fine sand. The Prince 
 still urged Walpole's impeachment, and a motion for 
 a committee to inquire into the conduct of the last 
 twenty years, was lost by 244 to 242, on March 9. 
 On March 23, the attack was renewed, and a com- 
 mittee of twenty-one was carried — to be appointed 
 by ballot — ^by 245 to 242. Then the struggle was 
 to put Wal pole's friends on the committee. They 
 only succeeded in nominating five. But the Opposi- 
 tion was either satisfied or exhausted; the inquiry 
 came to nothing, and Walpole was suffered to retire 
 in peace. Of course the Duke of Newcastle, the 
 patron of so many boroughs, gave additional proofs 
 of his clumsy duplicity, and was the glad go-between 
 to Pulteney. 
 
 Walpole died a poor man. His debts, including 
 a few trifling legacies, amounted to .^50,000. His 
 estate was nominally worth <^8ooo a year, but was 
 heavily mortgaged. In fact his fondness for 
 Houghton had endangered its possession. He had 
 not, like the Percevals and the Pelhams, built up a 
 fortune out of public money. He was coarse and 
 
92 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. 
 
 hard enough^ but not sordid. Nor did he use more 
 cruelty than policy — according to the judgment of 
 the day — required. He urged the condemnation of 
 the Scotch lords in 1716. But the Tower was so 
 negligently guarded, that Nithsdale and Wintour 
 escaped from it, perhaps with his connivance. Had 
 he lived and kept office, the rising of 1745 would 
 probably never have occurred. Had it occurred, he 
 would have tempered the severities which followed 
 it, which roused a dangerous sympathy for the 
 suiferers, half justified the University of Oxford in 
 paying for a picture of Flora Macdonald, and fas- 
 tened on William, King George^s favourite son, the 
 nickname of the Cumberland butcher. It was to 
 this William that Walpole gave his last piece of 
 advice. The Duke consulted him as to how he 
 should best be able to avoid a marriage with a 
 Danish princess. ' Ask the King,"* said Walpole, ' for 
 an establishment, and he will not press it."* So the 
 Duke escaped, married to please himself, gave occa- 
 sion to the Eoyal Marriage Act, and is now chiefly 
 remembered as the presumed progenitor of the 
 Princess Olive, about whom our fathers gossiped, 
 and of Mrs. Ryves, about whom our own generation 
 has talked. 
 
ADAM SMITH. 
 
96 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 Bastiat ; the experimental aspect is, and long will be, 
 imperfect. The former has had little practical effect 
 on the conduct of public affairs, exact and suggestive 
 as the theory is^ for it has constantly been disfigured 
 by errors and paradoxes, and is distasteful from its 
 very dogmatism; the latter has grown with the 
 expansion of political experience, financial skill, social 
 progress. The former may be condensed into a brief 
 treatise ; the latter is, as a coherent system, still 
 buried in a vast accumulation of statistics, a mountain 
 of unarranged and unexpounded facts. If you read 
 the works of a French economist, the very best of 
 the school, you will find abundant illustrations from 
 fictitious hypotheses. If you open a page of Adam 
 Smith, you wiU be sure to light upon a fact, an histo- 
 rical parallel, a careful induction. 
 
 I must say a few words on this ancient French 
 economist, whose name has probably been heard by 
 you for the first time this evening. As was the case 
 with nearly every man of letters in that age, Oresme 
 was an ecclesiastic. For some years he was Master 
 of one of the Colleges in the University of Paris, and 
 became successively Archdeacon of Bayeux, Dean of 
 Rouen, Treasurer of Sainte Chapelle, and ultimately, 
 in 1377, Bishop of Lisieux in Normandy. At some 
 time or other he was Preceptor to Charles V, sur- 
 named the Wise. The ordinary date given for his 
 appointment to this office is impossible, for in 1360, 
 Charles had no time for any other instruction than 
 that in the school of adversity and patience. In 
 
ADAM' SMITH. 97 
 
 1356 occurred the battle of Poitiers, or Maupertuis, 
 as it is now the fashion to call it, and during- the 
 interval between this catastrophe, and the Peace of 
 Bretigni, Charles was the wandering regent of a 
 shattered and debiHtated kingdom, while his father 
 was a prisoner in the Savoy. But 1360 may well 
 have been the date of Oresme's treatise, * On the 
 Function of Money/ 
 
 There was ample necessity at that crisis for the 
 promulgation of a sound theory on this subject. The 
 privilege of coining money is conferred on an ad- 
 ministration in order that the subjects of a govern- 
 ment may be, as far as possible, protected from 
 private fraud. The legend of the Maltese money 
 ran — non as sed fides — designating that the basis of 
 the currency must be laid in the integrity of those 
 who issue it. Yet hardly a European government 
 fulfilled this duty, even if they understood and 
 acknowledged it. But the Kings of France were 
 the principal offenders. They diminished the amount 
 of silver in their coins. This is a temporary wrong, 
 a remediable offence. But they debased it also, a 
 far more serious and lasting evil. Philip the Fair 
 was threatened with excommunication by Boniface 
 the Eighth, for this fraud, and was branded as long 
 as time lasts, by Dante, for his offence. Even 
 Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, remonstrated 
 with the French monarchs and denounced their 
 practices. Seldom have excommunication and reproof 
 been more richly merited, more justly launched. 
 
 H 
 
98 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 But the greatest offender in this particular was the 
 unlucky John, the prisoner of Poitiers, whose chival- 
 ric character has been described by Froissart, and 
 lauded in a hundred romances. Nothing, in my 
 opinion, points out more clearly the terrible gap 
 which divided the knight from the peasant, during 
 the fourteenth century, than the contrast between 
 this monarches historical reputation and his actual 
 deserts. Owing to this King's practices, whom the 
 romancers called the Good, the value of the currency 
 underwent seventy changes in ten years. John took 
 an oath of his moneyers that they would keep his 
 frauds a profound secret, especially from the mer- 
 chants, and would do their diligence to deceive the 
 public, with a threat that, if they gave an oppor- 
 tunity of detection, they should suifer the penalties 
 of treason. There have been times when sentimental 
 novelists have striven to harmonise the lighter and 
 darker shades of character in heroes like Claud Duval, 
 Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, and Jack Sheppard. It 
 is to such panegyrists that we may relegate the task 
 of describing a monarch, who might have been a 
 gallant knight on the battle-field, but who was a 
 smasher in his own mint, a swindler of his people. 
 It was these practices which Oresme reprobated. 
 
 I have already commented on the fact, that histo- 
 rians are apt to overlook the economical side of their 
 subject. This folly or negligence, as it comes from 
 the mannerism which Macaulay used to ridicule as 
 concessions to the ^ dignity of history,' or from sheer 
 
ADAM SMITH. 99 
 
 ignorance, leaves us constantly in the dark as to the 
 real causes which aid the progress or hurry the 
 downfall of nations. To me the weakness of France 
 during the century 1340-1440, seems to be directly 
 traceable to economical causes, to the universal dis- 
 trust which these royal frauds induced. All nations, 
 as they emerge from barbarism, adopt a currency, 
 the circulation of which is conditioned by a few 
 intelligible prinqiples. A man takes money to get 
 rid of it, because it facilitates exchange, and is of all 
 commodities that which is most easily sold. But to 
 facilitate exchange and to be easily sold, it must be, 
 for a time at least, possessed of an intrinsic, un- 
 changeable value, and must be capable of instant 
 valuation. To debase the currency is to destroy the 
 very essence of its utility, and to force society back 
 into barbarism and isolation. Exactly similar results, 
 though perhaps of a less serious kind, attended, as 
 I stated in a previous lecture, the frauds of Henry 
 the Eighth and the Protector Somerset. Results of 
 an analogous kind always follow, in various degrees, 
 those unhappy concessions to the nostrums of such 
 currency quacks, as persuade governments to commit 
 an offence to which they are.only too prone, the issue 
 of paper money on the security of public debts. 
 
 It was because there is no part of the theory of 
 political economy which is so strictly logical as the 
 demonstration of the function which money performs 
 in civilised society, and because the same or nearly 
 the same exactness belongs to the exposition of the 
 u 2 
 
100 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 process by which wealth is produced, that the French 
 economists have been so successful in these two parts 
 of the science. It is when they come to deal with 
 the phenomena of exchange, with the influence 
 which custom or conventional usage has upon social 
 life, and with the circumstances which modify the 
 distribution of wealth, that their system breaks down 
 for want of induction, and because they adopt hypo- 
 theses instead of facts. They construct a formal 
 garden, the plants of which they select, and the 
 cultivation of which they arrange, and neglect to 
 study the pasture which lies outside this factitious 
 parterre, and in which nature supersedes art. For 
 the study of political economy — ^the latest and the 
 most difficult of the sciences — is the estimate of 
 society and politics from the vast aggregate of ex- 
 perience, as it denotes the causes which direct or 
 control the industrial energies of different commu- 
 nities, and attempts to discover the circumstances 
 under which the material interests of social life vary 
 in kind or in degree. 
 
 What little we know of the personal history of j 
 Adam Smith is from the pen of Dugald Stewart, i 
 and was composed a ^few years after this great q j 
 economist had ended his quiet uneventful life. The ^ • 
 posthumous son of a Custom-house officer at Kirk- ^ 
 caldy, he was carefully brought up by his mother, jgg / 
 whose years were extended to within six of his own ^ 
 death, and who constantly lived with her illustrious '^^ *" 
 son, as she was affectionately tended by him. Smith 5 
 
ADAM SMITH, loi 
 
 received his first teaching in his native town, at one 
 of those schools which were even then of infinite 
 value to Scotchmen, and the establishment of which 
 was of primary interest and care to the founders of 
 the Scotch Reformation. When he was fourteen 
 years old, he was transferred to the University of 
 Glasgow. 
 
 During the reign of Charles the Second, a Glasgow 
 merchant, zealous to maintain Episcopacy in Scot- 
 land, granted funds towards the establishment of 
 exhibitions in Balliol College, Oxford, the recipients 
 of this benefaction being chosen out of the students 
 of the Glasgow University, and by that Corporation. 
 A few years afterwards, Episcopacy fell, but the 
 benefaction remained, and grew considerably in value. 
 There are ten such exhibitions held by students of 
 Balliol College, and there is no doubt that the great 
 reputation of this Academical society is due in no 
 slight degree to the annual selection of some of the 
 most promising young Scotchmen at Glasgow for 
 further instruction in a College which is peculiarly 
 connected with Scotland. When he was seventeen 
 years old Adam Smith was nominated to one of these 
 exhibitions, and proceeded to Oxford, where he re- 
 sided, it seems, Uninterruptedly for seven years. But 
 he never graduated at this University. 
 
 When Smith left Scotland for Oxford, his native 
 country was miserably poor. The annalists of British 
 commerce, Anderson and Macpherson, have very 
 little to tell us of Scotland's trade and manufactures. 
 
102 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 A linen manufacture existed in the Lowlands, and 
 especially on the eastern coast, but it was of small 
 proportions. For the greater part of the eighteenth 
 century Scotland sent no revenue to the Imperial 
 treasury, the scanty proceeds of taxation being swal- 
 lowed up in local charges and bounties. It took five 
 or six days to travel from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. 
 The country gentlemen resented the Methuen treaty, 
 and the scarcity of claret, and entered into arrange- 
 ments with smugglers for a supply of French wines 
 and brandies. In 1 745, Duncan Forbes, Lord Presi- 
 dent of Session, wrote to the Elgin justices and urged 
 them ' not to be so impudently profligate as to screen 
 these offenders,'' wishes to know *how they indivi- 
 dually vote in favour of, or against, repressing this 
 evil, in order that he may know what scoundrels to 
 detest and avoid,-* and concludes a long letter of 
 reproach and warning by ' making his compliments 
 to every one among them, who can lay his hand 
 on his heart, and say that he is not a rascal.' 
 Ten years after this a letter printed by Captain 
 Dunbar informs us that there is no news, as the 
 Edinburgh mail-bag was returned in a mistake for 
 the London mail and vice versa. 
 
 The lairds in the Highland districts exercised 
 heritable jurisdiction. A gallows was a regular 
 part of the buildings on the estate, a hangman 
 always figured in the chieftain's retinue, unless, like 
 Sir Robert Gordon, the laird found it more convenient 
 to drown his local culprits. Death was inflicted for 
 
ADAM SMITH. 103 
 
 petty thefts, imprisonment awarded without warrant 
 or prospect of release, except when the local magnate 
 was pacified. The peasantry seem to have acquiesced, 
 or at most to have avenged themselves only by 
 making strange charges of sorcery against their lords. 
 These rights were abolished after the affair of 1745, 
 not, it seems, because they were deemed unreasonable 
 in themselves, but because they were abused, and 
 made subservient to rebellion. Slavery, however, pre- 
 vailed in Scotland till after Smith's de^h, for the 
 Colliers and Salters, who were excepted by name 
 from the Scotch Habeas Corpus Act of 1701, were 
 only finally emancipated in 1799. 
 
 If the rural districts were thus under the dominion 
 of the lairds, who had appropriated the land of their 
 clansmen, and had engrafted a rigid system of entails 
 on the ancient tenures of the country, the boroughs 
 were in no better plight. The property and revenues 
 of these boroughs, the right of local taxation, patron- 
 age, jurisdiction, and the election of representatives 
 to Parliament, were in the hands of small self-elected 
 bodies. Droll stories are told of the way in which 
 this patronage was sold or distributed. For example, 
 the ofiice of town-clerk at Forfar was held for twenty 
 years by an idiot. In 1831, the county voters in the 
 whole of Scotland were only 2500, many of whom 
 had neither property nor residence in the county for 
 which they held the franchise. The electors in the 
 sixty-six boroughs amounted to 1440 only. Thirty- 
 three electors returned the representatives for Glas- 
 
I04 ADAM SMITH, 
 
 gow and Edinburgh. We can under these circum- 
 stances understand the Scotch member who boasted 
 that he had never been present at a debate or absent 
 at a division^ and that he had only once voted con- 
 scientiously, and then found that he was in the 
 wrong. Nor again can we wonder that even as 
 late as 1820, when there was a sharp contest between 
 the families of Grant and Duff for the representation 
 of the Elgin burghs,, the Duffs kidnapped the baillie 
 of Elgin, and a Mr. Dick, two of the opposite side, 
 and carrying them off to Sutherlandshire, kept them 
 there till it was too late to vote. The character of 
 these Scotch municipalities was retained unchanged 
 till 1833. But we need not be surprised that when 
 the change was made, a Marquis of Bute moved that 
 the Scotch Municipalities Reform Bill should be read 
 that day six months, and that an Earl of Haddington 
 entered his protest on the journals of the Lords, and 
 predicted all sorts of danger to the constitution from 
 the change. 
 
 Towards the close of Adam Smithes life Dundas 
 ruled despotically in Scotland. Three years after his 
 death, Muir was prosecuted for sedition, the words 
 which he used being what is now every-day criticism 
 on existing administrations. Braxfield, the Jeffreys 
 among Scotch judges^ raged in the style of Jeffreys, a 
 hundred years after such a monster became impossible 
 on the English bench. ' Bring me prisoners,^ he 
 shouted, ^and I will find them law."* And when a 
 pliant jury convicted Muir, he inflicted an illegal 
 
ADAM SMITH. 105 
 
 sentence, adding that he increased the penalty because 
 the audience applauded Muir's eloquent defence. The 
 Liberals who, like Horner and Jeffreys and Brougham 
 and Sidney Smith, dared to keep alive the principles 
 of freedom in Edinburgh seventy years ago, imperilled 
 their fortunes, their liberty, and even their lives, by 
 their courage. What wonder that enfranchised Scot- 
 land has raised her monument on Calton Hill to the 
 martyrs of the eighteenth century, and has all but 
 entirely repudiated the principles which were domi- 
 nant and despotic little more than a generation ago. 
 In talking of the Keign of Terror in France, people 
 forget that there was as frightful a reign of terror 
 in Ireland, and that there were reactionary if not 
 revolutionary tribunals in Great Britain during the 
 same epoch. 
 
 Mr. Macculloch, without stating his reasons, avers 
 that Smith does not appear to have felt any peculiar 
 respect for the great University at which he com- 
 pleted his education. I am not aware that he speaks 
 of his personal relations to it except in one passage, 
 where, acknowledging his election as Lord Rector of 
 Glasgow, he mentions it as part of his debt of grati- 
 tude to that institution, that it sent him to Oxford. 
 In truth, it cannot be doubted that however other 
 people may have conducted themselves at Oxford, 
 Smith derived great advantage from his studies 
 there. His reputation in his native country was 
 acknowledged immediately on his return. The fact 
 is, just as eminent scholars have, from time to time. 
 
io6 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 proceeded from Eton, because' diligence and genius 
 will exhibit themselves under the most untoward 
 circumstances, so men could study with profit even 
 in that, the darkest age of Academical history. 
 There is reason for calling that a dark age. There 
 is a consistent tradition of the period during whicli 
 Smith lived in Oxford, to the effect that an enter- 
 prising cat was found in All Souls^ library, but starved 
 to death, and dried into a mummy. All Souls^ had 
 the best college library in Oxford, owing to the nuga- 
 tory munificence of Codrington. 
 
 With one notable exception, that of the wonderful 
 Puritan movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, whicb sprang from Mildmay^s College in 
 Cambridge, every great upheaval in learning, politics, 
 and religion, which England has witnessed, has had 
 its beginnings in Oxford. It was there that Merton, 
 during the calm revolution of Henry the Third^s 
 reign, began to establish a system of secular learning, 
 by excluding all monks and friars from the benefit 
 of his, the earliest English college. The fruit of 
 this policy is to be seen in the fact, that, within a 
 century after this foundation, Wiklif, the bitter 
 enemy of the monastic orders and the great eccle- 
 siastics, learned his power of controversy within the 
 walls of Merton''s College. To counteract WikliPs 
 doctrine, another College was founded, from which, 
 three centuries afterwards, came even a greater 
 reformer than Wiklif. At the close of the fifteenth 
 century, Oxford was the birthplace of physical 
 
ADAM SMITH. 107 
 
 science, and the early nurse of that revived classical 
 learning which supplied the longings after ecclesi- 
 astical reforaiation with critical powers, for Linacre, 
 the first English physiologist, Colet, Erasmus, More, 
 the earliest students of classical scholarship, were 
 among her sons. In those days, the energies of the 
 University were not straitened by an Act of Uni- 
 formity. 
 
 After the great shock of the Reformation in 
 Europe, and the vast, well-nigh destructive changes 
 which subsequently ensued, when both parties ap- 
 pealed to the sword, when liberty was sacrificed to 
 municipal selfishness, and the quarrels of potentates 
 begot that monstrous phantom, the balance of power, 
 Oxford fell under the baneful influence of Laud. 
 She did not indeed submit without a struggle. The 
 Puritan party, dominant in Cambridge, was strong 
 in Oxford. Nor was the High Church reaction a 
 mere step into darkness. Laud, despite his blind 
 bigotry, his slavish superstitions, his ungovernable 
 temper, was a sincere lover of learning. He pen- 
 sioned Chillingworth, and promoted Hales. But in 
 great Academies, no patronage can compensate for 
 the loss of freedom. Oxford was weakened by the 
 discipline of Laud, and was demoralized by becoming 
 the head-quarters of the Cavaliers. The Laudian 
 regimen became the tradition of the University. 
 Its Convocation, after the Restoration, solemnly pro- 
 claimed the divine right of Kings, and as solemnly 
 proscribed the principles of human freedom. It 
 
io8 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 clung to these tenets after the Revolution^ and 
 became the focus of the Jacobite faction. In the 
 first half of the eighteenth century^ it was the 
 hiding-place of the Pretender^s adherents. The 
 Tory squires sent their sons to Oxford. The heads 
 of Colleges and the heads of the University, made 
 one by Laud^s pernicious legislation, protected these 
 boys, when they made the streets ring with curses 
 on King George and blessings on King James. 
 Sometimes soldiers were sent to keep these young 
 rebels, and old traitors in awe. Then there was 
 outward quiet, and the Academical authorities shut 
 themselves up in their official lodgings, to write 
 diaries, to complain of Hanoverian tyranny, to drink 
 their port, and to symbolise their attachment to 
 the fallen dynasty by passing their wine over the 
 water-jug, while they swore allegiance to the ruling 
 powers, on pain of losing their emoluments. In the 
 very year in which Smith left Oxford, a treasonable 
 riot occurred in the streets, the culprits being mem- 
 bers of Balliol College. They were screened by 
 Purnell, the Warden of New College and Vice- 
 Chancellor. But Walpole cared little for these things. 
 That minister, who is said to have held one tenet 
 strongly, that every man has his price, was alive to 
 another more general and more generous rule, that 
 every fool should have his way. The audacity of these 
 academics culminated, when, in 1734^ the University 
 complimented George the Second on the marriage 
 of his daughter to the Prince of Orange, and hinted, 
 
ADAM SMITH, 109 
 
 as well as it could, on the blessing's which a former 
 Prince of Orange had been enabled to confer on the 
 nation. 
 
 It will surprise no one to hear that this noisy 
 disaffection was coupled with gross ignorance, and 
 still more gross brutality. What the condition of 
 education was in the old Universities during the 
 eighteenth century, is plain from the novels of the 
 period. The Professorships at Oxford were turned 
 into sinecures. The occupants of those offices did 
 not pretend to teach anybody. Even long after the 
 period to which I refer, up to the time when Acade- 
 mical reform was seriously taken in hand fourteen 
 years ago, hardly a fraction of the University pro- 
 fessors undertook any active duty. Adam Smithes 
 criticism on their utter uselessness in his time is well 
 known. 
 
 The age was eminently coarse. But the fugitive 
 literature of Oxford was more coarse than that which 
 was current with the general public. Grub Street 
 and Hog Lane would not have put forth such abomi- 
 nations as the speeches of Terrcs filius or the rhymes 
 on the Oxford Toasts. Nor was this brutality con- 
 fined to words. I have spoken of the turbulence of 
 those young men. In the very year in which Adam 
 Smith left Oxford, the undergraduates of Balliol 
 College murdered a college servant, under circum- 
 stances of the grossest barbarity. The narrative of 
 this crime is to be found in a pamphlet written at the 
 time, which, for grave and earnest comment on the 
 
no ADAM SMITH. 
 
 atrocity, might have been written by Smith himself. 
 The culprits were protected by Theophilus Leigh, 
 Master of the College, who owed his election to an 
 intrigue, and held his place for fifty-two years. 
 
 I said above that out of a college, founded for the 
 express purpose of doing battle with the tenets pro- 
 pagated by the great reformer of the fourteenth 
 century, came, exactly three centuries after the date 
 of its foundation, a greater reformer. Perhaps at 
 no age of the history of Christianity had all its 
 vital principles fallen more completely into sleep 
 than during the first half of the eighteenth century. 
 Then began the revival inaugurated by the two 
 Wesleys. The elder son of the rector of Epworth 
 was a fellow of Lincoln College, and here established 
 that enthusiastic movement which spread over the 
 British Islands and many of her colonies. Wesley's 
 influence, like all religious influences, was social also, 
 and civilisation owes to him and his sectaries that 
 they were, if not precisely the first, the most en- 
 ergetic and powerful preachers in that anti- slavery 
 crusade, which gained its first legal victory in 1771, 
 when the judges decided, in the case of Charles 
 Somerset, that slavery cannot exist on British soil, 
 and has nearly consummated its beneficent aims, 
 after a century of uninterrupted struggles. 
 
 I will not dwell on the latest of these Academical 
 developments ; on what has been called the Tractarian 
 movement, and last of all on the philosophical liberal- 
 ism of Oxford in our own day. It is sufficient to 
 
ADAM SMITH. iii 
 
 point out how continuous has been the influence of 
 Academical activity on Enghsh thought, and how 
 far removed one English University is, at least, from 
 the mere function of a schoolmaster in dead languages, 
 and an extinct philosophy. 
 
 Originally Smith was destined for Anglican orders, 
 the preparation of candidates for this office having 
 been the original purpose of SnelFs foundation. But 
 he abandoned this prospect, returned to Scotland, 
 lived a few years at Edinburgh, and in 1751 was 
 appointed to a professorship at Glasgow. Here he 
 remained for twelve years, when he accepted the post 
 of travelling tutor to the young Duke of Buccleugh. 
 Stewart laments that Smith arrived at that decision, 
 and suggests that the interruption of his studies was 
 a public loss. It would be more correct to say, that 
 we owe the ' Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of 
 the Wealth of Nations' to this interruption in his 
 previous habits. The three years during which he 
 travelled in France suggested to him the conception, 
 and to some extent supplied him with the materials 
 of his great work. 
 
 Adam. Smith visited France immediately on the 
 conclusion of the Seven Years War. The Peace of 
 Paris, which Sismondi says was the most humiliating 
 which France had ever undergone since that of Bre- 
 tigni, stripped her of her colonies in the New World, 
 and her settlements and factories in the East. Lally 
 had succumbed to Clive, Montcalm to Wolfe. 
 England, on the other hand, was generally victorious. 
 
112 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 But the victory was obtained by profuse expenditure. 
 The public debt — for it was chiefly by loans that 
 the war was sustained — was doubled under the elder 
 Pittas administration. One war begat another. The 
 charges of the Seven Years War, when the reaction 
 of peace came, were grievously oppressive, and the 
 Government was at its wit's end for money. In an 
 evil hour they resolved to tax the colonies by a 
 stamp-duty, and to reimburse the East India Com- 
 pany for an advance to the treasury, by a duty on 
 tea, to be levied on New England. Everybody 
 knows the story of the resistance to the Stamp Act, 
 of the riot in Boston harbour, of the Declaration and 
 the War of Independence. The reaction of that war 
 precipitated the French Revolution. The proclama- 
 tion of the Duke of Brunswick gave that revolution 
 the unity which it needed, and half justified its 
 atrocities. It was followed by the great convulsion 
 through, which Europe passed at the beginning of 
 the present century. The effects of this convulsion 
 will not pass away for generations. 
 
 Two years after Smith quitted Paris, Corsica was 
 ceded to France by the Genoese. The relations of 
 Corsica and Genoa are a long story. They are in 
 little, the parallel to the relations between the East 
 India Company, India, and the British Empire. In 
 her difficulties, the republic of Genoa had consulted 
 her leading merchants on the state of her finances. 
 The merchants — for, as a rule, mercantile credit is 
 higher than the credit of a government — came to 
 
ADAM SMITH. 113 
 
 the rescue. They retrieved the finances, and received 
 privileges for the Bank of Genoa in exchange. The 
 Bank began to make war and acquire territory on its 
 own account, after the fashion and the folly of the 
 time, and conquered Corsica. It was the box of 
 Pandora, without Hope at the bottom. Finding the 
 possession mischievous, the Bank presented this per- 
 nicious estate to the Genoese republic. At the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century, Genoa was in 
 a state of chronic war with the savage islanders of 
 Corsica, just as Turkey now is, with those of Crete. 
 My hearers may remember the story of Theodore 
 Neuhoff, who, in 1736, appeared at Aleria, as a 
 mysterious stranger, whose riches seemed boundless 
 to those barbarous people, how he was made king, 
 and how, after checkered fortunes, he quitted the 
 island, came to England, got up a new expedition, 
 failed, returned to London, and was thrown into 
 prison for debt, lived in prison there seven years, 
 and when released by the despair of his creditors, 
 was kept from starving by the efforts of Horace 
 Walpole, and how at last he died in such poverty, 
 that Walpole could contrast the fallen monarches 
 experience of the possession of a kingdom and the 
 want of bread in a couplet. Too late, Paoli came 
 to the rescue. After the Peace of Paris, the Genoese 
 sold the island to France, despite the intrigues of 
 North. It was the worst bargain which the house of 
 Bourbon ever made, for a twelvemonth after the sale 
 was completed. Napoleon was born, a French subject, 
 
 I 
 
114 ABAM SMITH. 
 
 and the founder of a dynasty which has certainly 
 dethroned the Bourbons^ and may hereafter extinguish 
 royalty in France. The story of CEdipus is rivalled, 
 by the efforts which Louis XV made to annex Cor- 
 sica to France. 
 
 Certainly_, if the maxims of good government can 
 be best learned by witnessing the consequences of 
 their violation, no better study could be found for 
 the economist than the condition of France at this 
 time. Four assemblies, called parliaments, sat in four 
 places. There was no true commercial intercourse 
 between the several provinces of the kingdom. The 
 lands of the nobles and the church were free from 
 taxation ; those of the peasants were afflicted by an 
 arbitrary taille and an equally arbitrary corvee. 
 Agricultural improvement was impossible when an 
 income-tax was levied on the visible means of the 
 farmer — just as it is in Ireland, wherever the rent 
 is raised to the highest possible amount by letting 
 annual tenancies by auction. All grades in the army 
 were closed to those who were not ennobled ; all 
 industry was harassed by arbitrary restrictions. The 
 King's officers were petty but absolute tyrants, and 
 tyranny is always most grinding when it is exercised 
 in a narrow area and on few victims. The crimi- 
 nal law, as is always the case under despotic go- 
 vernments, be they monarchical or aristocratic, was 
 frightfully severe. Sudden and secret arrest was 
 everybody's risk ; torture was freely adopted in order 
 to obtain convictions; and punishment was inflicted 
 
ADAM SMITH. 115 
 
 with every refinement which a diabolical ingenuity- 
 could inflict. Our government, during the same 
 epoch, was savage enough, was unrelenting, Draco- 
 nian in its attempts to protect property by the free 
 use of the gallows ; but the French of the eighteenth 
 century are said to have united the manners of 
 monkeys to the ferocity of tigers. The execution 
 of Damiens, for example, was prolonged through 
 hours of torture. 
 
 Political servitude is the parent of atheism; for 
 men cease to believe in God when all they know of 
 government is despotism, when they cannot recognise 
 God's moral qualities in man, and when religion is 
 parodied by its professed teachers. Again, it cannot 
 be by accident that sceptics in religion are absolutists 
 in politics. This. combination has been witnessed over 
 and over again. Spinoza and Hobbes, Bolingbroke and 
 Hume^ are only a few instances out of many. In the 
 middle of the eighteenth century the Encyclopaedists 
 represented this form of fatalism. 'The French,^ 
 said a gentleman to an eminent scholar and wit, 
 'worship Voltaire as some men worship Christ.^ 
 ' And a very good Christ for a Frenchman/ was the 
 reply. Join an acutely logical mind to an irreverent 
 wit, fluent sentiment to a selfish heart, elegant taste 
 to utter depravity, and smother the whole with un- 
 sleeping and exuberant vanity, and you get the French 
 gentleman of the old monarchy. Voltaire was a little 
 better, and Rousseau a little worse, than this model. 
 Such people were fairly imitated in England by 
 I 2 
 
ii6 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The example was 
 repeated in its coarser and more revolting traits by 
 Wilkes and Sandwich, and the rabble of the Med- 
 menham monks. 
 
 The head of the French social system, of a troop 
 of profligate courtiers, and still more profligate 
 churchmen, was Louis XV. Brought up in the 
 midst of flatterers, accustomed to indulge every 
 caprice, he was utterly unable to reason ; habituated 
 to indulge in every excess, his life was one long 
 orgie. ' His religious belief/ says Sismondi, * con- 
 sisted in his dread of the Divine vengeance, and in 
 the dogma of his own absolute power/ As he grew 
 older, he grew worse. From Versailles to the Pare 
 aux cerfs was one degradation, even for him ; from 
 Pompadour to Du Barry was another. But withal 
 he was strictly orthodox. The victims of his vile 
 pleasures were carefully instructed in the Catholic 
 faith. Though he wallowed in every pollution, he 
 was anxious to keep his harem free from the heresies 
 of the Jansenists. His title was that of Hhe most 
 Christian king ; ' and, according to his interpretation 
 of Christianity, he resolved to maintain his repu- 
 tation. But in these days, no one could venture on 
 telling, ever so superficially, the recorded details of 
 his private life. 
 
 There was, however, in Paris a society with which 
 Adam Smith became intimately acquainted. This 
 was the sect of the Economists, and, in particular, 
 Turgot, Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours. These men 
 
ADAM SMITH. 117 
 
 were theorists ; but the motive-cause of their specu- 
 lations was a very practical evil. They saw that 
 agriculture was depressed, and that labour was de- 
 graded. It was no use to attack the fiscal system 
 under which France groaned. The Government had 
 a short and sharp remedy against those who offended 
 it; and any attack, however indirect, on the privi- 
 leges possessed by the nobles and the clergy, was a 
 crime — the crime, namely, of exciting hatred and con- 
 tempt against the Government. Now it could not 
 be denied that the measure of population is deter- 
 mined by the success of agriculture, that the more 
 subsistence the earth can be made to produce, the 
 more persons can subsist, and, indirectly, the larger 
 the amount of that which, under the name of rent, 
 the owner of the soil can appropriate to himself. 
 Conversely, the more the farmer pays to the state, 
 the less can he pay to the landlord. But as all pro- 
 duce on which a price can be put is derived from 
 the soil, and as all purchase is of such produce, to 
 curtail a man^s power of purchase is to check pro- 
 duction, and to debar him from offering a price for 
 such produce. But as rent is all that remains over 
 and above the cost of producing that which the pro- 
 ducer sells, it follows that to tax the purchaser is to 
 diminish rent ; and, therefore, as all taxes ultimately 
 fall upon rent, the policy of the French fiscal system 
 seemed to lay taxation on the farmer, but in reality 
 to lay it on the landlord. 
 
 I will not occupy you with a dissertation on the 
 
ii8 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 mixture of truth and error which this view of the 
 economists contains. It is sufficient to point out 
 that in distributing the gross price of any product 
 other than those which are purely agricultural, the 
 portion which is appropriated as rent is almost in- 
 finitesimal. But there is a more obvious answer 
 still. The logical inference of this argument would 
 be to tax the rent of land in order to supply the 
 public revenue and local levies. But in this country, 
 the annual amount of local and imperial taxation is 
 considerably in excess of the whole rent of land. 
 
 The economists had another and a more rational 
 purpose before them. Colbert, minister of finance 
 in the early days of Louis XIV, saw the wealth 
 which commerce and manufactures had bestowed on 
 the Dutch, and sought to appropriate some portion 
 of this prosperity to France. To effect this, he gave 
 state assistance to manufacture, and, as far as France 
 was concerned, was the founder of the mercantile 
 system in that country. Like most theories, this had 
 a true side in it. Manufacturing countries are gene- 
 rally wealthy, and for two reasons. The very exist- 
 ence of such industry proves that agriculture produces 
 in excess over the needs of those who labour at it. 
 Next, manufactures represent larger values in port- 
 able shape than agricultural products do, and can 
 therefore be more easily transported and sold. The 
 power which this country possessed during the great 
 continental war consisted in the value of, and demand 
 for, its manufactures, and the command which it 
 
ADAM SMITH. 119 
 
 thereupon had over the markets of the world. But 
 the error of the French policy lay in the fact, that 
 these advantages are easily seen, and when seen are 
 certainly acted on ; that the instinct of self-interest 
 needs no stimulus, and that industry finds out its 
 own good best. We have learned, but only lately, 
 that a Government is the worst judge of the way 
 in which the capital of those for whom it consults 
 can be administered or invested. When Governments 
 affect to help, they retard the progress they pa- 
 tronise. 
 
 Even here, however, the French theorists fell into 
 a strange delusion. They argued that nature does 
 nothing for man in manufactures, forgetting that the 
 labour of man is busied in appropriating certain forms 
 of matter and their qualities, by means of certain 
 natural forces. To discuss whether nature does most 
 for man in agriculture or manufactures, apart from 
 the illogical distinction of processes not radically 
 distinguishable, is to debate which of two scissor- 
 blades contributes most to severing a piece of cloth. 
 Adam Smith was not free from the fallacy into which 
 his teachers fell, and the modern student is constantly 
 able to detect the influence of the French theory on his 
 mind, though on many occasions he refutes its errors. 
 
 That which Adam Smith got from the French 
 economists was the habit of analytical research, exer- 
 cised upon economical phenomena. I do not say that 
 political economy began with him, but I can assert 
 that its method does. His teachers argued from 
 
I20 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 a priori, or what they believed to be apriori, principles, 
 and examined the facts by these principles. Smith 
 applied an inductive method to his facts^ and, as far 
 as possible, verified his hypotheses by observation. 
 Hence his work is full of illustrations, is copious in 
 examples, whenever illustration or example could be 
 obtained. And just as succeeding economists have 
 used his method, and in so far as they have gone to 
 history and statistics, so they have been able to 
 correct Smith ; for in his day history was uncritical, 
 statistics were imperfect and inexact. But in so far 
 as they have departed from his method, and suffered 
 themselves to evolve the science from their own 
 theories, they have, even the ablest among them, 
 fallen into notorious fallacies. 
 
 The quickness of Smithes inductive power was as 
 noteworthy as his diligence in collecting materials 
 where materials were forthcoming. For example, he 
 was well aware that the mass of the English peasantry 
 passed from a state of penury and dependence in the 
 thirteenth century into one of aflBuence and pros- 
 perity in the fifteenth. The peasant in the first 
 epoch, as described by the early English law-books, 
 is a totally different person from the yeoman of 
 rortescue''s age. Smith rightly divined that the mass 
 of the agriculturists must have passed through a 
 metayer system before they arrived at independence. 
 And the facts recently discovered bear out this hy- 
 pothesis. After the great social convulsion of the 
 fourteenth century, the greatest which modern history 
 
ADAM SMITH. 121 
 
 has undergone, — due to the occurrence of the great 
 plague in the year 1349, — it became impossible for the 
 landowners to carry on their estates by hired labour, 
 for the wages of labour rose at once by 50 to 100 per 
 cent., and there had long existed a custom of com- 
 muting serf-labour, never very profitable, for a money 
 payment. The attempt to revive this serf-labour led, 
 beyond the shadow of a doubt, to the uprising of 
 138 1, known familiarly as Wat Tyler^s rebellion. In 
 the interval, and indeed after this event, (for the de- 
 mands of the Blackheath rioters were effectually con- 
 ceded,) it became necessary for the landowners to let 
 their lands. As the new tenants had not enough 
 capital to stock these farms, (for in these days the 
 stock on a well-tilled farm was worth three times as 
 much as the land,) the landlord leased farm and stock 
 together, on consideration of receiving a certain por- 
 tion of the produce. This is the metayer system 
 which has prevailed in Southern France, and generally 
 in Italy from the days of Imperial Rome. In about 
 seventy years, so great was the prosperity of the 
 English yeomanry in those days, the farmer was able 
 to carry on his business with his own stock, and, in 
 many cases, to purchase the land on which he lived. 
 I have supplied you with the verification of Smithes 
 hjrpothesis, but the hypothesis itself is an induction 
 of singular sagacity. 
 
 The hardest work which any writer or thinker has 
 before him is to separate himself from the habitual 
 and tyrannous prejudices of the age in which he lives. 
 
122 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 A prejudice is a judgment, but an imperfect judg- 
 ment. It is because it simulates an exact inference 
 that the person who holds it, or, to be more correct, 
 is occupied by it, is irritated at any attempt to dis- 
 turb it. It is because attempts to disturb prejudice 
 are generally made by the emission of other pre- 
 judices, the weak points of which are recognised by 
 the adversary, that the attempt is constantly a failure. 
 Even when the refutation of an error is overwhelming, 
 men are not apt to be thankful to their instructor. 
 
 The dreamer in Horace, before whose eyes, as he 
 sat in an empty theatre, and applauded what he 
 thought were the scenes, the processions, the poetry 
 of noble tragedies, had little thanks for his friends 
 when they cured him of his delusion, and thereby 
 took away the pleasure of his existence. ' During my 
 whole life,^ said a friend of Tooke the economist, *I 
 have been laboriously engaged in gathering and bind- 
 ing up my faggot of notions, — how can you expect 
 that I shall be grateful to you for unloosing and 
 scattering them away?^ The fate of reformers is 
 well known, — the indifference of lukewarm friends, 
 the undisguised hostility of bitter enemies. As long 
 as loss and injury are the portion of those who labour 
 to speak wisely and do justly, there is no immediate 
 risk of rash and sudden change. ^ So you intend,^ 
 said a Yorkshire nobleman to Wilberforce, ' to reform 
 society. I will show you the destiny of all reformers ;' 
 and he pointed to a picture of the Crucifixion. 
 
 It must be admitted that in Adam Smithes days. 
 
ADAM SMITH. 123 
 
 when books were dear, and confined to the educated 
 few, when there was no popular press, and no means 
 for reachino" and teaching* the mass of the people, the 
 intolerance of prejudiced authority was far less marked 
 than it is in later times. Smithes political economy 
 was a war against privilege and monopoly, as all 
 honest political economy is, whether it be privilege on 
 the part of landlords or masters, peasants or workmen. 
 But it awakened no violent opposition, because it 
 awakened no immediate fear. Smith was a Scotch 
 professor, and the monopolists of the age felt no 
 serious alarm at the speculations of a north country 
 thinker. It is only in these later days that vested 
 interests begin to dread and detest the intellectual 
 activity of the 'wild men of the cloister.^ I have 
 indeed seen one violent attack on the ' Wealth of 
 Nations^ in the preface and notes of Mickle's Lusiad. 
 But Mickle wished to get patrons for his work among 
 the holders of East India Stock, and Smith had 
 severely commented on the monopoly of the great 
 Company. In Smithes time the manufacturers and 
 merchants were the great advocates of protection, and 
 Smith thought that they would cling to it with more 
 tenacity than the agriculturists did to their bounties 
 and corn laws. He was wrong. Thirty years after 
 the great economist's death, Tooke drew up the 
 memorable Merchants' petition. Simultaneously, and 
 as if by contrast, Vansittart produced his last budget. 
 It took more than a quarter of a centuiy before the 
 Corn Laws were abandoned, and they were given up 
 
124 ADAJI SMITH. 
 
 under the pressure of a formidable agitation^ and a 
 frightful famine. The event was followed by the 
 wreck of traditional parties,, and the establishment of 
 new parties under old names. Even now the battle 
 of protection and freedom is being waged, though on 
 a different material, and under a disguise, in the 
 pressure of a similar crisis, and with the prospect of 
 the same political phenomena. 
 
 In the days of Adam Smith statesmen thought 
 that money was wealth, and that a country which 
 permitted the export of the precious metals, unless 
 indeed it produced them from its own mines, and in 
 excess of its own wants, was wilfully inviting poverty. 
 He demonstrated that money was distributed over the 
 world just as all other merchandise is, and by the 
 same machinery. We now know that all the per- 
 fection of the mechanism by which money fulfils the 
 functions of currency, consists in the multitude of 
 transactions which the least possible quantity of 
 money can effect, and that communities strive as far 
 as possible to economise the currency which they 
 retain. 
 
 The statesmen of, the age believed that it was a 
 matter of paramount necessity that a country^s ex- 
 ports should exceed its imports. Adam Smith de- 
 veloped the exactly opposite doctrine. He taught 
 that a profitable trade consists in getting as much 
 foreign goods as possible, with as little British goods 
 as possible; that the difference between the two is 
 the profit on the transaction ; that the goods of one 
 
ADAM SMITH. 125 
 
 country are exchanged against the goods of another ; 
 and that the wisdom of the merchant is contained 
 in finding the market in which he can sell at the 
 highest price, and buy at the lowest. He therefore 
 repudiated those expedients for securing a special 
 market for British produce, which was in his day the 
 main object of commercial diplomacy, and was till 
 the time of Canning, who gave his instructions to 
 our representative at the Hague, at that time nego- 
 tiating certain concessions, in characteristic doggrel — 
 
 * In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch 
 Is giving too little, and asking too much.' 
 
 We now know that communities which hamper their 
 foreign trade with restrictions deliberately choose the 
 worst market for their produce. 
 
 The Economists taught that land was wealth. 
 Adam Smith proved — and it was a prodigious step 
 in advance — that labour was the cause and the sole 
 cause of wealth. Ever}' body knows how he illustrated 
 this position, and conclusively proyed it, in his famous 
 chapter on the division of labour. The importance 
 of this distinction cannot be overrated, for it gav^e 
 a scientific explanation of the origin of rent, and a 
 scientific refutation of those communistic theories 
 which anticipate the reform of all social inequalities 
 and grievances by a redistribution of land. For as 
 long as peo'ple believe, or perhaps are led to believe, 
 that land is wealth, so long will they, seeing that 
 its original distribution is accidental or arbitrary, 
 
126 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 claim as a matter of abstract justice^ which needs 
 only sufficient power to become a matter of legis- 
 lative action, that such inequalities as have arisen 
 from past circumstances should be rectified. The 
 French economists of later times have never escaped 
 from the influence of the thinkers who were associated 
 with the early studies of Adam Smith, and therefore 
 either argue,, as Proudhon and others, that *" property 
 is theft/ or with Bastiat and the school which he has 
 founded, an equally untenable paradox, that ' all the 
 value which land has acquired is the result of labour/ 
 Agrarian forms of socialism, disputes about what 
 really constitutes property in land, and what the 
 extent of that property is, have been the earliest 
 causes of party strife in the social history of mankind. 
 When communities subsist on agricultural produce, 
 the necessity for defining this property becomes only 
 more immediate and urgent than it does when the 
 life of a people is spent in hunting and in pastoral 
 pursuits. The battles of savage tribes are agrarian 
 contests, in which the prize is the fairest hunting- 
 ground. The progress of civilised life necessitates 
 the abandonment of these savage forms of sustenta- 
 tion or amusement ; though, so strangely are the 
 extremes of habit continued, that, in a country like 
 our own, it is still argued that the unlimited pre- 
 servation of game is a legitimate and defensible 
 practice, though it is clear that when any region 
 which can be made to produce food by agricultural 
 labour is abandoned to the maintenance of wild 
 
ADAM SMITH. 127 
 
 animals, it cannot supply a hundredth part of the 
 food which it might otherwise afford. 
 
 They who have studied the early history of civilis- 
 ation, are aware how incessant has been the ven- 
 tilation of the agrarian question. It appears in the 
 fierce municipal struggles of ancient Greece. It is 
 the most distinct fact in the mythical annals of 
 Rome. The customs of feudal Europe referred with 
 hardly an exception to the determination of the rights 
 which the possessor of property in land might ex- 
 ercise. The social question in Ireland, where, till 
 within 250 years, the custom of Celtic tenures existed 
 and was recognised, has been uninterruptedly agra- 
 rian. In our own country, where the limits of 
 private ownership in land have perhaps been extended 
 farther than in any other community, where private 
 rights are conceded to the possessor more fully than 
 elsewhere, the debate as to what must be the maxi- 
 mum of private ownership has been greatly aided by 
 the interpretation of the circumstances which ori- 
 ginally necessitate the ownership in question. 
 
 The joint or common ownership of land, enjoyed 
 by the whole of any given society, is abandoned for 
 particular or private ownership on economical grounds. 
 When land is cultivated by spade or plough, it sus- 
 tains many more people than could subsist on an 
 equal area occupied by domesticated animals. But 
 the cultivation of the soil is impossible except on the 
 condition of permanent ownership. The man who 
 ploughs and sows expects to reap, and will not plough 
 
128 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 and sow, unless the prospect of reaping is sufficiently 
 guaranteed to him. In course of time_, this guarantee 
 becomes permanent. For other reasons, this per- 
 manent occupation represents annually a higher value 
 than is sufficient to compensate for the charges of cul- 
 tivation, and rent arises. Lastly, discretionary powers 
 over land are accorded. But society cannot ever, except 
 by an act of suicide, abandon the right of asking 
 and answering the following questions. Does the 
 occupation, the use, the distribution of land, subserve 
 that purpose for which society originally abandoned 
 its common right in the soil? Does the concession 
 of these private rights, intended to effect the fullest 
 productiveness of land, in any way militate against 
 the end which it is always supposed to accomplish ? 
 These rights were granted in order to ensure the 
 fertility of the soil ; does the existing usufruct induce 
 barrenness ? Is it always clear that private interest 
 is sufficiently strong to prevent the waste of these 
 powers, which are, after all, part of the national 
 resources ? Upon these and similar questions, the 
 economical interpretation of the theory of rent and 
 the distribution of land has given and is giving 
 an unassailable solution. Now Adam Smith was one 
 of the . earliest writers who recognised the social 
 importance of the axiom, that labour is the cause 
 of wealth, and that the permanent occupation of the 
 soil, under intelligible, but under strictly limited 
 conditions, is necessarily antecedent to the economical 
 exhibition of labour. 
 
ADAM SMITH. 129 
 
 But the special delusion of Adam Smithes day, and 
 that which he combated with the greatest effect, was 
 the theory of protection. The plea on which the 
 protection of particular industries is defended, is 
 always the public good. Protection, in logical lan- 
 guage, is always particular. If everybody were pro- 
 tected, i. e. if every kind of labour were assisted by 
 regulations and restrictions, were sheltered from com- 
 petition, and provided with a market, it is plain no 
 one would be the better, but every one would be the 
 worse off for the machinery of legislation. Hence 
 universal protection is as gross an absurdity as uni- 
 versal over-production. Nor, for certain reasons, is 
 the protection of particular trades and manufactures 
 any real benefit to those who are engaged in these 
 occupations, except under particular circumstances, 
 and to a limited extent; though the removal of a 
 protection once accorded may be, indeed ordinarily is, 
 accompanied by a loss. It follows, then, that the 
 restriction is the avowed sacrifice of the public to 
 some public object, of which the legislature is con- 
 ceived to be a better judge than the public can be. 
 It is impossible to state a grosser paradox. 
 
 It must not indeed be imagined that the protective 
 system which Adam Smith found in his day had so 
 respectable an origin as a mistaken view of the public 
 good. In the early days of royalty, when the king's 
 prerogative was large and undefined, the monarch 
 assumed the right of licensing individuals in the 
 manufacture of certain goods, or the conduct of certain 
 
 K 
 
I30 ABAM SMITH. 
 
 trades. The grant of such monopolies was freely 
 exercised by Elizabeth. But that prudent princess, 
 when in her later years Parliament remonstrated 
 against these privileged traders, abated her preten- 
 sions. Her successor, whose notions of royalty were 
 more extravagant, was forced to abandon the prero- 
 gative altogether. But what the King relinquished, 
 the Parliament assumed, and during the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries these privileges of sole trade 
 were freely granted by the legislature. 
 
 In order to support the woollen trade, the export- 
 ation of wool was made a felony, and when this pre- 
 posterous punishment was remitted, heavy penalties 
 were still levied on this imaginary offence. The pro- 
 hibition was continued for many years after the time 
 that not a single ounce of British wool was employed 
 in the manufacture of fine cloth. The legislature 
 investigated the causes which led to the low price 
 of wool, and then discovered that, acting, as always, 
 in the capacity of country gentlemen, they had vir- 
 tually been engaged in depreciating the value of their 
 own produce. They had taken care previously to 
 ensure the consumption of woollen fabrics by an Act 
 of Parliament, to which I believe no legislation offers 
 a parallel. They did not, perhaps could not, despite 
 their hereditary wisdom, provide that every living 
 person should be decently clad. But they made 
 this provision for the dead. A law declared that 
 every dead body should be buried in a woollen 
 dress, and the officiating clergyman was constrained 
 
ADAM SMITH. 131 
 
 to certify that the provisions of the law had been 
 obeyed. 
 
 A monopoly heightens the profits of an individual. 
 But protection does not, unless the number of persons 
 engaged in the trade or manufacture is limited. The 
 reason for this fact is found in an economical law, 
 that equal capitals, liable to equal risks, are remu- 
 nerated by equal profits. Hence, if the price of ar- 
 ticles is heightened by protection, the competition for 
 producing the high-priced article increases, and pro- 
 fits are equalized. But when the protection is re- 
 moved, the trade is overstocked; and unless the 
 market is greatly widened, and demand increased, 
 the change is sure to be attended by serious depres- 
 sion. But, as the reputation of English manufac- 
 tures grew, protection was found to be unnecessary 
 and mischievous, and the mercantile community in 
 this country was the first to claim the benefits of 
 free trade. 
 
 The case is somewhat different with agricultural 
 produce. In Adam Smith's time England exported 
 wheat, and the economist thought, with immediate 
 reason, on looking at the circumstances, that the 
 earliest advocates of free trade would be the land- 
 owners; the sturdiest remonstrants against it the 
 mercantile community. He was, to a further extent, 
 justified in this impression by the hostile attitude 
 which the merchants assumed against Walpole's 
 scheme of establishing bonded warehouses. But the 
 case was reversed when England ceased to export 
 
 K2 
 
132 ADAM SMITE. 
 
 com, and the demand for labour increasing, began 
 to depend on foreign supplies. Then it was seen 
 that high rents followed scarcity prices, and the Corn 
 Laws of 1815 were enacted in order to stereotype a 
 scarcity price and its presumed concomitant. 
 
 But the violation of an economical law generally 
 bears its own punishment, and that speedily. Any 
 attempt on the part of a legislature to regulate the 
 prices of a foreign product, the same as that which is 
 produced at home, or similar to it, induces violent 
 fluctuations in the price of the home product. As 
 long as the corn laws existed, agricultural distress 
 was a perpetually recurring cry, for nothing induces 
 greater commercial derangement than great varia- 
 tions in the price of products. The farmer was ruined 
 by the machinery which was devised for his benefit. 
 Nor was this the only result. As agriculture is a 
 complex process, the artificial heightening of one 
 among its products is the artificial depression of the 
 rest. And as rent depends on the profit of all pro- 
 ducts, the landowners reaped no real benefit from 
 protective legislation. 
 
 The modern theory of protection as advocated in 
 the United States, in Canada, and in our Australian 
 colonies, is far more subtle and socialistic in its 
 character than the rough-and-ready system of com- 
 promises for what are called peculiar burdens, and 
 the concess'ons to powerful interests which were the 
 real basis of those protective arrangements of ours 
 which lasted up to 1846. The latter were far more 
 
ADAM SMITH. 133 
 
 open to attack than the former are. They were ad- 
 mitted to serve a purpose of public policy ; the sus- 
 tentation, namely, of an institution which needs here- 
 ditary wealth, in order to support hereditary privilege. 
 When interpreted on economical grounds, it was seen 
 that they had no such value as was assigned them ; 
 that they did not strengthen, but rather impoverished 
 the social order in whose interests they were enacted. 
 But though this was proved conclusively, and not a 
 few able men among the persons for whose benefit 
 these laws were designed, determined, from an en- 
 lightened self-interest, as well as for patriotic reasons, 
 to abandon these guarantees, the English corn laws 
 died hard, and, in the opinion of many critics of 
 political forces, required the accidental calamity of 
 the Irish famine before they could be abrogated. 
 The instincts of large communities are not so much 
 conservative as impassive. They concede to reason 
 long before they act upon the reason which they 
 admit. There is in such societies a wide tract of 
 indifference, between the sympathy which supports, 
 and tlie antipathy which overthrows customs, — an 
 indiflPerence which ardent partisans underrate, and 
 cynical critics exalt from acquiescence into admir- 
 ation. There is nothing in the philosophy of politics 
 more hard of interpretation than the question — How 
 far are nations who submit to peculiar institutions 
 prepared, on an emergency, to maintain them ? 
 
 The Englishman who quits his native country, 
 abandons his social traditions at once and for ever. 
 
134 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 No nation of Anglo-Saxon descent has transplanted 
 the institutions of this country to its new home; 
 but almost all these nations or colonies have adopted 
 the theory of protection which Adam Smith assailed. 
 They allege^, in defence of this economical heresy, a 
 variety of arguments. Sometimes it is said that the 
 internal revenue can be collected most cheaply by 
 such a process. Sometimes they aver that protection 
 is needed for nascent industries, — a position for which 
 they quote the authority of Mr. Mill. Occasionally 
 they allege a political reason; that it is expedient, 
 apart from economical considerations, to distribute 
 employment as well as to accumulate wealth, and that 
 a nation should be self-sustained. To the last state- 
 ment there is one answer. It is an axiom which 
 cannot be resisted, that there is no countervailing 
 compensation for the breach of a natural law. No 
 indirect advantage follows on a violation of public 
 policy. In the political, as well as in the moral 
 world, it is impossible to do evil and to succeed in 
 achieving a good, to confer a real benefit by inflicting 
 a real wrong. To the former reasons no answer need 
 be given, for they deserve none. Only this we may 
 say, that protection to nascent industries can never be 
 so great a boon as the ultimate withdrawal of that 
 protection is a certain loss. A permanent protection 
 is no benefit to the protected industry, is a neces- 
 sary loss to the community at large. A temporary 
 protection is an injury to both parties; to the con- 
 gumer first, to the producer afterwards. Abundant 
 
ADAM SMITH. 135 
 
 illustration could be supplied for this position, both in 
 past and present times. 
 
 It is more reasonable to refer these enactments, 
 made in the supposed interest of the State, or of in- 
 choate industries, to the incidental compromises of 
 party warfare. Did time permit, it would not be 
 difficult to trace this influence in the protective regu- 
 lations of the United States and Australia, and to 
 show how much the apology of the present time is an 
 after-thought, a mere explanation, intended to justify 
 the claims of powerful and selfish factions. But as 
 municipal government is a means to an end, that end 
 being the due order of the State, so the imperial policy 
 of an independent community is to be criticised, and, 
 if need be, condemned, if it is seen to be unfriendly to 
 the general good of the human race. Patriotism may 
 be, and has been, the highest public virtue ; but it 
 may also be, and more frequently is, a mask for sordid 
 and narrow self-interest. It is the former only when 
 it manifests itself on behalf of the common good of 
 man, or is not at variance with that common good. 
 Treating human nature from its economical aspect, 
 Adam Smith did not discuss municipal or local pros- 
 perity, but busied himself with the wealth of nations, 
 with the means, that is to say, by which communities 
 confer mutual benefits. 
 
 I do not venture on asserting, as Plato did, that 
 public affairs can be wisely and righteously conducted 
 only when philosophers are rulers, and rulers philoso- 
 phers, for the dissonance of philosophers is as marked 
 
136 ADAM SMITH. 
 
 as tlie discord of parties. There must needs be, when 
 the success of one or other among* rival theories in- 
 volves the undue exaltation or the unfair depression of 
 rival and important interests, a wise, or at least an 
 experienced, arbiter. The wisdom and experience 
 needed are gained for the most part by intelligent 
 reflection on successive failures. The philosophy of 
 government is gathered from the errors of historical 
 administrations ; the science of political economy is a 
 host of negative inductions, collected from the falla- 
 cies of a mistaken policy. Even were society less 
 apathetic in dealing with these errors and fallacies 
 during their existence and operation, there is wisdom 
 ^ in the slow acceptance of fundamental changes, in the 
 cautious criticism of proposed reformations. Nor is it 
 proper that those who think wisely and carefully 
 should be indignant at the slowness with which their 
 conclusions are accepted. If it be well to labour and 
 succeed, it is even better to labour and be patient. 
 Among the vulgarities of vanity, none is more vulgar 
 than that which cannot say or do what is good and 
 wise, unless the reward of approbation is forthwith 
 and emphatically conceded. 
 
 But it cannot be denied that civilisation has been 
 more indebted to what the world calls philosophers and 
 thinkers than it has been to rulers and administrators. 
 The truth is manifest enough when we reflect on the 
 progress which physical analysis and science have 
 efiected, and give their weight to the labours of the 
 chemist, the mechanician, the geologist. Not less 
 
ADAM SMITH, 137 
 
 noteworthy is the influence which the learning of 
 publicists has exercised. The legal reforms of our 
 (lay had their beginning in the speculative jurispru- 
 dence of Bentham and Mackintosh. The doctrine of 
 toleration was first taught by such students as Chil- 
 lingworth and Locke. The interpretation of those 
 conditions, which guarantee the fullest personal liberty 
 with the greatest administrative vigour, has found no 
 abler exponent than Mr. Mill. But the greatest 
 achievements have been made by the English econo- 
 mists, who have, under great disadvantages, and in 
 the face of strenuous opposition, reversed the policy 
 which was once thought to be the highest, the most 
 undoubted wisdom. It must not be believed that 
 their work is done; that there are no further con- 
 quests to be made by this science, whose operations 
 have been so beneficent, though its conclusions often 
 seem harsh and repulsive. But whatever may be 
 done in future, there is no doubt that successive 
 generations of economical reformers will always 
 honour, as the most illustrious of their order, the 
 Scotch Professor who sleeps in the churchyard of 
 the Edinburgh Canongate. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 In 1783, everybody thought that the sun of 
 England's glory was for ever set. To those who 
 recognised her reputation in her military greatness, 
 the successful revolt of the American colonies seemed 
 to annihilate her fame. To those who believed, as 
 ninety-nine men in a hundred believed, that the 
 colonial trade, regulated as it was by reciprocal ar- 
 rangements, was the chief, if not the sole source of 
 England's wealth, the disintegration of the colonial 
 empire was full of sinister omens. To those who 
 believed in the balance of power, as nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine men in a thousand did, it seemed 
 that Great Britain was in danger of occupying a 
 second-rate place in Europe. When Gibbon and 
 Franklin were together in Paris, the latter sought 
 an interview with the former. Gibbon replied that 
 he had the highest respect for Franklin's genius and 
 abilities, but that he could hold no communication with 
 a revolted subject. Franklin replied, that whenever 
 the historian wished to commence a new theme, ' The 
 Decline and Fall of the British Empire,' he would 
 gladly afford him the materials. The retort was at 
 the time believed to be as just as it was severe. 
 
142 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 Great Britain recovered herself without difficulty^ 
 and ten years afterwards commenced a war, the mag- 
 nitude and duration of which dwarfed every other 
 contest in which she had been before engaged. At 
 one time she fought with all Europe, as well as with 
 the most indefatigable genius which the art of war 
 has ever developed. She spent sums compared with 
 <vhich her previous outlay had been trifling. She 
 did what she had never done since the days of the 
 Plantagenets, landed an army in a foreign country, 
 and won every pitched battle which she fought, till 
 she had entirely routed her foe, and occupied the 
 territory which she invaded. She annihilated the 
 navy, mercantile as well as armed, of her adversary. 
 She twice dictated terms of peace within the capital 
 of France. Nor did she derive any material advan- 
 tage from her victory. She paid for all she needed 
 and used. She subsidized her allies, giving high 
 prices for generally worthless service. She came out 
 of this great war too without aggrandising herself. 
 One or two spots in the Mediterranean, and else- 
 where, were all her acquisitions, and these she kept, 
 because, according to the judgment of the age, she 
 made Europe secure by these costly stations. 
 
 It is not difficult to explain this revival. In the 
 first place, the colonial system was a delusion. The 
 only misfortune was that statesmen did not learn the 
 lesson which the rupture with the American colonies 
 could have taught them. They thanked heaven they 
 had colonies left, and went on tinkering the reci- 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 143 
 
 procal legislation between Canada and the sugar- 
 growing islands on the one hand, and Great Britain 
 on the other. I do not discuss here whether the 
 retention of colonies under the imperial sway is a 
 wise or a mistaken policy; but the whole civilised 
 world has at last learnt, that when two communities 
 agree to trade together exclusively, and prohibit any 
 other than mutual imports, they deliberately make up 
 their minds to lose on both sides. But the fallacy of 
 reciprocity is so inveterate, that, though the govern- 
 ment of this country had before it the evidence of 
 a growing trade between Great Britain and the 
 American Union, after the rupture of their political 
 relations, it clung to the reciprocity system till 
 within a few years ago, when it abolished the dif- 
 ferential sugar-duties, and later still, rooted out the 
 last fibres of the colonial theory, by remitting the 
 duties on timber. 
 
 The means, however, by which Great Britain was 
 enabled to weather the storm, and to ride triumphant 
 out of the far heavier tempest of the twenty-two 
 years' war, were the discovery and utilization of a 
 natural force, and the multiplication of labour by 
 machinery. The strength of Great Britain, from 
 1780 onwards, lay in the appropriation of the power 
 of steam, and in the marvellous economies of the 
 spinning-jenny and the mule. Compare the cottager's 
 distaff and spindle, the labourer's hammer, the power 
 of man's greatest muscular efforts, with the loom of 
 the modern manufactory, and the vast but manage- 
 
144 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 able force of steam, and you will be able to under- 
 stand how prodigious are the resources which Watt, 
 Ark Wright, and Crompton opened up. It was hardly 
 an extravagant boast, when Arkwright was reported 
 to have said, that if Parliament could continue his 
 patents, he would engage to furnish such ordinary 
 revenue as might be annually necessary for public 
 purposes. 
 
 I do not know what are the reasons which have 
 given rise to these late panics about the future indus- 
 trial position of this country. On economic subjects 
 men are apt to take the easy broad road of abstract 
 reasoning, and to neglect the steep and thorny path 
 of statistical' induction. But I have been unable to 
 find out any instance of mechanical genius in any 
 other race but our own, except the solitary discovery 
 of the carding-machine. This, beyond doubt a great 
 invention, though it consists (like all great inven- 
 tions) in a simple and obvious principle, was dis- 
 covered by a Frenchman. As some of you are aware, 
 its peculiarity is, that the fibre is delivered over the 
 cylinder, instead of under it. It is said that the 
 discovery was entirely accidental, having been sug- 
 gested to the inventor by his seeing his daughters 
 brushing their back hair. But I have found no other 
 notable invention for saving human labour which is 
 not the offspring of Anglo-Saxon thought. Other 
 nations can copy, perhaps improve details. The 
 Chinese are perfect in the imitative faculty; Con- 
 tinental machinists have had some success in the 
 
WILLIAM GOBBETT. 145 
 
 management of particulars, a stage beyond Chinese 
 intelligence : but they have hardly entered on the 
 far higher path of invention. 
 
 Adam Smith saw and stated clearly why it is that 
 a manufacturing people has far greater strength for 
 enduring the charges of a foreign war than another, 
 the surplus of whose industry consists of what he 
 calls raw produce. The value of manufactured goods 
 consists in the labour which is, so to speak, condensed 
 in them. As they represent greater value in less 
 compass, they are more portable, and more readily 
 permeate into the markets of the world. As they 
 represent greater utility, because they are imme- 
 diately available for current demand, they are more 
 manageable as articles of sale. As they were at the 
 time, to all intents and purposes, the sole produce of 
 this country, they gave it an exceptional strength. 
 No better example can be found of the power which 
 her manufacturing supremacy gave Great Britain 
 throughout this gigantic struggle than the utter 
 futility of the Berlin and Milan decrees. Napoleon 
 knew well enough that if he could cut off this 
 country from the markets of the Continent, he would 
 seriously cripple her resources. But he miscalculated 
 the strength of his police, as compared with the 
 strength of that which his police was intended to 
 exclude. He built, to be sure, a dyke, but he could 
 not make it impervious to that which he strove to 
 dam out. 'As water flows to the valleys,^ says 
 Sanuto, the Venetian merchant of the thirteenth 
 
 h 
 
146 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 century, ^ so traffic forces its way into the channels 
 which thirst for it/ Napoleon^s soldiers were clothed 
 in the produce of the Yorkshire and Lancashire looms. 
 His military chests were filled, at enormous sacrifices, 
 from the hoards of British bullion -dealers. The loaf- 
 sugar which he put into his coffee came from Bristol 
 and London, quadrupled in price, because it was im- 
 ported into France by way of Turkey. To have 
 destroyed the foreign trade of Great Britain, it was 
 necessary to destroy the demands of civilisation, to 
 make society content with the coarse and costly 
 makeshifts of barbarism. I do not deny that British 
 commerce was stunted by the great war, British wealth 
 lessened from what it might have been ; but the 
 resources of other nations were diminished in even 
 greater degree by the constraint which was put upon 
 their demands. Nor do I forget that there came, as 
 there always does come, a reaction from the feverish 
 prosperity of the great war. When nations engage 
 in hostilities, the demand for the labour of those who 
 are not actually fighting becomes urgent : wages are 
 high, profits are high. Everybody seems to thrive. 
 The delusion that they are rendered wealthier by the 
 waste of wealth occupies men^s minds, till the inevitable 
 reaction overtakes them. This fallacy possessed our 
 forefathers sixty or seventy years ago, as it possessed 
 our kinsfolk in the American Union four or five years 
 ago. Men mistake feverish energy for real strength, 
 and only learn their error when the fever gives way 
 to exhaustion. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 147 
 
 - There was, however, one class of persons in this 
 country who never tasted this factitious prosperity. 
 These were the yeomen and the agricultural labourers. 
 Between 1793 and 1815, this country was visited by 
 that series of bad seasons which seems to recur in 
 some undefined cycle. In 1800 and 1801, Great 
 Britain was nearer famine than it had been since the 
 terrible epoch of 1315-13 16, when the country was 
 deluged by two years' almost incessant rain. The 
 people could not be relieved from abroad, for the 
 pernicious corn laws — ^less evil, indeed, than later 
 enactments, but powerful for mischief — shut out the 
 foreign producer. The exceptional sterility of the 
 seasons, and the artificial famine which the law pro- 
 duced, led to various expedients, intended to supply 
 the continual deficiency of food. I remember, when a 
 boy, that my father pointed out to me a field in 
 Hampshire which was cropped for twelve successive 
 years with wheat. Nor were the people ignorant of 
 the causes of their misery. The longing for peace, 
 before the short-lived truce of Amiens, I have learnt 
 from the same authority, was intense and anxious. 
 
 The French were not wholly unreasonable in their 
 hatred of Pitt. Before the Revolution broke out, 
 Pitt, a disciple of Adam Smith, was fully persuaded 
 of the necessity of keeping up amicable relations with 
 France. Walpole and he had been the only ministers 
 who possessed even a conception of the true principles 
 of taxation. The former attempted a reform, the es- 
 tablishment of bonded warehouses, in which he failed. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 The London merchants^ alarmed lest the competition 
 of smaller capitalists should diminish their profits, 
 offered a determined resistance to this measure of 
 good sense, and Walpole was obliged to abandon his 
 project. Pitt was happier, and he made a change 
 which has caused Great Britain to become the e7itre- 
 pot of the world. He proclaimed a policy of peace. 
 He set himself to diminish the public debt, and 
 patronised the scheme of Price^s sinking fund. He 
 negotiated a commercial treaty with France, on prin- 
 ciples nearly the same as those which Cobden adopted 
 eight years ago. He frankly accepted the situation 
 in America, and strove to cement by friendship the 
 affinity which had been previously that of irri- 
 tated dependence and ill-judged supremacy. At home 
 he contemplated a Reform Bill, studied the incidence 
 of taxation, and resolved on revising the system of 
 national finance. He was courageous as well as 
 powerful ; confident in his own resources and popular 
 with his countrymen. He was, it is true, opposed, 
 but the opposition to which he was subjected merely 
 urged him to greater efforts, was the healthy stimulus 
 to a vigorous mind. 
 
 Again, Pitt loved freedom. He reformed the law 
 of libel against the licence of ministerial prosecutors, 
 too soon, indeed, to return to those measures of re- 
 pression in which he was finally outdone by Sid- 
 mouth and Castlereagh, men who copied the worse 
 parts of Pittas nature, as Vansittart parodied the 
 desperate measures of Pittas later finance. He con- 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 149 
 
 stantly and energetically opposed the slave trade, 
 even after he had retrograded from his earlier sympa- 
 thies with public liberty. It is possible that the real 
 reason which induced him to consent to the trial of 
 Hastings was his detestation of the cruelties which 
 that satrap committed, though he has been charged, 
 on insufficient grounds as it seems to me, with meaner 
 motives. It is certain that he denounced the Black 
 Acts of the West India statute book, and believed 
 that cruelty and vindictiveness in dealing with sub- 
 ject races were neither policy nor justice. Wilber- 
 force, that strange mixture of prejudice and benevo- 
 lence, of piety and policy, was on thoroughly good 
 terms with him, and Wilberforce would not have 
 hcmoured a man w^ithout a heart. 
 
 But the vigour and virtue of Pitt's heart and 
 nature were not proof against panic, though he re- 
 sisted the panic to which he ultimately succumbed 
 for more than two years. In 1789, the Constituent 
 Assembly, summoned by Louis XVI, met in Paris. 
 There was abundant need, urgent need, for sweeping 
 reform, and it cannot be denied that the Assembly 
 went to it with a will. They abolished primogeni- 
 ture, which, by the way, never prevailed in France 
 to the extent which English custom has sanctioned ; 
 they made taxation equal ; they annulled feudal privi- 
 leges, gave liberty of religious worship, took away 
 the power of arbitrary arrest, granted universal suf- 
 frage, made the administration of justice public, and 
 appropriated Church-lands to secular purposes. The 
 
I50 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 condition of France was desperate, and the remedies 
 were searching and drastic. 
 
 A year after the meeting of this Assembly, Burke 
 published his ' Reflections on the French Revolution/ 
 Never did any book produce such an effect. To be 
 sure, it was as the torch to gunpowder. The Court, 
 the Aristocracy, and the Clergy were immeasurably 
 alarmed at the progress of the Revolution. There was 
 some reason for their fears. King George was a re- 
 spectable man, whose private virtues made his political 
 traits, namely, inflexible obstinacy, joined to absolute 
 unscrupulousness as to the means by which his end 
 should be aimed at, more mischievous than the vices 
 of his children. His eldest son was a monster of 
 meanness and profligacy; nor were the rest of the 
 Royal family much better. One instance will suffice. 
 The Horse Guards, always liable to sinister influences, 
 were under the dominion of Mrs. Clarke and Nancy 
 Parsons. 
 
 The Peerage of the day was as worthless. The 
 right of hereditary legislation was conferred on those 
 who were able to return members for rotten boroughs. 
 The Lowther of the time was made Earl of Lonsdale, 
 for the sufficient reason that he controlled the repre- 
 sentation of Cumberland and Westmorland, and their 
 boroughs. How the Lowther had gained his in- 
 fluence is shown in the history of Words worth^s 
 family. The English aristocracy grew rich upon 
 pensions and sinecures. Pitt, who was personally 
 pure, suffered this to go on freely. Mr. Goldwin 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT, 151 
 
 Smith has adduced numerous instances of this form of 
 peculation. A little pains would supply as many 
 more examples. 
 
 Still more flagitious, however, was the conduct of 
 the prelates. This was the age of those ecclesiastical 
 cormorants, Tomline, Cornwallis, Moore. These men 
 were as negligent of their duties, as they were rapa- 
 cious after preferment. Never, perhaps, in the whole 
 course of English history, was the English establish- 
 ment so debased. There was some life in the Evan- 
 gelical clergy, who were then discredited and per- 
 secuted. The Dissenters, though tolerated, were 
 politically powerless, and had to a great extent fallen 
 from their austere rule. The followers of Wesley were 
 poor ; those of Whitfield few, and without influence. 
 Underneath this hierarchy lay a profoundly ignorant 
 people. The Church and King mobs, the populace 
 which could be stirred by fanatics, were found in the 
 great towns, — such mobs as those who were roused by 
 Lord George Gordon in London, and which sacked 
 Priestley^s house in Birmingham. Society was com- 
 posed of scum and dregs. In those days it was easy 
 to commit the worst of political crimes; to enlist 
 ignorance on behalf of injustice, to stimulate the 
 sordid passions of one class in order that the sordid 
 interests of another class might be protected and 
 continued. 
 
 This Burke did, unconsciously or wilfully. Some 
 persons have tried to explain the Beaconsfield reflec- 
 tions by the hypothesis that the author had suddenly 
 
152 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 gone mad. If a morbid egotism makes men mad, 
 Burke was always mad. If sudden and ardent sym- 
 pathy for any cause which is suffering, whatever its 
 previous demerits were, is generosity, Burke was 
 always generous. As there are men who always side 
 with the stronger, so there is an impulse, rarer indeed, 
 but more attractive, which induces other minds to 
 side with the weaker party. It is probable that Burke 
 knew nothing of the social state of France before the 
 Revolution. It is certain that any man of sense 
 would have acknowledged the evils which it con- 
 tained, and the difficulties which surrounded the em- 
 ployment of remedies. It is still more certain that 
 had it not been for the excesses which followed on the 
 declaration of Pilnitz and the manifesto of the Duke 
 of Brunswick, Burke^s declamatory invective would 
 have had no lasting reputation, beyond that of its 
 vigorous style, and the characteristic sincerity of its 
 hyperbole. 
 
 Burke's known love of justice and hatred of op- 
 pression assisted the intrinsic force of the work that 
 he published. It was known that he had been a 
 Liberal, a keen lover of his country, a generous friend 
 to subject and wronged races. Viewed in the magic 
 mirror which he put before the public, Louis XVI 
 became, instead of a dull, well-meaning man, the chief 
 business of whose life was that of repairing clocks 
 and watches, a wise and judicious benefactor of his 
 country, against whose prudent concessions a host of 
 mad fanatics were striving; — the Queen, instead of 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 153 
 
 being a frivolous intriguing woman (to whom suffer- 
 ing taught such dignity and fortitude, that she after- 
 wards became almost sublime), was spoken of as a 
 radiant angel, who challenged the worship of all true 
 and loyal hearts ; — the worthless nobles, and yet more 
 worthless clergy of France, were noble cavaliers, and 
 exemplary ministers of Christ. The Stuarts were bad 
 enough, but they never bred a monster like Philip 
 Egalite. The Church of Tomline and Cornwallis was 
 sordid enough, but it failed to produce such a wretch 
 as Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, who fled from the 
 diocese he disgraced when danger was near, took the 
 pay of the Directory as a spy in the United States, 
 and was a traitor to every constitution and every 
 ruler which France had. The English nobles during 
 the days of Sandwich, Chesterfield, Thurlow, were 
 licentious and heartless enough, but they were whole 
 periods of development superior to the satyrs who 
 thronged the French court. The peasantry of Eng- 
 land were ignorant and debased enough, but they 
 were civilised by the side of those hordes of savages 
 whom the customs of the French monarchy had de- 
 graded, and the energies of the French Revolution, 
 stimulated by the atrocious proclamation of the Duke 
 of Brunswick, ultimately let loose upon mankind. 
 
 I know of but one period in modem history in 
 which a similar delusion, had it occupied a mind like 
 that of Burke, and had it found utterance in the 
 words of so great a master of rhetoric, might have 
 produced equal evils. Seven years ago, there were 
 
154 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 men — good and otherwise prudent men — who de- 
 fended the social system of the slave-holding* States 
 in the American Union_, who spoke about the chivalry 
 of the South^ and, ignoring* the mean whites, lauded 
 the patriarchal relations of the master and the slave. 
 The same kind of reasoning, the same misstatement 
 of facts, the same ignorance existed in this country 
 as made it possible for a defence of the Southern 
 policy to appear respectable. Fortunately there was 
 no Burke, and still more fortunately, had there been a 
 Burke, the public was better informed. Even yet more 
 fortunately there was no congress at Pilnitz, and no 
 Duke of Brunswick, and no Directory liberated from 
 slavery, and suffered to run riot, under the joint in- 
 fluence of new-found licence and ferocious panic. 
 But there was a Pitt, though most fortunately he was 
 not. exposed to the same temptations, and therefore 
 did not commit himself to the same reaction. 
 
 For more than two years Pitt abstained from 
 meddling in continental affairs, and therefore was re- 
 sisting the anti-Gallican tendencies of the party whose 
 interests he administered. He had every reason to 
 do so, for he sincerely desired peace and economy, 
 if for no higher reason, at least for this, that he longed 
 to give his financial reforms a fair trial. No writer 
 has illustrated this period of history more lucidly 
 than Cobden, whose pamphlet ^ 1793 ^^^ ^^53> ^^^st 
 needs be studied by all who pretend to form an im- 
 partial judgment on the question. Pitt, I am per- 
 suaded^ strove against the current with all his might. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT, 155 
 
 In the year 179;? he proposed reduced estimates for 
 the military expenditure of the country, and all went 
 well till the battle of Jemappes and the occupation of 
 the Austrian Netherlands and Savoy. 
 
 Nor can there be_, I think, a doubt of the motive 
 which finally drove Pitt into this reactionary career, 
 — a motive which Lord Brougham has stated with his 
 usual clearness. Pitt was joined by the aristocratic 
 Whigs, and was so far strengthened in Parliament. 
 Had he, however, united with Fox, he might have 
 baffled the war party. To have done so, however, 
 would have compelled him to share his power with 
 a rival, to have divided his reputation with a political 
 enemy. So he preferred war to peace, ambition to 
 his country's good, supremacy to magnanimity. Re- 
 presenting as he did in Parliament the faction which 
 longed for war, which profited by it, and which was, 
 under the unreformed Parliament, almost in posses- 
 sion of the nation, (for in that day, according to Mr. 
 Grey, 154 persons sent 307 members to Parliament,) 
 he took a step from which retreat was impossible, he 
 declared a war which could not and did not cease 
 without dishonour, as long as Napoleon was victori- 
 ous in Europe. Nor did the miseries of that era 
 cease with the Battle of Waterloo. They continued 
 for seventeen years aftei-wards, till the grant of Par- 
 liamentary Reform. 
 
 Those who commit themselves to reaction in politics, 
 just as those who are renegades or converts in re- 
 ligion, rarely go half lengths. Strafford is a note- 
 
156 WILLIAM GOBBET T. 
 
 worAy illustration of this rule, by the greatness of 
 his apostasy, and by the severity with which that 
 apostasy was punished. Pitt was no exception. He 
 permitted a Reign of Terror in Ireland, hardly less 
 atrocious, though better concealed than the massacres 
 of September, and the fusillade at Lyons. He per- 
 mitted the reign of Dundas in Scotland, and revived, 
 in part at least, the memories of the Stuart times of 
 Claverhouse and Dalziel in Edinburgh. The country 
 swarmed with spies and informers. When ministers 
 pay for secret intelligence against their countrymen, 
 and rulers smother the past in acts of indemnity, 
 they are self-condemned. Sidmouth and Castlereagh 
 continued what Pitt began, but by viler means, and 
 with viler tools. It may be doubted whether Oates 
 and Turberville were baser than Castles, Oliver, and 
 Edwards. Sometimes indeed Pitt was defied and 
 repulsed. In 1796 he prosecuted Home Tooke in 
 vain, for a Westminster jury acquitted him. Adding- 
 ton contrived afterwards to visit the grave offence of 
 escaping a government prosecution by laying a 
 penalty on the culprit and on the order to which 
 he belonged. Home Tooke was a clergyman, and 
 we owe the law by which the clergy are excluded from 
 the House of Commons, to the baffled rage of Pitt's 
 partisans. Habeas Corpus was suspended, the press 
 was gagged, and the assault on public liberty which 
 this minister perpetrated, had (according to Mr. 
 Massey, the very reverse of a Jacobin in politics) no 
 parallel since the worst times of the most tyrannical 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 157 
 
 monarchs. In order to put down a spirit of revolu- 
 tion in France, the United Kingdom ran the risk 
 of a counter-revolution, in which every liberty she 
 had gained from the days of the Great Charter was 
 in peril. 
 
 I have given this rough and imperfect, but I hope 
 just sketch of the social and political history of the 
 time ; a sketch the outlines of which are taken as 
 much from Alison and Scott, as from Massey and 
 Cobden; because, as I stated in a previous lecture, 
 it is impossible to study political economy with profit 
 unless one combines with it the philosophy and the 
 facts of history, and gains an insight into social life. 
 One part of political economy, I repeat, that, namely, 
 which deals with the causes and conditions under 
 which wealth may be produced, is scientific in the 
 highest sense, and may be studied, but not studied 
 well, apart from illustrations. But every other expo- 
 sition of the subject is hollow and unreal, unless it 
 takes note of such facts as those which I have re- 
 counted. 
 
 William Cobbett was born on March 9, 1 762. His 
 father was a small farmer who lived at Farnham, in 
 Surrey. His grandfather was a day-labourer, who 
 worked from his marriage till his death — which oc- 
 curred a year before Cobbett's birth — on the same 
 farm. Beyond this, he did not trace his pedigree, or 
 did not care to do so. His father seems to have ob- 
 tained an education superior to that which generally 
 fell to the lot of the sons of agricultural labourers. 
 
158 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 He thus raised himself a little in life. He had arith- 
 metic enough to be a land-measurer^ and in these 
 days of irregular fields_, and piece-work in harvest, 
 the services of such a person were constantly in re- 
 quisition. So he prospered in his little way, for he 
 farmed a small tract of land on the verge of the most 
 fertile valley in the South, where the soil is twenty 
 feet deep, and the hop, our English vine, grows 
 luxuriantly, and fills the air in earl}^ autumn with 
 its fragrance. Here this peasant farmer brought up 
 his four sons, taught them such simple learning as 
 he knew, and boasted that his boys, the eldest only 
 fifteen years old, could do as much honest work as 
 any four men in the parish. Here, too, Cobbett 
 learned his power of describing rural life, — a power 
 which no poet has rivalled, a power which he re- 
 tained in all its freshness to the last day of his 
 life. 
 
 A little below the Thames, at Weybridge, there 
 commences a tract of moorland, broken by the upper 
 range of chalk downs at Guildford ; but continuing, 
 in varying breadth, till it reaches the lower range of 
 chalk downs above Portsmouth. This range of hea- 
 ther, extending through Surrey, and the borders of 
 Hampshire and Sussex, contains alternately tracts of 
 barren sand and gravel, and valleys of surpassing 
 richness. One of these valleys is Farnham, the rich 
 soil of which is sharply bounded by the unfruitful 
 sands of Aldershot and Frensham. In this contrast 
 of desert and garden Cobbett learned his love of rural 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 159 
 
 life. Here he cultivated his keen sense of natural 
 beauty, and stored his memory with those pictures of 
 rude and cultivated scenery which he drew with such 
 fidelity in his shop at Philadelphia, New York, or 
 Pall Mall; in his farmhouse at Botley, and in his 
 prison of Newgate. The soft outline of the downs, 
 the wide expanse of the heather, the flow of the clear 
 streams, the shade of the lanes, worn down deep into 
 the sand and gravel by the waggons which had passed 
 through them for centuries, the hazel coppices, 
 stunted on the south-west by the Atlantic winds 
 where exposed, or thriving luxuriantly in sheltered 
 places, the finches, the nightingales, in summer, 
 the fieldfares and plover in winter, the heavily-laden 
 orchards and brown cornfields were always before 
 his ear or eye. He was a farmer when a politician; 
 and throughout the hot and bitter struggle of his 
 life, there were two kinds of Englishmen whom he 
 always loved and laboured for, the farmer and the 
 farm-labourer ; the former not yet swollen into his 
 present pretensions, the latter not yet dwarfed into 
 his terrible degradation. 
 
 In these primeval times, from which a real epoch 
 separates us now, the well-to-do yeoman hired most 
 of his hinds by the year, boarded and lodged them 
 in his home, and sat at the head of his table when 
 they dropped in at noon from their work to their 
 dinner. The homestead contained its large low room 
 on the ground-floor, with its spacious chimney and 
 long bacon-rack, with the parlour door at one corner 
 
i6o WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 of the great kitchen. This parlour was the mistress' 
 sanctum, with its comer cupboards and treasures of 
 old spoons and older china. Below the yeoman in 
 wealth, but not much below him in station and 
 plenty, were the married labourers, most of whom 
 cultivated some land of their own, — cottage garden 
 or small field by their houses ; and who, in the gene- 
 ral occupations of the farm, were employed all the year 
 through on varied work. Abject penury was well- 
 nigh unknown ; the terrible canker of pauperism had 
 not yet eaten out the better part of the agricultural 
 labourer's nature. 
 
 Cobbett rose, under singular difficulties, many of 
 which were of his own creation, from the condition of 
 a farmer's boy to that of a member of the British 
 Parliament. When a child of thirteen years old he 
 ran away to Windsor, and got employment in the 
 king's garden there. Even here he began that self- 
 education of his in hard coarse humour ; for he tells 
 us that he spent his last threepence in buying Swift's 
 ' Tale of a Tub,' and that when he lost the book at 
 sea years afterwards, he felt the loss more acutely 
 than he ever did far greater calamities. He returned 
 home, and when he was seventeen he was led by a 
 sudden impulse to run away again. This time he 
 went to London, and when his funds were nearly 
 exhausted, got a place as a lawyer's clerk. Then he 
 tried to go to sea, but was rejected, humanely, it 
 seems, by the captain of the flag-ship at Portsmouth. 
 At last, just at the close of the American War of 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT, i6i 
 
 Independence, he enlisted in a regiment which was 
 recruiting- for Nova Scotia. In a short time his 
 diligence, shrewdness, and punctuality were rewarded. 
 Within a twelvemonth he was raised to the rank of 
 serjeant-major, and was able to make considerable 
 savings from his pay. In 1791 he obtained his dis- 
 charge, receiving, at the same time, a high testimonial 
 to character from his colonel, who afterwards obtained 
 an unhappy eminence in connection with the Irish 
 outbreak of 1 798, for the colonel was Lord Edward 
 Fitzgerald. After his discharge he married. 
 
 Cobbett's marriage was eminently characteristic. 
 When he was in New Brunswick, he saw, on an early 
 December morning, a girl, not more than thirteen 
 years of age, scrubbing a washtub in the snow. She 
 was the daughter of a soldier, a serjeant- major like 
 Cobbett himself. He resolved to marry her in due 
 time. It seems that his project was favoured by the 
 girFs father. Three or four years after he made this 
 resolve, the parents of the girl were ordered back to 
 Woolwich. Cobbett, thinking the risks of a residence 
 in this town were neither few nor slight, recommended 
 her to take up her residence with some decent people 
 who would board her ; and to meet this expense he 
 handed her over all his savings, amounting to 150 
 guineas. They then parted for three or four years. 
 When he returned to England, he found her engaged 
 as a maid-of-all-work in a family. She returned him 
 his 150 guineas unbroken, and in a few weeks they 
 were married. In the spring of 1792, Cobbett went 
 
 M 
 
1 62 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 to France, and applied himself diligently to learning 
 French. Fearing the turn which the Revolution was 
 likely to take, he quitted the country and sailed to 
 America, appearing at Philadelphia in October. 
 
 At first Cobbett maintained himself by teaching 
 English to the French emigrants. In the early days 
 of the French Revolution there was a close and 
 friendly intercourse between the Americans and the 
 French. The feeling was natural; for the latter 
 had served the former at a very opportune time, by 
 declaring war against Great Britain during the crisis 
 of the revolutionary war. This intimacy was closest 
 between the Democratic party in America, — the party 
 of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, — and the French. 
 The Federal party, the heads of which were Washing- 
 ton, Adams, and Hamilton, were rather disposed to 
 cultivate the friendship of Great Britain. The latter 
 were on the whole in the ascendant, and had, in the 
 reformation of 1787, given larger powers to Congress, 
 besides handing over the executive, under certain 
 checks and guarantees, to the President. But the 
 contest of parties was exceedingly bitter. Such a man 
 as Cobbett immediately felt himself in his element. 
 According to his own account, which there seems no 
 reason to doubt, overtures had been made to him by 
 Talleyrand, who was then filling the congenial office 
 of agent and spy in the United States, under the 
 cloak of a general dealer in New York. Cobbett 
 rejected his advances. He had determined, as soon 
 as possible, to attack the Democrats. How violently 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 163 
 
 hostile they were to England, is suggested by the 
 whimsical project of Thornton, who proposed that the 
 language, since it could not be abandoned, should be 
 put into masquerade, by spelling all words phonetiT 
 oally, and by printing the letters upside down. 
 
 Cobbett began his partisanship with a defence of 
 Washington''s treaty of amity and commerce with 
 Great Britain. With him political writing was neces- 
 sarily personal ; so he assailed Priestley, Tom Paine, 
 and Franklin, with a bitterness as novel as it was pun- 
 gent, under the thin disguise of* his favourite nom de 
 plume, Peter Porcupine. He soon raised himself a 
 host of enemies, as well as a circle of admirers. Some 
 of the former took to traducing his character, and 
 to circulating damaging statements about his previous 
 career. To these libels he answered by giving the, 
 world a brief autobiography, into which, full as it 
 is of that peculiar rural description of which he was 
 so great a master, various passages of singular pun- 
 gency are inserted. One of these passages, in which 
 the writer glances at Franklin, may serve as a speci- 
 men of Cobbett^s style. He has been giving an 
 account of his ancestry, which he is able to trace no 
 further back than to his grandfather. 
 
 ' Every one will, I hope, have the goodness to be- 
 lieve that my grandfather was no philosopher. Indeed 
 he was not. He never made a lightning rod, nor 
 bottled up a quart of sunshine in his life. He was 
 no almanack maker, nor quack, nor chimney-doctor, 
 nor soap boiler, nor ambassador, nor printer^s devil. 
 M 2, 
 
1 64 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 Neither was he a deist; and all his children were 
 born in wedlock. The legacies he left were his scythe, 
 his reap-hook^ and his flail. He bequeathed no old 
 and irrecoverable debts to an hospital. He never 
 cheated the poor during his life, nor mocked them 
 at his death. He has, it is true, been suffered to 
 sleep quietly beneath the green sward; but if his 
 descendants cannot point to his statue over the door 
 of a library, they have not the mortification to hear 
 him daily accused of having been a profligate, a 
 hypocrite, and an infidel.' In this kind of hitting, 
 Cobbett had hardly a rival, and certainly no superior. 
 It is not marvellous, therefore, that, unable to cope 
 with him in the use of the pen, his numerous enemies 
 tried to crush him by other expedients, — by threats, 
 by prosecutions, and by violence. Meanwhile he 
 continued to increase the hatred felt towards him by 
 acts of singular audacity. 
 
 He opened a shop at Philadelphia, and, by way of 
 showing his daring, he filled his windows with por- 
 traits of George the Third and his ministers, of nobles 
 and prelates. He denounced the Revolution in France, 
 and the acts of the Convention, with as much savage 
 bitterness as that with which any man might have 
 reprobated the deeds of the Committee of Public Safety. 
 He scoffed in unmeasured terms at the independence 
 of the United States. He ridiculed the Constitution 
 of the Union, and predicted the inconveniences which 
 would ensue from its written and therefore inelastic 
 forms. He held up to contempt the doctrine on which 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 165 
 
 the Americans prided themselves, the democratic 
 equality of all men, under a fable, the coarse humour 
 of which has never been equalled. He compared 
 society to the various vessels in a crockery-shop, and 
 the republic in which he was living to the same 
 vessels rendered uniformly worthless by being shat- 
 tered into fragments of uniform value. But his 
 bitterest scorn was reserved for English sympathisers 
 with American institutions. He received threatening 
 letters. These he published in his journal. He added 
 comments on them, not intended so much to sting 
 the writers, for whom he cared nothing, as to hold 
 up those institutions to obloquy which, he assumed, 
 could alone produce such correspondents. 
 
 Cobbett could hardly have been unaware that a 
 fiftieth part of the political libels which he uttered 
 in the United States would have been sufficient, in 
 his native country, to bring down on his head the 
 merciless penalties of Pitt's gagging acts. He railed 
 at transatlantic liberty with all the licence which 
 that liberty allowed, with greater virulence than 
 any other community has ever permitted. But it 
 has constantly been seen that the fiercest enemies 
 of popular liberty have always invoked and used the 
 freedom which they assail. The men who after the 
 B/Cvolution would have coerced the press, uttered th^ 
 most malignant libels against the Government which 
 permitted free speech. Had Swift written a tithe of 
 the calumnies against the favourites of James, which 
 he published against the Whigs of the junto and 
 
1 66 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 the Irish administration of Walpole^ he would have 
 been put in the pillory^ and been whipped at the 
 cart's tail, as Oates was. Not that we need wonder 
 or complain at this. When base and servile natures 
 are emancipated against their will, they always at 
 first abuse the benefits which are conferred on them. 
 In this way, and in this way only, can they be 
 schooled into the dignity and truthfulness of real 
 freedom. Cobbett, it is true, was never servile, and 
 seldom base, but he was intoxicated with the freedom 
 of the institutions which he attacked. Had he been 
 left alone, he would, without doubt, have exhausted 
 his petulance. 
 
 I said before that Burke, from innate generosity, 
 always sided with the weaker party. Cobbett fol- 
 lowed the same course, from an innate spirit of 
 contention. The selfwill of his youth, strong and 
 resolute beyond parallel, had raised him from the con- 
 dition of a farmer^s boy to that of a powerful writer. 
 When he was little more than thirty years old, he 
 had gained a name in both hemispheres — a far more 
 arduous task than at present. He had but little 
 knowledge of books, and even less of other men^s 
 thoughts. But he had a memory of singular reten- 
 tiveness, a keen eye, an instant appreciation of the 
 ludicrous, a marvellous mastery over the English 
 tongue, and a unique faculty of inventing suggestive 
 nicknames which stuck like birdlime. Added to 
 these mental powers was an almost unique egotism. 
 Some egotists become morbid ; but Cobbett's egotism 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 167 
 
 was always healthy. Some become ridiculous ; but 
 Cobbett's humour saved him from this risk. ' I wrote 
 for fame/ he says, 'and was urged forward by ill- 
 treatment.^ He never lost sight of the fame he 
 sought for, and he never forgot the illtreatment 
 which he endured. Once, and once only, he made 
 himself ridiculous. When he returned from his 
 second journey to America, he brought back Paine's 
 bones, and advertised gold rings, each to contain 
 a lock of that notorious republican's hair. His 
 motion, when he got into the House of Commons, 
 that the King should be petitioned to strike off 
 PeeFs name from the list of the Privy Council, was 
 the act of a man who is ignorant of his fellow-men, 
 and mistakes his own hatreds for popular opinions. 
 He gave the clue to this ignorance of other minds 
 than his own, when he refused the Speaker's invita- 
 tion on the plea that he was unused to the society 
 of gentlemen. His egotism would not allow him to 
 defer to any man, in any place or in any company. 
 The Speaker thought he was modest. He knew 
 little of his man. 
 
 The persecution which Cobbett underwent in the 
 United States was a series of prosecutions for libel. 
 Like most of these prosecutions, they were unfair, or 
 at best a cloak for procedure against a man noto- 
 riously unpopular, who must be crushed, no matter 
 how. Cobbett had unluckily, too, made an enemy of 
 the chief justice of the State; and in those days a 
 judge was no mean foe when he nourished a grudge 
 
1 68 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 against prisoner or defendant, prosecutor or plaintiff. 
 Not indeed that the judge in the city of Brotherly 
 Love was harsher or more unfair than Braxfield on 
 the Scotch_, or Erskine on the English bench; that 
 Erskine whom Cobbett, in later days,, delighted to 
 designate by his second title of Clackmannan. 
 
 The first prosecution which Cobbett defended, (and 
 he almost invariably conducted his defence in person,) 
 was that on account of a libel against the King of 
 Spain. It was certain that such a. prosecution would 
 fail, and it failed. But in the next case his enemies 
 were more fortunate. 
 
 A certain Dr. Bush had advertised a new cure for 
 yellow fever. It consisted in copious bleedings and 
 in prodigious doses of calomel. The doctor puffed 
 his remedies, and Cobbett, eager for attack, assailed 
 him, called him Sangrado, and published in his paper 
 parallel passages from the physician^s method of 
 treatment, and Sangrado''s conversations with Gil 
 Bias. Bush prosecuted him, and laid his damages 
 at 500 dollars. It seems that Cobbett foresaw the 
 result of the trial, for he migrated to New York, 
 declaring that while his old enemy was in power and 
 office, the issue could not be fairly tested. He was 
 right, for the jury assessed Bush'^s damages at 5000 
 dollars. But Cobbett, after all, vindicated his criti- 
 cism on Bush, for Washington fell a victim to the 
 treatment of the Doctor. In New York, Cobbett 
 published a new paper, under the name of 'The 
 Bushlight,^ in which he reiterated his libels on his 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 169 
 
 medical foe, . and after a short time came back to 
 England. 
 
 With the exception of a few weeks, Cobbett had 
 been absent from England for sixteen years. No 
 contrast could be more marked than that of his social 
 position at his departure and at his return. He left 
 his country a common soldier, he returned to it one 
 of the most powerful political writers in the world, 
 the courageous advocate of English institutions, of 
 constitutional monarchy, of Church and State, under 
 the most untoward circumstances, in the face of the 
 bitterest and most implacable enemies of the old 
 country. He was immediately adopted by some of 
 the anti-revolutionary Whigs, such as Wyndham. 
 He took a shop in Pall Mall, and commenced his 
 career as a journalist and publicist. Pitt, however, 
 refused to meet him, and, as he never forgave a 
 slight, he speedily found opportunities of resenting 
 this act of contempt. 
 
 It is not, I think, difficult to explain Pitt's in- 
 difference to a man who might have been, under 
 judicious management, so powerful an ally. The 
 Prime Minister was absolute in the House of Com- 
 mons, so absolute, that people believed his resignation, 
 the year following, was a mere act of dissimulation, 
 intended to save his reputation for liberality in deal- 
 ing with the Catholic claims, and for consistency in 
 negotiating the short-lived and shameful Peace of 
 Amiens. But Pitt cared little for the press. He 
 cai'ed, it seems, in the height of his power, but 
 
170 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 little for votes. He held his followers together by 
 offices and pensions, his party by dread of revolu- 
 tionary France. He brought Canning into Parlia- 
 ment. But for a short time Canning was well- 
 disposed to the party of Fox. When he saw that he 
 could get nothing except by the active support of 
 his patron, he abandoned his predilections, and fal- 
 sified Sheridan''s prediction. This sudden conversion 
 of a young man, afterwards famous for lampoons, 
 made him the object of an epigram at the time : — 
 
 *The turning of coats is so commonly known, 
 
 That no one would think to attack it; 
 But no case until now was so flagrantly shown 
 Of a schoolboy in turning his jacket.' 
 
 But how could the author of the Gagging Acts, of 
 the Press prosecutions, of the Act of Indemnity, 
 patronize a journalist ? 
 
 Cobbett revenged himself by going-over to the 
 party of Burdett, Cartwright, and Hunt, by sneering 
 in characteristic fashion at Pitt's expedients and 
 policy, and in particular by holding up the King's 
 family to contempt. His weekly ' Political Register' 
 was commenced in 180:2; and was continued, with 
 few interruptions, till his death. But he still re- 
 tained his hatred for revolutionary France, declined 
 to illuminate his shop after the Peace of Amiens, 
 and bore the smashing of his windows with his cus- 
 tomary courage, having taken the precaution of 
 getting his wife and children out of the way of 
 danger. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 171 
 
 Politicians in the beginning of the present cen- 
 tury, wlien the laws were administered by men like 
 Kenyon, wrote with the sword of Damocles hanging 
 over them. If one is astonished at their courage, 
 one is amazed at their virulence. Press prosecutions, 
 however energetically conducted by governments, are 
 invariably failures as part of the machinery for re- 
 pressing opinion, except perhaps when they are con- 
 ducted by an agency like the Spanish Inquisition. 
 We need not go to our neighbours across the Channel 
 for proofs of this position, for illustrations of the way 
 in which inuendos, which cannot be grasped by the 
 hand of the law, are far more damaging than down- 
 right open speech, free criticism. Despotic govern- 
 ments have silenced plain comments on their acts, 
 only to suggest the more subtle attacks of fable, 
 parable, apologue, or tale. The satires of Juvenal 
 are far bitterer than the philosophic romance of 
 Tacitus. The gross apologue of Eabelais is more 
 biting than the diatribes of Luther. You may find 
 political satire in plenty in the fables of La Fontaine, 
 and in the fairy tales of Hans Andersen. 
 
 In Cobbett's time the press was violently personal. 
 A publication, in which Hunt and Cartwright were 
 probably interested, called * The Black Dwarf,' 
 lavished weekly abuse of the coarsest kind on the 
 public men of the day. These papers circulated by 
 thousands, and were read with the greatest avidity. 
 But no papers were more popular than the ' Porcu- 
 pine,' the ' Regifc^ter,' the ^ Twopenny Trash,' and the 
 
172 WILLIAM COBBETT, 
 
 ' Gridiron/ I have said that Cobbett was an adept 
 in the art of suggestive nicknames. Such were Pros- 
 perity Kobinson^ Old Glory Burdett. In his later 
 years he similarly vilified the two clergymen who 
 promulgated and adopted the theory of population^ 
 Malthus and Mr. Lowe of Bingham_, the latter the 
 well-known father of a more distinguished son. He 
 had an equal aversion to a living economist of great 
 eminence in poor-law and sanitary reform, Mr. Edwin 
 Chadwick^ whom he always designated as Penny-a- 
 line Chadwick. 
 
 'The best remedy for the evils of liberty/ says 
 a great and wise philosopher of our own time, 'is 
 more liberty.^ Never was this adage more exactly 
 verified than in the history of the political press. 
 When the law of libel was relaxed, when the repeal 
 of the infamous Six Acts of Sidmouth heralded fur- 
 ther concessions to the right of free comment on 
 public affairs, the tone of the anonymous press con- 
 tinually improved. As more liberty was given, less 
 licence was taken. It is not too much, I think, to 
 say, that whatever are the evils of anonymous 
 writing, (and it is a moot question whether it has 
 done more good than mischief,) its evils were vastly 
 greater under the repressive system of fifty years ago. 
 It is sometimes said that statesmen should not yield 
 to clamour, to sentimental grievances, to popular 
 demand. It is a truer interpretation of the function 
 of a statesman that he should face, on just principles^ 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 173 
 
 clamour, grievance, demand ; and should silence, 
 satisfy, concede each, if needs must, by wise and 
 equitable legislation. This is the canon of true pro- 
 gress. For the art of the statesman is like that of 
 the physician. It takes no action when the body 
 is soun4, it treats that disease only which it knows 
 by symptoms. Fifty years ago men thought it 
 wisdom to meet the disease by driving in the erup- 
 tion. But experience teaches, as its best learning, 
 that what was once thought wisdom, has been 
 found folly. 
 
 In 1800, Cobbett was prosecuted for a political libel 
 on Lord Hardwick and Lord Plunket. He was cast 
 in damages to the amount of ^^500. But a further 
 prosecution in 1810 ruined and finally embittered 
 him. Certain militiamen at Ely had been guilty of 
 some act of insubordination. For this offence, five of 
 the ringleaders were flogged. The punishment, ac- 
 cording to the brutal fashion of the time, was severe. 
 But the sting in Cobbett's mind consisted in the fact 
 that the 500 lashes inflicted on each of these offenders 
 was superintended by a guard of the Hanoverian 
 legion, then quartered in England. Cobbett's wrath 
 was roused, and he poured his whole fury on the Ad- 
 ministration. He was prosecuted, sentenced to two 
 years' imprisonment in Newgate, to a fine of ^1000 
 to the King, and was ordered to find securities for 
 good behaviour in a large amount. The sentence was 
 probably intended to be fatal. Cobbett was passion- 
 
174 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 ately fond of his farm at Botley, and lived as much 
 as he could in the open air. He loved his family, his 
 wife and children, as men who hate earnestly love 
 earnestly. He has left on record that he never 
 uttered but once a harsh word to wife or child, 
 and that he bitterly repented of that one harsh word 
 spoken to one child. He was sentenced to two years' 
 imprisonment in a filthy gaol, in the filthiest part of 
 London. 
 
 He bore up, however, bravely. He wrote with un- 
 abated vigour, and directed the farm at Botley with 
 untiring interest. Once, it seems, he tried to make 
 terms. One Reeves gave in evidence, ten years after 
 Cobbett's conviction, that the prisoner offered to stop 
 his ^ Register' if he were released. His political enemies 
 chuckled over this offer and refused it. So Cobbett 
 continued his ^ Register,' and served out the term of 
 his imprisonment. ' The Regent,' says Cobbett, ' got 
 the ^^looo, and no doubt held it in trust for his 
 father.' 
 
 On his release he was entertained at a dinner 
 given by Burdett. When the guests lifted their soup- 
 plates, each found the reprint of a lampoon which, 
 some years before, Cobbett had written on his host, 
 and which some waiter had been bribed to distribute. 
 I heard this story from an uncle of mine, who was 
 present at the banquet. The trick failed, however, to 
 produce more than a momentary discomposure. Men 
 who were political prisoners in Newgate fifty years 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT, 175 
 
 ago got bronzed and ready in emergencies. After- 
 wards, Cobbett wrote more lampoons on Burdett. 
 
 In 1 81 7, Sidmouth passed the Six Acts, the object 
 of which was to further restrain the political press. 
 Cobbett fled to the United States, and lived for two 
 years on Long Island, writing his ^ Register' as usual. 
 He averred that he fled to avoid the Six Acts. But 
 he was also in debt to the amount of ^30,000. When 
 in America, he wrote his English Grammar, and, with 
 characteristic pungency, made his illustrations the 
 vehicle of political jibes. In 18 19 he returned, with 
 Paine's bones. He was again prosecuted, now by a 
 private person, was cast in damages to the amount of 
 a^iooo; Scarlett, with the keen enjoyment of a 
 renegade, leading against him. He turned butcher, 
 and soon became bankrupt. 
 
 He stood for Coventry, and again for Preston, his 
 rival at the latter place being the present Lord 
 Derby. In 1830, aided by the interest of Mr. 
 Fielden, he was returned for Oldham, and sat for 
 that borough till his death in June, 1835. He made 
 no way in the House of Commons, but rather 
 damaged his reputation. He was buried in the 
 graveyard of his native town. As a boy, I re- 
 member the circumstances of his funeral, and the 
 attendance with which the farmer's son was gathered 
 to the grave of his forefathers. Elliott, the Corn- 
 law rhymer, who had, in the smoky streets and 
 wild moors of Lancashire, felt the keenest relish for 
 
176 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 Cobbett^s descriptions of the warm, rich, sunny 
 valleys of Surrey, sung of him — 
 
 'And in some little lone churchyard, 
 
 Beside the growing corn, 
 Lay gentle nature's stern prose bard — 
 Her mightiest peasant-born.' 
 
 As a political writer Cobbett, who occupied a first 
 place in the criticism of current politics for more than 
 forty years, had few rivals. He was a great master 
 of that homely, idiomatic English, which, is per- 
 suasive by its very plainness and lack of ornament, 
 and which is exhibited in its perfection by another 
 farmer^s son — another politician, but also a statesman 
 of the highest and noblest type. A fortnight before 
 Cobbett^s death Cobden published his first political 
 work, under the title of ^England, Ireland, and 
 America,^ and in it, using such English as Cobbett 
 used, announced a policy which is now become identi- 
 cal, on the acknowledgment of all parties, with pru- 
 dence and good sense. 
 
 As a controversialist, Cobbett was constantly unfair 
 from his vindictive violence. Men who have been 
 persecuted are rarely tolerant ; the most patient 
 martyr has often been the most savage inquisitor. 
 Cobbett felt himself wounded, and he retaliated with 
 ferocious energy. ' He had,' says Hazlitt, ^ the back 
 trick simply the best of any man in lUyria.^ He 
 never hesitated in his revenge, and he continued it 
 after revenge was indecent, as well as superfluous. 
 He hated Castlereagh — most of Castlereagh's oppo- 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 177 
 
 nents had reason to hate him — during his life, and 
 he gloated over the circumstances of Castlereagh's 
 suicide after his death. Canning felt the blows of 
 his bludgeon; for Canning, like most satirists, was 
 sensitive. Lord Lytton calls Cobbett 'the con- 
 tentious man/ but the adjective, though eminently 
 suggestive, hardly covers the range of this writer's 
 controversial nature. He was vindictive, with the 
 greatest facility of retaliation. Some men, like 
 Wilkes, are irresistible in repartee ; others, like 
 Canning, have a vein of polished iron}^; some, like 
 Moore, have a gay wit, which pleases even when it 
 stings the most, and is hardly offensive to its object : 
 but Cobbett was capable of that harsh ridicule which 
 springs from an unforgiving nature, and is unfor- 
 given ; — which bruises instead of wounding; but 
 which roused in its day \\^ole masses of the people 
 to band themselves against what they were taught 
 to believe was wrong or selfishness. 
 
 It may seem to most of my hearers that the 
 politician is more prominent in Cobbett than the 
 economist. I have, it is to be admitted, given greater 
 prominence to the former constituent in the career 
 of this renoarkable man ; but, in truth, the sub- 
 stratum of all Cobbett's positive convictions was 
 economical. He never swerved from his purpose, — 
 that of undertaking the defence of the farmer and 
 the peasant. As a consequence, his influence was 
 exceedingly great among the class from whom he 
 sprung. 
 
 N 
 
178 WILLIAM GOBBETT. 
 
 He denounced, not wisely indeed (for he had little 
 tincture of scientific method), the Corn Laws. He 
 saw that the object which the framers of these 
 famous statutes had, was to keep up rents, to stereo- 
 type the price of food, and to do this, not necessarily 
 to the profit of the farmer, but certainly to the injury 
 of the peasant. He knew that high prices of food 
 do not imply high prices of labour, and he dreaded 
 the degradation of the English peasant to the level 
 of the Irish cottier. His hatred of the potato, as 
 an article of food, nearly equalled his hatred of 
 Castlereagh and Sidmouth. He predicted the Irish 
 famine as the inevitable consequence of using the 
 accursed root, as he called it, on which the Irish 
 lived. When Brougham, in the ardour of his edu- 
 cational reforms, was predicting that the time would 
 come in which the English peasant would be familiar 
 with Locke and Bacon, Cobbett retorted that he was 
 far more anxious for the time in which the peasant 
 would not need to put a lock on his bacon. 
 
 But Cobbett could not, or would not, point out 
 that the corn laws were as suicidal as they were 
 unjust. He did not show that a farmer^s trade was 
 multiform, that if he grew corn, he also bred and 
 kept stock, and that if an artificial price was put 
 on the former, the value of the latter would be cer- 
 tainly depreciated. The corn laws went further. 
 They stimulated the production of one kind of grain 
 only, and so lowered the price of the rest. Had he 
 reflected on the economical circumstances which 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 179 
 
 attended the selfish folly of" the corn laws, and had 
 he brought to bear his vigorous good sense on the 
 project, he might have obviated, in great measure 
 at least, the hateful system which Cobden overthrew. 
 He had such influence with the tenant farmers, that 
 he might have banded them together against the 
 legislation which affected to be in their interests, but 
 which mocked them with the hopes of an unattain- 
 able advantage. 
 
 In one of his latest works he tells us, that, at 
 Charlbury in Oxfordshire, every man who had been 
 a farmer thirty years before, was on the poor-book 
 in 1 835. He witnessed, with wondering indignation, 
 the gradual decline of the class which he loved, and 
 to which he belonged by birth. He did not, however, 
 see how distinctly traceable this fact was to the 
 system of precarious tenure, of artificial legislation, 
 and thereupon of perpetual and damaging fluctuations 
 in the price of the agricultural staple. It may be 
 the case, as some economists think, that the large 
 system of-cultivation is better suited to the conditions 
 under which high farming is carried on, than small 
 cultivation can be. The hypothesis is at least doubt- 
 ful. But there is no doubt that this large system 
 has destroyed the yeomanry and degraded the i)ea- 
 santry of England. It is equally certain that the 
 change has not been induced as a consequence of the 
 economical principles with which it is supposed to be 
 in harmony, but in absolute defiance of them. 
 
 The condition of the peasant is now lower than 
 
 N 2 
 
j8o WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 it was even in Cobbett^s time. In tbe days of Arthur 
 Youngj the agricultural labourer was far better off 
 than he is now. You who live in the centre of active 
 industries, and among whom^ therefore, the rate of 
 wages in rural districts is heightened by the com- 
 petition of manufacturing energy, have probably no 
 conception of the stolid misery which is the unvarying 
 lot of the farm labourer in the South of England. 
 His wages have scarcely risen for the last twenty 
 years. A few of his luxuries have been cheapened. 
 Most of the necessaries of his humble life have been 
 made dearer, (for the development of railway com- 
 munication has equalized prices in town and country,) 
 if indeed they are not, owing to the regularity of 
 the market, cheaper in the former than in the latter. 
 The prices of meat, butter, cheese, and milk are at 
 present double those at which they stood twenty years 
 ago in rural districts. The rate of house-rent too has 
 increased, and will it seems increase, owing to causes 
 on which I have no time to dwell now. The best 
 proof of the depth to which the south-country hind 
 has descended, is to be seen in the formation of 
 children's gangs, and in the increasingly early age 
 at which children labour. 
 
 Cobbett, during the great war, and the reaction 
 which followed upon peace, saw the beginning of this 
 misery. He traced it, in some degree, to its true 
 causes, the absorption of capital in the war, and the 
 limited demand for labour. The wealth of the 
 country, Cobbett thought, with some reason, was 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. i8i 
 
 consumed in foreign expenditure, in foreign subsidies, 
 and, in no small degree, in the profits of loan- 
 mongers. Upon the latter functionaries he looked 
 with intense disfavour. 
 
 Like most men of warm sympathies and warmer 
 hatreds, Cobbett believed in the possibility of remedy- 
 ing these evils by communistic expedients. His 
 ' History of the Reformation^ was an attack on the 
 hereditary wealth of the Tudor nobles. His ^ Legacy 
 to Parsons^ was an assault on tlie endowments of the 
 Church. His quarrels with O^Connell, his abuse of 
 Mai thus, Mr. Lowe of Bingham, and Mr. Chadwick, 
 were the fruit of his admiration of the old poor law. 
 
 The poor law of Elizabeth was not a compensation 
 for the loss which the people sustained by the sup- 
 pression of the monasteries and the alienation of their 
 estates. But it was a consequence of this great 
 social change. The wealth of these orders was rapidly 
 dissipated by Henry VIII. The price which his 
 courtiers and grantees paid for their possessions was 
 as rapidly squandered. Upon this waste of public 
 capital, came the debasement of the currency, to which 
 I have already alluded. Agriculture was abandoned, 
 and sheep-farming substituted in its place. The 
 peasantry was unemployed and starving. Vagrancy 
 was made a capital offence, but ineffectually. At last 
 a poor law w^as the only refuge from brigandage. 
 Pauperism, which hardly existed during the prosperous 
 epoch of tlie eighteenth century, became the promi- 
 nent evil of the nineteenth. In some parishes, every 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 shilling of rent was absorbed in the relief of the 
 poor. It was necessary that this system should be 
 checked, and that the remedy, however sharp it 
 might be, should be found and applied. 
 
 Malthus and the writers of his school advocated 
 the most extreme processes. Cobbett thought that, 
 granting the present appropriation of the soil, and 
 allowing that the usurpation of the landowner, as 
 he conceived it, should be undisturbed, the poor had 
 an inalienable right to maintenance from land. 
 * The right to land,"* said he, ' is founded in labour, 
 and in labour only.-' Labour is divorced from the 
 land, but it cannot be defrauded of its interest in 
 the distribution of that which it alone has earned. 
 To him, therefore, the arguments of these economists 
 was not merely distasteful, but their plans were 
 immoral and fraudulent. It was not the poor law, 
 he thought, which had degraded the labourer, but 
 misgovernment and reckless expenditure. It was not 
 an attempt to better his condition by wholesome 
 severity, which Malthus and Lowe advocated, but the 
 relief of the landlord's rent, and the saving of the 
 parson''s tithes. 
 
 Fortunately, Cobbett and those who reasoned with 
 him were foiled. Workhouses are no long-er the 
 warrens in which hereditary paupers are bred and 
 brought up, but penitentiaries to the able-bodied, 
 refuges for the aged and sick. It is true that the 
 issue of the workhouse system is not tried by its 
 success in discouraging the relief of capable workmen 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 183 
 
 by means of a public charity. The question is yet 
 unsettled, whether or no the agricultural labourer 
 is not entitled to some compensation as a set-off to 
 those laws and customs which have annihilated his 
 interest in the soil ; but no one in these days doubts 
 thatj whatever that compensation should be, it cannot 
 and should not be a system which wholly destroys 
 any restraint of prudence, every impulse of self- 
 reliance and independence. 
 
 Cobbett denounced the paper money of the war, 
 and the expedients adopted by Peel, for the resump- 
 tion of cash payments after the war was over. The 
 former had, he thought, been a great advantage to 
 the moneyed classes, the latter was an attempt to 
 secure the gains which the same body of financiers 
 had accumulated during the war. With his customary 
 rashness of political prophecy, he predicted that cash 
 payments would never be resumed, and published his 
 ' Gridiron' in order to sustain his views. The resump- 
 tion of cash payments was necessaiy and just. But 
 Cobbett was to some extent in the right. Great dis- 
 tress followed on the legislation of Peel. As usual, 
 the agricultural interest suffered, was clamorous, and 
 was heard; and we owed the latest sliding-scale to 
 their importunities. 
 
 It would carry me far beyond the limits which 
 time imposes on an evening lecture, if I were to 
 attempt a fuller sketch of England at the day of 
 Cobbett's death, and England in our own immediate 
 present. It is sufficient to say, that though som» 
 
i84 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 interests have suffered — those, unhappily, which needed 
 elevation the most, — the material progress of the 
 country has on the whole been rapid and continuous. 
 Prosperity has folio \\^ed on wise legislation, for it 
 is an axiom in politics, that the wage-earning classes 
 have a far greater interest in wise government and, 
 public morality than their wealthier fellow-country- 
 men. The sinister predictions which accompanied 
 the reforms of the last forty years have been falsified, 
 and would be forgotten, were they not invariably re- 
 suscitated when other changes are demanded and 
 impending. And above all, the United Kingdom 
 has been fruitful in brave and wise men, whose public 
 life has stood out in marked contrast to the Church- 
 men and Statesmen of Cobbett^s stormy retrospect. 
 
 Again, it is not easy to discover what are the 
 special influences which the career of such a man 
 exerted over the age in which he lived, and over that 
 which succeeded it. It was impossible that a popu- 
 lar writer, who played so notable a part on the public 
 stage, should fail of aiding the forces out of which 
 society has grown to its present stature and form. 
 At least, Cobbett familiarised the people with the 
 most effective kind of popular education, that, namely, 
 which criticises public events and public characters. 
 If he was not the progenitor of the free press, he was 
 at least one of its eldest sons. It is true that he dis- 
 figured his vigorous English by personalities, and 
 injured his own reputation by his unreasoning and 
 ferocious animosities, but he had a hearty love for 
 
WILLIAM GOBBET T. 185 
 
 his country and his countrymen, and a readiness to 
 strive for what he believed to be the right. For no 
 popularity can be enduring which does not lay its 
 foundations in a real interest for the public good, 
 though the means may be taken in error, and the 
 effect marred by lack of experience. In Cobbett^s 
 nature the good preponderated vastly over the evil. 
 The influence of his writings was on the whole 
 beneficent, for it was pure, earnest, honest. His 
 many blemishes, both of mind and temper, pre- 
 vented him from being great. The faults of his 
 education led him into many a hasty judgment. But 
 he kept alive much that was true and just in an age 
 when truth and justice were reduced to struggle for 
 existence. We may be sure that there was much that 
 is worthy in a man whose writings were read by 
 millions during his life, and whose coffin was followed 
 by thousands when he was laid in the sepulchre of 
 his fathers. 
 
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